In the Modern Library: The Mill on the Floss!

To hear Bennett Cerf tell the story (or to read his well-shaped and non-actionable ‘reminiscence’ of it in his 1977 book At Random), the Modern Library in its current incarnation was born of equal parts financial desperation and marital infidelity – both being experienced in acute amounts in 1925 by publishing schmoozer and would-be Broadway impresario Horace Liveright.

Liveright was a spendthrift with no head for business, and he ran his publishing house of Boni & Liveright like a madhouse, with money flowing in and money flowing out and daily drunken lunches with authors he was wooing. One of the most steadily valuable of all Boni & Liveright’s properties was the Modern Library, a collection of affordable classics new and old which Liveright’s erstwhile partner, Albert Boni, had conceived as a rival to England’s Everyman Library (several of the Modern Library editions were typically used in school courses, and as a much later publishing impresario would rightly put it, “You won’t go broke if you’ve got the schools on your side”). But for all its industry recognition, the Modern Library was haphazardly run – until young Cerf insinuated himself into its operation.

Eventually there came a day when a tipsy, debt-ridden Liveright agreed to sell Cerf the Modern Library outright, for $200,000 (which, considering the fact that it included all existing inventory stock, was very nearly a steal, and Cerf knew it instantly), and the two of them repaired to Liveright’s office on 48^th St. to finalize the deal. Liveright’s long-time associates and friends were outraged and huddled in his office trying their best to talk him out of it, and just as they might have succeeded, word came up from the reception desk that a famous literary agent had arrived in a towering rage and brandishing a pistol – it seems he’d just found out that Liveright was having an affair with his wife, and he’d come to remainder the great publisher. One of Liveright’s cronies – the most outspoken critic of the sale – was dispatched to calm the man down, and Cerf was able to carry the day.

It’s a great story (there are no bad stories in At Random), for all that it’s unlikely to be true, and in any case the Modern Library was launched with flair and energy. Cerf and his young colleagues poured money and energy into the line, and it prospered as never before, going through several iconic incarnations (as we’ve covered here at Stevereads).

I think the current incarnation – lovely soft-opening paperbacks with calfskin-colored spines topped in black with the Modern Library logo (once irreverently described as “some dame Cerf is chasing”) at the top on a field of black – may be my favorite of them all. I like everything about these brown volumes, from the little details (on the spines, “the Modern Library Classics” and the “Introduction by” are in elegant cursive) to the big (in terms of general editing and notes, these new editions surprisingly often punch at the same weight as Oxford and Penguin Classics). I dearly loved the old row of hardcovers with their plain beige wrappers, but in my endless travels to used bookstores, it’s always these new brown-spined paperbacks I’m happiest to see these days.

Just the other day, in fact, I found a cheap copy (unmarked, which is the real trick here, since so many of these volumes are still used in school courses by idiots wielding their unholy highlighters) of George Eliot’s inexorably depressing novel The Mill on the Floss, with an Introduction by Margot Livesey that’s so good – so smart and so playful – that it reminded me of the irritating fact that there’s currently no collection of this author’s nonfiction.

This particular essay starts out with the inimitable line “George Eliot, born Mary Anne Evans, later also known as Marian, Polly, and Pollian, had a remarkably large head.” Hee.

“In scene after brilliant scene,” Livesey writes, “Eliot invokes the intense, operatic world of childhood, a world in which everything hangs in the balance, in which all may be lost or saved because of a cross word, a torn dress, a reckless haircut.” And her tone regarding the book’s … shall we say longueurs? … is just the perfect blend of sympathy and encouragement:

It’s easy to get discouraged by the leisurely pace and slightly quaint tone of the opening. Also by the complex and meticulous machinations with which Eliot sets up Mr. Tulliver’s downfall. So I am here to say, dear reader, keep going, keep turning those pages. And forgive yourself and the author for whatever lapses of attention may occur. You will be rewarded many times over by finding yourself a privileged visitor to a complex adult world in which the struggle between past and present affections, cerebral and physical passions, is rendered with extraordinary insight and imagination.

Eliot enthusiasts (including at least one far more knowledgeable and eloquent on this gloppy book even than Livesey is) tend to say this kind of thing when cornered, and God knows when it’s true – as in the case of Daniel Deronda or the great, towering Middlemarch – it’s very true. Readers of The Mill on the Floss who “keep turning those pages” at Livesey’s behest may even end up agreeing with her. Stranger things have happened, in the Modern Library.