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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
Long history of loss
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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A lament for all the books that might have been but were lost forever.
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"Loss," the author writes, "is not an anomaly, or a deviation, or an exception. It is the norm..."
IS the history of literature also the history of loss? Books lost, damaged, stolen, and never written? What is famously known is Kafka asking his literary executor to burn all his books, the Alexandrian library on fire, and Gogol burning the second half of Dead Souls.
What is less known is Sandiston, a novel about hypochondriacs that Jane Austen never completed, Shakespeare's Love's Labour Won (perhaps a sequel to you know which play) which has been missing, Speak, America, a second volume Nabokov had planned to his memoir, Speak, Memory, but never wrote, Malcolm Lowry's only manuscript copy of Ultramarine, which was stolen from his publisher's car and then had to be reassembled from his wastepaper basket, Socrates' version of Aesop's Fables and Homer's first work, Margites, (a comic epic poem about a fool, who, "knew many things, but all badly") — both destroyed, some nearly thousand pages of Burrough's Naked Lunch that Algerians street boys stole from his hotel room and sold on the streets and Double Exposure, a second novel that Sylvia Plath had been writing about her marriage that has been lost.
Compulsive collector
Stuart Kelly, the author of The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read is a bibliomane — a compulsive reader and a compulsive collector. He is what I call a "completist": a collector who is obsessed with completing his or her collection. For Kelly it began as a teenager when he had to have every Agatha Christie title in every edition, and once he discovered literature, every Penguin Classic he could buy. In the process he discovered, to his dismay, that there are several books by classical and modern writers that are lost forever — destroyed, missing, stolen or conceived and abandoned. It shocks one to learn that only seven of Sophocles plays have survived out of 133 lost, only 18 of more than 90 by Euripides remain and Aeschylus? Eight known, 73 missing! The 90 odd chapters of The Book of Lost Books are really wide ranging mini-essays on the stories of books we don't possess, and tantalisingly researched biographies of their authors.
The next question is — so what? What if all these books are lost? You can mourn them only if you really care enough about them. And Stuart Kelly does. His passionate and witty book is not another book of lists — like those deep sea divers, he is a deep reader who has travelled down to the very bottom of literature to bring up what is there AND what is not there. Imagine the reading of this man! You can report a book lost only if you have first read prodigiously — all of Austen, all of the Hellenic dramas, all of Shakespeare, all the modern masters, most of world literature and all the obscure writers in between. What Kelly writes about is not only not common knowledge but news to literary scholars as well. This is why The Book of Lost Books has become the best reviewed book (one critic calls it, "a formidable piece of bibliographical belletrism", another: "a Borgesian library of books") since its publication a month ago and taken so seriously by book lovers, academicians and book critics.
Not all loss, Kelly discovered, is tragic. T.E. Lawrence mislaid his manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom at a railway station and by his own admission his second draft was "shorter, snappier and more truthful". Hemingway lost all of his early unpublished writing when his trunk was stolen en route to Switzerland in 1922 — but this forced him to write new stories in a new style — that spare, unaffected prose he is now famous for. Around individual essays that look at a particular lost book, Kelly spins intriguing asides and digressions: Dylan Thomas lost the manuscript of Under Milk Wood three times and found it three times — the last was in a pub; Dostoyevsky had a sequel planned to The Brothers Karamazov in which Alyosha, writes Dostoyevsky, "leaves the monastery and becomes an anarchist. And my pure Alyosha will kill the Tsar!" Strangest of all: Mikhail Bakhtin, while exiled in Kazakhstan, "used his work on Dostoyevsky as cigarette papers, after having smoked a copy of the Bible".
Destruction of books
"Loss," the author writes, "is not an anomaly, or a deviation, or an exception. It is the norm...We struggle unsuccessfully against oblivion and the struggling itself is our success." He writs of how vulnerable books are to destruction — from the material used to make them — paper — to the deliberate destruction of literature at the hands of fascists, religious zealots and spouses! But then he also wonders, "Is becoming lost the worst that can happen to a book? A lost book is susceptible to a degree of wish fulfillment. The lost book...becomes infinitely more alluring simply because it can be perfect only in the imagination." There is something nostalgic and wistful about books becoming actually lost — because we can't imagine such a thing today when every book published is preserved and backed up and Google-linked. My one disappointment with the book is that in his survey of lost books, Kelly sticks largely to reporting on the Western canon — works by dead white male (and female) writers. The wide-ranging reader that he is, he should follow this book with a report of what has been lost to us in other literatures.
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