The long, hard-fought campaign that led to The Library of America’s founding

Humanities,
September/October 2015

An origin story that is near and dear to us reached the public last week with the publication of “Edmund Wilson’s Big Idea,” a detailed history of The Library of America’s founding by David Skinner that appears in the September/October issue of Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and online at neh.gov.

Skinner’s intricate, inside-baseball account makes it clear that the LOA had a long gestation period, stretching across decades—which perhaps isn’t surprising for a nonprofit literary enterprise. What may grab readers’ attention, though, is how close the Library came to not happening at all.

The original inspiration dates back to the 1950s, and to the critic Edmund Wilson, who had long complained of the lack of authoritative, readily available editions of seminal American authors. Wilson had in mind a U.S. equivalent to the French Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: reference editions of the classics in an inexpensive format. While he was able to recruit influential allies for his venture, his efforts to secure the necessary funding never came to fruition, despite the founding of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965. After that, years of competing proposals and various forms of academic and institutional politics kept his dream from becoming reality until the late 1970s, well after Wilson himself passed away in 1972. And even then, as Skinner shows, launching the project was a close-fought battle.

Skeptics argued that the proposed books would be too bulky. They would be too uncommercial—or they wouldn’t be scholarly enough. But years of tireless advocacy and shrewd politicking by the team who succeeded Wilson—“a rough synthesis of scholarship and New York City publishing brio,” in Skinner’s words—finally led to a Ford Foundation grant of $600,000 and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant of $1.2 million in early 1979.

The Library of America's first print ad, May 1982.

The rest, as they say, is literary history, and it would take an article at least as long as Skinner’s to do justice to the Library of America story since then. Its first four titles—collections of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—went on sale in early 1982, and years later Edmund Wilson himself entered the pantheon, via a two-volume set that amasses his essays and reviews from the 1920s through ‘40s. Perhaps the happiest note to conclude on is to mention that while in 1982 the first Library of America print ad [above] proudly predicted, “eventually the series will number more than one hundred volumes,” our upcoming James Baldwin: Later Novels, publishing later this month, is number #272 in the series.

Read “Edmund Wilson’s Big Idea” at neh.gov

(Note: since its founding The Library of America has not received regular funding from any foundation or government agency. Instead, it relies on grants and charitable contributions every year to supplement its revenue from sales.)

Related posts:

• How a Library of America book is born
• The Library of America’s All-Time Best-Selling Titles
• Reading Richard Poirier: Two Journals Honor His Legacy

Guillermo del Toro to direct H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness; Edmund Wilson and Cthulhu

Daniel Zalewski’s recent New Yorker profile of director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) chronicled his passionate efforts to develop one of H. P. Lovecraft’s best-known later works into a major motion picture:

The movie that he most longs to make is an adaptation of a grandly ridiculous H. P. Lovecraft novella, At the Mountains of Madness, in which explorers, venturing into Antarctica, discover malevolent aliens in a frozen, ruined city. Some of the aliens mutate wildly, which would allow Del Toro to create dozens of extreme incarnations. He said, “If I get to do it, those monsters will be terrifying.” . . . To anybody who owns thousands of comic books [as Del Toro does], At the Mountains of Madness is as central to the American canon as Moby-Dick. . . . Del Toro loves the story, in part because Lovecraft combines terror—the panicked effort to escape the creatures—with metaphysical horror: “The book essentially says how scary it is to realize we are a cosmic joke.”

Although the project has yet to receive a green light, Del Toro recently confirmed that he will be the final judge of the winner of the short film competition at this year’s H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival.

Prompted by Zalewski’s piece, Jon Michaud wondered whether the name “Cthulhu,” the giant alien being that recurs in many of Lovecraft’s tales, had ever appeared before in the magazine’s pages. It had, once before, in a 1945 essay, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous,” by Edmund Wilson. Lovecraft fans had besieged Wilson with complaints when his 1944 essay, “A Treatise on Tales of Horror” failed to include their revered author. In the earlier essay Wilson contended that the contributors to several recent collections of horror stories suffered by comparison with the genre’s more literary practitioners—Joseph Conrad, Nikolai Gogol, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Lewis Stevenson. The only contemporaries he thought worthy of inclusion were Walter de la Mare and Franz Kafka.

But the “enthusiasm of [Lovecraft’s] admirers” was “so insistent” that Wilson decided to look into his work “more seriously.” The 1945 essay detailed his findings and as a “tribute to such power as H. P. Lovecraft possesses” Wilson was willing to “suspend disbelief . . . in regard to the omniscient conical snails.” But overall he was not impressed: “The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.” Wilson did find Lovecraft intriguing as a person and a scholar. “His long essay on the literature of supernatural horror is a really able piece of work.”

Also of interest:

• An overview of previous movies based on Lovecraft’s work
• Peter Straub discusses the perennial debate about literary versus genre treatments of horror in a Reader’s Almanac excerpt from his interview with The Library of America about American Fantastic Tales
• Read “What Robert Bloch owes H. P. Lovecraft,” a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (includes At the Mountains of Madness); Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s (includes both “A Treatise on Tales of Horror” and “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous”)

Henry James’s The Bostonians, published 125 years ago today, sparks a scandal

The Bostonians proved one of the most troubling of Henry James’s publishing efforts. It first appeared in thirteen installments in The Century magazine (February 1885–February 1886), but by the time of the last installment James’s American publisher, James R. Osgood and Company, had gone bankrupt. Scrambling to recover his losses, James had his English publisher, Macmillan & Co., bring out the first edition in London on February 15, 1886. The American edition appeared a month later.

In his novels of the late 1880s—The Bostonians, The Tragic Muse, and The Princess Casamassima—James turned to political topics for the first time and soon discovered that his readers did not follow. Richard Watson Gilder, publisher of The Century, was reportedly alarmed to find his subscribers falling away. Many found James’s portrait of his two main characters, a Boston feminist and her young protégé, scandalously close to the well-known “Boston marriage” of Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett (although James’s biographers claim he drew more from observing his sister Alice’s relationship with Katharine Loring). Even his brother William chided Henry for creating a “portrait from life” in basing the character of Miss Birdseye on the veteran abolitionist Elizabeth Peabody, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister-in-law.

Henry found these attacks “harsh and unfair” and protested (perhaps too much) that he had “not seen Miss Peabody in 20 years” and had created Miss Birdseye “from my moral consciousness, like every person I have ever drawn.” Yet he was dismayed at the book’s reception, as he later wrote to William in October 1885:

I fear The Bostonians will be, as a finished work, a fiasco, as not a word, echo or comment on the serial (save your remarks) have come to me (since the row about the first number) from any quarter whatever. The deathly silence seems to indicate that it has fallen flat. I hoped much of it, and shall be disappointed—having got no money for it, I hoped for a little glory.

William reassured his brother of the novel’s success after he was able to read it as a book. His assessment echoed that of many contemporary reviewers:

Never again shall I attack one of your novels in the magazine. . . . The truth [is] that it is superlatively well done, provided one admits that method of doing such a thing at all. Really the datum seems to me to belong rather of the region of fancy, but the treatment to that of the most elaborate realism. One can easily imagine the story cut out and made into a bright, short, sparkling thing of a hundred pages, which would have been an absolute success. But you have worked it up by dint of descriptions and psychologic commentaries into near 500—charmingly done for those who have the leisure and the peculiar mood to enjoy that amount of miniature work—but perilously near to turning away the great majority of readers who crave more matter and less art.

Mark Twain famously declared that “I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read [The Bostonians].” Later critics developed a keener appreciation. In his essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” Edmund Wilson wrote:

The first hundred pages of The Bostonians, with the arrival of the young Southerner in Boston and his first contacts with the Boston reformers, is, in its way, one of the most masterly things that Henry James ever did.

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Sarah Orne Jewett, “unsurpassed chronicler and interpreter of women’s lives”
• Moved by a story, Henry James writes to Edith Wharton for the first time
• Henry James as a fictional character
• The Art of the Interview: Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Henry James

Related LOA works: Henry James: Complete Novels; Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s (includes “The Ambiguity of Henry James”)

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, celebrated by Edmund Wilson, Harold Bloom, and Bones

Given his concern about the state of current literary culture in his recent review of T. S. Eliot’s letters, Joseph Epstein may be comforted to learn that Eliot is still very much in the zeitgeist. As The TV Watchtower recently reported, the December 9 episode of the television show Bones had Dr. Adit Gadh quoting from The Waste Land: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” Dr. Gadh went on to explain:

We do not actually fear death—we fear that no one will notice our absence—that we will disappear without a trace.

American readers discovered Eliot’s quoted words eighty-eight years ago today when Boni & Liveright published The Waste Land. Within a month of publication Edmund Wilson acclaimed the poem in The Dial:

. . . the publication of his long poem, The Waste Land, confirms the opinion which we had begun gradually to cherish, that Mr. Eliot, with all his limitations, is one of our only authentic poets.

Wilson itemized rather severely what many considered “his limitations”:

. . . that he depends too much upon books and borrows too much from other men . . . that he does not feel enough to be a poet and that the emotions of longing and disgust which he does have belong essentially to a delayed adolescence . . . [that] he has no capacity for life.

Yet Wilson judged these deficits counterbalanced:

Well: all these objections are founded on realities, but they are outweighed by one major fact—the fact that Mr. Eliot is a poet. . . he feels intensely and with distinction and speaks naturally in beautiful verse. . . I doubt whether there is a single other poem of equal length by a contemporary American which displays so high and so varied a mastery of English verse. The poem is—in spite of its lack of structural unity—simply one triumph after another . . .

Harold Bloom has called The Waste Land “indisputably the most influential poem written in English in [the twentieth] century.”

Not everyone has shared Wilson and Bloom’s enthusiasm. Adrian Slather retells the story of when Eliot read his poem to the royal family during World War II. The Queen Mother later recalled the experience:

We had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem... I think it was called "The Desert." And first the girls [Elizabeth and Margaret] got the giggles and then I did and then even the King.

Also of interest:

• Listen to T. S. Eliot read The Waste Land
• Read a hypertext version of The Waste Land with links to notes in a separate pane
• Read Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s essay “Next Year’s Words”: T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
• Read “T. S. Eliot and literary culture: Dare we ask what is it?” a recent Reader’s Almanac post
• Watch the full episode of "The Doctor in the Photo" on hulu.com

Related LOA works: American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, volume one: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker (includes The Waste Land and thirteen other poems by T. S. Eliot); Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s (includes “The Poetry of Drouth: The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot”)

H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan: A Legendary Ten-Year Literary Partnership

Today many Baltimore residents will be celebrating Mencken Day, in honor of the 130th birthday of one of their most famous residents—as they do each year on the Saturday before September 12, the date of his birth in the city he lived in until his death. In commemoration of the festivities, it seems only fit to recall the friendship that launched his career.

George Jean Nathan first met H. L. Mencken when they were interviewed together in the New York offices of The Smart Set in May 1908. Mencken was twenty-eight, Nathan, twenty-six. Thomas Quinn Curtiss describes the scene in The Smart Set: George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken:

When Nathan arrived in [Norman] Boyer’s office he found the managing editor chatting with a cherub-faced, snub-nosed young man whose golden hair was parted in the middle and slapped down like a butcher’s on Sunday morning. The stranger’s clothes—a stiff, starched collar, gaudy strawberry tie, checkered suit, and yellow shoes—typified a provincial dandy or race-track tout.

On seeing Nathan the man leapt to his feet and thrust out his hand. “I’m H. L. Mencken of Baltimore,” he exclaimed, his bright, blue eyes sparkling. “I’m the biggest damned fool in Christendom and I don’t want any boastful reply that you claim the honor.”

By the fall of that year Mencken would be The Smart Set’s literary critic and Nathan its drama critic. So began one of the great literary partnerships of the twentieth century. The Smart Set had a limited budget—it paid just one cent a word—and so specialized in discovering new writers. Mencken and Nathan quickly proved such popular and prolific contributors that when new owners took over the magazine in 1914 they offered the editor position to Nathan. He agreed, “but only if Mencken comes with me.” Nathan became the senior partner, Mencken his co-editor. Together they relaunched The Smart Set, promising “to give its readers a moderately intelligent and awfully good time.”

Each issue featured some twenty short stories, ten poems, four articles, a novelette, and a play. If Mencken and Nathan couldn’t sign enough stories in time for publication they included anonymous contributions of their own under pen names. Edmund Wilson would later describe what The Smart Set meant to him as a youth:

In the spring of 1912, just before graduating from prep school, I somehow happened to pick up a copy of The Smart Set, a trashy-looking monthly, and was astonished to find audacious and extremely amusing critical articles by men named Mencken and Nathan, of whom I had never heard. I continued to read The Smart Set through college, at first with a slight feeling of guilt, for it was making fun of everything respectable in current American drama and literature.

From 1914 to 1923 Mencken and Nathan would use the magazine to publish the newest voices in American literature: Willa Cather, W.E.B. Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Nathan paid him thirty dollars for his first published story), Dashiell Hammett, Sinclair Lewis, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Ezra Pound, and many more.

Mencken and Nathan developed a clear division of labor: Nathan did all the office editorial work, copyediting, and the layout of the magazine. Mencken’s job was to “keep on the lookout for good stuff.” As Marion Elizabeth Rodgers describes their working relationship in Mencken: The American Iconoclast:

Each Monday and Friday for nine years, Nathan carefully tied brown paper packets containing Smart Set manuscripts and sent them to Mencken in Baltimore. If Mencken found one he liked, he marked it “Yes” and returned it to Nathan. If Nathan liked it too, it was set in type at once, and the author’s check went out at the end of the week. If Mencken dissented, the manuscript was returned. The procedure also worked in reverse order, Mencken to Nathan. No time was wasted on discussion of manuscripts although brief written comments sometimes were included. The “No” of either was final. “The plan was so simple and so practicable that we often wondered that no other editors had ever thought of it,” commented Mencken.

It was a partnership that shouldn’t have worked. As Rodgers points out, “No two men could possibly have been more unlike in style and thought. ‘Nathan detests philosophical questions,’ Mencken said. ‘He sees life purely as an idiotic spectacle. I delight in such questions, though I reject all solutions. Nathan aims at a very complex style. I aim at the greatest possible lucidity.’”

What they shared was a passion for discovering, nurturing, and publishing the work of new American writers, for enjoying humor, and for attacking sacred cows. They also complemented each other: Mencken refused to move to New York; Nathan was very much the Manhattan man about town. Joseph L. Mankiewicz based the character of the acid-tongued ladies’ man and theater critic Addison DeWitt in All about Eve on Nathan. By the 1920s they had become such intimidating arbiters of taste that a popular ditty “Mencken, Nathan and God” satirized their stature.

“Nathan and I never took the magazine seriously,” Mencken later wrote—and it was their irreverent attitude that would prove their undoing. Having lampooned President Warren G. Harding during his presidency, they saw no reason to stop after his death in August 1923. When the printer brought their satiric parody of Harding’s funeral procession to the attention of the magazine’s conservative publisher, he exploded and declared the magazine for sale.

But Nathan and Mencken had been eager to start a magazine of their own. In 1924 they joined with young publisher Alfred Knopf to revolutionize magazine publishing with the launch of The American Mercury. Unlike The Smart Set, which was printed on cheap grade paper, the new magazine was handsome and in a larger format with no illustrations; the paper was imported Scotch featherweight, the binding sewn so that it opened flat like a book. And it didn’t just include stories, poems, and reviews: there were extended profiles of world figures, an entire section on “Arts and Sciences” with essays on medicine, architecture, and language. Although priced higher than its competitors at fifty cents, the first printing of ten thousand copies quickly sold out. By the end of the year the circulation was over 42,000; it peaked at 84,000 in 1928.

Authors flocked to the new magazine and liked what they found. James Branch Cabell explains why: “[Mencken] gives immediate attention to your manuscript, pays spot cash, encloses a return stamped envelope with the proofs and gives you second serial rights without asking.” Many of the innovations introduced by The American Mercury—extended profiles, aphorisms in the margins, and “Americana,” amusing items gleaned from newspapers and magazines across the country—soon became staples of magazine publishing.

Unfortunately, shortly after the magazine’s launch the clear division of labor Mencken and Nathan had cultivated started to unravel. Mencken wanted more social and political coverage; Nathan an equal balance of literature and the arts. More to the point, Nathan no longer cared to handle the editorial office chores. “The Smart Set was fun,” he complained. “The Mercury was a job.” Nathan resigned as co-editor but continued to contribute, come to the office, and retain his stock and seat on the board of directors. This infuriated Mencken such that he took Nathan’s name off the building’s lobby directory and had his desk moved out among the stenographers.

Yet, like a latter-day Bartleby, Nathan continued to come to work. Nathan’s behavior mystified friends and colleagues. Alfred Knopf speculated that Nathan needed Mencken more than Mencken needed Nathan. “After all,” Knopf wrote, “ the theater and H.L.M. were, I think, the two great experiences of his life.” Knopf would eventually buy out Nathan’s share in the magazine for $25,000. The stock market crash a few years later wiped out the value of the remaining stock and, Knopf later acknowledged, Nathan “was the only one to get any cash out of the magazine.”

Mencken continued as editor on The American Mercury until 1933 and Nathan continued to contribute articles until 1930. Despite their differences the friendship continued until 1932 when Mencken read the manuscript of Nathan’s memoirs. He found the chapter on him “full of malice” and errors. Even though Nathan apologized and excised all the offensive material from the published book, Mencken was adamant: “I am through with him.”

Read the Library of America interview with Marion Elizabeth Rodgers about H. L. Mencken (PDF)

Read “The Nature of Liberty” by H. L. Mencken (Story of the Week)

Read “Baiting the Umpire” by George Jean Nathan (Story of the Week)

Listen to a rare interview with H. L. Mencken (YouTube, in four parts)

Related LOA works: H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series (includes Mencken’s essay “George Jean Nathan”); The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner (includes three essays by George Jean Nathan: “The Audience Emotion,” “On Vaudeville,” “Eugene O’Neill”)

A toast and a tear for Dorothy Parker, writer and poet, for her 117th birthday

Project Elegance celebrated Dorothy Parker’s birthday yesterday with a bouquet of quotes. Our favorite: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

In “A Toast and a Tear for Dorothy Parker,” his 1944 review of The Portable Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson reflected on the close connection between Parker’s work and her era:

. . . the thing I have particularly felt is the difference between the general tone, the psychological and literary atmosphere, of the period—the twenties and the earlier thirties—when most of these pieces of Mrs. Parker’s were written, and the atmosphere of the present time. It was suddenly brought home to me how much freer people were—in their emotions, in their ideas, and in expressing themselves. In the twenties they could love, they could travel, they could stay up late at night as extravagantly as they pleased; they could think or say or write whatever seemed to them amusing or interesting. There was a good deal of irresponsibility, and a lot of money and energy wasted, and the artistic activities of the time suffered somewhat from its general vices, but it was a much more favorable climate for writing than the period we are in now.

And on Parker in particular:

When one has bought Dorothy Parker . . . one has really got a book. She is not Emily Bronte or Jane Austen, but she has been at some pains to write well, and she has put into what she has written a voice, a state of mind, an era, a few moments of human experience that nobody else has conveyed.

Laurence Senelick echoed Wilson in his introduction to “The Jest,” his selection of one of Parker's drama reviews from Vanity Fair for The American Stage:

In the age of disillusionment that followed the Great War, the wisecrack best conveyed the fashion for cynicism. No wonder that the “Round Table” at the Algonquin Hotel, the journalists’ luncheon club she frequented with Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Franklin Pierce Adams, Alexander Woolcott, and George S. Kaufman, was commonly known as the Vicious Circle. The bon mots of these mauvais langues—such as the barb that Katherine Hepburn “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B”—were made public in their columns the next day.

Parker would not have been happy being characterized as a wisecracker, since she once wrote: “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

The Dorothy Parker Society website contains a great deal of material about Parker’s life and work. The society has a newsletter; it conducts an Algonquin Round Table walking tour, and the site has a page filled with audio of Parker reading her poems (requires RealPlayer).

Related LOA works: Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays of the 1930s and 1940s; The American Stage: Writings on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner

Frank Kermode (1919–2010), leading literary critic of his generation

In his epilogue to the 2000 reissue of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, a collection of lectures Allen Tate has called “a landmark in twentieth-century critical thought,” Frank Kermode makes one of his signature observations:

It was my belief that in referring to the sound of a clock not as “tick-tick” but as “tick-tock” we substitute a fiction for the actual acoustic event, distinguishing between genesis of “tick” and apocalypse of “tock,” and conferring on the interval between them a significance it would otherwise lack. The fictive end purges the interval of simple chronicity. It achieves a “temporal integration”—it converts a blank into a kairos, charges it with meaning. So it can be argued that we have here a tiny model of all plots. . . . our sense of, or need for, an ending transforms our lives between “the tick of birth and the tock of death,” and stories simulate this transformation but must not do so too simply.

This brief excerpt illustrates what students of literature and even casual readers have come to cherish in Kermode’s criticism: the graceful, effortless movement from common observation to thought-provoking insight.

On Wednesday The London Review of Books posted a short notice that Frank Kermode died on August 17. What Kermode meant to the Review was quietly on display in the cascade of links below the notice: more than 200 articles and reviews he had contributed over the past thirty years. LRB’s blog linked to Kermode’s June 1979 article in The Observer that called for a new literary journal and prompted the Review’s founding.

Frank Kermode wrote his first book at the age of twenty, a study of Aaron Hill, the eighteenth-century theater manager who introduced castrato singing to England. The publication of his last book, Concerning E. M. Forster, was timed to coincide with his ninetieth birthday. In the intervening years Kermode published more than sixty books, held professorships at six different universities, served as a visiting professor at many colleges and universities in the United States, was a judge for the first Booker prize, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991, the first critic to be so honored since William Empson.

In 1963 Richard Poirier offered this appraisal: “Frank Kermode is generally regarded as the best practicing critic in England today, free of the polemical or theoretical limitations that have been ascribed to F. R. Leavis or I. A. Richards and credited with the power, which Matthew Arnold required of good criticism, “to ascertain the master-spirit.” Thirty-three years later, in 1996, David Lodge confirmed Kermode’s enduring status, writing “In my opinion, and that of many others, Frank Kermode is the finest English critic of his generation.” Writers also perceived a different sensibility at work in Kermode’s judgments. Philip Roth admitted that although he dislikes reading reviews, "if Frank Kermode reviewed my book I would read it".

Kermode’s breakthrough critical work came in 1957 with The Romantic Image, which John Mullan briefly summarized in his obituary for The Guardian:

It was an account of the continuities between Romanticism and Modernism, with the poetry of Yeats at its heart. With its easy erudition, but not a footnote in sight, this book seems a long way from today's average academic output. In range it is huge, reaching into European and classical literature, aesthetic philosophy as well as poetry, verse from the Renaissance as well as the 19th and 20th centuries–yet in tone it is modest, provisional (it calls itself an essay). Learning with a certain lightness was his style.

Throughout his career Kermode moved easily between modernism and other literary periods. “Wallace Stevens, as even hostile critics will admit, is a deeply interesting poet” begins Kermode’s short (just 134 pages) introduction to the prose and poetry of Wallace Stevens (1960), a book credited with introducing Stevens to the English speaking world as a “maker of worlds.” His Arden edition of The Tempest in 1961 set the standard for annotated editions of Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare’s Language (2000) became a bestseller in England.

Kermode’s writings often seemed ubiquitous. As Helen Vendler observed in the Washington Post obituary. “You were either reading a new book by Sir Frank or else reading a book he reviewed. He was always in the present." He patterned his “literary journalism” after Edmund Wilson. In his introduction to Continuities, one of his many collections of essays, he explains:

Wilson can deal justly with other writers without neglecting the meditative movement of his own mind, and he can satisfy, without loss of intellectual integrity, the non-specialist’s urgent and entirely proper demand for amenity of exposition and fine texture. This is the kind of journalism I call valuable and rare. It is rare not because those who could easily do it have better things to do, but because it is more demanding than most of what passes for scholarship. It calls incessantly for mental activity, fresh information, and civility into the bargain.

Kermode famously testified for the defense in 1966 when a Conservative Member of Parliament initiated a private prosecution to declare Last Exit to Brooklyn, by Hubert Selby Jr., obscene. The trial lasted nine days and the court found for the prosecution but when the decision was overturned in 1968 it was considered a turning point in British censorship law.

Alan Samson, Kermode’s publisher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, revealed what he will miss to the Guardian's Alison Flood:

He's probably the greatest literary conversationalist I've ever known - it wasn't just the lectures and the monographs and the books, it's the fact that just talking about a writer he'd say incredibly pithy, intelligent things which would prompt you to go and read them again. He knew he had exceptional gifts, but there was a modest manner about him. He knew he was smarter than everyone else, but he was this pipe-smoking, beguiling man who listened to what you had to say.... It's the wreath of pipe smoke, and the benign smile and wisdom, which I'm really going to miss.

Readers can experience some of this beguiling modesty in the video of the ninety-minute interview Alan Macfarlane conducted with Kermode in February 2008.

As wide as his interests ranged, Kermode kept returning to one poet. As he put it in the epilogue to The Sense of an Ending:

[Wallace Stevens] remains the poet who, when the mood is right, speaks most directly to me; he understood fictions, and he understood the radiance associated with the notion of kairos, a radiance he sometimes associated with the seasons (kairos, after all, means “season”). He also understood that the imagination is always at the end of an era, and that “One day enriches a year.” . . . He wrote of midsummer that it was

. . . the last day of a certain year
Beyond which there is nothing left of time.

In 1997 Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson co-edited Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Reviewing it in The New York Review of Books. Helen Vendler wrote: “Now at last—in a handsome thousand pages [Kermode and Richardson] have given us—in the durable and elegant Library of America format—a Stevens for the foreseeable future.”

Excellent obituaries of Frank Kermode can also be found at The Telegraph and The New York Times.

Related LOA works: Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose; Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago

After what he called “five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors,” Nabokov finished writing Lolita in December 1953 and began submitting it to publishers. “It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation.... I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” So went one of the many rejection letters. Five leading publishers—Doubleday; Farrar, Straus; New Directions; Simon & Schuster; and Viking—all turned it down.

That was when Nabokov’s European agent, Doussia Ergaz, recommended Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris, publisher of Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs. Nabokov was then teaching Russian Studies at Cornell and feared he would be fired unless the book was published under a pseudonym. Girodias would publish it, but only with Nabokov’s name as author. Nabokov agreed but was wary, as he expressed in a letter in July 1955: “You and I know that Lolita is a serious book with a serious purpose. I hope the public will accept it as such. A succès de scandale would distress me.”

Girodias printed 5,000 copies of Lolita in English in September 1955. It sold mostly to English tourists and did not receive any critical attention until, in an interview with the London Times, Graham Greene named it one of the three best novels of 1955. This prompted John Gordon of the Sunday Express to order a copy and to denounce it as “about the filthiest book I’ve ever read” and “sheer unrestrained pornography.” The ensuing brouhaha (Gordon pointed out that Greene had been sued by Shirley Temple “for having said the little girl made her living out of displaying her thighs for the delectation of middle-aged gentlemen”) made Lolita into an international sensation. Responding to Gordon’s attack in Esquire, Dorothy Parker wrote:

I cannot regard it as pornography, either sheer, unrestrained, or any other kind. It is the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls ... an anguished book, but sometimes wildly funny, as in the saga of his travels across and around the United States with her.... [Nabokov’s] command of the language is absolute, and his Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—alright then—a great book.

The New York Public Library “Sessions” pages, edited by Rodney Phillips and Sarah Funke, recount the dramatic story of the American publication:

Though copies of the Girodias edition were making it into the United States, Nabokov still wished for an American edition. Jason Epstein, then an editor at Doubleday, hoped to convince Doubleday's president, Douglas Black, to take the novel, by playing upon Black's desire to refight the court battle he had recently lost over Edmund Wilson’s The Memoirs of Hecate County. In an attempt to gain ground, Epstein arranged for an excerpt (about a third of the novel) to appear in Doubleday's June 1957 Anchor Review, with critical praise from Partisan Review editor F.W. Dupee. The Anchor volume featured Nabokov’s specially written explanation of the genesis of the novel and his defense of it on the grounds of “aesthetic bliss”: “On a Book Entitled Lolita.”

Throughout the summer and into the fall, Nabokov endured delays and denials by Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and even Putnam’s. He settled on the small independent publisher Ivan Obolensky, but when his offer, too, fell through, Putnam’s made good on an earlier proposal, and went into production.

On publication day [August 18], Putnam’s president, Walter Minton, sent a congratulatory telegram:

EVERYBODY TALKING OF LOLITA ON PUBLICATION DAY YESTERDAYS REVIEWS MAGNIFICENT AND NEW YORK TIMES BLAST THIS MORNING PROVIDED NECESSARY FUEL TO FLAME 300 REORDERS THIS MORNING AND BOOK STORES REPORT EXCELLENT DEMAND CONGRATULATIONS ON PUBLICATION DAY.

By the end of the day, 2,600 orders had been received.

The “blast” referred to by Minton was Orville Prescott's pan, although Elizabeth Janeway's review that had appeared the previous day in the Sunday Times was a rave. Lolita would go on to be the first book since Gone With the Wind to sell 100,000 in its first three weeks.

In a 1964 interview for Life Magazine, Jane Howard asked Nabokov, “which of your writings has pleased you most?”

I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.

Related LOA works: Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 (includes the screenplay Nabokov wrote for the 1960 Stanley Kubrick film. It differs substantially from the final film.)