Sins of omission

Readers are defined by what they don’t read as much as by what they do. George Moore shunned works of reference. ‘An encyclopedia in this house!’ he spluttered indignantly at the enquiry of a friend. Mark Twain was not an enthusiast of Emma and Pride and Prejudice. ‘The best way to start a library,’ he advised, ‘is to leave out the works of Jane Austen.’ Sins of omission in writers are harder to judge, largely because, in the authorial realm, confessions of this kind are rare. Stephan Mallarmé, in a letter to Paul Verlaine, admitted that his unwritten opus was ‘simply a book, in several volumes, a book that is truly a book, architecturally sound and premeditated, and not a collection of casual inspirations however wonderful that might be’. And Nathaniel Hawthorne jotted down in the wish-list of his notebooks: ‘To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its eccentricities and aimlessness — with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole.