Tumblr Move and Canon Fever

Hey, to all like three people reading this, just a heads up that I've mostly relocated to Tumblr. You can find me at http://ghostorballoon.tumblr.com/ although I may continue to repost longer articles up here. Like this one:

Should the hypothetical American bookshelf be a democracy or an oligarchy? Is the curation of a canon a privilege, a right, or a waste of time? Is there something kind of weird about a $40 Philip K. Dick book and am I still allowed to write in it?
(pretend there’s a Cut here, Tumblr is being cranky)
Yesterday Melville House’s blog “Moby Lives” pointed out a fairly recent Newsweek article about The Library of America.
The gist of the article, as you might suppose from the almost-a-joke-but-not-quite sort of title “Jumping the (Literary) Shark,” takes the stance that the LoA— supposedly previously dedicated to the most austere and patrician icons of American letters, your Faulkners and Super James Bros. and Frosts— is rapidly descending into a scramble for people to publish, watering down their credibility as caretakers of the cough cough, “Library” of “America.”
I take offense to this whole argument on a number of levels, but let’s start with the factual. First of all, Newsweek’s Malcolm Jones bases his dismissal of the library’s recent output on an upcoming editions of John Updike’s essay on Ted Williams as well as the collected novels and short fiction of Shirley Jackson.
1. While selling just the one little Updike essay is a little puzzling, its as good a place to start as any. Presumably Updike is one of those authors like Marianne Moor or T.S. Eliot whose publication rights are sort of up in the air, as the LoA hasn’t put out any other work of his. Granted, it seems like a weird place to start, but you have to start somewhere. Raising your eyebrows at a questionable marketing decision is one thing, saying that John Updike of all people is a weak link in a roster or authors is another entirely.
2. As for Jackson, I’ll let Jones state his case for himself, mumbled through a mouthful of foot:
“And then, in May, here comes an entire volume dedicated to …. Shirley Jackson? A writer mostly famous for one short story, “The Lottery.” Is LOA about to jump the shark?”
Sure, um, its probably technically correct to say that Jackson is mostly famous for “The Lottery,” but since when did “mostly famous for…” have any kind of bearing on literary merit?
“And now here comes an entire volume dedicated to… Nathanael Hawthorne? A writer mostly famous for one short novel, “The Scarlet Letter.” Is LOA about to jump the shark?”
Putting aside that Shirley Jackson is “mostly famous” these days as a fucking master of post-war American gothic and that Jones’ easy dismissal suggests that he hasn’t thought about her at all since maybe ninth or tenth grade lit class, the idea that an author’s merit depends on whether or not he or she is “mostly famous” is intensely irritating.
The argument is mind-numbingly reductive, and carries an unpleasant tinge of the idea that the canon is something objectively stable and dependable, that doesn’t need any of this newfangled post-modern reassessment thanks. Its essentially a tautology: why bother lending the prestige and visibility of LoA inclusion to somebody who isn’t already famous, it seems to ask? Only the already venerable deserve to be, uh, venerated. Ok.
This all brings me to the bigger question looming behind what has basically been, up to this point, just blogosphere bullshit. Because the issue isn’t whether Jones thinks Jackson and Updike deserve to be published— let’s not put words in his mouth— but whether he thinks they have a place in the so-called “Library of America.”
Let’s not beat around the bush, the LoA volumes are for the most part luxury items. If you really wanted to read all of John Cheever, you could probably swing that for about $15 at a used bookstore, or you could drop $80 for the LoA’s two volume set. The same goes with their edition of Kerouac’s road novels, which seem somehow eerily out of place between cloth covers with a little silk ribbon dangling in front of the pages. On one level it would seem natural that if the outdated notion of “The Canon” should have any last outpost, it should be in these handsome, elegant, and improbably pricey tomes. Jones’ article seems to suggest that in a perfect world, the publisher would have an infinite supply of old white men with starched collars and bristly Puritan beards to roll out, and that these unfortunate forays into the works of people who— holy fuck— might have been alive in the last thirty years is a regrettable sign of some kind of fundamental compromise.
Not so, Jonesy. A look at the actual publishing history of the LoA reveals that its been pretty idiosyncratic from the beginning. William Dean Howells shows up well before anything by Henry James, and Francis Parkman (who is “mostly famous for…” I don’t know, Jones, you tell me) gets two volumes surprisingly early on. Raymond Chandler gets a collection before Steinbeck. James Thurber right before George Washington, and so on. The LoA, for all its suspiciously middle-brow trappings, has demonstrated rather egalitarian tastes for much of its history, dipping generously into Cain, Hammett, and other “genre” writers long before the well of “real literature” was anything close to dry.
I’d also like to mention that the H.P. Lovecraft collection, which Jones brushes off as his smug opening salvo:
“Hard to say precisely when it started, maybe with the publication of living authors, maybe with whole volumes dedicated to—hmm, maybe it’s cruel to label H. P. Lovecraft a second-tier writer, but maybe not so mean to call him a fringe author. Anyway, it’s become harder and harder to ignore the fact that the Library of America is running out of writers.”
came out over 15 years and 50 volumes ago, and was followed directly by Alcott, Roth, and Agee. Say what you will about Lovecraft’s merits, but in the context it hardly seems like the LoA was “running out of writers.”
As resistant as I am to the idea of a canon, its unavoidable that the prestige trappings and the very title of the “Library of America” suggests something like an elite roster of writers, a select pantheon. However, looking over their history, I’m pleased to find that the interplay between the academically hallowed and the popularly acclaimed is dynamic and alive, that cult favorites like Philip K. Dick can rub elbows with Hart Crane and Faulkner. I also have to say that in recent years many of their new choices have been pretty exciting to me, rather than suggestive of a downward trend. In the past two or three years they’ve put out pretty fucking phenomenal editions of Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Raymond Carver, and Saul Bellow. Contrary to Jones’ snobbish hysteria, we’re nowhere near hitting “peak writer” or whatever absurd drying up of the literary reservoirs he has in mind.
If I’m going to concede that the notion of a canon has any value, its as a living and evolving thing, the record of a debate rather than the setting down of laws. Every time the LoA adds to that debate by taking a “risky” choice, I have to see that as a positive thing, a boost to an author’s reputation at best and at worst an opportunity to talk about the shape of our country’s literary history. I’m not sure exactly what Malcolm Jones has in mind in terms of a solution to his snide whining, and I more or less don’t fucking care. I’ll be spending money I don’t have on Shirley Jackson.
(as for the tantalizing idea that the high production values of the books themselves are somehow subversive, or, I think I could equally well argue, counter-subversive, I’ll let John Lancaster do the talking, sort of)