Procrustes’ Bed

My rubric for this occasion entails versions of what, properly or not, may be deemed reference books.

Hemingway and Faulkner, edited by Earl Rovit and Arthur Waldhorn, is a fascinating little book (Continuum, illustrated, $22.95). You can read it from beginning to end or just dip into it at any point. It is an intelligently organized and neatly presented critical history of both writers that is buttressed by a solid index. Representative instances of how the two writers are compared may be found in passages quoted from the Paris Review interviews with James Thurber and Robert Penn Warren. Thurber is shrewd and amusing about the fears of Faulkner and Hemingway about their writing when they grow old. Warren contrasts the vastly different uses of time in their fiction. With Faulkner there are “frozen moments”: “Everything is there, just waiting to happen”; but in Hemingway “there is no time at all. He’s out of history entirely.” The editors’ commentary and their narrative structure make for a very readable book as well as a very useful one. I wish that John Crowe Ransom on Faulkner (who reveals man “under the aspect of magnificence”) and Ford Madox Ford on Hemingway’s style (“Hemingway’s words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched from a brook”) were here, but everything of critical worth cannot be included.

James Laughlin’s The Way It Wasn’t, edited by Barbara Epler and Daniel Javitch (New Directions, illustrated, $25 pb), would be defined by most people as an autobiography or a memoir; but it will be used by most readers for reference because Laughlin’s many friends and acquaintances appear in lively portraits under their names (Sylvia Beach, Elizabeth Bishop, Hayden Carruth, Brendan Gill, Hemingway, Lincoln Kirstein, Pound, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, W. C. Williams, et al.), as do various places (Ireland, India, Japan, Norfolk, Salzburg). Manic depression is a matter applying to Laughlin and his father and other males in the family connection (such as Uncle Harry, “the terror of his generation”) as well as to Robert Lowell and others. The miscellaneous entries given to bookselling, Laughlin’s work day and his writing habits, New Directions, and Frances Steloff, add up to an unexpectedly large sum about publishing. This tome, a selection of glittering fragments punctuated by superb illustrations, is one of the best instances of editing that I have ever seen. I salute the editors for their herculean work and Eliot Weinberger for his wonderfully acute review (New York Review of Books, March 1, 2007), which should be reprinted as the foreword to the next edition of The Way It Wasn’t.

The opportunities for error, factual and typographical, were countless. I have discovered no factual mistakes, and two of the three typos I have found appear under Fay, Bernard. James Laughlin, a greatly talented man of public spirit, often writes wittily and well. Of Faÿ’s friend Gertrude Stein he observes that she was “the most charismatic pyramid ever built.” Laughlin, who, as publisher of New Directions, spent his inherited wealth on supporting many writers and on enhancing the Republic of Letters, deserves our thanks.

The New Georgia Encyclopedia Companion to Georgia Literature, edited by Hugh Ruppersburg (University of Georgia Press, $22.95 pb), is a useful book of reference that runs to nearly 500 pages. In addition to covering most of the authors and related subjects that one would expect, it includes separate entries on such works as Deliverance, Driving Miss Daisy, A Member of the Wedding, Flannery O’Connor’s two novels, Strange Fruit, and Tobacco Road. The Chattahoochee Review, Five Points, and the Georgia Review (especially Stanley Lindberg and Stephen Corey) are included; but the publisher of the book and its most important director, Ralph Stephens, are not. A short history of the University of Georgia Press should have been written for this occasion. Among the missing are James Boatwright, Edd Winfield Parks, and especially Floyd C. Watkins. Watkins’s Yesterday in the Hills is a moving and memorable account of life in the North Georgia hills in the early twentieth century, a beautifully written book of enduring value; and...