Publishing a Dead Man, Against His Will

New books by long-dead authors seem to be all the rage these days. This year it's And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, a a 63-year-old collaboration between then-unknown writers Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Next year it will be the last, unfinished novel by Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov.

The delay in the publication of the former book is easily explained. At the time it was written, both of its authors were a decade away from publishing the works that would bring them fame -- On The Road for Kerouac and Naked Lunch for Burroughs. And the original of one of their characters and the book's inspiration, Lucien Carr, was very much alive and desirous that a fictional account of the most traumatic event in his life (the murder by Carr of his friend and stalker David Kammerer) not be published while he was alive. Only Carr's death in 2005 made it possible to publish the long-buried manuscript.

I've read And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, albeit with some trepidation, and all things considered I'm glad that it was finally made available. Both authors (Burroughs especially) are writing parodistically in the hardboiled style of Dashiell Hammett, and the novel is a fascinating time capsule of America in wartime, with classic French films playing on 42nd Street and men wanting to ship on any boat available in order to escape their fate. It's no masterpiece but it's a fun read, especially so when you know the real story involved (to which the novel cleaves pretty faithfully, with some details, like the murder weapon, changed). The book is a minor addition to the growing literature by and about the Beats, and it's worth a look if you're a fan of either author's more mature fiction.

The Nabokov is another story altogether. No matter what you may think of And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, at the very least it was a finished manuscript that the authors tried to publish at the time they wrote it, and neither man ever expressed the desire that it never see the light of day. The new Nabokov, entitled The Original of Laura, is being published by his son against the expressed wishes of its author, who instructed his wife on his deathbed to burn the unfinished manuscript (or, given that it was Nabokov, index cards).

Should she, should he obey his wishes? Tom Stoppard, speaking to the BBC, says yes: "It's perfectly straightforward. Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it." Of course, if we followed Stoppard's logic, we would lose out on a great deal of literature: Virgil's The Aeneid, Kafka's The Trial and The Castle and Eugene O'Neill's More Stately Mansions at the very least. It's clear that both Nabokov's widow and his son have agonized over this decision, which was not taken lightly. Vera Nabokov defied her husband's wishes and let the manuscript escape the flames, but apparently could not bring herself to allow for publication. Now, 31 years after its author's death, the book is being prepared for publication by his son.

Should it be published? Or should Nabokov's wishes be respected? These are very touchy questions. The heirs of Albert Camus had to decide whether to publish his last, unfinished novel, the manuscript of which was in the car with him when he died in an auto accident in his 40s (it took his children 30 years to decide to publish The First Man). But at least, having been cut down unexpectedly in his prime, Camus had left no explicit instructions for what to do with the book in the event of his demise. Eugene O'Neill, on the other hand, knowing he would not live to finish the plays he'd envisioned as an immense cycle of American history (the overall title of which was to be A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed), methodically set about to destroy all the manuscripts of the plays that were unfinished. A version of one of the plays for some reason escaped the destruction, and More Stately Mansions, was produced on Broadway in the 1960s in a truncated version with Ingrid Bergman in the lead. It has since been published in a far longer (and theatrically unfeasible) version by Yale University Press.

Dmitri Nabokov thinks it's relatively simple: "My father told me what his most important books were. He named [The Original of] Laura as one of them. One doesn't name a book one intends to destroy." He went on to tell the BBC that: "He would have reacted in a sober and less dramatic way if he didn't see death staring him in the face. He certainly would not have wanted it destroyed. He would have finished it." Of course he would have finished it, the devil's advocate in me replies, but he didn't have time to do so -- and, rather than let an unfinished work that didn't live up to his standards go out into the world, he preferred to see it destroyed.

I'm very much of two minds about this, but in the final analysis I have to say that I would vote for publication. Even if The Original of Laura is total crap, Nabokov's reputation is secure. I mean, if it survived his awful translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin it'll survive anything. And when we consider some of the holocausts of literature -- from the destruction of the library at Alexandria to the well-intentioned but idiotic burning of Lord Byron's Memoirs -- perhaps it's better that, to paraphrase Mikhail Bulgakov, manuscripts shouldn't burn.