There is a reason why writers aware of their own greatness order that their papers be destroyed when they die, and it is not perfectionism. No. It is a kind of shyness. ‘Art’, as we hear in Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, ‘is deceit’, and an unfinished work of art is like a magic trick with its sleight of hand laid bare for all to see. These writers are ashamed of their nakedness.
For anybody who wants to understand what makes a book tick or a poem sing, on the other hand, there is no better way to see how a writer works. Often we are moved to contempt of an author when the paraphernalia of his art are set before us. As Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet peters out into note form, his fiddling mania for construction is revealed like the creaking corsetry of a society lady.
Equally often, however, unfinished writing inspires the kind of admiration that comes only from absolute honesty. Vergil’s Aeneid is riddled with ‘half-lines’, verses that ripple to the caesura and leave a silence trailing in the air thereafter; but they are so well executed that we get the impression of a poet who thinks only in perfect periods. Other writers show bare flesh to deliberate effect: Carlo Emilio Gadda wrote a thriller, That Dreadful Mess on the Via Merulana, that beckons the reader aside but stops abruptly short of consummation.
Into this mess comes Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, recently published against his dying wish by his son Dmitri. We are given exact facsimiles of the index cards on which Nabokov wrote, complete with his mis-spellings, insertions and erasures. It is fascinating: Nabokov’s English turns out to be alarmingly bad, and the pages are stalked by the ghosts of his earlier work, and yet his erratic genius is never more forceful than in a line that distils the essence of the fragmentary book, of the fragmentary life: ‘poor Daisy had been crushed to death by a backing lorry on a country road – short cut home from school – through a muddy construction site – abominable tragedy – her mother died of a broken heart’. Haec finis fandi.
