Penguins on Parade: The Modern Classics!

Some Penguin Classics just look so nice! This has surely been noticed by the younger generation of printed-book buyers, whose Book Depository-roving eyes have been caught time and again by the recent redesign of the Penguin Modern Classics run. In a canny inversion of the now-venerable black-spined design of the main Penguin Classics line, these snazzy new Modern Classics volumes are bright white; in a canny inversion of the monumental visual stateliness of the Penguin Classics line (I’ve lost count of how many friends I’ve bored while walking around the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the National Portrait Gallery happily matching the Old Masters painting with its Penguin cover), the covers of these Modern Classics are bright and new and evocative (indeed, some of the gray-spined UK editions, like the one for L. P. Hartley’s weird and utterly heartbreaking book The Go-Between, sporting cover art specifically commissioned for the occasion); in a canny inversion of the canonical choices of the old Penguin Classics lineup, some of these new Modern Classics are a bit on the unpredictable side.

Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End, certainly, and for better or worse, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (which at least provides its soon-to-be stultified readers with a wonderful Introduction by Seamus Deane). The Great Gatsby with a great cover; a whole series of utterly arresting covers for the Modern Classics run of Kafka; some elegant editions of Virginia Woolf’s books .. these are expected things in any ‘modern classics’ lineup.

But The Collected Stories of Rumpole? You can imagine my surprise and delight in finding such a volume on the list! I wrote up the progenitor of this book for my reviewing home on the other side of the world years ago, and I had a great time doing it. And what about Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels? I might be practically alone in my opinion that they’re utter garbage, but even so, their appearance here bespeaks a very pleasingly broad editorial outlook just the same. And speaking of garbage: there’s John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, something that shouldn’t have seen the light of day, let alone achieve any kind of ‘classic’ status, but the mere fact that some editor stood up for it says good things about this series regardless of its lapses.

There’s Fair Stood the Wind for France by the criminally neglected H. E. Bates; there’s Ernesto Sabato’s bewildering The Tunnel; there’s a “selected poems” of Patrick Kavanagh, of all people, and a nice sturdy edition of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces; there are strange gems like Elias Canetti’s Kafka’s Other Trial and Paul Bowles’s Up Above the World – things you’d never expect to see in any kind of ‘classics’ line but are nonetheless glad to find here. There’s even Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Shah of Shahs, which I’ve pressed on many a reader in my day! And for the faint of heart (and the wimps, an ever-present sub-category of the reading world, the Silent Majority, as it were, in the Republic of Letters), there’s even a big boxed set of “Mini Modern Classics,” filled with some of the very worst books ever written, here gathered in one landfill-convenient set.

There’s E. L. Doctorow – not just the understandable Ragtime but the more idiosyncratic Book of Daniel; there’s the bizarre choice of Eric Ambler (you can trust me on this: not only does The Mask of Dimitrios have no redeeming rhetorical qualities, but its author didn’t even remember writing it), but there’s also Max Frisch’s Homo Faber, so often oddly neglected in roll calls of this kind; yes, there’s the dreariness of Saul Bellow’s inclusion, but there’s also John Dos Passos.

I’ve gone through phases where I scorned reprint lines like this new Penguin Modern Classics as crass and obvious marketing ploys designed to snag lazy readers who might buy a new paperback of The Bell Jar but would be much too intimidated to pick up Middlemarch regardless of how well-designed it was. After all, we can’t be elevating everything to the status of a classic, now can we? And if you make a gesture in that account – especially one that includes the C-list novels or Jack Kerouac, or the twin monstrosities of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead – aren’t you adulterating beyond recall the very definition of the term?

And I still scorn excessive inclusivity (especially the kind prompted by holier-than-thou political correctness) – but if there’s evidence of discriminating taste, if there are signs of a taste involved, even if it’s a woefully misinformed taste, well, I increasingly can live with that. I snatch up these Penguin Modern Classics every time I find one.