From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS NEW YORK--Orion Books, one of England's top publishing houses, has just brought out the first six titles in a series of abridged versions of such classic novels as "Anna Karenina," "Moby-Dick" and "Vanity Fair." The covers of these paperbacks, which have been shortened by as much as 40%, bill their contents as "Compact Editions." "'David Copperfield' in Half the Time," as one entry promises. Malcolm Edwards, the series' publisher, told a Times of London reporter that "many regular readers think of the classics as long, slow and, to be frank, boring."
Not surprisingly, Orion has been taking a beating from British highbrows. "It's completely ridiculous--a daft idea," one London bookseller told the Times. "How can you edit the classics?" Daft it may be, but no less a literary light than Somerset Maugham once undertook to prepare abridged versions of the 10 best novels ever written. His choices, which included "The Brothers Karamazov," "Pride and Prejudice" and "War and Peace," were unexceptionable. What kicked up a row was Maugham's cheeky claim that "the wise reader will get the greatest enjoyment out of reading them if he learns the useful art of skipping. . . . There is nothing reprehensible in cutting."
I haven't seen any of Orion's Compact Editions--they'll be published in the U.S. starting in August--but I'm not inclined to be snippy about them, because it happens that I grew up reading abridged novels, an experience that did me no harm whatsoever. My parents were among the many Americans who subscribed to Reader's Digest Condensed Books, a once-popular series of volumes published between 1950 and 1997 that offered its readers abridged versions of such popular novels as "Advise and Consent" and "The Caine Mutiny." Like Orion's Compact Editions, Condensed Books came in for a fair amount of teasing. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, for instance, wrote a very funny song in which they speculated on how the Digest's editors might have summed up "Gone With the Wind": "Scarlett O'Hara's a spoiled pet/She wants everything that she can get/The one thing she can't get is Rhett/The end."
I started dipping into Condensed Books in elementary school, and found them so engrossing that I talked my parents into becoming charter subscribers to another now-defunct series, Reader's Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers. It was this series, launched in 1966, that introduced me to "The Scarlet Pimpernel," "Treasure Island," "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and the Sherlock Holmes stories, among many other good things. As I grew older, I sought out the full-length versions of these books and found them even more rewarding, and I expect that more than a few of the readers of Orion's Compact Editions will do the same thing.
And if they don't? Then at least they'll profit from having been exposed to a slimmed-down but well-chosen selection of the literary cornerstones of Western culture. What's more, I suspect that some of the books they read will be the better for having been trimmed. Dr. Johnson described "Paradise Lost" as "one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is." That's how I feel about "Moby-Dick," an indisputably great novel that is nonetheless full to the gunwales with excess baggage. Everyone should read it once--but fewer and fewer people do, and I can't say that I blame them.
Of course great art deserves to be experienced on its own uncompromising terms, flaws and all. But the older I get, the more I appreciate those artists who say what they have to say, then shut up. Is there a more powerfully moving novel than F. Scott Fitzgerald's 56,000-word "The Great Gatsby"? Or a funnier film than Buster Keaton's 44-minute "Sherlock Jr."? Or a more profound meditation on the brevity of human life than "Anakreons Grab," Hugo Wolf's setting of Goethe's 12-line poem about the grave of an ancient Greek poet? "The happy poet rejoiced/In spring, summer and fall/Now at last this mound of earth/Protects him from winter." I'd trade any number of operas for that exquisitely wrought three-minute song.
Perhaps my growing appreciation of the virtues of conciseness arises from the fact that I am no longer young. To cross the 50th meridian is to be ever more acutely aware of the need to "use well the interval," as Cardinal Newman put it. Malcolm Edwards said the same thing less poetically but more pithily when he remarked that "life is too short to read all the books you want to." I regret to admit that there are a good many great novels that I have yet to read, some of which are long enough to make me quail at the thought of taking them on so late in the game.
I've never read Charles Dickens's "Bleak House," which is 388,000 words long, and one of my New Year's resolutions for 2007 was to do so. I picked it up in January--and put it down again in February, having gotten only a quarter of the way through. Alas, I was too busy to stick with it. So I note with interest that the next six-volume installment of Orion's Compact Editions includes "Bleak House."
Yes, I'm tempted.
Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
Short Is Good
The concise joys of condensed books--and the virtues of brevity
BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Saturday, May 12, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT
