What Would You Bury?
January 28th, 2008 by Therese Walsh
I read an interesting blurb on booktrade.info’s website last week about Richard Wright, an author famous for his powerful, controversial and often racially charged novels. Wright died in 1960 before finishing a work in progress called A Father’s Law. Now, 48 years after his death, his daughter is having the story published–even though it ends with the ultimate cliffhanger, e.g. at the protagonist’s black moment. Worse, Wright’s daughter is quoted in the original Rocky Mountain News article as saying the novel’s peculiar and unwieldy, “with some pieces not quite fitting.”
Yikes.
The author of the article, Patti Thorn, suggests we all bury our unfinished works to prevent this sort of humiliating catastrophe from befalling us. Personally, I have plenty of finished works I wouldn’t want others to look at–including some early fluff-ball poetry from my pre-teen years and worse. I’d bury or burn that for sure, along with every single draft of my story preceding my final draft.
So why not get rid of the evidence now?
I don’t know about you, but I’d be loathe to trash any of my previous works, no matter how embarrassing. Yes, they’re full of cliches and unrealistic relationships, but I love them just the same, because they each represent a step along my personal writer’s path and stand as a testament to growth. Still, I wouldn’t want anyone else to read them.
There is a controversy currently–and I can’t find a link right now, sorry–about an author whose family was supposed to burn everything after his death. But they didn’t, and now they’re hemming and hawing over whether or not they’ll follow their kin’s wishes and rid the world of his primordial mind scratchings or have them published. And did you know Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, had written a romance out in two notebooks and given it as a gift to a former paramour? Called Lost Laysen, the story was published in 1996, nearly fifty years after her death. I wonder how she would’ve felt about that?
What would you bury?
Photo courtesy Flickr’s Panzerfaustus.
The first “novel” I wrote, started at the ripe age of 14, would be the first to go in the furnace. I thought I was terribly brilliant at the time, but after reading snippets I would be crushed if anyone were to ever read it.
Oh god. What *wouldn’t* I trash? Stinkeroos don’t even begin to cover how bad those early efforts are. But like Therese, I can’t seem to throw them out.
I did manage to throw away a box of floppy disks with dreck I can’t access anymore. A teensy step in the right direction.
jane austen’s sister burned jane’s papers, letters etc so we’ve lost a treasure trove of info because of that. so don’t destroy anything!!
Can we count stuff we’ve already had published? Because I’ve got a few things floating around right now that make me squirm a little when they pop up
But I’m just gonna put this out there…whatever happened to respecting the dead? It really burns me when I hear of relatives publishing material belonging to some poor, deceased author. I mean, if a writer gets mowed down by a truck on the way to the post office with manuscript in hand, then I guess I’d be okay with publishing that. But anything else and you’ve crossed the line of decent, respectable behavior.
(Um, that was a bit of rant. Must have been the Margaret Mitchell thing that set this Southern gal off.)
I was disturbed on Mitchell’s behalf, too, Cath.
I didn’t know that about Austen, Thea. Yeesh.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who’d want to bury an embarassing writerly past.
Was this the current controversy you were referring to?
Vladimir Nabokov’s last unfinished manuscript
To be honest, depriving the world of a treasure or not, this is a matter of respecting the dead. We all have pieces of ourselves we’d rather not see the light of day. We should have control over that if we’ve provided instructions while we’re living or dead.
NS, YES, that’s it! I need to bone up on my short story novelists. And for the record, I agree with you. If Nabokov wanted the work destroyed, it should be.