Fictive Fiction
Fictive Fiction
Fictive fiction usually appears in fiction, when the character is a writer, or when a book appears as an element of the plot. Novelists are by nature attracted to the book as an object in their story.
Ariel in Mayfair
HILARY MALTBY
New York: Harper’s, 1910.
A Faun on the Cotswolds
STEPHEN BRAXTON
New York: Harper’s, 1910.
First mentioned in Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men.
Two books by a pair of contemporaries, together evoking “more of natural magic, more of British woodland glamour, more of the sheer joy of life than anything since ‘As You Like It’.” The books, appearing in the same year (1895) were a season’s wonder in London, Maltby’s a delicate, brilliant work; Braxton’s “crude, but with a genuine power and beauty.” Sadly, the relationship between the two authors was doomed from the moment of publication.
The Woman Who Braved All
ROSIE BANKS
London: McGee, 1924.
Mentioned in P.G. Wodehouse’s “Bingo and the Little Woman.”
This romance novel is often attributed to a Mr. Bertram Wooster, but it was written by Ms. Banks in 1920 while she was working as a waitress at the Senior Liberal Club in St. James. Mentioned in Wodehouse’s “Bingo and the Little Woman.” By the end of the book, Bingo is married, Jeeves wise, and Bertie the cheerful fool. All ends well.
Outside the Town of Malbork
Poza Osadą Malbork
TAZIO BAZAKBAL
Warsaw: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 1979.
First mentioned in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
The result of a certain amount of confusion at a printer’s establishment, this copy of Bazakbal’s interesting work actually contains a different novel, Leaning from the Steep Slope, a Cimmerian novel by Ukko Ahti.
Bazakbal’s novel is itself often discovered bound into copies of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The novel begins, “The novel begins in a railway station....
Camel Ride to the Tomb
X. TRAPNEL
London: Quiggin and Craggs, 1947.
First mentioned in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.
This book was Trapnel’s great success. It is famously said that the novel encapsulates the author’s central metaphor for life. He derived this trope from a street cry he heard as an impressionable child, that of a Bedouin camel driver advertising available transport. “Camel ride to the tomb! ... Camel ride to the tomb!”
Chain of Command
YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE
New York: Doubleday, 1947.
First mentioned in Herman Wouk’s eponymous novel.
Chain of Command is Youngblood Hawke’s great novel of World War II. Unfortunately, it was a work of which he became eventually ashamed, finally coming to think it inferior, shallow, and embarrassing, and wrong about the validity of the war. It went, of course, to the top of the best-seller list and stayed there. It won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize, and Hawke’s life started on its downward arc. Inscribed by Hawke to Thomas Wolfe.
Ask to Embla
RANDOLPH HENRY ASH
London: Fellowes, 1859.
First mentioned in A.S. Byatt’s Possession.
A volume of passionate love poems from the first Man to the first Woman (per the Norse mythos). These seventeen poems, written mostly in unrhymed iambic pentameter, represent some of the oddest (and, some would say, of the finest) work of the period. The book was most likely meant to be addressed to his lover Christabel LaMotte.
The Fairy Melusine
CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE
London: Edward Moxon, 1842.
First noted in A.S. Byatt’s Possession.
This is a series of exquisite poems in the Pre-Raphaelite manner. It was first noted in A.S. Byatt’s Possession, in which are portrayed two young contemporary Scholars, he studying Randolph Henry Ash, the Victorian poet, she Christabel LaMotte. The two scholars dislike each other initially, but they discover together that the two Victorians had fallen in love and had an affair, and in the process, the two scholars do as well.
Moeurs
JACOB ARNAUTI
Alexandria: n.p., 1931.
First mentioned in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.
This is a roman à clé by Jacob Arnauti, a novelist who used his book to try to define his relationship with his wife, Justine, a woman with many lovers, a complex sexuality, and an even more complex personality. The city of Alexandria itself looms as another significant character in the novel, shaping the mood, the plot, and finally, the resolution.