Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Poetry First Editions (Penguin Classics)



Mexican-born poet, publisher, and pundit Michael Schmidt is a formidable presence in the world of letters. Founder (in 1969) of Carcanet Press, he's championed the work of many neglected or unfashionable figures, from John Clare and Robert Graves to Sylvia Townsend Warner and Ivor Gurney.


The Book Binder's Daughter: A Carcanet Press Collection (2020)


I've already written a piece extolling Schmidt's extravagantly learned The Novel: A Biography (2014). But this is just one of the massive tomes he's written. They include:
  1. Lives of the Poets (1998)
  2. The Story of Poetry. 3 vols (2001-2006):
    1. From Cædmon to Caxton
    2. From Skelton to Dryden
    3. From Pope to Burns
  3. The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets (2004)
  4. The Novel: A Biography (2014)

Michael Schmidt (1947- )


This particular post, however, is about a little side-venture of his: the Penguin Classics "Poetry First Editions". So far as I can tell, this series lasted only a year or so. Which is to say that all of the eight titles I've been able to find details of seem to have been published in 1999, at the turn of the millennium. They were presumably collected in a boxset sometime after that.

So why do I assume that Schmidt was behind this enterprise? I guess because he contributed "notes on the text" to both of the books in this series I own myself - Robert Burns and John Keats - as well (it would appear) to the other six.


  1. [1786] Robert Burns: Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
  2. [1798] William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads
  3. [1814] Lord Byron: The Corsair
  4. [1820] John Keats: Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes &c.
  5. [1896] A. E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad
  6. [1915] Rupert Brooke: 1914 and Other Poems
  7. [1923] D. H. Lawrence: Birds, Beasts and Flowers
  8. [1928] W. B. Yeats: The Tower

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What's the first thing that strikes you when you look at this list? It's certainly eclectic and wide-ranging, but isn't it just a little surprising that all of authors on display are old, dead, white guys?

Old and dead, yes, that could be explained away by the nature of what was (presumably) meant to be a largely historical project: resurrecting important individual books of poems from the works of well-known poets we tend to encounter only in anthologies or in collected editions.

But white? Well, if you look at the list again, and try to deduce its approximate parameters, it would appear to be confined to poets from the British Isles. There are no Americans, no colonials, no poets writing in languages other than English (unless you count Burns). Finding a non-white poet to include might have risked sounding like tokenism, given the racial - and class - stranglehold on higher education (and publishing) characteristic of the British literary tradition until, at the very least, the mid-twentieth century.

The absence of any women poets demands a bit more explanation, though.


Henry Lamb: Sir Arthur Quiller Couch (1863-1944)


Back in the late nineteenth century, when he was putting together his classic Oxford Book of English Verse, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch seems to have had little difficulty in arriving at a satisfactory definition of just what he meant by poetry:
The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be recondite.

Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, ed.: The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918 (1939)


Forty years later, when he attempted to update his work, he must have felt a bit more pressure to justify the nature of his choices:
Of experiment I still hold myself fairly competent to judge. But, writing in 1939, I am at a loss what to do with a fashion of morose disparagement; of sneering at things long by catholic consent accounted beautiful; of scorning at ‘Man’s unconquerable mind’ and hanging up (without benefit of laundry) our common humanity as a rag on a clothes-line. Be it allowed that these present times are dark. Yet what are our poets of use — what are they for — if they cannot hearten the crew with auspices of daylight?
God knows what the old man thought of Auden and the other Macspaunday poets as they extolled communism and tried vainly to bring an end to "the old gang":
The hard bitch and the riding-master,
Stiff underground; deep in clear lake
The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there.
No, so far as Q was concerned:
The reader, turning the pages of this book, will find this note of valiancy — of the old Roman ‘virtue’ mated with cheerfulness — dominant throughout, if in many curious moods. He may trace it back, if he care, far behind Chaucer to the rudest beginnings of English Song. It is indigenous, proper to our native spirit, and it will endure.

Louis Edouard Fournier: The Funeral of Shelley (1889)


If you reexamine the list of Poetry First Editions above, it's pretty clear that it's largely confined to the Romantic tradition in English verse. There are no Augustan satirists, no Modernists, no problem poets of any kind. The tradition this list embodies would have been perfectly acceptable to Q and other turn-of-the-century conservatives, determined to stick to the well-made lyric and eschew any other approach to writing verse. No Basil Bunting, T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound - not even Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg need apply.

And yet, if you turn back the clock 50 years, to 1975 (rather than 25, to the 1999 Penguin list) you'll find the following 'Poetry Reprint Series' of facsimile reprints of influential first slim volumes of verse published jointly by St James Press in London and St Martin's Press in New York:


Books I own are marked in bold:
  1. [1916] Robert Graves: Over the Brazier
  2. [1916] H.D.: Sea Garden
  3. [1923] Wallace Stevens: Harmonium
  4. [1931] John Betjeman: Mount Zion
  5. [1914] Conrad Aiken: Earth Triumphant



Robert Graves: Over the Brazier (1916)

Robert Graves:
Over the Brazier (1916)

Robert Graves. Over the Brazier. 1916. Poetry Reprint Series, 1. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.


Robert Graves (1895-1985)



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H.D.: Sea Garden (1916)

H.D. [Hilda Doolittle]:
Sea Garden (1916)

H.D. Sea Garden. 1916. Poetry Reprint Series, 2. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.


Man Ray: H.D. (1896-1961)



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Wallace Stevens: Harmonium (1923)

Wallace Stevens:
Harmonium (1923)

Wallace Stevens. Harmonium. 1923. Poetry Reprint Series, 3. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.


Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)



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John Betjeman: Mount Zion (1931)

John Betjeman:
Mount Zion (1931)

John Betjeman. Mount Zion; or, In Touch with the Infinite. Illustrated by de Cronin Hastings et al. 1931. Poetry Reprint Series, 4. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.


John Betjeman (1906-1984)



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Conrad Aiken: Earth Triumphant (1914)

Conrad Aiken:
Earth Triumphant (1914)

Conrad Aiken. Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse. 1914. Poetry Reprint Series, 5. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.


Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)




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How exciting that "Poetry Reprint Series" still looks today! The ratio of Americans to Brits is, admittedly, 3 to 2, and all the books are from the twentieth century, but at least they've included H.D.'s marvellous first volume alongside all the blokes. Nor do they seem to be averse to experimental or even humorous poetry.

Was the idea, then, with the later 1999 'Poetry First Editions' series, to stick solely to exceptionally bestselling and/or influential volumes of verse? Keats's third book may well have been the latter, but it certainly wasn't the former. It sold as badly as the first two - until the news of his early death came out, that is. Rupert Brooke's book, by contrast, sold by the truckload, both before and after his own death. Why, then, the need to resurrect it now?

If, too, the dates can range over a century and a half, from 1786 to 1928, then why wasn't Emily Brontë included? Why no Christina Rossetti? Why not Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous (or, if you prefer, infamous) Sonnets from the Portuguese?

W. E. Henley's free verse poems from the 1870s, eventually collected as In Hospital (1903), would surely offer a salutary alternative to the flood of over-ornate verbiage characteristic of the High Victorian age. And if the intention was to cast back to the late eighteenth century, why not open your list with William Blake's Poetical Sketches (1783), as a companion piece to Burns?

Talking of other inclusions alongside Burns, how about one of John Clare's books? Perhaps Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), or The Rural Muse (1835).

None of these - it should be stressed - are meant as radical or revisionist suggestions. If the original objective of the series was to revisit influential mainstream poetry books which have left their mark on British writing in general, it does seem absurd that this opening salvo should have been so sedulously limited to the pale, stale and male.

Perhaps, in the end, that's why they decided not to persevere with the series. It's a shame, though, because these books are - in themselves - both beautiful and useful. I'm sorry that, as in the case of those 1975 "Poetry First Editions" books, there was no set 2 to straighten up the balance a bit.

I've included my own suggested list of supplementary or alternative inclusions directly below the original Penguin list below:


  1. [1786] Robert Burns (1759-1796): Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
  2. [1798] Wordsworth (1770-1850) & Coleridge (1772-1834): Lyrical Ballads
  3. [1814] Lord Byron (1788-1824): The Corsair
  4. [1820] John Keats (1795-1821): Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes &c.
  5. [1896] A. E. Housman (1859-1936): A Shropshire Lad
  6. [1915] Rupert Brooke (1887-1915): 1914 and Other Poems
  7. [1923] D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930): Birds, Beasts and Flowers
  8. [1928] W. B. Yeats (1865-1939): The Tower



Robert Burns: Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1999)

Robert Burns:
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786)

Robert Burns. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. 1786. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. London: Penguin, 1999.
  • Robert Burns. The Kilmarnock Poems [Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, 1786]. Ed. Donald A. Low. Everyman's Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1985..


Robert Burns (1759-1796)



William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. 1798. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
  • William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads 1805. 1798. Ed. Derek Roper. 1968. Collins Annotated Student Texts. London: Collins Publishers, 1973.


Peter Vandyke: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)



Benjamin Robert Haydon: William Wordsworth (1770-1850)



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Lord Byron: The Corsair (1814)

George Gordon, Lord Byron:
The Corsair (1814)

Lord Byron. The Corsair. 1814. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
  • The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. Ed. Frederick Page. 1904. Rev. ed. 1945. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.


Thomas Phillips: Lord Byron (1788-1824)



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John Keats: Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes (1820)

John Keats:
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems (1820)

John Keats. Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems. 1820. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
  • Jack Stillinger, ed. The Poems of John Keats. The Definitive Edition. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1978.


Joseph Severn: John Keats (1795-1821)



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A. E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Alfred Edward Housman:
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

A. E. Housman. A Shropshire Lad. 1896. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
  • A. E. Housman. A Shropshire Lad. 1896. London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1923.


A. E. Housman (1859-1936)



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Rupert Brooke: 1914 and Other Poems (1915)

Rupert Brooke:
1914 and Other Poems (1915)

Rupert Brooke. 1914 and Other Poems. 1915. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
  • Rupert Brooke. 1914 and Other Poems. 1915. London: Faber, 1941.


Sherril Schell: Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)



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D. H. Lawrence: Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923)

David Herbert Lawrence:
Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923)

D. H. Lawrence. Birds, Beasts and Flowers. 1923. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
  • The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 2: Unrhyming Poems. 2 vols. London: Martin Secker, 1928.


D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)



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W. B. Yeats: The Tower (1928)

William Butler Yeats:
The Tower (1928)

W. B. Yeats. The Tower. 1928. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
  • The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt & Russell K. Alspach. 1957. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1973.


W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)



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And here's my own (doubtless very subjective) counter-list:


  1. [1783] William Blake (1757-1827): Poetical Sketches
  2. [1820] John Clare (1793-1864): Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery
  3. [1846] Emily Brontë (1818-1848): Poems by Currer, Ellis & Acton Bell
  4. [1850] Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861): Sonnets from the Portuguese
  5. [1850] Christina Rossetti (1830-1894): Goblin Market and Other Poems
  6. [1903] W. E. Henley (1849-1903): In Hospital
  7. [1918] G. M. Hopkins (1844-1889): Poems
  8. [1920] Wilfred Owen (1893-1918): Poems
  9. [1932] W. H. Auden (1907-1973): The Orators



William Blake: Poetical Sketches (1783)

William Blake:
Poetical Sketches (1783)

William Blake. Poetical Sketches (1783)
  • Poetry and Prose of William Blake: Complete in One Volume. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. The Centenary Edition. 1927. London: the Nonesuch Press / New York: Random House, 1948.


William Blake: William Blake (1807)



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John Clare: Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820)

John Clare:
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820)

John Clare. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820)
  • The Poems of John Clare. Ed. J. W. Tibble. 2 vols. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1935.


John Clare (1862)


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Currer, Ellis & Acton Bell: Poems (1846)

Emily Jane Brontë:
Poems (1846)

Emily Brontë [as 'Ellis Bell]: Poems (1846)
  • Emily Jane Brontë. The Complete Poems. Ed. C. W. Hatfield. 1941. New York & London: Columbia University Press & Oxford University Press, 1963.


Branwell Brontë: Emily Brontë (1833)


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Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese (1906)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
  • The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Oxford Complete Edition. London: Henry Frowde / Oxford University Press, 1908.


Michele Gordigiani: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1858)


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Christina Rossetti: Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)

Christina Georgina Rossetti:
Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)

Christina Rossetti. Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)
  • The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti. Ed. William Michael Rossetti. 1904. The Globe Edition. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1924.
  • Christina Rossetti. The Complete Poems. Ed. R. W. Crump. 1979-90. Notes & Introduction by Betty S. Flowers. 2001. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.
  • Christina Rossetti. Goblin Market. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: Harrap Limited, 1984.


Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Christina Rossetti (1866)


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W. E. Henley: In Hospital (1903)

William Ernest Henley:
In Hospital: Rhymes and Rhythms (1903)




Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Robert Bridges (1918)
  • Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Robert Bridges. 1918. Second Edition With an Appendix of Additional Notes, and a Critical Introduction by Charles Williams. 1930. The Oxford Bookshelf. 1937. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.
  • Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Poems: Fourth Edition, based on the First Edition of 1918 and enlarged to incorporate all known poems and fragments. Ed. W. H. Gardner & N. H. MacKenzie. 1967. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.



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Wilfred Owen: Poems (1920)

Wilfred Owen:
Poems (1920)

Wilfred Owen. Poems. Ed. Siegfried Sassoon (1920)
  • The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. with a Memoir and Notes by Edmund Blunden. 1931. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1963.
  • The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. Cecil Day Lewis. 1963. Memoir by Edmund Blunden. 1931. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 18. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1977.
  • Wilfred Owen. The Complete Poems and Fragments. 2 vols. Ed. Jon Stallworthy. 1983. Rev. ed. Chatto & Windus. London: Random House, 2013.


Wilfred Owen (1920)


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W. H. Auden: The Orators (1932)

Wystan Hugh Auden:
The Orators: An English Study (1932)

W. H. Auden. The Orators (1932)
  • W. H. Auden. The Orators: An English Study. 1932. London: Faber, 1966.
  • W. H. Auden. Poems. Volume I: 1927-1939. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022.


W. H. Auden (1946)


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So there you are! 8 + 5 + 9 = 22 wonderful books of poetry we'd all be a lot worse off without. I wish I had enough space here to write a treatise on each them: but luckily such information isn't hard to access nowadays.

If you haven't read at least a few of them, you really should. You won't regret it. I promise.


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Wednesday, February 05, 2025

The Uncollected Henry James


Floyd R. Horowitz, ed.: The Uncollected Henry James (2004)


The moment I saw this book in a second-hand shop I knew I had to have it. It's exactly the kind of thing I love: a monomaniac academic's life work, nestled neatly between two covers.

That's not to say that it doesn't come with impressive literary credentials. As the blurb on the back-cover puts it:
More than two decades of research, study, and literary detection lie behind this treasury of stories by one of the undisputed giants in the field of American fiction, as Professor Floyd Horowitz here offers a collection of tales that he himself has authenticated to be the work of the prodigiously gifted Henry James, ... justly remembered for his novellas and scores of short stories. And there may indeed be scores more [my emphasis], as this important volume shows. Published anonymously or under noms de plume in magazines like nineteenth-century New York's favourite The Knickerbocker, Frank Leslie's Lady's Magazine, The National Magazine, and The Continental, these previously uncollected pieces represent both apprentice work and early stories that already bear the mark of Jamesian artistry. Written in a period of more than ten years before James's first signed fiction appeared (in 1865) ... these uncovered stories add significantly to the James canon.
Well, you can't say better than that! So precocious was this studious young man that he apparently wrote (and published) at least 24 stories between the ages of 9 (!) and 26 as a kind of side-hustle to his burgeoning official career as a professional author, which began with "The Story of a Year" in 1865, and eventually grew to include no fewer than 112 stories (as you'll see if you consult this list of his work in that genre).



My comments above may sound a little sceptical, but they're not meant to be. After all, most young writers fill page after page with more-or-less accomplished juvenilia before they eventually begin to publish - and many are subsequently anxious to suppress any evidence of early work which appeared in print before they were ready ...

And, in at least partial support of Horowitz's claims, the first item on the list of authenticated James short stories, "A Tragedy of Error" (1864) was indeed published anonymously, and only identified by his biographer Leon Edel through a chance reference in a letter.


Leon Edel, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James (12 vols: 1962-64)


For that matter, the first dozen or so of his canonical stories could probably be quietly shelved without any great loss to posterity. The Master himself only included a little over half of the 100-odd novellas and short stories he'd previously published in the multi-volume New York Edition (1907-09), which he definitely intended to stand as his last word on the matter.


Philip Horne, ed. Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999)


So what are these new stories like? And, more to the point, are they really all by Henry James? Distinguished Jamesian Philip Horne, editor of the Life in Letters pictured above, is, unfortunately - according to the précis at the top of his review - "not convinced of the authorship of Floyd R Horowitz's 'newly discovered' Henry James stories." That, however, "does not mean that they are not worth reading."

His Guardian article is too long and closely argued to quote here in detail, but I thought I might tease out a few of the more telling points:
Horowitz's central notion is that young James had a secret life as "Leslie Walter", consistently using that pseudonym to get his stories into (mostly unremunerated) print: eight of those here, mostly later ones, seem to be attributable to that author.
Horne, however, detects certain problems with this hypothesis:
I discovered, for example, that in January 1869, well after James had broken cover under his own name, "Lesley Walter" published a pretty awful sentimental poem called "Among the Lilies" in the Galaxy: Horowitz doesn't mention the supposed alter ego's unJamesian propensity for verse. And then Leslie Walter's rather monotonous subject matter, supposedly showing a closeness to James's father's Swedenborgian philosophy, seems just conventionally pious ... Indeed, these tales often amount to cases of what [Henry James] used to call with withering scorn "flagrant morality". Horowitz might have done better to claim they were parodies.
But he goes on to concede:
This is not to say that one steeped in James, and reading for resemblance, doesn't occasionally come across something that seems strikingly close to the master's voice in these tales, or fleeting parallels of situation. Horowitz has built a certain plausible deniability into his case, moreover, in the sense that these stories are presented as apprentice works, written to the house style of the Knickerbocker or the Newport Mercury, from a period mostly before we have any authenticated James fiction.
In other words, anything unlike James can be attributed to his desperation to break into print by aping each journal's house-style. Anything that is like him is clear proof of his authorship. Either way, Horowitz can claim to be vindicated. Horne, however, is not having any:
The greatest value and interest of this collection ... is ultimately not that it's by James, but that it isn't. Short stories reveal worlds even when they're affected or sentimental or badly written, and this book constitutes a vivid picture of the literary, cultural and social universe James entered. Apart from showing us just how original he actually was, it reeks of the dead past ...

Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire (1962)


"From time to time one catches a whiff of Pale Fire mania in the confident circularity of Horowitz's logic," Horne comments about the former's methodology - the magic wand which rendered this Computer Science professor capable of nosing out lost pieces of Jamesiana amongst all the reams of abandoned fiction he'd been assembling for the past thirty years.

Pale Fire, for those of you unfamiliar with this most teasing and, in some respects, most worrying of Nabokov's fictions, "is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote."

Kinbote, who is (most readers would agree) a delusional monomaniac, "inherited" (i.e. stole) the manuscript of "Pale Fire" after John Shade's murder, and is now attempting to prove in his commentary-cum-autobiography that this poem, which never directly mentions the subject, is nevertheless is almost entirely about him and the (possibly imaginary) country of Zembla, whose lost king he may or may not be.



Clear? No? You're not alone in feeling a bit puzzled. Suffice it to say that the nutty, monocular professor is a commonplace of post-modern fiction - but actually the idea of writing a self-refuting, self-satirising commentary on what is alleged to be someone else's work goes way back beyond that: to E. T. A. Hoffmann's Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper (1819-21); or, even further, to Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67); or, for that matter, to the fons et origo of most of Sterne's erudition, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).



So how exactly did Professor Horowitz set about distinguishing Henry James's work from all the other sludge in these ancient journals from the 1850s and 1860s? Philip Horne summarises the two, rather technical, appendices in Horowitz's book as follows:
First, by reading his way through the myriad American magazines and journals of the period, "using a set of critical discriminators". These included "the use of particular words, the employment of what I came to recognise as distinctive syntactical and word patterns, the use of puns and other wordplay, as well as the repetition of symbolic allusions, themes, and ideas". He also found "corroborating ideational evidence in the texts", which built up, in his vision, into "a coherent linguistic and philosophical framework that was consistent with the structures and themes of James's later, signed work". In other words, the evidence is massively internal, and interpretative - one might say subjective.
It puts me in mind of that old hymn about Jesus we used to sing at Sunday School:
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.
In other words, I don't know, but I'd like to pretend that I do.

This "I know it when I see it" argument, familiar from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's classic 1964 definition of obscenity, is backed up by some pretty hard science in Horowitz's case, however:
In an appendix called "The Computer and the Search for Henry James", Horowitz took the 20,783 words known to have been written by James between 1858 and 1871 and ran stylometric tests on the tales he'd attributed to James - the test being similarity of vocabulary (single words). This yielded a total of 72 stories by James, and another 12 "probably written by James". I was unable to follow the complicated details of his explanation, but confess to an impression that the hurdle set for identification as Jamesian was worryingly low. Stories with the same kinds of setting and with similar themes will surely generate many chimings of vocabulary without being being really similar in style. And there's no test of quality: some of these tales are pretty execrable.
72 (+ 12 doubtful cases) is a pretty high number for us to credit. After all, these are stories James allegedly published, not simply wrote, during this period. He must have been banging them out, rain or shine, at a rate of about one a month!

But wait, there's more!
The allusion test, in another appendix called "Allusion as Proof in the Search for Henry James", turns out to mean echoes of things in books in Henry James senior's library, including the Arabian Nights and the King James Bible. Horowitz also detected his young Henry James in putative quasi-Oulipian games with his copy of Anthon's Latin Primer and Reader, taking English words from different columns of the Latin vocabulary lists to generate stories. The problem with these "tests" seemed to me that either the source was very widely known (for example the Bible) or that the words used were not so unusual as to be striking (the Anthon words used to cement Horowitz's case in the short passage he selects as most convincing include "with", "made", "will", "against" and "all") ...
Even the most credulous of readers will probably part company with Horowitz when he starts to explain just how James could construct an almost unlimited number of stories out of odd words which just happened to be placed more-or-less contiguously in his Latin Grammar! It all sounds just a little too uncomfortably like those calculations about infinite numbers of monkeys tapping away on infinite typewriters.

Perhaps it's just as well that Horowitz never got to publish the follow-up book Searching for Henry James promised on the blurb for The Uncollected Henry James. At least, I don't think he did. I haven't succeeding in finding any allusions to it online, even in self-published form. What I did find, sadly, was the following obituary for the author himself.

From this I learned that Floyd Horowitz (1930-2014) taught Computer Science at Kansas University for over 30 years, then English at Hunter College, New York for another five years, until his retirement in 1996. He died on August 9th, 2014 "from complications of vascular dementia."

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, as the saying has it: Speak no ill of the dead. I can't help wondering a bit, though. There are some very odd statements - not to mention strikingly eccentric word-choices - in those two appendices at the end of Prof. Horowitz's book. Just how carefully did his editors actually check them before clearing the text for publication?

His obituary concludes, rather poignantly, "He is now at peace."

Constant J. Mews. The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France. Trans. Neville Chiavaroli & Constant J. Mews. 1999. The New Middle Ages. Ed. Bonnie Wheeler. Palgrave. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001.
Mind you, just because it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck doesn't necessarily mean that it is a duck. I recall having a similar uneasy feeling roughly halfway through the book above, by Prof. Constant Mews, son of the composer Douglas Mews, whom I remember very well from my years singing in the Auckland University choir.

Mews's claim to have identified a lost correspondence between medieval scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard and his lover Héloïse d'Argenteuil seemed just a little too good to be true.

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Trans. Betty Radice. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
Pretty much everyone interested in the story of these two star-crossed lovers is familiar with the book above: a translation of a Latin correspondence between the two conducted many years after Abelard's seduction of the young girl Heloise, whom he'd been hired to tutor by her uncle Fulbert, a canon of Notre Dame.


Helen Waddell: Peter Abelard (1933)


The uncle, as you've no doubt heard, took a fearful revenge on the lustful philosopher. He arranged for him to be castrated by some hired ruffians. Abelard survived, just barely, but that and a number of other scandals (including accusations of heresy) made it almost impossible for him to advance in the church.


François Villon (1431-c.1463)


The story was so famous that it's even referred to in fifteenth-century jailbird poet François Villon's famous "Ballade des dames du temps jadis" [Ballad of Ladies of Past Times]:
Où est la très sage Heloïs,
Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne
Pierre Esbaillart à Sainct-Denys?
Pour son amour eut cest essoyne.

[Where is the very wise Heloise,
For whom Peter Abelard was castrated
then made a monk at Saint Denis?
For his love had this travail.]


Most readers prefer Heloise's honest and insightful letters to the pompous, top-lofty prevarications of the great scholar, who presumes to lecture her on virtue despite his own obvious shortcomings in that regard.

Mews, however, argues that some earlier letters exchanged by the couple, possibly at the time they first met, have survived in the form of a book of "exemplary letters" for the use of students. As one reviewer commented:
Although the correspondence reproduced and translated [by Mews] has been available to scholars in Latin since Ewald Könsgen's 1974 publication, Mews' edition is the first to translate the letters into English and devote to them the comprehensive commentary they deserve. Könsgen may have made the first tentative suggestions that they might be the letters of Heloise and Abelard, but it is Mews who offers convincing evidence that they are.

Ewald Könsgen: Epistolae duorum amantium (1974)


In her own, more comprehensive review, Barbara Newman explains that:
Ewald Könsgen's edition of the twelfth-century Latin text he titled Epistolae duorum amantium: Briefe Abaelards und Heloises? [Correspondence of Two Lovers: Letters by Abelard and Heloise?] (Leiden: Brill, 1974), could not have appeared at a worse time. Scholars had been debating the authenticity of Abelard's famous exchange with Heloise for almost a century, but that controversy, after remaining at a simmer for decades, had just reached the boiling point. At a conference at Cluny in 1972, John Benton had proposed that the entire correspondence was forged in the late thirteenth century to influence a disputed election at the Paraclete. In the same year, D. W. Robertson argued in Abelard and Heloise (New York: Dial Press, 1972) that the real forger was Abelard, who created the literary fiction of Heloise's letters as part of an exemplary treatise on conversion ...

In such a climate, no scholar could have been expected to stake his credibility on the anonymous love letters discovered by Könsgen in a late 15th-century manuscript from Clairvaux. Könsgen himself, after all, appended a question mark to his title, arguing only that the letters must have been composed in the Ile-de-France in the early twelfth century by two people "like" Abelard and Heloise. Even Peter Dronke, the staunchest defender of Heloise's writing, did not want to connect the famous lovers with this newly edited correspondence. Such an ascription would have seemed literally too good - or too self-interested - to be true. So Könsgen's edition attracted little notice and vanished without a ripple.
Which is not to say that Mews's own claims for the correspondence have been accepted by everyone. His critics, however, are quick to deny the accusation that "they are motivated by professional envy at not having got there first."
"It's not jealousy, it's a question of method," said Monique Goullet, director of research in medieval Latin at Paris's Sorbonne University. "If we had proof that it was Abelard and Heloise then everyone would calm down. But the current position among literature scholars is that we are shocked by too rapid an attribution process."
While, as Barbara Newman reminds us, "the majority of scholars now accept the established letters as authentic", the burden of proof is certainly on Mews to demonstrate "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the authors of these newly unearthed letters "were indeed Heloise and Abelard."
Mews argues on both textual and contextual grounds, providing evidence that: (1) learned women did exchange Latin poems and letters with their male admirers in the early twelfth century; (2) the fragmentary narrative that emerges from the recently discovered letters is consistent in all particulars with what we know of Abelard and Heloise; and (3) most important, the philosophical vocabulary, literary style, classical allusions, and contrasting positions on love apparent in Könsgen's letters are so thoroughly consistent with the known writings of Heloise and Abelard that the supposition of their authorship is simpler than any alternative hypothesis.

Jacques Trébouta, dir.: Héloïse et Abélard (1973)


I guess what surprised me most, after reading Mews's book, was the fact that there hadn't been a lot more fuss about so immense and exciting a claim. After all, the love story between Abelard and Heloise, and in particular the character of Heloise herself, have been revisited repeatedly in popular novels and movies, as well as being exhaustively picked over as a theme in medieval studies. Why, then, isn't Mews's book shelved beside Betty Radice's classic translation of the "established letters"?


Clive Donner, dir. Stealing Heaven (1988)


Mews is certainly no fool, and his claims for these letters have been subjected to considerable scrutiny. The alternative explanations offered by some of his critics that it may be "a literary work written by one person who decided to reconstitute the writings of Abelard and Heloise," or "a stylistic exercise between two students who imagined themselves as the lovers, or that it was written by another couple," are perhaps rather less convincing than their own authors may imagine.

As Barbara Newman puts it:
the woman of the Troyes letters simply sounds like Heloise and like no other medieval Latin writer known to us.
I wish that that could be the last word on the matter, but I fear that the jury will remain out for a long time yet: possibly forever.


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John Cheever: Thirteen Uncollected Stories (1994)
Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever. Ed. Franklin H. Dennis. Introduction by George W. Hunt, S.J. Note by Matthew Bruccoli. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1994.
So, we have one probable attribution: the "new" Heloise and Abelard letters; and one rather more dubious item: the "uncollected" Henry James stories. Let's conclude with another bibliographical curiosity, these 13 stories by American author John Cheever.


John Cheever (1912-1982)


This is how Wikipedia describes the débâcle surrounding their appearance:
The publication of Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever had its genesis in a copyright dispute beginning in 1988 between a small publisher, Academy Chicago Publishers, and Cheever's widow, Mary Wintemitz Cheever. Mary Cheever had entered into a contract with Academy for the nominal fee of $1500 to permit publication of a sampling of Cheever's uncollected early short fiction, pending family consultation. When the publisher sought to include all the works not published in The Stories of John Cheever (1978) — a total of 68 stories — a protracted legal struggle ensued.

Mary Cheever prevailed, but Academy Chicago succeeded in securing publication rights to a total of thirteen stories whose copyrights had lapsed. These are the stories that appear in Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever.
Here there are no doubts at all about the stories' status and genesis: just the desirability of having them in print, alongside the more mature work of this consummate fictional stylist.

But that's not really how most academics think: they see the recovery of lost texts as the crown of their scholarly achievements. No wonder so many writers end up burning all their papers - if they get the chance, that is!

Having a foot in both camps, I can sympathise with both of these attitudes. For the most part, I tend to side with the writers. Who knows, though? Which of us isn't ready to call down blessings on the head of Max Brod for not heeding the instructions of his friend Franz Kafka to burn all of his unpublished literary remains, including The Trial, The Castle, and America?




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