A Handbook to Literature [antikvár]

Preface to the fifth Edition Fifteen hundred chances to put in my two cents' worth have amounted to a good deal more than thirty dollars' worth of enjoyment. In preparing the newest edition of this Handbook, I have experienced two pleasures to which many are tempted but few are treated: amending a classic and improving a friend. It has been my privilege, first, to tamper with the Handbook in the hope of making it handier. The first edition came out in 1936, and both William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard died during the 1940s, long before I eould have a chance to meet them. They share the distinction of having inaugurated a Handbook that for fifty years has served many thousands of readers as an aid in the understanding and enjoyment of reading and as a stimulus to further reading; and the Thrall-Hibbard Handbook has achieved for many the stature and familiarity of a classic in its own right. It has been my privilege, second, to try to make improvements in a friend. We seldom do sueh a thing with our friends, because we like them as they are, as we like ourselves, warts and all. But a reference work, which is obliged to remain a satellite orbiting an ever-changing body of material, can become a friend that is nothing but warts or—to shift the figure from the Cromwellian to the Johnsonian mode—a horse that is nothing but pasterns; and we have to supplement and revise. Another pleasure, in fact, has come in the very witnessing of change in a world of new thresholds and new anatomies. O how the mighty have fallen, yes, but O how—at the same time—the humble have risen. Meek irony began, back in 1936, as a lowly figure, then inherited the earth and became the trope for a while, and now, as far as I can teli, survives chiefly in the cramped lexicon of sports announcers. Even meeker onomatopoeia—a figure so low that it may not belong to speech at all, being just raw nőise—is now enjoying a vogue and may reap its reward in heaven. The world has turnéd upside down several times since 1936—which was before Finnegans Wake, Four Quar-tets, Paterson, The Pisán Cantos, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Well Wrought Urn, Anatomy of Criticism, Gravity's Rainbow, and much else—and a handbook has to keep up. (A fourth pleasure: As I think of what I have done, revising a book that was first written by people I never knew and was published fifty years ago, before I was born, I think of another revision to be undertaken fifty years hence, after I am gone, by somebody not yet born whom I shall never know. To her or him or them, I say, "Look into your heart and rewrite! That's what I did, and that's what I'm sure Thrall, Hibbard, and Holman did before me.") C. Hugh Holman, who was my close friend for many years, prepared revised editions that appeared in 1960, 1972, and 1980. Adding a lot and subtracting a little, I have left hardly a paragraph unchanged, but I think I have kept faith with Hugh's style. He and Thrall were here at Chapel Hill for all of their teaching careers, and Hibbard spent many good years here before moving to Northwestern. Although I was not around to witness the publication of the first edition, I did get to Chapel Hill in time, fifteen years ago, to know three of the scholars—