Forgotten Books
Also: Quadrant’s new editor-in-chief, P.G. Wodehouse’s allusions, fraternity in America, the early days of skiing, and more.
In Slightly Foxed—a lovely quarterly out of the U.K.—Sam Leith writes about the “half-forgotten” Nicholas Fisk’s “wholly forgotten book” Pig Ignorant:
It deserves not to be, and he deserves not to be. Fisk was a bestselling children’s writer through my own ’70s and ’80s childhood and was described by one critic as ‘the Huxley-Wyndham-Golding of children’s literature’. But if he is remembered now, it’s for his science fiction and only vaguely, and only by people about my age. There’s the Bradburyesque alien invasion horror Grinny (see SF no.78) and its sequel You Remember Me, the disconcerting genetic-engineering story A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair, and Trillions, in which tiny, collectively intelligent alien particles fall to earth like snow. In his most memorable stories the surface appearance of the world masks something darker and stranger. There’s a world behind the world.
Accordingly, perhaps, this remarkable short memoir is a journey from innocence to experience. Its themes are the big ones: sex and death. And its focus is on the narrow little sliver of time that takes its protagonist from his mid-teens to the brink of manhood proper. Its epigraph is from Victoria Wood: ‘I believe we all have a certain time in our lives that we’re good at. I wasn’t good at being a child.’ The book, written half a century after the events it describes, traces Fisk’s attempt to leave his childhood and find a secure identity as a young adult: ‘For Nick, school is over! He’s free! He’s his real self at last!’
But who is that real self? The very framing of the narrative is a little unstable. Like Frances Hodgson Burnett – an earlier children’s writer who in The One I Knew the Best of All also produced an extraordinarily vivid memoir of childhood (that sort of recall seems to be a characteristic of children’s writers) – Fisk describes his younger self in the third person. And his protagonist is ‘Nick’: another little estrangement. Fisk’s real name was David Higginbottom. The narrator self introduces us to his adolescent self as ‘a walking, talking, breathing solid ghost. Not the ghost of someone dead. I am still alive. His flesh is my flesh, his heartbeat is my heartbeat. Because he is me. But so long ago . . .’
I doubt I’ll pick up Pig Ignorant—too many other things to read—but I am a sucker for these “forgotten author” columns. Why is that? Is it because contemporary fiction is in such a sorry state—because most new books today sound much the same? Christian Lorentzen writes about six new books that got big advances. They all have a “narrow range,” he writes,
within the not much wider spectrum of commercial fiction: liberal morality tales (feminism; climate change doomsdays), topical thrillers adapted from the headlines (the influencer friend who is some kind of fraud or secret psycho), and romance reinscribed on a perfected future where the imperfect present can at last be sentimentalized (actually, that one sounds possibly interesting). It’s nice for these authors that they got big advances, can quit their jobs, and so on, but even if they become big sellers, earn back those corporate gambles, and get adapted to screens of whatever size, these aren’t the sort of books that get reviewed or discussed in the so-called “literary world,” or, in the language of hype, generate that kind of buzz? Who wants to read gossip about somebody with a side hustle as an inspirational speaker for Google, even if she was a Stegner fellow (again, who cares?)?
Who’s to blame for this? Writers? Publishers? Contemporary culture? It’s hard to say. The disinterest in risk in modern publishing, however, has created space for ventures like the New York Review of Books Classics series, which brings experimental fiction from the days of yore back into print. Not that NYRB is taking a risk here. It is simply giving a rather narrow readership what it wants with little by way of expenses except production costs. New Directions, which used to publish only new work, has turned to much the same model—bringing back mostly foreign works with new translations (works by Osamu Dazai and Clarice Lispector are slated for the spring) in addition to still bringing out new work by living writers.
In other news, Sam Lebovic writes about Nazi spies in America during the Second World War: “‘Nazi spy ring’ has an undeniably ominous tone. But, in general, Nazi intelligence efforts in the United States were comically inept, more Colonel Klink than supervillain. Establishing a robust network of spies within the United States was never a priority for the German regime. No one wanted to repeat the mistakes of World War I, when efforts to spy on the Americans had only antagonized them and brought them into the war. Combined with the usual tensions between competing branches of the Nazi state, support for spies remained ambivalent for much of the decade. As a result, Nazi operations were small-scale sideshows for most of the 1930s. By the end of the decade, when the war ramped up and caution could be abandoned, it was too late to cultivate agents with sufficiently deep cover. Nazi intelligence therefore relied on a haphazard crew of amateur agents, none of whom were really up to the task.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Prufrock to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.