Grant Munroe

It’s not often that I come across a great find in the dollar rack outside Atlantic Books in Brooklyn Heights.  But yesterday I did.  I scored a tattered 1918 Modern Library softcover edition of The Seven That Were Hanged by Leonid Andreyev.  

I learned about Andreyev recently, though his stories “Lazarus” and “Ben-Tobith”, both of which were anthologized by Jorge Luis Borges (the former in Vol. 29 of The Library of Babel and the latter in The Book of Fantasy).  Still, I didn’t know much about the man apart from the fact that his work is almost impossible to find in translation — unjustly, I feel, because every story that I’ve read of his has been exceptional.  The Seven That Were Hanged, a novella in twelve short chapters, was tremendous.  So too was The Red Laugh, a b-side novella used to fill out the remainder of the book.  I read both long stories that afternoon while sitting under the big shade tree in Brooklyn Bridge Park.  

But this entry isn’t about Andreyev.  It’s a quick note of appreciation for his translator and champion, Thomas Seltzer.

Seltzer, according to Wikipedia, was a Russian immigrant of Jewish descent.  He was born in 1875, came to America as a young child, and died here in 1943.  He attended the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship, then went on to post-graduate study at Columbia.  He worked for Harper’s Weekly for several years.  Then as editor for the socialist magazine, The Masses (a rag notable for its publication of the short stories that Sherwood Anderson would later cull and publish as Winesburg, Ohio).  In 1917, after The Masses was shut down by the Fed and its editors (Seltzer included) were charged with anti-sedition laws for publishing articles that supposedly obstructed military enlistment, Seltzer — acquitted by a hung jury — sidled into an editorial position at Boni & Liveright.  In years prior (maybe as a way to support his wife, Adele), he’d translated several Russian novels — including works by Gorky, Gogol and Doestoevsky — for major publishing firms like Little, Brown and Knopf.  At B&L he translated Andreyev’s The Seven That Were Hanged.  It was one of the first titles that The Modern Library, an imprint founded by Boni & Liveright, printed.  That’s how my tattered copy came to exist.

Seltzer, in addition to translating The Seven, also wrote the book’s introduction. It’s through his introduction — clearly-written, witty and informative — that I came to learn a good deal about Andreyev and the period in which he wrote.  I also got a feel for Seltzer, whose prose — unlike that of the typical stodgy academic who’s usually asked to pen introductions to obscure texts like this one — shows an uncommon vitality.

Here’s a sample of Setlzer’s intro, where he comments on the largely defeatist literary scene that arose after the failed 1905 Russian Revolution, and the start of the imperialist crack-down that was the Coup of June 1907:

New and strange gods arose whom the Russian intelligentzia [sic] fervently worshipped, each in turn: Artzybashev with his novel Sanin, which, with its glorification of the sexual appetite, swept the young Russian generation like a holocaust; Merezhkovsky and his school with their reactionary religious mysticism in the name of culture; Valery Briusov, a wondrously artistic nature, who, when not contemplating the cheerful prospect of the destruction of the universe, takes flight from the misery of this world to a world of his own creating, a sort of realistic-romantic world of marvelous beauty; and Fiodor Sologub, another poet of great merit, who sees in death the only good in life.

The bit on Briusov is pretty classic, and representative of Seltzer’s humor: wry and sardonic, yet suggesting a personal lightness.  It’s the type of humor that I find makes for great commentary.  It’s similar, in a way, to that of future New Yorker journalist A.J. Liebling, who, at the time that this book was published, was a teenager living nearby in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, filling out his application to Dartmouth.

In 1919, a year after The Seven went to print, Seltzer started his own publishing firm, named (aptly) Thomas Seltzer, Inc.  This company went on to put out a great number of D.H. Lawrence‘s novels, effectively introducing them to the American public.  For his publication of Lawrence’s Women In Love and two other novels of “questionable” taste, he was sued in 1922 by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a group founded by  Anthony Comstock, the man who inspired the sadly forgotten word comstockery.  (The same society had, just two years prior, brought a successful suit against The Little Review for its publication of the masturbation scene in Joyce’s Ulysses; at the 1921 trial, Ulysses was declared obscene, resulting in its ban in the US until 1933.)  Refusing to be cowed by Comstock’s legal action, Seltzer fought and won.  Then Comstock sued him again in 1923.  Again, Seltzer fought the suit.

So Seltzer wasn’t just a witty guy — he was scrappy one, too.

Sadly, though, he wasn’t a man of unlimited wealth: due to the cost of his second protracted legal battle over censorship, his firm declared bankruptcy in 1925, just after publishing two translations of Proust and a novel by Ford Madox Ford.

On reading the introduction to The Seven, I was surprised by the openness with which Seltzer wrote in favor of the Russian communist revolts, and the frankness with which approached the (still) touchy subject of revolutionary terrorism.  He was obviously — as evidenced by his involvement with The Masses – a far-left leaning man.  But he was also one who stood up against those who sought to censor literature and impose stifling limits on freedom of expression.  All together, he had a strong libertarian streak, may have sympathized with bomb-hurling anarchists, had good taste in literature, and could tell a joke.  The early 20th century was an incredible and sadly forgotten era in the history of America.  It seems that Seltzer was, for better or worse, very much a man of his era.

None of this would have come to my attention — none of this, in my mind, given the distance between his life and mine, would have mattered to me at all — if Seltzer hadn’t been produced such a damn fine translation of Andreyev’s The Seven That Were Hanged.  Certainly, the source material was undoubtedly good.  But given the wealth of bad translations from that era — stories dragged down by an overuse of punctuation and a total lack of humor (here I’m thinking of an early translation of Gogol’s The Inspector General I remember reading as a teenager, and hating) — his skill is to be lauded.

It would have been interesting to meet Seltzer.  I’d have mentioned that his contracting of John French Sloan (a great influence on Edward Hopper, and the painter of the famous oil of McSorley’s shown on the left) to illustrate The Masses was inspired, and pretty amazing.  I also would have thanked him for his work in introducing Russian works, like those by Andreyev, to North America.

I’m probably not the only one who felt the same way.  According to S.T. Joshi, the same 1918 Modern Library translation of Andreyev’s The Seven That Were Hanged was conspicuous among those books in the library Lovecraft left at his death: it was heavily thumbed through, marked, annotated.  Given that The Seven follows the lives of seven prisoners–five anarchists, a brigand and a mentally-deficient murderer–as they await their common hanging, all seven reflecting on and (in some cases) coming to to terms with their incipient demise without the aid of organized religion, it’s not surprising that it appealed to Lovecraft, the consummate materialist.  Especially, I’m guessing, as he neared death by stomach cancer.

Thankfully, 1918 ed. of The Seven is now available online.  You can find it here, at GoogleBooks.