A few entries back, I made a passing reference to James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, in which survivors of a plane crash find their way to a Tibetan lamasery high in the Himalayas, whose inhabitants don’t appear to age and who live in perfect peace and contentment in their isolation from the outside world. Sadly, this novel doesn’t seem to be very well remembered today, or at least that’s my impression, considering I’ve never met anyone who’s actually read it, and not many more who’ve even heard of it. It’s shocking to me that something could fall so far into obscurity in spite of being a huge bestseller in its time as well as the basis for two movie adaptations (in 1937 and 1973) and the source of an idea that still has currency in the pop-cultural hivemind (i.e., Shangri-La). I’m willing to bet most of the people who saw The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor thought the screenwriters came up with that notion all on their own. Oh, and just as a historical aside, Lost Horizon also has the distinction of being the first book published in the format we now know as the “mass-market paperback”; it was, in fact, Pocket Books #1.
My own memories of this novel go back to early childhood. My mother had a copy of it, which sat for years in a cupboard in my basement playroom (now the fabulous Bennion Archive, a sort of Shangri-La in itself), right alongside a copy of Alive, that infamous nonfiction book about those Uruguayan rugby players who resorted to cannibalism after their plane crashed in the Andes. Apparently my mom had a thing about high-mountain plane crashes or something. Anyway, I was long intrigued by the cover of her edition of Lost Horizon, which you can see above. The glowing green valley in the middle of the icy blue backgrounds whispered to me of magic and wonder; for a kid who’d already somehow developed a taste for decades-old pulp-fiction stories about adventurers and explorers encountering lost civilizations, that image held a magnetic lure. And yet, weirdly enough, I never got around to actually reading the book until my college years. And I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I don’t remember much about it now — my retention for books appears to have gone to hell in recent years. I remember the basic premise, of course, and that I enjoyed it. But all the details are gone. Well, almost all of them. As it happens, I do recall the opening line, which struck me then and now as a wonderful articulation of something everyone has probably felt, but rarely thought to put into words:
Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had.
Stories work differently upon us depending on what’s happening in our lives when we encounter them. Maybe that line stuck in my mind because I had just experienced that same disillusion for myself around the time I read Lost Horizon. Or maybe something in my psychology is properly tuned for that sentiment to resonate. Or perhaps there’s just such a quiet truth to it that it couldn’t help but make an impression on me. Whatever the reason, those words have stayed with me for 20 years now while all the ones that follow them have evaporated.
Photo: 73rd Pocket Books printing of Hilton’s Lost Horizon, 1971; source.
