The Book of Lost Books
Table of Contents
Introduction - “I'll burn my booksâah, Mephistophilis” CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Doctor Faustus
The Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, the Priestly Author, and the Redactor
Luis Vaz de Camões (Camoëns)
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)
This book is for Sam, who found me
Hence, perpetually and essentially, texts run the risk of becoming definitively lost. Who will ever know of such disappearances?
âJACQUES DERRIDA, “Plato's Pharmacy”
Introduction
“I'll burn my booksâah, Mephistophilis” CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
, Doctor Faustus
MY MOTHER CLAIMS it started with the
Mr. Men
series of children's books. In a well-rehearsed pantomime of parental exasperation, she recounts how, after a family relative had given me a copy of one of Roger Hargreaves's stories, every holiday jaunt, weekend outing, and Saturday shopping trip became a single-minded trawl of bookshops until I had every single one of the series. Mr. Bump needed Mr. Nosey, Mr. Tickle was lonely without Mr. Chatterbox. After I had finished this first collection I swiftly became obsessed, I forget for what reason, with the
Dr. Who
novelizations; this was followed by “Fighting Fantasy” dice and decision books, and, as I approached my teens, Agatha Christie paperbacks.
A pattern began to develop; a pattern that would turn obsessive. Having
one
or
some
of the titles within any given series was not sufficient; I seemed to be afflicted with a relentless monomania for
all,
a near-compulsive necessity for closure and completeness. I even kept a “Book of Lists,” to reassure myself that I really did know every episode of
Dr.
Who,
with checks by the ones I had bought and annotations about the ones that had never been novelized. When all of Agatha Christie's books were reissued with newly designed covers, the idea of having mismatched volumes struck me as unspeakably grotesque. I stalked the old stock, ferreted for the forgotten copies at the back of the shelves.
It must have been with some trepidation, on my fourteenth Christmas, that my parents watched me unwrap a
Complete Works of Shakespeare
(Chancellor Press, 1982, printed in Czechoslovakia) and a selection of Wordsworth (by W. E. Williams, introduction by Jenni Calder, Penguin Poetry Library, 1985). I presume that they were hoping that Literatureâwith a capital Lâwas a large enough field in which my fixation might peter out.
Instead, Literature drove my zeal to new heights. The itch became a palpable rash when I started studying Greek (initially as a shameless ruse to avoid sports). Having saved up months of weekend-job wages, and having starved myself rationing lunch money, I binged on Penguin Classics of Hellenic drama: two volumes of Aeschylus, two of Sophocles, three of Aristophanes, four of Euripides, and a solitary Menander. The first shock to my well-ordered system came as I peeled back the smart covers and began to browse through the introductions. I was under the impression that I had just bought
all
of Greek drama, yet the prefaces and commentaries doomfully tolled otherwise: Aeschylus, whose seven plays I was holding, had actually written eighty; there should have been thirty-three volumes of Sophocles, not a mere brace . . . and so on.
The second, more grievous realization came when reading note 61 to Aristophanes' play
Thesmophoriazusae:
“Agathon, one of the most celebrated tragedians of the day, was forty-one when this play was produced. None of his works has survived.” None? Not a chorus, not a speech, not a hemistich? It seemed unthinkable.
This, I decided, at the age of fifteen, was a situation I should rectify. I started compiling a List of Lost Books. It quickly superseded my Book of Lists with its “Everyone in
Star Wars
That Wasn't Made into a Figure,” “
Dr. Who
Episodes Lost by the BBC,” and even the list of books that I should read. This new list would be of the impossible and the unknowable, of books that I would never be able to find, let alone read.
It soon became clear that the subject was not limited to the Greeks, who, after all, had managed to keep on existing through Roman arrogance, Christian lack of interest, and a certain caliph's censorious view of libraries in general and the Alexandrian Library specifically.
From Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, Homer to Hemingway, Dante to Ezra Pound, great writers had written works I could not possess. The entire history of literature was also the history of the loss of literature.
It is intrinsic to the nature of literature that it is written: even work initially preserved in the oral tradition only truly becomes literature when it is written down. All literature thus exists in a medium, be it wax, stone, clay, papyrus, paper, or evenâas in the case of the Peruvian knot language, Khipuârope. Since it has a material dimension, literature itself partakes of the vulnerability of its substance. Every element conspires against it: flame and flood, the desiccating air that corrupts, the loamy earth that decays. Paper is particularly defenseless: it can be shredded and ripped, stained and scrubbed away. Countless living things, from parasites and fungi to insects and rodents, can eat it: it even eats itself, burning in its own acids.
The simplest form of loss is destruction. Though the Roman poet Horace proclaimed, “I have built a monument more durable than bronze,” he expressed a hope about his work, not a certainty. The nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins burned all of his early poetry, as he dedicated his life to the beauty of God. James Joyce petulantly flung
Stephen Hero,
the first draft of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
into the fire, but did not prevent his wife from saving what she could of it. Mikhail Bakhtin, exiled in Kazakhstan, used his work on Dostoyevsky as cigarette papers, after having smoked a copy of the Bible.
Some writings are absent, presumed destroyed: Socrates, while in prison awaiting his execution, wrote versifications of Aesop's
Fables.
None of these have survived, and we rely on Plato's remembered and invented dialogues to catch even an echo of what Socrates himself might have written. Similarly, at some point, the only text of Aristotle's second book of
Poetics
was lost, and even the first book is made up from students' notes. A similar fate happened centuries later to Ferdinand de Saussure's
Course in General Linguistics.
When the publisher John Calder had to hastily relocate his offices in late 1962, many manuscriptsâincluding
The Sowing,
the third part of Lars Lawrence's trilogy, and Angus Heriot's
The Lives of the Librettistsâ
were left behind in the old premises. The building, unpublished works and all, was demolished. If any undiscovered genius had sent his sole copy to Calder, undiscovered he would remain.
There are other works that are lost in the sense of being misplaced. A suitcase containing Malcolm Lowry's
Ultramarine
was stolen from his publisher's car, and the version we have had to be reconstructed from what was left in Lowry's wastebasket. Allen Ginsberg recollected hearing fellow Beat poet Gregory Corso reading in a lesbian bar in the Village, though you can search in vain through Corso's published oeuvre to find a poem with the line he remembered: “The stone world came to me, and said Flesh gives you an hour's life.” How Ginsberg knew that Flesh was capitalized is a moot point.
There are also those manuscripts that meet an untimely end, whose authors' mortal existence is concluded before their work. The medieval Scottish poet William Dunbar wrote a haunting elegy for many of his dead fellow writers: of the twenty-two poets he lists, there are ten about whom we know nothing whatsoever. Virgil left instructions for
The
Aeneid
to be torched, since he had not polished it to perfection. Sir Philip Sidney wrote the
Arcadia
once, but his own massive expansion of the work was abruptly terminated by a bullet on the battlefield at Zutphen. Nathaniel Hawthorne's
The Dolliver Romance,
Robert Louis Stevenson's
Weir of Hermiston,
and William Makepeace Thackeray's
Denis Duval
are all partial classics. The SS put paid to the radical theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's disquisition on ethics. Robert Musil and Marcel Proust never quite perfected their similarly voluminous master-pieces; and though we have enough extant to make them “classics,” a doubt scratches around these incomplete, unfinished, permanently paused novels.
The final category of lost books is the eternally embryonic works that the author planned and worked on, but never actually got around to the business of writing. Solon, the Athenian legislator, was too busy introducing income tax to turn the story of Atlantis into verse. The philosopher Boethius never managed to create his proof that Plato and Aristotle were in strict agreement. Sheridan told everyone that the sequel to
The
School for Scandal
was going to be called
Affectation,
but did not bother writing it. Daudet's
The Pentameron
and Victor Hugo's
La Quinquengrogne
are both perpetually forthcoming. Lewis Grassic Gibbon was prevented from even beginning the novel he described in a letter as “McLorna McDoone,” and who knows whether or not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might not have planned to reveal the true story behind the Giant Rat of Sumatra, which Watson once alluded to while Holmes was engaged with more immediate cases? Would Thomas Mann's
Gaia
have been the masterpiece that while it was unwritten he believed it could be? Would Nabokov's never-written
Speak, America,
the follow-up to his volume of memoirs,
Speak, Memory,
have told us more about the composition of
Lolita
or his triumphs in butterfly collecting? Often these works are so ambitious their completion seems intrinsically impossible: Novalis'
Encyclopedia,
covering all human knowledge, progressed little beyond his anxieties about whether the contents list would also serve as an index. Likewise, Leopardi's
Encyclopedia of Useless Information
is incomplete: one wonders what he would have made of the Internet.
One other category of lost books exists but, with an unreasonable optimism about the future, I have chosen not to discuss the illegible. Languages such as Linear A, Mayan, and the Easter Island Script have not been deciphered, and might therefore be considered to contain whole lost literatures: however, after being thought incomprehensible for millennia, the decryption of the Rosetta stone in the nineteenth century meant hieroglyphics could now, tentatively, be read. If this book is on the Quanta net in 5005, I would not wish my descendents to be troubled with having to make any deletions.
Loss has symptoms and predilections. Comedy displays many of the high-risk features, as do erotica and autobiography. The loss of Philip Larkin's diaries, combining all three of these genres, was almost inevitable. The censuring of the erotic also accounts for the loss of a book by the Abbasid court poet Ibn al-Shah al-Tahiri (whether panegyric, satire, or handbook can never be known) entitled
Masturbation.
Over and above the content of the work, the multiplicity of theological and political regimes under which a piece of writing might find itselfâits nurture, rather than nature, if you willâcontribute to extinction.
From Savonarola to the Ayatollah Khomeini, religions have expressed themselves through book-burning. Valentin Gentilis, who lived in Geneva, wrote a discursive piece on the idea that Calvin's Trinitarian doctrine inadvertently posited a fourth member of the Godhead. He was imprisoned for eight years, recanted, and then was executed: his punishment (apart from the deprivation of life) was first to burn his own work. His sentence was considered light.
The fact that Osip Mandelstam's blisteringly satirical “Stalin Ode” survived at all is remarkable; many others of his papers, drafts, and scribbles were burned, flushed, and otherwise discarded. His compatriot Isaac Babel was not so lucky. When he was arrested by Stalin's secret police on May 15, 1939, agents removed every single piece of paper from his flat.
Certain authors, rather than certain works, become suspect. That there are not more entries on women writers, gay writers, and writers from outside Europe, and the English language, is partially my own fault, and partially the fault of those who systematically erased that work. Virginia Woolf famously tried to imagine Shakespeare's sister, but the inexorable and unchangeable nature of the past frustrates any attempt at giving a name to those who have been deprived of even a ghostly lost existence. In their place, with a few exceptions, I will concentrate on the so-called Canon. The much-vaunted Western Canon, trumpeted abroad for its wealth, happiness, and strength, is not an Olympian torch or a Thoroughbred horse; it exists by chance, not necessity, a lucky crag protruding from an ocean of loss. That melancholy parade of disfigured busts, crazed ceramics, blistered portraits, and foxed photographs is here, in all its shaky, precarious glory. They are our conditional, might-have-been-otherwise, sheer damn lucky tradition. Those overwhelmed by Time's corrosion are not so fortunate.
Is becoming lost the worst that can happen to a book? A lost book is susceptible to a degree of wish fulfilment. The lost book, like the person you never dared ask to the dance, becomes infinitely more alluring simply because it can be perfect only in the imagination.
We are, nowadays, almost incapable of believing in loss. As Project Gutenberg and databases like the Chadwyck-Healy continue to grow, and offer the idea of a perma-fixed cyberspace culture, it is important and humbling to recognize that there is no automatic afterlife for literature. Prizes and plaudits are awarded on a daily basis; yet the ultimate fate of those lucky recipients is no more secure than that of the great prize-winner Agathon. Even a repository like the British Library used to have old request slips with a box on the back, infrequently but occasionally checked, stating “Volume lost.” There is, equally, no guarantee that an intangible existence is also an unreachable state of being. If literature were a house,
The Book of Lost Books
would be Rachel Whiteread's
House,
a poured-into vacancy that is both tomb and trace.
The Book of
Lost Books
is an alternative history of literature, an epitaph and a wake, a hypothetical library and an elegy to what might have been.