The curators of Finca Vigía museum (Ernest and Mary Hemingway’s house outside Havana) will publish online 3,000 papers previously belonging to the author. The papers include Hemingway’s notes in code detailing his efforts to track German Nazi submarines in the waters off the northern Cuban coast. They also include the manuscript of the epilogue to For Whom the Bell Tolls and the script of the film based on The Old Man and the Sea. Many of the papers record mundane matters, such as insurance policies and accounts. The papers will go online January 5, 2009.
Sources: Graham Keeley, “Ernest Hemingway’s coded encounters revealed in online collection,” The Times (Jan. 2, 2009), “Cuba pondrá 3.000 documentos inéditos de Hemingway a disposición de los investigadores,” El mundo (Dec. 30, 2008)
Recently, I posted that three drafts of a previously unknown novel by Alberto Moravia had been discovered and were being published in Italy. I wrote then –
three drafts (”redazioni”) of a story, each about one hundred pages long, has been edited by Simone Casini and published in one book that Casini entitled, I due amici (The Two Friends).
Michael McDonald, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, described the book as “three successive renderings of the same story, each roughly a hundred pages long.”
Two Friends tells the story of a young intellectual who must decide whether to sacrifice his lover for his cause.
Earlier this week, I learned that the novel will be published in English as Two Friends by Other Press. I could not, however, find any information on the translator.
Last year, Other Press published another novel by Moravia, Conjugal Love (L’amore coniugale, 1949).
The manuscript of a previously unknown novel by Roberto Bolaño has been discovered and will be published in English as “The Third Reich.” The literary estate will now be represented by Andrew Wylie.
…Andrew Wylie, scored a double coup by taking over representation of deceased Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño just as an unpublished novel by him was discovered.
Wylie’s agency has been offering the manuscript of “The Third Reich” at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. Publishers were said to be fighting over the novel from an author whose stock hit new highs in the English-speaking world after the success of “The Savage Detectives”…
“The Third Reich” is said to have been written in the early 1990s before Bolaño began to work on a computer.
According to the article, Bolaño used a typewriter and corrected the manuscript by hand. It would not have shown up in any searches of his hard disks as it was never written on a computer.
When Fernando Pessoa died in 1935, he left hundreds of books, magazines, manuscripts, papers, and photographs. These have been sold or auctioned off in installments by his heirs. In 1979, the Portuguese government bought many of these papers and deposited them in the Biblioteca Nacional, or national library, where they can be consulted by the public. Now it has been revealed that his heirs have retained a significant number of papers, notebooks, magazines and books once belonging to Pessoa, and that these will be auctioned.
One literary researcher believes that the family still has in their possession 140 books and magazines and “more or less 2,300 papers” belonging to Portugal’s most famous Modernist poet. He believes they have the equivalent of ten percent of what is already at the Casa Fernando Pessoa, a private institute in Lisbon that conserves and promotes research and cultural activities related to the poet’s work, and ten percent of what is in the National Library.
The director of the National Library, Jorge Couto, stated to the Portuguese newspaper, Última Hora, that the library does not express interest in any auction, as a matter of policy. Portuguese law gives the library preference (direito de preferência) when it comes to bidding and obtaining works considered part of the national cultural patrimony. Last December the national library exercised this right and purchased for EU 35,000 a manuscript by Mário de Sá-Carneiro in another auction by the same house that plans to auction Pessoa’s papers and objects this October.
This October, the heirs plan to auction what has become known as the Pessoa-Crowley dossier, a collection that contains all the papers related to the relationship between Fernando Pessoa and British occultist Aleister Crowley. Pessoa made a living as a freelance translator from English to Portuguese. One day, reading a horoscope prepared by Crowley, he noted what he thought were errors and wrote Crowley to correct them. From then on the two established a relationship. Pessoa eventually translated several of Crowley’s works. Other items that will go on sale are several astrological charts.
Many expect that news of the auction will stir interest among British collectors and push the price past anything the Biblioteca Nacional can afford, resulting in the transference of those papers and objects out of Portugal and perhaps their loss as well.
Photo: Monument to Fernando Pessoa in front of A Brasileira café (2005), Lisbon, Nol Aders, photographer, Wikipedia; Source: Kathleen Gomes, “Manuscritos importantes herdados de Fernando Pessoa vão a leilão em Outubro,” Última Hora (May 26, 2008), article on Pessoa in English and article on Pessoa in Portuguese, Wikipedia
There was a time in the 1970s when previously unheard tapes of Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar were being released to great fanfare years after his death. The tapes had not been “discovered” in any sense of the word. They were there all along, only Hendrix had chosen not to release them. The executors of his estate thought differently.
Almost forty years after Hemingway’s death in 1961, his estate continued to publish with astonishing frequency. One can argue that the posthumous books were not only good at first — better than the last works he published while still alive — but they declined in quality with each addition. Who can deny that A Moveable Feast is a good book, even stripped of its voyeuristic qualities? What of the novel, The Garden of Eden, which has all the freshness of the young Hemingway and all the control of the experienced writer? I would put it next to The Sun Also Rises. Yet by the time we get to True At First Light in the 1990s, it is clear that the estate had best leave the rest of the manuscripts, if there are any, to the archives.
Recently, we heard from Nabokov’s son, who is the executor of the author’s estate. After years of speculation whether he would publish Nabokov’s “last unfinished novel,” he announced that he would. But what he is publishing is not a draft, something that is more or less finished, something that with judicious editing can be made into a good book. In the case of Nabokov, we are talking about a stack of index cards.
Nabokov’s son admitted that the resulting book would total one hundred pages, at most. He said that there would be another book in which they would reproduce the index cards themselves. A book reproducing the cards would be the subject of curious inspection by many interested in seeing the way Nabokov worked. Another book based on those cards and purporting to be the author’s “last unpublished novel” needs to include an explanation in the foreward, a disclaimer, if you will, written by the editor or editors, that it is not the Nabokov’s work but the editors’ interpretation of his notes.
How much of an author’s unfinished work is fair game for the estate to publish? The problem with unfinished works is that we usually do not know whether the author intended them for publication. It is the rare case where an author leaves a will or if not a legal document then at least some instructions. Death takes no appointments; it revels in making surprise appearances.
The Times Literary Supplement reports that three drafts of an unpublished novel by Alberto Moravia were recently discovered in a suitcase he left behind when he moved from one house to another. It is precisely such discoveries that ignite the literary world: several Hemingway manuscripts were found in a suitcase at a hotel in Paris. A photo album and numerous poems were discovered in the house of Gabriela Mistral’s literary executrix. (See here.) And now three drafts (”redazioni”) of a story, each about one hundred pages long, has been edited by Simone Casini and published in one book that Casini entitled, I due amici (The Two Friends). Michael McDonald, in the TLS article, writes about the resulting book –
Potential buyers of I due amici need to be aware that what Casini has packaged and presented to the reading public as a posthumous Moravia novel is not a single, albeit incomplete, manuscript, but rather three successive renderings of the same story, each roughly a hundred pages long. …
In the first draft – “Redazione A” – we find the beginnings of a fragmentary prologue in which [the protagonist] Sergio Maltese’s background assumes many of the biographical details of Moravia’s own life. “Redazione B” is a more rounded and nearly completed novella told in the third person. Then comes the final version, “Redazione C”, in which Moravia undertakes a profound stylistic shift from the third to the first person – an expedient that was to characterize nearly all of his fiction from that point onwards.
In an interview that Moravia gave to The Paris Review in 1954, which is also quoted in the TLS article, he explained the way he wrote another work, La romana –
Moravia: Well, La romana was written twice. Then I went over it a third time, very carefully, minutely, until I had it the way I wanted, till I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Two drafts, then, and a final, detailed correction of the second manuscript, is that it?
Moravia: Yes.
Interviewer: And that’s usually the case, two drafts?
Moravia: Yes. It was three times with Il conformista, too.
Given this revelation about his working habits then, it is fair to consider I due amici a finished work. Here, we have three drafts, the same as in the two other works that he cites in the interview. A question remains, though, and that is if it was finished, why didn’t Moravia publish it?
Alberto Moravia was born in 1907 in Rome. At the age of nine years, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in his bones. He was confined to bed for three years and lived in a sanatorium for two more. Consequently, his formal education ended after nine years of grade school. In 1925, he left the sanatorium and wrote his first novel, Gli indifferenti, which he published in 1929. Over the next four decades, he continued to write novels, about twenty of them, and became known as a writer of clean prose, anti-heroes, and alienation.
We don’t hear much about Moravia anymore, certainly not in English-speaking countries. But there was a time when his works represented 1950s Rome, when he was considered one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century. You can spot Moravia’s influence in Antonioni’s famous “trilogy,” L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse, films that put him on the world stage, none of which is an actual adaptation of any work by Moravia. (It is ironic that the most famous film adaptation of a work by Moravia — Jean-Luc Godard’s La méprise, based on the novel, Il disprezzo (Contempt) — has Godard written all over it and few of Moravia’s themes, the atmosphere that he created so well using spare and clean prose. [You can see what has to be the worst movie trailer ever made here.])
The star power he once commanded is evident in this mock and rather humorous interview shown on the Italian television network RAI (in Italian, date unknown). After some horsing around with the phone, Moravia gets serious and explains the principal theme behind his work (beginning at 2:43 and ending at 3:21) –
Mi limitare al dire che il tema dominante della mia opera sembra essere il rapporto dell’uomo con la realtà. Questo potrà parere ad alcuni strettamente un problema filosofico: La realtà è il problema fondamentale di nostro tempo. Essa in aggiunta a sua fase [unintelligible] durante ed imediatamente dopo la prima guerra mondiale a causa della totale distruzione, a traverso la guerra stessa, della scala tradizionale di valori, distruzione che comporta la brusca interruzione ed il completo collasso di quel rapporto tra il uomo e la realtà che finora era basato sulla etica tradizionali.
* * *
I will limit myself to say that the dominant theme in my work is the relationship between man and reality. This may seem to some as strictly a philosophical problem: Reality is the fundamental problem of our time. Moreso [unintelligible] during and immediately after the First World War due to the total distruction, through the war itself, of the traditional scale of values, destruction that makes up the brusque interruption and the complete collapse of that relationship between man and reality that up until then had been the base of traditional ethics. [translation mine]
McDonald, in his TLS article thinks that part of the value of this previously “lost” novel is that we can see Moravia at work through the three drafts that are included within it. He quotes the author from The Paris Review interview and adds his own spin –
“Each book is worked over several times [as with] painters centuries ago, proceeding, as it were, from layer to layer. The first draft is quite crude . . . although even then, even at that point . . . the form is visible. After that I rewrite it as many times – apply as many ‘layers’ – as I feel to be necessary”. Moravia methodically destroyed the drafts leading up to each of his completed novels. But here, owing to the fact that he moved house, and that he, or someone, ended up packing the drafts in suitcases that were left in storage and only recently discovered, we are able to see Moravia at work, applying the successive layers of paint to his canvas.
McDonald thinks Moravia may have chosen to not publish this work because the timing was wrong. Perhaps. But it still doesn’t explain why he left the suitcase behind in storage and forgot about it. People lose things, simple as that.
So we get back to the question I asked at the beginning of this post — How much of an author’s unfinished (or unpublished in Moravia’s case) work is fair game? Assuming that the author did not leave instructions to the contrary, we should ask ourselves how much we stand to gain from publication. Through I due amici, which McDonald judged to be a good book in its own right, we can watch Moravia work from first draft through the end. More importantly though, the book may give a second life to a once-renowned author before he too is left behind.
The rest of the TLS essay is here. A biography in English of Alberto Moravia is here.
Image: Portrait of Alberto Moravia (1960), Vilim Svecnjak; Sources: Michael McDonald, “Alberto Moravia at the Canvas” Times Literary Supplement (June 6, 2008), The Paris Review (Summer 1954), youtube.com, italica.rai.it, prefaces and chronologies from Alberto Moravia, Il disprezzo (Tascabili Bompiani 2003), La noia (Tascabili Bompiani 2000), and Racconti romani (Tascabili Bompiani 2003).
In 1958, after being released from involuntary confinement in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Ezra Pound convinced the editor of the Richmond News Leader to name him foreign correspondent. He was paid fifty dollars per article. One article entitled, “Italian Renaissance,” appears to be about finance and about boxing and began –
While the frogs (JJK [the editor] — spell it french is he likes) are looking to heavier taxes, and what they call the HEAVY FRANC, a new coin to be the equivalent of the present 100 francs of chicken-dust, the Italians are rising after their crushing defeat at the hands of international finance. Their politics mayn’t be up to much but they now have FOUR European boxing champions, and the Figaro itself is slightly ironical re/ the local french light-weight Herbillon, who has a broken nose and has to meet the french challenger Auzel, who may give him the bird.
Pound helped T.S. Eliot, even editing The Waste Land. (Above is a picture of Eliot’s typescript with handwritten annotations by Pound.) And he helped the young Ernest Hemingway find his way among the expatriate community in Paris in the 1920s. He introduced Hemingway to Ford Madox Ford and was instrumental in getting his early work published. In 1957, Hemingway joined others in campaigning for Pound’s release from the hospital.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, many of the articles that Pound submitted were incoherent rantings and were not published. They remained in a desk drawer until years later when they were donated to the University of Virginia library. Jon Schneider tells the story.
Image: Typescript of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland with handwritten annotations by Pound, robweir.com; Sources: Virginia Quarterly Review, Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (1985)
The Scotsman yesterday reported that the first page of a love story written by Napoleon Bonaparte — yes, that Napoleon Bonaparte — was sold at auction for £17,000 (about $35,000). The story was loosely based on Napoleon’s romance with Desirée Clary. A young officer befriends two sisters and falls in love with the more spiritual of the two. The final 22-page handwritten draft was completed in 1795, when Bonaparte was 26 years old, right before he began his career in politics. It was not published in his lifetime.
Image: Jacques-Louis David, The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries (1812), Wikipedia; Source: The Scotsman [page no longer available]
Discovering the previously unknown work of a great writer is always important news. The Spanish paper, El país, today reports that Luis Vargas Saavedra, a scholar and specialist in the life and works of the Nobel-prize winning Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, found previously unknown poems, letters, and photographs filed away in boxes. The literary cache was in the home of Doris Dana, who was Mistral’s assistant until the poet’s death, and who became her literary heir. The boxes lay hidden in Dana’s Massachusetts home for fifty years, until her own death, when her executrix asked Vargas Saavedra to examine the “unknown treasure.” Vargas Saavedra has photographed 860 pages containing 78 previously unknown poems, 500 letters, and five leather-bound photo albums with pictures of Mistral, her son, and her family. Dana’s heirs have agreed to send everything to Chile once the work of indexing and cataloguing is completed.
Mistral will always evoke for me that afternoon when I first discovered her poems in my great-uncle’s library. One wall was hidden by glass-fronted bookcases made of dark mahogany. The doors to the bookcases each had a small keyhole, but fortunately they were unlocked. Inside, the bookcases smelled of cedarwood.
There were medical and surgical textbooks, which was no surprise, as my great-uncle was a surgeon. There were also two bookcases filled with novels and poems. I used to visit my grandmother and her family for the summer, so I’m sure that I must have spent more than one afternoon paging through my great-uncle’s books. But it is Mistral’s little book of poems, dark green leather-grained cover with Bible-thin pages, that I remember most.
Photo: Gabriela Mistral, Hispanic and Portuguese Collection, US Library of Congress; Source: “100 poemas de una Premio Nobel, dentro de varias cajas,” El país (July 23, 2007)
