Posthumous Publication: Honoring an Author’s Wishes or Literary Grave Robbing?
Last month, the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez published his seventh novel, Until August. (The pedantic might suggest that at a slim 110 pages in suspiciously large type, it is more accurately described as a novella, but never mind.) There would be nothing especially remarkable about this, save that Márquez died almost exactly a decade ago, and Until August has been mired in controversy ever since his publisher Knopf Doubleday announced its posthumous publication. Márquez wrote the book while he was succumbing to dementia but retained enough self-awareness to say to his sons Rodrigo, himself an acclaimed writer and director, and Gonzalo, “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”
Initially, the brothers obeyed their father’s wishes. But as they examined the manuscript once again, they saw either an artistic or a commercial opportunity, or both, and hired an editor to take the 769 pages of drafts and notes that were lurking in Márquez’s archive in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin and rework it into some kind of coherent shape.
Few would suggest that the finished work is a lost masterpiece, and even his sons admit that it has “rough patches” and is “not, of course, as polished as his greatest books.” Is it not fit, then, to share shelf space with Love in the Time of Cholera or One Hundred Years of Solitude? Or is it a late triumph, a testament to how an engaged estate, a committed editor, and the final spark of genius in its late author can coalesce to produce something remarkable?
Sadly not. Until August is thin in all senses, both in its derivative storyline, revolving around the late-in-life erotic odyssey of a frustrated woman, and its surprisingly unimaginative prose style. Novels in translation are often prey for
the whims of quixotic or plain bad writing, but lines such as “his whole being radiated a distinctive air through his fresh eau de cologne” are not just bathetic but suggest that either the book’s translator Anne McLean was not up to the job or, more likely, Márquez’s existing work was so poor that even the most talented interpreter would be unable to make headway with its incomprehensibilities and banalities.
Still, Until August will undoubtedly sell like hot pastéis all over the world, thanks to its author’s fame and reputation. And in Colombia, where Márquez is still regarded as a secular deity, nicknamed “Gabo,” there will be rejoicing at the unexpected temporary resurrection of a man who was, in his country’s former President Juan Manuel Santos’s understated words, “the greatest Colombian who ever lived.” Even if the book’s literary qualities are all but nonexistent, it will do no lasting damage to Márquez’s name.
The reason why we can be relatively confident in this assumption is that virtually the same thing happened in 2009, when Vladimir Nabokov’s final novel, The Original of Laura, was published by his son Dmitri 32 years after his father’s death. The publication, which the BBC breathlessly called “the literary event of 2009,” was mired in controversy because of similar circumstances to the belated birth of Until August. When Nabokov was on his deathbed in 1977, he gave instructions to his executors, Dmitri, and his wife, Véra, that all his unfinished and unpublished work was to be destroyed.
Véra, who famously rescued Lolita from the bonfire when her despairing husband believed that it would be regarded by posterity as nothing more than pornography, was unable to decide what to do with the 138 index cards on which Nabokov had begun to sketch the exploits of the doomed academic Philip Wild, so she placed it in a Swiss bank vault and tried to forget about it. After her death in 1991, Dmitri agonized over the matter, before deciding that it was his “filial duty” to see the book published, albeit in its fragmentary and unfinished state. In his introduction to The Original of Laura, Dmitri wrote that “the lesser minds among the hordes of letter writers that were to descend upon me would affirm that if an artist wishes to destroy a work of his that he has deemed imperfect or incomplete, he should logically proceed to do so neatly and providently ahead of time.” But the younger Nabokov eventually rejects this, saying instead that “nor … do I think that my father or my father’s shade would have opposed the release of Laura once Laura had survived the hum of time this long.” The self-described “nice guy,” who believed that people the world over empathized with “Dmitri’s dilemma,” as he styled it, was not deaf to murmurs that he was acting beyond his paygrade, and so he asked, rhetorically, “Should I be damned or thanked?”
The reviews were mixed, to put it kindly. Many critics noted that Dmitri’s method of typographic presentation, of reproducing the index cards with the text underneath, turned a book into a grim memento mori of sorts. Martin Amis, a noted Nabokovian, called it a “relic” and wrote that “Laura is somewhere between larva and pupa (to use a lepidopteral metaphor), and very far from the finished imago.” He remarked that “when a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.” Alexander Theroux, meanwhile, suggested that “the last card of The Original of Laura is a poignant list of synonyms for ‘efface’ — expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate . ... It is a pity that his instructions were ignored and the novel survived in such a form.” To answer Dmitri’s question, “damned” proved to be closer to the outcome.
Nabokov’s reputation was not dented, nor even seriously bruised, by the appearance of Laura, any more than Márquez’s shall be by the exhumation of
Until August. And not every single act of posthumous publication is an act of literary grave-robbing. Virgil was supposed to have asked for the destruction of the manuscript of The Aeneid on his deathbed, only for those around him to ignore his wishes, supposedly at the behest of the emperor Augustus, and thereby bequeathing Western literature one of its greatest masterpieces.
The name of Franz Kafka will live forever in the hearts and minds of the bookish and paranoid alike, but so should that of Max Brod: It was Kafka’s literary executor’s decision to ignore his friend’s orders that his works, including such accomplishments as The Castle and The Trial, be burnt that assured his place in the canon of 20th century writing. And the list of significant literary achievements that only appeared after the deaths of their authors, from Sylvia Plath’s Ariel to Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, is a
lengthy one.
Perhaps the most poignant example is E.M. Forster’s final novel Maurice,a
keenly observed study of same-sex love. Forster wrote it in 1913 but asked that it only be published after his death in 1970, dedicating it, in hope, to a “happier year” than the age he depicted. When it finally appeared on bookshelves in 1971, it was two years after homosexual acts were legalized in his home country of Great Britain. The “happier year,” finally, had come to pass.
There are also authors who simultaneously exemplify the best and worst aspects of posthumous publication. Writer John Kennedy Toole killed himself in 1969 at the age of 31, worn down by repeated rejections of his novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Most parents would have left the matter there, but his mother, Thelma, continued to believe in her son’s genius. She eventually shepherded it into print, thanks to the intervention of the novelist Walker Percy. He famously wrote, after failing to fend off Thelma’s badgering, that “in this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity; surely it was not possible that it was so good.” A Confederacy of Dunces
is now justly regarded as one of the finest American comic novels of the 20th century. But The Neon Bible, a piece of juvenilia that Toole had written at the age of 16, suggested that he had only had one great book in him at the time of his death, or out of him at any rate. It was, somewhat inexplicably, filmed by Terence Davies, which only revealed the innate thinness of the subject matter and may even have damaged Toole’s posthumous reputation in the process. (A Confederacy of Dunces is yet to be filmed.)
Some writers even become posthumous cottage industries in their own right. When J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, he left behind a relatively slim corpus: The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, of course, but also some academic writing and a few jeux d’esprit such as Smith of Wootton Major and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Yet after his death, under the careful auspices of his eldest son, Christopher, there has been a never-ending parade of apocrypha, all titled things like The Fall of Gondolin and Morgoth’s Ring.
The literary merit, or otherwise, of these titles is essentially irrelevant, given how popular Tolkien’s work continues to be, thanks in part to the never-ending stream of film and television adaptations. However, as with The Original of Laura and Until August, the question remains how far Tolkien himself was responsible for any of these books and whether the credited editors have done sterling work in putting together hefty volumes from a few scattered notebooks and drafts. It would come as little surprise, so profitable is the Tolkien industry, to find some new epic saga based on a few of his sales slips and laundry receipts.
There are, of course, nonexistent books that we might wish had been published, such as the diaries of Philip Larkin and Lord Byron, both destroyed after their deaths, or Nikolai Gogol’s sequel to Dead Souls, which he burnt himself shortly before his own passing. At least these writers knew publication and fame. Undoubtedly, there will be other mute inglorious Miltons out there, John Kennedy Tooles who did not have committed mothers to fight their corner years after their end. Yet the reverse, writers’ children who decide, long after their illustrious parents’ death, that their fragmentary jottings should be given the full dignity of publication, literary merit be damned, is likely to remain part of the literary firmament as long as there are authors whose names are synonymous with both excellence and high sales.
Unless there is some strange development — and given the ever-shifting state of American literary publishing, such things are always possible — Until August will disappear into the same category of puzzling obscurity that the likes of The Neon Bible, The Original of Laura, and Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden occupy. Yet ultimately, these books remain willo’-the-wisps, passing curiosities rather than serious representations of their authors’ talent. They therefore deserve to be treated with the same mild indifference that any other fad or fancy merits, rather than given the full scornful treatment. But don’t, for heaven’s sake, actually buy them: It would only encourage the worse elements in profiteering, which barely needs such encouragement, anyway.