The Book of Lost Books (37 page)

In 1953, one M. Haquin, an elderly reader of the paper
Libération,
responded to an article on Zola's death. A chimney sweep friend of his, one of the many anti-Dreyfusards who considered the author nothing more than a traitor, had confessed: “I and my men blocked the chimney while doing repairs next door. There was a lot of coming and going and we took advantage of the hubbub to locate Zola's chimney and stop it. We unstopped it the next day, very early. No one noticed us.”

Arthur Rimbaud

{1854–1891}

IN MAY AND JUNE 1886, the French literary magazine
Vogue
published a work called
Les Illuminations,
a haunting sequence of prose poems. The effect was galvanic. Critical acclaim was immediate: the author, in the words of one enthusiast, was “a sort of legendary figure,” whom younger poets already “claim as their Master.” His hallucinatory, synesthetic texts were replete with alchemy, socialism, drunkenness, and adolescence. He was literature's fallen angel. Nearly all his poetry had been written before he was twenty years old. According to the magazine, this titanic talent was “the late Arthur Rimbaud.”

Rimbaud, in fact, was not dead. He had left France for Africa in 1880 and was currently living in Tadjourah, awaiting a consignment of guns he intended to sell to King Menelik. A taut, tanned adventurer, Rimbaud was something like a Baudelairean poet transformed into a cohort of Richard Burton. His new attitude toward writing can be seen, askance, when his business partner, Pierre Labatut, dies suddenly the next year. Despite his widow's pleas and in front of her eyes, Rimbaud burns all thirty-four volumes of Labatut's memoirs, “a great misfortune, I later learned,” he says, “as certain property deeds were shuffled in amongst these confessions.”

He had never been particularly reverential with manuscripts.
Les Illuminations
had been constructed from a sheaf of papers handed by Rimbaud to his ex-lover, the poet Paul Verlaine, in 1875. Almost the entire print run of
Une Saison en enfer
(
A Season in Hell
) was moldering in a warehouse in Brussels, eventually to be rediscovered ten years after Rimbaud's actual death. The editors of the Pléiade edition described his “slim and flashing work which, at the end of the nineteenth century, Arthur Rimbaud left to us with a kind of disdain, and without having bothered to publish almost any of it.”

Rimbaud's corpus is slight, but as thin and sharp as a stiletto. Had Verlaine, in one of his jealous rages, discarded the papers, Rimbaud's reputation would be as the ghostly memory of a petulant and deliberately impudent youth on Verlaine's arm, and a few scattered works in literary magazines. His entire oeuvre could well have stretched from the school-book, where phrases like “Arthur / The infinitely little” sit beside his denunciations of Latin (“maybe it's some sort of made-up language”) and his arithmetical notes (“If 2 cubic metres of wood cost 32F how much would 7 decimetres cost?”), up to the African accounts (“35 Abyssinians @ 15 Thalers for the journey and two months back pay @ 3 Thalers, payment promised on arrival, 34 × 21 . . . 714 Thalers”), with nothing in between.

Assiduous scholars and opportunistic friends have attempted to enlarge this smattering of genius. Verlaine, for example, quoted as an epigraph to his poem “Ariettes oubliées” a line by Rimbaud—“It rained softly on the city”—which does not appear in any of his works. Rimbaud's school friend Ernest Delahaye had remembered by heart two rather coprophilic little sonnets, which were published in 1923. He could also recollect a snatch of a satire against pro-monarchist grocers, though the text no doubt ended up in the bin at the newspaper to which it was supposedly sent.

Another school friend, Paul Labarrière, waited until 1933 to confess that he had managed to lose a notebook containing fifty or sixty of Rimbaud's poems while moving in 1885. Apart from remembering a poem about “geese and ducks splashing around in a pond,” almost all he could recollect was a line full of the typical Rimbaud bravado: “And the drunken poet rebukes the Universe.”

Desperate for any extra scrap, how many scholars must have lamented the aside left by another of Rimbaud's colleagues in Africa, Ugo Ferrandi? “He provided me with some precise and lucid observations about Tadjourah which I once intended to publish, along with some notes of my own, but fate did not decree this to be. I still have several pages of these notes by Rimbaud.” The trail goes cold just there.

There is a blank at the heart of Rimbaud. How did the homosexual, blasphemous, drunken, demonically gifted poet transform himself into a reputedly temperate merchant who discussed the Qur'an with local Muslims? Are the poems some kind of ciphered message that can explain, or enact, the metamorphosis? Is it all supposed to
mean
something? Is the answer lost in a misplaced notebook?

“If I don't write to you any more it's because I'm very tired and also because with me, as with you, there is nothing new to write about,” he wrote to his family in 1882. And two years later: “In the end, as the Muslims say: It is written! That's life and it's no laughing matter.”

Frank Norris

{1870–1902}

TWELVE YEARS AFTER his death, a novel by Frank Norris that was thought destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was found.
Vandover and the Brute,
his study of moral degeneration and lycanthropy, was Norris's second posthumous novel. Literature is so rarely found, once lost, that
Vandover and the Brute
should be a cause for celebration. But the pleasure was subdued, given that another, possibly more significant, work was irretrievably gone.

Norris had found fame in 1899 with
McTeague,
an unremittingly ferocious novel about human greed and inhuman desires. With its deviant psychologies and frank depictions of brutish sexuality, critics immediately associated it with the work of Émile Zola. It was a comparison relished by Norris, who signed letters and autographed books with his self-given nickname “the Boy Zola.” Just as Zola had announced himself with the shocking
La Bête humaine
and then progressed to a more ambitious project, so too would Norris.

Even before
McTeague,
he had fixed his eye on his major literary goal. In 1897, in a letter to the literary editor of the
San Francisco Examiner,
he had written, “There are two ways of considering the question of the ‘great American novel.' One as to the best novel produced by an American author, and the other as to the novel which is the most thoroughly American in its tone and most aptly interprets the phasos of American life.” Norris's intention was to produce the latter.

In 1899, he had the Idea, an idea so immediate and vast he woke his friend Bruce Porter at five a.m. to tell him. He wrote to the novelist and critic William Dean Howells, explaining it in detail. It was “thoroughly American,” and took California as its background:

My Idea is to write three novels around the one subject of
Wheat.
First, a story of California (the Producer), second, a story of Chicago (the distributor), third, a story of Europe (the Consumer) and in each to keep to the idea of this huge Niagara of wheat rolling from the West to the East.

The business of America was business: before Calvin Coolidge's dictum, Norris was using an economic process as the structural underpinning of his epic trilogy. Although it was “straight naturalism with all the guts I can get into it,” Norris was presenting a radically different vision from Zola. Whereas Zola's characters were driven by inherited conditions, Norris was to explore economic conditions. As Cedarquist in the first part of
The Octopus
presciently puts it: “The Great Word of the nineteenth century has been Production. The Great Word of the twentieth century will be—listen to me, you youngsters—Markets.”

The Octopus
appeared in 1901. It deals with the conflict between California farmers and the Pacific and Southwestern Railway Trust. The farmers have leased the land, irrigated it, planted it, and expect to buy it for around $5 an acre. The company, however, alters its prices, pushing them up to $40 an acre. Political machinations and corrupt bureaucracy spawn armed resistance and internecine violence. It is an archetypal American conflict: the individual frontiersman versus the capitalist monopoly. Norris researched thoroughly, and even in its journalistic factuality and fidelity (though some called it muckraking)
The Octopus
was a new benchmark in the Americanness of American novels.

When the second volume,
The Pit—
about the brokerage of the wheat on the Chicago exchange—appeared, Norris was already dead from peritonitis. He was only thirty-two. Nonetheless, the preface was published as he had planned. It announced a book he would never write.

The Trilogy of The Epic of the Wheat includes the following novels: THE OCTOPUS, a Story of California.

THE PIT, a Story of Chicago.

THE WOLF, a Story of Europe.

The Wolf,
we are told, “will probably have for its pivotal episode the relieving of a famine in an Old World community.” Norris was planning his trip to Europe, and another trilogy on the Battle of Gettysburg, only days before his death. Welcome though
Vandover and the Brute
is, if we had
The Wolf,
Norris's reputation might now be far higher. William Dean Howells captured the elegiac quality of the incomplete epic precisely:

The two novels he has left behind him are sufficient for his fame, but though they have their completeness and their adequacy, one cannot help thinking of the series of their like that is now lost to us. It is Aladdin's palace, and yet,

“The unfinished window in Aladdin's palace
Unfinished must remain,”
and we never can look upon it without an ache of longing and regret.

Franz Kafka

{1883–1924}

FRANZ KAFKA WAS exceptionally clear about what should happen to his literary remains. In 1921 he said to his friend Max Brod, “My will is going to be quite simple—a request to you to burn everything.” Brod refused, and Kafka never made a will, but among his papers, two notes were found.

DEAREST MAX, my last request: everything I leave behind me (that is, in the bookcases, chest of drawers, writing-table, both at home and in the office, or wherever anything may have got to, whatever you happen to find), in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, letters, my own and other people's, sketches and so on, is to be burned unread to the last page, as well as all writings of mine or notes which either you may have or other people, from whom you are to beg them in my name. Letters which are not handed over to you should at least be faithfully burned by those who have them.

In pencil, rather than in ink, was what appeared to be a draft of this note:

DEAR MAX, perhaps this time I shan't recover, pneumonia is likely enough after the month of pulmonary fever I have had, and not even setting it down in writing will keep it off, although there's some power even in that.

Just in case, then, this is my last will concerning all I have written:

Of all my writings the only books that count are these:
The Judgement, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor,
and the short story:
Hunger-Artists.
(The few copies that exist of the
Meditation
can be left; but I don't want to give anyone the trouble of pulping them, but there's to be no reprinting.) When I say that these five books and the short story count, I don't mean that I want them to be printed again and handed down to posterity; on the contrary, should they disappear altogether that would be what I want. Only, since they do exist, I don't mind anyone's keeping them if he wants to.

But everything else of mine that I have written (printed in magazines or newspapers, written in manuscripts or letters) without exception, so far as it can be got hold of, or begged from the addressees . . . —all this without exception and preferably unread (though I don't mind you looking into it, but I would much prefer that you didn't, and in any case no one else is to look at it)—all this, without exception, is to be burned, and that you should do it as soon as possible is what I beg of you.

To Gustav Janouch, an aspiring poet and the son of one of his colleagues, Kafka was equally adamant. Janouch had bound some stories in leather, and Kafka insisted that his “own materialization of horror . . . should be burned.”

It was not that Kafka lacked the mettle to destroy his work himself. In 1923, he and Dora Diamant, his last love, committed a large amount of material to the flames. This conflagration included letters, the final pages of the short story “The Burrow,” a play, and a story about ritual murder in Odessa. He had burned manuscripts to keep warm, wrote all night and then immediately destroyed the results, and constantly edited his slender oeuvre in the most drastic manner.

Brod refused to honor his friend's wishes. He rationalized his decision by maintaining that Kafka had always known he would refuse to comply, and that by addressing the instructions to him, Kafka had entrusted his works to the one person he knew would preserve them. Thus, the letters' ostensible meaning was, at best, adolescent posturing and, at worst, evidence that he was not in sound mind at the time of their writing. So in 1925,
The Trial
appeared, followed by
The Castle
(1926),
Amerika
(1927),
The Great Wall of China and Other Stories
(1931), and
Diaries 1910–1923
(1951). Seven hundred pages of letters Kafka sent to Félice Bauer, who was twice his fiancée, became available to the public in 1967, fifteen years after his equally distraught and self-lacerating correspondence with his lover and Czech translator Milena Jesenká had been published.

Did Max Brod do the right thing? The fact that Kafka's reputation rose exponentially after his death, to the extent that he has become one of the central figures of twentieth-century Modernism, would seem to suggest that Brod's transgression was eminently forgivable. There are, however, certain ironies that complicate the picture of an unrecognized genius.

Kafka did not complete any of the novels, and both
Amerika
and
The
Castle
are unfinished. If he had prepared
Amerika
for publication, certain anomalies might have been resolved. Karl Rossman, the protagonist, is confronted at the end with the “Nature Theatre of Oklahama” (the misspelling being preserved from Arthur Holitscher's
Amerika heute und morgen
): whether this strange, fake, commercialized heaven was to be a fool's paradise or a genuine redemption is unknown. Likewise, the ultimate fate of K, the central character in
The Castle,
is beyond our reach. Brod claimed it would end with K dying of exhaustion, and in the extant version we have K seemingly at the nadir of his fortunes, deserted by Frieda, confounded in his scheme to enter the Castle, and aware that he will never meet the mysterious and powerful Klamm. But with a writer as profoundly sensitive to the vertiginous depths to which humanity can sink, we cannot be sure that even this apparent pit might not belie some even deeper despondency. We cannot underestimate Kafka's sense of
worst.

The Trial,
at least, has its ending. Joseph K, about whom someone must have been telling lies, buffeted and rebuffed in his attempt to clarify the exact nature of the accusation against him, and the nature of the trial itself, throws himself into the arms of his executioners. The form in which we read
The Trial
is not, however, unimpeachably Kafkaesque. Although the manuscript was divided into chapters and the chapters had titles, Brod had to “depend on [his] own judgement” as to their arrangement, based on having heard Kafka read sections of his work in progress. His editorial decisions were “supported by actual recollection”: not the firmest of critical foundations. Brod admitted that “various further stages of the mysterious trial should have been described,” but argued that since we know from the last chapter that Joseph K never reached the highest court, the intervening, torturous section “could be prolonged into infinity.” With an almost arrogant assurance, Brod believed that if readers did not know about the book's lacunae, they “would scarcely notice its deficiencies,” such as the jump from late autumn to late spring between the penultimate and final chapters.

The absence of a trial in
The Trial
is a central tenet of Modernist aesthetics, and yet to attribute this to authorial design rather than to textual fragmentation is a mistake. As Kafka again said to Brod, “I am not going to include the novels. Why rake up these old attempts? Only because they happen not to have been burned yet?” In a typically self-obliterating sentence, Kafka suggested that if someone “hoped to create a whole out of the fragments, some complete work” it would be “impossible here, there is no help for me in these. So what am I to do with these things? Since they can't help me am I to let them harm me, as must be the case, given my knowledge about them?”

It is too easy to cast Kafka as a twentieth-century Virgil, demanding that since
The Aeneid
is not perfected, it should be burned. But Kafka's insistence on the destruction of his papers is not retroactive vanity in the face of bad reviews. In some way, the latent incendiary quality, the transitory nature of his texts, is paramount.

Of all writers, Kafka is the most shatteringly aware of the abuse of power. This self-awareness led him to earnest protestations of his worthlessness, as he recognized those impulses in himself; he was “infinitely dirty,” he told Milena. He knew the inefficacy of writing as a defense against the horrors: in a chilling passage he relates a “swoon” that comes over him as he criticized a piece of theater: “What are you talking about? What's the matter? Literature, what is that? Where does it come from? What use is it?”

He knew, at some visceral level, about peremptory and nonreversible judgments, implacable, unjust rules, and meek submission to the eventual knife. Although he was the least willing to impose his will or exert his force, he knew that writing was an act of violence, and that when we talk about the “power” of a text, this is not unrelated to the power wielded by tyrants. He wrote:

Altogether I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can “make us happy,” as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all . . . what we need are books that hit us like the most painful misfortune . . . that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods . . . a book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.

Kafka wanted his manuscripts burned because they were meant to hurt.