In his short story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges describes an infinite library, one which contains “Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues . . . the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages.”
Would that such a library existed! It would also contain the vanished MSS. of history’s great writers, some of which are catalogued (truthfully, we presume) in Stuart Kelly’s new book (The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly; Random House, 368 pages, $24.95). Numberless works have been lost to the sands of time, not to mention the floods, demolitions, thefts, fires, and even lungs of time: “Mikhail Bakhtin, exiled in Kazakhstan, used his work on Dostoyevsky as cigarette papers, after having smoked a copy of the Bible.”
Do you know the Anglo-Saxon scop Widsith the Wide-Traveled, author of the eponymous poem “Widsith”? His poem mentions dozens of names, which Kelly supposes may be “the heroes of lost works.” Many of Kelly’s examples are thusly only hinted at by cryptic, teasing citations, but he knows for sure that, for instance, we lack Chaucer’s Book of the Leoun and Pope’s Alcander. (The latter “was burned at the suggestion of Francis Atterbury, the dean of Westminster and bishop of Rochester.”) And what about the Greeks? Where are the rest of Aeschylus’s eighty plays?
Don’t weep for all these losses: Only a masochist would wish for the hundreds of pages, stolen and sold by Algerian urchins, of the original draft of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Ditto Double Exposure, Sylvia Plath’s lost novel, which promised “a husband, wife, and mistress,” and, we may guess, countless yawns.
The esoteric learning on offer here would do Borges proud, but it isn’t inaccessible. (At times, it’s too accessible, less scholarly eccentricity than garden-variety nerditude: “I started compiling a List of Lost Books. It quickly superseded my Book of Lists with its ‘Everyone in Star Wars That Wasn’t Made into a Figure’ . . . .” But no matter.) The entries are fairly short and ought to be read out of order, one or two a day, on a coffee break or after dinner. They’re intriguing CliffsNotes for books that, sadly or happily, will never be on the test.