Old Wine in New Bottles

Like a dog to its vomit, the wags at n+1 have returned to NYRB Classics (here is an archive.ph link in case that one no longer gives the full text), though the topic this time around is really the new landscape of "reissue publishing" more broadly, the editors justifying the leading place they give NYRB on the grounds that the specific way the landscape is new is that "the NYRB Classics template [has been] taken up and refined by a thicket of upstarts", such as McNally Editions and, curiously, Dalkey Archive, all trying to get in on the phenomenon of "old-new books", by which they mean … something, I'm sure. But if their topic seems a bit underspecified, at least their point is clear. Right?

As has always been the case with "The Intellectual Situation" columns when I have read them, this one is written with brio. Some of the lines read as if their writing just must have made their authors feel clever. It has a magisterial, confident tone and takes a lofty view. Indeed, it is profoundly untroubled with the specifics of its topic, preferring to float above such mundane questions as "is there an empirically verifiable phenomenon that is the occasion of this piece?" or "what do we actually intend by the phrase 'old-new books'?". When it makes a claim in one sentence, then offers an illustration in the following, it is not concerned about whether the case in the second sentence actually has anything to do with the assertion in the first.¹ We should all aspire to such calm; it is, I'm sure, very freeing. The armchair beckons to the writer. Still, as a reader one may feel that the effect is unfortunate. Peculiarly given that n+1 has actually published books itself, the editors do not seem to be aware of the midlist.² Are they just annoyed at the quality of conversation at the parties they attend? Why are they so interested in NYRB Classics specifically? (Yes, it's definitely a successful enterprise; on the other hand, its list, counting the Classics branch specifically, is smaller than Dalkey's.) Is it because they're so prominent in bookstores?³ For that matter, are they aware that libraries and used bookstores exist? There is an argumentative throughline, or perhaps one should say an attitudinal throughline: because it doesn't really pop up as an explicitly articulated position, except as almost an aside, it cannot be argued consistently; that, perhaps, is why the editors can identify what they take to be a problem, and almost immediately after suggest a remedy that has little to do with the diagnosis.

What is an old-new book, as opposed to a just plain old book? If you look at the editors' first encounter with NYRB Classics, you'll see them describe, in the last paragraph you can read for free, three facets of the "spirit of revival", which perhaps give us a clue:⁴

1. "An effort to capture the 20th century for posterity, by those who helped to create and sustain it"
2. "An in-between-times effort to make book canonization personal and idiosyncratic before the digitization of all information makes it completely chaotic".
3. "The summary of a present-day writerly feeling that when it comes to influences, creators must look elsewhere than to the well-known old names."

It helps, of course, if a press doing this kind of work has the infrastructure of a journal or review to call on; on the one hand, the writers and critics the press is thereby in touch with can suggest new fitting titles, and contribute introductions; on the other, essays about forthcoming titles can appear in the review itself, serving to make potential readers aware of it. And of course the review can probably offer the press discounted ad space. It also helps, or at least I am inclined to think it helps, if the editorial direction really is the work of a personal, idiosyncratic taste; it won't be for everyone, but as Virginia Woolf (recently, and oddly, published by NYRB) said of Thomas Browne (more understandably published by NYRB, in 2012, though I know some would be scandalized by their decision to separate Urne Buriall from The Garden of Cyrus, and the Penguin Classics Major Works remains in print), those whom it is for are the salt of the earth.

Is there a press that not only hits those three points, but was also started with the aid of a pre-existing journal to render it those services just mentioned, helmed by what anyone could agree was an idiosyncratic taste? Well yes, but the most obvious candidate to my eyes is not NYRB Classics but John O'Brien's Dalkey Archive Press, an outgrowth of John O'Brien's Review of Contemporary Fiction, described by Chad Post as being "born from[] the desire to put back into print works that [had] been abandoned due to poor sales, yet fit within the grand, over-arching literary taste promoted by RCF." Post then explicitly draws a connection to NYRB, though actually, it is not super clear to me that the three motivations the n+1 editors identified in 2008 are or were explicit concerns of the NYRB brass. You can look at their self-descriptions from 2007 and 2003 if you like. (This is not to say that Edwin Frank doesn't have his own taste, or anything like that; but it doesn't seem to inform NYRB Classics quite as much as O'Brien's did Dalkey.)

I mention all this about Dalkey because I was surprised to see them nominated as one of those inspired by NYRB Classics to get into the reissue game "following its acquisition by Deep Vellum" in 2020. Dalkey has been big into reissues from the jump. It's true that, following the acquisition, Dalkey started a series ("Essentials") consisting of reissues, but they're reissues from its own list, which isn't the NYRB model, and does correspond to O'Brien's idealistic desire that his books always remain in print. Was Dalkey old-new avant la lettre? Is a novel brought back out that you first published yourself an "old-new novel"? Certainly, it hasn't been "vetted twice over, most recently by a reissue outfit, and before that, by some other publisher", except in a Ship of Theseus sense. Is it "old-new" if it's a publisher revisiting its own backlist, but not old-new if it's simply been in print the whole time? Perhaps a book reissued by Penguin isn't an old-new book because Penguin's list is too much an omnium-gatherum; it's only a real old-new book if it comes with from a press with a perspective, with a distinct taste, something the reader feels has some cachet. That would fit with their odd assertion that the new-old reader feels "the paraliterary thrill of the rescue", which seems to credit the bookstore-browser with more knowledge of and interest in each volume's publication history than I find credible.⁵ But no, that can't be it, since they cite a Penguin edition of Dostoevsky's "White Nights", in one of those single-serving short story editions that have always existed (some of those Dover Thrifts were mighty slender) but do seem to have become more widespread in the past 15 or so years, as an example. But wait, has Dostoevsky even been significantly out of print in my lifetime? "White Nights" is part of a Modern Library collection from 2001…

Not every actually old book is old-new, in the editors' estimation. Not having gone out of print won't save a book from being old-new; more surprising is that apparently having gone out of print and come back also doesn't mean that an old book is old-new. Zola furnishes an example of an old author whose books are not categorized as old-new, because they are "edifying". The relevance here is unclear—it seems to have to do with their ability to understand reading an old book—but they do say it. As it happens, some of Zola's novels have been out of print in English—Le Rêve was only published in unexpurgated form in 2005, then it went out of print, then it came back in 2018. Zola is a canonical author, but then so is Henry James, whose "marginal works" seem to count as old-new in the editors' eyes. (Mind you, Zola's canonicity is no bar to a reader experiencing the thrill of discovery on reading him.)

In the end, "old-new fiction" appears to be that fiction which is older than a certain number of years, has maybe been out of print in English, or possibly never was in print in English (lots of these houses, NYRB included, publish original translations, a fact which barely registers with the editors), and is not centrally canonical (so Moby-Dick, for instance, is not old-new, I guess, even though it has been out of print and eye-catching new editions continue to appear). It does not take keen insight to see that this means that the members of this class are held together by mere externalities. Nothing unites "books that went out of print, then were reissued" beyond that bare fact of publication history such that one could really say much useful about them. The editors themselves note that the houses and imprints issuing these books are "unalike in genre, form, sensibility, obscurity, and era", and they think, therefore, that "a deeper, more durable readerly desire is at work" than the desire to "dock[] in disparate pasts at whim" for their existence. I would suggest that the durable readerly desire at play is that people interested in literature tend to be interested in literature, and that there's nothing new about reading widely, either individually or as a collective of individually not-so-wide readers. I went on a real Thomas Bernhard jag a while back, perhaps because of Wittgenstein's Nephew.⁶ Earlier this year I read Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper because I happened to have seen it on a shelf and thought, why not? Turns out it's great. One of my most-adored books I found because it was next to a different book in the library.⁷ In order to get their essay off the ground, the editors have adopted a pose (I hope it's a pose) of befuddlement that a person would read a minor work when a major one is available, or an older work in place of a newer. It makes sense to read Zola; he's a heavy hitter. But why in the world would anyone read the novels of, say, George Meredith?⁸ They don't seem to cognize that one can be interested in a book, and not merely in a second-order attitude about reading. The bit in which they invoke Zola is instructive, actually:

Of course, one understands that reading Zola is not just pleasurable but edifying. The 21st-century reader can go back to Zola and feel herself comprehending something about the origins of naturalism, about how the realist novel as we now know it shaped itself around the project of representing class and consciousness. These non-, or a-, or anti-canonical novels are up to something else, and to read them produces an entirely different affect. They seldom reveal much about the development of the form, though they sometimes gesture toward paths not taken. The most exemplary old-new fiction can serve a sociological function, but of a low-key kind: a record of what it was like to be a minor player at a specific moment in a specific place. Take two representative titles reissued by NYRB Classics in the 2010s, …

In the fifth paragraph after noticing the extreme heterogeneity of "old-new books", the editors have once again forgotten it. There would seem to be no other basis for their describing any sort of book at all as being "exemplary" of "old-new fiction" other than their believing that the essence of being a reissued book is to have been written by an English author who goes by their initials,⁹ or for their identifying any two novels as "representative" of such an inchoate non-category. To be sure, "it's a record of what it was like to be a minor player a specific moment in a specific place" is not an inaccurate comment to make about, say, Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary or Félix Féneon's Novels in Three Lines, though it is certainly not a very complete comment. It is at best a peculiar comment about James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner or John Collier's Fancies and Goodnights. As a comment on Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy or Gert Jonke's Geometric Regional Novel it is likely to make one think the commentator has lost their mind. (All of these have been reissued by NYRB, except the last, which is a Dalkey.) Does Turtle Diary therefore more partake of the quiddity of having been reissued than does The Anatomy of Melancholy? It's hard to know where to start with the idea.

The reference to a sociological function, though, is one of the places where the attitudinal throughline becomes more visible. Later on, in a basically inept rhetorical move, they will ask us to imagine someone, H.R., "who only reads NYRB Classics".¹⁰ I guess they got bored of talking about its list directly. What makes it inept is that now, instead of simply saying that the temporal distribution of NYRB's offerings is not an accurate reflection of 20th century Anglophone publishing overall, which would admittedly invite the very fair question "why should it be?", they say instead that "H.R.'s knowledge would be partial … Reflecting on their studies, H.R. would conclude that the middle of the American century was denser than its beginning or its end, and that literary history as a whole slowed down around the time of the great downturn and came to a halt entirely in 2005". This however invites the fair response that one can know that publications exist which one has not read. It's not just literature itself to which H.R.'s ignorance extends, though:

And what features of contemporary life would H.R. fail to see reflected in literature? Cryptocurrency, Instagram face, drone warfare, pickleball, data centers, monthly school shootings, same-day shipping, gooning — not even Guido Morselli’s The Communist could have anticipated all these disturbing developments. And then there are all the 21st-century miracles necessarily left out of H.R.’s canon: Narcan, freedom flotillas, hyperpop, new hybrid fruits, the Paris Agreement, legal weed, Bluetooth. Ivy Compton-Burnett didn’t know about hyperpop, and thus neither would H.R. Poor H.R.! So much to say about Patrick Leigh Fermor, so little insight into the texture of the world system.

Lamentably, they give no examples of the novels they have in mind that do grant insight into the world system. Does one learn more about this system from reading The Aesthetics of Resistance (doesn't know about gooning) or All Fours (Miranda July 100% knows about gooning)? Anyway, the implication is clear: the proper business of literature isn't the human comedy, something you might be inclined to think is discernible in various periods despite the different furniture of the social world, but the way we live now, as in right now. Zola in particular was a happy old-old author to work in, since one can excuse reading an early exemplar of socially informed realistic fiction on historical grounds even if he also doesn't know about hyperpop. Viewed in this light it's a little funny that they lightly twit Vincenzo Latronico for giving us one of "a series of geists of zeits past"; isn't Perfection in fact doing us a great service, pouring the old wine of Perec's Things: A Story of the Sixties into a new bottle, one that knows about Airbnb? If you think that an individual's struggle for justice against society is a worthy theme for a novel, but can't abide to read Michael Kohlhaas because there are no automobiles in it, fear not: you can read Ragtime. Though that's due for a reworking too by now. But this, presumably, is why the only two motivations they can think of for reading an "old-new" book are feeling satisfied about a "rediscovery" that the reader didn't even rediscover, and the pleasure of experiencing "a past whose edges haven't yet been dulled by repetition", i.e., a glimpse into how we lived then, both when we lived differently then and when we lived then pretty much how we lived now.¹¹ And, sure, this is a pleasure—who hasn't been amused by the instant legibility of Myles na gCopaleen's use of "beards and corduroys"? (But one has to pity the reader who picks up David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress or Perec's W, or the Memory of Childhood seeking this kind pleasure.) The editors are positively charming on this point, observing that "an older novel can feel awfully current" and that "the best reissued fiction seems to scramble temporality altogether", much as some people watching a black-and-white movie for the first time will register amazement that Dr. Strangelove is actually funny, or that the trial scene in M is compelling (and funny—"du bekommst sogar 'nen Verteidiger").¹² Well, yes: Douglas Adams was, at least in some respects, correct to say that the past is a foreign country—they do everything the exactly same there. Adolescent yearning has not vanished from our experience in the 100-plus years since the writing of the periodically reissued Le Grand Meaulnes. The editors do propose a third candidate explanation for the reading of an old-new book, noting that "the orientation invited by the old-new novels is a liberated, fun, highly optional noncomprehensiveness". This however is not specific to the case at hand, first because that is also the orientation one takes to reading new releases, and second because it is an orientation available to the reader who freely chooses to read the capital-c Classics as well, as a friend of mine who decided some years back to read Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius did. They have confused an attitude a reader may have toward anything with an attitude essentially elicited by one kind of book.

For all that what they appear really to value is socially engaged realistic fiction, or at least novels that "chart contemporaneity", apparently sharing with Lauren Oyler the unelaborated belief that it is "our job" to put McDonald's in our fiction, they are unwilling to follow through and dare their readers to read more of that, specifically, landing instead on exhortations that simultaneously are uncontroversial and comport poorly with the earlier sections of the piece: on the one hand, (a) balance old fiction with new ("a book published in the last five years"); on the other, don't be beholden to the tastes of any one editor but rather (b) "be your own canon editor[] and ensure that your canon is continually replenishing itself." In between they warn: "Don’t let the seductions of the past blind you to the fascinations of the present." Not to belabor the general lack of concern with empirical reality shown by the editors, but one wonders: do they have anyone particularly in mind with this warning? Are readers really failing here?

As regards (a), it is apparent that one can fulfill that injunction without ever encountering Bluetooth or pickleball, or enlightenment about the world system, which, I confess, still seems more the province of non than fiction. I am not sure I learned much about contemporary life, in the intended sense, from Alex Kovacs's Sexology. I am not sure that Jack Cox's Dodge Rose shed all that much light on the world system that obtained in 2016, or that Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid did that for 2015. Of all the recently published fictions I've read in the past several years, the one that most seems to conform to what the editors have in mind was the worst, and I can report that I did read it more or less with the sense of duty: perhaps I should put in some time in the contemporary literary realism mines. (It doesn't help that I read it immediately after The Man without Qualities, a comparison difficult for even a better novel to stand up to.) I don't want to quibble with their assertions that the novel these days can still "bring the news" about, for instance, "the plight of illegal aliens"; surely it can.¹³ I merely wish to register the obvious fact that the novel can do plenty else, too, and plenty of novels doing other things get published every year. If social engagement is your aim, why not exhort readers to read those novels specfically?

Perhaps because one can't very well do that and then encourage the development of an individual taste, which might run to other things. (I don't know how else to construe "be your own canon editor" than as "get your own taste".) But then, that encouragement doesn't really fit easily with a sniffy attitude toward reading the "non-, a-, or anti-canonical novels", which aren't even edifying by the way, one can find daring to commingle with recently published fiction on bookstore shelves, either; of such stuff is a taste made. Surely a person developing a, or with a developed, taste in literature will find their way back into the temporal depths of more than five years ago. In one of the few instances of purely front-handed praise for "reissue houses" in the piece, the editors note that such outfits actually do operate according to dictates of taste and discernment, while the Big Five, excuse me, Big Four (or is it Three now?) basically do not. They are "outposts of cosmopolitan curiosity". There's really—I mean this sincerely—nothing like a host of discerning series to form one's own discernment; examples are, after all, the go-cart of judgement. So the proliferation of these outposts would seem to be an unalloyed good, actually. And amazingly, the three presses named in that paragraph, NYRB Classics, Dalkey, and newcomer Hagfish, all also publish new books, even Hagfish, which seems to publish a grand total of five books period, of which two aren't even out yet. (It is the first US publisher of Iphigenia Ball's Man Hating Psycho, published in the UK in 2021 by Influx Press.) So one wishes to ask: what were you trying to do here?

Let me close by quoting a favorite bit from Kenneth Rexroth, from the introduction to Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays. (If, impossibly, anyone from New Directions happens to see this, you should reissue it!) Philip Rahv was the co-founder and editor of the Partisan Review:

Taste is an individual thing. If it is not wide-ranging and erratic, captious and unpredictable, it is not taste but snobbery. Just try saying: Mark Twain is a better writer than Henry James. The 10th Street Club is the apotheosis of formularized academic painting. Kierkegaard is dull and silly. No adult can take Dostoevsky seriously. Pissaro was a better painter than Van Gogh and Tiepolo than El Greco, who is another artist for adolescents. Finnegans Wake is an embarrassing failure. You can’t associate continuously with immature minds and write poetry — even if it’s called Creative Poetry 1976520A and you get paid $18,000 a year for it. … Just say anything like that and see how far you get with Phil Rahv.