The Book Draft that Burned

Good to hear Steve Grossman.  “Zulu Stomp” from “Some Shapes to Come” just popped up randomly.  My dear friend has been back in New York this past week, snapping photos here, sending me remembrances there.  Hearing this song now I feel like I’m walking west on Houston going to see some show, though I never saw Grossman, over at the Knitting Factory.  We’d probably go kill time at that dive bar a few doors down.  What was it's name?  They had generations of memorabilia on the wall and all that I can remember is a big photo of Frank, reminding the patrons that it was his world, and that we just lived in it.  I suspect both venues have become part of a large Walgreens by now. 

It was just the other day and I typed out a blog that I enjoyed and later, search as I might, I couldn’t find it.  When computers were new this happened all the time but these days it isn’t as frequent.  I reckoned I must have hit “not save” late at night and sent it off to oblivion unwittingly.  And when I tried to write about this incident I remembered a story of some historical Englishman who’d written a manuscript, lost it in a fire and then, rewrote what by his own reckoning was an improved work.  But who was he?  I searched all sorts of combinations of “lost work” “lost in a fire” etc. and came up short. 

Today I started reading “A Tale of Two Cities” in earnest.  Though I’ve read “Great Expectations” and “Bleak House” and seen my share of a Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist, I’ve never made it to the one novel for which I and most people can repeat the first line.  I’d gotten a copy last spring to read aloud with my younger daughter.  But we’re bogged down for the next year or so with “Anna Karenina.”  Having finished Rene Chateaubriand’s (or at least the quarter of which has been translated into English) “Memoires from Beyond the Grave” I was in the mood for more about the French Revolution.  So far most of our time has been in Old Blighty.  I look forward to crossing the Channel and attuned myself to looking closely at all the clues that Dickens will be deliberately leaving around as he unravels this tale. 

And apparently one his greatest sources for this story was Thomas Carlyle’s “The French Revolution: A History,” written twenty years before Dickens own work and sixty years after that tumultuous time.  I guess that would be like someone writing about the events of 1958 from the vantage of today.   Reading it over I immediately decided to add the work, which is apparently timeless, and still in print, to my Amazon list.  It brought to mind Edward Gibbon and “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” which was, appropriately perhaps, written sixty years before Carlyle’s effort and is similarly lauded as essential to the topic. 

And there on the Wiki page, for the Carlyle’s book, I noticed a funny Japanese print that I’d remembered seeing before.  It was of a man running with his hands in the air, towards a fire on the floor.  And there it was: the reference to the book draft that burned.  Carlyle had apparently leant the manuscript he’d penned to John Stuart Mill, who had persuaded Carlyle to take up his contract for writing the book in the first place.  Mill's maid had mistaken it for trash and thrown it into the fire.  It is not clear just what the quality of despair it was that Carlyle descended into upon learning this, but what we do know is that he sat down, rewrote the entire manuscript and in so doing established himself as a nineteenth century intellectual force.  This up-from-the-ashes aura will hover about, I suspect, whenever it is I finally get a chance to make my way through his work.  What a courageous mastery of self, to sit down and do it all over again.  Would you have had it in you?

Sunday, 10/21/18