Reviewed by A.J. Jacobs
Sunday, May 21, 2006; BW16
THE BOOK OF LOST BOOKS
An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read
By Stuart Kelly
Random House. 344 pp. $24.95
Remember those innocent days when an author's work could actually be lost forever? When the only remaining copy of a book could be destroyed in a shipwreck? Or a typewritten manuscript could be left in the back of a cab, never to be seen again? Or a scroll could go up in flames in a monastery fire?
Nowadays, good luck trying to misplace a single piece of published writing. Every page, every sentence, every keystroke from the last decade is archived and Googled and linked to within an inch of its life. And the idea of losing a manuscript? It's fast becoming obsolete, as writing is increasingly vomited straight from the brain onto the Internet with nary an editor in between.
As a writer, I can tell you, it's no treat. I'd pay good money to have Google erase my ill-conceived 1996 defense of Jerry Springer. But the world is stuck with it until the Rapture or the supernova of the sun, whichever comes first.
Theoretically, this bold new digital age will allow us to preserve masterpieces that might have otherwise vanished. But really, who can find those rare works of genius among the mountains of schlock? It becomes harder every day. We live in an era when anyone who has mastered the hunt-and-peck method can be an alarmingly powerful publisher.
In any case, once upon a time, books did, in fact, disappear. And Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books is an entertaining and learned survey of those pages you'll never get your hands on. A self-described compulsive reader, Kelly began keeping a list of lost books when he was 15. That list eventually resulted in this chronological study that covers everything from cuneiform tablets to Sylvia Plath.
For the very unlucky writer, not a single syllable of writing remains. The celebrated Greek tragedian Agathon was one such poor sap. His fellow playwright Xenocles didn't fare much better -- we know of only two lines, and lame ones at that: "O cruel goddess, O, my chariot smashed/Pallas, thou hast destroyed me utterly!"
Shakespeare was far more fortunate: Most of his work has been saved, but there's still the vexing case of a play called "Love's Labour's Won." Was this a real play, perhaps a sequel to "Love's Labour's Lost"? Or was it an alternative title for "The Taming of the Shrew"? Kelly hopes the former -- and even ventures that it may someday be found; the quarto for "Titus Andronicus" was discovered as recently as the first decade of the 20th century.
Kelly, a critic living in Scotland, catalogs all the disheartening ways that writers have watched their words vanish -- including a manuscript left in a "refreshment room" (T.E. Lawrence) and one sold for $1 a page by Algerian street boys (William Burroughs). Perhaps most creatively, the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin, while exiled in Kazakhstan, "used his work on Dostoyevsky as cigarette papers, after having smoked a copy of the Bible."
The definition of lost books here is about as elastic as Kelly could make it. It includes those works left unfinished at the author's death, such as Charles Dickens's famously incomplete The Mystery of Edwin Drood . Dickens would be happy to know his novel was finished by a series of literary ne'er-do-wells, including a spirit medium from Vermont who allegedly got the plot directly from Dickens's eternal soul. We'll also never read Dostoyevsky's planned sequel to The Brothers Karamazov in which the writer promised to have Alyosha "leave the monastery and become an anarchist. And my pure Alyosha will kill the Tsar!"
A lost book, in Kelly's view, also means a manuscript that was abandoned midway through. Edward Gibbon settled on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire only after ditching his partly finished The History of the Liberty of the Swiss . Probably a wise decision. Wasn't it Orson Welles in "The Third Man" who summed up the Swiss contribution to Western civilization in two words: cuckoo clocks? (Note: Angry Swiss readers should send letters to Welles's estate, not to me.)
One novel was orphaned by no fewer than two great authors, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Close friends before their curiously vicious falling-out, each considered writing a novel based on the true story of a bigamist sailor.
And then are those books we should be thankful ended up in the ash bin. Consider Byron's Memoirs , which were burned by his publisher. A critic who saw them said they were "fit only for the brothel and would have damned Lord Byron to everlasting infamy." But if they had been salvaged, we would probably have been disappointed. Byron said he "left out all my loves ." What's the fun in that?
Kelly's writing is, at times, twee and labored (the section on Coleridge, for instance, uses a too-cute extended metaphor about what he calls "scriptus interruptus"). But that doesn't detract from the book's scholarship. And by the end, Kelly has proved his point that the Western canon "exists by chance, not necessity." If Gibbon had a longer attention span or Bakhtin had packed rolling papers, our bookshelves would look a lot different. ยท
A.J. Jacobs is the author of "The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World" and an editor at large at Esquire.
