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One of my guilty pleasures is reading outdated collections of essays and the like. Sometimes you discover forgotten treasures: A. A. Milne's essay on The Wind in the Willows, for example, or Edward Mott Woolley's writer's-autobiography, Free-Lancing for Forty Magazines. Then again, however, you may come up with Grant Overton's Cargoes for Crusoes, a 1924 guide to what Overton deemed the best fiction of the times.
In all fairness, he did hit upon a few writers with staying power: Aldous Huxley, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton, most notably, though he was a little condescending toward Ms. Wharton and most of her gender. The bulk of the book is taken up by writers who are, I fear, little remembered today: Philip Gibbs, Melville Davisson Post (author of the Uncle Abner detective stories), Cosmo Hamilton, E. V. Lucas, Courtney Ryley Cooper... and Thomas Dixon, author of the Clansman trilogy of novels "undoing the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and giving the deferred answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin." The first of which D. W. Griffith turned into The Birth of a Nation.
The fact that these authors were all once household names and many of them quite wealthy as a result should teach humility to even the most successful of today's writers.
So much work went into this book! Yet, now that I've read it, it's going into the Wee Free Library out front of our house. There to await another antiquarian reader of dubious tastes.
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5 comments:
Dixon I know of, and am glad he's forgotten (save by historians). But I am curious about your attitude towards the rest. You draw the "all glory is fleeting" moral, and yes, most certainly. But the existence of an old collection of essays with a bunch of forgotten names makes *me* wonder if any of them are any good! Do you have any idea? Are you at all curious? I always think about how Melville was all-but-forgotten in the decades after his death only to be rediscovered in (if memory serves) the 1920s. What if one of them is, or ought to be, the next Melville?
Ellery Queen spoke as with a single voice to term the Uncle Abner stories "an out-of-this-world target for future detective-story writers," and said Uncle Abner was "the greatest fictional detective of all time."
And Thomas Dixon is of course well known to history majors of the 1960s. I once found a copy of his novel "The Leopard's Spots," whose title reveals all.
The others? Lost to history?
Opinions can vary on the Uncle Abner stories. Grant Overton gushed about the perfection of one in particular, a locked-room mystery. So I read it online. The man was murdered by a flaw in the glass window creating a hot-spot that touched off a loaded musket leaning against the wall at the exact right angle to kill the loathsome victim. So, as Uncle Abner solemnly declared, he had been murdered by God. I didn't think it was a very good story, much less an unforgettably perfect one.
It's possible some of the others were of interest. But while Overton slathered them with butter and caramel, he didn't make them sound interesting enough for me to bother with.
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