Literary anniversaries, Sherlock Holmes in the pub, Clare Quilty at the Grolier
By M. C.
For the benefit of the literary journalists amid our readers, we like to turn at this time of year to survey the coming round of bookish anniversaries – those beguiling opportunities for today’s would-be lions to roar in honour of their mighty forebears. Or perhaps to snarl at them in disapproval? The would-be lion must move with the times, after all.
Round numbers are easiest for the beleaguered commissioning editor to contemplate. Tempt her with a century of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (published in April 1925) and, likewise, a century of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (May). Also worth consideration, and of the same vintage: “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot and The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein. Ought you to mention Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler – or retreat to Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse? The two together, perhaps. Either way, don’t forget that 2025 is also a century on from the births of Gerald Durrell, Yukio Mishima, Flannery O’Connor, William Styron and Gore Vidal – to name but a significant few.
Eighteenth-century experts: there’s always Alexander Pope’s edition of Shakespeare and the first volumes of his translation of the Odyssey (both 1725); though neither might be reckoned to be Pope at his best. The Romanticist may have more luck with The Spirit of the Age by William Hazlitt; and maybe there is still a little to be said about the first edition of Pepys’s Diary, edited by Lord Braybrooke.
Eventually, alas, the littérateur may have to look up the publications of fifty years ago. Dust down your paperback of The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury or High-Rise by J. G. Ballard; prepare to make a case for Charles Bukowski’s Factotum or John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Away from the chaps, 1975 happens to have been the year of Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The Female Man by Joanna Russ and Corregidora by Gayl Jones. Not bad going?
Presumably we have overlooked some author or work of awful importance; our readers will kindly tell us so. We can only plead that we are fully aware that John Buchan was born on August 26, 1875, mere weeks after the birth of Edmund Clerihew Bentley (July 10), who was not only the inventor of the clerihew but the author of three volumes of the things.
And no, we have not forgotten that a certain Jane Austen was born almost 250 years ago, on December 16, 1775. Jane Austen’s House in Chawton reminded us of this fact when it opened a new permanent exhibition, Jane Austen and the Art of Writing, back in October. There is a year to go until the novelist’s bicentenary, but the museum’s celebrations will run throughout the year. There will be mini-festivals devoted to Pride and Prejudice in January, Sense and Sensibility in May, Emma in July and Persuasion in September. If there was an announcement about Mansfield Park, we missed it. Has it been overlooked? All the better, if so, for the critic who yearns to make a case for its obvious superiority.
Literary pubs have proved to be a predictably fruitful theme. This has meant pubs in fiction for the most part. G. Thomas Tanselle writes from New York to note that “in the mid-1960s I went to a pub near Charing Cross that had an exhibition of Sherlock Holmes and issued a catalogue of it”. This is the Sherlock Holmes on Northumberland Street, which, in its former guise as the Northumberland Arms, makes a guest appearance in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”; and it is “still flourishing”. “I wonder if my 1960s catalogue is now a rarity, and if there are other so-called themed pubs with literary themes that had exhibition catalogues and that still exist.”
East of the Embankment there are literary pubs such as Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, the Wheatsheaf and the George – but have any of them gone as far as the Sherlock Holmes in honouring regulars such as Charles Dickens, George Orwell et al? We fear not. Some, indeed, seem to place somewhat less value on these connections than others.
So could it be that the Sherlock Holmes is a unique instance? Tell us, and Mr Tanselle, if you know otherwise.
The book pictured above may or may not exist – we only have Humbert Humbert’s word for it.
In Lolita, you will recall, Vladimir Nabokov’s reliably unreliable narrator notes that his enemy Clare Quilty is the author of a book called The Lady Who Loved Lightning, written “in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom”). Who or what Quilty is we should not say, for the sake of those who have not yet read Lolita; but the name of Quilty’s collaborator, we hope it is fair to point out, is an authorial anagram. We are all too much in the presence here of what certain literary scholars like to call the “ludic”.
Now The Lady Who Loved Lightning has taken up temporary residence at the Grolier Club in New York. Imaginary Books: Lost, unfinished and fictive works found only in other books is a witty exhibition curated by Reid Byers, the author of The Private Library: The history of the architecture and furnishing of the domestic bookroom. A “post-structuralist project”, it runs to more than 100 imaginary books, and seems to offer much to contemplate in terms of literature’s ever-flimsy hold on reality.
“Every book in the world was an imaginary book when it was first begun to be written”, Mr Byers says. It’s just that some books stay imaginary – or return to being so. Among other lost, unfinished and fictive works, his exhibition boasts “copies” of Love’s Labour’s Won (Shakespeare’s sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost), Byron’s memoirs (condemned to John Murray’s fireplace) and Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure (about “a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer”). You have until February 15 to glimpse the impossible at 47 East 60th Street.