Unfinished Works: The Complete Discussion
Whether it’s the new John Cheever biography or David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, posthumous publications aren’t exploitations — they’re necessary.
JEFF ELDRIDGE: If there’s an afterlife, John Cheever is watching and squirming. The earlier publication of his diaries changed his image, and now the new Blake Bailey biography apparently depicts him in all of his boozy inglory, along with his undisciplined sex life that apparently was as miserable as it was active.
Cheever’s one of the only writers worth a 700-page bio, and I’m geeked (in every sense of the word) for it. But would a guy whose work and image drew so heavily from a sensibility of old-fashioned New England WASPhood want his vices and frailties reviewed in the New York Times?
It doesn’t matter, and it’s a mistake to elevate the posthumous wishes and insecurities of the Late Greats into an inviolable principle.
Little, Brown has announced that it will publish an incomplete draft of David Foster Wallace’s, The Pale King, a work in progress that Wallace reportedly struggled over for years. From press accounts, it sounds like the manuscript was far from a point of publishability: New York magazine describes it as “clearly unfinished, definitely not intended for publication, and quite possibly still boring.”
But now he’s gone, and his plans for the book will never be fulfilled. It’s better that the fragments see the light of day than remain secreted by his estate. Great writers should be studied like the great presidents, in all of their false starts, discarded ideas, back-of-the-napkin outlines, messy personal lives and flat-out errors. If they’ve produced great work, nothing that we learn subsequent is going to detract from that. Their masterpieces are there. But there’s still the chance to understand how they came about, and to pick up insight on why they wrote in the first place. Wallace was trying to transition away from the expansive, maximalist style of Infinite Jest. Maybe he was flirting with something entirely original. At worst, The Pale King will be a forgettable work in progress. At best, maybe it will be a portal for readers who loved him to glimpse at fragmented greatness, possibly pushing others to pick up the pieces and incorporate qualities in the language, structure or theme into their own work.
And really, how important is it to respect the aspirations of a dead writer? Time magazine chronicles the misjudgments: Emily Dickinson ordered her poems and letters destroyed upon her death; A Movable Feast, Persuasion and A Confederacy of Dunces didn’t see publication until their after authors’ passings. In recent years, Roberto Bolaño and Irène Némirovsky were posthumously published and translated in the United States, to acclaim and enthusiasm.
And there’s the matter of Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, which will see publication only after Vladimir’s conflicted son Dmitri elected to disregard his father’s wishes and release the manuscript to the public. Writers often are terrible judges of their own work; no reason to elevate the self-doubt to sacred status and inviolable artistic intent. The readers and the critics can have their says without causing any damage.
We don’t know whether The Original of Laura or The Pale King will add up to much. They may be in company with the posthumous publication of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth — labored upon for decades, released to a dissatisfied and ambivalent public, a shadow of what the writer had in mind.
Either way, the release of these books is a low-risk, high-reward proposition. I just wish there were some more Cheever stories left to spill, too.
None of us should be making publication choices for David Foster Wallace.
TED BERG: So David Foster Wallace’s new novel will come out next spring from Little, Brown. Great. Can’t wait.
Here’s the thing, though: David Foster Wallace is dead. He committed suicide in September, before he could finish the novel.
The book, The Pale King will be cobbled together from hundreds of thousands of words that Wallace left behind on his computer, on floppy discs, and in notebooks in his home office. The author, a notorious nitpicker who would return his editor’s edits with pages worth of edits of his own, left no clear instructions on how the novel should be structured or in what order any of the completed scenes should be published.
D.T. Max’s recent New Yorker article, “The Unfinished,” partly describes Wallace’s painstaking writing process and partly the late author’s lifelong struggles with depression, substance abuse and addiction to anti-depressants, not to mention Wallace’s borderline pathological dedication to his own craft.
The yield is a portrait of a tortured soul, and so I’m not so sure we should be eager to pick up our copies of The Pale King to take to the beach next summer. It does appear that, at least in Max’s retelling, Wallace’s attempt to restyle his prose for the novel contributed in some way to his suicide and that Wallace might not have considered any part of the work ready for publication.
To me, that makes patching together a novel out of his notes and selling it seem like the worst kind of profiteering and reading it seem like the worst kind of voyeurism. Granted, a lot of it has to do with the packaging, and I guess if Little, Brown makes it clear enough that the book was unfinished the company should be partially exonerated, but smart money says it won’t. Smart money says the book will have “David Foster Wallace” nice and big on its spine and something about the novel’s true nature in smaller print on the front or back cover.
And that’s fucked up.
I understand the desire to see the thought process of a great writer like Wallace and to become more intimate with the way a mind like his works. It’s fascinating, and there’s definitely a place for the publication of his notes somewhere. But piecing together a novel? Doesn’t seem right. Not for someone to whom every single word and every single decision obviously mattered so much.
To me, a work of art is the finished product. While I’m often interested in learning how the creator reached her end, I’m not nearly as interested in the process as I am in the result. And though the sausage-factory truths behind my favorite books, movies and music are often intriguing, I rarely find that the artist responsible approached the subject the way I imagined or hoped he had, and so I’m usually disappointed. Miles Davis makes some awesome music, but when he spoke about that music in his autobiography? Uninspiring*. Jeff Koons speaking about his art? Mind-numbing.
But I stray from my point. The Pale King is not a “Making of…” novel, though the case could probably be made that all of Wallace’s novels are “Making of…” novels. It’s an unfinished one, and since Wallace left it that way, the onus is on his editor, his family and his publishing house to leave it that way.
Because there’s something David Foster Wallace knew about writing that none of those people did, and that made him David Foster Wallace and all of them not. Dave Chappelle knew Season 3 of Chappelle’s Show shouldn’t have come out, then when Comedy Central forced the issue, the few episodes that aired arguably sullied the integrity of the entire series.
Of course, Max leaves his reader with the haunting image of Wallace, minutes before hanging himself, tidying up what was written of The Pale King so his wife could find it. So who knows? Maybe Wallace wanted his novel published after all, abruptly cut off just like the final lines of The Broom of the System. On the other hand, who am I to speculate on what could have been running through a brilliant mind in its dying moments? But who is Little, Brown?
*- The music parts were uninspiring, but every other part was totally awesome, and I heartily recommend the book.
A healthy respect for individual privacy is one thing that has not flourished over the years, in art as well as life.
MOLLY SCHOEMANN: Did you know that Charlotte Bronte’s original name for Mr. Rochester was Mr. Sinkbottom? And that the working title of Jane Eyre was “Mr. Sinkbottom and the Trouble with Orphans”?
All right, so that’s not true. But if it were, would you want to know? Would it add to your enjoyment of the novel, or give you insight into Charlotte Bronte’s creative process? The character’s final name was Mr. Rochester, and the book went to press as Jane Eyre. As one of my favorite books, that is what matters to me.
Granted, I do enjoy learning a bit about the lives of my favorite authors. I am interested in their personal experiences as they may have applied to and shaped their written work. But do I want to read the unpublished lost chapter of Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennett has a dream where Mr. Darcy appears in a coach pulled by giant cats to tell her that he only has six hundred pounds a year? No. If that chapter didn’t make the final cut, there was probably a reason for it. And the reason was probably that Jane Austen didn’t think it was good enough to include in the final version of her famous novel. Since I agree with her on the work that she DID think was good enough to publish, I’m going to trust her opinion on the matter of what was best left on the drawing room floor.
On the subject of that floor, many DVDs currently offer the option of viewing ‘deleted scenes’ that didn’t make it into the final version of the movie. While these scenes are usually not all that great, because if they had been, they probably would have been included in the final cut, occasionally they do offer a unique, revelatory glimpse of the film. Still, whether they are a simple outtake or a fascinating ad-libbed monologue, deleted scenes have one thing in common—the director chose to include them. Authors, posthumously, don’t have much of a choice what we get to read and what we don’t. And when the choice isn’t theirs, I’d just as soon respect their privacy. If they didn’t publish it, who should?
In fact, a healthy respect for individual privacy is one thing that has not flourished over the years, in art as well as life. The modern age is filled with ways for individuals to make every thought in their heads public for the enjoyment of friends and strangers alike. Websites like Facebook and Twitter make it possible to broadcast your every move and emotion on the internet, where it can be read and dissected by millions. Today’s authors realize that every shopping list and doodle they produce has the potential to end up in the Smithsonian.
This mentality was alien to many of the writers whose long-hidden margin-notes and idle scribblings we yearn to examine. It’s easy to imagine that writers of a previous age figured their diaries and half-finished works would be left to languish, perhaps eventually read by their families. In life and in death, their private work and private lives stayed private. For many authors, the mystery surrounding their personal lives is part of their appeal. After all, can you imagine Shakespeare on Twitter?
“OMG just finished a play about fairies. Now it’s off to the pub! I heart ale.”
Some things are better left unread.
So long as we are prepared as fans to condone the self-serving rape of an artist’s hidden legacy, we must also be prepared for the point at which this props up the artist as an image, an icon and a commodity falsely separated from his work.
DAVE TOMAR: Nobody knows exactly what happens when you die. Maybe you are judged for your behavior on the mortal plane and sentenced to an eternity of retribution. Maybe it’s just empty, abyssal nothingness for which we have no precedent or comprehension. Maybe it’s just like sitting in the waiting room for your dentist, with a never-ending hereafter of expired Better Homes and Gardens, wailing babies and Phil Collins tunes.
It’s hard to say and none of us truly knows. But when it comes to manifesting the final wishes of those artists to whom—while living—we have paid the greatest of respect, we have collectively assumed a will for the dead to keep speaking to us. So has it been to varying degrees of success, dignity and severity that we have feebly sought to keep alive such men as Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and a list of music deaths too awful and extensive to believe. In the premature passing of such artists, two voids tend to emerge, both to be filled with the same cork. Neither prepared to relinquish the artistic insights yet to be yielded by such figures nor yet ready to withdraw from the commercial opportunities still available, we are guilty of raiding the tombs for treasures which are not our own.
And of course, we would love to make the argument that this is done for the glory of the dead. Certainly, quite few of us would suggest that those such as Jimi Hendrix (27), Kurt Cobain (27), Tupac Shakur (25), Biggie Smalls (24) or Buddy Holly (!!22!!) might have had nothing more to say. It is truly a crime and a tragedy that none of these men lived to see his craft refined or his personal life fulfilled. But it is history. It is how it happened.
And if we take Hendrix as a case study, it means that it happened to one of the unparalleled forces of pure musical brilliance in our world over the course of only four records and two landmark festival appearances. So with roughly five hours of music, Hendrix reinvented the wheel and was subsequently snuffed out by his own appetites. To understand the impact of his accomplishments, only this music will suffice. It is contextualized by his moment in history, by his notoriously perfectionist tendencies and by the relationship that this work formed with the audience. Today, these recordings are dusty relics in a morass of posthumous releases which run the gamut from illuminating to unlistenable. Some is art, some is education and some is the kind of adolescent scrawling that most artists would probably like to see relegated to adolescence. The relevance accorded these recordings has diluted one of the more perfectly concise career documents in the rock canon, and if I may venture a leap here, has been done so with capitalization in mind moreso than the extension of a legacy.
The proof is more than evident with somebody like Hendrix, who after decades of remastering, repackaging, anthologizing and studio mining, has been stretched to the artistic hilt. A man who guarded his ideas with obsessive particularity such that he actually recorded this mountain of sound and only showed its peak to the world, has been the author of exponentially more releases in the years following his death than were ever imagined during his life.
While this may be worth the insight to the historian or the hobbyist, it is also the categorical distortion of Jimi’s body of work, and serves not only to separate him from the artistic accomplishments that made him so important, but to reduce him to a commodity that now makes far more money in merchandising than in album sales, no matter how much is available in the latter category.
The recent deal struck between the estate of Bob Marley and Hilco Consumer Capital, owner of brand names like Linens’N Things, The Sharper Image and Polaroid, really drives this point home. Essentially, the Marley estate had reached the breaking point in terms of finding new old music that it could repackage. Therefore, Marley’s likeness which has long been a globally favored icon for all manner of Marley/weed-related merchandise, is now on its way to becoming something more akin to The Jolly Green Giant or that little bastard who sells Pillsbury Products. Look to see a man who many thought of as a great spiritual and political leader summoned from beyond the grave to market video games, luggage and Epsom-salt foot-baths.
So long as we are prepared as fans to condone the self-serving rape of an artist’s hidden legacy, we must also be prepared for the point at which this props up the artist as an image, an icon and a commodity falsely separated from his work.
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