What is a lost book? In his treasure of a book just out, In Search of Lost Books: The forgotten stories of eight mythical volumes , Giorgio van Straten, an Italian writer and arts administrator, makes a distinction: “Lost books are those that once existed but are no longer there. They are not those forgotten books that, as happens to the majority of the works of mankind, gradually fade from the memories of those who have read them, slip from the histories of literature and then vanish, together with the existence of their authors… For me lost books are those that an author did in fact write, even if they might not have been brought to completion: books that someone has seen, or even happened to read, but which were subsequently destroyed, or vanished leaving scarcely a trace.”
As you read van Straten’s account, translated from the Italian by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre, it is difficult to not enrol for the hunt for these lost manuscripts by writers ranging from Nikolai Gogol to Sylvia Plath, from Ernest Hemingway to Romano Bilenchi, and float away into a different orbit. It’s as if the fact of a text being “lost” gives it a pivotal place in the writer’s body of work. As van Straten writes of his inquiry, “By the end of the voyage I had realised that lost books possess something that others do not: they bequeath to those who have not read them the possibility of imagining them, of telling stories about them, or re-inventing them.”
A changed character
It’s similar to the wild imaginings that overtook most of us in early 2015 when news came that Harper Lee’s “sequel” to To Kill a Mockingbird called Go Set a Watchman would be published. GSAW was, in fact, an early draft of TKAM . Lee had finished that draft of her novel on race in 1957, but her editor suggested that she rework it, setting it in Scout’s childhood instead of her adult years. The result was TKAM as we know it, with Scout’s father, Atticus, a hero for anyone familiar with the book or film adaptation. We, therefore, were left as bundles of confusion when GSAW came out, with Atticus uttering clearly racist sentiments. Was the Atticus of the two texts the same person and was GSAW intended to provide clues about what he’d become? Or was it a stretch to imagine that it was the same Atticus in the two books and Lee abandoned the Atticus of the early draft to recast him as the moral centre of her reworked novel?
Lee, as far as we know, never told. And going back to a biography of her by Charles Shields, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee , it was spooky to read an account of her days in Manhattan in the 1950s working on her big novel: “Suddenly she gathered up everything she’d written, walked over to a window, and threw the entire draft outside into the snow.” Lee eventually went out and gathered the pages, but was that the manuscript of GSAW ? If so, did it not give weight to the argument that she never intended for GSAW to see the light of day, no matter what her publisher’s statement conveyed in 2015? On the other hand, once a manuscript is discovered, can anyone but the writer take the decision to keep it hidden?
To read and remember
Van Straten’s examples suggest that he believes that nobody but the writer can determine whether to destroy a novel. He opens with the story of the well regarded Italian writer Romano Bilenchi. After he passed away in 1989, Bilenchi’s widow consulted a bunch of people, including van Straten, on a manuscript of an unfinished novel, clearly based on a real-life clandestine affair, she found among his things. Van Straten found the text very moving, and it also appeared to be vital to understanding Bilenchi’s evolution as a novelist. His widow had made all the readers promise not to make a copy of the manuscript. After her own death, van Straten learnt that she had destroyed the manuscript, prompting him to ask: “If the author had not destroyed it himself, or asked someone else to do so, why make it disappear forever, preventing anyone else from reading it in the future?”
Such questions have followed Ted Hughes ever since Sylvia Plath’s suicide in 1963. Holding that her diary entries from the last months of her life would be extremely difficult for their children to negotiate, Hughes destroyed them. It is less clear what he did with the manuscript of Double Exposure , a semi-autobiographical novel — all Hughes said at one point, notes van Straten, was that “some 130 pages” of the manuscript had “disappeared somewhere around 1970”. The cult of Plath has only continued to grow since then, and many will want to believe van Straten when he concludes, “It seems likely that Ted Hughes was not telling the truth, and faced with his reticence and contradictions it is next to impossible to know what really happened to Double Exposure .” Now there’s a discovery to look forward to.
