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June 29, 2004

TO BURN OR NOT TO BURN?

NPR's Andrea Seabrook sits in with the Ethicist, Randy Cohen, to discuss whether requests by the dead to destroy all their correspondence need to be fulfilled.

It's an interesting question. Franz Kafka famously instructed Max Brod to burn his unpublished work after his death - a request Brod refused. But Kafka's request was hardly unusual, as this brief essay by M.A. Orthofer makes clear.

It seems always to have been so. Roman poet Virgil instructed friends to burn the incomplete Aeneid after his death (and, apparently recognizing their reluctance, unsuccessfully tried to destroy his manuscripts himself). When he died—after returning from a voyage to Athens, on September 21, 19 B.C.E.—there was even imperial intervention: Caesar Augustus himself defied the poet’s wishes and insisted upon publication of the work.

There have been authors who managed to erase the work they did not want preserved, some only in their final moments: 19th-century Russian fiction writer Nikolai Gogol burned the second half of Dead Souls 10 days before his death in 1852; popular 18th-century novelist, dramatist, and actress Elizabeth Inchbald, too weak on her deathbed to do it herself, instructed a friend to cut her memoirs to bits in front of her. Instances of authors leaving entire manuscripts to be burned after their deaths are relatively rare, but stories of private papers that they wanted destroyed—like the ones Florence Hardy spared from the flames—are plentiful, and much has been preserved against their wishes.

I used to ask that all my stuff be burned, simply because it was so godawful embarrassing. Since then, I've decided that the best move is simply to toss it all myself and make absolutely sure ... The world of letters will thank me.

Posted at 12:25 AM |

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Comments

steve

The introduction to Patrick White's collected letters joyfully recounts his frequent requests to all family and friends to destroy whatever correspondence they'd kept from him. On the next page appears a thank you letter he wrote to the hostess of an elementary school birthday party.

I wish email could be sent with a self-destruct feature.

Posted by: steve | June 29, 2004 at 07:20 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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