Into the abyss

MOST readers would agree that there are plenty of books. After you’ve read all the great ones once or twice, you can begin on the semi-great ones or the mere fluff, and you can spend several lifetimes doing it. But in “The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You Will Never Read,” Stuart Kelly reminds us that the glass of books is half empty rather than brimming full. Not only are we missing the second part of Dickens’ “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” but also the whole second volume of “The Brothers Karamazov,” the entirety of Herman Melville’s proposed collaboration with Nathaniel Hawthorne, titled “Agatha,” and 73 of Aeschylus’ 80 plays.

“The Book of Lost Books” is a compendium, often witty and sometimes poignant, of what Kelly has been able to discover about the books we don’t have. Beginning with Homer and ending with French writer Georges Perec (1936-82), many of the writers he discusses are renowned, such as Sophocles, but others are obscure, if intriguing, such as Scottish author James Hogg (1770-1835). The works of theirs that have not survived cast a slanted light over those that have.

For writers who are thinking of stashing their work against the apocalypse, maybe the story of Aeschylus is the best cautionary tale. According to Kelly, the man died the strangest of deaths. Out for a walk, he was attacked by an eagle and killed. Kelly doesn’t record how Aeschylus’ contemporaries interpreted this event, but he suggests that from the eagle’s point of view, the playwright’s bald head might have looked like a stone, which the bird meant to pick up and drop on the shell of its prey, a tortoise.

As far as Aeschylus knew, his legacy was taken care of: He had written his own epitaph (concerning his valor at the Battle of Marathon) and his plays were famous and carefully preserved. Then, about 200 years after his death, the Egyptian Pharaoh Ptolemy III decided that he simply had to have the only manuscript of Aeschylus’ complete works for his library at Alexandria. The Athenians turned it over for a large consideration, but part of the deal was that no copies could be made. History went awry. In AD 640, Amrou ibn el Ass burned the library of Alexandria with the manuscript and hundreds of thousands of other scrolls. Still, Aeschylus was lucky. Almost all that is left of Sappho is her name.

Readers and writers will approach “The Book of Lost Books” somewhat differently. The former will be philosophical, I think, about the missing oeuvre of Faltonia Betitia Proba, a poet whose only extant work is in the form of a cento -- a compilation of lines written by another (Virgil, in this case) and rearranged according to a mathematical model to tell a new story (here, a history of the world from a Christian perspective). Allegedly, Proba hoped her inventiveness would convert her husband to Christianity. Her other works are lost. Most readers will also lose no sleep over the missing second half of Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queen,” which is already many hundreds of pages of hard going. To make the going even harder, Kelly reports, there is evidence that Spenser intended the entire work to be a kind of astrological puzzle exploring virtue as defined in Aristotle. Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.

Other lost works are less easy to let go of. Jane Austen’s unfinished novel “Sanditon” has been completed five times in the last 30 years alone, and many of her books have spawned sequels, including Elizabeth Aston’s recent novels about the daughters of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Perhaps these Austen continuators should take on a project that, according to Kelly, the author herself turned down: “The Magnificent Adventures and Intriguing Romances of the House of Saxe Cobourg,” (showing in this, as in all other literary matters, her perfect good sense).

Personally, after reading “The Book of Lost Books,” I began to wonder: If I had to pick one or two of my own books to be preserved, which ones would they be? Would I claim the serious works, as Algernon Charles Swinburne did, and risk coming to seem, like him, overwrought and overwritten, even though the record of his life shows considerable traces of a satiric, irreverent and playful gift? Or would I preserve the funny efforts, knowing that humor is perhaps the most time-bound and ephemeral form of all? What if all the books were lost and only that screenplay was left, the one I wrote for television that was entirely rewritten by the producers before it aired under my name?

That, in some sense, was the fate of Agathon, a contemporary of Socrates and Aristophanes, who appears in Plato’s “Symposium” and is referred to in a few other works, but leaves nothing in his own voice. Even worse is the story of Menander, adored by Plutarch and Julius Caesar, whose writings were presumed lost. All that was left was his reputation (“second only to Homer”) until his work was rediscovered, in 1905. First, there was great excitement; then, critical revision. As Kelly puts it, “One of [his] favorite plots could be summarized as: ‘Whoops! I raped someone last night,’ which normally ended with perpetrator and victim realizing that they are the love of each other’s lives, and getting married.”

Some authors do get lucky. There is Franz Kafka, of course, who left explicit instructions that his manuscripts be destroyed and his books be allowed to molder away untouched. (Kelly is not sure that Kafka would have viewed his preservation as good luck; rather, it’s the readers who got lucky here.) And Dylan Thomas, who kept misplacing “Under Milk Wood” -- at one point leaving it in a hotel he could hardly remember the name of, and at last forgetting it in a pub. But I guess you could say the play had a life of its own, and was determined to be published, and kept coming back to Thomas until it was.

Not every authorial adventure is as amusing as every other, but Kelly, originally a classicist, does what he can to make the best of his 85 subjects and their varied fates. “The Book of Lost Books” leaves us pensive, imagining all the works that are well and truly lost, even beyond “Anonymous,” and thankful for what remains.