The Modern Library is very dear to my heart. I discovered the imprint as an illiterate Kindergartner looking through his late father's books. He'd owned a small number of editions, including Anna Karenina, Arrowsmith, Of Human Bondage, and Eugene O'Neill's Nine Plays, each bearing his signature and a stamp with our Beaconsfield address. I liked that they were compact and uniform. I also liked the covers.
As a young adult, Modern Library's founders Albert Boni and Horace Liveright, became personal heroes. Firebrand, Tom Dardis's 1995 biography of the latter, had something to do with this, though I was already in their camp. As a university student, I sought out Modern Library editions of assigned texts, snubbing the cheap mass market paperbacks sold at the campus bookstore.
During those years I kept my spare cash in Winesburg, Ohio.
Ernest Boyd wrote the introduction to Winesburg, Ohio. Ford Maddox Ford wrote the introduction to A Farewell to Arms. Famously, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the introduction to what was then the commercial flop known as The Great Gatsby.
Because Modern Library's focus, like mine, is on the past, I've not kept up with the imprint, and so only recently became aware of its 2021 reissue of Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings by Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton).
It made the heart proud for a second or two. Mrs. Spring Fragrance may be the only book by a Canadian on the today's Modern Library list, though you would not know this from C Pam Zhang's introduction. True, her contribution isn't large – roughly four pages in length – but you'd think that there might be room to mention of the author's birthplace (Prestbury, Cheshire, England) or the city in which she was raised, educated, lived most of her life, died, and is buried (Montreal, Quebec, Canada). She's instead presented as "North American."
The errors are egregious: Eaton’s mother was Chinese, not "Chinese British;" her "white American father" was in fact English. Sister Winnifred, who was inarguably the more successful writer, is ignored entirely.
I end by noting that Mrs Spring Fragrance, whom Zhang describes as "a Chinese woman thriving in San Francisco," lives in Seattle.
It's right there – "Seattle" – in the very first sentence of the very first story.
For me, it's been the Penguin editions of classic novels (beginning with Dickens and others in the orange-spine editions) and, as something of a collector, the old Everyman's Library with the sort of Art Nouveau endpapers. I suppose I have around 40 of those.
ReplyDeleteDale Nelson
I do like both. And though I'm primarily interested in Canadian literature, Library of America is another favourite.
DeleteSad to see so many errors and omissions in a short introduction. I expect the Modern Library of Boni, Liveright and later Cerf did better.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of Louis Begley's error-ridden introduction to the (current) NYRB edition of John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse.
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