Extending the shelf-life of forgotten classics
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Most publishers look for new talent;, but a few look for neglected ones -- and that author pool is considerable. New York Review Books, for example, has found a thriving niche by reissuing forgotten classics. In Southern California, the same has been done by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli. Go to Green Integer’s website, and you’ll find reissues of books by Arthur Schnitzler, Knut Hamsun, Emile Zola, Yuri Olyesha and Paul Celan as well as more contemporary voices like Paul Vangelisti and Dennis Phillips. After looking at the entire catalog, you’ll realize (if you hadn’t already) that Penguin Classics may fill up a lot of shelves, but there are plenty of gaps in what it has to offer.
Consider Horace de Saint-Aubin (not to be confused with “Spinal Tap’s” David St. Hubbins). Does Penguin offer any of Saint-Aubin’s works? Don’t bother looking. This month Green Integer published Saint-Aubin’s “The Vicar’s Passion” (672 pp., $14.95 paper), an early 19th century novel about a handsome young priest with plenty of secrets to hide -- including his love for his own sister (there’s a twist to this, but you’ll have to read it for yourself). Few may recognize the author’s name, but the cover reveals that this is an early novel by none other than Honoré de Balzac. There’s much of the mature Balzac in this book (though he dismissed it himself as hack work): his fascination with social corruption, the desperation of people in love and how virtue usually goes unrewarded while vice gets all the laurels.
In an introductory note, Saint-Aubin explains that the unhappy young vicar died, leaving his lengthy testament in the hands of Saint-Aubin, a proud bachelor of arts, who takes credit for improving the text: “The bad things that you are going to find in it must be ascribed to the account of the dead man, and if there is any good in it, then please attribute it, I beg you, to this young holder of a bachelor of arts degree.”
“The Vicar’s Passion” might have been forgotten -- a true loss for any fan or serious student of the great French novelist. In fact, New York publishers declined to publish Edward Ford’s translation, and then he contacted Green Integer, which quickly accepted it. Now, Ford writes in a preface, we can all “enjoy a lost classic whose day in the sun has finally arrived.”
Nick Owchar