Some strange incomplete novels
Jane Austen: Sanditon was her unfinished work
Novels unfinished due to the inopportune death of the author form an intriguing aspect of the history of literature. Some have been published in their incomplete state: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston (1896), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941), Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers (1975), Albert Camus’ Le Premier Homme (1994), and Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura (2009).
They’re an eternal mystery for readers. What might have been? It’s a subject that’s interested me for some time and manifested itself in “Ceylon Connection with Dickens’ Unfinished Tale”, The Sunday Times, 11 & 18 October 1998, regarding Dickens’ last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, andmore specifically “When the Pen Falls: Unfinished Novels by Prominent Authors”, The Sunday Times, April 26, 2015.
The Hermaphrodite
Other unfinished novels not mentioned in the latter article by mostly lesser known and often exceedingly experimental authors, include some bizarre examples. Take, for instance, The Hermaphrodite, by Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), the American author, poet – renowned for her Civil War-era song “Battle Hymn of the Republic” – and leading social activist.
The hermaphrodite of the title is Laurence, also called Laurent, who was raised as a male by his father even though ‘he’ has gender characteristics of both sexes. A physician-character claims that Laurence is “one presenting a beautiful physical development, and combining in the spiritual nature all that is most attractive in either sex”.
In fact Laurence spends some time living as a woman. A female friend remarks: “I recognise in Laurent much that is strictly feminine . . . and in the name of the female sex, I claim her as one of us. Her modesty, her purity, her tenderness of heart belongs only to a woman.”
Laurence is sent to college, excels in his studies, especially poetry, a talent that attracts the attention of a widow, Emma. Alas, he only shows asexual tendencies, and when Emma expresses her love for him he admits he is a hermaphrodite, which sends her into such distress that consequently causes her death.
The manuscript, probably written between 1846 and 1847 but left untitled by the author, is a series of fragments with a large amount of text missing. Nevertheless, it had a recognizable narrative and was published in 2004.
According to the World Heritage Encyclopedia, “The text is unique, especially for the time period in which it was written. Its Romantic themes of self-discovery, sublimity in nature, and the tumultuous intersection between death and love combine with more modern investigations of asexuality and challenges to cultural patriarchy, to produce a story that is at once a reminder of a particular time in American history, and yet also a remarkable prophetic speculation about changes to come.”
Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman
Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), a founding feminist philosopher and author of the revolutionary A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), wrote an unfinished sequel, a novel, Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman. A gothic story of a woman whose husband manages to consign her to an insane asylum, it remained unfinished as she died during its creation aged 38, days after giving birth to the novelist Mary Shelley, future wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and creator of Frankenstein.
Today, many believe Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman to be her most radical feminist work. In addition to criticising the patriarchal marriage system of the era, Wollstonecraft also condemns women’s collusion in their oppression by being overly-sentimental. Her praise of female sexuality made the novel unpopular when her husband, the social philosopher, political journalist and novelist, William Godwin, published the manuscript in 1798.
Godwin damaged Wollstonecraft’s repute – and in part the reception of the novel – by also publishing a biography, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). Candid, it revealed parts of Wollstonecraft’s life considered lacking morality at the time, such as her latent lesbianism, love affairs, an illegitimate child and her suicide attempts.
Sanditon
In January 1817 the better-known Jane Austen (1775-1817) began writing a romantic novel provisionally titled “The Brothers” but abandoned the project in March due to her chronic physical condition that led to her death in September. Despite this situation Austen displays, as she always did, extremely witty and innovative writing.
Renamed Sanditon after her death at 44, the first eleven chapters explored how a society was constructed. It’s a story of families in a town still being developed, undoubtedly based on England’s south coast resort of Worthing, where Austen stayed in late 1805, just 29 and still an unpublished author. Most important was that she met entrepreneur Edward Ogle, Wothing’s chief citizen and benefactor, who ensured the town became a thriving seaside resort. Mention of Worthing transports me back to the early 1960s when I attended a preparatory school there. Much of the town then, especially the seafront housing, was typical of the early 19th-century development in England which Austen describes. The inhabitants of “modern Sanditon”, as Austen refers to it, have moved out of the “old house; the house of [their] forefathers” – in reality the nearby inland village of Broadwater where my school was located – and are industriously building a new world, a modern seaside town.
However, in the novel there are two versions of Sanditon, one the actual reality, and the other an expected reality – the ideals of the inhabitants who have a concept of the town and wish for this identity to reach the world. Through letters and word of mouth Sanditon does indeed gain fame. It’s a text that demonstrates Austen’s interest in, and experimentation with, the outcome of communication.
Austen was correct in the upward curve of Worthing. At the time she was there the population was about 3,000, while today it is 104,000 and the 15th most populous area in the UK. Apart from its value as a seaside resort, and despite being bland to some extent, it has been a cradle of eccentric creativity.
In Jane Austen’s Worthing: The Real Sanditon (2015), Antony Edmonds mentions that Robert Bloomfield, who wrote “rustic descriptive verse”, visited the town in 1805 (as did Austen) and penned the populist “News from Worthing”, a satirical account of his pleasure at the coquettish nature of the beach belles, published in April 1807.
Essayist and poet Charles Lamb, considered by his principal biographer, EV Lucas, as “the most lovable figure in English literature”, thought Worthing dull. Yet he was inspired by the names of the town’s two publicans, Mr Hogsflesh and Mr Bacon (yes, really!), to write a dreadful farce titled Mr H, somehow staged at Drury Lane in 1806 and roundly booed by the audience.
More significantly, Oscar Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest while staying in the town during August and September 1894 and named the protagonist “Jack Worthing” in its honour. Nobel laureate Harold Pinter lived in Worthing from 1962-1964, where he wrote one of his finest plays, The Homecoming (1965). Moreover, singer-songwriter Billy Idol and master keyboardist Keith Emerson are residents.
Incidentally Jane Austen’s younger brother Charles Austen, who joined the Royal Navy is buried in Trincomalee.
Mount Analogue
Having embraced pataphysics and surrealism since my late teens, it is no surprise I wish to include Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing (1952) by René Daumal (1908–1944). An early practitioner of pataphysics, and a hailed avant-garde poet, it is of note that Daumal was self-taught in Sanskrit and translated some of the Tripitaka into French.
His first novel was the extraordinary A Night of Serious Drinking (1938), influenced by mystic GI Gurdjieff. So was his next manuscript, Mount Analogue, unfinished at his death aged 36 from tuberculosis, probably partly caused by experimentation with drugs and psychoactive chemicals.
The novel is philosophical and bizarre, detailing the discovery and ascent of Mount Analogue, “which can only be perceived by realising that one has travelled further in traversing it than one would by travelling in a straight line, and can only be viewed from a particular point when the sun’s rays hit the earth at a certain angle.
“Its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible.”
Daumal coined the word “peradam”: an object that is revealed only to those who seek it. Such a concept is the opposite of that of “serendipity”, in which, while searching for something, another entity not sought for is stumbled upon. Daumal reveals that at a certain height of Mount Analogue can be discovered an “extremely hard stone – a kind of crystal, a curved crystal, something extraordinary and unknown on the rest of the planet. [Peradam] may mean ‘harder than diamond’ or ‘father of the diamond’ and they say the diamond is the product of the degeneration of peradam by a quartering of the circle or, more precisely, cubing of the square.”
Such ‘mineralogical information’ is followed by esoteric speculation: “Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action. You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again . . . So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above.”
Of interest to cineastes is that the novel is believed to have inspired the Chilean-French film director Alejandro Jodorowsky in the making of his cult classic, The Holy Mountain (1973).
The Good Soldier Švejk
My final example, probably the best-known – it’s been translated into some 60 languages – is The Good Soldier Švejk (1923), an unfinished novel by the anarchist Czech author, Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923). Set during World War One, it relates the farcical episodes of one soldier, Josef Švejk, and provides a satire on the incompetence of military authority. Six volumes were originally planned by Hašek, but he only completed four by his death in 1923 – another at a grievously young age of 39. After his demise the volumes were published as one.
Though a Czech, Hašek served in the Austro-Hungary Army (as did many of his compatriots), hence involved in a conflict for a country to which he had no allegiance. The novel incorporates not only his experiences in the 91st Infantry Regiment but also tackles common anti-war issues in a series of farcical episodes regarding the futility of conflict and the absurdity of military discipline, in particular that dispensed by the Austrians.
A taste of the plot is worthwhile I believe. Švejk shows such keenness to serve the Austrian Emperor that no one can decide if he is a fool or cleverly undermining the war effort. He is arrested by the secret police, sent to prison, certified insane, transferred to a madhouse, but eventually released.
Suffering from rheumatism, he travels in a wheelchair to the recruitment office, where his enthusiasm causes a minor sensation. Nevertheless, due to his rheumatism he is transferred to a hospital for malingerers, but eventually manages to join up as batman to an army chaplain, who loses him at a card game to a lieutenant being sent to the front.
Švejk misses the train, tries to walk to the destination but is arrested as a possible spy or deserter, then returned to his regiment and subsequently promoted to company orderly. His unit travels by train to the front, and while at a stop, is arrested for a street fight with a respected Hungarian, and later taken prisoner by his own side as a Russian deserter, after trying on a Russian uniform. Avoiding execution, he rejoins his unit, at which point Hašek was unable to proceed further to reveal what happened to Švejk after he reached the front.
Yet another eternal literary mystery due to the sudden death of the author.
With thanks to Wikipediafor
much information