CD4, 50¢, August 1959. Cover artist unknown. 160 pp.

(This cover, like Tom Sawyer’s, seems to have been painstakingly traced and redone at some point in its first couple of years. Compare. In this case the above is the first version; subsequent editions (see below) use the recreated illustration.)

The dark places of the human soul — this is the region that Joseph Conrad so brilliantly explores. In the steaming jungles of the Congo or the vast reaches of the sea, it is man’s capacity for good and for evil that is his enduring theme.

Heart of Darkness tells of a powerful European, Kurtz, who reverts to awful savagery in an isolated native trading post.

The Secret Sharer describes the terrible conflict of a young captain who is torn between his duty to his ship and his loyalty to a young officer with whom he identifies himself after the murder of a mutinous crew member.

Compelling, vivid, exotic, suspenseful, these are among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language. “To make you hear, to make you feel, above all to make you see” — this was first and last, the aim of Conrad.

With an Introduction by Albert J. Guerard

I was assigned both of these in or around 10th grade, and read them in my trademark style, bounding over the text like a stone over water. A lot of description? Skip it. Somehow I was never properly taught how to read descriptive passages. My instincts told me that attempting to achieve visual effects in prose was futile, and I wished authors would know better than to try.

Here’s your first excerpt, the opening paragraph of The Secret Sharer:

On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach. To the left a group of barren islets, suggesting ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses, had its foundations set in a blue sea that itself looked solid, so still and stable did it lie below my feet; even the track of light from the westering sun shone smoothly, without that animated glitter which tells of an imperceptible ripple. And when I turned my head to take a parting glance at the tug which had just left us anchored outside the bar, I saw the straight line of the flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness, in one leveled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky. Corresponding in their insignificance to the islets of the sea, two small clumps of trees, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the river Meinam we had just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey; and, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye could rest from the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the horizon. Here and there gleams as of a few scattered pieces of silver marked the windings of the great river; and on the nearest of them, just within the bar, the tug steaming right into the land became lost to my sight, hull and funnel and masts, as though the impassive earth had swallowed her up without an effort, without a tremor. My eye followed the light cloud of her smoke, now here, now there, above the plain, according to the devious curves of the stream, but always fainter and farther away, till I lost it at last behind the miter-shaped hill of the great pagoda. And then I was left alone with my ship, anchored at the head of the Gulf of Siam.

No way would I have read any of these words, as a 10th-grader. I would just let my eyes drift down it, waiting to be stopped by the subliminal sparkle of an active verb — like looking for Waldo. He’s not here! Onward. And I still feel that temptation sometimes, to rush past the painting and get to the acting. But it turns out that when I force myself to stop, move very slowly word by word, and paint, I enjoy the task.

I think what I was never given the opportunity to learn is just how slow that work can be, compared to other reading. It’s counter-intuitive, after all, since in reality, imagery is taken in very quickly whereas action is intrinsically time-consuming. In prose nearly the opposite. Elementary school students ought to be given the assignment of reading passages like this and then actually drawing everything that’s described. (For all I know, maybe I was given that task, and then later decided on my own that it would be preferable to outrun it. Oops.)

Conrad limits large-scale paintings like the above to a few choice spots, but he’s not shy about taking the brush in hand. In addition to the visual effect I think it also creates an important psychological impression: the overabundance of words demanded by each picture suggest a narrative anxiety. Conrad and his narrators are overthinkers, in environments that give them plenty of space to run. When I was a kid, excess of detail felt like a miscalculation, but now that I’m an anxious adult I recognize the mental mode from which it springs: overdescription is what it feels like when too much conscious thought crowds each moment. All that noticing is a burden, even as it notices well and with pleasure, and in a sense, the weight and quality of that burden is what Conrad’s work is really about. What’s it like to be a man of the world, a man at sea, but be thinking and feeling all the damn time? It’s hard.

I went in a bit wary that Conrad might be a zone of masculinity in some off-putting, puffed sense — and indeed there is a marked “manliness” of both style and substance, but it never grates because he comes by it honestly, and also clearly has profound reservations about the whole package. Running silently through both of these stories was the subliminal implication that being a man is more or less the same thing as being traumatized. That, I think, is how biography, subject matter, and style ultimately link up. Heart of Darkness ends on this note: women wrongly believe that life is good and meaningful, but the prospect of actually destroying that illusion is too much, too depressing, for a man to go through with. Of course the woman and the man are both in his head.

Heart of Darkness seems to be a rendering of the most traumatizing experience of Conrad’s life, and it is indeed a masterpiece. I’m with the consensus on this one. For the first half of my reading I felt prepared to call it an “absolute masterpiece”; in the second half I had the sensation of there being some lumps in the pudding, and some burned bits. But that’s really a quibble. The scope of what Conrad takes on, here, and the ability to construct the thing so that it does in fact take it on, is to marvel at: nothing less than the equation of politics with philosophy with psychology, made concrete and harrowing, fully modern in 1899. Its grip is very firm.

“The horror! The horror!” is generally interpreted as being Kurtz’s report on a cosmic vision, his judgment on the soul of man and the nature of existence and all that; it’s all “a horror.” Sure. But I propose that he might equally and equivalently be describing an actual emotion, particular to him. An underlying horror is the impulse that has driven him in all his amorality, now finally laid bare to his self-awareness. And the deep resonance of the story, for its mesmerized witness Marlow/Conrad, is his own persistent inner sense of horror. That is, I’m again saying: there’s a whiff of PTSD here. “I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.” A wonderful phrase for a sad thing, from someone who knows.

The Secret Sharer pales in this company — it’s much smaller-scale, and simpler in technique and intent — but it’s still a forceful little story with a striking premise. It comes first and makes for a suitable opening act.

The two works are linked by psychological elements that I can’t help but note are also recurring themes in my Twilight Zone entries: the doppelgänger-projection of a detached inner self; the implicit menace of the world, of society, of one’s fellow man in all his unknowability. Rod Serling, as a soldier, had also been a bit traumatized. For what it’s worth.

Guerard’s introduction pushes a psychological interpretation, pretty similar to mine; it seems like the idea of pairing these two items into one volume might have been his. I felt his sale was maybe a little strong-armed for an introduction — hey, let us make up our own minds! — but it’s well-written enough.

Okay, since there were two works here, we’ll do a second excerpt too, from Heart of Darkness. Marlow has just arrived at a Belgian station in Congo and has found a chaotic scene of pointless activity, broken equipment, and brutality.

You know I am not particularly tender; I’ve had to strike and to fend off. I’ve had to resist and to attack sometimes — that’s only one way of resisting — without counting the exact cost, according to the demands of such sort of life as I had blundered into. I’ve seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men — men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther.

That nearly gave me chills, when I read it. These days I spend more than enough time contemplating the flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of rapacious and pitiless folly; I felt and knew exactly what he was talking about before he put the excellent words to it.

CP523, 60¢, 1972.
CT824, 75¢, 1975.
CQ1004, 95¢, 1977.
CY1221, $1.25, 1979.
CE1429, $1.75, 1980?

New branding and 70s typography to match.

CW1668, $1.50, 1982? (price drop!?)

Centered logo.

CW1668, $1.50, 1983?
CE1893, $1.75, 1983
CE2072, price unknown, 1986?
CE2321, $3.95, 1989?

Once again, a tasty 80s revamp. The terrifically atmospheric image (which wraps around, by the way) is credited in the book as “cover painting by Fritz Trupp,” but Fritz Trupp turns out to be not a painter but an anthropologist. I think there must have been some sort of miscommunication from the art department; surely what we’re looking at here is a photograph rather than a painting, presumably one extracted from Trupp’s book The Last Indians: South America’s Cultural Heritage, published in 1983, that same year.

In other words: it’s the wrong jungle. But that’s okay. It’s cinematic and it looks the part.

2657, $4.95, 1997

That was a great cover, but guys, we’ve got a problem: it’s too mysterious and engaging. How can we put a damper on that? I know, dump the palette, and blot out most of the visual interest with a big rectangle. There we go, now it looks dull as can be; in fact you can hardly even tell what you’re looking at anymore. Perfect.

Another late-90s downgrade. Joyce Carol Oates shows up to try to compensate, but to no avail: her comments are shallow and unenthusiastic; she doesn’t seem to like Conrad all that much. The only part where she perks up — distastefully so, to my mind — is when she goes through the motions of giving him a pointless drubbing for his supposed crimes against PC. She seems to really relish that. “I’m bringing all my scholarly skills to bear, here, so listen up: when you really break it down, this story is awfully Eurocentric in its worldview, tsk tsk tsk.” NO SHIT, CAROL! THAT’S THE STORY! I’m rolling my eyes just typing this.

3103, $4.95, 2008 (Now OOP)

This is simultaneously bland and garish, and is clearly just a tacky Photoshop manipulation of a bit of stock imagery, but let’s admit it: it could be worse. At least it’s trying to entice us. New piece by Vince Passaro is unpretentious and on point; as with Tom Sawyer, the most recent commission was the most rewarding to read. A pleasant surprise, that!

CD3, 50¢, August 1959. Cover artist unknown. 128 pp.

This remarkable book has been described in many ways — as a masterpiece… a fairy story… a brilliant satire… a frightening view of the future. A devastating attack on the pig-headed, gluttonous and avaricious rulers in an imaginary totalitarian state, it illuminates the range of human experience from love to hate, from comedy to tragedy. “A wise, compassionate and illuminating fable for our time… The steadiness and lucidity of Orwell’s wit are reminiscent of Anatole France and even of Swift.” — NEW YORK TIMES

With an Introduction by C.M. Woodhouse

Yeah! A classic that you can read in two hours! In and out!

This is a brilliant conception, cleanly executed. But it’s not half as timeless as people want to believe. The fabulist trappings seem to imply that a universal truth is being illustrated, but really it’s just a big political cartoon: the pigs could be wearing block-letter captions that say “Marx,” “Trotsky,” “Stalin.” So now that Stalin is long dead, what’s really the message for a modern reader? Does the book make the case that such pigs will always arise? Or just that one did, in that instance? We find in it what we want to find. One so wants it to be about the inevitable decay of revolution into tyranny… despite the fact that the way it’s constructed, it’s not about inevitabilities; it’s about personalities.

And even that only superficially. Why is Napoleon the Stalin-pig such a thoroughgoing tyrant? Why all the self-serving lies, the paranoia? What drives him? And what could have been done about it? The book doesn’t go there. Orwell’s intentions are more political than philosophical; he’s too furious about the state of affairs to really investigate the questions of porcine nature that ought to drive the thing. His purpose is just to call something out. “Hey, pay attention, everybody: this can happen, and in fact has happened.” Bigger claims aren’t made because it’s not at all clear that he would have wanted to make them. Everyone remembers that the book is anti-Stalinist but I think people tend to forget that it’s also more or less pro-socialist — as Orwell was. The whole thing hinges on a fundamentally Marxist metaphor, after all: that the working classes are to the bourgeoisie as farm animals are to farmers. Once you’ve nodded at that you’re already pinko.

I was very much with it, thrilling to the slow creep of tragedy, right up until the moment when Napoleon/Stalin emerged from the shadows, seized power and violently drove out Snowball/Trotsky. Suddenly the tragedy was no longer inevitable or cautionary: there was a shameless villain on the scene, on whom all future degradations could be blamed. I wanted to see ideals get eroded from within; I wanted to be shown that revolutions are psychologically insufficient, that the injustices of the social order cannot simply be opposed and conquered, because they continue to live deep inside the minds and expectations of the people. Instead I just got to see what happens when a bad guy takes over. I already knew what happens.

Not to say it wasn’t scary reading, at this particular historical moment. Oh, it’s scary, all right. I know I’m pretty resolutely anti-political on this blog, but let it not be thought that I’m so oblivious as to be able to read Animal Farm now without certain stuff coming to mind. People have been talking about 1984 seeming eerie and prescient and apropos, but this book seems to me even closer to what we’re watching on the news. The ruling monsters aren’t a massive techno-conspiracy; they’re sloppy and stupid and paranoid and shortsighted, a bunch of pigs driven by the pettiest vanities, playing with things they don’t understand, covering their asses in only the most absurd, infantile ways. And it seems to be working out for them.

I read this as a kid because the premise appealed so strongly. As did the tone of unrelenting deadpan. Charlotte’s Web as Lord of the Flies — of course I wanted to read that. But I remember the actual experience being frustrating. The book starts and ends as it should, I felt, but the stuff in between left me cold. Now I see that it’s because I didn’t know Russian history. I would have been incredibly dismayed to learn that it was a prerequisite. I guess I still find it disappointing. Couldn’t he have aimed higher and wider?

The book I imagined, the one I was hoping for — the one I think most people forcibly extract from this one and remember this one to be — is a better book. That book doesn’t quite exist. I can’t imagine that American public schools would be nearly so quick to assign this if they really thought it through and recognized it for what it is: a tract by and for Western socialists. But of course since it only takes two hours to read, it’s not too hard to hold on to the imaginary book you want it to be, as the real one zips by. Before you know it you’re alone with your imagined book again, undisturbed by Mr. Orwell. He mostly plays along, after all.

Excerpt:

Suddenly, early in the spring, an alarming thing was discovered. Snowball was secretly frequenting the farm by night! The animals were so disturbed that they could hardly sleep in their stalls. Every night, it was said, he came creeping in under cover of darkness and performed all kinds of mischief. He stole the corn, he upset the milk-pails, he broke the eggs, he trampled the seedbeds, he gnawed the bark off the fruit trees. Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball. If a window was broken or a drain was blocked up, someone was certain to say that Snowball had come in the night and done it, and when the key of the store-shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. Curiously enough, they went on believing this even after the mislaid key was found under a sack of meal. The cows declared unanimously that Snowball crept into their stalls and milked them in their sleep. The rats, which had been troublesome that winter, were also said to be in league with Snowball.

Napoleon decreed that there should be a full investigation into Snowball’s activities. With his dogs in attendance he set out and made a careful tour of inspection of the farm buildings, the other animals following at a respectful distance. At every few steps Napoleon stopped and snuffed the ground for traces of Snowball’s footsteps, which, he said, he could detect by the smell. He snuffed in every corner, in the barn, in the cow-shed, in the henhouses, in the vegetable garden, and found traces of Snowball almost everywhere. He would put his snout to the ground, give several deep sniffs, and exclaim in a terrible voice, “Snowball! He has been here! I can smell him distinctly!” and at the word “Snowball” all the dogs let out blood-curdling growls and showed their side teeth.

The animals were thoroughly frightened. It seemed to them as though Snowball were some kind of invisible influence, pervading the air about them and menacing them with all kinds of dangers.

Yup!

Progression of the Signet edition. Note that this section is particularly long because this baby, along with 1984, was Signet’s bread and butter for decades. The book isn’t in the public domain, and the Signet edition is more or less the preferred edition, certainly for schools. Selling this thing in quantity was undoubtedly a vital part of the New American Library business model. Hence the careful attention to its pricing over the years, evidenced by these many many incrementally inflated new editions:

CP121, 60¢, 1962.
CT304, 75¢, 1965.

First a couple more prices still with the cover design as above.

CQ605, 95¢, 1972.
CY749, $1.25, 1974.
CW1028, $1.50, 1977.
CE1469, $1.75, 1980.
CJ1679, $1.95, 1982?

The same design with minor adjustments for the new branding.

CJ1801, $1.95, 1982?

In the early 80s all the covers get overhauls; this is one of the only instances where the new cover retains the illustration from the old cover. Good call! That illustration is iconic and, I think, pretty much unimprovable. And the new stencil type is inspired. This is what a tasteful update looks like.

CJ1801, $1.95, 1983?
CE1900, $2.25, 1983?
CE2087, $2.50, 1986?
CE2156, $2.95, 1988?
CE2230, $3.50, 1989?
CE2466, $4.95, 1990?
CE2536, price unknown. 1991?

Then soon afterward the series branding is redone, so the design is rejiggered into this version. This lasts most of the 80s and 90s and is probably the most abundant at used bookstores. The copy I read was a CE2156 that looked like this. I approve. This was and remains an excellent book cover, and it well deserves its ubiquity. (The fence looks better with wider boards, don’t you think?)

2634, $5.95, 1996.

Uh-oh, it’s the 90s, mom, and as usual that’s bad news for book covers. The venerable 1959 illustration is being given a none-too-subtle hint that it’s kind of starting to feel “in the way,” if you know what I mean, no offense, and maybe might want to think about looking into one of those nice retirement homes, just a thought. But isn’t it so great that it’s still with us. Yes. Lifetime achievement awards all around.

Meanwhile it’s time to spice things up with a new piece of prefatory material (added to the old), this time by Russell Baker. It’s well done, though it dates itself by asserting as fact that the extreme pessimism of 40s-era literary prognostications about totalitarianism, like 1984, turned out to be “ludicrously wrong” — which he attributes to the authors having far overestimated the efficiency and intelligence of the regimes. How very 1996 of him! I mean, I’d still like to agree with “wrong,” but in this future year 2017, “ludicrously” is starting to sound a little overly brash. We’re still waiting and seeing, I think.

2634, $6.95, ~2000?

50th Anniversary has come and gone.

2634, $7.95, 2004.

Well, they had a nice run, but good old donkey and pig have finally been let go. Because it’s the 21st century and you know what that means: time to take the “classic” out of “Classics.” Now you’re waking up strapped to an operating table after a rough night at Fight Club, you can’t quite remember what happened, and a serial killer is holding a toy in your face. It’s millenial; it’s edgy; it’s raw. It’s Animal Farm, baby.

2634, $9.99, recent.

Okay, we made your book a little taller, because that’s the style these days. That’ll be 2 dollars, ma’am.

[The original and correct cover]

CD2, 50¢, August 1959. Cover artist unknown. 224 pp.

[Compare the above to this. The design is exactly the same, but if you look closely you’ll see that it’s all been redone from scratch! Whatever screw-up necessitated the redo, it seems to have happened early on: the linked image is the only one I can find online of what I guess must be the original version.]

Here is a light-hearted excursion into boyhood, a nostalgic return to the simple, rural Missouri world of Tom Sawyer and his friends Huck Finn, Becky and Aunt Polly. It is a dreamlike world of summertime and hooky, pranks and punishments, villains and desperate adventure, seen through the eyes of a boy who might have been the young Mark Twain himself. There is sheer delight in Tom Sawyer — even at the darkest moments affection and wit permeate its pages. For adults it recreates the vanished dreams of youth. For younger readers it unveils the boundaries of tantalizing horizons to still to come. And for everyone, it reveals the mind and heart of one of America’s greatly loved writers.

With an Afterword by George P. Elliott

Sure sure, Tom Sawyer. But wait… what is that, exactly? It turns out to be a very odd thing: a memoir-fantasy. Apart from Wes Anderson, I’m not sure I can think of any other works in the genre. This is a book where the author’s memories of real life and of make-believe life are treated as equal. Tom and Huck quixotically get it in their heads that they should dig around town for buried treasure, “as boys will”… and then lo and behold they find buried treasure. It’s like the authorial hand of god keeps reaching in to give his younger self every crazy thing he ever dreamed of, curious to see how he’ll react. Autobiography as ant farm.

It’s common in therapy to ask the adult to comfort the child it remembers once having been: time-travel communion for healing long-ago wounds. Mark Twain is stumbling his way around something similar here, on instinct — but he doesn’t seem interested in healing. All wounds remain untouched. There are strange blurry omissions throughout this book and Twain is committed to keeping his gaze averted. (What, for example, happened to Tom’s parents?) His agenda is more like a benediction: I have decided that it is good that it was thus, and so I am bestowing upon my past the greatest gift I can think of, which is for it to be rendered in the register of a kitschy magazine story with wry observations sprinkled throughout. Amen.

Apparently he originally set out to write a kind of bitter Remembrance of Things Past, a “before and after” in which remorseless time would devour all the promise of youth… but then somewhere in the middle of the writing process decided that “before” might just as well stand alone. An absurd creative decision that I think qualifies as an emotional stroke of genius. Clearly all he ever really wanted to do was take a sentimental journey; he just felt the need to rationalize it as part of something angry and adult. Then once it was underway the rationalization fell away as inessential. A lesson there for all of us. Perhaps.

However: the other shoe, which never drops, is still implicit. The whole book has an evasive, unsettled quality; heartfelt reverie shades into pat sentimentalism, which shades into snark, and then back again. Plus occasional spurts of real horror. This is not a carefully composed work with a clear vision; rather it’s fairly direct access to the inner world of a complex personality, working it all out as he goes. It’s an improvisation at every level, a formless bedtime story he’s telling to hypnotize himself. It obviously all has intense personal significance; and that’s a kind of force. But the force isn’t contained or focused.

For these reasons and others, kids shouldn’t be assigned this book. This is one of the books that, in 5th or 6th grade, taught me to read badly. Rereading it now brought back a sense memory from those days: the words on the page felt slippery, refusing to hold my gaze. My eyes would involuntarily drift down the page looking for the meat, eliding entire paragraphs, pages. The memory came back because the sensation arose again: the author isn’t being quite straight with the reader or with himself; I want to get to the part where he really means what he says. The problem of it is that he doesn’t want to get there. He’s got other fish to fry: beautiful dream-fish fished out of the dream-river on a homemade pole, sitting shoeless side by side with his imaginary friends. That’s all well and good but it’s not a story. As with Adolphe, the intentions aren’t actually literary.

Really none of this book is a story: it’s a collection of dream-images. Teaching it to kids as though it constitutes a story is bad education. There’s a reason Aesop is about animals and not people: kids need to be clearly cued to distinguish between a tableau and a true event, because they’re going to read everything as event anyway.

Here are the sounds of other fish frying: Ain’t it just darling; ain’t it just so. Ain’t that just the way. Don’t it just go to show. And when you think about it ain’t we all a bit like that.

That’s the crackle of non-story.

Also I consider it to be a point of moral principle that children ought never be encouraged to fantasize about being splendidly childlike. Any reading experience is inevitably a fantasy; a book wherein young boys dream of being pirates and ho ho ho yum yum yum isn’t that just marvelous is a much less wholesome object of investment, for a child, than a book about actual pirates.

(And I’m not going to even attempt to address the many problems with assigning kids to read about Injun Joe — who, in addition to stabbing a man dead right in front of Tom’s eyes, and later dying an incredibly agonizing death of starvation, at one point announces his plans to mutilate the widow Douglas: “You slit her nostrils — you notch her ears like a sow!” Good god! Did I really read that in 5th grade? The answer, probably, is that my eyes drifted past it, always questing for something better, more real.)

Now, of course, I’m an adult and free of the tyranny of being instructed by every book I read. So how are these, as dream-images go? They’re not bad. They have some depth, some draw. I found the reading experience gradually became compelling, as I worked my way through the various disjointed episodes and came to develop an intuition for the weird, unsteady rhythm of the thing, for the man behind the curtain.

“The man behind the curtain” is a pretty good point of reference, actually. Professor Marvel is pulling these strings exactly because he’s afraid that his nostalgia is actually all humbug. Similarly it arrives only at a tentatively hopeful confusion: quintessentially American. “And if you ever go looking for your heart’s desire… something something… um… there’s no place like home. Right? Right?”

At the end, when Tom and Becky lose themselves in a fantastical maze of caves, first wandering deeper and deeper through caverns of undiscovered wonders, and then alone and starving for three days in absolute darkness… I was strangely moved. It was so tonally incongruous that it felt significant: like the dreamer had stumbled on something within himself, an unexpected pocket of fear and loneliness in the dreamlife of nostalgia. Maybe at its heart.

This is a weird and fascinating text. It has real aesthetic value; I got something out of it. It’s also misshapen, overwhelmingly personal, inescapably of its time, and not entirely sympathetic. It ought not to be a childhood classic, but what can you do.

Excerpt. Here’s Mark Twain closely resembling a thing that he will elsewhere mock and parody. But as long as the others are still asleep and can’t see him, his heart will sing, with all the woodland creatures. Like Snow White. I think this passage is sweet, because I can tell he means it and feels it. But would HE be able to tell? I think he’d be far more suspicious of such stuff. The book is an uneasy attempt to reckon with the memory of joy. Here’s some of the joy, expressed as best he could figure out how.

When Tom awoke in the morning, he wondered where he was. He sat up and rubbed his eyes and looked around. Then he comprehended. It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature’s meditation. Beaded dewdrops stood upon the leaves and grasses. A white layer of ashes covered the fire, and a thin blue breath of smoke rose straight into the air. Joe and Huck still slept.

Now, far away in the woods a bird called; another answered; presently the hammering of a woodpecker was heard. Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy. A little green worm came crawling over a dewy leaf, lifting two-thirds of his body into the air from time to time and “sniffing around,” then proceeding again — for he was measuring, Tom said; and when the worm approached him, of its own accord, he sat as still as a stone, with his hopes rising and falling, by turns, as the creature still came toward him or seemed inclined to go elsewhere; and when at last it considered a painful moment with its curved body in the air and then came decisively down upon Tom’s leg and began a journey over him, his whole heart was glad — for that meant that he was going to have a new suit of clothes — without the shadow of a doubt a gaudy piratical uniform. Now a procession of ants appeared, from nowhere in particular, and went about their labors; one struggled manfully by with a dead spider five times as big as itself in its arms, and lugged it straight up a tree-trunk. A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said, “Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children’s alone,” and she took wing and went off to see about it — which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once. A tumblebug came next, heaving sturdily at its ball, and Tom touched the creature, to see it shut its legs against its body and pretend to be dead. The birds were fairly rioting by this time. A catbird, the Northern mocker, lit in a tree over Tom’s head, and trilled out her imitations of her neighbors in a rapture of enjoyment; then a shrill jay swept down, a flash of blue flame, and stopped on a twig almost within the boy’s reach, cocked his head to one side and eyed the strangers with a consuming curiosity; a gray squirrel and a big fellow of the “fox” kind came skurrying along, sitting up at intervals to inspect and chatter at the boys, for the wild things had probably never seen a human being before and scarcely knew whether to be afraid or not. All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.

The old Signet afterword by George P. Elliott is chatty and shallow. Shallow in a ballsy sort of way; you can imagine him confidently cranking it out in an hour, off the top of his head, without bothering to do any research. Yeah, yeah, Tom Sawyer.

The 1876 first edition of this book was published with hundreds of lovely illustrations by True Williams, of which Mark Twain heartily approved. It’s frankly indefensible that they are not generally retained in reprints. (The Modern Library edition and the University of California edition are the only ones I found that currently offer the illustrations.) No offense to Signet, but this is really how this book ought to look. Since puzzling out the spirit of this performance is such an important part of the reading experience, the packaging matters.

Future of the Signet edition:

CD2, 50¢, ~1970.
CP747, 60¢, 1974.
CT845, 75¢, 1975.
CQ978, 95¢, 1978.
CY1165, $1.25, 1979.
CW1337, $1.50, 1981.

The original design is tweaked to accommodate the new series branding.

CW1337, $1.50, 1982?
CE1962, $1.75, 1985.
CE2355, $2.25, 1988.

Somewhere around 1982 the branding is redone again, and this new cover illustration is commissioned. I like it. (Huckleberry Finn got a matching one.)

It’s unsigned and no artist is credited. I tried hard to identify the painter. After a lot of digging, my best guess — ultimately based on the signature on Pudd’nhead Wilson cover from around the same time — is that I guess it’s maybe Robert Lapsley?

[2022 edit: Confirmed! The “Lapsley” signature is in fact visible in the corner of the very first such printing of Huckleberry Finn, but cropped out in all subsequent print runs.]

Should they be allowed to get away with dropping the word “The” from the title? I’m not sure. The important thing is that they did. They got away with it.

2653, $4.95, April 1997.

With a New Introduction by Robert Tilton (replacing the Elliott afterword).

Yikes, 1997, that’s a pretty hard drop down! From a lavish original illustration to a white cover with a cramped inset of an over-familiar painting. At least we got the “The” back, now gripped in place with little brackets, to make sure it doesn’t get lost again.

3093, $4.95, May 2008. Currently out of print.

With a New Afterword by Geoffrey Sanborn (and retaining the Tilton introduction. I read both of these, by the way. The Tilton is a bit stiff, but inoffensive. The Sanborn I thought was actually quite good; definitely the best of the three Signet-commissioned pieces.)

This cover is embarrassing too, for different reasons. First of all the DISTORTION VERY MUCH PLAYFUL TYPOGRAPHY SUCH AS IN STYLE OF CHILDLIKE HUMAN, ALSO PLEASE TO READ AUTHOR’S NAME AT BOTTOM. LOVE, PHOTOSHOP. Second of all “Tom” himself: what exactly is he doing? The answer may surprise you.

You can understand the designer’s excitement at stumbling across the work at of John George Brown. This has GOT to be the spot, right? It’s scamp city! It’s ragamuffin central! Surely, SURELY one of these hundreds of hateful little fuckers can be Tom Sawyer. Just can’t be too poor or too black or too urban or be, um, doing anything in particular. Or be with a goddamn doggie… Hm. Harder than you’d think. Okay, well, fine, this one, if we crop it down, he looks like maybe he’s… I dunno, about to grab a canary or something. He’s about to get up to mischief, right? And “mischief” is one of my keywords! Done. Print.

[The original and correct cover]

CD1, 50¢, August 1959. Cover artist unknown. 160 pp.

Back cover:

In these two remarkable works, a brilliant, vain, long-suffering Frenchman describes the first twenty years of his life and their culmination in a tortured love affair with an older, possessive woman of the world. Benjamin Constant attempted to conceal the fact that these two books were autobiographical. But to his familiars, it was clear that he himself was Adolphe. And in the intimate account of his strange liaison with Ellénore, he may well have been protesting against his inexorable bondage to his fiery, demanding mistress, Madame de Staël. Constant was an able parliamentarian, a champion of liberalism and the author of the History of Religion. But posterity remembers him as the man who bared the anatomy of a destructive passion in the story of Adolphe.

With an Introduction by Harold Nicolson

I was at The Strand and found a used copy (requiescat in pace Eve Auchincloss) of not the Signet itself but the 1948 edition which the Signet reprints in its entirety. Unlike nearly ever other title in the Signet Classics catalog, this one was never reissued as such, though it seems to have appeared briefly in 1986 as a “Meridian Classic” from the same publisher. (No cover available online.)

I like a little book that grabs one’s attention between its teeth, shakes it roughly a bit, very soon loses interest, puts it down and trots off. A book like an animal wrote it. Benjamin Constant is much too raw and needy to concern himself with any aspirational tedium that would waste my time. He’s got axes to grind; he’s writing as therapy, not for art. He can’t be bothered to pad this thing out. Good, say I.

This is a fine example of a familiar but unheralded genre: real-life confessional self-absorption shamelessly passed off as literary fiction. Examples are submitted daily as “my novel” to uneasy writing teachers the world over. I guess officially we’re supposed to shake our heads at such stuff, but maybe let’s all admit something: when you’re not stuck in a writing class with the author, and don’t have to give reader feedback — or even reader tact — navel-gazing myopia can actually be quite compelling. (“So, yeah, Marcel, I really liked it! Some of the dialogue was really funny! I just… I guess… I would have maybe liked to get a little more information about… the, um, narrator character?”)

Benjamin Constant isn’t really asking for affection, just attention. Fair. And it’s not a marathon, just a novella; it can afford to be one-note. It’s a very peculiar note, so it feels natural that it should get a whole volume to itself — a nicely slim volume. His anti-heroic self-obsession has its own distinctive flavor; it felt new to me, though I guess Knausgaard had a similar quality: he plumbs self-disgust with an ease and confidence that seem quietly to contradict it.

Lord Byron: “it leaves an unpleasant impression.” Indeed it does. In an engaging way. It’s like a piece of sour candy. My genuine thrills of “my god! Adolphe, c’est moi” alternated throughout with “oh for crying out loud.” That kind of alternation is queasy; the line it crosses is a sensitive one for anyone. And so it felt obscurely edifying, even if I have to admit that in retrospect I come away fairly unedified.

People out there will summarize Adolphe by saying that unlike the many books about being in love, this is one of the very few books about being not in love. That’s okay as far as it goes but it sort of misses the point: the book catalogs a series of emotional states in a way that is too agonizingly fine-grained to allow for comfortable application of the concept of “love,” one way or the other. It charts the psychological territory differently.

I’d be interested to read psychoanalyses of Constant. Seems like he would have been interested too. The book is more or less begging for it. And his vaguely Proustian psychological comments seem to me strikingly ahead of their time.

Reading Adolphe I honestly did think I had found something strangely c’est moi more than others. Then “The Red Notebook” — essentially an abandoned memoir draft — recasts the same foibles as a different kind of cringe comedy: an avalanche of absurd profligacy, which made me chuckle and squirm more confusedly. Is this in any way moi? Can I recognize myself in this mirror? Not as readily. God I hope not. “The Red Notebook” seems to be much less often reprinted than Adolphe — it’s really just a fragment — but I found it equally compelling.

Excerpt will be the one I’ve already typed up for several people. But now I type it up for me:

In my father’s house I had adopted, in regard to women, a rather immoral attitude. Although my father strictly observed the proprieties, he frequently indulged in frivolous remarks concerning affairs of the heart: he looked on them as excusable if not permissible amusements, and considered nothing in a serious light, save marriage. His one principle was that a young man must studiously avoid what is called an act of folly, that is to say, contracting a lasting engagement with a person who is not absolutely his equal in regard to fortune, birth and outward advantages; he saw no objection — provided there was no question of marriage — to taking any woman and then leaving her; and I have seen him smile with a sort of approbation at this parody of a well-known saying: It hurts them so little and gives us so much pleasure!

It is not sufficiently realized how deep an impression can be made in early youth by sayings of this sort, and to what extent, at an age when every opinion appears dubious and unsettled, children are amazed at finding the clear rules they have been taught contradicted by jokes which win general applause. In their eyes those rules cease to be anything but banal precepts which they parents have agreed upon and which they repeat to children out of a mere sense of duty, whilst the jokes appear to hold the real key to life.

I also want to bank this splendid phrase: “With the furious courage of a coward in revolt.”

Thumbs up.

PS. Laying this out now for future reference:

In 1948, the American office of Penguin Books separated from its British parent company and became an independent publisher called New American Library. They called their fiction imprint “Signet,” their non-fiction “Mentor” (corresponding to Penguin’s division between “Penguin” and “Pelican”).

The Signet Classics series wasn’t launched until 1959. It received an independent numbering system, beginning here with “CD1.” The C is of course for “Classics” — they’re all gonna start with that — and the “1” is the number of this issue within the Classics series.

The “D” refers to the pricing scheme: back when Signet started out, standard Signets were 25¢ and a few special double-width editions were twice that. Seems like the “D” for “Double” stuck around meaning 50¢ even after inflation had eliminated the 25¢ base price. We’ll also see T for 75¢ and Q for 95¢, which follow similar logic. But then over the years there will eventually also be P for 60¢, Y for $1.25, W for $1.50, J for $1.95, and finally E for all other prices. If anyone has good guesses for what those might stand for, bring ’em.

Hello broomlet lovers and hate-readers alike.

I am proud to announce that after nearly 11 years in service (and, of late, more than two years of worrying silence), the “Western Canon” reading list project is being repealed and replaced.

Need I explain why? I think I needn’t. Quite simply: The American people deserve better.

For those of you who were curious: the final, incomplete assignment was Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. Which, from what I’ve read of it, isn’t bad. I need you to understand that this divorce is not your fault, Baudelaire. Let’s be very clear: it’s Harold Bloom’s fault. He betrayed our trust.

“But you knew I was a snake when you picked my lisssssst!” Well, it’s true, what the man says. I need to accept some blame here too. We all do, in a sense. But let’s move beyond that. Healing is more important right now.

That’s repeal. Replace is:

The Signet Classics!

If you can’t beat the mass market, join it. Take that, Harold.