Neglected Books

 Before crashing yesterday, I opened several tabs on sites devoted to neglected books. Which is where I started this morning cold, cold morning where we are awaiting the first big snow storm of the year.

Why read read neglected books? I have always been an omnivorous reader. I have found writers who got lost in faddishness or just in the sheer volume of published works who had something to teach me, or give me enjoyment. You may do the same.

There is also the idea that people put in the work, did their job well, and should not be forgotten.

Another reason is history gets distorted by time and fashion and outright prejudice. What got published does not always line up with our teaching. 

Which leads into what is for me the greatest reason, that what has been neglected, secluded, banned, or suppressed may have for us a way to go forward - opening us to techniques, themes, ideas, viewpoints that can be used in our own work.

Let me use an analogy with rock music. After Jimi Hendrix, there was not much more for rock music and the guitar. What came was a heavier sound, more guitar solos, which limited Hendrix's influence to "Purple Haze". It also shifted rock music to being music for white people. Eventually, it became corporate. AOR, and classic rock. Written out of that history were black musicians, and the Hendrix of Electric Ladyland. Scraping away the received history, would take us back to Bo Diddley, Funkadelic, Sly Stone, Love, The Bus Boys, and Living Color. Make out of all that what you will.

The staring point: The Neglected Books Page: Other Sites about Neglected Books (2006) 

Surprisingly, some of the sites are still around. Some even remain remain active.

Dr Tony Shaw: Mainly the Obscure, and/or mainly 'Outsider' Literature has published nothing since 2022, and is is it a slow site. Unlike what you, dear reader, do with this blog, I took a look at his posts by Label. I am not sure what is obscure or neglected about Simone de Beauvoir or Daniel Defoe, but the posts for the former do discuss some of her books, while for the latter there are posts with photos of places associated with Defoe. It looks like a lot of French writers. If the site were not so loaded with images that it opened with a glacial pace, I would have read more.

How Jack London Changed My Life is current as of this past August. It is something to see - small fonts and full of text. All that was redeemed by the writer's fierce opinions. I admire Kazou Ishiguro, but had never read, if I have even heard of, his collection of short stories. I am not sure that I could have written this review:

Nocturnes – Kazou Ishiguro

After I read the first two entries in this collection I wondered if stories as lacking in merit as these didn’t disqualify you for the Nobel Prize (obviously not, for Ishiguro was awarded it in 2017, nine years after Nocturnes came out). In the first, “Crooner,” a once-famous singer takes his wife of many years on a return visit to Venice; he hires an itinerant guitarist (who tells the story) to go with him on a gondola as he gives his wife a nighttime serenade under her hotel window. Old love songs they once shared. But it turns out that it’s a goodbye serenade – the crooner is leaving his wife for another woman, and she knows this. The thinking behind this “romantic” gesture is sappy, and the three people involved lack substance (though we hardly spend any time with the wife). Despite the fact that the two men talk a lot about deep feelings, I found their words to be no more than prattle. The second story, “Come Rain or Come Shine,” is remarkable in that it is much, much worse than the first. The characters are ridiculous props, their actions go beyond stupid into the farcical. Sometimes I wondered if I was reading a comedy, or a bit of juvenilia. I was grasping at straws; the mentality that would produce such inanity evaded me. It even brings up the issue of self-respect: was not Ishiguro, at some point, aware that the story was junk and should never see the light of day? Anyway . . . Since I hadn’t yet read half of the book, I skipped to the last story, the shortest. “Cellists” wasn’t a redeeming masterpiece, but it wasn’t an outright bust. It had a glaring narration problem. The unnamed musician telling the story has total knowledge about the main character, a young cellist by the name of Tibor; he knows his thoughts, his words, etc. (How does this happen, Kazou?) And, as far as credibility goes (a problem in the previous two stories), the woman who sees promise in Tibor and gives him intense instruction (in words only) can’t, we find out near the end, play the cello herself. Yet she has a rare gift, an insight into what is right, what a piece should sound like. Well . . . OK, I guess. At any rate, I had now read half the book, so I was done. I did glance through the rave reviews from respected sources on the book’s back cover. It’s still the same old story, folks – the one about the emperor in his new clothes.

And not many would write of Pride and Prejudice like this:

 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Mr. Darcy was a problem for me, one that never went away. For most of the book Austen presents him as a man whose sense of superiority is such that he has open disdain for those who don’t meet his lofty standards. He’s also a meddler; he uses every resource to separate his friend from a woman who he, Darcy, considers an inappropriate match. Since he displays little feeling for Elizabeth, when his proposal of marriage comes it’s a surprise (her “astonishment was beyond expression”); she rejects him and catalogues her reasons for actively disliking him. Yet they will marry, and this is due to nothing short of a metamorphosis in Darcy. Suddenly he engages in all sorts of kind, generous acts. We’re to take this as an indication of his feelings for Elizabeth, but to me it wasn’t Darcy doing these things; it was Austen stacking the deck in his favor. Does she succeed at making the two credible as lovers? I saw no warmth on either side. Darcy remains wooden, and though the same cannot be said of Elizabeth, her most passionate moment takes place when she first sees his estate; the splendor of the house and grounds is such that she feels “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” When her sister asks her how long she has loved Darcy, she answers, “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” Her mother is enraptured by the marriage: “Oh! my sweetest Lizzie! how rich and how great you will be!” Her sentiments are not just those of a small-minded and greedy woman. In the society of the idle rich depicted in this book (no main character does a lick of work) people maneuver to be in the good graces of those who rank higher in wealth and status. The two worst toadies – Elizabeth’s mother and the fatuous Mr. Collins – are one-dimensional objects of Austen’s ridicule and disdain. Yet Elizabeth’s friend marries Mr. Collins for the financial security he can provide. And Elizabeth? After her marriage she plans to protect Darcy from the “mortification” of having to interact with “vulgar” people. She “looked forward with delight to the time when they should be removed from society so little pleasing to either, to all the comfort and elegance of their family party at Pemberley.” (2 other books by this author are reviewed)

I found a novel I had not known about - what I have read about Tarkington's career, it petered out to dullness; now I am wondering:

Image of Josephine – Booth Tarkington
Tarkington produced dozens of works – mostly fiction, but also a good number of plays and non-fiction. He was popular both with readers and critics (he won the Pulitzer Prize twice). Five of his novels were made into films. As a boy I enjoyed Penrod, and as an adult I thought The Magnificent Ambersons was excellent. But, until now, that has been my only exposure to Tarkington. I was surprised to find, after completing Image, that it was his last novel. I would say it was a fitting closure to a long career, mainly because Josephine is a unique and compelling character. We first see her as a girl of fourteen, playing with friends. Well, not really friends; she’s too bossy, rude, imperious, she has too inflated an idea of her worth to inspire anything in others but hostility. At this young age her extremely wealthy grandfather (who dotes on her and encourages her outsized beliefs) puts her in future control of a fabulous museum he’s going to build, full of precious works of art. Skip ten years, the museum is built, and Josephine – now a beauty – is still thoroughly dislikable. She has no respect for her unperfected fellow-creatures; she walks over people or uses them. Another character plays a major role in this story: Bailey Fount, a WWII veteran who was severely wounded and is on leave to recover. Besides his physical wounds, he’s a psychological mess, so unsure of himself, so self-conscious, as to be almost a stumbling mute. As a safe refuge, he’s placed in the position of Assistant Curator of Paintings at the museum. Events occur that cause him to enter into a complex entanglement with Josephine. The strength of the novel is the way both these characters become more than they initially seemed to be. Is this evolution entirely believable? No, but I went along with it because it interested me. Bailey expands to assertive manhood, Josephine shrinks to the point where one actually feels pity for her. She long harbored a gilded image of herself, and when that image begins to crumble what she faces is a frightening aloneness. Yet she stubbornly holds onto her pride – or, at least, its remnants. The ending is ambiguous; the reader never knows what the future holds for these two. But, somehow, that Big Question works.  

 I found another novel that I had read, and for which I had a slightly different opinion - Albert Camus' The Fall is difficult compared to The Plague; I am not sure its philosophical problem is any more difficult than The Stranger; but there is it being a monologue that depends on how entrancing you find the narrator.

The Fall – Albert Camus (French)
Two men meet in a bar in Amsterdam (“May I, monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?”). What follows is a monologue: one man (Jean-Baptiste) talks to another (who never says a single word). This occurs over a number of days, at various meeting places. What we get is a prolonged confession, a dark one, but presented in a witty, offhand way. The speaker examines his life and the motives driving him. What he confesses to is his falsity and pridefulness and emptiness. The book is highly cynical (“Of course, true love is exceptional – two or three times a century, more or less”). Our narrator’s good acts are actually, under his scrutinizing eye, seen to be motivated by vanity, a need to be considered virtuous in his eyes and in the eyes of others. It amounts to a greed that needs to be constantly fed. And, it’s implied, many of the human species act under similar drives. I have few high-minded illusions about human nature, but I found Jean-Baptiste to be an extreme specimen – not a believable one. He merely serves the purpose of allowing Camus to make philosophical points. But to do so in a novel is a tricky proposition. Halfway through this confession I took the place of the man listening and decided that, if I were him, I would avoid meeting up with J-B at all costs. So why take his place and read on? Camus’s acclaim as a writer (the Nobel Prize at the youthful age of forty-four), and his death three years later (car accident), impart a certain glamor to his work. I may once have been impressed. Delete

YMMV, but it was fun, palate-cleansing of my mind to visit.

forgotten classics stopped back in 2007. I wondered what was forgotten about Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943)  I read this while in prison, so it was still in print at some time. The post makes sense of its inclusion.

Famous now perhaps for a handful of works – Brighton Rock, Our Man in Havana, The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene was a profound stylist and experimental writer. His minor novels are often things of delicate and strange beauty. The Ministry of Fear is such a text, an odd, enigmatic work about salvation, memory, guilt and loyalty set during the blitz. Greene’s protagonist Rowe is a conflicted, grief-stricken man racked with guilt for the killing of his wife in an act of mercy – in a powerful flashback we see them both tacitly acknowledging what he is doing. Rowe attempts to cocoon himself away from his past and from his present, living from day to day and rarely reaching out to anyone. The war is not his business, and he lives mechanically. The masterly opening chapter begins with Rowe visiting a rather forlorn wartime fête in a Bloomsbury square for old time’s sake and ends with him in a daze looking skywards from the basement of his freshly bombed out house. At the fête he wins a cake which, slowly, it becomes obvious contains something of great value to the Germans, and a series of strange events lead to him being sought in connection with another, more violent murder, before being admitted to a sinister nursing home having lost his memory. 

No archive by subjects, which bothers me but probably not many readers - no one uses my archives to dig into what I have written - but troubles me here because there are some interesting lists here.

From that site, I got to Persephone Books (the link on the site above is broke, probably out of date). 

 BBC Open Book: Neglected Classics - I could not figure out how to listen, so I am putting this page here as a reading list. I read A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, found him well-worth reading. But I suppose it could be neglected in regard to Tolstoy and Chekhov and Dostoevsky. I wonder if Carol by Patricia Highsmith is as neglected since the movie. I remember seeing the name Paul Gallico when I was a teenager, never read any of his books. Trollope is one who I came to read only in prison, with surprise and enjoyment. Otherwise, the other names are unknown to me.

British Women Novelists, 1910s-1960s: The 'middle-brows' reads to me as a bibliography (but why the green background?)

 Criteria for selection. These were all women writing in the first half of the twentieth century, who first published a novel before the Second World War. There are doubtless a number of other interesting women I could include: either I haven't read them, or don't much care for the individual writer. They were not necessarily feminist (although I did first discover several of them, marked *, through essays in "Man, Proud Man: A Commentary" edited by Mabel Ulrich,1932) but they do deal with the problems of being a woman in the society of their day, which is why I haven't included one or two writers who were dealing in the eternal verities of rural life (e.g. Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith, though having now (2008) read some Kaye-Smith (a close friend of the urban, indeed cosmopolitan, GB Stern) I think this characterisation may be a little unfair, as she did deal with the effects of economic and social change on rural populations, see this blog for further thoughts on the ways in which Kaye-Smith was responding to issues of her own day, even if she used historical settings: Constance Holme is in because she definitely dealt with rural society undergoing processes of change, especially in the expectations of women).

 Now, we are leaving the territory of the specifically neglected into a wider area of books you may not have read (scanning just the titles on some of these web pages, most are unknown to me).

 Open Letters Monthly is now an archive, the project having moved to Open Letters Review. Taking one issue at random, I found a review of a book I had read: Book Review: The Seventh Function of Language. Too much for me, who is already feeling overwhelmed by the written word. My topmost thought is this was a beautiful, well-written magazine that I am glad still exists as an archive.

 Open Letters Review continues the work of the Monthly with the same level of writing about books, but current.

Closing out this post for today - I have been four hours, more or less, on it, with Laila Lalami. I think I have seen the name, but looking at her site tells me I have read none of her books. What I have more likely done is seen her name attached to essays from The Nation. Such as Fiction Can Help Us Deal With Trump’s Chaos (2019).

These novels showed me what life does to all of us, how it tests and humbles and reveals us, regardless of our private history or public identity. And fiction does so much else, too: It gives us the infinite pleasures of prose, the surprise of encountering something unexpected on the page, and an escape from the tedium and stress of our daily routines.

“Now, wait a minute,” I hear you say. “Turning to fiction at this moment in time means turning away from a reality where awful things are happening. The president is a racist, for God’s sake. Civil rights are being violated every day. The forever wars are raging. An alleged rapist has just been seated on the highest court in the land.”

All of this is true. But we also have a president who manipulates social media to keep the attention on himself at all times: He announces major policy shifts on Twitter, then leaves everyone guessing about their meaning. Instead of spending my time reading the tea leaves of his pronouncements, I choose to spend it on novels. Making time for fiction helps me to stay out of the news bubble and ultimately enables me to be more engaged as a citizen.

I could not find anything on neglected books, but that is okay when what I found was writing worth reading.

While Goethe and Faust may not be as neglected as others, I wonder how many people actually read the poem (I did more than 40 years ago and have not come back to it since). So, here is Great Authors - Neoclassical and Romantic Literature - Goethe, Faust

 

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