The Book of Lost Books

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1747364,00.html

Literature: The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly
REVIEWED BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS

THE BOOK OF LOST BOOKS An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You
Will Never Read
by Stuart Kelly

Viking £15.99 pp390



One of the best stories in Stuart Kelly's excellent account of all the
great books that have been lost to posterity concerns the 4th-century BC
Greek dramatist Menander. He was revered by Julius Caesar and Quintilian
among others as second only to Homer - a sort of early realist, witty,
humane and profound. He was the source of the only non-scriptural quotation
in St Paul's writing, and, although all his work had been lost, he enjoyed a
holy place in the critical pantheon for more than two millennia.

Then, in 1905, fragments of five of Menander's plays, including
Dyskolos, turned up in Egypt; 50 years later the rest of Dyskolos surfaced
in Geneva. The masterpiece was lovingly pieced together, translated and,
finally, produced and broadcast by the BBC in 1959. It was awful.

The translator admitted that it was "not a work of calibre", while
Erich Segal, the classics professor, thought Menander a "suburban Euripides"
.. The plots of the other restored plays revealed a kind of proto-Whitehall
farce, with rape, incest and unexplained orphans - Ray Cooney with a whiff
of Tarantino.

The moral is that not all we have lost was necessarily great. Kelly's
definition of "lost" reasonably includes "not written" or "abandoned" as
well as missing. When Jane Austen dedicated Emma to the Prince Regent, his
librarian took the opportunity to suggest a few further plot lines to Miss
Austen, including an epic romance on the history of the house of
Saxe-Coburg. She elegantly declined; and had she had not done so, there
would have been no Persuasion.

What are the greatest lacunae in our literary heritage? Presumably the
plays of Sophocles, only seven from 120 of which survive. The prize jury of
Athens never gave him less than second prize, so, if the juries were
reliable, this suggests that Sophocles wrote 113 other plays as good as
Oedipus Rex. A further heartbreaking absentee is Homer's third epic, a
comedy by all accounts, called Margites, only a few lines of which survive
in quotation in other writers. This is perhaps the most tantalising loss in
literature, though Kelly argues, I think, that had it survived it might have
been irksome for future comic writers to work in Homer's giant shadow.

Kelly is a bibliomane, whose passion for lists, dates and details fits
him well for this task. Occasionally, one feels his desire to be
all-inclusive might have been curbed; it is hard to see by what definition
of "lost" it is legitimate to speculate that Swinburne would have written
more and better if he had been less silly. It is also odd that someone so at
home with the Greeks and Romans as Kelly appears to be should make common
mistakes of meaning when using words that derive from their languages, such
as "internecine", "cohort" and, most bizarrely, "alibi".

These are small quibbles about what is on any view a formidable piece
of bibliographical belletrism, which will serve better as reference or
bedside book than as straight narrative. Kelly deals wittily with the
question of Love's Labour's Won, which title, he argues, represents a
genuinely missing Shakespeare play rather than an alias (alibi!) for an
extant one. Each of his 90-odd chapters gives, as well as the story of a
book we don't possess, a sort of shilling-life of its author which, to those
of us (those few, I often think) who do not care for the 900-page Life, is a
free bonus. I liked the story of one of Milton's early editors, who was so
sure that the old blind guy had got the last couplet of Paradise Lost wrong
that he changed two of the greatest lines in English - "They hand in hand,
with wand'ring steps and slow, Through Eden made their solitary way" - to:
"Then hand in hand, with social steps their way Through Eden took with heav'
nly comfort cheer'd." Editors, eh?

Even when the territory is familiar, Kelly has something to add. We
are whisked through the usual whodunit conundrum of Dickens's unfinished
Edwin Drood, but Kelly is good on the actual quality of the novel: "shows a
novelist eager to expand the range of his work . . . a series of resonances
and ambiguities that seem comparable to the films of David Lynch"; while
with the most famous tale of all - when John Stuart Mill inadvertently
allowed a friend's maid to burn the only manuscript of Thomas Carlyle's The
History of the French Revolution - he gives us the key detail: that it was
Carlyle who had to console Mill: "Mill, whom I had to comfort and speak
peace to, remained injudiciously enough till almost midnight, and my poor
Dame and I had to sit talking of indifferent matters; and could not till
then get our lament freely uttered." That "injudiciously enough" puts us
right there, at that fraught fireside.

In the case of Herman Melville, Kelly has unearthed a gem: a novel
called Agatha that remained unwritten by two great novelists - Melville
himself, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who passed the project back and forth,
each encouraging the other. Melville was in possession when the music
stopped, but although among his papers at his death they found Billy Budd,
of Agatha there was no trace.

Kelly is as poised among the moderns as the ancients, and his account
of Sylvia Plath's non-existent second novel, Double Exposure or Double Take,
is fascinating and psychologically acute. The consolation for the absence of
this semi-autobiographical text, however, is considerable: it would
doubtless have spawned a dozen more parasitic volumes in the Hughes-Plath
"industry", and those are some books for whose "loss" we can all be
profoundly grateful.




--------------------------------------


April 30, 2006
'The Book of Lost Books,' by Stuart Kelly
Treasure Hunt
Review by JOE QUEENAN

Before finally sitting down to write "The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire," Edward Gibbon
briefly contemplated a project entitled "The
History of the Liberty of the Swiss," as well as
a book about an obscure Egyptian pharaoh whose
agricultural innovations ultimately led to the
invention of geometry. After being banished by
Augustus Caesar to a backwater on the edge of the
Black Sea, Ovid wrote a eulogy in honor of his
nemesis in the language of the barbarians that
inhabited the region. Both the eulogy and the
language have disappeared. Toward the end of his
life, the impoverished and increasingly addled
Sir Walter Scott set out to write a novel called
"Il Bizarro"; it survives today only in
rudimentary fragments. Aeschylus, the father of
Western drama, is said to have seen his career
come to a premature end when an eagle mistook his
inviting bald head for a rock and smashed a
turtle against it. Charles Dickens offered to
divulge the ending of "The Mystery of Edwin
Drood" to Queen Victoria, but she passed, and
whatever Dickens had planned as the novel's sign-off remains a mystery.


Those intrigued by such oddities, or even
practical sorts jumping the gun on Christmas
shopping for the literati, will surely find
Stuart Kelly's "Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete
History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read"
worth a gander. An absolute joy, if a mite
esoteric and demanding, Kelly's book is as
appealing for what it is not as for what it is.
In an age of slapdash laundry lists of places to
see before you die, or dining establishments to
visit before you leave Albuquerque, "The Book of
Lost Books" is a work of great passion, insight
and scholarship. (Kelly studied literature at
Oxford, and regularly contributes to the Scottish press.)


In less gifted hands, the book might have ended
up a predictably dreary procession of wisecracks
about things that happened long ago and far away:
let's all of us swell modern chappies have a big,
anachronistic laugh about Moses or the Roman
Empire! But in Kelly's hands, the saga of
literature's labors lost is presented in both
witty and illuminating fashion, via anecdotes
that are sometimes heartwarming (how Kafka's
novels escaped destruction) but usually
heart-rending (how most of Sophocles' plays did
not). It is a book written by a passionate,
erudite man who obviously lives and breathes
great literature, aimed at likeminded souls.
Where Random House hopes to find an audience for this book is beyond me.


"The Book of Lost Books" concerns itself with two
main subjects: books that have disappeared,
either through negligence, deliberate destruction
or the vicissitudes of history; and books that
never got written in the first place. Ranging
over authors as famous as Homer, Hemingway,
Austen and Aristophanes, it also contains
chapters devoted to non-marquee names like
Widsith the Wide-Traveled, Fulgentius, Ahmad
ad-Daqiqi and Faltonia Betitia Proba. Each
chapter contains abundant biographical
information about the author in question, then
proceeds to explain how one or more of his or her
books was lost, stolen, mutilated, bowdlerized,
incinerated or abandoned. Kelly seems to
grudgingly accept that we are lucky so much great
literature has survived, but would be a whole lot
luckier if cultural pyromaniacs had refrained
from burning down the library at Alexandria once
and for all nearly a millennium and a half ago,
where the only complete copy of Aeschylus' 80
plays had been housed for a thousand years.


Books that are missing in action include a comic
epic attributed to Homer, Confucius' extensive
thoughts on music and a much-missed volume by the
Venerable Bede called "On Orthography." Other
notable casualties of history are Suetonius'
"Lives of the Famous Whores," a sequel to the
"Odyssey" written by the unjustly overlooked
Eugammon of Cyrene, 1,500 of Lope de Vega's 2,000
plays and a novel by Sylvia Plath that, Kelly
conjectures, "might have been a fusion of 'The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' and 'The
Doppelgänger.' " Here, as in the case of Gibbon's
jettisoned Alpine dissertation, society may have dodged a bullet.


Prodigiously informative, if occasionally dense,
"The Book of Lost Books" is less a book one reads
than a vade mecum one consults. But every page is
a garden of delights. Mark Twain, Kelly reports,
once referred to the Book of Mormon as
"chloroform in print." Jean Racine, the greatest
French playwright of all, wrote about the sea but
never once saw it. Every last scrap of Ernest
Hemingway's early writing vanished when his trunk
was stolen. Malcolm Lowry suffered an identical
fate with the first draft of "Ultramarine," which
got filched from his publisher's car.


Kelly loves to tease his Olympian subjects,
invariably in a good-natured way. Alexander Pope,
Kelly writes, "never quite got over not being
Homer." A novel called "McLorna McDoone" was once
on the drawing board, but happily not for long.
Sir Walter Scott, slipping fast, cooked up a
real-life plot for "the kidnapping of Princess
Victoria, securing her protection in Scotland,
and installing Wellington as dictator." Perhaps
rumors of this zany Highlands escapade cooled her
on British novelists, explaining her indifference
toward Dickens's literary overtures much later in life.


An original to the very end, Adolf Hitler was
busy reading the no longer fashionable Thomas
Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" as the Allies
were closing in on his Berlin bunker, a fact that
Kelly suggests "does little to endear him to
contemporary readers." (One assumes he is
speaking of Carlyle.) Carlyle, of course, is the
accursed individual who lent John Stuart Mill the
manuscript of the first volume of his "History of
the French Revolution," only to learn that Mill
had lent it to a friend whose maid mistook it for
scrap paper and threw it on the fire.


There is more. Jane Austen apparently laid the
groundwork for a history entitled "The
Magnificent Adventures and Intriguing Romances of
the House of Saxe Cobourg," but died instead. In
his unfinished "Don Juan," Lord Byron considered
having his hero finish his life incarnated as
Anacharsis Cloots, a Prussian nobleman
guillotined by Robespierre, "who asked to be
beheaded last that day, in order to complete some
pertinent scientific observations." It is not
hard to imagine Kelly in a similar situation,
petitioning the Committee on Public Safety to
delay his execution long enough for him to polish
off one last anecdote about Sappho, whose husband
was believed by some, though not all, to be
Cercylas of Andros, which, according to Kelly,
literally means, well, something too vulgar to be printed here.


Occasionally Kelly gets lost inside his
sentences; it's anyone's guess what he's ranting
about early in the book when he repeats the
accusation by Lasus of Hermione that Onomacritus
might have been guilty of misattribution, nay
forgery, in his edition of Musaeus. In other
places, he can turn pedantic; discussing the
language of the "Iliad," he writes:
"Predominantly in the Ionic dialect, it contains
traces of the Aeolic, hints of Arcado-Cypriot."
Mr. Kelly: behave! But these occasional lapses
quickly give way to delightful vignettes like the
one about a critic thrown off a cliff by "irate
Athenians who objected to his carping criticism
of the divine Homer." Today, if anyone got thrown
off a cliff, it would be for complaining about Oprah.


Perhaps the most touching moment in the book is
when Kelly reflects upon the devastation
inflicted on every succeeding generation of every
civilization by the deliberate destruction of
literature at the hands of fascists, religious
zealots, spouses, editors and troglodytes.
Recapitulating the events of Dec. 22, 640, when
an edict dispatched by an idiot from afar ordered
the destruction of the library of Alexandria,


Kelly writes: "The scrolls opened a final time,


unfurled before the unscholarly eyes of flame,
and 'The Complete Works of Aeschylus' became lost
forever." It didn't start with the Nazis. It won't end with the Taliban.

Joe Queenan's most recent book is "Queenan
Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country."


http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2006/04/30/book...


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