Reading is always re-reading, anything less is only half-reading, an act of perusal or skimming the surface. Most books are not even worth reading once, but this sporadic series on what I’m re-reading will include what is currently on the pile on the floor next to my reading chair.

1.

Wallstein Verlag has recently published The Life of the Mind Texts by Hannah Arendt, as part of their ongoing series, Hannah Arendt: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Complete Works.

Arendt tended to write in her adopted English language, but her drafts retained much of the shape and style of her native German; a language closer to the actual structure of her thought. She would work closely with her longtime friend and confidant, the author Mary McCarthy, to redraft her texts prior to publication. This series of complete critical editions, however, is making available Arendt’s original, unvarnished drafts – before she handed them over to McCarthy – published alongside related texts, additional drafts, notes, outlines, articles and lectures, many of which have not previously been made available to the public.

The Life of the Mind was originally published in two volumes in 1977 and 1978, and covered the topics Thinking and Willing, respectively. A third volume was projected that would have covered the topic of Judging, but Arendt died in 1975 before starting it. She had just completed drafting the text for ‘Willing’, and had inserted the title page for her draft of ‘Judging’ in her typewriter before dying of a heart attack – a facsimile of that original title page is included in The Life of the Mind Texts.

After Arendt’s death, McCarthy worked alone to edit and revise the texts for the first two volumes. As with her work on Arendt’s previous books, she did an exemplary job. We would probably not have had many of Arendt’s published works if it was not for McCarthy’s efforts, and many of the Arendt quotes that people share nowadays contain McCarthy’s fingerprints. But there is something special about being given access to Arendt’s original drafts, to be able to follow her attempts at articulating her own thoughts – in their natural environment, so to speak. The value of McCarthy’s revisions is that she clarifies the endpoint of each of Arendt’s thoughts and weaves them together in a coherent narrative form. But the value of Arendt’s own texts is that we can follow more closely the very process of her thinking.

This book is a perfect example of the importance of re-reading, and how deeper resonances can resound from a particular work. More so because I’ve already read the originally published volumes a few times, and now I am effectively re-reading and reading anew, simultaneously. The critical edition also forces its own practice of re-reading as the main texts are followed by lectures covering ostensibly the same topics, going over the same ground, with slightly different language, scope and emphasis. These different iterations of basically the same set of ideas allows for a more expansive reading experience.

This is only the second volume from the Wallstein Verlag project that I have read, the first being a volume from 2018, The Modern Challenge to Tradition: Fragmente eines Buchs. That is a very exciting and stimulating work, as it contains various texts – multiple draft attempts, outlines, lectures, and notes – for a work Arendt never actually finished writing, but which she started working on even before The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951, and then abandoned in order to write The Human Condition (1958). So frustrated was she by this intermediate project that the last attempt to write it, between January and September 1954, was given the working title: “Eine Art Buch – A Book That Can’t Be Written”. And yet, these previously unpublished pages – a sort of prequel and corrective to The Origins of Totalitarianism – constitute a veritable laboratory for Arendt’s thinking, with ideas from this period being developed in various ways in all her future books, articles, and lectures. Some of the ideas – and clear references to this work – can even be found in The Life of the Mind Texts.

So far only four of a projected eighteen volumes in this series has been published. Annoyingly, the final volume slated to be published in 2031 is Arendt’s Denktagebuch, her private intellectual journal, previously unpublished in English and so only available to scholars with access to Arendt’s archive. Meanwhile, books we already have published versions of – such as The Life of the Mind – are coming out beforehand. This makes no sense to me.

This brings to mind another publishing venture which I’ve been following impatiently since 1995, with equal parts appreciation and irritation: Stanford University Press’s The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (in 19 volumes). What irritates me is that although I’ve dipped into it over the years, I prefer to read chronologically, and so I have been waiting – since 1995 – for them to actually publish the first book of the series, The Birth of Tragedy/Unpublished Basel Writings (Winter 1869/70–Fall 1873), before I can begin a broad, systematic reading of the subsequent texts.

To date, they have published 14 volumes from the series, but are still going, with no end in sight. But consider this: Nietzsche wrote all of his works over a 20 year period, from 1869-1889, and so this project – which has already been going for 29 years – is translating and publishing works at a slower clip than Nietzsche actually took to write them in the first place.

But I digress.

2.

When Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the disgraced French collaborator, escaped Paris after the Second World War, he reportedly left behind a cache of manuscripts, which he claimed were subsequently stolen. He banged on about this in his post-war autobiographical novels, Castle to Castle (1957), North (1960), and Rigadoon (posthumously, 1969). But it was always unclear if this was actually true or part of his growing catalogue of fantastic, paranoid grievances. Turns out, it was true, and recently the manuscripts surfaced, with War (written in 1934, but published 2024) finally appearing.

I’ve only just read it (i.e. ‘half-read’ it), but already I’m itching to re-read it. Coincidentally, I recently retrieved many boxes of books from decades long storage, and this includes many of Céline’s early novels. War reminded me of why Céline is such a powerful writer, with his kinetic prose, and a narrative form that drags the reader along.

The manuscript for War is brief, incomplete, and from some of the character names changing mid-chapter, it is clearly a very early draft. But even in this raw state, Céline proves himself to be a master stylist and unflinching observer human sordidness.

I still recall a conversation from many years ago, in a pub in Nottingham, when a friend made the case (persuasively, after a few Guiness) that where reading Samuel Beckett allows you to think about the world differently, Céline allows you to experience the world differently. His writing certainly exposes one’s nerve endings to the air.

I’ll re-read some of his early novels first, however, especially Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936). War – and another manuscript from the once missing cache, London (awaiting translation) – were supposedly part of a loose trilogy, associated with Death on the Installment Plan. So I’ll start with that, while waiting for London to be published in translation, before returning to War.

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3.

Last year I read an edited collection of essays called The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster.

Alexander and McMaster are the co-founders of a new field in the humanities called Juvenilia Studies, which focuses on the youthful writings of otherwise well-known adult writers. The project started through a practice of editing and publishing 19^th century juvenilia, through their publishing venture, Juvenilia Press. But they have since expanded to cover material from the centuries before and after.

I will be doing a public lecture at the National Library of Australia on February 12, on the adolescent writings of Frank Moorhouse. As you probably know, I recently published the first in a projected two-volume cultural biography of the Australian author and literary intellectual, Frank Moorhouse. The archives at the National Library of Australia house materials from his early years, including his extensive juvenilia. Hence the topic of the lecture.

I am currently writing this lecture, and so I have been re-reading this edited collection, drawing heavily from it in order to frame my argument, and to provide an interesting perspective on Frank’s early years.

Frank would be chuffed to consider how much his youthful experience of writing had in common with that of Virgina Woolf (née Stephen), a writer he turned to more and more over the final years of his life.

If you’re in Canberra at the time, you should come along. But the lecture will also be live-streamed, details and access here.

Northrop Frye’s Four Levels of Literary Meaning Matthew Lamb · May 17, 2023 Read full story

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