Virginia and Vanessa

I've time for only a very quick post today, again drawing on Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf. Lee is particularly good on Virginia Woolf's relationship with her sister, Vanessa Bell, making their combination of intimacy, love, need, jealousy, and competitiveness suitably complicated and wholly convincing. What caught my eye today was the following, from a letter Virginia wrote to Vanessa on February 20, 1922 after an afternoon spent with Vanessa where she must have let her jealousy--of Vanessa's lovers, children, Paris life, art--show:

Yes, I was rather depressed when you saw me--What it comes to is this: you say "I do think you lead a dull respectable absurd life--lots of money, no children, everything so settled: and conventional. Look at me now--only sixpence a year--lovers--Paris--life--love--art--excitement--God! I must be off." This leaves me in tears.

In a short paragraph, Woolf transforms her distress, no less painful for knowing that it's in some sense poorly founded, into a joke on her own absurdity--yet it's a joke that manages nonetheless to convey to her sister that the pain is real.

I'm rolling along happily with the biography, interrupted only by piano practice and work. Yet as good as it is, I'm having to fight the temptation that strikes any reader of a compelling biography of a writer: to take a break and re-read that writer's own work. There's a copy of Jacob's Room on the side table, calling to me . . .

Another winter reveler

In Wednesday's post, I all but nominated Thoreau as the patron saint of winter. Who else, I asked, made a better companion than this hiker of frozen swamps and admirer of frost?

It was only later that another name came to mind, a writer who could almost be seen as a bright mirror image of Thoreau, another man with hermitic tendencies, a love of nature, and an appreciation of wintry landscapes. But whereas Thoreau is prickly, this man's manner is genial, wry, even puckish: E. B. White.

White's descriptions of the wintry Maine countryside, often sent in letters back to friends in New York City, make the cold and snow seem as enchanting as a Currier and Ives print, or a Christmas carol sleigh ride. Here he is on New Year's Eve, 1937, writing to his wife, Katharine:

I don't know when I've had a better time, sick or well. If you were here it would be perfect. Had a good night's sleep, and this morning am almost whole--no more throat. The snow stopped at nightfall and this morning is bright, clear, cold and gorgeous--the harbor (half frozen over) shining in the sun; the little boys, too, shining in the sun. . . . . A country town on a snowy morning is agreeably deceptive--it leads one to believe there can be no bad in the world--even the dogs feel the extra gaiety and goodness.

Now despite my origins, I'm city folk through and through . . . but as I look out my back window onto our small backyard (the first time I've had a backyard as an adult), there is something about the pristine sweep of snow, overlooked by a benevolent birch tree, that calls to mind country pleasures, and country quiet, both best enjoyed in winter.



Here's White writing about a cold spell at the tail end of winter, from a letter of March 18, 1922:

This is really a most cheery and exciting time of year--the world holds its breath, anticipating the great event. Farm animals stand motionless against the mows, which at this season are gutted all round the base from being eaten into so much; country schools hold session with doors tight shut and windows; streams, silent beneath a thin crisp coat of ice, throw back the mild grey glare of the sky; cats, hunting in brown fields, are poised in the midst of motion, as though caught by the cold; and sad-eyed loungers at the cross-road inns stand blankly up against the outworn bar, awaiting the provocation to spit. A most cheery time of year.

White's letters, as much as those of any writer's I've read, are performances: feeling peeks through, especially when, as in the top letter, he's writing to his wife, but in the main they're deliberate and polished. This letter is a good example: the long series of observations of nature under cold has all the clarity and rhythm of finished prose. Try saying that line about the "sad-eyed loungers" aloud; it's a marvel.

As the mercury declares its intention to plunge yet again--like a high-diver, it climbed only briefly in order to show off, in its case with some lovely snow--I'll leave you with one last description, of a bitter late cold snap, described in a letter from April 4, 1954:

Blowing a living gale here from the NW, and the temperature this morning early was 10 degrees. All water pails frozen solid, pasture pond solid, all doors resisting all attempts at ingress and egress, frost-proof valve on outside water line frozen, master of house all alone and frozen, barnyard sunny and full of little black-faced lambs and their mammas. I have spent most of my time, since getting here, keeping the kitchen stove hooked up to fever pitch. Coldest 4th of April since 1879. Am living on a straight diet of rye whiskey and Franco-American spaghetti.

Rather than rye, I'm opting for coffee, and it's ready, so I'll sign off. Stay warm, folks.

Some light visitations

For the first of tonight's October bookshelf wanderings I'll beg a modest indulgence. {Looks around furtively.} It's not about ghosts or haunts at all!

But it is from the pen of M. R. James, master of the ghost story, and it does feature the creature I'd most trust to manage a ghost, a cat. So surely it will do? It's from a letter to his friend Jane McBryde, then about nine years old, sent December 23, 1914. The season of ghosts, in England, and surely never more so--if not in the usual, light-hearted way--than at the end of that horrible first year of World War I. Spirits surely clustered thick about the land that Christmas. Despite the times, however, James conjures up some non-supernatural cheer:

My sister has been with me for about three weeks now, and has brought with her a large beautiful black cat who is so nervous that he won't speak to anyone: my own cat has not even seen him yet, but she suspects that something is being kept from her and takes it a little to heart. "Of course it is very likely that I"m not fit to be trusted," she said last night, "only I like to be told so; then I know where I am. If you like to have German spies in the house, it's no business of mine. It might become my duty to speak to the police about it, and it might be very unpleasant for some people if I did: but of course I don't want to make trouble only I do like people to be straightforward and say what they mean," and so on and so on. I said, "What makes you think there are German spies in the house?" "Oh nothing, nothing whatever, only when one sees meals being carried up to one of the bedrooms--and much better meals than ever I see downstairs--and when the maid take particular care that one shouldn't go into that room, and when one sees with one's own eyes a great vulgar black cat climbing the mulberry tree as if the whole place belonged to him: why, then, I think the time has come to put two and two together and speak plainly, but old as I may be, I'm not too old to see through a glass door." There was a great deal more, and at the end of it she burst into tears and laid her head on the fender and said nobody loved her and she had better go and bury herself in the garden or drown herself in the fountain.

Pleasantly silly, no?

Not wanting an October post to be entirely ghost-free, however, I'll share another passage I came across today, from the introduction to The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner, written by her friend William Maxwell, who also served as the volume's editor:

According to some notes that were taken down from Miss Townsend Warner's dictation in 1966, her mother fell into labour at the sound of a knell--a Harrow governor had just died--and she was born with a caul, which the midwife claimed and probably sold to a sailor as a protection against death by drowning. The ghost of her maternal grandmother visited her cradle.

Sadly, the notes didn't mention who actually saw that ghost. But, Maxwell continues:

She herself as a grown woman not only believed in ghosts but (in a letter that has managed to make itself invisible to me) described how she saw them, on two different occasions--the daughter of the house, who had died a year or two before her visit, and an old man who had taken his own life.

It would be just like a letter dealing with ghosts to spirit itself away, wouldn't it?

Tidbits of Lovecraft, Poe, and Stephen King

{Photo by rocketlass.}

On this sunless day, lashed by the first true rains of autumn--the ones that test the tenacity of the lingering leaves and remind you, through their insidious chill, that you're nothing but bones, cold bones, under your skin, let's have a post about Lovecraft and Poe.

As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I spend a lot of time reading writers' letters. What you may not know is that a lot of that reading begins with searches on Google Books: I'll go to a volume that's set up for previewing and see what I find through a search for a particular term. Often, the choice is topical: lately it's been "autumn," for example, or "night," or "ghosts."

Last night found me with Lovecraft's letters, and even though they're only readable in snippet form on Google Books, the returns were satisfying. "Weird," for example, brought me this pithy statement of purpose:

The weird artist should invent his own fantastic violations of natural law.

"Strange" turned up this:

The way I think of strange phenomena and outside intrusions is as a dreamer helplessly and passively watching a panorama flit past him.

"Nightmare," meanwhile, brought a letter in which Lovecraft describes in great detail a particularly horrible nightmare from childhood, one so intense that it led me to dig deeper and turn up more of the letter, which was written to Harry Otto Fischer in February of 1937:

But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now — but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's « splatter-stencil » triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly. I have seen these things ! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form — & the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well — after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear — & as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!

To some degree, that letter helps me understand Lovecraft's preference for the inchoate and indescribable--the horror beyond human comprehension--because what are dream terrors if not embodiments of horror that cannot be described without surrendering their potency?

Earlier in that letter, Lovecraft also offers an account of how he turned his childhood fear of the dark into a fascination:

In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me.

I will admit to a certain skepticism about the grandfather's approach, which seems needlessly cruel. It does, however, seem to have worked--to the extent, that is, that you consider Lovecraft to have been mentally healthy. Ahem.

With Lovecraft on my mind, I turned to Michael Schmidt's gargantuan The Novel: A Biography, a book that I've taken such pleasure dipping into and arguing in the month I've owned it that I already know I'll be pulling it down from the shelves regularly for years to come. Schmidt treats Lovecraft briefly, largely as an entree to a slightly longer consideration of Stephen King ("His bibliography is vast, but the novels are generally substantial and serious in intent.") and in conjunction with Poe, and in a short space he offers some useful analysis:

Poe can still frighten a reader, especially late at night. It has to do, as Nabokov understood, with language, with the spaces that vowels carve out of the darkness and the way night loosens the hold of the literal world so that things move and happen in unanticipated ways. Shadows detach from their forms and develop a will. Poe and Lovecraft have much in common. Like Poe's, Lovecraft's favored medium is the tale, not the novel. Poe worked by a faultless instinct, Lovecraft sometimes willfully and by design. He is more interested in places than people, places with inherences; there is a general haunting about his worlds, which start as literal and then degrade. Gothic horror inheres, an aspect of reality, "cosmic" to use his word, rather than of invention.

When he points out Lovecraft's attachment to place over person, it instantly seems obvious, yet I've never before seen it put quite so succinctly.

It's worth briefly setting that--and Lovecraft's interest in the cosmic nature of horror in general--against Schmidt's analysis of Stephen King's approach:

Central to fiction is a simple paradigm, what King calls in an interview "an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it." What interests him is not the mechanics of the intrusion--ghouls, rabid dogs, ghosts--but what the characters do in response.

Exactly--and watching those responses, and realizing how strong is King's faith that somewhere along the line someone will respond with the combination of grit and inherent goodness that is required to beat back the dark, accounts for a big part of King's appeal. There's no writer I know of, other than perhaps Dorothy Dunnett, who writes so convincingly about simple human determination, a quality that we all can use as autumn draws in.

Even Tennyson can be tentative

Not much time tonight--I made the mistake of deciding to make rice pudding, which (I had forgotten) involves standing at the stove for an inordinately long time, toil-and-troubling as the concoction bubbles. So I'll simply share a passage I came across while hopping around in Tennyson's letters earlier this week. Like a lot of nineteenth-century volumes of letters, it was a "Life and," which tends to be annoying: letters get presented out of context, partially quoted and partially summarized, and it's frequently hard to be sure of their dates and addressees.

In the case of the Tennyson volume, however, the grab-bag approach was fruitful: the editors threw in some Tennyson-related passages from the diaries and letters of those who knew him, which yielded the following account from Aubrey de Vere's diary:

Alfred Tennyson came in and smoked his pipe. He told us with pleasure of his dinner with Wordsworth—was pleased as well as amused by Wordsworth saying to him, "Come, brother bard, to dinner," and taking his arm; said that he was ashamed of paying Mr. Wordsworth compliments, but that he had at last, in the dark, said something about the pleasure he had had from Mr. Wordsworth’s writings, and that the old poet had taken his hand, and replied with some expressions equally kind and complimentary.

I enjoy the idea of Wordsworth--the conservative, older Wordsworth--calling Tennyson "brother bard." And isn't it easy to imagine Tennyson, briefly the picture of English reticence, quietly muttering some words of praise and gratitude?

All of which reminds me that I've got another bit of Tennysoniana (is that the word?) for you as well! This one is a bit of a joke from a letter Rupert Brooke sent to James Strachey on August 20, 1905:

You demanded a return catechism. Here it is. As yours ‘embraced all the Important in Life’; so mine, I hope, embraces all the Unimportant in Life—a much more essential thing.

1. What are the two greatest tragedies in Life?

2. Shew the comic side of both.

3. What is the most beautiful adjective in English?

4. When did you give up reading Tennyson?

5. What is the World coming to?

Good-night.

The only one which I'd expect you, fair reader, to answer, is number 3. My answer? Hmm. I do have a soft spot for "numinous," though the need for it is rare. "Sere" is also good, though even less useful. Perhaps "inordinate" (see above) or "wanton" would do?

A visit to the library

When I started work on The Getaway Car, I hadn't been a student for nearly twenty years. So the first step was re-learning how to do research--which also involved learning just how much could be done from my couch. With the help of the University of Chicago Library, I was able to discover and order nearly fifty books and articles, and have a surprising number of them delivered to me directly, within minutes, right on my laptop. It was a spectacular lesson in the enlarged, place-less library of the present-and-future.

Ah, but there's still plenty to be said for actually hitting the stacks, as a visit this week to the Regenstein Library on campus reminded me. I went in search of Roy Fuller's The Second Curtain, an English crime novel from 1953 that had been recommended to me by Will Schofield (proprietor of the wonderful Fifty Watts). I located it, admired its first line "("Fox was rather like a fox."), and was about to move on . . .

Then another name caught my eye. Firbank. Ah, Ronald Firbank! The writer whom Anthony Powell led back into print when he worked at Duckworth, of whom Harold Nicolson wrote, "It would be impossible, I think, to actually be as decadent as [Firbank] looked." It has been a while since I've looked into his baroque weirdness. [Flip, flip, flip]

Oh, yes, this browsing was worth it. It turned up this, from the unfinished  Tragedy in Green:

It was one of Lady Georgia's habits to find equivalents for all her worser feelings in the Bible.

That line was offered as a gloss on a bit of dialogue:

"I am a work of art," she sighed, "and this evening I feel nearly as wicked as Herodias."

Few writers ever mastered the sigh like Firbank.

The same volume also yielded this bit, from another incomplete work:

Her week-ends were a noted success. She arranged a circle of chairs under the lime trees on her lawn, and everyone slept. It was so restful, her friends said, and then when one could not sleep one could always talk scandal to one's neighbor.

Firbank's complete works aren't extensive, which meant it didn't take long for my eyes to light on another irresistible volume: Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques (1977), an example of one of my favorite genres: a collection of accounts of a writer by those who knew him. With a character as memorable as Firbank, such a book can't but be riddled with gems. Here's one, from Ifan Kyrle Fletcher:

In 1905 he published a slim volume containing this story ["Odette d'Antravernes"] and another sketch called "A Study in Temperament." Some of the copies were bound in pink wrappers and some in blue. The pallor of these colors offended his eye, now quick in aesthetic sensibility. He expressed his detestation in a letter to his publishers which foreshadowed his later ironical work. From the point of view of the public, he need not have been concerned. His book was ignored.

Fletcher also supplies a wonderfully concise description. After quoting another person to the point that Firbank was "full of contradictions," "naturally artificial and sincerely paradoxical," Fletcher writes::

It is this twisting of qualities which today makes him appear so remote, like a figure from a Restoration comedy. And it was this twisting of qualities which, in his life-time, made him so vitally baorque. His life seemed all grotesque ornamentation. His love of beauty was skilfully disguised. But it was always apparent in his hatred of pretensiousness. He suspected his own expressions of admiration as strongly as he questioned the sincerity of all rodomontade. Growing out of this was his refusal to talk seriously about art and life, even to kindred spirits. he feared that serious talk would become sober tosh.

Then there's this unforgettable account from Augustus John:

If I terrified Ronald Firbank, as he used to say I did, he often quite unnerved me with his way of emitting a long, hollow laugh about nothing in particular, a laugh like a clock suddenly "running down," accompanied by a fluttering of the hands (not the clock's), hand which he would then proceed to wash with the furtive precipitation of a murderer evading pursuit.

Osbert Sitwell, meanwhile, retails an anecdote that is appropriate for this month's Great War centennial (even if it smacks of being far too good to be true):

He told us . . . that when, after a dozen or so examinations, the War Office finally rejected him as totally unfit for service (which anyone else could have told at a glance), and then, in their usual muddled way, at once called him up again, he replied to them through his lawyer with the threat of a libel action. The War Office, at a time when it governed the world, was so taken aback at this simple piece of individual initiative that it at once sent back to him a humble apology.

Evelyn Waugh, meanwhile, contributes a critical essay in which the following effectively analytic paragraph stands out (once you get past the "inscrutable wit of the Chinese," that is):

But by its nature Firbank's humour defies quotation. Perhaps it is a shade nearer to the abiding and inscrutable with of the Chinese. It is there to be njoyed by those who have a taste for it, but it is too individual and intangible to become a literary influence. The importance of Firbank, which justifies the writing of a critical essay about him, lies in his literary method. He is the first quite modern writer to solve for himself, quite unobtrusively and probably more or less unconsciously, the aesthetic problem of representation in fiction; to achieve, that is to say, a new, balanced interrelation of subject and form. Nineteenth-century novelists achieved a balance only by complete submission to the idea of the succession of events in an arbitrarily limited period of time. Just as in painting until the last generation the aesthetically significant activity of the artist had always to be occasioned by anecdote and representation, so the novelist was fettered by the chain of cause and effect,. Almost all the important novels of this century have been experiments in making an art form out of this raw material of narration. It is a problem capable of many solutions, of which Firbank discovered one that was peculiarly appropriate and delicate.

His later novels are almost wholly devoid of any attributions of cause to effect.

Still reeling from the strangeness of Firbank, I let my eyes slide over a shelf, where they found the safest of harbors: John Galsworthy. A volume of his letters, flipped open, yielded this passage, which seems a suitable way to tiptoe back towards ordinary life from the Firbankian shadows:

I am conscious of never having been of any set in my life. To be "in" and "of" are not the same. It seems queer to look back on those times; queer and not too reassuring--yet sometimes there comes over one now the feeling that in pure physical health and pleasures lies the true existence, and that in all the nerve devouring and heart searching analysis of our present years lies discontent and fag. How comparatively vegetably happy are not one or two of my friends of those days who have been content to pass their lives keeping packs of hounds. No doubts and queries about them! Jolly red faces, and solid muscles. Ah! well, everything that is, is right.

Equilibrium restored to at least its usual tentative state, I ambled from the library, remembering as I left a passage from late in the new, final volume of Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy, The Magician's Land. Grossman's characters are wandering a magical library located between worlds, and they glance into a side room, set aside by the librarian for "problem formats":

It was the weirdest bibliographical menagerie she'd ever seen. Books so tall and yet so narrow that they looked like yardsticks; she supposed they must be illustrated guides to snakes, or arrows, or maybe yardsticks. One book was kept in a glass terrarium--a librarium?--the better to contain the words that kept crawling out of it like ants. One lay slightly open on a table, but only slightly, so you could see that its pages emitted an intolerably bright radiance; a welding mask lay next to it. One book appeared to be all spine along all of its edges. It was unopenable, its pages sealed inside it.

Another room contains all the novels people have meant to write but not gotten around to. I imagine browsing in that room would be a tad less productive than the hour I spent in PR6011 through PR6013.

Enjoy your weekend, folks. May your browsing lead you to good places!

Dickensian Laughter

Though I read a lot of literary biographies, I don't read a lot of non-biographical secondary literature. Oh, here and there I'll read something about one of my favorites--Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, or Thomas Hardy, for example--but the only writer about whom I regularly find myself reading criticism is Dickens.

In part it's because Dickens, two hundred years after his birth, still seems inexhaustible. There's so much matter in each of his books that it seems there's always a new angle of attack or area of focus. He also has the benefit of being stodgy enough that even contemporary critical writings about him feel largely like the product of an earlier century: even as they may take new findings and new approaches into account, they nonetheless keep an eye on the general reader, and work in a prose register that is accessible to him or her.

In addition, those are the books that bring me into better contact with the wild world of non-novelistic Dickens writings. Any serious Dickens fan does some dipping, here and there, into Sketches by Boz, or American Notes for General Circulation, but those books don't bulk so large in our memories as the novels. And who reads beyond that, to the Household Words pieces, or the countless volumes of letters? But there are rewards in almost any page of Dickens's writing, and one of the great pleasures of a good work of Dickens criticism is the new acquaintance it offers us with those writings.

All of which is by way of a long preamble to saying how much I'm enjoying Malcolm Andrews's new book Dickensian Laughter: Essays on Dickens and Humour. As Dickens's own people say, it does what it says on the tin, offering a number of different angles on how Dickens used humor, how his audience received it, how he fit with and broke from earlier traditions, and--best of the bunch--what we know about Dickens's own laughter.

The book is so rich with quotation that it feels at least as much like a conversation as an argument, throughout the book, Andrews treats us to gleanings from the minor Dickens, along with opinions and insights from his contemporaries and friends. I'll treat you to my favorite bit thus far, from a letter Dickens sent to Georgina Hogarth from a reading tour in Ireland on August 25, 1858. Dickens cast this portion of the letter in the form of a dialogue between himself and a young boy he met on the street:

INIMITABLE. Holloa, old chap.

YOUNG IRELAND. Hal-loo!

INIMITABLE (In his delightful way). What a nice old fellow you are. I am very fond of little boys.

YOUNG IRELAND. Air yer? Ye'r right.

INIMITABLE. What do you learn, old fellow?

YOUNG IRELAND (very intent on Inimitable, and always childish, except in his brogue). I lairn wureds of three sillibils, and wureds of two sillibils, and wureds of one sillibil.

INIMITABLE (gaily). Get out, you humbug! You learn only words of one syllable.

YOUNG IRELAND (laughs heartily). You may say that it is mostly words of one sillibil.

INIMITABLE. Can you write?

YOUNG IRELAND. Not yet. Things come by degrees.

INIMITABLE. Can you cipher?

YOUNG IRELAND (very quickly). Wha'at's that?

INIMITABLE. Can you make figures?

YOUNG IRELAND. I can make a nought, which is not asy, being round.

INIMITABLE. I say, old boy, wasn't it you I saw on Sunday morning in the hall, in a soldier's cap? You know--in a soldier's cap?

YOUNG IRELAND (cogitating deeply) Was it a very good cap?

INIMITABLE. Yes.

YOUNG IRELAND. Did it fit uncommon?

INIMITABLE. Yes.

YOUNG IRELAND. Dat was me!

Dialect often feels like the weakest of jokes, but here it's animated so wonderfully by Dickens's sly stage directions, and by the fun that he and the young man both are clearly having. Oh, to have gone to your mailbox and found there a letter from Dickens!

Anthony Powell and the publishing world of the past

As I promised on Monday, today I turn to Anthony Powell's letters for a glimpse at the publishing world of the not-so-distant past. The letters come from The Acceptance of Absurdity: Anthony Powell and Robert Vanderbilt, Letters 1952-1963, a slim volume that was published in a limited edition in 2011. Vanderbilt was a New York bookshop owner, and the correspondence began when he proposed to Powell that he reissue Venusberg and Agents and Patients in a single volume. They had been published in the UK years earlier, but had failed to find a US home and, as Powell himself noted in a reply to Vanderbilt, were hard to find:

My books are practically impossible to obtain secondhand, which, although satisfactory from one point of view, is most inconvenient from another.

Vanderbilt's proposal met with approval, and by the end of the year he had published the book, complete with cover illustrations by Powell's friend Osbert Lancaster.





That's when the publishing part of the story gets interesting, at least for someone who works as a publicist today. In its first three months on the market, the book--which, remember, was an edition, by a bookshop, rather than a proper publisher, of novels that were at that point twenty years old--Vanderbilt had sent Powell reviews from Newsweek, the New York Times (which Vanderbilt characterized as "doubtless . . . more like a press release of our own than any other we shall get"), the New Yorker (which Powell told Vanderbilt was so good that it "absolutely staggered" him--and which he viewed as useful in England, too, because "In some ways in certain circles, New Yorker book reviews are looked on with even more awe than in the States."), the Atlantic, the New York Herald Tribune (written by Elizabeth Bowen and, Vanderbilt wrote, "rapturously favorable" despite Powell's earlier worry that she wouldn't like his work), the San Francisco Chronicle (contributed by a woman of whom Vanderbilt wrote, "She's been described to me as a type who has gone a long way on self-confidence. She thinks BM [Powell's Dance novel A Buyer's Market] is like Trollope. A friend of mine remained calm, and said 'Also like Proust, don't you think?' This arrow was never recovered."), and Vogue (where it was listed as "a modish subject of conversation"). Oh, and after Vanderbilt poked his head in at the Scribner's bookshop, while they declined to devote a window to the book, they did take five copies.

This happens every once in a while: just when I think I've fully taken in just how different the publishing world, and especially the book review landscape, used to be, I'm surprised anew. The coverage Powell's book received would these days be viewed as a solid success for a new novel, and out of the realm of all possibility for a reissue. Wow.

The letters themselves are a pleasure: Vanderbilt is a congenial interlocutor for Powell, and Powell himself is just as amused, opinionated, and entertaining in his letters as one would hope. I look forward to what will surely be a larger, more complete selection somewhere down the line.

I'll close with another amusing glimpse at older ways. In a letter of February 11, 1953, Vanderbilt tells Powell,

A few days ago my mail included a small blue note saying the following.

Gentlemen: I ordered and received (for which I paid $4.00) a copy of Venusberg. After reading 11 pages of this book I knew it was not the kind of book that I could give as a birthday gift to an elderly, churchgoing lady. It is also not the type of story I enjoy or admire. The book shop from where I purchased it is not carrying any copies--it was a special order--so therefore I cannot expect them to refund my money. Therefore my request to you is will you allow me to return it to you and I shall be satisfied with the refund of the wholesale price. It is in the same perfect condition in which it was delivered to me. May I say in addition I think it a vulgar, salacious book and one which I do not care to read further. (Eleven pages are more than sufficient).

Which leads to two thoughts:

1. Elderly, churchgoing ladies differ in the States and England. Barbara Pym would have found such a gift perfectly suitable, as, I dare say, would a number of her characters. (Though I suppose it would likely have given rise to a flurry of quiet speculation about the motives and stance of the giver.)

2. The woman's understanding of the business, and willingness to adapt to its structures, impresses me. Asking only for the wholesale price is a remarkable concession considering how powerfully she reacted against the book.

Vanderbilt sent her the refund, and the story amused Powell, who replied with an anecdote of his own:

I remember when I was a publisher [with Duckworth] the illustrated catalogue designed by myself elicited a letter saying 'as I have a household of children and young servants I should be obliged if you would not deliver your cess on my door.'

Enjoy the weekend, folks.

Trollope tries to let a friend down easy

Part of the fun of reading writers' letters--something I spend a fair amount of time doing--is getting a glimpse of publishing's past. I made discoveries on that front in two collections recently, of letters from Anthonys Trollope and Powell. I'll start with Trollope, and pick up Powell later in the week.

That Trollope's letters offer insight into publishing is no surprise: as Michael Dirda writes in Bound to Please of Trollope's Autobiography,

It reveals, better than almost any other work in English, that a writer is a man (or woman) who sits down at a desk each morning . . . and writes. To Trollope, the creation of fiction may occasionally rise to Art, but there's no nonsense about awaiting inspiration or a timely visit from the Muse. . . . He frankly discusses his contracts, even listing the exact amounts he was paid for each of his works. . . . When An Autobiography was published posthumously (in 1883), as was always intended, readers were said to be horrified at its mercantile tone.

So it's no surprise that many of his letters are addressed to publishers: settling fees, checking on dates, discussing editions. This bit from a note to Frederic Chapman, head of Chapman and Hall, of September 25, 1871 is not atypical:

One of the "Australian" people--Editor, manager, or owner [of the Australian magazine] told me that he had bought from you the rights to republish my book about Australia. What is the meaning of this? I have never spoken a word of an Australian novel to any one.

Write again like a good fellow, and send me all the news about the business & other things.

The most striking series of publishing-related letters that I've come across thus far, however, are a string to Trollope's regular correspondent Mary Holmes, an acquaintance of (and eventual governess for) Thackeray of whom the volume editor, Bradford Allen Booth, says she had "literary and musical enthusiasm, and worked hard, but there was little talent." Late in 1874, she sent Trollope a manuscript of a novel, about which he had been theoretically encouraging and which he promised to forward to Chapman and Hall. On November 9, he wrote to Holmes with bad news:

I have seen Mr Chapman the publisher today and he tells me that his reader has said that your novel in its present form will not do, but that he thinks that, with certain alterations, it might do. I presume the novel has been sent back to you. It will be for you to decide whether you will make the alterations which will have been proposed to you--

I did not look at the MS myself. In such a case I can do no good by my doing so. Should I not like it, it would break my heart (as it has done in similar cases) to have to say so; and should I like it my opinion would go for nothing with a publisher who would regard my opinion simply as that of a friend.

Despite Trollope's combination of forthrightness and delicacy, Holmes's response must not have been particularly accepting or even-tempered, for two weeks later Trollope wrote to her again:

Your letter has made me unhappy; because I feel that you feel that you have been ill-used. I feared that it would be so. It generally is so when some little assistance is wanted by literary aspirants. One cannot give the help that is needed. One can only try, and fail, and suffer in the failure.

You think that Chapman and his reader have illused [sic] you,--but I believe you to be wrong in so thinking. I know them both well and would not have put your MS into their hands had they been unworthy. The firm is existing (you suspect that there is no such firm). It is doing a very lucrative business (you imagine the contrary). Mr Chapman is not deterred by the need of publishing the works of either his friends or his relatives from publishing yours. He has in truth done with your MS as he does with others,--but has done this somewhat quicker than he usually does under my instance. He sent your MS to his reader, and acted on his opinion. . . .

You write,--(and not only you but many others with whom I become acquainted, and who use my services because, being an old stager, I am supposed to be able to give assistance,)--as though it were the publishers business to publish your work and as though he injured you by not doing so.

Trollope goes on to explain the role, and necessity, of the publisher's reader, in the course of which he strips away some of the gentleness of the earlier letter's rejection, noting that the reader said it might be publishable "with very great alterations."

It's hard not to feel for both parties, of course: Holmes's letter must surely have been intemperate, but her ambitions are far from uncommon, and it's hard to deny a Victorian woman of slender means the reed of hope that artistic success could conceivably represent. And Trollope's position is certainly unenviable. The bulk of his correspondence with Holmes reveals that he really did think of her as a friend, and the emotional cost he incurred by trying to do her this favor becomes fully apparent in the final paragraph of the letter:

For myself I may say that the task of dealing with the MS of other persons is so painful,--the necessity of explaining to an aspirant that his or her aspirations must be disappointed is so grievous,--that I have often been tempted to say, that I would never again incur the punishment. I can hardly bring myself to tell a friend that he or she cannot do that which I by chance can do myself--But I remember how often I failed myself before I succeeded,--how Vanity Fair and, as you say, Jane Eyre were carried here and there before they were accepted. I would suggest that you should read your own MS carefully and see if you yourself think it capable of improvement--and,--let me say this in pure friendship, without giving offence,--do not allow yourself to be tempted to think evil because the thing does not go as you wish it.

The fulsome closings of old letters ring hollow to contemporary ears, but when Trollope closes this letter with "Yours very sincerely and with true friendship," we believe him.

Christmas Eve

To carry us into Christmas, a letter from Katherine Anne Porter, sent to Albert Erskine on December 14, 1937:

I’ve been thinking about your Christmas present. It occurs to me that I never heard you say you wanted anything. I know things that you don’t want, for example, a book. So I shan’t give you Audubon’s Birds of America simply bursting with pictures. . . . You’ve got a radio. (Don’t give me one, by the way.) . . . What about a valet rack? It says: ‘The gift of gifts for a man, exclamation point. It saves time and temper by having his clothes all assembled for the morning rush.’ And then shows a picture with sure enough everything assembled. It’s one of the ugliest things I ever saw, though.

And then, for those of you more concerned with a seasonal mood than with shopping, here's Iris Murdoch writing to Frank Thompson on Christmas Eve, 1941:

It is Christmas eve & I in Blackpool. There is the hell of a wind blowing over the house & I feel a bit withered away already. I have just received a box of expensive Turkish cigarettes from Michael. Dear old Michael. A lost soul too. (The problem is, I have been reading Virginia Woolf, the darling dangerous woman, & am in a state of extremely nervous self-consciousness. The most selfish of all states to be in.

Woolf or no Woolf, let us all leave selfishness aside for a few days. Happy Holidays, folks.

The early Nancy Mitford

What better way to emerge from the ghosts and gloom of October--and distract oneself through the drizzle and sleezing rain of the opening of November--than to dive into the frothy nonsense that is an early Nancy Mitford novel? While I've long been a fan of Mitford's best-known, most-respected novels, Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, until this week the only one of her early books I'd read was Wigs on the Green. It's funny, if slight, but it didn't lead me to her others--I suspect because Mitford herself was so dismissive of them, at least in her letters to Evelyn Waugh. In a letter of November 5, 1951, Mitford told Waugh that Hamish Hamilton had just come over to convince her to let him reprint Wigs and Christmas Pudding, and "I gave way, though I know unwisely." Three days later, she was on the topic again:

I'm in a great state about my early books. I think I told you Jamie came over specially to ask me for them to be reprinted, which softened me. Then I read them. Well Wigs on the G. which isn't too bad, I find, is a total impossibility. Too much has happened for jokes about the Nazis to be regarded as funny or as anything but the worst of taste. After all, it was written in 1934. I really couldn't quite have foreseen all that came after. So that is out. Xmas Pudding is pathetic, badly written, facetious & awful. I can't conceive why he wants it & the fact that he does has shaken my faith in his judgement.

Mitford's embarrassment likely contains at least an element of performance: throughout the correspondence with Waugh, you get the sense that she views herself as a distinctly inferior talent, which results in wide-ranging, mostly comic self-deprecation. But given that her only real complaint about Wigs is its inappropriateness, and that later in the month she calls Pigeon Pie, her fourth novel, "better than the others," I'm willing to take her assessment  of Christmas Pudding mostly at face value.

Waugh's response is entertaining:

You could write a most amusing & interesting and popular work in this way: Describe yourself in 1951 taking up Wigs on the Green and rereading it for the first time since its publication. Print 2/3 or half of the original text with constant interruptions from your 1951 self asking: "Why did I say that?" or saying "This still seems funny, why?" So in the easiest & most informal way possible you could write your reminiscences & the history of the deteriorating world and the improving authoress.

Don't you wish she'd run with that idea?

With more distance, both in person and in time, Christmas Pudding looks much, much better than Mitford would have you believe. It's arch and artificial and light, but it also has the pleasantly anarchic heedlessness of '30s English comic novels, the sense that the old things of the world have lost their attraction and the new ones are mostly meant to throw around and smash up. What in Waugh is sour and in Anthony Powell is a bit confused in Mitford is a source of simple entertainment: having no responsibilities and no reason to prefer one action over another, the Bright Young Things simply do--they party and propose and pilfer and play, and Mitford show us how silly they are as they do it all. Eighty years later, for a few hours at a time, it can be wonderfully entertaining.

Much of the fun comes in simple descriptions of characters, and their limitations. Take this discussion of an eligible bachelor who proposes to a couple of different women in the course of the novel:

"I gather that Michael made a mess of everything as usual. He had only to go about it with a little ordinary sense and she'd have been crazy about him by now. Really that young man, I've no patience at all with him; he behaves like a very unconvincing character in a book, not like a human being at all."

"Yes, doesn't he. The sort of book of which the reviewers would say, 'the characterization is weak; the central figure, Lord Lewes, never really coming to life at all; but there are some fine descriptive passages of Berkshire scenery.'"

Or this riff on Lady Bobbin's confused love of Merrie England:

Lady Bobbin was always most particular that the feast of Christmas should be kept by herself, her family and dependents at Compton Bobbin in what she was pleased to call "good old-fashioned style." In her mind, always rather a muddled organ, this entailed a fusion of the Christmas customs brought to his adopted country by late Prince COnsort with those which have been invented by the modern Roman Catholic school of Sussex Humorists in a desperate attempt to revive what they suppose to have been the merrieness of England as it was before she came to be ruled by sour Protestants. And this was odd, because Germans and Roman Catholics were ordinarily regarded by Lady Bobbin with wild abhorrence. Nothing, however, could deter her from being an ardent and convinced Merrie Englander. The maypole on the village green, or more usually, on account of pouring rain, in the village hall; nocturnal expeditions to the local Druid stones to see the sun rise over the Alter Stone, a feat which it was seldom obliging enough to perform; masques in the summer, madrigals in the winter and Morris dances all the year round were organized and led by Lady Bobbin with an energy which might well have been devoted to some better cause. This can be accounted for by the fact of her having a sort of idea that in Merrie England there had been much hunting, no motor cars and that her bugbear, socialism, was as yet unknown. All of which lent that imginary period every attribute, in her eyes, of perfection.

You can imagine Jim Dixon drinking straight from the bottle about ten words into that description. Later, we get a bit more detail on Lady Bobbin's holiday spirit:

Christmas Day itself was organized by Lady Bobbin with the thoroughness and attention to detail of a general leading his army into battle. Not one moment of its enjoyment was left to chance or to the ingenuity of her guests; these received on Christmas Eve their marching orders, orders which must be obeyed to the letter on pain of death. Even Lady Bobbin, however, superwoman though she might be, could not prevent the day from being marked by a good deal of crossness, much over-eating, and a series of startling incidents.

The battle opened, as it were, with the Christmas stockings. These, in thickest worsted, bought specially for the occasion, were handed to the guests just before bedtime on Christmas Eve, with instructions that they were to be hung up on their bedposts by means of huge safety pins, which were also distributed. Lady Bobbin and her confederate, Lord Leamington Spa, then allowed a certain time to elapse until, judging that Morpheus would have descended upon the household, they sallied forth together (he arrayed in a white wig, beard and eyebrows and red dressing-gown, she clasping a large basket full of suitable presents) upon a stealthy noctambulation, during the course of which every stocking was neatly filed.

As you might imagine, their prowling is not particularly welcome:

Forewarned though they were, the shadowy and terrifying appearance of Lord Leamington Spa fumbling about the foot of their beds in the light of a flickering candle gave most of them such a fearful start that all thoughts of sleep were banished for many hours to come.

Mitford also offers more than a few barbed aphorisms, most centered on marriage (a state she'd yet to experience at twenty-eight, when she wrote the novel, but which would, in her case, bear out her skepticism). There's the acid of

Oh, I don't expect to be her first husband, naturally.

And

The fact of being in love with somebody is a very good reason for not marrying them.

Then there's the question of money:

"If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes for a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other reasons for marrying at all.'"

Mitford's best, most piercing line comes in the center of this reflection:

"Oh, dear," said Paul gloomily, "it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?"

To which his friend Amabelle replies,

The trouble is . . . that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can't imagine why, but they do.

I started this post with Mitford's epistolary friendship with Evelyn Waugh, and that exchange leads me back to them. In April of 1952 Waugh wrote to Nancy,

Just had a letter from a group of American school girls asking me the Secret of Happiness. Me. I wrote back sharply that they were not meant to be happy but if they thought they were, you were the one to consult.

Indeed. It doesn't get more perfect Evelyn, more perfect Nancy.

RI(SV)P

{From the window of Shake, Rattle, and Read bookstore in Uptown, Chicago.}

A letter sent by A. E. Housman to Grant Richards on August 24, 1909:

My dear Richards,

I shall be very pleased to dine with you on Thursday, if you are not then dead of ptomaine poisoning, in which case please appear as a ghost and cancel the engagement.

My favorite thing about this letter comes in the notes, where the editor admits to having no idea what put the idea of ptomaine poisoning in Housman's head.

J. F. Powers makes the effort

I'm a bit pressed for time today, so I'll just share a passage I like from Suitable Accommodations the new collection of J. F. Powers's letters, which I'm enjoying very much. This one closes a letter of June 11, 1956, to Father Harvey Egan, a friend and literary patron:

I took a bath tonight and put on a clean shirt and drove own to the Press Bar for a glass of beer. It was formal like that, and something I've never tried before. Bless me, Father, I was trying to give St Cloud a chance. I was in the mood, Father, and I was prepared to take a certain amount of pleasure in it. The choice was Cold Spring or Pfeiffer's (Schmidt's), because I wanted no bottle beer in my mood. I wanted it from the keg, or ex cathedra, if you understand my meaning here. Well, I drank the bitter draughts and departed after one glass, returned home, and that, I'm afraid, was, and is, it. The Press Bar was dark pink inside, and I was alone at the bar.

Alone
Jim

It's such a compact assemblage of Powers's good traits as a writer: wry humor, self-deprecation, an ability to turn a phrase--and, especially, to turn the phrases of the Church to new, amusing ends--and a satisfactory melancholy suitable to a fallen world.

From the more cryptic letters of Thomas Hardy

I've been flipping through Volume Two of Thomas Hardy's letters, which covers the years 1893 to 1901, and there are many pleasures to be found within, particularly Hardy's flirtatious letters to Florence Henniker--which, were it an era when women were wearing pants, you'd be hard pressed not to read as a sustained effort to get into hers. Ahem.

That's a good note on which to lead into the first of the two letters I want to highlight today. Both are short, almost to the point of being cryptic, and both are amusing. The first, to Havelock Ellis, was sent on July 29, 1895:

Dear Mr Ellis
Pamphlet received. Shall read it with interest.
Yours very truly,
Thomas Hardy

Ellis, you probably know, was a pioneering sexologist, and the pamphlet? Editors Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate helpfully note that it was likely Sexual Inversion in Women. If a famous sexologist sends you, unsolicited, that pamphlet, in that less open era, what other response is possible? (And presumably he kept it hidden from his wife?)

The second letter is from May 4, 1895, and it reads:

Dear Sir,
I am in receipt of your note. I will if possible call on you about 5 this afternoon.
Faithfully yrs,
Thomas Hardy

What makes this one of interest is that it is to an unknown recipient. Oh, sure, it's probably innocuous. But what if it's not? Couldn't that be the response to a blackmail demand? To a note from a private detective who has some information that he's sure will be of interest to the eminent Mr. Hardy?

Could May 4, 1895 have been the day Thomas Hardy met Sherlock Holmes!

Things to do with books--other than read them, that is

On a Friday night at the close of a strange and unpleasant week, I'll turn the mic over to Ford Madox Ford, who, on being asked by an American editor to write a few hundred words on the uses of books, replied, in this letter from September 14, 1929:

Books can be useful from so many points of view. In my early days, for example, I used to use the Encylopedia Britannica as a trouser-press and certainly the house that was without it was to be pitied. Books are also very useful for pulping; bibles and other works set over the heart will deflect bullets; works printed on thin india paper are admirable if you happen to run out of cigarette papers. Their use for that purpose is in fact forbidden in France where there is a tobacco monopoly. In fact, if you are ever without a book you are certain to want one in the end. For the matter of that, my grand aunt Eliza Coffin used to say: "Sooner than be idle, I’d take a book and read." According to her the other uses of books were (1) for the concealing of wills (2) for the ditto of proposals of marriage by letter; (3) for pressing flowers; (4) folios piled one on the other will aid you to reach the top row in the linen cupboard; (5) they have been used as missiles, as bedsteads when levelly piled, as wrappings for comestibles; (6) as soporifics, sudorifics, shaving paper etc.

I was once accused of using slices of bacon, at breakfast, to mark my place in a book. That is untrue.

Glad we got that last bit cleared up.

Writing home

One of the problems of not having children and not practicing any religion is that spring break sneaks up on you. Judging by the lack of commuters on the L today, I suspect that the Internet may have already packed its Speedo and headed out the door for the weekend, hying (or, since this is the Internet, perhaps "hai-ing"?) to Daytona Beach to pound some Jager and barf intricate patterns onto the sand?

Well, just in case I'm wrong, let's look at some letters! And today's subject is perfect: Faulkner, a master drinker himself, a man who--to his ultimate detriment, one suspects--could have out-Jello-shotted your average Chi Delt Biff of Tri Delt Betty any day. This day, however--January 12, 1925, when he was twenty-eight--the pleasures on offer were more modest and quiet. He writes to his mother from the house of a friend, where he's visiting:

We got there Saturday evening in time for dinner. They are grand people, they let you do whatever you want to--dont try to entertain you, you know. Dr Rainold is a funny light little man, and Mrs Rainold is like Mrs Eatman. They were sitting before the fire reading, and spoke to us, and then went on reading. I have never felt as completely at home. They didnt try to 'talk' to me at all, let me get a book and read too.

Ghosts of the Rainolds: if you're listening, you're welcome to haunt the Rocketship any time you'd like. We've got books a-plenty. Just watch the ectoplasm; it ruins books.

Because I'm going to be spending at least part of my weekend proofreading--and thus ever-so-briefly regretting that I chose the glamorous field of publishing--I'll close with a reminder that the world is made up of readers and non-readers, and we, friends, are not in the majority. From a letter Faulkner sent home from Paris on November 9 of that same year:

I'm having one high and elegant time. With my $200.00 check I got to the American express Co. bank. I stand in line for a long time and then am told I must see a manager. I go to the manager's office: i is 12:30 then, and he is gone to lunch. He returns at 2:15, followed by a train of people all talking at once--like Moses crossing the Red Sea with his gang. After a San Francisco woman gives him hell for thirty minutes, I get to speak with him. Well, he never heard of Boni & Liveright--not a reading man, he explained. He looks in Bradstreet & Dun, Liveright is there, but no rating whatever is given. So he wont take the check.

The American consul also turns him down. What he doesn't do is go try Sylvia Beach--surely she, at least, would have honored the check? He might not have been able to turn it into food or booze, but books are a better consolation than nothing.

The Wodehouse cure

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Among people who are willing to countenance the possibility that ghosts exist, one of the most common explanations for haunting--for why this person returns be-sheeted while that one sleeps peacefully in the grave--is that the person died with some important business left undone on this plane.

If that's the case, the new collection of P. G. Wodehouse's letters may explain why no one has ever seen the Master's ghost wandering the stately homes of England, harrying aunts and aiding nephews. For with the next-to-last letter in the book, undated but from very late in Wodehouse's life, and addressed to Godfrey Smith, editor of the Sunday Times magazine, Wodehouse discharged a duty:

Jeeves's bracer does not contain dynamite as is generally supposed.

It consists of lime juice, a lump of sugar and one teaspoonful of Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo. This, it will be remembered, is the amount of the Buck-U-Uppo given to elephants in India to allow them to face tigers on tiger hunts with the necessary nonchalance.

Imagine the loss to humanity had Wodehouse gone to his grave with this recipe a secret!

Now to lay in a store of Buck-U-Uppo. Next time I'm in New York, I'll have to stop by the Butler Supply District and claim a case or two.

Wodehouse's letters

In need of a quick post today, I find Jeeves coming, as usual, to the rescue. Well, not Jeeves so much as his creator: I can't believe I've not yet mentioned the new collection of P. G. Wodehouse's letters.

For a proper review of the volume, you couldn't do better than my fellow Invisible Librarian Ed Park's for Bookforum (which I just amused myself by mistyping Bookfuror). One of Ed's most interesting observations concerns the disjunction between Wodehouse's meticulous plotting and an expressed desire for its opposite:

How interesting, then, to read what a younger Wodehouse wrote to a friend in 1914: “That is what I’ve always wanted to be able to do, to interest the reader for about five thousand words without having any real story. At present, I have to have an author-proof plot, or I’m no good.” Voice is subservient to narrative. Of course, an author as long-lived as Wodehouse will change his views on craft and ambition over the years. But in that contradiction between form and style—in a pinch, predestination and free will—lies a curious truth. Could it be that for us readers (after all, the most important part of this equation), Wodehouse in the end achieved his goal of dispensing with “any real story”? “It’s just a question of detail,” Wodehouse remarks about the composition, after the heavy lifting is done. Perhaps the aspects of his books that give us the most pleasure—the utter insouciance, the similes of fizzy genius (comparing, to pluck at random from the sacred oeuvre, a dour countenance to a “V-shaped depression off the coast of Iceland”)—could only be arrived at once the scaffolding was absolutely secure. Which is to say, a reader with much on his mind about the uncertainties of life might well have deeper reasons for immersing himself in a story called “There’s Always Golf.”

It's well worth clicking through to read the rest--there are few writers whose comedic sense I trust more than Ed's, and that comes through in his choice of lines to quote.

For my part, I'll share just two of the bits that have greatly amused me as I've flipped through the book. First comes from a letter to Wodehouse's daughter, Leonora, of July 3, 1921:

Love Among the Chickens is out in the cheap edition. I'll send you a copy. Townend told me it was on sale at the Charing Cross bookstall, so I rolled round and found they had sold out. Thence to Piccadilly Circus bookstall. Sold out again. Pretty good in the first two days. Both men offered to sell me "other Wodehouse books," but I smiled gently on them and legged it.

Just as Bertie would have done.

Then there's this account, sent to his friend William Townend in 1932, of a visit to H. G. Wells's house:

I like Wells, but the trouble with him is that you can never see him alone. He is accompanied wherever he goes by the woman he's living with. When they came to lunch, we were all set to listen to his brilliant table talk, and she wouldn't let him get a word in edgeways, monopolizing the conversation while he sat looking like a crushed rabbit. I did manage to get him away in a corner after lunch long enough for him to tell me that he had an arrangement with her that when he went to London, he went by himself, and he added, his face lighting up, that he was going to London next week. Then she yelled for him, and he trotted off.

By the way, when you go to his residence, the first thing you see is an enormous fireplace, and round it are carved in huge letters the words: TWO LOVERS BUILT THIS HOUSE.

Her idea, I imagine. I can't believe Wells would have thought of that himself.

What makes that letter even more deliciously amusing is that--as editor Sophie Ratcliffe points out in a note, Wodehouse used that very image a mere six years later in The Code of the Woosters. Bertie explains that at the house of a newly married friend he'd seen, over the fireplace, "the legend 'Two Lovers Built This Nest,' and I can still recall the look of dumb anguish in the other half of the sketch's eyes every time he came in and saw it."

I would be falling down on one of my self-imposed Internet duties if I didn't close with some lines from Wodehouse's one letter to Anthony Powell, from 1967. A bookseller had sent him Powell's 1939 novel What's Become of Waring, and Wodehouse sent Powell a note of appreciation:

I have always admired your work so much, especially the Music of Time series. The early ones are all fine, but what I like, and what I suppose everyone likes, is the feeling that one is living with a group of characters and sharing their adventures, the whole thing lit up by the charm which is your secret. I hope the series is going on for ever. I should hate to feel that I should never meet Widmerpool again.

Which leads to two thoughts:

1 It's interesting that Wodehouse likes Dance, for Powell's sense of time couldn't be more different from Wodehouse's: the latter's characters are trapped in amber, living forever in a prelapsarian (or at least pre–World War I) wonderland, while Powell's are forever moving, paced by death and driven by various and sundry furies, acted upon by time in ways they could never have predicted.

2 I'm pleased that Wodehouse uses the word "charm." It's undeniably one of Dance's great qualities, yet it's not one I've ever properly identified by that name. But Wodehouse is right: there are few books whose wit and humanity are more delicately charming than Dance.

Did you mean to attach a document?

As part of my continual trawl through various letters collections, I wandered into those of Daniel Defoe recently. There are almost no extant letters of a personal nature--as George Harris Healey wrote in his introduction to the 1955 collection he edited, "One searches in vain for a single letter written to his parents, or to Mary Defoe, patient helpmeet of a half-century of small triumphs and great calamities."

Which leaves business and politics, in both of which Defoe was up to his ears. Many of the letters are written to patrons, and thus are almost unreadable today for all their florid praise and nonsense. The occasional letter, however, jumps out for its immediacy: when, as a journalist (and spy) in Scotland promoting the cause of union, Defoe scribbles the news and hurries it on its way, the power and immediacy of political machinations come to life, feeling almost news-like, even familiar and contemporary.

My favorite letter, however, is the following, sent on April 17, 1712 to Defoe's patron and spymaster, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. In the introduction, Healey acknowledges his gratitude to Harley for preserving so many of Defoe's letters . . . though he could have done a slightly better job:

The cautious Harley was a collector, and it is to his instinct for keeping things that we owe the happy preservation of most of the letters in this book. One may wince at his occasional practice of tearing off the now-prized signature of his secret agent, but he did not destroy the letter itself, and for that the student of Defoe must always be the debtor of Harley.

The letter itself I think you'll find amusing:

I am to ask Pardon for a Mistake I thought my Self Uncapable of (Viz.:) That having written to your Ldpp last Night for Cover of The Enclosed, and Given The letter to a Servt to Carry, I Found The Receipt on My Table left Out. I have left it without Date because your Ldpp So Ordred before. I Humbly Ask your Ldpps pardon for the Mistake And am

May it Please your Ldpp

Your Most Humble and Obedt Srvt—

Daniel Defoe

That's right: even three hundred years ago people were forgetting to attach the document before hitting Send.

This penny monster is about to explode!, or, Pre-Internet investment spam

We are reaching the end! February--always, somehow, less intolerable than the eleven weeks of January--is nearly upon us, and that means the group snoop into the writers' postbox that has been this month of blogging is coming to an end. I hope you've enjoyed it. February should find me with my feet properly beneath me, work beaten into quivering submission, travel translated to its most manageable state, memory.

But I can't let you turn the calendar page without first apprising you of an amazing investment opportunity--brought to you by P. G. Wodehouse in a letter to his daughter Leonora of September 27, 1920, found in the lovely new collection P. G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters:

I've just had a letter from a man in California who wants me to buy an interest in a gold mine for five hundred pounds. He says "I happened to pick up the Sept Cosmopolitan and on one of the front pages I see a list of authors and I said to myself that bunch could put this over and I have a hunch they will and your name is in the list and I'm writing you along with the others to send me your check for twenty-five hundred dollars and write on the check that it is for one-thirtieth interest in the eight-year lease of the Kid Gold Mine and then after a while I will send you a check for your share of a million dollars or a letter of regret telling you I have spent the money digging through the mountain and my hunch was a bum one, but anyway I expect your check." Sanguine sort of johnny, what? I'm going to put the letter in a story.

Editor Sophie Ratcliffe helpfully notes that Wodehouse--if not, one assumes, the miner--made good on his statement, using the anecdote in Big Money.

The speculator, methinks, was about a decade too late: Twain would have been a better mark.