On belatedly learning the value of first editions
The 50th Anniversary of Frank Moorhouse’s The Electrical Experience
1.
This November marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Frank’s Moorhouse’s third book, The Electrical Experience (1974). I wrote an essay about this occasion for the Sydney Review of Books, which you can read here:
Discontinuous Connections | Sydney Review of Books
The reason this anniversary is worth celebrating is because this was the book when critics and readers finally understood the larger project Frank was only then, in his mid 30s, beginning; it was only with The Electrical Experience that his larger thinking about literary form and social enquiry began to take on a discernible shape. As I say in the essay: ‘It is worth reflecting why this was the case fifty years ago – and why we should still be reading The Electrical Experience today.’
I end the first volume of the biography, Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths (2023), with the moment of this publication in 1974 – because in many ways it was the natural fold in Frank’s life; coming around his middle years, it was the end of a long, hard apprenticeship. The second volume will be about what Frank does with that hard earned recognition and how he develops the literary and intellectual project that was only then, with The Electrical Experience, beginning to take shape.
2.
Another reason I wanted to write that piece for the Sydney Review of Books was to include some images from the first edition of The Electrical Experience. As I argue, in both that essay and in the biography, Frank was at the time deeply indebted to the work of various media theorists and sociologists, especially Marshall McLuhan. As I state in the essay:
‘Frank’s perspective on McLuhan was partly generational. McLuhan’s generation… was purely ‘typographic’. The generation coming up under Frank, which McLuhan targeted, was largely ‘iconic’ – oriented by audio-visual media. But coming from the generation in between, Frank was more of a hybrid, somewhere between typographic and iconic. Though his focus was on writing and typographic culture, he felt somewhat excluded from that world. The more he dealt with his contemporaries, the more he realised how ill-suited they were to coping with contemporary (iconic) reality. He had used literary fiction as a form of imaginative inquiry, to engage more completely with the complexity of his social world. Increasingly, however, he was experimenting with how the medium of literary fiction could be used to incorporate social changes – precipitated by new technology – and reflect these critically back to his contemporaries. In other words, Frank was considering how to incorporate the iconic into the typographic.’
In The Electrical Experience, Frank attempted to address these generational changes, to consider the impact of technological change on society. But he also wanted to enact these considerations in the physical form of the book. ‘By foregrounding its own physical design,’ I argue in the essay, ‘the book invites the reader to reflect upon itself as a cultural artefact under duress.’
These iconic aspects appear in the design of the book, the use of archival images, of differing fonts and title pages, and the insertion of non-fictional fragments printed with white text on a black page, inverting usual publishing conventions.
The essay in the Sydney Review of Books allowed me to tell this story with accompany scans form the first edition, to illustrate the argument. This is important, because subsequent editions of the book have omitted to reproduce these otherwise integral aspects of the book. This does a certain cultural damage to the book, and to Frank’s reputation, because it means readers nowadays tend not to have the full experience – or the full, dare I say, electrical experience – of reading the book as Frank intended, both typographically and iconically.
That said, my first encounter with The Electrical Experience was the most recent edition, as part of the Moorhouse Collection, and it is perfectly fine. After all, it was reading through this entire collection that finally persuaded me to undertake the project to write Frank’s literary biography. But that reading experience only gave me a general sense of the whole project, an outline of Frank’s literary imagination. It was only when I read the first edition of The Electrical Experience, and read it against its archival background, that not just the importance of this book, but the importance of this edition of the book, as a lynchpin to Frank’s whole literary project, came into sharp focus.
3.
Most people reading this would already be aware of the value and importance of first editions. I must confess, however, that this is not something which usually moves me. I don’t collect books, although I own many of the little fuckers. My library is a working library, not a museum. Books are tools, not artefacts. I write in them, dog ear them, and when they fall apart from overuse, I buy another copy.
I have, however, more recently started buying ‘clean’ copies, for books which I return to over and over, and which I want to re-read unencumbered of my previous jottings and under linings (I keep a second, working copy of these books for that vanity). But these are the few, not the many. And they are not first editions, but merely cheap, clean copies. Although, I have started preferencing hardbacks to paperback, where possible, and affordable.
It was only through necessity – my warrant to write this biography – that I have started buying first editions of Frank Moorhouse books, if only to track changes to the text over time, so my reading of each was historically grounded in what he did, and what readers experienced, at each particular moment in time. Many of his early short stories, for example, when they were first published in little magazines, literary journals, or in ‘girlie’ magazines, they were usually censored, often without Frank’s permission or involvement. When the same stories were collected in book form, Frank restored many of the texts to their original, uncensored form, but he also revised them. Later, when his books were republished, he was known to make little edits, tiny revisions. In his archive, his own copies of his first editions are also corrected by hand, underlined, annotated
So in working through his archive, in order to write his biography, I needed to consult the original magazine or newspaper version, the first edition book version, and then later editions of the book, if only to ensure that if I were to excerpt quotes from them, I would be doing so correctly, with historical accuracy.
4.
One evening, in a cocktail bar in Darlinghurst, Sydney, I met Frank for a drink. Over a martini, he pulled out of a little brown paper bag a first edition of his first book, Futility and Other Animals (1969). He wrote in it then and there, on the little round table top at our corner table in the bar, between sips of his cocktail, nibbling on his olive. He inscribed the book and then gave it to me as a gift. What I like about this gesture is that over fifty years earlier he originally inscribed the selfsame copy of this book to somebody else; over time the book had ended up in a second book shop somewhere, and somehow it made its way back to Frank. In inscribing the book to me, he also added an explanatory footnote as to who the original owner of the book was.
The imprint of time is visible on these pages, the foxing, but also the change in his handwriting, marking the years and the experience from a 32 year old Frank, finally publishing his first book, to Frank in his late 70s, when he was near the end of his career.
Long story short, I am beginning to understand the value of first editions.
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