THE PHILOSOPHER ARTHUR Schopenhauer wrote of the sadness of reading publishers’ catalogues, knowing that in 10 years’ time every book will have sunk without a trace. For most books, such a fate is natural and expected. But every reader has a list of literary shipwrecks that deserve resurrection: not always masterpieces, perhaps, but excellent works that somehow failed to make their mark.

One day, e-publishing may ensure that no book ever goes out of print. But even then, readers will need someone to point out the few diamonds in the miles of rough. In fact, as publishing becomes cheaper and easier, the role of the editor becomes more important, not less. The best editors have always been intelligent judges, trustworthy recommenders; in a sea of WebLogs and Amazon.com reviews, they are needed now more than ever.

That’s why the New York Review of Books Classics series is one of the most exciting recent developments in publishing. Under the editorial direction of Edwin Frank, the series draws on the magazine’s expertise to pick neglected favorites and bring them back into print. Launched in 1999, the series now includes some 75 titles, each with a new introduction by such contemporary writers as Susan Sontag and Lydia Davis. The books are attractively designed paperbacks, and most sell in the $12-to-$15 range.

Simply reading through the list from beginning to end would provide a rare education. The fiction includes lesser-known works by Balzac, James, Turgenev, and Shchedrin, as well as by 20th-century masters like Italo Svevo, Cesare Pavese, and Alberto Moravia. It also includes a number of fine English and American novelists: Ivy Compton-Burnett, J.F. Powers, Richard Hughes, Sylvia Townsend Warner. The nonfiction titles are also a revelation: Trelawny’s memoirs of Byron and Shelley, Auden’s idiosyncratic selection of Kierkegaard, and An African in Greenland, an anthropological adventure story by Tete-Michel Kpomassie. You have a lot to choose from, in short, so here are four excellent ways to get started on the series.

THERE COULD be no better choice from the NYRB Classics than The Quest for Corvo ($12.95; introduced by A.S. Byatt), a neglected book about the author of neglected books. In fact, A.J.A. Symons begins his "experiment in biography" by recalling a discussion of books "that miss their just reward of praise and influence." Fatefully, Symons’s friend asked him if he had read Hadrian the Seventh, a bizarre novel by a man known only as "Fr. Rolfe." Symons was bowled over by the book, and set out to learn the story of its author.

As Symons soon discovered, the "Fr." stood for "Frederick," not "Father," and this ambiguity perfectly symbolized Rolfe’s strange life. Born a petty-bourgeois Anglican, he played the roles of priest, aristocrat, and artist, though never quite successfully. Rolfe’s first ambition was to be a Catholic priest, but he was dismissed from two seminaries for his feckless extravagance. This disappointment was the first in a long series and led to the persecution complex that made him such a fascinating and sinister character. He covered himself in pseudonyms — "Baron Corvo" was allegedly bestowed on him by an Italian duchess — but his true nature always broke through: everywhere he went, he fell into the same pattern of debt, betrayal, and recrimination. Only his books, especially Hadrian the Seventh, were successful, though not commercially: Rolfe died a pauper, pimping young boys to English visitors in Venice.

But this man, who made so many enemies in life, achieves a form of immortality in Symons’s biography. The Quest for Corvo is groundbreaking in its self-consciousness: it lays bare the biographer’s techniques — his soliciting letters and revelatory conversations — as well as the gaps and failures that keep one mind from ever truly knowing another. Through it all, Symons remains a model of sensitive sympathy. He loves the miserable Corvo with a wary but forgiving affection, and by the end of the book, so does the reader.

FITTINGLY, THE Classics series has also republished the book that launched Symons’s quest, Hadrian the Seventh ($14.95; introduced by Alexander Theroux). It is transparently a work of revenge fantasy and wish fulfillment by a thwarted man, and is therefore absurd; but Rolfe writes with such conviction that even its absurdity seems valuable. Frederick William Rolfe is transposed into George Arthur Rose, a failed seminarian who is now "tired, worn out by years of hope deferred." But that hope is spectacularly rewarded when a Cardinal-Archbishop descends upon his hovel to apologize and offer him ordination; immediately after, the Cardinals in Rome break a stalemate by choosing him as Pope. From that eminence, Rolfe/Rose literally pontificates about Catholicism, world politics, and the iniquities of his enemies. There are tirades in defense of Mary Queen of Scots and against German socialism, and high-camp lectures on design ("Hadrian was wondering why people will persist in using diamonds by themselves instead of as a setting for colored stones"). The style, too, is resolutely personal: Rolfe spells Sistine "Xystine" and coins words like "tolutiloquence" and "contortuplicate." The novel is too rarefied and obsessive ever to become a classic, but anyone who appreciates Pater, Wilde, and Firbank will find it a hidden treasure — as did Symons.

THERE ARE very many people," wrote Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, "who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking." Reading Lichtenberg, on the other hand, positively forces you to think; like all the best aphorisms, his are little depth charges for the mind, slight things with wide repercussions. The Waste Books ($12.95; introduced by R.J. Hollingdale) collects the random thoughts he jotted down in his notebooks over 30 years, from his student days until his death in 1799. Lichtenberg was a German professor of physics, a popular lecturer, and a well known Anglophile, but it took the posthumous publication of these notebooks to promote him to the rank of philosopher. He was praised by Nietzsche, and it is easy to see why: like his famous successor, he had an acerbic, skeptical intelligence, perfectly suited to the aphoristic form. Much of the time he is insistently rational, a true product of the Enlightenment; he has no patience for nationalism ("From love of fatherland they write stuff that gets our dear fatherland laughed at") or superstition ("One Pope excommunicated people who believed in the antipodes"), and he makes war on the ignorant ("Non cogitant, ergo non sunt"). But at other times his observations are surprisingly comic ("The ass seems to me like the horse translated into Dutch"), and he has a markedly tragic sense of human nature: "From the folly of the people in Bedlam it should have been possible to infer more of what man is than has been done hitherto." His sentences do not build a system, but make raids on the truth, each time bringing back something strange and exhilarating.

IN THE Alfred Hitchcock classic Shadow of a Doubt, two minor characters constantly discuss how they would commit the perfect murder, trading stories from true-crime magazines, while a real murderer hides out under their noses. It’s a good joke on the writers and readers of murder stories, fictional and nonfictional: only in a genteel and peaceful society could murder become the subject of a hobby, like stamp collecting.

There was no greater connoisseur of murder than William Roughead. A lawyer and criminologist, Roughead attended every major trial held in Edinburgh from 1889 to 1949, writing them up into a series of best-selling books. Classic Crimes ($14.95; introduced by Luc Sante) is a selection of 12 of his case studies, most dealing with sensational Scottish murders from the last three centuries. Whether Roughead is merely doing research in court archives, as in "Katherine Nairn," or was actually a participant, as in the unjust trial of Oscar Slater, he writes with the same cool intimacy and macabre wit. He is unshocked by lust, jealousy, and hatred; what really raises his ire is incompetent police work or corrupt judges, which he discovers everywhere.

Nairn, for instance, was the young wife of a middle-aged Scottish laird who died under suspicious circumstances in 1765. It seems that Katherine was a little too close to her husband’s brother, a dashing officer who stood to inherit the title. Yet Roughead makes it clear that she was convicted largely on the testimony of one Anne Clark, who herself was involved with the third brother — a shady character and a bigamist. Roughead is ironic, yet damning, about the court trial, which lasted 43 hours straight, and during which members of the jury shouted down the defense witnesses and chatted with the prosecutors. Clark managed to get the middle brother executed, clearing the way for herself and her paramour — only to be disappointed when he fell from a window and died just after the trial. It is the kind of sordid story that we read about in the tabloids or see on Court TV. But it takes a cool chronicler like Roughead to see in such a tale all the meanness and black comedy of human nature.

Adam Kirsch can be reached at abkirsch@aol.com.

Issue Date: November 27 - December 7, 2001

Back to the Books table of contents.