#50 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Henry Miller

When I was in college I had a lot of deep thoughts.  Sometimes these thoughts came out of nowhere, like a stomach virus.  Sometimes I had them when I was reading books, and they caused me to circle key passages.  My copy of Tropic of Cancer has a lot of circling.  At one point, in fact, I circled four consecutive pages.  Let’s take a gander at a bit of it, shall we?

“I have found God, but he is insufficient.  I am only spiritually dead.  Physically I am alive.  Morally I am free.  The world which I have departed is a menagerie.  The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws.  If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one.  I go forth to fatten myself.”

Oh my!  Weren’t we the embryonic Objectivist?  I’m glad I terminated that mind-pregnancy.  This was also the time when I thought that poverty would be no problem if one was an artist and really Living.  L-i-v-i-n.  A time when I wanted to live in a tubercular Berlin hellhole with Christopher Isherwood, smoke cigarettes with George Orwell at the Hotel X, and sleep with men who fought in the Spanish Civil War.  I went so far with my yen for adventure as to apply for a job tending dog-sledding dogs in Iceland.  I did this even though I hate snow, and dogs.  I didn’t get the job, and I was relieved, because it said you had to be prepared to “break up fights and sustain injuries.”  I don’t know what I want to do now that I have a job and a feller and I quit smoking.  Be a Mitford sister, I guess, but not the Nazi sympathizer one, or pen pals with Roberto Bolaño.

Anyway, I’m not some kind of square now, if that’s what you’re thinking.  This was only, like, four years ago.  I just have to pay rent now.  I still like those books.  I still like Tropic of Cancer, too, but I’m embarrassed to admit that I mainly remember a) the part when the fellow pooed in the bidet b) learning that it used to be shocking and undesirable for ladies to have denuded parts c) reading that even people in the twentieth century thought safe sex meant a splash of water on said parts.  I guess I’m not the only person who fixated on those occurrences; they couldn’t publish the goddamned thing in the U.S. for three decades.

I can’t do a little plot thing for you here.  This book isn’t about plot; it’s about L-i-v-i-n.  It has so many words put together in so many exciting ways, but not too many words, or excessively novel ways like, for example, Ulysses.  It’s like a much dirtier, more thrilling Manhattan Transfer.  It’s a revelation. It’s the best thing he ever wrote.  Flipping through it again now it seems prudent to recommend that house-bound parents with small children, people who have to deal with members of the public in a service capacity, or anyone who’s just having a bad day should steer clear of this book, lest it encourage them to take off on in search of L-i-v-i-n.  I guess that’s why they wouldn’t let anyone read it for so long.  I wanted to leave you with the coolest celebrity photo I’ve ever seen, which I ripped out of a Vanity Fair a long time ago, but I can’t find it anywhere.  It was Henry Miller past fifty, with his feet in some wallabee-looking shoes propped on a desk piled with books, and he is lighting a cigarette because he does not care about cancer.

Sexy time! The first edition was Paris: Obelisk, 1934.  Here is a picture of the copy at the Massachusetts College of Art:

That is some provocative cover art.  The first edition in the original wrappers is scarce.  Currently there are no complete copies in the original state with the crab  cover art for sale.  Argosy has a first edition rebound in black morocco for $3,500.  The first authorized American edition was New York: Grove Press, 1961, in a limitation of 100 copies signed by Miller.  Peter Stern has a fine copy at $4,500.  There was an earlier pirated edition, New York [but really Mexico]: Medusa, 1940.  The man who published it went to jail for some ungodly amount of time, I think.  There are several copies in the $300-$600 range.  Ken Lopez has a copy in an early variant binding, purple wrappers, for $325.

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Reader’s #30 The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

John Fowles

The Modern Library list is obviously problematic.  For one, the things it purports to measure are not quantifiable.  For another, almost everything on it was written by the white man, even though a number of other people did manage to set pen to paper during the last century with extraordinary results, when they weren’t being prevented from having a fun time by the white man.  Finally, Lucky Jim is not on the list, unless we are to understand that #85, Lord Jim, is a typographical error, which makes more sense.  Essentially, “best” is impossible to define because it is a wholly subjective concept, one which in this case has been colonized by the Literary Industrial Complex.  Presumably with all this in mind, Modern Library  compiled a Reader’s List, like Viewer’s Choice Awards, and posted it next to the official, or Board’s List, on the website.  I think we can agree that the Reader’s List appears to have been heavily influenced by a couple of demographics.  Numbers one through four, respectively, are Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Battlefield Earth, and The Lord of the Rings.  And yes, I haven’t even read anything by Ayn Rand, so I am a bad person, and I don’t know what I’m talking about.  I do want to read Atlas Shrugged, but I want to do it in a place where no one can see me, lest they think I subscribe to these charming ideals.  Anyway, this has gotten away from me, but I wanted to say that a) the Reader’s List exists b) nerds have a high voter turnout (not hating just saying) c) I support many of the selections, like this one, #30, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is not present on the Board’s List.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is non-threatening Post-Modernism for people who want to be with-it and read something Post-Modern but can’t understand a goddamned word of, for example, Gravity’s Rainbow.  And it is  good for people who like novels from an earlier time period, but also want to know what happened when the stays came unlaced and the pantalettes came off.  It’s about Charles, who is a hip Victorian gentleman, abreast of the hot new theories, like the one from that fellow Darwin.  He is going to be married to a proper Victorian lady named Ernestina, and he visits her in the country, but then he sees this creepy woman, “Tragedy,” née Sarah Woodruff, walking by the sea, and he finds out that she is a Fallen Woman who did ze unspeakable things with a Frenchman, even though she is really just a girl who never had a chance because she had too much education and not enough money.  He tries to help her ostensibly out of the kindness of his heart, but mostly because he thinks she’s easy, and then he finds out the whole thing was a lie and that really he is the vile deflower-er, and that means the death of the Victorian age and the onset of that Communism we hear so much about.  Also, there are two different endings to the novel (Po-Mo!) It is a magical book; it perfectly captures so many elements of novels written a hundred years earlier, and includes interesting tidbits, like the number of brothels present in London in 1867.  It also makes us examine ourselves as modern people because We Are All Charles, or something.

Sexy time! TFLW was inspired by a French novel called Ourika, Paris: Chez Ladvocat, 1824, which is about a Senegalese woman who comes to live with a fancy French family.  Everyone thinks she is great and smart, but she is nonetheless considered an inferior person.  The Brick Row Book Shop has a fine copy of the first published for $2,100.  Apparently 25 copies were privately printed prior to that; there are not currently any copies for sale.  Perhaps there are never copies for sale.  I don’t know.  John Fowles liked this book so much he translated it, and his translation was published by the Bird and Bull Press in a limitation of 500 copies, signed by Fowles, Austin: W. Thomas Taylor, 1977.  There are a number of copies for sale; the Brick Row Book Shop has a fine copy for $150.  The first edition of TFLW itself is London: Jonathan Cape, 1969.  There are lots of nice copies, many of them signed, from the $1,500 range to the $100 range; this is not an old or a scarce book, just a famous one.  Here is a fine copy from Peter Harrington, at $220.

They also have this fun item for $8,000.  It’s a fine copy of an elaborate edition, Lyme Regis: Serendip, 1981, one of 25 copies, published to mark the completion of the movie version.  It’s signed by Fowles as well as people involved in the film, including Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.

#57 Parade’s End (1924-1928)

Ford Mad Dog Ford

Unlike Parade’s End, I’ll keep this short.  Suffice it to say that if you loved The Good Soldier and never wanted it to end, and you were excited to read something that would hopefully be just like TGS except thousands of pages longer, Parade’s End will be one of the more disappointing experiences of my life.  Erm, your life.  I’m not sure what went wrong; it’s about The Great War, the end of a marriage, the end of a Time When Men Were Men, or something.  It should have been right up my alley!  All that notwithstanding, I felt like I was dying.  Everything was ending so slowly!  Apparently W. H. Auden said “There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.”  First of all, something about that sentence is very confusing.  Secondly, I never liked Auden anyway, except that poem that was in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Sexy time! Argh, this is a pain in the ass because it is was four separate books published over four years (a “tetralogy,” if you will).  First came Some Do Not, London: Duckworth and Company, [1924], also published (simultaneously?) in the Transatlantic Review, which FMF founded.  I don’t see any copies of the book for sale, curiously.  Only fourth impressions of the second American edition.  Interesting.  The first should be green cloth with white lettering.   You can get all 12 issues of the Translantic Review for $5,000 at Jeffrey Marks.   After that was No More Parades, London: Duckworth, [1925], also in green cloth.  There are a number of copies online, Maggs has one for $220.  So not a super expensive book.  I can’t find a picture so here’s old Mad Dog:

See, he’s not so bad.  Then was A Man Could Stand Up, London: Duckworth, [1926].  Jeffrey Marks has a first edition in the dust jacket at $125, and William Reese has a second impression of the first edition, inscribed by Ford.  There are lots of copies of the first American edition (issued the same year by Albert and Charles Boni) at similar prices.  Finally The Last Post, which according to the bibliography I just found was actually issued first in America by The Literary Guild of America and then by Boni, followed by Duckworth in London [1928].  Apparently this happened because Ford didn’t want to pay taxes or something.  I see one very questionable copy of the earliest edition on Amazon, but there are a number of nice copies of the Boni and Duckworth editions for sale, $300 and below.  God, I’m tired.  Sorry about the excess of words and the dearth of pictures.

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#30 The Good Soldier (1915)

Ford Madox [Hueffer] Ford

I like reading books that are described as Modernist only when they sound exactly like the outmoded books that they replaced.  (This is also how I feel about books that are called Post Modern.)  For this reason I am particularly fond of The Good Soldier, (and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for an example of the latter).  The things that their respective authors achieved that were good and new did not involve removing punctuation, inventing new words, starting the book in the middle of the sentence, or, verily, re-imaging “sentence” and turning the fucking world upside-down. Yes, I am very bitter because three times now I couldn’t finish Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake is obviously out of the question, and it makes me feel stupid, and there must be some kind of support group that I should seek out and join.  I suppose I am the reader’s equivalent of the elderly fellow who complains about the goddamn immigrants not speaking English, when really he just doesn’t understand the changing world around him, and is frightened of his impending death.  Or maybe he’s just a dumb, racist old coot.  Perhaps there is no connection there.

My neuroses aside, The Good Soldier, a short book, seems to me a rich and perfect novel.  It is a less well-known example of the old unreliable narrator, familiar to high school and college students everywhere from The Turn of the Screw (1898).  Remember, the one where the lady squeezed the boy’s neck and he died?  Basically the narrator here, an American named Dowell, is writing the history of his deceased wife Florence and their joint relation to a British couple called Ashburnham.  They are all more or less rich, and Florence and the male Ashburnham have “hearts,” which means they spend all of their time taking waters in continental spas.  I love it because it has things like this in it:

“The given proposition was, that we were all ‘good people.’ We took for granted that we all liked beef underdone but not too underdone; that both men preferred a good light brandy after lunch; that both women drank a very light Rhine wine qualified with Fachingen water –that sort of thing.”

But meanwhile (and this is a legitimate spoiler, maybe even like a Sixth Sense game-ending spoiler), the narrative has a kind of perverse, inexorable trajectory where you find out Florence is doing it with everybody and never one time with her husband, and you know Ashburnham is going to do something unspeakable, but you aren’t sure what (literally cut his own throat!), and meanwhile you can only speculate at the interior life of the purportedly chaste narrator, but if you’re me you imagine it has something to do with dirty sex, and it’s all very juicy, but described in clear, rather bloodless prose.  Two thumbs up!  I didn’t want it to end!

I don’t have anything very interesting to say about the life of FMF.  He was a big deal, his family was best friends with all of the Pre-Raphaelites so he grew up in their milieu.  In the few photos I have seen he doesn’t look particularly un-prepossessing, but the little fact sheets I have read about him usually manage to get in that he was a success with women despite having a  fat, ugly mug.  Evidently literary biographers are an attractive and judgmental bunch.  (Ford Madox Ford: The Triumph of Genius over Ugly)  His name can be a source of confusion.  I guess he changed it from Hueffer because he didn’t want anyone to think he was some sort of kraut.  But his grandfather, a handsome painter, who was also famous, was named Ford Madox Brown.  It gets even more confusing if you have ever been a child, and read A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which has nothing to do with Ford Madox Ford or Ford Madox Brown, but there are characters named, respectively, Madoc, Madog, Maddok, Mad Dog, and Maddox.  Think about that.

Sexy time! The publication history of TGS is neat because it was first published as a short piece called “The Saddest Story” in the first issue of “Percy” Wyndham Lewis’s sexy literary journal BLAST, which was the hot new thing in 1914. It featured Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, Rebecca West, T. S. Eliot (and my favorite poem), and others.  Unfortunately, shortly after the first issue came out, war happened and basically killed everyone’s buzz (and Gaudier-Brzeska).  There was one subsequent issue.  Here’s Blast I (this picture is the one at the Tate), London: John Lane, 1914.

Arst Libri is selling BLAST 1 and 2 together for $2,000.  Number 1 lacks the backstrip, and both issues are chipped, but they sound very good given the frail wrappers format.  They are also on sale together at $2,260, with the wrappers of 2 detached.  There are two copies of Blast 1 by itself online, one good only at $930, one sounds fair at $650.  There were a number of facsimiles and reprints, notably the Black Sparrow edition of 1981, which Jeff Maser has for $450.   The first edition, London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1915, is evidently not common.  Here is Peter Harrington’s very nice copy, which they have at $4,300:

Beautiful!  I don’t have a bibliography so I don’t know if it was issued without a dust jacket or what.  James Jaffe has a very good copy at $3,500 and Commonwealth Books has one at $2,500.

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#14 I, Claudius (1934)

Robert Graves

It just says I, Claudius on the Modern Library list, so I gather they have spurned Claudius the God and his Wife Messalina.  Since I read them together in one paperback volume I am counting them as one novel.  I think they were published the same year, or just one year apart.

At any rate.  I like to read novels.  I seldom read non-fiction (except sometimes memoirs) or history of any kind (except Herodotus, but that was one time).  I like my facts to be folded into novels, particularly those featuring sexy ladies or illegitimate children or going to Oxford.  If the novel is a so-called “historical novel,” especially if it is by James Michener, especially if I find it in a hotel lobby, I  read it, assume it is full of true things, and resolve to remember one of them should the subject ever come up in conversation.  For example, if anyone mentions South Africa, I recall Michener’s seminal work Exodus, which I found a hotel in China and read on the train.  Then I say  “The Broderbund, so evil, so sad,” and hope that the conversation ends soon, before someone can ask what I mean.

My point is, I, Claudius is special because not only is it unusually full of facts and my go-to source for Roman history, it also one of my favorite novels full stop.  Because it is wonderful.  In my extensive research, which was reading the preface to my copy, I learned that Robert Graves, who identified as a poet, wrote IC simply as a way to make fast easy money.  Here’s what I have done to make fast money: 1. Worked in a toy store.  2.  Edited someone’s college paper about the movie The Piano with Holly Hunter.  Here’s what Robert Graves did: 1. Read dozens of historical texts in the original Latin and Greek.  2. Used said texts to write a riveting two-volume first-person narrative about the history of Rome 44 B.C. to 54 A.D., subsequently making a ton of money because they were so readable, nay, infinitely readable and also humorous.  So much so that I am compelled to use italics like a heroine out of L. M. Montgomery.

Historical facts according to Claudius the Stammerer (the narrator), according to Robert Graves: Livia convinces Augustus, first emperor of the Roman Empire, to leave his first wife and marry her; she then uses her position of power to poison almost everybody.  Tiberius is a pervert of shocking magnitude.  Everyone thinks Claudius is lacking mentally but he turns out to be the smart one and ends up in charge before he marries his own awful bitch who brings him down.  There is the old song-and-dance about should Rome be a Republic or have an Emperor, familiar to those of us who have seen the movie Gladiator.  Romans had different ideas about family than modern people do, so everyone is constantly adopting adult children and marrying one another, which is sometimes confusing.  Furthermore, everyone has one of four possible names, plus some extras, but Graves does a very good job of keeping it relatively simple.

Knowing that Graves considered himself a poet before anything else, I have tried to read his poetry.  I didn’t much like it, but I struggle with most poetry.  It is my achilles’ heel.  His (partial) autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929), though, is another one of my favorite books.  It describes his experiences at school and in WWI, in a wry, warm way, so that you wish he was your friend.  Although I read (not in his autobiography) that he could be very grumpy, and had woman trouble.  But serious woman trouble, as in he had a long-standing menage-a-trois with his wife and another lady, and he decided he liked his wife better, and the other lady threw herself out of the window, and then he changed his mind about the wife and hobbled off with the other lady after her bones knitted together.  Kind of like a Roman!  Except in Rome, as I know from a book, his new paramour would have convinced him to exile the wife to a malarial island, so she would get a fever and die.

Sexy time! The first edition is London: Arthur Baker, 1934.  Here is a fine copy in a near fine dust jacket, which Nigel Williams is selling for $2,900. 

Charles Parkhurst has a near fine copy in a very good jacket at $2,800.  Less expensive copies lack the dust jacket.  There are a handful of first editions of IC and Claudius the God bound together in morocco or calf, one in the high two-thousands, one around $1,000, and $650. There was also a signed limited edition of 100 copies issued in 1977 by Paradin, and there are currently six copies online between $1,800-$3,600.  Here is Peter Harrington’s, at $2,500.

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#11 Under the Volcano (1947)

Malcolm Lowry’s Ultimate Literary Jam.

I picked this one to go first because I wrote my (undergraduate) thesis about it.  Which, incidentally, was the only thesis I ever wrote.  That’s a good segue into a disclaimer about this whole undertaking: I am not a big deal, and I probably don’t know what I am talking about.

Now then.  I would stop short of saying the novel is a chore to read, but it does, on occasion, try one’s fortitude.  The writing style somehow manages to mimic the experience of lying in the sun with a hangover, on pot.   To read it is to drink the hair of the dog while reflecting on the great failures of your life.  For me, anyway.  The story is also, of course, very depressing.  It documents the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, The Consul, a miserable alcoholic wreck in a backwater in Mexico.  Basically all he does is drink and fall down.  His estranged wife comes to visit, he decides to give  life another shot with her by his side, but he isn’t able to do it with her (sex), and he drinks more, and in the end he gets accidentally shot and dies in a ditch with dogs.  There is a multitude of Meaningful References.  Maximilian and Carlotta, and a lot of Dante because Lowry evidently wanted UtV to serve as one canticle of his own Divine Comedy.  (This was actually what my thesis was about but I can’t remember what I concluded, because it got very heady, because I spent a lot of time researching what happens when you drink to excess, and feeling sad about boys.)  Malcolm Lowry “IRL” was also a miserable alcoholic wreck, the kind that would attend a dinner party and when he left the host discovered that all of the cooking sherry was gone.  I read once that he checked into a hospital to undergo a ghastly modern detox technique wherein for days the patient sat in a small room lit with only a red lightbulb, while doctors periodically injected him or her with a powerful sick-making compound.  An aversion therapy, I guess it was.  Anyway most people only lasted one day before swearing off drink forever and going home, but Malcolm Lowry made it through a week in the injection room before he escaped and went on a two-day bender, during which he drank everything.  This anecdote endears him to me.

Everybody made a great fuss about UtV, which is part of the reason ML was such a disappointment.  He was never able to write anything worthwhile other than UtV, even though he was writing all the time.  He also had terrible luck and it was very common that periodically all of his possessions would catch on fire, in addition to any masterpieces he was working on.  He wrote and published other things, which people weren’t overly enthusiastic about, and he left a lot of unfinished material when he died in what was possibly yet another fuck-up (he overdosed on pills, but it’s unclear whether it was suicide, accident, or something nefarious perpetrated by his long-suffering second wife, Margerie).

So that’s all I have to say about that.

Sexy time! Here is a first edition.  It’s New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.  I gather the book itself is in pale grey cloth.  This is a near fine copy in a fine, slightly restored dust jacket, which Michael Toth is selling for $4,500.  There are a few fine or near fine copies in dust jackets, all between $1,500 and $4,500.  Around $1000 and below are less nice copies, without dust jackets, and first UK editions (Jonathan Cape, also 1947, I believe).

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