Lost Books

Pradeep Sebastian explores the different forms and degrees of 'lostness' one encounters with literary works

A book can be lost on us, but it is hard to imagine that a book could be entirely lost  to us. Today, when books are backed up and Google-linked, we can hunt down a book by just browsing, or looking hard enough for a copy. And yet there are many versions of lostness: writers who write but don’t publish (Salinger) writers who wish to destroy their work (Kafka asking his literary executor to burn all his books) writers who have destroyed their work (Gogol burning the second half of Dead Souls) fires that destroy entire libraries (the Alexandrian library).
 
Books are so vulnerable to destruction — from the material used to make them — paper — to the deliberate destruction of literature at the hands of fascists, religious zealots and spouses! Lost Classics and The Book of Lost Books are two books that investigate two different kinds of book loss: one looks at personal loss, the other explores how the history of books is also a history of loss. Jorge Luis Borges once noted that ‘a certain class of objects, very rare’ can be ‘brought into being by hope.’ And this is exactly what the writers in Lost Classics accomplish: they bring into being, simply by their devotion and hope, books that were lost, and return them to our secret bookshelves.
 
Here you will come across the book that disappears from a house during a divorce! A writer who commits suicide after finishing his work, and a reader who exhumes it from a second-hand bookstore. A book that a reader only hears about which infects his imagination so much that he spends years looking for it! Finally, there is the one we are all best familiar with: a favourite book that has been overlooked or under-read. A little known book that we once admired so much that we find ourselves urging friends to discover it. Except — it’s out of print.
 
Michael Ondaatje, one among several editors of Lost Classics, invites 73 contemporary authors to evoke books loved and lost, unavailable, stolen or extinct. Pico Iyer's choice is The Saddest Pleasure by Moritz Thomsen, a strange travel book that is, in effect, ‘a journey towards extinction.’ Githa Hariharan picks All About H. Hatterr, a book she discovered in 1974, ‘emerging from the safe portals of Bombay University's Sophia College... my friends and I took to ransacking the lost-and-found bookstalls...and then I came across a strange and wonderful book.’
 
‘Curiously, it is a book I haven't read,’ says Laird Hunt of Lafcadio Hearn's Some Chinese Ghosts. ‘I saw a copy once: a dark blue, leather bound Modern Library edition that sat unread on my girlfriend's uncle's shelf. It was all I could do (that is, my girlfriend said, No!) not to steal it.’ Since then Hunt has been searching used bookstores for the book but has never found it. But he feels strongly that ‘somewhere out there, Some Chinese Ghosts, the one that I had hoped for, exists. I just have to put my hands on it again.’
 
Stuart Kelly, the author of The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read startles us with dozens of examples of great books completely lost to us. Only 7 of Sophocles plays have survived out of 133 lost! And only 18 of more than 90 by Euripides remain, while only eight of Aeschylus’ work are known – 73 are missing!
 
Sandiston is a novel about hypochondriacs that Jane Austen never completed. Shakespeare's ‘Love's Labour Won’ (perhaps a sequel to you-know-which-play) has also been missing. “Speak, America’, a second volume Nabokov had planned to his memoir, ‘Speak, Memory’, but never wrote. Kelly is not just a compulsive reader but a compulsive collector. He is what I call a ‘completist’: a collector who is obsessed with completing his or her collection. For Kelly it began as a teenager when he had to have every Agatha Christie title in every edition, and once he discovered literature, every Penguin Classic he could buy.
 
In the process he discovered, to his dismay, that there are several books by classical and modern writers that are lost forever — destroyed, missing, stolen or conceived and abandoned. Strangest of all: Mikhail Bakhtin, while exiled in Kazakhstan, ‘used his work on Dostoyevsky as cigarette papers, after having smoked a copy of the Bible’. Malcolm Lowry's only manuscript copy of Ultramarine, which was stolen from his publisher's car and then had to be reassembled from his wastepaper basket.
 
Socrates' version of Aesop's Fables and Homer's first work, Margites, (a comic epic poem about a fool, who, ‘knew many things, but all badly’) — both destroyed, some nearly thousand pages of Burrough's Naked Lunch that Algerians street boys stole from his hotel room and sold on the streets and Double Exposure, a second novel that Sylvia Plath had been writing about her marriage that has been lost.
 
The 90-odd chapters here are really wide ranging mini-essays on the stories of books we don't possess, and tantalisingly researched biographies of their authors. Not all loss, Kelly discovered, is tragic. T.E. Lawrence mislaid his manuscript of Seven Pillars Of Wisdom at a railway station and by his own admission his second draft was ‘shorter, snappier and more truthful’. Hemingway lost all of his early unpublished writing when his trunk was stolen en route to Switzerland in 1922 — but this forced him to write new stories in a new style — that spare, unaffected prose he is now famous for.
 
At the end of his search for all these lost classics, Kelly asks an intriguing question: ‘Is becoming lost the worst that can happen to a book? A lost book is susceptible to a degree of wish fulfilment. The lost book...becomes infinitely more alluring simply because it can be perfect only in the imagination.’