Forgotten books worth rediscovering

Most readers have favourite books or authors they feel have been either forgotten or unjustly neglected. R.B. Russell, an assiduous book collector, did something practical about this when in 1990 he co-founded the Tartarus Press in order to bring the works of the once popular Arthur Machen back into print. Machen’s particular speciality was ‘weird fiction’, novels and stories that inhabit the borderland of this and other worlds, and Tartarus went on to reissue other authors in this genre, notably Robert Aickman and Sarban (otherwise the British diplomat John William Wall), as well as to publish new writers and a handful of classics.

Fifty Forgotten Books inevitably includes a number of Tartarus authors, not only writers of supernatural and other-worldly fiction, but also Alain-Fournier, A.J. Symons, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Denton Welch. Russell cheerfully acknowledges that both Le Grand Meaulnes and The Quest for Corvo are sufficiently unforgotten to have been Penguin Modern Classics for several decades, while Townsend Warner’s work is regularly reprinted – to which one might add that Welch has an enthusiastic cult following that keeps his name and works very much alive.

However, Russell more than makes up for this cavalier net-spreading in his chapters on genuinely forgotten books. Alongside the familiar (Baudelaire, Walter de la Mare) and the cultish (Anna Kavan, Jocelyn Brooke), there are some bona fide oddities, and he sometimes selects unexpected volumes by authors known for other types of book, such as Ernest Dowson’s short stories or Gerald Heard’s tales of the supernatural.

One of the themes that runs throughout the book is of writers who even during their lifetimes existed on the margins, and it seem wholly appropriate that Russell’s survey opens and closes with two books titled The Outsider. Russell came across the first of these, by Colin Wilson (1956), as a 14-year-old attracted to existentialism, and it inaugurated his passion for book collecting. If Wilson’s book is hardly ‘forgotten’, it is now largely unread, while the other book that shares its title, Richard Wright’s novel of 1953, is undoubtedly less familiar than his earlier Native Son, a classic of black literature.

Other outsiders include Quentin S. Crisp (not to be confused with the Naked Civil Servant), whose autobiographical The Paris Notebooks (2017) portrays someone who ‘lives on the periphery of existence in terms of financial security, literary success and sexuality’ – the ideal Tartarus author. Less ideal in every way, but nevertheless worthy of attention as writers, are the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, represented by Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922), and M.P. Shiel, whose ‘remarkably morbid’ short stories are collected in Xélucha and Others (1975), and who in 1915 was sentenced to 16 months’ hard labour after being convicted of having sexual relations with his 12-year-old stepdaughter.

Anyone who has read Russell’s Past Lives of Old Books (2020), which includes essays on several of the authors treated here, will know what to expect of this new volume. It is not unlike his own description of Alexis Lykiard’s Jean Rhys Revisited (2000), ‘a book of rambling and digressive fragments and impressions’. Russell frequently veers off from the titles ostensibly under consideration to describe other books and authors or to reminisce about his life as a collector, publisher and member of Arthur Machen appreciation societies.

Much of this is entertaining, in particular his accounts of booksellers, some of whom are as murky and mysterious as anything in the recommended titles. For example, one owner of a chaotic bookshop in Brighton attempted to seduce our teenage author, was rumoured to have worked for the security services and then vanished without trace, leaving the shop untended, only resurfacing when he died some six years later.

Although not all of Russell’s endorsements are persuasive, who wouldn’t be tempted by such books as Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), about a ‘shape-shifting Ancient Egyptian entity’ seeking revenge on a politician, which in its time far outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula; or Murray Constantine’s ‘harrowing’ Swastika Night (1937), which imagines, long before Robert Harris and Philip Roth, a grim future under the Nazis?

Particularly appealing are Copsford (1948), Walter J. Murray’s account of attempting to make money selling herbs while living in a remote semi-derelict cottage (also praised by Grant McIntyre in a recent issue of the quarterly magazine Slightly Foxed); Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms (1926), about a young botanical student at Kew who ‘discovers romantic affinities with a giant orchid’; and Rebecca Lloyd’s The Child Cephalina (2019), in which an enigmatic 11-year-old girl is exploited by fraudulent spiritualists in 1850s London.

Russell informs us that a recent survey found that, contrary to popular belief, there are ‘more second-hand bookshops now than there have ever been’, and this engaging, idiosyncratic volume should send readers scurrying to them in pursuit of the curious and recherché works that it champions.