A burning question about how to deal with writers' final wishes

For a long time, Alex George has been haunted by the loss of Marcel Proust’s notebooks. Proust instructed his maid, Celeste Albaret, to burn all 32 of them. They contained the original outline of In Search of Lost Time, and who knows what other treasures.

In her memoir, Albaret wrote that when she asked the master why he wanted them burnt, he said he no longer needed them. George doesn’t believe it. Proust was a sentimentalist who cluttered up his little apartment with huge family furniture, he writes. ‘‘The idea that he would have been quite so ready to destroy the kernel of his masterpiece – which by then was pretty much all he lived for – seemed quite out of character.’’

Finally George decided that the only way the fire’s damage could be undone was through fiction. So he has written a novel, The Paris Hours, which retells the story – but in his version, the fictional maid saves one notebook as a keepsake. Then the notebook disappears …

From Virgil onwards, many writers have either burnt their unpublished work themselves or have instructed trusted servants, friends or relatives to burn it after their death. The work might be finished or unfinished manuscripts, diaries, notes or letters.

It might have to go because the authors got religion (Gogol, Gerard Manley Hopkins); or because they thought the surviving work would embarrass or hurt or offend others; or simply because they didn’t want to be judged by posterity for work they considered inferior (Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway). Whatever the reason, a fire was the surest way to make those papers disappear for ever.

Except that in many cases, they didn’t disappear. Fortunately for us, some of those servants, friends and relatives didn’t follow instructions, and the work, or some of it, has survived. Where would we be without James Joyce’s wife Nora, who rescued bits of his novel Stephen Hero from the flames? Joyce later reworked those fragments and produced his great coming-of-age novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

And what do we owe to Max Brod, who disobeyed his friend Franz’s last wish to burn all his manuscripts? Without Brod, we wouldn’t have Kafka’s novels The Trial and The Castle.

But it’s not quite as simple as that. In his book Kafka’s Last Trial, Benjamin Balint says that Kafka’s will was ambiguous about destroying his work, and by choosing Brod as his executor, he picked the least likely person to light the fire. Perhaps Kafka still hoped his work would survive, but didn’t want to make the decision himself.

The ethical dilemma for Brod and others – to burn or not to burn – is one that continues to fascinate fiction writers. Do you follow the author’s wishes or do you reward posterity, and perhaps also reward yourself? Henry James presented us with a rapacious scholar hunting down literary treasure in The Aspern Papers; another scholar pursues letters by T. S. Eliot in Martha Cooley’s novel The Archivist; and in Australia, Toni Jordan has devised The Fragments, a literary mystery about tattered pages of a famous writer’s manuscript that survived a fire.

But even if the papers are burned, will that put out the fire of speculation? Whether they like it or not, writers reveal themselves through their work. Novelist Roxana Robinson, writing in The New Yorker on the release of Willa Cather’s letters 66 years after her death, says that perhaps the question is not ‘‘Should we restrict our letters after we die?’’ but ‘‘Should we sit down at this desk and start making sentences?’’. That, she says, is the real risk.

Jane Sullivan’s latest book, Storytime, is published by Ventura Press at $26.99.
Janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com