The Red Thread Read online

  THE RED THREAD

  TWENTY YEARS OF NYRB CLASSICS

  A Selection

  Edited and with a foreword by

  EDWIN FRANK

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Selection copyright © 2019 by NYREV, Inc.

  Foreword copyright © 2019 by Edwin Frank

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Archie Rand, 1. To Know There Is a God. (Exodus 20:2) from The 613, 2015; courtesy of the artist

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Frank, Edwin, 1960– editor, writer of introduction.

  Title: The red thread : 20 years of NYRB classics : a selection / edited and with a foreword by Edwin Frank.

  Other titles: 20 years of NYRB classics : a selection | 20 years of New York Review Books classics : a selection | Twenty years of NYRB classics : a selection | Twenty years of New York Review Books classics : a selection

  Description: New York : NYRB Classics, 2019. | Series: New York Review Books classics |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019017461 (print) | LCCN 2019021715 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681373928 (epub) | ISBN 9781681373911 (paperback)+

  Subjects: LCSH: Literature—Collections. | New York Review Books classics. | BISAC: FICTION / Anthologies (multiple authors). | FICTION / Classics. | FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PN6013 (ebook) | LCC PN6013 .R38 2019 (print) | DDC 808.8—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017461

  ISBN 978-1-68137-392-8

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  In Memory of Margot Bettauer Dembo

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Foreword

  THE RED THREAD

  THE CAMEL by Andrey Platonov, from Soul and Other Stories.

  THE LONG CROSSING by Leonardo Sciascia, from The Wine-Dark Sea.

  NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL by Eve Babitz, from Eve’s Hollywood.

  A PASSION IN THE DESERT by Honoré de Balzac, from The Human Comedy: Selected Stories.

  THE SHORT DAYS OF WINTER by Henry David Thoreau, from The Journal, 1837–1861.

  THE WEDDING RING by Mavis Gallant, from The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories.

  AN UNUSUAL YOUNG LADY AND HER UNUSUAL BEAUX by Gyula Krúdy, from Sunflower.

  SHUI LING by Qiu Miaojin, from Notes of a Crocodile.

  CHORAL ODE FROM HIPPOLYTOS by Euripides, from Grief Lessons: Four Plays.

  CHARLOTTE by François-René de Chateaubriand, from Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1768–1800.

  ETHICS AND AESTHETICS: THE CHINESE LESSON by Simon Leys, from The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays.

  A TALK WITH GEORGE JACKSON by Jessica Mitford, from Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking.

  QUADRATURIN by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, from Memories of the Future.

  FOR AS WITH ANIMALS, SO IT IS WITH MAN; THE ONE MUST DIE, THE OTHER LIKEWISE by Alfred Döblin, from Berlin Alexanderplatz.

  HELEN by Rachel Bespaloff, from War and the Iliad.

  BILLIE HOLIDAY by Elizabeth Hardwick.

  YEREVAN by Vasily Grossman, from An Armenian Sketchbook.

  KARDAMYLI: BYZANTIUM RESTORED by Patrick Leigh Fermor, from Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese.

  YVETTE by Gillian Rose, from Love’s Work.

  IN THE GREAT CITY OF PHOENIX by Tove Jansson, from Fair Play.

  VICUÑA PORTO by Antonio di Benedetto, from Zama.

  THE FLESH-MAN FROM FAR WIDE by David R. Bunch, from Moderan.

  THE EARTHGOD AND THE FOX by Kenji Miyazawa, from Once and Forever.

  AN ESCAPED MAN by Victor Serge, from Midnight in the Century.

  I’M WAITING FOR THE FERRY by Kabir, from Songs of Kabir.

  Chronological List of NYRB Classics

  Appendix

  Biographical Notes

  Credits

  FOREWORD

  IT’S CUSTOMARY to begin a piece of this sort with a shake of the head: Twenty years, all gone by just like that, a score, time enough for someone to move from youth to middle age, from middle age to old age, time enough for the mainstays of another day to have died but also, equally, for a new generation to be coming into its own, for whom what once was a new thing may now stand as a given thing, such as it is, and practically immemorial.

  What was going on in the fall of 1999?

  In the world of books? What comes to my mind was the surprise of Philip Roth writing a historical novel, American Pastoral, a reckoning with everything sadly or violently self-deceiving and self-­destructive about America’s pretended innocence, along with a historical novel of a very different sort, Penelope Fitzgerald’s humorous and desolate The Blue Flower. McSweeney’s was a nifty novelty, while The Baffler’s dourly ironic slogan, “Commodify Your Dissent,” captured the seemingly inescapable transformation of youthful rebellion into consumerism and careerism that continues apace. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest had appeared, but Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections were yet to come. José Saramago, a Communist, had won the Nobel Prize in ’98. Now it was Günter Grass’s turn. Grass had once had the temerity to point out in a public debate that there were people in America who lacked shelter or food, and the critic James Atlas angrily demanded, “Has the Nobel become a prize with a political agenda?”

  As to book publishing and bookselling: Throughout America, independent bookstores were closing, and the superstores Barnes and Noble and the now-vanished Borders ruled, though Amazon was getting bigger all the time. In cities, local papers were still in print and respectably plump, even if many had been farmed out to chains; a few continued to feature book pages.

  In the wider world? In America and Britain, it was the heyday of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s Third Way, notwithstanding Clinton’s brush with impeachment. The dot-com bubble continued to swell. Protestors were planning to descend on Seattle to shut down the latest round of international trade talks. The 2000 election loomed. Vladimir Putin was serving as the prime minister for a drunk and doddering Boris Yeltsin. China’s economy was roughly the size of Italy’s. The euro was not yet in circulation.

  The Internet was sluggish, social media nonexistent, cell phones not yet ubiquitous and definitely not smart.

  In other words, to look back to ’99, that last year before the first century of a new millennium, is to look back at a world with some continuities with our own but also one that we know was about to change drastically in ways then largely unforeseeable, and there was perhaps a sense of foreboding in the air; you can certainly feel it in some of the books I mention above. On the whole, however, what strikes me most in looking back is how robustly complacent the moment was. Financial deregulation and international trade, championed by Reagan and embraced by Clinton, had “delivered growth,” and that economic model was considered a model for the world. The crime rate in America’s cities was rapidly dropping. With the USSR out of the way, the United States was, in the unforgettable words of Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, not just the leader of the free world but the world’s “indispensable nation.” (Too bad for the dispensable rest!) It was true that in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa, people hadn’t yet received the good news that the terrible wars of the twentieth century and centuries past were over and done with, but in any case
Y2K would pass without a hitch!

  •

  What does any of this have to do with NYRB Classics, which in the fall of 1999 began to publish a list of what might best be described as old books and new translations?

  Oddly, quite a bit, though here I have to digress into personal history for a moment. In the late ’90s, I’d taken a freelance job at an outfit called the Reader’s Catalog, an ambitious experiment in mail-order bookselling cooked up some years before by the veteran publisher Jason Epstein. The catalog was as big as the proverbial (which is all it is now) phone book, where you could easily browse among and find out a little about and, if you chose, order one or two or all of “the 40,000 best books in print.” The idea was that readers lost in America without a bookstore would find it, well, indispensable. Like Amazon, you could say, just missing the Internet.

  Working on the catalog, I soon discovered that a lot of what I at least took to be the best books weren’t in fact in print. How come?

  Well, the obvious answer was that they didn’t sell, and yet obvious as that was it wasn’t quite right. It’s not that these books didn’t sell, so much as they didn’t sell enough for the market as it had been reshaped—and here we come back to the historical moment—by years of mergers among corporate publishers and the imperative to look after share prices. Books that had done well enough over the years were cast aside in favor of new books that, such was the hope, would do much better, especially with the help of the marketing muscle of the superstores.

  Simultaneously, complementarily, the new, now-unrivaled ascendancy of the United States meant that all sorts of old bothersome problems, essentially the rest of the world, could be conveniently forgotten—or at least rigorously compartmentalized—and the already pronounced tendency to pay no attention to books from outside of the Anglosphere, happily indulged. “We Are the World” was at last proved true! If during the Cold War writers from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had been given a hearing as dissidents, well, we had won that fight, and why bother with them now? W. S. Merwin and Clarence Brown’s pioneering translation of the great poet Osip Mandelstam went out of print; Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, just as it could finally appear in Russia, likewise.

  Economism, triumphalism, provincialism, and presentism were the order of the day, when what was deemed to make a book interesting was, in the critical parlance then current, being “smart and sexy.” (This was before our own fierce and sharp and gorgeous and, God help us, crafted took the floor.)

  The literature of the world out there, where there were all sorts of extraordinary books that had never even been translated into English, and the literature hidden away in publishers’ backlists would become our resource. To those of us at what was then the Reader’s Catalog but would soon branch out into New York Review Books—supported, attentively, unstintingly, and wonderfully, by Angela and Rea Hederman, as ever since—it seemed impossible that there could not be a distinct and devoted audience for such books. There was, for example, the audience, both sophisticated and inquiring, commanded by The New York Review of Books, our relative with its offices down the hall. That said, none of us, I think, realized quite how cross-grained, withershins, backward-looking, haplessly wishful, and finally hopeless our new project must have seemed to more experienced hands.

  •

  A list of lost books, but of course countless books have been lost, for all sorts of reasons, good and bad. A gathering of ghosts, okay, but who gets an invitation and on what grounds, and in what sense would their coming together be said to constitute a list? This because one of my earliest convictions was that the idea and character of the list was just as important to the endeavor as the books on it; or rather, if the endeavor was to find readers for those books, the best way to do it was through a list. List is etymologically related to love (and lust), and, when I first began to read voraciously and omnivorously, the sort of paperback series that then existed, lists that had for the most part sprung up during World War II because of paper shortages and to serve soldiers and had proliferated in the decades after, among them Anchor Books, Meridian Books, Mentor Books, New Directions Books, Penguin Modern Classics (for many years only available as exotic imports), each with an editorial and graphic character of its own, and, in many cases, in the back a list of other books on the list, a small virtual library to pore over—these had been my nourishment, and indeed one list led to another, gradually compiled inside the back cover of my loose-leaf binder for school, of books to look out for when I got to the bookstore at last. It struck me as strange, in ’99, that these lists had, like many of the books on them, disappeared.

  So, NYRB Classics, a list, and so—what? Obviously the list had to include good books, books to delight and enlighten and surprise readers, but it also had to be surprising in its own right, making connections with a spark, and, of course, it had to be recognizable as a series. It needed a look, which, following an early design about which the less said the better, Katy Homans stepped in and beautifully provided. Equally, however, there were things it couldn’t be. Notwithstanding the moniker “classics,” it couldn’t primarily be a list of classics, ancient or modern, for the simple reason that these books weren’t lost. No one needed to be sold on The Scarlet Letter or The Yellow Wallpaper, especially not a rising generation of readers who had endured endless schooling and testing and training in symbolic analysis and whatnot, so much that one could only imagine that if they retained any yen to read at all it would be for something seriously extracurricular. Then again it shouldn’t be a list of weird cult books or books of studied smallness that get deemed lost treasures or of books important or popular in their day and quaint and curious now or of great one-offs or of books that stand out because they are absolutely like nothing else. It couldn’t be any of those things, because it had in a sense to be all of them, displaying a life of its own comparable to any real reader’s reading life, moving in and among different books and kinds of books with an explorer’s spirit.

  “This is the city and I am one of the citizens, / Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools, / The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships. . . .” Walt Whitman writes in “Song of Myself” (the list goes on). “You must know everything” is how the Soviet writer Isaac Babel put it, no less imperative for being impossible. The series had to mix everything up, and so the first fourteen books that came out in the fall of 1999 sought to do. There is Edmund Wilson’s selection of Anton Chekhov’s late, long stories, among them “Three Years,” about the exhaustion of love and the exhaustion of language and ending, with perfect and devastating poise, on the blankest of clichés: “Time flies.” The story is certainly a classic, as is Robert Walser’s mysterious Jakob von Gunten, written not long after the Chekhov, whose curious hero is a disconcerting model of rock-ribbed meekness. Charles Duff’s Handbook on Hanging is a Swiftian polemic against the death penalty, and Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, by Alexander Berkman, who tried to assassinate Henry Frick in 1892, is a record of how a fanatical young revolutionary discovers the distance between theory and life. Both books are remarkable page by page—Berkman’s should be part of the American canon—and both books also spoke to the moment, opening perspectives on America’s appallingly swollen prison population and its ongoing affair with the death penalty. That too was a reason to publish them. Analogously, we would publish C. V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War not long after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

  Also on that first list (and you will, by the way, find a chronological list of every book so far in the series toward the end of this book) were two memoirs by J. R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip and My Father and Myself, which slyly upend standard understandings of what life and love and memoirs are or should be, as well as two wonderful novels from the 1920s, A High Wind in Jamaica and Lolly Willowes, which had largely fallen off the literary map, perhaps because while being utterly modern in sensibility—both are post–World War I parables about the impossibilit
y of innocence—they were not in the least modernist. There is nothing programmatic at all about either book, nothing tendentious. Each is the author’s first book—they are works of pure, upwelling, realized invention—and both are somewhat teasingly, or deceptively, fantastical and satirical. Both, above all, are scarily alive to the inescapably lonely and scary core of life.

  That was the beginning. The challenge for me and for my colleagues over the years—Stephanie Smith, Kerry Fried, Amy Grace Lloyd, Stephen Twilley, Jeffrey Yang, Susan Barba, and, throughout, Sara Kramer, and abetted in more ways than I can say by suggestions from writers, translators, friends, family, fellow publishers, booksellers, and, above all, readers—has been to go on adding to the mix without succumbing to an empty eclecticism. I’ve described the series in the past as having various strands. You could also say it has a variety of logics. Translation is certainly central to it—from Russian, Chinese, Italian, French, German, and Hungarian, among other languages—each responsive to its particular, complicated history and complex sense of literary possibility. There are also a number of writers we publish extensively: Victor Serge, Andrey Platonov, Vasily Grossman, Eileen Chang, Henry Green, Tove Jansson, Mavis Gallant, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Eve Babitz are some of them. The power of genre literature—noir and crime and horror fiction, nature and travel writing—is another thing we’ve sought to bring out. The essay, ranging from the great spreading girth of Richard Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to the concentrated fury of Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” in War and the Iliad, is prominently featured, while I myself am taken by a certain kind of old-fashioned memoir, one that doesn’t novelize a life, or epically aggrandize it (see Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave), but seeks to account for it amusingly, anecdotally, forthcomingly, the better to draw up its moral balance. S. Josephine Baker’s Fighting for Life, about setting up the New York public health system, is like that. So is Ben Sonnenberg’s Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy, about spending years running away from a huge fortune before finding fulfillment in running a little magazine—that we will publish next year.