"Fifty Books That Are Books" by Ben Hecht

My friend writes me:

"As for the library, I want no more than fifty books. And none of them modern; that is, no novels that are coming off the presses these last ten years. Are there fifty intelligent books in the world? If you have time send along a list of fifty books. I promise to buy them and have them beautifully bound. I am consulting you as I would my lawyer. I have not time to develop a literary consciousness at my age. So if you were cutting your own library down to fifty books, which books would you keep?"

This is a very flattering letter. And the temptation is too insidious. I doubt whether there are fifty books that remain in my mind as amazing, beautiful or intelligent. But it is better to trust to one's memory than to one's bookshelves. Ten minutes in front of the bookshelves and there would be five hundred volumes, all demanding recognition. Old favorites, books that thrilled on a winter's evening years ago, books one has forgiven and adopted, books that represent the enthusiasms of adolescence; all these would clamor from the bookshelves.

But sitting in front of a typewriter on a hot summer day my memory offers the following fifty books to my friend.

1. The Idiot, by Dostoevsky. A marvelous novel. For years it has remained in my mind as the best book I ever read.

2. The House of the Dead, by Dostoevsky. Memoirs of a man buried in a Siberian prison.

3. At the Sign of the Reine Pedauque, by Anatole France. An epitome of the venom and listlessness which have been celebrated as the irony of M. France.

4. The Opinions of Jerome Coinard, by Anatole France.

5. The Genealogy of Morals, by Freiderich Nietzsche. Dynamite. Beware.

6. Ecce Homo, by Frederick Nietzsche. More dynamite, but diluted with skyrockets.

7. Zarathustra, by F. Nietzsche. As quaintly written as the Bible.

8. The Legend of Tyll Eulenspiegel, by De Coster. A historical novel crowded with poetry, pep and pleasure. A book to place alongside

9. The Works of Francois Rabelais. A rococo mausoleum, in which the soul of man lies in its happiest incarnation.

10. The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci, by Daniel Merjckowski.

11. Natural Philosophy of Love, by Remy de Gourmont, in which Ezra Pound in an epilogue reveals what an ass he is and what boobs contemporary scribblers in the main are, alongside the genius of de Gourmont.

12. Morbid Fears and Compulsions, by Frink. The best orchestration of the psychanalysis (sic) penumbral I have encountered.

13. The Psychology of Insanity- - Hart. A tiny volume which tells all there is to be told about the thing. A blue print of modern thinking.

14. Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev. As I remember it there was a character called Bazarov or Barazov in this book. I tried to imitate Bazarov or Barazov for three years.

15. Masks and Minstrels of New Germany, by Percival Pollard. Pollard used to drink wine at the old Richeleau Hotel on Michigan Avenue.

16. Affirmations, by Havelock Ellis. James Huneker looted Havelock Ellis and Havelock Ellis looted de Gourmont.

17. A Book of Masks, by Remy de Gourmont. Nearly all modern literary criticism derives from 17.

18. En Route, by J.K Huysmans. His A Rebours is a better book but it is still untranslated. But En Route is good enough. Huysmans poured his passion into a vocabulary. His phrases are the adventure of proud syllables.

19. The Golden Ass, by Signore Apelius. Which supplied Signor Boccaccio and Signor Cervantes with almost too much material.

20. The Lives of the Caesars, by Suetonius. Biography that reads like an old-fashioned Fourth of July gone mad.

21. The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter. In which the unholy Roman Empire of Nero bows itself into the oblivion celebrated by the platitudinous Mr. Gibbon.

22. Margaret de Valois, by Alexander Dumas. De Medici, Henri of Navarre, Charles the Ninth, the poisoned page; the poisoned glove- -death! A book for the intellectual's hammock.

23. The History of Art, by Elie Faure. The song of the ages, the soul of man, the torment, tragedy, the beauty of life- - there was never another work like this written.

24. The Crowd, by LeBon. An antidote and an explanation.

25. The Golden Bough, by Frazer. Anthropology. The marvelous, the hideous, the illuminating beginning of his majesty the American citizen.

26. The French Revolution, by Carlisle. A dyspeptic dramatist. History on a jazz band. I prefer it that way.

27. M'mselle de Maupin, by Gautier. Its preface anticipates H. L. Mencken. The novel itself is Rabelais played on the violin.

28. Maggie, by Stephen Crane. Together with 29. George's Mother, by Stephen Crane, constituting the great American novel.

30. The Hill of Dreams, by Arthur Machen. To be read for its delicate Satanism.

31. Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson. The evangel of the American Renaissance.

32. Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine. Lingers like old wine in my memory.

33. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, who had intelligence enough to steal it from J.K. Huysman's A Rebours.

34. Decameron, by Boccaccio, who was the literary adviser of my favorite Spanish Italian, Caesar Borgia.

35. Prejudices, First Series, by H. L. Mencken, the berserker Americano.

36. Tono-Bungay, by an H. G. Wells who had not yet ascended the soapbox.

37. The Egoist, by George Meredith. To whom I still bow in passing.

38. Celibates, by George Moore. A sneering, vicious volume, lightly done.

39. Spiritual Adventures, by Arthur Symons, which contains my favorite short story about a piano player called Travelgya or Treveylga or something else.

40. Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence. As profound and beautiful a novel as England has ever turned out.

41. The Genius, by Theodore Dreiser.

42. Volume 6 of Burton's Arabian Nights, in which Bagdad (sic) dreams again.

43. The Memoirs, by Ben Cellini.

44. Salambo, by G. Flaubert. I almost forgot Salambo, beside which Madame Bovary is a stutter in monosyllables and inanities.

45. The Queen's Quair, by Maurice Hewlett. I read it on a boat and it kept me from seasickness.

46. To 50. 46. The Mystic Rose by Crawley;

47. Chicago Poems, by Sandburg; 48. The Renaissance by Gobineau; 49. Joan of Arc;50. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (condensed in the original).

You're welcome.

"5. The Genealogy of Morals, by Freiderich Nietzsche. Dynamite. Beware."

kinda scary that he writes this in the 20's. he wasn't kidding.

Cool thx.

H. L. Mencken, the berserker Americano

cool list, its superterrible

This is hard for me because (1) a lot of the books that I think of as "important" to me were really important to me at a certain age and may have lost some of their relevance to me and (2) I read a lot fewer books than I used to.

"The History of Art, by Elie Faure"

i bought this 2-volume set when i was young and impressionable and it was in henry miller's book on the books he likes. i never read the whole thing. i look in it sometimes. its pretty cool and ornate. i like how 20's this list is. i like period lists. anatole france was the shit.

12. Morbid Fears and Compulsions, by Frink.

just such a great suggestion for someone who only wants 50 books on their bookshelf.

this list makes me feel incredibly poorly read.

lots of books by Men here

"The History of Art, by Elie Faure"

^ i bought this too for the same henry miller reasons. still have it, my edition is 4 fat hardbound volumes. dipped in & out of it, but that's about it

i read jean giono because of henry miller. and i am forever in his debt for turning me on to my hero krishnamurti.

"I almost forgot Salambo, beside which Madame Bovary is a stutter in monosyllables and inanities."

lol. i love ben hecht. his own early novels are totally bonkers. and total period pieces now. probing psychology of the day and all that. he was so much better at patter and everyday vernacular. that book of newspaper columns is worth its weight in gold. i even read his long autobiography once and that is a strange trip indeed.

Man the dark ages when you could not read a rebours unless you read french

i read two of these books, a couple others im sure ive picked up and held in my hands

You might wanna check out the new disc of The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, an Otto Preminger film which Hecht (maybe the greatest Hollywood screenwriter of all time btw) rewrote w/out credit. It'll make you think of Bradley Manning via Gary Cooper.

I just got into James huneker's music writing this year. He's pretty dope.

he wrote the screenplay to Scarface in 9 days.

"The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem.... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: ‘Who shall be in charge of telling the story.’ ...
“The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and , later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status. ... “Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.” ...
“The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type – as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer – an insipid one or a clumsy one – but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years – as producers did – who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write. ...
“Most of my script-writing friends – I never had more than a handful—took eagerly to the bottle or the analyst’s couch, filled their extravagant ménages with threats of suicide, hurled themselves into hysterical amours. And some of them actually died in their forties and fifties. Among these were the witty Herman Mankiewicz and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the fine novelist. ...
“I have known a handful of producers who actually were equal or superior to the writers with whom they worked. These producers were a new kind of nonwriting writer hatched by the movies—as Australia produced wingless birds. They wrote without pencils or even words. Using a sort of mime-like talent, they could make up things like writers.
“When I come to put down their names, there weren’t many. David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Walter Wanger, Irving Thalberg seem to exhaust the list…Ninety per cent of the producers I have known were not bright. They were as slow-witted and unprofessional toward making up a story as stockbrokers might be, or bus drivers. Even after twenty or thirty years of telling writers what and how to write, they were still as ignorant of writing as if they had never encountered the craft.
“Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product. These were Underworld, The Scoundrel, Wuthering Heights, Viva Villa, Scarface, Specter of the Rose, Actors and Sin, Roman Holiday, Spellbound, Nothing Sacred.”

i would hate to only have read these important & significant books, what poverty

think fathers and sons is the only one i've read. it was grand but not even in my top 10. i don't know what standard is being used above though.

no andy mcnab also...

just the fact that one guy could write wuthering heights, the great gabbo, scarface, and spellbound? and dozens and dozens of other amazing scripts...he was one in a million.

"think fathers and sons is the only one i've read."

you should read The Idiot! it's great.

if you read all those you would feel strange. it would be kinda cool to try.

also miniature lol at the guy including a huysmans novel on a list basically addressed to the protagonist of against nature

Ben does not seem to realize that Notorious was about ten times better than Spellbound

You can purge The Egoist with no loss.

the genealogy of morals kinda blew my mind when i was young and sad. i was like the panel in the charles atlas ad where the kid kicks the chair.

also miniature lol at the guy including a huysmans novel on a list basically addressed to the protagonist of against nature

Hahaha

So prescient in that it reads like an Artforum end-of-year feature.

I've got such a backlog of books that I want to read, but this has made me really want to re-read The Idiot. It's been a long time.

Never read it but I really liked that recent Estonian film adaptation of it, and like fd in general.

I've read seven or eight of these ... I rescued an old copy of The Idiot from the garage the other day, maybe I ought to read it again

I've read 13 of these and parts of a few more. Hecht makes it clear at the outset that he's just sitting at a typewriter rummaging around in his memory for the first books that pop into his mind; he's not crafting a list for the ages.

yeah, bcz lists for the ages are only made by damn fools

15. Masks and Minstrels of New Germany, by Percival Pollard. Pollard used to drink wine at the old Richeleau Hotel on Michigan Avenue.

That's nice information to know. Apparently that book was published in 1911, and Hecht is writing in the 20s. I suspect it would soon be of limited relevance.

The de haut en bas irony in all this may be a 20s manner. One finds the same thing in James Branch Cabell, who was so successful in that decade. Both Mencken and Pollard were supporters of Cabell.

Cabell has been on my to read list for ages.

Cabell has been on my to read list for ages.

There are no more than 6 of them worth anyone's time.

He's a strange case. A very intelligent guy who refused to progress mentally beyond late adolescence or Richmond Virginia aristocracy in any way, except to make fun of his younger self and his audience.

Mencken was disgusted by Cabell's Down's-syndrome son, whom Cabell loved and to whom he spoke with hilarious urbanity. Cabell was also a skilled occasional editor for Sinclair Lewis and Ellen Glasgow, and for a literary review out of Richmond in the 20s. He could have done a lot of things, but he preferred to insulate himself in his study and invent ironic romances out of nothing, and ran out of ideas. The Depression came along and made his manner obsolete.

the idiot is cool but its not his coolest

not sure what kind of person thinks it is

28. Maggie, by Stephen Crane. Together with 29. George's Mother, by Stephen Crane, constituting the great American novel.

I guess Melville hadn't been rediscovered yet.

There are no more than 6 of them worth anyone's time.

Which ones if I may ask? I have Jurgen, the Cream of the Jest and a couple others.

i love stephen crane so much. if i could be a writer i'd be him. except for all the coughing and the bawdy house wife. and i wouldn't move next to henry james, i'd move to london and live it up.

Which ones if I may ask? I have Jurgen, the Cream of the Jest and a couple others.

The Cream of the Jest, Jurgen, Figures of Earth, The Silver Stallion, Something About Eve, The High Place. There's also a collection called The Witch-Woman which is worth reading.

He's so polished and elusive that he gives the impression that there is more to him, and you look for more, and he doesn't give it to you.

I have a pet theory that R. A. Lafferty borrowed from him. It's a fact that Flann O'Brien borrowed from The Cream of the Jest for At Swim-Two-Birds. That's a pretty good legacy. Pádraic Colum, who was part of the Irish Literary Revival and a friend of Yeats, edited a collection of Cabell's letters. I have no idea how that happened.

Lafferty was the fucking man.

Seems evident from what I've read abt Cabell that jack Vance took some inspiration too. That's two of my top 10 SFF writers right there.

Heinlein did more than anyone, and Blish edited the JBC newletter for a while. But we're getting off track.

23. The History of Art, by Elie Faure. The song of the ages, the soul of man, the torment, tragedy, the beauty of life- - there was never another work like this written.

And here I've never heard of it.

I'm assuming some of the more obscure items are on either Gutenberg US or Gutenberg AU. Gonna look for some of them later.

never read any Lafferty and am curious, but nothing at the library and all his shit on Amazon is insanely expensive. problems with his estate (he died recently iirc)?

problems with his estate (he died recently iirc)?

2002, and yes. The late agent Virginia Kidd was said to have kept a whole stack of unpublished manuscripts. Like I posted elsewhere, when will the Library of America get on the case?

Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Ringing Changes and Strange Doings are the three story collections I would push. Don't start with his novels. And yeah they are too expensive these days bc Neil gaiman talked abt them somewhere. There were POD editions for awhile but not anymore I don't think. It's a problem. I have them in PDF if you do that kind of thing.

the Faure history of art is a beautiful thing. i've seen it used before. i think i had a 2 volume set in my store for about 2 years. but i don't know if i could ever tackle the whole thing.

http://archive.org/details/historyofart04fauruoft

Only used books to price-wise rival Lafferty are the old Macmillan translations of the Strugatsky bros.

The History of Art, by Elie Faure.

gonna take a look at this, looks great! a bit surprised he didn't include anything by Jacob Burckhardt

"Morbid Fears and Compulsions, by Frink."

i'm definitely searching for this.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DTchJZUZ7NE/TNl7laSP61I/AAAAAAAAACg/fgy09fbDAmo/s1600/frink.gif

eh, standard hysterical freudian stuff.

http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7122004M/Morbid_fears_and_compulsions

everyone should read "winesburg, ohio".

i agree!

Love to read these:

17. A Book of Masks, by Remy de Gourmont. Nearly all modern literary criticism derives from 17.
19. The Golden Ass, by Signore Apelius. Which supplied Signor Boccaccio and Signor Cervantes with almost too much material.
21. The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter. In which the unholy Roman Empire of Nero bows itself into the oblivion celebrated by the platitudinous Mr. Gibbon.
25. The Golden Bough, by Frazer. Anthropology. The marvelous, the hideous, the illuminating beginning of his majesty the American citizen.
30. The Hill of Dreams, by Arthur Machen. To be read for its delicate Satanism.
42. Volume 6 of Burton's Arabian Nights, in which Bagdad (sic) dreams again.
43. The Memoirs, by Ben Cellini.

I like how a couple of these (Havelock, Gobineau) are evil.

Turgenev is just a joy to me. Him and Lermontov are my 19th century Russians of choice although I never properly got into Dosto and suspect I'd dig with a bit of effort.

the edition of the book of masks that atlas press put out really is excellent, the original book of criticism with editorial comments on each entry from alastair brotchie and additional stories and poems from most of the people he covered. i have a collection of gourmont's stories dedalus put out which i should really get around to.

think it's "Apuleius" in fact - I have read this, in fact I remember building an entire shaky theory of satire and metamorphosis on it. can't remember whether it was good or not, I think it was. kinda proto-picaresque.

30. The Hill of Dreams, by Arthur Machen. To be read for its delicate Satanism.

ah no, not really. unless you mean satanism in such a broad, notional way as to not really include anything to do with satan. maybe this is what they mean by "delicate". ("the rank fume of the goat" is much stronger elsewhere in AM's works, and even then, Satan isn't a great identification).

Good, strange book tho.

Oh wow: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Man-Who-Made-Models/dp/1613470460/

*sticker shock*