Please, no more scraps from beyond the grave

12 April 2012

George III got it right, I think. He once said he was always glad to hear of the death of an author - because then he knew he'd got the fellow complete upon his shelf. These days, he could have no such security.

Posthumous barrel-scraping is one of the great recourses of publishers, almost as prevalent as jumping too late on a passing bandwagon.

Any half-finished, never-published scrap by an author with any reputation is now produced with greater devotion than was shown to the author in his lifetime.

Currently, for example, there's a previously unseen, unfinished novella by Graham Greene and a "new" version of Hemingway's memoir of his early days in Paris, among many other rediscoveries.

You can see why publishers find it frustrating when long-established brands suddenly cease production. Indeed, sometimes they just purse their lips and refuse to let it happen.

The pulp novelist Virginia Andrews has been more productive post-mortem, thanks to ghostwriters, than she ever was in life. The fact that Ian Fleming fell down on the job hasn't stopped James Bond having fresh adventures.

But this option isn't really available for more literary writers, even though it's often been tried with Jane Austen.

So instead, what we usually get is over-inflated claims made for whatever unpublished leavings can be scraped up and stuck together.

Logically, the only people who could genuinely be interested are people who have read all the writer's published work, committed it so far as possible to memory, and still been left hungry for more.

Every few months, there's an excited news story about the discovery of previously unknown letters by Dylan Thomas, always originated by the auction-house hoping to flog them. But who could be interested in Thomas's already-published letters? Or any of them? Only Dylan Thomas completists, a stomach-turning concept.

Life is short and there are more great books than anyone can hope to read. Every book you do read denies you the chance of reading others, you realise after a certain age, long passed in my case.

Of course, there are some authors about whom every cultivated person might reasonably want to be a thorough-going completist. If ever a substantial and genuine new work by Shakespeare were to be discovered, it would thrill every serious reader.

But what can be the appeal of a poor and unfinished story by Graham Greene to anybody who has never bothered to read all the stories he did publish? It's one of the great recurrent publicity cons, this business.

As it happens, there is a previously unpublished work appearing this autumn which I will, touch wood, be really pleased to have lived to read. When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left behind him an unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura, on 138 index cards.

On his deathbed, he requested of his widow Vera and son Dmitri that it should be destroyed, not because the work was poor but because it was incomplete - and Nabokov was "that rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except for the perfect achievement", as he put it, in the first novel he wrote in English.

Dmitri Nabokov, now 75, has decided to release The Original of Laura. It will be published worldwide on 3 November, a genuine literary event - a previously unpublished work that deserves to be news.

And having once worked on a thesis on Nabokov, I actually have read everything he published in English, often. So this time I'm prepped.

But it's an exception. No more retrievals from the bottom drawer, please. No more fragments offering a unique insight. Enough is enough. If not already too much.

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