What a Day! What a Day! For an Auto Da Fe!

I read a letter in the New York Times about a profile of Harvard Professor Helen Vendler and it inspired me to go back and read the original article, which I had not seen before.

In the article Professor Vendler harshly criticizes the recent publication of "Edgar Allan Poe & the Jukebox," a collection of previously unpublished poems by Elizabeth Bishop.

The Times piece reads:

Even as other critics — including David Orr, in these pages — welcomed the book as an important addition to the Bishop oeuvre, Vendler, writing in The New Republic, said the volume “should have been called ‘Repudiated Poems.’ For Elizabeth Bishop had years to publish the poems included here, had she wanted to.” It would have been far better, in Vendler’s view, for Quinn to have published the drafts that went into Bishop’s published, polished “real poems” rather than “their maimed and stunted siblings,” adding: “I am told that poets now, fearing an Alice Quinn in their future, are incinerating their drafts.”

The point here is that while it is true that, as Vendler says, Bishop had years in which to publish the poems included in "Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box," it is also true that she had the same number of years in which to burn them if she chose -- and she chose not to, knowing full well (if literary history is any guide) that those poems would be published eventually.

But that's not all. Professor Vendler goes even further:

“I would rather have had the drafts of the finished poems well before you got the rejected stuff from the trash can,” Vendler said, sitting on a chair facing the window and a life mask of Keats. “If you make people promise to burn your manuscripts” — as Kafka and (by legend) Virgil did — “they should,” Vendler insisted. “I think the ‘Aeneid’ should have been burned and Kafka’s works should have been burned, because personal fidelity is more important than art,” she said in her quiet, direct manner. “If I had asked somebody to promise to destroy something of mine and they didn’t do it I would feel it to be a grave personal betrayal. I wouldn’t care what I had left behind. It could have been the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ”

What are we to make of this? Does this attitude make Vendler more rigorous ethically than the rest of us? Or just a nascent cultural vandal, like the people who burned Byron's Memoirs?

First of all, Professor Vendler is wrong on the facts. Kafka did not "make [someone] promise to burn [his manuscripts]." If we are to believe Max Brod, he specifically told Kafka to his face that he had no intention of carrying out any such request. So if Kafka had really wanted his unpublished manuscripts (which included both "The Trial" and "The Castle") to be burned, then he should have either chosen someone who would agree to the immolation or carried it out himself.

As far as Virgil goes, the order to destroy "The Aeneid" (which Virgil ordered from his deathbed, reportedly feeling that it was not in a finished state) was countermanded by the order of the Emperor Augustus, so there was no question of betrayal there. One did not disobey the emperor in Imperial Rome.

And what is one to make of those so-called friends that I alluded to before, who burned Byron's supposedly salacious "Memoirs" after his death? Did they act in the best interests of their dead friend -- or were they merely cultural vandals?

As you may have guessed, I disagree strongly with Professor Vendler here. While I wouldn't make an absolute law in all cases (Hemingway's widow, for example, didn't do him or his literary reputation any favors by allowing his letters to be published), I don't think the wanton destruction of literary works by friends and executors should be encouraged.

After all, that's what critics are for.

Tom Moran