Book News, Good and Bad

Let's start with the good news.

It's been announced (I stumbled over it in Amazon.com, but it's discussed at length at the blog of National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors) that the Library of America will be publishing in October two volumes of the literary journalism and criticism of Edmund Wilson, perhaps the last century's finest all-around man of letters.

The first volume ("Literary Essays Reviews of the 1920s and 1930s") will contain The Shores of Light (Wilson's collection of literary journalism from the 1920s) as well as Axel's Castle, his pioneering book on Symbolism that helped make somewhat accessible to an Anglophone readership such formidable writers as James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein. The second volume ("Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 1940s") will contain The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow and his collection of literary journalism from the 1940s, Classics and Commercials.

I can't tell you how welcome, or how overdue, these two volumes are. The fact is that the Library of America, which came into being in 1982, a decade after Wilson's death, was pretty much Wilson's idea. He dreamed of having an American equivalent of France's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, where what the French call the œuvres complètes of classic American writers would be permanently available on good paper in elegant but affordable bindings, without all the pseudo-scholarly trappings of the editions of the Modern Language Association (and about which he wrote so scathingly in his 1968 New York Review of Books essay, "The Fruits of the MLA").

The Library of America is Edmund Wilson's vision come to life -- although I shudder to think what he would have said if he could have known that such a collection would eventually come to include not just unassailably canonical authors such as Henry James and Walt Whitman, but such (in his eyes) ephemeral writers as Dashiell Hammett and George S. Kaufman (not to mention science-fiction writers such as Phillip K. Dick). It's a shame that it's taken a quarter-century to include Wilson in the collection he envisioned, but I'm glad it's happening now, and I can only hope that more volumes of Wilson (including To The Finland Station and Patriotic Gore, among others) will follow in short order.

Okay, that's the good news. The bad news is pretty bad.

Last week saw the end of The Gotham Book Mart, a New York instutition since 1920 whose devotees included the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and J.D. Salinger. Along with the closing of Coliseum Books not long ago, that means that two of the most civilized and reader-friendly bookstores in Manhattan are now gone.

Like Coliseum, The Gotham Book Mart had moved from its traditional location (in the middle of the diamond district at 16 E. 46th Street) to a new location a block away, and never really recovered from the effects of the dislocation. The entire inventory was auctioned off and purchased by the landlord of the building for $400,000.

So another New York institution bites the dust. People looking for that rare edition of William Butler Yeats will have to look elsewhere -- possibly online, instead of asking a clerk who actually knows what he's talking about. The James Joyce Society (founded 60 years ago and whose first member was T.S. Eliot) will will have to find another place to meet and pore over the pages of Finnegans Wake.

And the cultural life of the city gets a little more impoverished.

Tom Moran