Subject: Re: a corrective from Yasna Polyana
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 18 2000 - 00:28:00 GMT
On Sun, Sep 17, 2000 at 12:09:22AM +0100, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> I was making a general point about posthumous publications.
> They seem to me to have a bad record.
>
> Can you suggest any reasonable parallel of a man, successfully
> published, who then lapses into forty years silence only to
> emerge eventually - or even after death - with promises
> fulfilled?
I don't know how many of these writers had 40 years of silence, but
many of them had significant publications after their deaths.
Raymond Carver had a comeback, though it was not after 40 years. But
it was perhaps 40-year mileage on his liver -- which was nearly
equivalent!
Harold Brodkey's books were not the utter failures that one might expect
from the gossip, but they lacked the clarity and brilliance of his first
collection of shorts, and they were at least 30 years in the making.
Henry Roth (CALL IT SLEEP) had a publication decades after he went
silent, and while I haven't read the new work, I know it received
respectful attention.
What's the scoop on Ralph Ellison's JUNETEENTH? I completely missed
all the reviews. That's a work from the beyond, after many decades of
silence.
A lot of Kafka saw the light of publication day after his death, and
even the fragments were more brilliant than what most writers can hope
to achieve.
I concur with Scottie on Hemingway's A MOVEABLE FEAST, a book that I
love beyond measure. But the other graveyard writings I could do
without.
I wouldn't be shocked if William Maxwell were found to have one or two
unpublished MSS. in his estate, whenever that business gets settled.
Dawn Powell had some good stuff -- though no novels, sadly --
discovered and published posthumously. Her diaries and letters are
quite fine, and help put her fiction into context.
Georges Perec -- at least in English translation -- made out well.
Philip K. Dick did not suffer from the work that was published after
his death; in fact, interest in his output picked up after BLADE
RUNNER was released. He did not live to see the release, but he saw a
close-to-final edit of the movie and was said to have liked it
enormously. His removal from the public eye was not so very long,
though.
Emily Dickinson was published to small acclaim during her life, but
blossomed truly after her death.
Sylvia Plath was a phenomenon after her death, and (at least to my
reader's ear) her post-suicide work holds up quite well.
Anatole Broyard's KAFKA WAS THE RAGE is a memoir that holds up well
enough, if not breathtakingly, and was a long time coming.
Flannery O'Connor had at least one novel published posthumously, to
excellent reception.
Marshall McLuhan, too, had published at least one posthumous work: The
Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st
Century. The book was composed about ten years before its 1989
publication.
On the other hand are the writers who have been smeared by posthumous
publication: F. Scott Fitzgerald (though I actually enjoyed the
Cambridge University Press edition of THE LAST TYCOON and thought it
went far toward correcting the mess of the original "sanctioned"
edition), Thomas Wolfe, most of post-1961 Hemingway (oh, the
embarrassment of THE GARDEN OF EDEN!), Joseph Heller, John Kennedy Toole
(not CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, but the other novel), Jack Kerouac. I think
(but cannot swear to it), too, that Truman Capote may have had a trifle
published posthumously, to his disadvantage.
That's all that comes to mind improvisationally; I suspect that I
could make a better list if I had time and energy. I admit that I
have violated Scottie's "40 years" rule, but in many cases these were
writers from whom little or nothing was expected, and the publication
was a delightful surprise.
--tim
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