Friday, September 10, 2021

Taking Early Retirement



Philip van Doren Stern, ed.: The Annotated Walden (1970)


Lately I've been renewing acquaintance with one of my favourite books, The Annotated Walden. Why? Because I can. Because I'm taking early retirement from Academia, that's why. In fact, I gave in my required three months notice of departure today, so I thought I'd better start getting in training for the new life!

Don't get me wrong. I have other editions of Thoreau's masterwork, as well as owning a copy of the beautiful fourteen-volumes-in-two Dover reprint of the 1906 edition of his complete journal:



Henry David Thoreau: The Journal, 1837-1861 (2 vols: 1962)


It isn't just Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) which enchants me, though, it's Philip Van Doren Stern's superb, lovingly illuminated annotated version of the book.







Philip van Doren Stern, ed.: The Annotated Walden (1970)


Stern, perhaps better known for his Christmas story The Greatest Gift - which inspired the Frank Capra movie It's a Wonderful Life (1946) - was an editor and Civil War historian who clearly sympathised greatly with Thoreau's unfettered idealism.

His annotated Walden includes photos of the site of the famous cabin "now" (i.e. in the 1960s), and there's an enchanting sense of double-focus in this book published fifty years ago which invites us to contrast further his "then" with our "now." Thoreau's retreat to the woods seems so much more distant in time, yet its relevance to contemporary thinking has, if anything, grown.



Henry David Thoreau: Walden Pond (1854)







Henry David Thoreau: Walden (1854)

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
It's one of the most famous quotes in American literature. But what does it mean? Stern is very helpful here, as he quotes in the margin from the original version of the passage, where Thoreau gave a long account of an Irish workman moving from job to job without being able to settle in any of them - due mainly to his ever increasing air of desperation, and his gradually disintegrating attire.

This poignant true story was reduced and cut down as Thoreau shaped his book, until it ended up with the sentence as we see it above. The workman, though a signal example of the trend towards self-defeating and ever-growing anxiety ("free-floating anxiety," as we tend to say now), was not the whole story. What Thoreau wanted to say was that apparent increases in prosperity were not really significant when set alongside our ever-growing desire for complete security, and our consequent mounting dread of disaster and destitution.

Which is why he went to the woods - or, rather, a couple of miles down the road from the village of Concord, Massachusetts - to see if it was actually feasible to live self-sufficiently without being either a wage-slave or a pensioner.

The results, it must be said, were mixed. He made his basic point, but it's hard to know if he could have survived without the support of friends such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who actually owned the land the cabin was built on.



David Mikics, ed.: The Annotated Emerson (2012)
The Annotated Emerson. Ed. David Mikics. Foreword by Phillip Lopate. The Belknap Press. Cambridge, Mass & London: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Emerson sympathised with, but never saw entirely eye to eye with Thoreau. The latter was too grimly consistent in his thinking: too fanatical in his desire to have no truck with slavery or any of the other 'worldly' realities which others were able to accommodate themselves to somehow.

He was, admittedly, only one of the eccentrics (or, as they would have put it, Transcendentalists) who surrounded the sage of Concord, and whom he supported in one way or another for much of his life: another was Louisa May Alcott's father Amos Branson Alcott. The tale is told very entertainingly in Hemingway-biographer Carlos Baker's last book, Emerson among the Eccentrics.



Carlos Baker: Emerson among the Eccentrics (1996)
Carlos Baker. Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. Ed. Elizabeth B. Carter. Introduction & Epilogue by James R. Mellow. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.

The great value of Thoreau, for me, is that he asks all the right questions. His answers, by and large, are less useful to me. I can't see myself building a cabin with my own hands out in the woods behind Mairangi Bay (even if someone would let me). But I do feel it necessary to ask those same questions about how best to live, how to avoid mortgaging your life to other people's expectations, and to that awful trepidation that overcomes so many of us at the thought of stepping down from our current position of solvency.



I've always admired C. K. Stead's decision to resign from Auckland University in his fifties to pursue the life of a full-time writer. I never - until now - thought to emulate it, but it seems now, for a combination of serendipitous reasons, that I'm going to.

Karl has given me a number of useful pieces of advice over the years, but I think it was his example in this particular respect which has proved most inspiring to me. I could easily have stayed in my job until 65, then retired on a full pension. But, to be honest, I don't feel a real vocation for it any longer.

I've done a lot of things in the fifty-odd semesters I've been teaching on Massey University's Albany Campus (and the five years before that at other places, and the ten years before that as a student), but now I think I've started to repeat myself. It's time for someone new to step into the role - someone who has everything to prove and has the burning desire to tell other people all about it.

It's not that I've stopped loving teaching, but I want now to shift gears into full-time rather than part-time writing and research instead. Every one of the books I've published to date was written while I was teaching at Massey. It's never been easy to claw back enough time to do it without a great deal of compromise on both sides, however.



Étienne Carjat: Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)


To be perfectly honest, right now I feel as happy as a sandboy. Whatever the future holds, it will be unpredictable, uncharted territory. As Baudelaire puts it so succinctly in 'Le Voyage':
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe ?
Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau !

[To the depths of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, who cares?
To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!]





Henry Thoreau (1856)

Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862)

    Books:

  1. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. 1854. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. Foreword by Townsend Scudder. 1937. The Modern Library College Editions. New York: Random House, Inc., 1950.

  2. Thoreau, Henry David. The Annotated Walden: Walden; or, Life in the Woods, together with “Civil Disobedience,” a Detailed Chronology and Various Pieces about its author, the Writing and Publishing of the Book. 1854. Ed. Philip van Doren Stern. New York: Bramhall House, 1970.

  3. Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walden: or, Life in the Woods; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod. 1849, 1854, 1864, 1865. Ed. Robert F. Sayre. The Library of America, 28. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1985.




  4. Poetry:

  5. Bode, Carl, ed. Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau: Enlarged Edition. 1943 & 1964. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965.

  6. Thoreau, Henry David. Collected Essays and Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell. The Library of America, 124. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2001.




  7. Journals:

  8. Torrey, Bradford, & Francis H. Allen, ed. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. 14 vols in 2. 1906. Foreword by Walter Harding. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1962.

  9. Shepard, Odell, ed. The Heart of Thoreau's Journals. 1906. Boston & New York: The Houghton & Mifflin Company / Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1927.

  10. Thoreau, Henry David. A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851. 1990 & 1992. Ed. H. Daniel Peck. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.



Wednesday, September 01, 2021

Seven Stages of Book Collecting



In her 1969 book On Death and Dying Swiss-German psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed the celebrated "five stages of grief":
  1. denial
  2. anger
  3. bargaining
  4. depression
  5. acceptance
(I should perhaps add that the Wikipedia entry on the subject adds - in what seems to me an unnecessarily pompous manner - that:
Although commonly referenced in popular culture, studies have not empirically demonstrated the existence of these stages, and the model is considered to be outdated, inaccurate, and unhelpful in explaining the grieving process.)


Ken Ross: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004)


Be that as it may, I've decided to follow her example, in a somewhat more humble fashion, by introducing the John Mackenzie Ross "seven stages of book collecting" model. Here it is:
  1. Buy the book
  2. Shelve it
  3. Cover it
  4. Catalogue it
  5. Research it
  6. Read it
  7. Write about it
Naturally, each of these stages may require further exposition. I've more than once been greeted with blank incomprehension when mentioning some (to me) routine aspect of collecting which turned out to be far less self-explanatory than I'd anticipated.



Bronwyn Lloyd: Jack's Arabian Nights Bookcase (30/7/21)


Take, for example, my online interview with novelist Jaspreet Singh on the subject of my 1001 Nights book collection. "When exactly did you start seeing your growing collection as a separate bookshelf?" was one of his questions, and yet to me appropriate display is an obvious outgrowth of the collecting bug.



Jack Ross: A Gentle Madness (2009- )


Similarly, one of my ex-students posted the following set of queries on my Book collection blog, A Gentle Madness (prefacing them with the possibly accurate comment, "Captain Jack, you've gone quite mad, but I guess you must have always been this way!"):
    Questions:

  1. Did you one day realise you had the makings of a "collection" or was it your intention to "collect"?

  2. What book started your collection (when it first became a collection or when you first realised it)?

  3. Do you read every book you buy?

  4. How do you decide what books to buy? Must they be your personal favourites? Are there boxes you need to tick before a book can be allowed into the collection?

  5. Would you ever allow Stephenie Meyer or Dan Brown in your collection?

These are all good questions, I guess, but they proved surprisingly difficult to answer. I'll leave you to see what kind of a fist I made of that by directing you to the original post here.





    The Booksellers (2019)


  1. Buy the book


  2. The thrill of the chase is probably the most familiar aspect of collecting even to people who don't share this passion themselves. How else account for the immense popularity of such reality TV series as American Pickers or Pawn Stars?

    I wrote a post about the Lost Bookshops of Auckland some years ago now, where I tried to convey some of my own nostalgia for the second-hand and antiquarian bookshops which once dotted the city.

    Something of the same spirit is conveyed in the recent documentary The Booksellers, which takes us into the inner sanctum of some of New York's most celebrated bookstores.

    Now, of course, the game has changed utterly, thanks to the immense convenience and practicality of online purchasing from the likes of Amazon.com or AbeBooks. This, too, is not without its risks and excitements, but it is a somewhat domesticated version of the sport. It's hard to imagine any serious present-day collectors ignoring it when it comes to filling significant gaps in their collections, though.



    Mike Wolfe, Danielle Colby-Cushman & Frank Fritz: American Pickers (2010- )







    Bronwyn Lloyd: "Before" (2019)


  3. Shelve it


  4. No matter how much shelf space you have, you will fill it eventually. Accordingly, as you'll gather from the "After" picture below, I've had to resort to stowing away my books in double rows.

    This is certainly not an ideal way to present them. I've taken to putting one book by some particularly prolific author in the front row, and shelving all the rest of that person's books behind. That way you can deduce with a reasonable amount of certainty what is likely to be there - if you have some idea of the scope of the collection in the first place, that is.

    I am not myself a fan of bookcases which graduate the height of the shelves so as to allow for bigger books in one, standard hardbacks in another, and even smaller ones (such as paperbacks) in another. Authors are seldom so obliging as to make all of their books the same size, so one ends up having to run parallel alphabetical rows of books on different levels to accommodate any one writer. Which can be very confusing to outsiders trying to find a specific book.

    After considerable research, I've come up with the following rough ratio for the ideal bookcase (for my own requirements, that is). All shelves should have exactly the same dimensions, except for the top one, which should be open on top so as to accommodate exceptionally large books. Each shelf should be roughly 280 mm. [= c.11 inches] deep, by 280 mm. high. That is tall enough for most books, and also provides ample room for two rows of normal sized volumes. I'd recommend including at least seven shelves, which would add up to a height of 2 metres [= c. 6 feet], with a breadth of at least a metre - or even a metre and a half [= 3-4 feet].

    In other words:
    Shelves:
    180 mm. deep x
    180 mm. high

    Bookcases:
    1000 mm. tall x
    500-750 mm. wide
    Aby Warburg saw his own book collection (now housed in the Warburg Institute in London) as a dynamic way of connecting otherwise disparate disciplines. Merely by shelving the books a certain way:
    the library revealed the similarities which existed among each of the investigative approaches pertaining to these disciplines and promoted the insight that multiple problems cannot be solved by considering each of them in isolation.
    I can make no such lofty claims for my own assortment of disparate titles, but it's true that they do encourage such juxtapositions by the very fact of their coexistence in the same space.



    Bronwyn Lloyd: "After" (2019)







    Model Ship World: Covering Dustjackets (2013)


  5. Cover it


  6. For years I've been trying to protect at least a few of my books with plastic covers, but it wasn't until I managed to locate a reliable source of mylar plastic rolls in the past couple of years that I've been able to do this more systematically.

    At first it was only hardbacks with dustjackets which received this treatment, but more recently I've taken to covering all the hardbacks, as well as a few of the more vulnerable paperbacks. I make an exception for books in slipcases, as they seem to be quite sufficiently protected already.

    Damp air and direct sunlight are the two main enemies of books. The first promotes mould and foxing, the second fades brightly covered spines. Of the two, I prefer sunlight, as I'd rather have a faded dry book than a colourful damp one. Best of all, of course, is a temperature controlled environment (a dehumidifier will help you with this) in a room with appropriately placed curtains.

    I am, finally, far more interested in what's inside a book than its outside appearance, but there isn't much point in spending a lot of money on acquiring nice things if you don't take care of them once you have them.



    Ubiquitous Books: Mylar Covers for Books (2019)







    A Gentle Madness (2009- )


  7. Catalogue it


  8. This is a major part of my collecting endeavour. I catalogue each new book I acquire both by category and by location.

    "Mr. Humphries and His Inheritance" is probably my favourite M. R. James story of all time. In it, James relegates his usual ghostly shenanigans to the background even more than usual, since it mostly concerns a bookish young man who's just inherited an old house with a wonderful maze - as well as a library of mostly unexamined treasures - from a distant relative.

    "The drawing up of a catalogue raisonné would be a delicious occupation for winter," is probably the one line from this story which has influenced me most over the years. Yes it would be a "delicious activity" - and it is. Cataloguing can become a chore like any other, but when it's done for pleasure, the possibilities of online book catalogues are as yet in their infancy, I firmly believe.

    Besides the principal functions mentioned above, my own book collection website, A Gentle Madness, includes complete listings of the books of favourite authors of mine so that I know what I still need to be be on the lookout for. It also includes a category of posts about recent acquisitions to my library.

    Further refinements will no doubt follow. Hopefully they'll be reasonably easy to institute, now that most of the essential data is in place.



    Jack Ross: A Gentle Madness: Acquisitions (2012- )




  9. Research it


  10. I suppose, since I have spent thirty years working as a teacher at tertiary level - and ten years as a university student before that - I should know a little bit about this subject.

    What's more, I date from an era when dissertations where painstakingly tapped out on typewriters, and when access to a bank of encyclopedias and dictionaries was necessary to provide the necessary facts for literary research.

    The horrid truth, though, is that I have a tendency to make my first stop Wikipedia just like most of my students do. And why not? Many of the entries are flawed and incomplete, admittedly, but then so were most of the reference sources I had access to in the university library. The advantage with an online encyclopedia is that one can click on the links to supplement the basic information included there.

    It will certainly provide you with what you need to know about the contents (and authors) of most of the books in an average library. Beyond that, admittedly, more specialised techniques may have to be employed - but that's another story (as Rudyard Kipling was probably not the first to say).



    Wikipedia (2001- )







    Eve Arnold: Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce (1955)


  11. Read it


  12. "Have you read them all?"

    This is probably the book collecting equivalent of that infamous question for writers: "Where do you get your ideas?"

    No, of course I haven't read all of them. Nor would I really relish looking round at a group of books every one of which I'd already read. "La chair est triste, hélas ! et j'ai lu tous les livres," as Stéphane Mallarmé once put it: "The flesh is sad, alas, and I've read all the books."

    I have read a pretty sizeable percentage of them, though, some several times, and am gradually working my way through the others. Interestingly enough, not all book collectors actually do this. There are even some library collections which boast of including only uncut copies, unread and never-to-be-seen by any human eye.

    That's all very well, but my collection exists for use, not ornament. There are a few books which are kind of old and delicate, and those I might choose to read in a library copy instead, but most of them I read regardless of any risk to their spines or their ancient acidic paper. It is, after all, a large part of my job, as well as my leisure (though generally somewhat different books are involved).

    I am, one might say, a reading machine - by necessity as well as inclination.



    Bronwyn Lloyd: Reading at Paekakariki (2013)







    Jack Ross: The Imaginary Museum (2006- )


  13. Write about it


  14. Writing about the books you've bought and read is really the icing on the cake. Ever since I first started this blog in 2006, it's been moving more and more towards an exclusive focus on book collecting. Hence this post, among many others along the same lines, and hence the various series of author or series-focussed blogposts I've composed to date.

    Books, after all, are fascinatingly various objects. They have a physical presence as well as existing on a more ideal or abstract plane. The object interests me as much as its content, in most cases. They can be old or new, big or small, beautifully bound and packaged or scruffily mass-produced.

    But I suppose that the main point of collecting them is to connect with them in some way: either by suggesting new ideas or refinements of ideas in you, or just delighting you with "the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to life beyond life" (Milton).



So that's a little taste of the background to my madness. What about yours?

I suppose that the word "hobbyist" might be applied to what I do here by some tetchy critics in place of the rather more grandiose term "collector." But a collection is nothing but a hobby with a college education (to paraphrase Mark Twain), so yar boo sucks to them!





Sunday, August 15, 2021

Fast Thinkers and Ghost Writers



Britannica: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)


A bit of wisdom here from Pierre Bourdieu:
Fast-thinkers ... think in clichés, in the "received ideas" that Flaubert talks about - banal, conventional, common ideas that are received generally. By the time they reach you, these ideas have already been received by everybody else, so reception is never a problem. But whether you're talking about a speech, a book, or a message on television, the major question of communication is whether the conditions for reception have been fulfilled: Does the person who's listening have the tools to decode what I'm saying?
Like most people (I suppose), I used to worry about my inability to shine in contests of quick-flowing wit. I remember once meeting a friend who'd been at Graduate School in America, and had returned to New Zealand to show off some of what he'd become. The talk came thick and fast, with nary a space to insert a word of one's own, or query exactly what it was we were talking about.
When you transmit a "received idea," it's as if everything is set, and the problem solves itself. Communication is instantaneous because, in a sense, it has not occurred; or it only seems to have taken place. The exchange of commonplaces is communication with no content other than the fact of communication itself. The "commonplaces" that play such an enormous role in daily conversation work because everyone can ingest them immediately. Their very banality makes them something the speaker and the listener have in common.
- Pierre Bourdieu, 'On Television' (1996/98)
[reference courtesy of Australian novelist Christine Howe, who quoted it at the 'Critical Futures' symposium I attended a couple of years ago at the University of Wollongong]
Now, however (thanks largely to Christine Howe), I worry about it less.





Dorothy L. Sayers: Whose Body? (1923)


At one point the conversation with my friend-recently-returned-from-the-US shifted (for some reason I've now forgotten) to the detective novels of Dorothy Sayers. Now I'd read all of these, in sequence, on more than one occasion, and could easily have answered any random question on campanology or heraldry drawn from her books.

My friend dismissed her quickly with a wry reference to the naming of the evil surgeon Sir Julian Freke ("Freak" - get it?) in her very first novel, Whose Body?, as well as a claim that the book was anti-semitic, given that the murderer's victim was a wealthy financier called Sir Reuben Levy.



Sir Frederick Treves: The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923)


Now this seemed (and seems) - to me - rather a complex matter. The name of Sir Julian Freke had, to my mind, been carefully chosen to recall to the reader that most famous of British surgeons Sir Frederick Treves, discoverer (and promoter) of Joseph Merrick, the (so-called) "Elephant Man."

Treves certainly seems a far more sympathetic figure, so perhaps 'Freke' is supposed to hint at the Mr. Hyde-like double nature lurking in any God-like surgeon. Or perhaps Sayers knew more gossip about Treves than we do now.



Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)


As for the claims of anti-semitism, they don't seem to me to have that much behind them, gruesome though the details of this particular murder undoubtedly are. Certainly Freke is presented as being intensely anti-semitic.

The subject is canvassed interestingly in the Wikipedia article on Dorothy Sayers. Later, in 1936, when "a translator wanted 'to soften the thrusts against the Jews' in Whose Body?, Sayers, surprised, replied that the only characters 'treated in a favourable light were the Jews!'"

In other words: "How can I be a racist? Some of my best friends are [fill in as required ...]."

I guess the overall point I'm trying to make is that my friend, a fast thinker if ever there was one, was onto the next point before any real consideration could be given to this one, wrecked reputations left smoking in his wake. Dorothy Sayers - anti-semite; T. S. Eliot - anti-semite; Pound - Fascist ... and so on and so forth. A label for everyone and the mouth constantly moving on to new aperçus and subtleties: quick subtleties, mind you, so that no-one (such as myself) stoutly bringing up the rear, could be permitted any time to break down or examine the ideas presented.

Talking people down in this matter - battering down their resistance with a shower of facts and figures, flimsy literary and cultural parallels, and random contemporary events, is, of course, one of the more effective ways of ensuring victory in debate. On paper it can seem to work equally well just as long as no-one really reads what you write.

As long as they skate over it in the same way, and at the same speed, that you composed it, the knockdown argument is almost guaranteed.



I'm sorry to say that British cultural critic and historian Marina Warner does seem to me to exemplify some of these traits. Don't get me wrong: I've read a great many of her books, and have received much profit from them. They certainly cover many areas - European folklore and fairy-tales, Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Arabian Nights - which are of profound interest to me. And yet they continue to frustrate me, perhaps because of the speed at which her mind moves from subject to subject.

Here's a list of the books by her I own:
  1. The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of T’zu-hsi (1835-1908), Empress Dowager of China. 1972. London: Cardinal: 1974.
  2. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. 1975. London: Quartet Books, 1978.
  3. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. 1981. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
  4. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. 1985. London: Vintage, 1996.
  5. The Mermaids in the Basement. 1993. London: Vintage, 1994.
  6. [Edited] Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment. Illustrated by Sophie Herxheimer. 1994. London: Vintage, 1996.
  7. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. 1994. London: Vintage, 1995.
  8. No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock. 1998. London: Vintage, 2000.
  9. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. 2002. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
  10. Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature & Culture. 2003. London: Vintage, 2004.
  11. Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights. 2011. Vintage Books. London: Random House, 2012.

As you can see, they're a eclectic bunch: history, fiction, literature, folklore ... She certainly covers a lot of ground.



Her ideas on transformation, cultural fluidity, gender roles, are all very persuasive, and tend to get quoted approvingly by other like-minded writers. But is she reliable? Can you trust her when it comes to tedious matters such as facts and dates?

Not always, I'm sorry to say. Let's take one small example:



In her introduction to the Folio Society's sumptuous six-volume edition of the Mardrus/Mathers translation of the Arabian Nights, she mentions that:
In the Victorian era, adventure-explorers such as Hugh Lane and Richard Burton, both ardent lovers of Araby, produced translations based on these Arabic compilations. Their editions reflect their own attachments: Hugh Lane's is stuffed full of ethnographical details of Old Cairo (some of it densely researched and nostalgic, other parts rather fanciful): Burton's version is an almost Chattertonian exercise in auncient tongues, prolix and rococo, and is also truffled with lore (much of it salacious, earning Burton his nickname, 'Dirty Dick.'). [p.xiv]
But who is this "Hugh Lane" she is speaking of? There was a Hugh Lane (1875-1915), drowned by the sinking of the Lusitania, who is famous for having attempted to leave his priceless collection of impressionist paintings to his native country, Ireland, only to be rebuffed by the local Dublin authorities.

But the Lane Warner means is clearly Edward William Lane (1801-1876), who was indeed the first major translator of the Nights from Arabic into English. I don't think anyone has ever accused him of writing especially "nostalgically" about "Old Cairo", though - let alone "fancifully". On the contrary, his classic work on the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), remains a most informative and detailed guide to the city, compiled - as it was - in consultation with a number of local Sheikhs. His main claim to fame, however, is the comprehensive Arabic-English Lexicon, which occupied him from 1842 until his death.

Warner is on safer ground with Richard F. Burton. Her description of his work as a "Chattertonian exercise in auncient tongues" is certainly accurate enough. Fans of his version - such as myself - may feel a little affronted by her casual dismissal of this massive labour of love, but she is (of course) perfectly entitled to her opinion, which is by no means an uncommon one.



Marina Warner: Stranger Magic (2012)


A few years later, in her book Stranger Magic, she admitted having mainly relied on the most recent French translation of the Nights - by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and André Miquel, 3 vols (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2005-7) - in preference to any of the English ones. Had she actually read them? She certainly implies as much. Here, for instance, is her revised version of the paragraph quoted above:
In the Victorian era, adventure-explorers such as Edward W. Lane and Richard Burton, both ardent Arabophiles, produced translations that reflected their own attachments. Lane's, published in 1838-41, followed close on the heels of his ethnographical description of contemporary Cairo (The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1835); Lane added a huge apparatus of notes on Arab Society (some of it densely researched and nostalgic, other parts rather fanciful). The three-volume set of 1850 includes 600 engravings based on Lane's experiences in Cairo; my copy, which came originally from my great-grandmother's library, is one of the few books that I've owned and read since I was a child, and though it is pretty fustian, with Lane tranquillising so much of the book's agitated emotions and adventures, it is readable to a degree that Richard Burton's lurid and archaising version, made fifty years later, never reaches. [p.18]
It's not for me to cast any doubt on the passage referring to her childhood reading of Lane. It just seems a bit odd that someone who didn't even know (or bother to check) his first name a decade before, should treasure a copy of his translation as "one of the few books that I've owned and read since I was a child."

The snap judgements of the first version of the passage remain - "rather fanciful," "translations that reflected their own attachments" - though she has softened some of the more egregious epithets: "lovers of Araby" has become "Arabophiles", and Burton's version is now "lurid and archaising" rather than "an almost Chattertonian exercise in auncient tongues, prolix and rococo ... truffled with lore (much of it salacious ...)."

I certainly don't question Warner's choice of texts to base her discussion on. I, too, am an admirer of the wonderful new French translation: It's just difficult to continue to believe in the reliability of a scholar who was hazy about E. W. Lane's first name - and certainly seems never to have read extensively in Burton's work - as a reliable guide to the intricacies of one of the world's longest books, with a complex textual history which spans cultures and continents as well as millennia of analogues.

In other words, beguiling as so many of Warner's generalisations and juxtapositions are, none of her statements - especially those centred around dates and names - can be trusted without further research. Which is really not much use. Even historical and cultural popularisers (a very worthwhile calling, IMHO) should be careful to check their facts. What exactly are they popularising, otherwise?





Helen Sword: Ghostwriting Modernism (2002)


My final exhibit is the book Ghostwriting Modernism, by Auckland University Academic Helen Sword. Like Warner's, Sword's pages are plastered her pages with allusions and lists of possible parallels. Unlike Warner's, though, her notes are a carefully composed repository of bibliographical leads and further information.

In terms of readability, it's probably no accident that Warner's book flew off the shelves whereas Sword's is obtainable only in university libraries and from specialist booksellers. If it weren't for my fascination with its subject-matter - the manifestation of spiritualist tropes in such canonical authors as Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, H. D., Plath and Hughes - I probably wouldn't have bothered to read it myself.

But, having now done so, I've shelved it close to hand for further consultation. This is a book which is more than the sum of its parts. It opens perspectives on masses of further work on such fascinating exhibits as James Merrill's Ouija-board epic The Changing Light at Sandover, or the spirit messages from dead RAF pilots which H. D. collected in the latter years of the Second World War, which have proved such an embarrassment to many of her admirers.

Everyone already knew that Yeats was a convinced Occultist, but simply collecting - in convenient form - so much data on the phenomena of 'ghostliness' in such mainstream twentieth century writers makes it almost impossible to continue to sideline it as some kind of individual aberration on the part of each of them.

That's not to say that there isn't something a bit loony about Sylvia and Ted crouched over the Ouija board receiving messages from the great unknown. But it certainly isn't nearly as odd and uncommon as many critics would like to believe. Did they do it, like Yeats, to access new "metaphors for poetry"? Or was it something more serious for them? All this, and much more, is discussed judiciously, and with ample cross-referencing, by Helen Sword.



Fast-thinkers or Ghostwriters? So many books now fall into the first category, I'm afraid. You start to read them, only to become gradually aware that they're little more than condensations of the idées reçues [received ideas] mocked so thoroughly by Flaubert in the "Dictionnaire des idées reçues" in his posthumous novel Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881). The research is sloppy and second-hand, the editing perfunctory, and the whole thing a mere "interruption to our studies," in A. E. Housman's devastating phrase.

Think of all those war books which keep on flopping out year after year: Martin Middlebrook's The First Day on the Somme (1971) was regarded as a seminal and revisionist work when it first appeared some fifty years ago now. Now, of course, further research has thrown in doubt many of its conclusions, but do we really need successive legions of books with more or less the same title, gloatingly recounting the same devastating events?

There's a furtive voyeurism about the worst of these books. They look like real books - their publishers try hard to make them resemble genuine historical works - but actually they're just rehashes of the same tired clichés. How many hacks have written books designed to show that Sir Douglas Haig was a great general, a genius on the level of Napoleon or Marlborough? He won, didn't he? And he was British, after all.

The trouble is that the real books concealed in this crimson tide of white noise, those based on real research and genuine new thinking, increasingly seldom emerge from the ruck. Ghostwriting Modernism is such a book. It's not perfect by any means - but it's certainly based on careful reading over many years. Stranger Magic, despite all the extravagant encomia reprinted on its cover ("a flying carpet of a book" - Jeanette Winterson), is, I'm afraid, not. It's hard, even, to say what it's actually about. Does it have a point? Or a theme? If so, I'm not really clear what it is, despite having read it assiduously from cover to cover.

And, when it comes to new books about the Arabian Nights, I can assure you that I'm not a particularly critical reader. Pretty much any and all authors of such can rely on me as a captive audience!