Matthea Harvey
Graywolf Press ($25)

by Renoir Gaither

If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, Mattea Harvey’s fifth collection of poetry, combines photographs, silhouettes, sewn images, and poetry with startling originality and depth. Harvey conjures a portmanteau of dazzling wordplay where mermaids, puppet snobs, and glass girls frolic in dreamscapes at once strangely odd and utterly familiar.

Harvey’s poems erect temporary worlds circumscribed by their own playful insouciance. We stumble into them, slightly flummoxed, as one might upon seeing a tinker toy on the bridge of a warship. In the poem “One Way,” we follow the narrator into a devilishly funny poke at the provocation of pointing a finger:

Where the first one came from,
We’ll never know, but once it landed,
it did what arrows do—it pointed.
The headlines read NEW SHAPE DISCOVERED:
ARROW INVENTS THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW.

She then winnows through delightful valences of her arrow metaphor, gently nudging us toward a cloying awareness of the deleterious effects of having things pointed out to us:

Arrows led to purchases.
Arrows led to adieus. A simple shape
had turned us all from cars into ambulances,
keening with intent.

Harvey explores various depths of disappointment and unfulfillment in a group of poems about the lives of women, thinly disguised as mermaids. Using this mythical, feminine figure of longing tinged with tragedy, she carves out images teeming with symbolic import. Each poem is paired with a silhouette of the sea-faring creature, tail fitted with a utensil such a wrench, rake, or Swiss army knife.

In “The Objectified Mermaid,” Harvey imagines her subject as a downward spiraling sex object, photographed and packaged for consumption. Much like the patrons who pay to fondle her tail, we too become voyeurs of her cynical exploitation via Harvey’s provisioning of details such as a standard seaweed bra and glycerine-sprayed scales.

The mermaid trope carries over into the long poem “Telettrofono,” with a mingling of journalese, legalese, and pedestrianism. Structured in eighty sections or “modes,” the poem follows the tragic life of Italian Antonio Meucci, a 19th-century New York immigrant now largely forgotten as the inventor of an early telephone-like device. Harvey’s attention sits squarely on Meucci’s wife, Esterre, whom she envisions as a mermaid who flings herself ashore in search of sound. Harvey’s deft use of alliteration dresses Esterre’s transformation to human with magical fanfare:

I smashed my head through the barrier between sea
and sky and there was the two-ton wave-timpani,
the puffin’s claws click-click-clicking as it skidded
to a stop on the cliff’s edge, rain spanking the sea
until it wailed. I clapped my hands and the claps
echoed back like an answer. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Between the third and fourth yes, my tail split
In two, sprouted knees and feet, toes.

In collaboration with sound artist Justin Bennett, Harvey wrote the poem as part of a soundwalk for the STILLSPOTTING NYC: STATEN ISLAND project in New York. The book provides an online link to a full audio recording.

This collection casts a range of poetic forms: prose poetry, erasure, lyric, sonnet, and visual assemblage (poesia visiva). “Stay,” a series of photographed “sculptures” comprised of colorful miniature figurines encapsulated in ice cubes, is one of the more formally arresting “poems” in the collection. Using the title (itself a photograph) and linear arrangement of the ice cubes, one might read this text-less poem as a comment on domestic turmoil and ultimate separation. The spatial arrangement of human figures and chairs suggests isolation, fracture, and loss. Who knows? This poem and others leave ample room for speculation.

And that’s what’s so special about If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?—Harvey invites us inside her voluminous imagination without polemic, although at times her poems are starkly self-conscious. Whether they allow us to pity a hapless Michelin Man tire that sees through the eyes of William Shakespeare or ponder a stereotype tying its shoestrings, we come away savoring her wily irreverence. Many poems here demand multiple readings. A first reading might thwack us over the head; a second might elicit some sigh of relief; a third will confirm how much these poems reward us with the awe—and the protection—of dreams.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Georges Perec
Translated, introduced, annotated, edited and indexed
by Philip Terry and David Bellos
David R. Godine ($16.95)

by Jeff Bursey

To some readers, the title of this newly translated book by Georges Perec will bring to mind another with the same title, and in a prefatory note Perec acknowledges that earlier work while distinguishing it from his enterprise: “The title, the form, and, to a certain extent, the spirit of these texts are inspired by I Remember by Joe Brainard.”

Published in 1979, Perec’s short work became, as David Bellos explains in the introduction, a surprisingly popular selection from its author’s inventive and amusing oeuvre. Contemporaries of Perec appreciated it—it “quickly became one of France’s most-loved short works”— for its combination of communal nostalgia and playfulness, and I Remember continues to be embraced by “later generations,” even having been reimagined by others as both a stage performance and a movie. Explanations offer themselves—collective memory, the juxtaposition of oddities, and additionally, for Perec readers, windows opened on his other works—but the greatest pleasure people take from I Remember, something like that offered in Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, resides in what it steers clear of offering: there is no plot to involve the emotions, there is no main character you’re badgered to care for, and as for a Great Theme, that is as absent as the letter e in La Disparition, Perec’s novel that refrains from using that vital letter. Meaning resides in the diverse recollections that are far-flung, at times mysterious (helpful notes in the back provide information for contemporary English readers), and set in a particular time period, but this meaning ceaselessly shifts and is, in the end, as visible as a soap bubble but as impossible to seize. The work manages the difficult feat of eluding complete sense while capturing the imagination with its free movement from one subject to another.

As with most works by Perec, there is an Oulipian restraint: “you had to remember something that other people could remember too; and the thing remembered had to have ceased to exist.” At Perec’s request his publishers (originally, and with this edition too) left blank pages at the end so that readers could fill them with their own memories. This openness to extending the text encouraged many variations that, as Bellos relates, took on lives of their own. “The most touching imitation of the formulaic design of I Remember is Harry Mathews’s homage, The Orchard” (Perec dedicated the book to Mathews, who had introduced him to Brainard’s book).

The 479 entries—the 480th is unfinished deliberately—do fit in categories: much is recalled of performances by film actors, musicians, and singers, while cycling, racing and boxing heroes are given in verbal thumbnails: “I remember that the racing driver Sommer was nicknamed ‘the wild boar of the Ardennes’” runs one entry, and in a more familiar vein, “I remember Davy Crockett fur hats.” Jokes can be labored—“I remember: ‘Say it, eh Shaun, pronounced the whale, I’ve a dull fin, but don’t lack purpose’”—or treacherous, like other parts of the work. Philip Terry, the translator, remarks that “Perec’s French is full of hidden puns and references and is never easy to translate—and if it looks easy, I should be especially wary.”

Advertisements, jingles and shows on radio and television were set down over the period of composition (1973-1977) and are often drawn from earlier days. The random recollections appear on the page as distinct units:

– 46 –

I remember the period when the fashion was for black shirts.

– 47 –

I remember crystal radios.

– 48 –

I remember I started a collection of matchboxes and one of cigarette packets.

(In this respect, I Remember brings to mind two other French books: Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, in which events are compressed into brief and laconic newspaper accounts, and Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait, a work filled with seemingly unconnected assertions.) What Perec retrieved from the past was, at the same time, general in that others had to stand a chance of sharing the memory, and particular, for though his statements might be mistaken in a detail, still, that remains true to what he recalled. Occasionally he allowed for doubt: “I remember Atlas the Giant (and the dwarf Pierhal?).

Part of the pleasure of reading I Remember is the unexpected encounter with other authors: “I remember that I belonged to a Book Club and that the first book I purchased was Planus by Cendrars” will delight readers of that Swiss-born idiosyncratic writer. When Perec recalls “an anecdote that traced the invention of mayonnaise back to the siege of Port-Mahon (under Napoleon III),” it summons up my reading, years ago, that in I’ll Say She Is!, the first successful Marx Brothers stage show, Groucho, dressed as Napoleon, on hearing “La Marseillaise” declares, “The Mayonnaise! The Army must be dressing!”

The last few years have been good for Georges Perec fans: I Remember comes on the heels of English editions of An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Wakefield Press, 2010), The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise (Verso, 2011), and La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams (Melville House, 2013), and ahead of the newly published Portrait of a Man, his first novel and one not previously published in English. Though the method behind I Remember seems easy to duplicate—today I write I remember Selectric typewriters, and I remember eating a Bar Six, usually at recess—trying to come up with the right 500 entries might be a strain. This work is a treasure chest of associations and an enjoyable light read.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Soumitra Chatterjee
Translated by Arunava Sinha
Supernova ($6.50)

by Graziano Krätli

Soumitra Chatterjee was for Satyajit Ray what Marcello Mastroianni was for Federico Fellini, Jean-Pierre Léaud for François Truffaut, or even (though in a far less problematic way) Klaus Kinski for Werner Herzog—an early and fateful discovery meant to become a source of inspiration, an alter ego and a close friend (or, in Kinski’s case, a “best fiend”). Now approaching eighty, with two cinematic careers under his belt (one largely shaped by his thirty-five year collaboration with Ray, the other following the filmmaker’s premature death in 1992) and a growing presence on stage (crowned, recently, by his first Shakespearean role in a Bengali adaptation of King Lear), Chatterjee is a cultural institution in Kolkata, like the used bookstores or the Coffee House on College Street. The latter venue, conveniently located opposite Presidency College and down the street from Calcutta University (Chatterjee’s alma mater), has long been a favorite meeting place for students and intellectuals, and represents one of Kolkata’s main cultural hubs. Chatterjee recalls how, in the mid-1950s it was for him and his friends like a second home, where adda sessions, or intellectual debates, lasted for hours and focused largely and most passionately on (Bengali) literature and theatre. Cinema, on the other hand, was not taken “all that seriously” yet, and Chatterjee himself “harboured a certain unwillingness to act in films” as a result of his “warped ideas” about cinema, and Bengali cinema in particular. What changed everything—including Chatterjee’s prospects—was the filming of Pather Panchali, one of the most popular and beloved novels in Bengali literature, by a commercial artist who was better known, at the time, as the son of a famous writer and illustrator.

The circumstances of his first meeting with the man who made this change possible are representative of the small, intimate world of Bengali cinema (and culture) at the time. A friend met in the street introduced him to a man who turned out to be Ray’s assistant director and was looking for someone to interpret the lead role in Pather Panchali’s sequel, Aparajito. A few minutes later the three are on a bus bound for the Lake Avenue residence of the Master himself, where the young aspiring actor finds in the barely older but already famous director a kindred spirit. Even though he proved too tall for the role of young Apu (he would have to wait a couple more years before Ray chose him for the title role in the last film of his famous Trilogy), the encounter marked the beginning of a lifelong association and one of the longest and most fruitful collaborations in the history of cinema, resulting in fifteen films in thirty-five years and including such classics as The World of Apu (1959), Charulata (1964), Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), and Distant Thunder (1973), as well as a 1987 documentary on Ray’s father.

Coming soon after two other intimate portraits of the man known to family and friends as Manik da—those of Ray’s still photographer Nemai Ghosh (Manik Da: Memories of Satyajit Ray, 2011) and wife Bijoya (Manik and I: My Life with Satyajit Ray, 2012)—The Master and I strives to subdue the hagiographic impulse and draw a more objective and nuanced portrait of a rich and multidimensional relationship. Despite its reverential and laudatory tones, awkward similes (“Like a good captain, he led from the front,”) and occasional repetitiveness (Ray’s “famous” or “trademark baritone” is mentioned no less than five times), the book achieves its goal largely thanks to the ample selection of behind-the-scenes anecdotes, most of them intended to illustrate the symbiotic character of the master-disciple relationship between the two. Thus we learn that, during the making of Charulata (“The Lonely Wife,” 1964), Ray’s adaptation of a novella by Rabindranath Tagore, Chatterjee had to change his handwriting “in order to write the way people did in the pre-Tagore era.” The fact that this change became permanent (something that Chatterjee refers to as an “extremely important incident in my life”) is almost paralleled, a few pages later, by Ray’s decision to alter the ending of the film as a result of Chatterjee’s criticism. An even more interesting example of their symbiotic relationship and its consequences is provided by Chatterjee’s reaction to Ray’s illustrations of his most popular character, private detective Feluda, in which he finds a resemblance to the filmmaker. To which Ray replies: “‘Really? Several people have told me that I’ve drawn him with you in mind.’”

Symbiosis aside, Chatterjee’s portrait ultimately reveals a more complex, multifaceted and contradictory personality than its devotional agenda is willing to present or acknowledge. On the one hand, it makes a point of showing Ray’s responsiveness to suggestions and criticism, explaining how he would read his screenplays to his close collaborators and ask for their reactions, and generally “listened to people’s opinions with genuine interest.” On the other it gives glimpses of a self-absorbed, maniacally dedicated, detail-oriented artist with a tendency to micromanage and work around the clock. Most revealing, in this respect, are Chatterjee’s remarks on the filming of Baksa Badal (“The Swapped Suitcases”), a comedy for which Ray wrote the screenplay based on a story by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (the author of Pather Panchali and Aparajito):

There’s another point that I might as well make directly. The facts that Manik da’s assistant Netai [Nityananda Dutta] was directing the film and had requested him earnestly to be present were not the only reasons for his visits. The truth is that Manik da never felt confident of the outcome when someone else made a film from his screenplay. He used to be nagged by anxiety, wondering whether the execution would be up to the mark.

Consistent with the overall tone of the book, Ray’s passing is dealt with in a dignified and understated way, without details about the event itself or references to the “inexpressible sadness” in which, according to Amitav Ghosh, Calcutta was sunk upon hearing the tragic news. Instead, once Ray is gone, Chatterjee respectfully abstains from any further references to cinema, ending his memoir with a diminuendo devoted to music, and Western music in particular, as an ultimate example of his Master’s expansive artistic personality and influence.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Susan Sherman
Wings Press ($16)

by Jim Feast

While Susan Sherman’s book of stories Nirvana on Ninth Street is certainly a refreshing and readable volume, a reader might object to it on grounds of truth in advertising. The back cover copy describes the book as a kind of tell-all about Sherman’s neighborhood. Demetria Martínez blurbs it as a text that has “evoked the untamed spirit of the Lower East Side and of the dreamers who live there.” This would make Nirvana on Ninth Street a sort of companion piece to Ed Sanders’s Tales of Beatnik Glory, which traces the transformation of the area from Beatnik stomping grounds to hippie enclave. Truth is, the book is closer in tone to some of Delmore Schwartz’s short stories, such as his piece about a father who retires from a garment factory to become a Lower East Side painter. As with Schwartz, Sherman uses the neighborhood as a setting, not for realistic sketches, but for ingenious parables.

In one piece, for instance, she describes the love affair of Jerald and Geraldine. Jerald “collected people’s faults,” keeping a notebook of his neighbors’ foibles and foolishnesses. He meets Geraldine and she falls for him because she is entranced with the idea of someone enumerating her many weaknesses in a secret diary. Yet blinded by love, Jerald can never bring himself to fill in a single entry on Geraldine. When she eventually learns this, their partnership is over. The story delicately turns on the false expectations people have going into a love affair, which end up determining the whole course of its future.

The framework of the book is that an older character, Rachel, who has lived for decades in the same building on Ninth Street, is reminiscing about the events that have taken place in and around her enchanted tenement. She herself has a bewitched mirror, which does not throw back an exact likeness. When Rachel looks in, “It was as if she were looking simultaneously at a complete stranger and at someone more familiar to her than any image of herself she had ever seen.” Rachel’s memories make for striking stories, proving Sherman is a master at writing adult fairy tales, allegories done in a lapidary style about crushed hearts and roses.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

John Carr Walker
SunnyOutside ($13)

by Beth Taylor

In this first collection of short stories, John Carr Walker studies the psyches and stumbles of men in the rural west as they try hard to negotiate the mysteries of others and themselves. Whether it’s in a vineyard, the woods, or a hand-built house, his men respond crudely, trying to “repair” the damage in their relationships.

Animals pervade these stories—as victims, tools, and metaphors. In “Turning Over,” a husband’s care for a rabbit correlates with a turning point in his struggling marriage. “Grandeur,” the most literary story, parodies Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a man tracks birds dying from West Nile virus, investing himself so deeply into his subjects that he becomes one. In “Ain’t It Pretty,” an indecisive man invites his brother to his home in the woods, ostensibly to kill the annoying dog left by their recently deceased mother. But the visit resurrects the competition of their childhood, the legacy of their father’s harsh discipline, and the violence that has led the man’s wife to leave with their child. “Pups” continues the study as a wife neglects her husband’s wolf cubs in vague retaliation for whatever it is he can’t offer her.

Public history collides with private life in some of the stories, such as “A Sword from My Country,” in which an adopted Vietnamese teenager evokes a veteran’s memory of his “Orchid” during the war and the teen’s mother worries about what men do to pretty girls. Similarly, “Candelario” brings alive the complex nuances of racism and classism as the sons of a vineyard owner exploit their authority over experienced laborers, the callowness of youth leading to an education in guilt.

Father-son dynamics are, in fact, integral to many of these stories. In “The Atlas Show,” a father and son live a life of delusion, believing that each has been, or will be, an athlete of note, conning their ways toward impractical fantasies that at least bind them together in mutual appreciation. The strongest story is “The Rules,” in which a father and son clear a tree from a dirt road in a snow storm, risking their lives, and note that they are the only ones still following the rules of a back-to-the land dream, even though it had been the wife’s fantasy and she left long ago, returning to civilization.

Walker has a superb ear for dialogue, making each of these stories seem like a scene overheard—real people trying to translate others’ intensions, needs, and frustrations. It isn’t pretty, but Walker’s vision illustrates how hard it is to fix the messes of anyone’s life.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Lydia Davis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26)

by Brooke Horvath

With the 122 stories comprising Can’t and Won’t averaging two-and-a-half pages each, Lydia Davis can make István Örkény, the Hungarian writer famous for his “one-minute stories,” seem downright verbose. Readers familiar with Davis’s previous work will notice few changes here of style or sensibility, though there are more exceedingly short stories than previously (several under two dozen words each, many less than a page long). New this time are stories recounting dreams and “dreamlike waking experiences” (both hers and those of family and friends) and stories reworking material taken from the letters of Gustave Flaubert (Davis having published a few years ago a new translation of Madame Bovary).

If Can’t and Won’t is a refinement of the author’s less-is-more aesthetic, the collection also contains a number of longer efforts. The longest, at twenty-nine pages, is a “letter” thanking a foundation for a research grant the letter-writer hoped would get her out of another miserable year of teaching. Another epic effort of sixteen pages describes the day-to-day activities of three cows in a nearby field, while “Local Obits” catalogs in nine pages what made sixty-eight recently deceased persons special: “Helen loved long walks, gardening, and her grandchildren. Richard founded his own business.” Among the shortest stories are “Contingency (vs. Necessity),” sixteen words about a dog that could belong to the author but does not, and “Ph.D.,” which reads in full: “All these years I thought I had a Ph.D. But I do not have a Ph.D.”

Between these extremes are whimsical noodlings, found texts, remarks overheard while traveling that give the lie to Gertrude Stein’s contention that “remarks are not literature,” possibly true anecdotes gleaned from reading, letters (to a “Frozen Peas Manufacturer,” the Harvard Book Store, the “President of the American Biographical Institute, Inc.”), and what Davis described in a 2008 interview with The Believer as “meditation, logic game, extended wordplay, diatribe.” In one, a woman receives a box of chocolates and dithers over how and with whom to eat them; in another, a woman named Davis does and then does not wish to sell a rug to a man named Davis who both does and does not want to buy it. In a third, Hungarian playwright Ödön von Horváth finds a dead hiker in the Bavarian Alps in whose knapsack is a postcard, “ready to send, that read, “Having a wonderful time.” The two-sentence “Her Geography: Illinois” notices a woman who “knows she is in Chicago” but “does not yet realize that she is in Illinois,” while “I’m Pretty Comfortable, But I Could Be a Little More Comfortable” offers us seven pages of complaints (“My thumb hurts. A man is coughing during the concert”).

As Davis told Dana Goodyear in a recent New Yorker profile, her stories offer us “isolated events in a context of mystery,” constructs that are “a little different from reality.” They read, often, like Zen koans written by a monk who grew up on Samuel Beckett and Russell Edson (two of her acknowledged influences), their meaning, Davis avers, something she herself has never liked to think about. Or say these stories are the verbal equivalent of a series of paintings by Josef Albers or Mark Rothko, before whose work one thinks what, exactly? What, after all, are we to think about a story in which the five-sentence “plot” turns on a maid’s unwillingness to remove a vacuum cleaner from the hall even though a priest (possibly the Rector of Patagonia) is coming for a visit? Or a story in which, during a “long phone conversation” with her mother, a woman shuffles the letters of the word “cotton” into various permutations (“nottoc,” “coontt”)?

As for me, I am thinking about the boy who arrived at my door earlier today with a fruit tart that, he claimed, contained an excellent, ready-to-submit review of Can’t and Won’t. I looked, but found no review. “Too bad,” said the boy. “It was a peach.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

An Aladdin’s Cave of Delights

by Lydia Wilson

A Canon?

The New York Review of Books has an authority which gives a children’s book published by its imprint the instant stamp of a classic; this effect is emphasized by their red cloth spines which line up beautifully on a shelf to unite the variety of writing they present—an Everyman for children, as it were. The enterprise began in noticing that great books were continuously dropping off publishers’ catalogues to make room for the new, and many were also out of copyright and so could easily be reprinted and presented to a new generation. And so this is no library in the sense of a canon—there can be no in-print classic such as Alice in Wonderland or Winnie the Pooh. But this makes for a far more exciting Aladdin’s cave of delights, open-ended, ever-expanding, the editors seeking out forgotten gems or less famous works by popular writers with wholly unexpected treats spanning over a century and from all over the globe.

But it is not just the forgotten or minor works—quite the contrary. Jean Merrill’s The Pushcart War was on the School Library Journal’s list of “One Hundred Books That Shaped the Twentieth Century,” and is also endorsed here by Tony Kushner, who tells of the profound effect it had on him as a child. It appears in a 50th anniversary edition, though since it is set in 2026 it remains just as relevant to today; it should be mandatory reading for all the participants in the Occupy movement, with its tale of the powerless multitude’s non-violent resistance up against the biggest of opponents, literally. The most important book to Neil Gaiman, we learn in his beautiful introduction, is The 13 Clocks by James Thurber (perhaps better known for his fiction and cartoons at The New Yorker; also in the series is his The Wonderful O). J. K. Rowling tells of her admiration for E. Nesbit, an author still very much known about from TV adaptations (and more recently from Jacqueline Wilson’s best-selling Four Children and It), which makes it all the more surprising that House of Arden makes a red-spined appearance. TV chef Sara Moulton writes that Mud Pies and Other Recipes persuaded her at age five that cooking must be fun; indeed, they all look like proper recipes, with the following delightful instruction at the beginning: “The time it takes to cook a casserole depends upon how long your dolls are able to sit at table without falling over. And if a recipe calls for a cupful of something, you can use a measuring cup or a teacup or a buttercup . . . What does matter is that you select the best ingredients available, set a fine table, and serve with style.” Philip Pullman introduces the Australian classic The Magic Pudding with the highest praise: “This is the funniest children’s book ever written. I’ve been laughing at it for fifty years, and when I read it again this morning, I laughed just as much as I ever did.” I could go on and on: children’s books are a source of passion for most writers, and New York Review Books has tapped this rich resource.

A Shared Culture

Another source one might plunder for ideas is the children in the books themselves. The sure-minded Henrietta in Henrietta’s House (written by Elizabeth Goudge in 1942—a worthy candidate for a future addition), has a specific idea of a library for children, listing twenty books which were obviously classics, in 1942 at least:

Henrietta took books from the shelves with a certainty that quite surprised the Old Gentleman. The Water Babies and Alice in Wonderland, Undine and The Pilgrim's Progress, Jackanapes and Little Women, The Fairchild Family and A Flat Iron for a Farthing, The Back of the North Wind and The Princess and Curdie followed each other into the basket with startling rapidity, followed by Uncle Remus, Hans Andersen, The Swiss Family Robinson, Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book, his Red One and his Green One, Mary's Meadow, Lob-lie-by-the-Fire, The Wind in the Willows and The Cocky-Olly Bird.
“Isn't that enough?” gasped the Old Gentleman.
“Yes, I think that's all,” said Henrietta, counting them.
“You seem to know exactly what is required,” said the Old Gentleman with much respect.
“Yes,” said Henrietta. “My father and I have often talked it over. We decided that if a person of my age had a library of twenty books those are just the twenty the person would want.”

Henrietta is not the only fictional child who might give indications of lost classics: E. Nesbit’s characters show great familiarity with Kipling and the Arabian Nights (and knowledge of her own 1902 classic Five Children and It is demanded for Jacqueline Wilson’s aforementioned contemporary novel). Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons< pepper their conversation with literary quotations; like Henrietta they are familiar with The Wind in the Willows, and also regularly refer to texts from Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island to Keats and The Song of Hiawatha, taking in Greek and Norse mythology and other sea-faring tales. Roald Dahl’s Matilda shows an attachment to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (though soon moving onto Dickens, child genius that she is).

These shared cultural landscapes shown by the children in past books may be partially lost to later readers, but only partially, and the link to Alice or Mowgli may well help to transcend the time lapse between publication and later readings. That spark of recognition—I’ve read that too!—that shared experience between character and reader, can overcome alienation of language, or customs, or social mores, bridging gaps and bringing characters to life. The revival of so many more in this series not only means more quality books are available for children, but also expands their range of inter-literary, historical, and cultural references. For better or worse, we lack a universal curriculum and consequent shared knowledge. In Western societies, familiarity with the Bible, the classics, and certain poets, philosophers, theologians, and historians was assumed for many centuries. An educated person could pick up on allusions to these central texts—an ability which has been mostly lost, a situation reflected in the numerous glosses now necessary for students to read the so-called “classics.” And so the study of older works is made into a chore, without the immediacy of recognition. (Of course what is gained from the loss of this universal curriculum is a broadening of education and cultural horizons; the canon was small and largely restricted to white, male, Westerners.)

Shared references are now formed of more contemporary culture—movies, music, bestsellers, and children’s books. Partly this is because parents pass on what they loved—often the very same copies as they read—and so the chain remains unbroken. Partly some remain enduringly popular for teaching purposes. And partly this is due to the very same trend of the ubiquity of contemporary cultural production: multimedia interpretations of classics. The Jungle Book has spread far and wide courtesy of Disney, Lord of the Rings by the Hollywood machine and Peter Jackson, the Narnia books by the BBC and others, Peter Rabbit by app designers—all of these new platforms have provided access to new generations of children, often leading them and their parents back to the original. And so Jon Stewart can name-check Beetlejuice, the Muppets, Tinkerbell, and Han Solo, knowing these will be recognized, and thus knowing the audience will understand his message: the childish nature of those he is satirizing.

So why have some previously extremely popular “classics,” like a few on Henrietta’s list, completely disappeared? What are the fashions which have expanded certain books’ appeal but left others languishing? There is no answer to this question but the whims of publishers and markets, which is precisely why the NYRB Children’s Collection has found a niche, and precisely why there are constant suggestions, endorsements, and introductions for the series.

On Difficulty

Lydia Davis has gone even further, and “translated” an old love of hers, Bob, Son of Battle, from English to English—that is, from a dialect of north England (with some Scottish) to a modern English stamped with her trademark clarity, sometimes even adding explanatory phrases. I suppose the original, by Alfred Ollivant, is deemed too difficult for children now, but I do wonder if this was checked. Ordering an original online was easy, and reading it was a joy. Its language is rich and evocative throughout, and so Davis’s re-wording cannot and does not retain what is special about the book; in fact, the translation has made something extraordinary into something rather ordinary, if more “accessible.” The first paragraph alerts a comparative reader, where “Relics of the time of raids, it looked” becomes “left from the time of the Scottish raids”; “a goodly array of dark-thatched ricks” becomes “a crowd of dark-thatched haystacks.” Later: “And the parson, striding away down the hill, was uneasily conscious that with him was not the victory,” becomes “. . . was uneasily aware that he had not won this battle.” The richness and the musicality have been lost for the sake of clarity, a feature which shows even more in speech; the characters are all rather flattened in the treatment (a common problem in translation). In speech, “ye” and “aye” have been kept all through for all characters, and this gesture to the dialect, while at the same time stripping it bare, rings false, as many gestures to dialect can. For why do they say “ye” and yet not “ain’t” (a word also familiar to a modern child)? Reading the original is undoubtedly a challenge, but children are obviously used to encountering words and ideas they do not know, for that is the nature of learning to talk and read.

Diana Wynne Jones, veteran author for a range of ages (another suggestion for the series, as a few of her wonderful books have dropped out of print), had no truck with the assumptions of her readers’ capabilities. An adult once approached her at a signing event, and told her that the latest book was too “difficult.” Wynne-Jones turned to the child in tow. “And what did you think?” she enquired. “Brilliant,” he replied. She didn’t feel any further response was necessary. Her explanation, indeed a theme that runs throughout her essays, is that children are not stupid, and moreover they are generally more careful readers, bringing none of the assumptions that might lead adults to miss subtleties.

Language Play

Fortunately, other books in the series delight in introducing new language and even making it up. Alastair Reid’s Ounce Dice Trice exhorts every child “to love words for their own sake” and to create words when the situation demands. “Words have a sound and shape, in addition to their meanings,” he says in the introduction. “Sometimes the sound is the meaning. . . . All the words here are meant to be said aloud, over and over, for your own delight.”

But there are also books for older children which simply do not make as much fuss over difficulty, which Diana Wynne Jones would applaud. Thurber’s The 13 Clocks had me running to a dictionary, even after I’d manage to unscrabble the word in a limerick. The book is a quite brilliant (sub)version of a fairy tale: a Prince disguised as a minstrel tries to win the hand—the only warm hand in the castle—of the Princess, niece of the ever-cold evil Duke, in the face of impossible quests and challenges, against a backdrop of a curse with the inevitable loophole (slyly nodded to: “‘In spells of this sort,’ Hark said, chewing, ‘one always finds a chink or loophole, by means of which the right and perfect prince can win her hand in spite of any task you set him.’”). There is all the logic of Alice in Wonderland: “‘Now let me see,’ the Golux said. ‘If you can touch the clocks and never start them, then you can start the clocks and never touch them. That’s logic, as I know and use it.’” The wordplay is in the best of the nonsense tradition, as seen in the aforementioned limerick, designed to make a woman laugh until she cried:

There once was a coddle so molly
He talked in a glot that was poly,
His gaws were so gew
That his laps became dew,
And he ate only pops that were lolly

Here are scrambled words and phrases from mollycoddle to polyglot—the one I didn’t know was “dewlaps” (a fold of loose skin hanging from the neck or throat of an animal, in case you didn’t either). You will have to read it to find out whether she did indeed laugh-unto-tears, and in so doing giving the prince one solution to his impossible tasks.

Fantasy routinely invents whole vocabularies when magic or other species require (in the most extreme cases whole languages are devised, such as for The Lord of the Rings, though not as far as I can recall in any of the books in this series—yet). The lizards in Lizard Music by Daniel Pinkwater have their own language, but in this case it’s largely untranslatable; luckily some speak English. In John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk and the follow-up The Box of Delights the sinister word “scrobble” is never defined, which adds to the sense of threat and fear and also mystery: what have the black-hearted villains done to brave Maria or the kind Bishop when they were “scrobbled?” And how do they get un-scrobbled? (This has now entered the dictionary, or at least the wiktionary and urban dictionary, with the primary etymology given: John Masefield, 1927. Neil Gaiman uses it in Neverwhere, with full acknowledgement.)

For Adults, for Children

And of course this playfulness in language isn’t restricted to children’s literature. Russell Hoban is an author who makes an appearance in both the NYRB Children’s and Classics series. The picture book The Sorely Trying Day is as lovely as the still-popular Frances books created by Russell and his wife Lillian. A father returns to the mayhem of four arguing children and a cat and a dog, with excuses being passed from one to another until the cat blames a mouse for distracting him, whereupon the mouse does the unexpected—he takes the blame, and apologizes. The cat is so taken aback he leaves the mouse to apologize to the dog, and so it goes on, until the children are all contrite and the parents appeased (with one more twist I won’t reveal).

Hoban’s contribution to the adult series, Turtle Diary, is my biggest literary find of the year, bar none. A haunting tale of two lonely adults, written from both perspectives in alternating chapters just a page or two long, Turtle Diary seems to be firmly in another tradition than A Sorely Trying Day, but close reading yields overlaps beyond the presence of animals; the internal thoughts of both protagonists in Turtle Diary have the whimsy of Hoban’s children’s books in both imagery and language play, such as when William G is eavesdropping on two oyster catchers at the zoo:

‘Kleep it and have klept with it for God’s sake,’ said one.
‘I don’t have to kleep it just because you klawp I should,’ said the other.
‘Then don’t kleep it,’ said the first. ‘It’s no klank off my klonk.”
‘Oh aye,’ said the second one. ‘You klawp that now but that’s not what you klawped a little klink ago.’
‘I klick very klenk what I klawped a little klink ago,’ said the first one. ‘I klawped either kleep it or don’t kleep it but stop klawping about it. That’s what I klawped.’
‘It’s all very klenk for you to klawp “Kleep it,”’ said the second one. ‘You’re not the one that has to kleggy back the kwonk.’

Frances the badger often resorts to making up words to express herself through her songs, and so Hoban had practice in expanding his range in this way—and it works, for all ages, as the above passage shows so well.

There is another double appearance in both the Children’s and Classics series—this one not only by the same author but the very same book. Pinocchio first appeared in the NYRB series packaged for adults in a slim, elegant, brown edition, introduced by Umberto Eco and with an afterword by Rebecca West, then reappeared three years later in a gloriously large, colorful, glossy version for children, with an introduction cut down from the adult’s version and without the afterword. (Foreign language books are another source for the series as they bypass a problem of rights; if a new translation is commissioned, the rights belong to the translation rather than the original. Thus the series is able to include Pinocchio, in a new translation by Geoffrey Brock, despite the many others available.) Each and every word is identical, but the materiality and aesthetics of the two versions couldn’t be more different. The illustrations—big, flat, bright, and crude—serve either to soften or increase the sense of danger at different points, or to highlight the humor or love in a situation, or to show the sinister side of characters which Pinocchio himself never spots in time. The Classics version has no illustrations, but the words alone serve in building the same anxiety, and the format is easier to handle; the big version is designed for poring over on a bed or floor, as children are wont to do.

Another curious bridge between the two series comes with mythologies. In the Children’s series appear the classic D’Aulaires retellings of the Norse myths (and also the spin-off Book of Trolls, which takes the Norse folklore and runs with it). In the Classics series, labeled as being for young adults, are Rex Warner’s versions of the Greek myths and legends. Another interesting boundary category: mythology is indeed for everyone.

The slippage between writing for adults or children is also evident in books which have migrated from a Children’s classification when they were published to the adult’s Classics series. The very welcome addition Red Shift, by Alan Garner, centers on an adolescent relationship and as such no longer counts as for children. The same migration has happened to Walkabout, the story of a journey of three children, two white survivors of a plane crash in the Australian outback and one Aboriginal who saves them from the harsh environment they find themselves in. It is a difficult theme, with death a major feature and uncertainty and threat and fear pervasive, and also in the difficulties of shifting friendships and trust. But an adult book? Perhaps a red spine would not do its serious tone justice (it looks very good in its Classics design), and this is where perhaps the beauty of both series fails young readers: any content which shades into adult concerns, whether sex, death or violence, is excluded from their library.

Making these distinctions between child and adult reading is to ignore the immense popularity among adults of new writing for children, epitomized by the Harry Potter phenomenon, a children’s book devoured by adults the world over. This phenomenon was repeated with the Hunger Games books, the Twilight series, and many more—all boosting the already biggest sector of the publishing market, that of Young Adult, or YA. Bloomsbury went as far as to publish an “adult” version of the Harry Potter books (that “could be read on the subway”) and captured the young and old YA audience – thus contributing to, even helping to shape, a new shared pool of cultural references, reinforced by movies, merchandise, games, apps, and other spin-offs.

The blurbs on the covers are a mixture of old praise and new, from their first appearance and their recent revivals, which tells of enduring appreciation. But a deeper look shows the changing place of writing for children; for example, there are pull quotes from “serious” journals such as the Times Literary Supplement, although this august “adult” journal now does not review children’s books at all. Children were taken more seriously by authors, publishers, and reviewers than they are now, it would seem, with New York Review Books offering a notable exception: with this series they are showing trust and faith in children and their capabilities. The books, in all their difficulty, strangeness, humor, language, and unfamiliarity, are presented in beautiful editions. Children can be the best readers, and here they are given the best to read.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2014-2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

by James Naiden

She lived for just over sixty-three years (1912-1975), her last three decades as an active writer who published fifteen books in her lifetime, one posthumously. Born Dorothy Betty Coles on July 3, 1912 in the provincial city of Reading, she did not attend college or university. Her poor “Maths” skills in what we would call high school meant she was denied a certificate of graduation. So it was unlikely she would have acquired formal education beyond that. Instead, after working as a tutor, governess, and librarian, she met a young businessman when she was twenty-one at a theatrical production in which they were both cast. When they married in 1936, she took his surname.¹

Taylor was respected as a writer during her lifetime but has been largely forgotten in the tumult of political and cultural upheavals within the generations since 1975. Her coincidental namesake, the London-born American film actress who was twenty years younger, appears to have had no effect on the writer herself, who remarked once—according to her husband—that when the actress got a good review, her own work was frequently praised as well. There was nothing to this claim, of course, meant in whimsical humor, but at least she was not deterred by an irrelevant consideration.

Virginia Woolf’s books were of singular influence on Taylor, if anyone’s were, but she did not engage in the normal effluvia of the literary life. She did not write book reviews or literary essays, nor did she attend literary gatherings. She and her spouse had two small children when she began what would be her first published novel, At Mrs. Lippincote’s, eventually appearing in the U. K. in September 1945. The book was brought out in the United States and Canada the following year, when the stresses of wartime shortages had abated. Her husband John was a successful, middlebrow owner of a sweets factory. He seems to have encouraged his spouse in her driven activity. Ray Russell, with whom Elizabeth had an early relationship, had been captured by the Germans during the Second World War. Her husband, while sympathetic to Russell’s earlier misfortunes, insisted that her affair with him “must end”—and so it did, although she did continue writing to him. ²

Her epistolary friendship with fellow novelist Robert Liddell (also a prominent literary critic until his death in 1992) shows that Taylor was not indifferent to the reactions of other writers to her work, including luminaries as Elizabeth Bowen and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Liddell would remain, as would others, a lifelong friend and supporter of Taylor’s work. Perhaps that he lived abroad in either Egypt or Greece (principally Athens) augmented Taylor’s early affinity for Greece and the Greek language, and fixed Liddell as a conduit to a place she had visited but had never stayed for long.³ But what shaped this unlikely candidate for literary exception?

After her formal schooling ended in 1930, she was employed in a succession of jobs—governess, tutor, and librarian, as well as a non-paying stint in amateur theatrical productions, as mentioned earlier. She said later she knew she would be a writer from the time of her adolescence, but because she was denied a university education, she knew it would not be easy. Reading books, with regular visits to the public library, was the one route she had to learn, aside from the drudge of sending work out only to have it rejected, sometimes summarily. Nicola Beauman documents Taylor’s methods and frustrations, laid out revealingly in her correspondence with Ray Russell before, during, and after his imprisonment in Austria. Earlier, by the time war had arrived—September 1, 1939—Taylor was busy with her family and trying desperately to finish a publishable novel. After her marriage, money worries were non-existent, not an inconsiderable factor in her creative output.

Taylor’s involvement in the Communist Party was not frivolous, and it seemed not to inject stress in her marriage. From the evidence known, John Taylor regarded his wife’s political views as possibly eccentric but harmless. She was a lifelong atheist, as well, and viewed extreme right-wing movements such as that led by Oswald Mosley in the 1930s in near-imitation of Hitler in Germany as an indication that action, not prayers, were the only way to defeat bilious and undesirable social/political antipathies. As for the Communist Party, it was the indigenous British version, hardly subversive, more concerned with conditions of the working class than Leninist agitation and revolt. Taylor’s eventual boredom with the local chapter in the first town she and her family lived is depicted convincingly in Taylor’s first book, At Mrs. Lippincote’s, which mirrored many aspects of the Taylors’ lives, including her faithless husband, although apparently it was not a source of declared tension. “The novel is humorous rather than comic,” Liddell wrote appreciatively, “and melancholy rather than sad, and yet entirely unsentimental”—as indeed a trademark of Taylor’s fiction would be for the rest of her career.⁴ Neither comedic impulse nor political tendentiousness interested her within her craft.

When it was suggested she might apply for formal membership in the Party, she retreated into measured diplomacy, polite but candid:

It is more or less an accident that I stumbled upon you all. There’s nothing in my experience to take such a step. I feel it would be an affectation, not altogether trustworthy. I don’t think you can understand. You’ve worked in factories all your life. I’ve never been inside one. I’ve been treated with consideration by everybody, never victimized . . . I’m lonely, like all my kind. The thing I notice about you all is that you’re never lonely. You get tired, you argue, quarrel even, but you all love one another and depend on one another and give one another courage. ⁵

Taylor was more fortunate than her character Eleanor, in that Taylor’s family assuaged some feelings of loneliness, as did her correspondence with Ray Russell and her subsequent friendship with Maud Eaton, a younger woman and native of New Zealand, who was passionately interested in literature.⁶ Taylor’s correspondence with Russell was still active but less intense after 1948, and she needed a female friendship outside of her domestic life, her life of writing and keeping house. Maud Eaton is a curious case, for she is portrayed in some ways as Camilla in A Wreath of Roses (1949), Taylor’s third novel. There are two suicides in the book, one at the beginning and another at the end. Coincidentally, after being caught by an ear infection—tinnitus—and having no cure for it, Maud Eaton took an overdose of sleeping pills. Taylor felt much chagrin, possibly even guilt, upon learning this.

By 1948, Taylor left the Communist Party. Russell was chagrined, but was apparently able to compartmentalize his disappointments once married. He and Taylor were in communication regularly until nearly the end of the 1940s, when she also started writing to Robert Liddell, by then living in Cairo and not long thereafter to depart for Athens. Taylor went on to support the Labour Party with various degrees of enthusiasm for the rest of her life. Taylor had no desire to give up the comfortable lifestyle her marriage afforded. Her children were growing up. Her son was at boarding school. She began to have more time and energy for her writing. Her novels had come out with regular frequency since 1945 and she began to publish short stories in American magazines, in particular The New Yorker and McCall’s. Her principal editors at the former were Katharine White and then William Maxwell, both supported in their judgments by editor-in-chief William Shawn, who also admired Taylor’s work.

Her second novel was Palladian, published in 1946. Memories of her pre-marriage experience as a governess/tutor were drawn upon dexterously in the composition of this book. The central character is Cassandra, who was eighteen and newly orphaned just as she finished her formal education. Again, Taylor’s penchant for the Greek language comes into play as Cassandra’s employer, the mysterious but attractive Marion Vanbrugh insists that Cassandra tutor his daughter, Sophy, in the language, perhaps so that she can read Pliny and Sappho and other austere immortals in the original. Cassandra agrees to this. With her knowledge of French and basic skills in arithmetic, she tutors and tries to guide Sophy into a constructive view of the world, which seems to backfire as the girl has developed singular eccentricities.

Among other characters, we see in this novel many men addicted to drink or at least not averse to it, who have escaped living with women but still like them for sex and companionship. Might Ray Russell have been a prototype for some of these sodden characters? He was an artist, too, but had no known dependency on booze. He did marry, as we have seen, relatively late at age thirty-nine, but his affection for Elizabeth, his early lover, never abated. In the decades-spanning missives between Taylor and Russell used in Beauman’s account, we see the novelist’s frustrations, her occasional pessimism, and her ebullience when a novel was finished as well as despair when a negative review might pop up. She also wrote of her approbation about her own abilities as a novelist when a positive review appeared or a letter of encouragement, even praise, from a fellow writer—such as Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Robert Liddell, or Graham Greene. The novel ends, after Sophy’s accidental death, when Marion proposes to Cassandra and she accepts him. Indeed, although it is unspoken at first, the reader is aware though Cassandra’s interior monologue that she believes falling in love with Marion “will do”—lest she become a spinster, a horrid thought. Although the author’s life trajectory was very different than Cassandra’s, as far as one can tell by novel’s end, it is a story spun out of real-life experience.

At one point, Marion, who is of independent means and owns the house, partially adorned with a Palladian façade (another echo of Taylor’s love for Grecian influences), gives Cassandra a Greek lesson and then takes her down to the cellar where his wine stock is kept. She opts for sherry when he asks, possibly because on Sundays, her parents had served roast beef, and sherry went with the meal:

There was nothing of roast beef in this sherry, Cassandra thought. It had no Sunday morning associations for her. It was essentially a drink for the violet hour, the cool summer airs, the earth reeling over into darkness and flowers stiffening their petals against the night; it was quiet in the mouth, like olives.

After only small sips, Cassandra’s perceptions are blurry. Marion perceives that she is slightly inebriated while Tom, encountering her in the upstairs hallway shortly afterward, insists she is “drunk.” Would a glass of sherry, harmless in itself, have this effect on one who seldom drank alcohol?

Her head was like a globe of shifting flakes; when she moved, it became full of confusion like the snowstorm in a glass paperweight.⁷

In 1947, A View of the Harbor appeared and received generally favorable reviews. It’s worth noting that Newby, a small town by the seaside in southeastern England, a fishing harbor, has its variable residents, including Beth Cazabon, a novelist, and Robert, her physician husband. There is a small myriad of others, such as the elderly and infirm Mrs. Bracey, her daughter Maisie, Bertram Hemingway, a retired sailor who has taken up painting seascapes and views of the harbor itself, Tory, a divorceé and carrying on an affair with her next-door neighbor, Dr. Cazabon, without Beth’s knowledge, and Prudence, their teenage daughter, courted by Geoffrey, the idealistic son of one of Beth’s old school chums. Geoffrey is also an admirer of Beth’s novels, although there is barely one serious conversation between Beth and her reader. Should we assume Taylor was writing about a younger version of herself?

Newby, as Liddell points out in his afterward, is a modest train ride “up to London” for a day of shopping, perhaps. In Taylor’s novel, there is New Town, a cluster of post-war houses built up not far away, leaving the older port town to apparent desuetude. Still, you live where you live at any one time. Taylor’s characters both stay and leave by novel’s end. They also die, as Mrs. Bracey finally does, much to her daughter Maisie’s relief. They all gossip furiously, and love and hate. There is deception, of course, principally with Robert and Tory falling in love, much to Beth’s obliviousness but not to their daughter Prudence who discovers it, and then Bertram proposes more than once to Tory. Both he and the reader are surprised when she finally accepts him. By novel’s end, they are packing and ready to leave for a flat in London, near where Tory’s son Edward is in boarding school. Loneliness, as Liddell points out, is Taylor’s great theme, as well as the friendships of women. It is also notable that Taylor was exploring her own fragile balance—as a novelist and also a dutiful wife and mother.⁸

A Game of Hide and Seek was published in 1951, Taylor’s fourth novel. In 1950, the entire first chapter had been published in The New Yorker, a high compliment to Taylor’s work as well as her bank account. The author’s influences, her love of Greek, and her admiration for a teacher of Greek during her teenage years all enter into A Game of Hide and Seek as deftly as any novelist using the past as a conduit to self-understanding. It was far more than that, of course. Taylor’s narrative abilities to build terrible choices for her characters—Harriet’s love for her childhood crush versus her duty to her husband and young daughter–this oppositional pull is what drives the novel and why it is a salient book in her oeuvre. Taylor’s ability to describe much in concise imagery is remarkable. For example, three short sentences describe anguish, momentary though it is: “Terrible shrieks were coming out of the loud-speaker horn. Caroline put her hands to her ears. Harriet’s eyes were stars.” ⁹

More than six decades later, one can see readily the conflicting points of view, but the quality of Taylor’s achievement is undeniable. The story presents high emotional conflict in Harriet’s life, and while there is no clear-cut resolution in the end, the author’s deft control over the fates of her characters, as both Liddell and Beauman point out, lifts the story well beyond the commonplace. Indeed, A Game of Hide and Seek would have to be considered among her best performances.

When The Sleeping Beauty was finished in the summer of 1952 and published the following year, Taylor was in a fine stride as a novelist. Although, as mentioned earlier, she rarely partook of literary confabs and never did any reviewing or essay writing, she did maintain a steady rhythm. The Sleeping Beauty involves a deception centered around Vinny¹⁰, supposedly a middle-aged bachelor, and the woman he loves, Emily, as well as her resentful sister, Rose, and of course Rita, who married Vinny years earlier when she claimed to be pregnant but was not, as it turned out. There is also Isabella, a recent widower whom Vinny pays attention to at first before he decides on Emily. Laurence is Isabella’s soldier son, who has a college education but has no further ambition than to be a farm laborer. (Whether this is a joke or not is not explained or demonstrated.) It is worth noting that Taylor uses her “neighborhood” in southeastern England repeatedly, as if mining for insights continuously. One writes best about what one knows. She is also capable of some exquisite imagery: “The sea, winking with light, was stretched taut like a piece of silk.”¹¹ Such divertissements are not uncommon.

The Sleeping Beauty is a good example of a book’s reception both favorable and unfavorable. The bad reviews, as Beauman recounts, tended to haunt Taylor more than the good ones, even praise privately tendered by editors such as William Maxwell, which to some degree bolstered her confidence. When one editor suggested perhaps tactlessly that Taylor revise the book, she declined and eventually changed American book publishers.

The year 1954 saw Taylor’s first short-story collection, Hester Lilly, appear in the United States. The book comprises one novella (the title entry) and twelve short stories, some longer, some very short—one only three pages. The title novella is nearly ninety pages. Hester Lilly is a young woman whose parents have died, who has no siblings, and the only living relative is an older cousin, Robert, married to a woman his own age named Muriel. Although Beauman demonizes Muriel as scheming, if not worse, a more balanced assessment is that, failing to have children, her marriage to Robert, a schoolmaster in postwar England, is stultified. The sudden presence of a young, attractive cousin—Hester—threatens her relationship with her husband. Robert displays no amorous interest in Hester, only concern for her welfare and a desire to help, if possible. Hester’s story is familiar: a young woman suddenly alone in the world is a theme Taylor returned to often. Hester is just one more unmoored person in a basically harsh world in which predatory natures are always rampant. Of the story itself Robert Liddell wrote: “it is far richer in atmosphere and more profound in its study of human nature.”¹² In the end, Hester meets Hugh Basenden, a young schoolteacher who has come to work at Robert’s school. After only a brief acquaintanceship, he asks Hester to marry him. Diffidently, she accepts him. The story is essentially over at that point. However, what is remarkable are not the human vis-á-vis human internecine battles or rivalries, suspicions at the very least, but Taylor’s observances of nature. This is where one gets a full appreciation of the author’s command of visual imagery:

The bark of the trees was blood-red in the dying light, and there were no sounds of birds of anything but branches creaking and tapping together. Then the pink light thinned, the trees opened out, and blueness broke through, and in this new light was a view of a tilted hillside with houses, and a train buffeting along through cornfields.¹³

Such descriptions are not uncommon in Taylor’s descriptions of human relationships. Taking one of the book’s short stories, “The First Death of Her Life,” one sees this deft, painterly quality in images both of what is happening kinetically and the unspoken essences poetry might capture. Taylor depicts a young woman whose mother has just died in hospital. Her father, presumably the deceased’s husband, is late. The world is late, it seems, but death will not be denied, and what may seem callous is indeed matter-of-fact:

The nurse came in. She took her patient’s wrist for a moment, replaced it, removed a jar of forced lilac from beside the bed as if this were no longer necessary, and went out again.¹⁴

In the immediacy of a loved one’s death, or any death, the world doesn’t stop, nor does Taylor imply that it should. Discordancies ring aplenty. As the young woman leaves the hospital, she is confronted by a half-expectation:

Opening the glass doors onto the snowy gardens, she thought it was like the end of a film. But no music rose up and engulfed her. Instead there was her father’s turning in at the gates. He propped his bicycle against the wall and began to run clumsily across the wet gravel.¹⁵

Because we are sentient beings, inadequacies seen by each person may be chafing. Taylor doesn’t dwell on this, but merely describes it, and as with her descriptions of nature, the poetry emerges.

In January 1956, Taylor began writing Angel—a story atypical in that the central character was not a contemporary. The character Angel Deverell was born to distressed, working-class parents in 1885 (Taylor, as noted above, was born in the summer of 1912). A single child, Angel is possessed by monomania, a hatred of anyone telling her what to do—that is, authority figures such as her mother or any of her teachers—and a single-minded intention to become a novelist, although peculiarly she doesn’t read that much, if anything, which might lend polish or veracity to her writing.¹⁶ Yet Angel, who sets out on her writing career still in her teens, refuses to attend school after a teacher suspects her of plagiarizing something she had indeed written. She instead spends her time in the flat above her mother’s shop on Volunteer Street, writing in her bedroom, much to her mother’s distress. As Beauman suggests by inference, this reverse doppelgänger was a stylistic but still quite viable technique, drawing upon one’s experiences and creating an opposite person with a ferocious appetite for both work and success. Taylor had that appetite in the extreme.

Angel is likewise suited but without common courtesies or much interest in the day-to-day struggles of her peers, not the least of her own mother or her aunt Lottie, who mean well but are seen as tiresome and presumptuous. Angel eventually marries an opportunistic painter named Esmé, whose sister Nora lives with them in the once and future dilapidated old house in the country known as Paradise House, in real life a place Taylor knew existed but never actually saw.¹⁷ Angel’s husband dies in a lake accident, leaving her and her sister-in-law to grow old together. Angel dies in Nora’s arms—old, impoverished, forgotten as a writer, an example of true pathos, what every writer dreads. The mise-en-scéne is convincing, at least for the reader of the twenty-first century, albeit sans computer, Internet, or fax machine. Taylor herself did not face poverty, nor was she forgotten in her lifetime.

In 1958, the year she turned forty-six, Taylor saw her second short story collection published—The Blush and Other Stories. The volume had most of her hitherto ungathered stories since Hester Lilly four years earlier that had appeared among other journals over the years in The New Yorker, Taylor’s favorite place to have her work published. Validation was part of it, certainly, but so was the exposure of her work to the American readership, much wider and larger than in the U.K. Money also was a factor. No publication in English paid as much as The New Yorker. Politics may have played a minor factor in Taylor’s decisions about where to try and get her stories published. Indeed, the Labour government had long since vanished in the Conservative sweep of 1951. By now, in post-Churchillian England, Harold MacMillan was in power at Downing Street. While Taylor disapproved of Conservative policies, as much as she could bear to read or hear about them through the media, she kept her politics out of her work. “Put that in a novel,” she might have heard Norman Mailer contend, as he did so often, “and you’ll be sidelined as a writer. That’s not where I’m at.”

The Blush has twelve stories, not all with autobiographical derivations—is it possible always to detect this in a fiction writer’s output?—but certainly mnemonic elements providing considerable fictive amplitude. For example, the title story, one of the shortest in the book at only eight pages, reveals those who work for others and those who depend on hired help to run their own households, or think they do. Mrs. Allen, childless and edging into middle age, is helped with domestic chores by Mrs. Lacey, who has three children at home, fears she might be pregnant again and doesn’t feel well, not helped by occasional drinking bouts at The Horse and Jockey, a local tavern. She has a sober husband, remarkably, who has a suitable job (we never learn what it is, except that it is in a neighboring town) and earns enough money that his wife doesn’t need to work for another household. When Mrs. Lacey leaves early, leaving a note that she is ill, Mrs. Allen is distressed, for she is not used to doing laundry or tidying up. Still, Mrs. Allen bears up, not without compassion. That afternoon she is visited by Mr. Lacey. The two have never met before. He explains that his wife is pregnant (which Mrs. Allen already suspected), that she doesn’t need outside work because he makes good money, and that he hopes Mrs. Allen understands because his wife cannot say No. Mrs. Allen agrees immediately. After the man leaves, Mrs. Allen feels embarrassed, almost as if she were to blame for Mrs. Lacey’s physical ailments, which of course she has had no part in. Still, she feels some guilt:

Then she felt herself beginning to blush. She was glad that she was alone, for she could feel her face, her throat, even the tops of her arms burning, and she went over to a looking-glass and studied with great interest this strange phenomenon.¹⁸

Taylor’s friendship with Liddell bears mention again, for “The Letter-Writers” also appears in this book. Originally appearing in The New Yorker, it is a fictional chronicling of their first encounter. In fact, as Beauman recounts, he did not come to see her first in England. (The poet Leslie Yates, who died in 1943, was the inspiration for this story.) There was, however, a naturally exorcistic quality about it in regard to her correspondence with Liddell.¹⁹ Edmund visits Emily, who has prepared a meal of lobster. However, when she steps outside momentarily, her cat makes a mess of the lobster. Just as Emily is about to toss the cat out the front door, Edmund appears, taken aback but gracious, as she might have expected. He is slightly but not significantly “different” in person than what she’d expected, and they get on pleasantly. In the shifting of points of view back and forth, Taylor’s gifts are evident. Just before the visit, she allows us the predispositions of each letter-writer vis-à-vis the other:

At first, he thought her a novelist manqué, then he realized that letter-writing is an art by itself, a different kind of skill, though, perhaps with a different motive—and one at which Englishwomen have excelled. As she wrote, the landscape, flowers, children, cats and dogs, sprang to life memorably. He knew her neighbors and her relation to them, and also knew people, who were dead now, whom she had loved. He called them by their Christian names when he wrote to her and re-evoked them for her, so that, being allowed at last to mention them, she felt that they became light and free again in her mind, and not an intolerable suppression, as they had been for years.²⁰

In a Summer Season, an accomplished novel by any standard, was published in 1961. In it Kate, a middle-aged woman, has remarried after her husband’s sudden death to Dermot, who is a decade younger. He has no money and is unemployed, whereas Kate does have money. Therein is part of the problem in their marriage, although she refuses to acknowledge it. In this novel, there is the flavor of upper middle-class life depicted through a series of unpredictable events. In 1982, the British critic Susannah Clapp contributed a salient forward to a new edition, writing, “Secrecy makes Kate’s intensities more insistent: so does a background which is both comfortable and sedate,” Clapp writes. “Elizabeth Taylor’s skill at catching the predictable and soothing in middle-class life, in pointing to its limitations without scorn, never deserted her.”²¹

The Soul of Kindness was printed in 1964. In contemporary American parlance, this book would have to be considered “edgy”—that is, fraught with competing egos, frustrated ambitions, the very best of intentions: all of this does not quite descend into tragedy, but catastrophe hovers closely. The central character, if there is one and so depicted as “the soul of kindness” is Flora, married to Richard, a straightforward businessman who prefers his life uncomplicated by suspicion and distrust as well as all other mortal shortcomings. Richard realizes this may be impractical, but Flora wants to do good by everyone she knows. Richard and Flora employ Mrs. Lodge, a housekeeper, who had announced her desire to leave their employment in order to return to the country, where she spent her earlier life. One finds Taylor’s depiction of these characters replete with color and emotion, qualities that make convincing fiction. The book is “one of her best novels,” judged Liddell some twenty years later. “There are scenes in variety, but connected by an interesting theme and one that she made particularly her own, the self-deceiver.” ²² In other respects, The Soul of Kindness can remind one of a soap opera, which perhaps it is to a certain extent.²³ Flora’s determination to cement her marriage against any threat, real or imagined, as well as provide a healthy environment for their baby daughter are described in near-believable pathos:

As it was Mrs. Lodge’s day off, Flora had made a special dish for Richard’s dinner—his favourite steak pie. She had a feeling today she must propitiate him, draw him close with every gyve she could find. This particular gyve, the steak pie, she kept taking out of the oven, then putting it back. The pastry seemed to be hardening. She wandered about the house—went up to Alice several times: but as in the dream Alice slept peacefully, her legs on top of the light coverlet, her hair stuck to her head like damp feathers.²⁴

A third collection of short fiction, A Dedicated Man and Other Stories, appeared in 1965. Twelve stories, all highly trenchant and evocative of English life both at home and in the experiences of traveling abroad, comprise this salutary book. The title story suits our purposes here. Silcox, a professional waiter in middle age, has Edith as a partner, although he treats her at times with contempt. Silcox’s verbal abusiveness toward Edith prompts her departure at story’s end. Taylor’s rendering pits the story well: Silcox has just been informed that Edith has gone:

Before the new couple arrived, Silcox prepared to leave. Since Edith’s departure, he had spoken to no one but his customers, to whom he was as stately as ever—almost devotional he seemed in his duties, bowed over chafing dish or bottle—almost as if his calling were sacred and he felt himself worthy of it. ²⁵

Although 1967 and 1968 were significant years politically and socially around the world, especially in the United States, this was a period of quietude in Taylor’s life. She and her husband went on trips to North Africa as well as islands near Greece, though Taylor herself “boycotted” the country, as noted above, because of its military junta. She also completed work on Mossy Trotter, a book supposedly just for children. The nickname and surname of a eight-year-old boy, Robert Mossman Trotter, the novel is built of simple declarative sentences and the point of view is exclusively Mossy’s—dealing with his parents (especially his expectant mother), his younger sister Emma, and fears of ridicule at being dressed for a wedding as a “page boy” which he overcomes as he develops a fondness for Alison, the page girl, who has a tendency toward maladroitness and thereby inflicting minor injuries upon herself. That Mossy Trotter is written from the point of view and thus uncomplicated language of a third-grader helps considerably, for Taylor and her husband had raised two children of their own and grandparenthood was in the offing. Still remarkable, even stunning at times, are the observations reflecting both her characters and nature, the latter especially worth noting at the beginning of Chapter Seven:

The summer was now quite over. The cherry trees dropped their thin yellow leaves onto the grass, and the autumn flowers were out in the garden—Michaelmas daisies and goldenrod. Big striped spiders spun beautiful webs from stem to stem, and the hedges on the damp, misty mornings were covered with cobwebs.²⁶

Elizabeth Taylor’s past came to visit her again as she labored on The Wedding Group, published in 1968. The setting is a disparate one. Quayne, a village of Catholic artists and sculptors, was where Taylor (as Betty Coles, before she met her future husband) lived briefly in the early 1930s. Pigott was its real name, and Eric Gill, the leader, was renamed Harry Bretton, a sculptor. Beauman speculates back and forth whether there might have been a sexual relationship in the wake of Elizabeth posing in the nude for Gill. At any rate, this novel—judged by some to be her weakest—does have problems with characterization. The character Midge is an excruciatingly lonely woman whose youngest son still remains at home, after a fashion. (The older two sons have married and live far away, and her husband has long since left her for a depressingly solitary existence of his own.) Taylor’s time at Pigott was brief, but she remembered the thin outlines of personalities some thirty-five years or more in the past, enough to craft an imperfect novel about disharmonious characters who never quite fuse with each other. Midge’s youngest son, David, presumably in his thirties, fancies Cressy, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Quayne couple. Indeed, Cressy is their only daughter, but they do not object when David comes to tell them he wants to marry her. Midge enjoys having their company as she has no other visitors or friends to speak of. The marriage might seem problematic were it not for Midge’s willingness to serve as a friend to her daughter-in-law as well as a doting grandmother when David and Cressy’s son is born. The title of the book is odd, since there is only one wedding in the novel and that takes place “off-stage,” as it were. While the characters are believable, this book gave its author quite a bit of birthing trouble. Perhaps this is, after all, salutary, for the characters—even David’s isolated and absentee father—are plausible for their peculiarities.

By the time Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont was published in 1971, it was the result of the author having met and known elderly people, such as her fellow writer Ivy Compton-Burnett, among others.²⁷ The hotel was based on a real London hotel where elderly pensioners lived out their days. Beauman notes cryptically that the book “was the only one of her books to be short-listed for a prize in her lifetime.” Not only that, but the theme, constant with Taylor, was solitude—as Beauman notes: “It is another study in excruciating loneliness.”²⁸ Taylor herself had not experienced solitude for any length of time, but her observational powers were keen. Taylor’s friendship with Ivy Compton-Burnett, as Beauman has it, was one of two inspirations for Mrs Palfrey as well as the profound fact of isolation brought on by time’s rush. The character Ludo is a construct of fiction melding with reality to create a believably grounded character. Mrs Palfrey is not well, has a stroke, and dies in a hospital, but not before Ludo brings her flowers and repays a fifty-pound gift that he refuses to accept as anything other than a loan.

As Beauman intimates, Mrs Palfrey was the only novel of Taylor’s to be short-listed for the esteemed Booker Prize, admittedly in an era when relatively few prizes existed. However, a “lukewarm review” in Times Literary Supplement, as well as carping by Saul Bellow, one of the judges, doomed it to lose to In a Free State, a novel by V. S. Naipaul. (There were four other competitors.) Both comedy and “vicious satire” are evinced in the book, and—as Paul Bailey wrote—Taylor’s talent “is for noticing the casual cruelty that people use to protect themselves from the not always casual malice of others. Her ear for insult is, every so often, on a par with Jane Austen’s.”²⁹ Indeed, Taylor was often compared to Austen, although there are obvious limitations to pairing two English writers who lived a century apart.

The Devastating Boys and Other Stories was brought out in the U. S. by Viking in 1972, comprising some of the most vivid short stories Taylor had ever written. The title piece, reflecting Taylor’s and her husband’s experience hosting two young black boys about six years old from north Kensington was perhaps too factual, one reason that William Maxwell of The New Yorker might have turned it down, as did a number of English editors. Still, the story is vivid, not at all reflecting a negative two weeks as the title might suggest. Another story, “The Fly-Paper,” suggests at its conclusion a kidnapping of an eleven-year-old girl on her way to a music lesson. The motif of the flypaper, close to the story’s end, suggests horror to come but then nothing is overt. Sylvia, the eleven-year-old, is at first impressed by the neat and clean little house to which she has been enticed on her way by a middle-aged woman who had been on the bus. She also notices flypaper on the kitchen window with dying insects struggling to get free. Then a talkative middle-aged man she also saw on the bus suddenly comes in through the back door. There is already a tea setting for three on the kitchen table. The ending is like a punch in the stomach, or as Benjamin Schwarz, the literary editor of The Atlantic, wrote more than three decades later: “This is an almost unbearably terrifying story, especially for parents, in which evil emerges casually from the day-to-day.”³⁰

The collection, like everything else she published, received mixed reviews. Joyce Carol Oates proclaimed a similarity to instances in Taylor’s previous work. However, the themes and underlying motifs in these stories are uncharacteristically venturesome, such as predation upon an unsuspecting child (the aforementioned story), and another about two middle-aged women who had been living together for years (titled “Miss A. and Miss M.”), attesting to the author’s willingness to venture into societal matters not on a grand scale but whittled down to particular individuals and sadnesses that may accrue. When one of the women finally marries, the other kills herself, unable to cope with living alone.

In the fall of 1973, Taylor began writing what she knew would be her final novel, Blaming. We blame each other, the book seems to be saying, and certainly another person provides a convenient target for grief, outrage, small annoyances—a sundry list of perceived human foibles. But the characters are hardly outrageous enough for too much blame. In some ways, Amy—suddenly widowed as she and her husband Nick are about to return to England from a holiday in Greece—represents the author herself, except that Taylor was never a widow. Indeed, she knew she had cancer when she wrote this book over a year and a half, completing it (a second draft, according to Beauman) in May 1975. Liddell observes that the book lacked more than a first draft, but he was not close to the situation, although he kept in steady epistolary contact with Taylor until shortly before she could no longer hold a pen to write. As noted above, Maud Eaton, the New Zealand friend of an earlier time, is portrayed in the novel as Martha Larkin, a younger American, who befriends Amy and helps her through the immediacy of Nick’s sudden death (he had been quite ill, although we do not know his precise misfortune).

The myriad characters and ambitions, such as they are, that abound in Taylor’s stories and novels are very English depictions, although comparisons with other writers—in Canada, Alice Munro, and originally from Colorado, Jean Stafford—may engage the reader by human predicaments in their own lifetimes and spheres. While Munro’s writing extended through the first decade of the twenty-first century, she wrote of life as she encountered it and spun her stories through the travails and odd joys of living. Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 in large part because her characters were universal in their woes and small triumphs, not isolated as eccentrics. Elizabeth Taylor was concerned with twentieth-century British life as she knew it. This is her great accomplishment: the description of a troubled century as she saw her fellow mortals behold both joy and grief. She would have wanted no less than that as a writer.

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¹ Until the post World War II years, many British women who aspired to write fiction or poetry were actively discouraged from attempting higher education, some–such as Virginia Woolf–eschewed it altogether in favor of what we recognize now as autodidactism. Indeed, self-education or private tutoring in the case of Woolf did not hamper her later. She married well, too, and with her husband Leonard founded the Hogarth Press, through which her own books as well as those of others were published.

² Their correspondence, kept on his side by Russell, proved quite helpful to Taylor’s biographer, Nicola Beauman, who enticed him to let her use the letters in part for her book, The Other Elizabeth Taylor (Persephone Books, 2009). Russell finally was married in his late thirties to a woman thirteen years younger named Eunice. They had a son in 1960—Colin—and appear to have had a contented life, although he never got over Elizabeth completely, according to Beauman.

³ It is worth noting that after the Greek junta deposed the monarchy in 1967, Taylor never visited the country again, despising right-wing dictatorships, although Liddell, who by then had settled in Athens permanently, observed later that the Greek economy was not affected by the change in government, or for that matter the atmosphere in the country itself. Nonetheless, Taylor’s boycotting of her favorite foreign country in the last years of her life is significant as a statement of principle.

⁴ Robert Liddell, Elizabeth and Ivy, (Peter Owen, 1986), 15.
⁵ Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs. Lippincote’s (Knopf, New York, 1945), 149-150.
⁶ Ibid., 185-186.
⁷ Elizabeth Taylor, Palladian (Knopf, 1947), 127-128.
v8 Robert Liddell, “Afterward” to A View of the Harbour, Knopf (1947, 1987), 301-309. Liddell wrote this essay in Greece in 1986, more than a decade after Taylor’s death.
⁹ Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek (New York Review Books reprint, 1951, 2010), 104.
¹⁰ Taylor uses this nickname for Vincent also in A Game of Hide and Seek.
¹¹ Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty (The Dial Press, New York, 1953), 136.
¹² Robert Liddell, Elizabeth and Ivy, (Peter Owen, London, UK, 1986), 45.
¹³ Elizabeth Taylor, Hester Lilly and 12 Short Stories, (Viking, 1954), 43.
¹⁴ Taylor, op. cit., 188.
¹⁵ Ibid., 191.
¹⁶ Beauman, op. cit., 285.
7 Ibid., 285-286.
¹⁸ “The Blush” in Elizabeth Taylor, The Blush and Other Stories (The Viking Press, New York, 1959), 35.
¹⁹ Beauman, op. cit., 304-305.
²⁰ Taylor, op. cit., 40-41.
²¹ Susannah Clapp, “Introduction” –forward to In a Summer Season, by Elizabeth Taylor (The Dial Press, New York, 1961, 1982), 5.
²² Liddell, op. cit., 102.
²³ Still, the characters are vividly depicted. Flora, in another setting and another time, might seem like a figure in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, but it is England in the early 1960s before social media, cell phones, and the Internet. Indeed, this is the case with all of Taylor’s fiction – these electronic enhancements did not emerge until a generation after Taylor’s death.
²⁴ Elizabeth Taylor, The Soul of Kindness, (Virago, New York, 1964, 2010), 180-181.
²⁵ Elizabeth Taylor, A Dedicated Man and Other Stories (Viking, New York, 1965), 132.
²⁶ Elizabeth Taylor, Mossy Trotter. (Illustrations by Laszo Acs. Harcout, Brace & World, New York, 1967), 97.
²⁷ The honorific normally spelled “Mrs.”–with a period–is spelled without it all through this novel; hence, my reference is “Mrs” as well.
²⁸ Beauman, op. cit., 363.
²⁹ Quoted in Beauman, Ibid., 364-365.
³⁰ “The Other Elizabeth Taylor,” Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic, September 2007.

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Editor’s Note: Leslie S. Klinger and Neil Gaiman appeared at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis on November 9, 2014, to discuss Klinger’s latest book, The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (Liveright, $39.95). Klinger, also the author of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and The New Annotated Dracula, has also edited three volumes to date of The Annotated Sandman (Vertigo). What follows is a slightly edited transcript of the pair’s conversation and audience Q&A.

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Neil Gaiman: So, Les Klinger, who I’m about to bring on, is my lawyer. And this is actually true. About a decade ago, a little more than a decade ago, a very nice man named Michael Dirda, who used to be the literary editor of the Washington Post, invited me to a meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars—which is the mysterious organization of wastrels and retired judges and people who choose to believe that Sherlock Holmes exists and who know all about him. I learned of the existence of this from reading an Isaac Asimov essay when I was about thirteen, and as far as I was concerned, the Baker Street Irregulars were kind of like unicorns—so I was going to have to go and have dinner with the unicorns. In order to do this, I rented a tuxedo, because I’m not really a tuxedo person, and I walked in incredibly awkwardly, and I saw Michael Dirda, which was a relief because he was the only person there I knew, and he said, “This is Leslie Klinger.” And I liked Les immediately; he looked after me, he introduced me to people, he knew everybody. At that time he was annotating Sherlock Holmes, and he did it brilliantly. And then he did Dracula brilliantly. Somewhere in there he phoned me up and said, “Neil, I should do Sandman.” And I said, “No, that can wait ‘til I’m dead.” [Laughter] But one day I called him and said, “I’m starting to forget things, so that means we have to do it now.”

And also somewhere in there, I discovered that, actually, Les would say things to me things like, “Do you actually have a will?” And I’d go, “Yeah, it’s twenty years old now, and it was written when I was living in a different country and married to somebody else, but yeah, I have a will.” He pointed out that doesn’t actually count, so I asked, “Will you do it?” And he said, “Yes.” And so he is technically my lawyer, and he is making me do grown-up things that need to be done. He knows much more than I do about everything and is one of the nicest people in the world—Leslie.

[Applause]

Leslie Klinger: Thank you, although I have to say that when I was talking about doing this tour with another bookseller, he said it was really nice of me to be so supportive of young writers like Peter Straub and Neil Gaiman, and helping them out by letting them have appearances with me. [Laughter] Neil didn’t mention that he wrote the introduction for my Dracula book, and it’s terrific.

So we wanted to have a conversation about Lovecraft. By the way, I wanted to point out that this book is the new annotated Lovecraft because there are other annotated versions: S.T. Joshi, probably the world’s greatest Lovecraft scholar, has done three small collections of annotated stories with his own original annotations—I’m not very original, I’ve decided to bring in lots of scholarship, here—and pictures.

NG: So the biggest difference, it seems to me, between Lovecraft and some of your earlier annotations, is that with Sherlock Holmes, you began annotating the stories from the intellectual position that Sherlock Holmes existed, that Watson existed, and that Conan Doyle was just writing down stuff that had happened to them, and wherever it didn’t actually make sense, you needed to explain why.

LK: Right. This is what Sherlockians call “the game.” It’s very productive of interesting avenues of study. When you approach the stories that way, you get a lot more juice out of them, because if these are historical documents, then we can justify examining in minute detail the cultural and historical elements that serve as background in the stories. Plus, Sherlockians love to argue about “Why did Holmes do that instead of this,” “He got this case wrong,” and so on. So that was the approach, there. For Dracula, I did a mixture. Lovecraft was different, but not quite as different as you might imagine, because Lovecraft himself said that to write a great supernatural tale, it was critical that it be done like a hoax. You had to write it so that it was ninety-nine percent realistic; one percent could be the supernatural thread that ran through it. And so, there’s that incredible amount of detail to work with: historical, cultural, scientific, amazing stuff in the background.

NG: Let me just get a quick show of hands, in terms of what we’re going to talk about next: does anyone here—and do not be embarrassed to raise your hand—not know who H. P. Lovecraft was, or not know much about him? [People raise their hands.] Okay, well, that’s absolutely enough of you—

LK: Like my entire family, when I said I was doing this book, they said, “Who?” [Laughter]

NG: So let’s put Lovecraft into some kind of context. Les, who was H. P. Lovecraft?

LK: Well, he was unfairly tagged as a recluse, but he was a strange—and that’s a good word, I think—a strange gentleman who was born in 1890 and died in 1937; he was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, and spent all but two years of his life there. He fancied himself to some extent as a sort of reincarnation of an eighteenth-century gentleman. This is probably what many of us writers who don’t sell large quantities of books say, but he disdained the commercial aspects of writing; he actually wrote at some point that if only one reader read his works, that was okay with him, because he wasn’t writing his material for a commercial audience.
He was a polymath, a prodigy who began writing poetry at the age of seven. He wrote an astronomy column in his early teens for the local newspaper—he loved science and astronomy. He did not go to college. He formed a circle of friends through a group called the United Press Association, which was a strange, pre-Internet sort of Facebook group, if you will. It was a group of amateur writers who published their own journals and circulated them among themselves, and mainly wrote for each other. They wrote fiction, essays, poetry, everything. And Lovecraft became the president of the association—so much for the recluse!—but he was mainly communicating with these people via correspondence. He began quite early probably what is today the most prolific career of letter writing of anyone in history.

NG: And he wrote, like, 50,000-word letters!

LK: Absolutely. Some of the letters are seventy pages long. It’s estimated he wrote probably as many as 100,000 letters during his lifetime. Some of them are postcards with cramped little handwriting squeezing in as many words as he could, and some of them are very long. They ranged from his ideas about ice cream and cats and ancient history, to philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. His correspondence included people like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith and other early fantasy writers, and they discovered that they had great interest in the same things. That correspondence is being published slowly; there was a Selected Letters that came out in the 1960s, and now we’re up to maybe fifteen volumes of letters that have been published—and there are still dozens more to go. It’s fascinating to read them.

But, Lovecraft wrote only eighty-five stories. Like I said, he was a complete commercial failure. His stories appeared in Weird Tales, which was a pulp magazine. There are some modern equivalents, I guess, but back in those days it was the primary outlet for writers of these genre. And it paid terribly; he was getting twenty-five dollars or so for a story. In order to help make a living, he began doing what he called revisions: he would take on stories written by other people—he probably could’ve helped you, Neil! [Laughter]—and for a fee, he would edit and even rewrite the work. Some of the stories that came out are probably ninety-five percent Lovecraft, five percent author.

NG: Didn’t he write with Harry Houdini?

LK: He did. Houdini people don’t necessarily know, but he was a movie star, he had all these adventure films, and he wanted to write a sort of a spy story about a cult under the pyramids, and Lovecraft was commissioned to write it. But in general he was very poorly published, and there was only one book ever published in his entire lifetime: a single story called “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” It wasn’t until his death in 1937 from stomach cancer, a really ugly death that he wrote about in some detail in a “death diary,” that his friends decided he needed to be out there, in the world. And they started it.

NG: So you had a local boy . . .

LK: Indeed, August Derleth from Sauk City, Wisconsin, who formed a small company with a friend named Donald Wandrei. Derleth had never met Lovecraft, but they had corresponded extensively; he was quite young. He and Wandrei, who was a good friend of Lovecraft, decided to put out a book called The Outsider and Other Stories. They sent it around to critics, and they actually got some traction with reviews. Then there was more and more.

NG: And they named their press Arkham House.

LK: Yes, after the town in which a lot of Lovecraft’s stories take place. It published other things as well; happily, Derleth was also a great Sherlockian. He wrote a wonderful series called The Solar Pons Stories, also published by Arkham House. But Lovecraft started to get broader and broader attention. And then along came Edmund Wilson. Edmund Wilson was one of the great critics in America—just ask him! [Laughter]—and he wrote a piece about Lovecraft’s writing: he hated it. Hated it, hated it. I think of the movie Amadeus in which the emperor says there are too many notes. That’s sort of how Wilson felt about Lovecraft’s stories: too many words. Lovecraft deliberately cultivated an antiquarian style and used a lot of big words, and that’s probably a quarter of my footnotes—just explaining what those words mean.

NG: I remember as a thirteen-year old trying to read Lovecraft and having to go and find not just the dictionary, but the Oxford English Dictionary—the one in two volumes that came with a magnifying glass—in order to find out what words like “batrachian” meant. Frog-like. The people of Arkham tended to be squamous and batrachian. [Laughter]

LK: So Wilson hated him, and he put Lovecraft—again, happily—into the same dark corner as the Baker Street Irregulars; adults who were interested in that sort of material were not worth his attention. Fortunately we got past that, and Lovecraft was really discovered by the academics in the 1970s, when pop culture became an accepted curricular item, and now he’s taught in a wide range of courses. The real canonization of Lovecraft occurred when Peter Straub edited the Library of America edition, which came out in 2005, I think, and the fact that Norton was willing to do my annotated book in their series is sort of a second boost. So it’s an amazing arc. There is a brilliant introduction to the book written by Alan Moore, by the way, in which he talks about this.

So I want to talk about you and Lovecraft, too. I read Lovecraft very late in life—“late in life” sounds like now!—but you read Lovecraft as a teen.

NG: I did. I was about eleven or twelve. It was a wonderful time to be a lover of fantastic fiction. In America, and to a lesser degree, in England, you had publications which brought Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, all these people back into print.

LK: So this is the ’70s.

NG: This is the very early ’70s. Granada Books in England had an amazing color artist named Bruce Pennington who did these beautiful covers of books that they brought back into print by Clark Ashton Smith. So I picked up the Clark Ashton Smith books and kind of liked them, but they mentioned on the back H. P. Lovecraft. So I found a copy of a book called The Outsider and Other Stories. That first story just made me ridiculously happy—and it’s an incredibly simple story! It’s about a guy who’s sort of climbing up this tower, trying to get away from the dark and the horribleness; he gets to the top of the tower and comes out, but when people see him and scream at him, he realizes that he is a horrible monster, and he goes back into the tower and starts climbing down. Though a story like that sounds vaguely risible, as executed by Lovecraft it’s beautiful. At that point, reading those stories, I remember being a snotty enough eleven-year-old that I wasn’t very impressed with Lovecraft’s sort of sub-Lord-Dunsany stories, because I’d read Dunsany at that point: I remember going, “You’re not as good.” But then I loved “The Call of Cthulhu,” I was just absolutely fascinated with the feeling that you were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. I think that was the thing that attracted me as a teenager to Lovecraft—the idea that he had this huge self-contained universe that perhaps he understood, and things linking the stories, like the Necronomicon of the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred—all of these sort of weird things that would crop up that you never quite understood, because it would all drive you mad when you read it, and then you would die at the end of the story, often while writing. And you would die in italics. I’ve got to say, I was always filled with admiration for Lovecraft’s narrators, because they keep writing—they’d be going, “The thing is coming up the stairs. I can hear it. Oh my God, the door is opening.” And you think, “Just put the pen down and run!”

LK: Well, that early exposure explains why you’re you, and I’m a lawyer. [laughter] Lovecraft’s narrators tend to be very ordinary people. They’re people who looked into things that they probably should have left alone. And he really did that well in these stories.

NG: Well, some of them had just moved into houses. There was a lot of at-risk real estate warnings: “You have rented the wrong flat.”

LK: So, “The Outsider” is one of the stories that everybody’s already yelled at me about not including, and a few others that did not make it were “The Shunned House,” “The Rats in the Wall,” and “The Terrible Old Man,” but the stories that are included are, I think, some of his very best: “Call of Cthlulhu,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “Charles Dexter Ward,” and my very favorite, At the Mountains of Madness.

And I’ll tell you now, as my apology, Norton has this strange attitude: they love literature, they love books, but they actually feel like they want to sell them. This is very bizarre for a publisher. So there was a size issue: in order to keep it as a $39.95 book, it needed to be merely 860 pages with 300 photos, that sort of thing. So we had to cut something. What I ended up doing as a sort of unifying principle was to include stories that relate to what Neil described as Lovecraft’s universe, or mythos, as it’s known. Some of them are very early stories—“Dagon,” “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”—I think those are important to see his evolving technique and his growth, how he mastered the technique in later stories. Those are the first stories in which we see the mythos appear. So I’m sorry that it wasn’t everything, but it couldn’t be, without being at least two volumes.

NG: One of the things that fascinates me about Lovecraft, and I’m one of the people who this has affected, is the urge to go and play in the sandpit, as it were. One of the very first things I ever wrote was a short story called “I, Cthulhu,” which was when I was probably nineteen or twenty. I’d been reading a lot of Robert Nye, weird autobiographies in weird voices, and I just loved the idea of doing Cthulhu. So, I sat and wrote that, and sent it off to . . . nobody, because I was nineteen. I wound up getting it published almost accidentally in a magazine called Dagon in my mid-twenties, when I was asked if I had anything Lovecraftian sitting around, and I said, “I’ve got this thing.” I gave it to them, and I added a very long letter afterward, a sort of afterward about the correspondences between H. P. Lovecraft and P. G. Wodehouse. [Laughter] I think I was—

LK: This is not a joke, by the way. There are others—

NG: I was the first. I was the first.

LK: Okay, but now, it’s become a whole—

NG: —it’s become a thing. I remember coming up with “Scream for Jeeves,” “It’s the Call of Cthulhu, Jeeves,” [Laughter] . . . Also, I’m talking about P. G. Wodehouse’s H. P. Lovecraft musical, “Cthulhu Summer.” I remember even writing some lyrics for it . . .

I may just be a bird in a gilded cage
A captive like a parakeet or dove
But when a maiden meets a giant lipophage
Her heart gets chewed and broken, like that old adage
—I’m just a fool who
Thought that Cthulhu
Could fall in love

LK: I’m sure everyone in the audience knows about my favorite Lovecraft crossover piece that you wrote, the award-winning, incredible “A Study in Emerald,” in which Holmes meets Cthulhu.

NG: That was a grownup one. As an adult, I wrote two Lovecraftian pieces; one was a story called “Only the End of the World Again,” and then some years later Michael Reaves called me up, and said, “I’m doing an anthology of Sherlock Holmes meets Cthulhu stories. Can you do something for me?” That seemed like the most fundamentally stupid premise for an anthology I’d ever heard, because everything about Holmes is about rationality, everything about Holmes is the idea that things can be understood, that you can look at somebody and deduce that they are a thirty-five year old Latvian housepainter with a deaf left ear and an incontinent cocker spaniel. And everything about Lovecraft is about looking at somebody and not understanding that they are a remnant of a dead god from a formless cosmos whose very real appearance will drive you into madness and beyond. Trying to crossbreed these things is like trying to crossbreed a greyhound with Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . . . they don’t breed.

And then I thought, “Well, hang on. What if I actually made my entire world Lovecraftian and set a Holmes figure in there with the forces of rationality? What would happen then?” There are very few stories that write themselves, but that was one of those lovely occasions where the story kind of did all the work for me. And then I went on to collect Hugo Awards and things for it, and look very smart, and feel very awkward, because I had no idea how I’d done it.

LK: That also birthed another subgenre. I don’t know if you know the computer role-playing game Sherlock Holmes: The Awakening, in which there are serious Lovecraft elements, and things come out that Watson probably didn’t think were going to . . . you started that, too. They probably didn’t send you any money. . . .

NG: No, they didn’t, but that’s alright.

LK: I want raise a topic before anyone in the audience does. There’s been a great deal of controversy recently about the World Fantasy Awards. The statue given to the award winners is a bust of Lovecraft. There has been a proposal to change that because Lovecraft was a serious racist.

NG: He really was.

LK: This is something that is very troublesome about Lovecraft, because when you read his correspondence, it’s very clear that he hated Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Portuguese, Italians—just about anybody who wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon Protestant from Rhode Island. He actually married a Jewish woman, which is kind of hard to understand, because she had assimilated—she was an “okay” kind of Jew, because she didn’t look Jewish or act Jewish, he said. He had a couple friends who were Jewish who had similarly assimilated.

When he went to live in New York for two years, he hated it. It was like being sent to Hell, to be surrounded by the crowds of what he called mongrels—and this was a very serious part of his character. He supported Hitler in the early years; he was also a New Deal supporter, interestingly, and a proponent of eugenics.

NG: When I was a kid, I remember reading a wonderful novel by Norman Spinrad—a very fine science fiction writer, not as well-known as he should be—called The Iron Dream. In the book’s alternate universe, there was a novel written by a former housepainter named Adolf Hitler who had become a science fiction writer, and then come to America and actually achieved some popularity in the ’40s and ’50s as a science fiction writer; his great novel was called Lord of the Swastika. I remember reading it and being kind of both shocked and educated at the places that fantasy and horror take their energy, or can take their energy, from, and the idea of this Hitlerian figure writing an essentially standard science-fiction/science-fantasy/fantasy novel with a lone hero facing the mutant hordes as being all about revulsion at the Other. Lovecraft’s fiction, it seems to me—without wishing to get into a kind of pop psychology—takes enormous amounts of energy from several places: one is just absolute revulsion and fear of other people who are not like him.

There’s obviously a lot of very weird stuff about women in there too—you would never want to sit down with Lovecraft and say, “So, tell me how you feel about female genitalia.” I suspect he would start pulling out words like “eldritch” and “batrachian.”

LK: Fishy! I think you’re right about that. I think psychologists, biographers, etc., have said the outsider was, of course, Lovecraft, himself.

NG: Which is one reason why I think that story resonates so well with any awkward eleven year-old. You read The Outsider and you go, “This is me! I am the creature! That is why nobody likes me, and I’m reading books!”

LK: When you read Lovecraft’s stories, there is very little—with the exception of a story called “The Horror at Red Hook”—overt racism. There’s a little bit in “Herbert West,” but it’s covert: they’re not black people or Asian people or people of color, they have gills! So I think you’re right; the idea that they’re outsiders, and despicable, I think really powers the fiction.

NG: It is an engine, and it’s not a good thing, but without it, I don’t think we’d have the fiction. The H. P. Lovecraft award that is given, the World Fantasy Award, is a sort of Easter Island head . . . .

LK: By the way, in my book I have a picture of the Easter Island statues, because you can compare it to the picture of Lovecraft, and they really do look alike. Which opens up all kinds of strange questions.

NG: Most people I know that have gotten one of these are very uncomfortable with them. I was made a wonderful little bowler hat for mine. I know someone who had a Rastafarian hat with little curls. I would not mind at all if they changed the award. The point is it’s the World Fantasy Award, not the Lovecraft Award. And it’s not about Lovecraft, it’s about fantasy.

LK: I think that racist element really does power his stories. Another factor is that this is a man who had both his parents die in an insane asylum—the same insane asylum, by the way—and was deeply worried that he was going to find himself going insane at some point.

NG: Fear of insanity, even more than fear of monstrous things from beyond the galaxy to whom we are but infinitesimal specks of dust in the cosmic void, is the biggest thing that powers Lovecraft—can you imagine, the body horror of someone who may well be terrified he has some sort of syphilis?

LK: Yes, which is what his father died of, and he called it a mental breakdown. We should also mention that there is a mention of Sherlock Holmes in the book, because I, of course, wrote it. Lovecraft was a Sherlockian, living in those wonderful years when the stories were appearing in The Strand magazine, and he was a teenager at just the right time. He had a little Sherlockian club in which he was Holmes and everyone else had sort of lesser roles . . . and some of the stories clearly have imagery drawn from the stories. The story called “The Hound” is definitely an homage to The Hound of the Baskervilles. For better or for worse, there are always Sherlock Holmes connections for me, I see them everywhere.

We wanted to leave time for questions from the audience . . . does anyone have any questions?

Q: Why H. P. Lovecraft? What drew you to him, his style?

LK: Mainly it was that Norton wanted to do this. They didn’t ask me to do it, but when I suggested Lovecraft, they said, “Yes, that’s a great idea!” I think the reason they reacted that way, and the reason I enjoyed it so much, is because, like Holmes, like the vampire stuff, like Sandman, there is an intense fan following. There is a very, very strong community of Lovecraftians, and that enthusiasm out there has led to a great body of scholarship—not the quantity of stuff that’s in the Sherlock Holmes world, but nonetheless, a lot of amateur writing about Lovecraft that has appeared in various journals. That’s the most important part of the answer, the community aspect.

You have to understand the process for nonfiction writers; unlike Neil, I go to the publisher and say, “I’d like to write a biography about this,” and they say, “Nah.” And I go, “Well, what about this?” and they say, “Nah!” Then, finally, they’ll say, “Yes.” As opposed to Neil, who says, “Well, I have this child here, would you like to adopt him?” [Laughter]

It’s a long process, and some of the books I’ve proposed over the years might seem a little odd. Neil wanted me to do The Jungle Book. I thought, “Wow, that’d be great! All we have to do is convince a publisher to actually publish it.” I wanted to do The Lodger, I don’t know how many of you know that wonderful 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes; it’s a retelling of Jack the Ripper. I would love to do that. But these are books that are not in the mainstream.

NG: I suppose Lovecraft is interesting in that he has this weird sort of quantum position where he’s absolutely outside of the mainstream, and yet somehow the mainstream has wandered over to the little puddle where he lived, and flooded over him, and now he is everywhere.

LK: Yes, and that is a common thread in the books that I’ve done—people saying, “Oh, maybe that is good stuff!” Look at how hot Sherlock Holmes is right now. And Dracula was discovered in the ’70s by the academics, who said, “Wow, this is great literature.” My next book is on another one of those books, Frankenstein, now adopted by every academic curriculum in the country for queer studies, Marxist studies, feminist studies, etc.—why? People don’t really know why.

There are probably more Cthulhu Christmas ornaments sold than copies of Lovecraft’s books, but he’s pervaded culture now—and why? I wanted to look at that.

Q: Did you go to Providence?

LK: Yes, absolutely. My first trip was the NecronomiCon that was held that summer. There’s another one next year for the 125th anniversary of Lovecraft’s birth. One of the things I loved about doing the research was to see the incredible amount of research that Lovecraft had done. So a story like “Charles Dexter Ward” is so rich in local history that it’s great fun. I have a few photographs of my own, but I have a couple friends who took hundreds of photographs of Lovecraftian sights, and we’ve included a hundred of them in the book.

This is one of the great treats of doing annotated things—I think of it as reverse engineering. When I was doing Sandman, I felt it would be cheating to pick up the phone—since I couldn’t call Arthur Conan Doyle or Bram Stoker—to call Neil and say, “What does this mean?” and “Why is this here?” and all that.

NG: Why have you got him reading a book of poetry that, according to everything I could find, was not published for another eight months? [Laughter]

LK: Well, OK, I nailed you on that one. But by and large it was really fun to do the research and say, “Look! There’s where Neil got that!” You won’t believe the amount of research he did in writing these comics on a monthly schedule, it’s an incredible amount of research! One of my favorites is from one of the first Hob Gadling stories, in which a minor character, an old woman prostitute named Lush Lou, wanders in, and I said, “Boy, does that ring a bell.” I discovered it was from a Victorian account of life on the streets published in 1850, and you had read it, and used it! So that’s a great joy to me, finding this sort of minutiae, if you will.

Q: Are there any movies that capture the spirit of Lovecraft?

NG: I would, oddly enough, just for the ending, point to Cabin in the Woods. Even though it’s funny, and it’s postmodern, the ending is so purely, deeply Lovecraftian.

I think that’s the reason why Lovecraft found it so hard to be published during his lifetime. The underlying spirit of American short story publishing was this wonderful can-do, we will work it out, people are smart, we will conquer things—it’s all about beating things, and winning. Lovecraft is all about going, “Even if we beat this one thing, we are but tiny specks doomed in an incomprehensible universe which hates us.” [Laughter] Which is sort of out of keeping with the can-do spirit of America.

LK: The pulp tradition was very much that brave young men saving large-breasted women sort of thing; Lovecraft hated the other writers in pulp, he didn’t want to be in that company, but it was the only place he could get published.

NG: I would say In the Mouth of Madness, that was an interestingly Lovecraftian movie—I wish Kim Newman were up here, because he would probably spout a bunch of films that you’d never have thought of—“Oh, Tarkovsky!”

LK: I just did a talk at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival, and I said, “I don’t think there’s ever been an adaptation of a Lovecraft story that has ever been successful.” They’re very difficult to film, because of the way the story’s told. But my favorite is John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is as Lovecraftian as it gets. I have high hopes for Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness, if it ever gets made.

Q: What do you think of Lovecraft incorporating the writing of earlier writers in his mythos?

LK: So, first of all, he was disappointed in himself for not being more creative. At one point of his career he said, “I see my Poe stories and I see my Dunsany stories—where are the Lovecraft stories?” Clearly, he was a great student of supernatural literature. He wrote a masterful essay called “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”

NG: A really, really good essay. It describes a lot of the threads. You can see people like Arthur Machen and how his story, “The Great God Pan,” is something that Lovecraft fed off.

LK: Absolutely. He was very open to being influenced by other writers.

NG: He was also good about crediting. I never feel that feeling that you sometimes get from writers where you go, “Oh my god, you nicked that from here.” He was always very open and generous about his influences. The essay sends you to places you might not otherwise go—he sends people to writers like Arthur Machen.

LK: And he was very unselfish about his own writing, as well. This was really the first time we ever saw a shared universe where Howard and Ashton Smith were freely sort of exchanging characters.

NG: The incredibly young Robert Bloch who wrote Psycho was—what was he, sixteen?—when he was corresponding with Lovecraft.

LK: Right. So these writers were very willing to co-create things, and pre-Internet, you know. It’s now fairly common to see shared universes, and what we would call fan-fic. This was professional fan-fic, I guess.

NG: One of the loveliest things about his willingness to share, as well, is that it meant that after his death, nobody who owned nor claimed to own nor claimed to control Lovecraft’s fiction ever stopped other people from doing something with the Lovecraft world, which I think is really kind of cool. That genie was already out of the lamp.

Q [from a 5-year-old girl]: I liked Coraline.

NG: Really? It wasn’t too scary?

LK: I take full credit for it. [Laughter]

NG: You know, it’s funny, because Les and I were having a cup of coffee before coming here to talk, and we were talking about H. P. Lovecraft in my stories; I was saying there are big, obvious ones, like “A Study in Emerald,” or whatever. But there are also much less obvious ones, and Coraline was one that I pointed to and said, “Really, that’s probably my most Lovecraftian story, even if it is a Lovecraftian story for little girls of all ages.”

LK: I have a problem with my grandchildren who want to read my books and I generally steer them away from them and point to Neil’s books instead. I said, “But not Sandman. You can’t read Annotated Sandman yet. Sorry.” Lovecraft probably, you know—baby Cthulhu? There’s a market there! But he didn’t go there. [Laughter]

NG: Lots of people have.

Q: What’s your favorite Lovecraft story?

LK: It’s At the Mountains of Madness, for me. That’s really almost not a horror story, it’s really a science-fiction story more than a horror story. If you want to put a label on it.

NG: Julius Schwartz, who was an editor at DC Comics, once told me very proudly that he had been Lovecraft’s agent, and that was Lovecraft’s only major professional sale, and he had done it. I quoted him on that in some introduction, and S.T. Joshi wrote an essay explaining that I was an idiot, [Laughter] and pointed to all these other places, and I’m going, “Well, it’s the guy who told me that who may have got it wrong.”

LK: It was in Amazing Stories. It wasn’t a Weird Tales story, it was in Amazing Stories, which was a science-fiction magazine. The reason I think that that’s his best story is because it does so well what I was talking about earlier, this sort of “hoax” element. It reads for most of the story like almost an academic report on a scientific expedition. The quantity of science in there is incredible—and, as far as I can tell, as a non-scientist annotator, accurate about the geological aspects of the Antarctic, and paleontological things, and so on. It builds up to this incredibly scary finish. So that’s my favorite.

NG: My favorite is probably “The Outsider,” because it was the first, and it was like being hit over the back of the head with an H. P. Lovecraft-shaped brick. Although, I think that beyond that there’s two others: “The Call of Cthulhu” itself, which, again, is a very strange story—it’s built up from a newspaper report, and it doesn’t really have a plot and a storyline and characters, it just convinces you, which I love—and then there’s a story, and I’ve forgotten the name of the story, it was actually finished by August Derleth. It’s one in which Derleth didn’t know that the correct spelling of “caiman,” the alligator, is C-A-I-M-A-N, not C-A-Y-M-A-N.

LK: Was that “The Lurker at the Threshold”?

NG: Yes, definitely something creepy. And it has a Gaiman. These Gaimans hang everywhere, people start turning into Gaimans. I was particularly fond of that. [Laughter]

LK: It’s not in the collection, it’s classed as a revision, and there’s none of the revisions in the book. There is an appendix that lists them all, if you want to track them down.

Q: Did either of you young guys see the Night Gallery episode with Professor Peabody’s last lecture?

NG: No, we didn’t!

Q: Lovecraft is a stuttering student. Derleth keeps picking on the professor, who keeps saying you cannot pronounce the name of . . . And at the very end the professor pronounces it, and becomes a monster.

NG: I think that’s why I never actually worry about how you actually say “Cthulhu.” Les is much more accurate than I am, he just says [mumbles incoherently] [Laughter], I just say Ka-Thu-Lu, because that looks about right. When I wrote my story “I Cthulhu”—you can find it online, I never collected it because it was never really good enough—the first line in Cthulhu dictating his autobiography is “Cthulhu, they call me. Great Cthulhu. Nobody can pronounce it right.” [Laughter]

The idea is, if ever you actually pronounce it correctly, rather like pronouncing the name of God in Jewish Kabbalistic thinking, the world ends, and you definitely turn into something incomprehensible, with too many tentacles.

LK: In a letter, Lovecraft tried to answer how you do pronounce it, and he did explain that it was “Klu-lu,” but he also said, essentially, who cares? It’s an unpronounceable name; that was the whole idea. It was not a human tongue that uttered this name.

NG: It’s something weird and whistle-y. Batrachian. [Laughter]

LK: Well, I want to thank this young writer for coming up to help me today. Thank you. Do you want to say something about not signing, or. . . ?

NG: Oh, I’ll sign. [Applause]

LK: You could sign my books! [Laughter]

NG: I will sit next to Les, and we’ll see how this goes. They do have books by me here. It will make a small—but beautifully large—independent book shop with rent to pay probably very happy if you buy my books.

LK: And you’ll want Klinger signed books, because they are really rare. [Laughter]

NG: Thank you so much for such great questions, everybody.

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