People love to tag Edward Albee an asshole. But this writer/prof argues the playwright’s controversial demand that his unfinished work be destroyed at the time of his death is reasonable...perhaps even a service to academia.
Those who consider playwright Edward Albee’s stunning decision to have his incomplete work burned at the time of his death a characteristically selfish move—a slight to the arts and mankind—are shortsighted. As Peter points out in Albee’s “The Zoo Story,” “People can’t have everything they want. You should know that; it’s a rule; people can have some of the things they want, but they can’t have everything.” These lines fit my message, as this lifelong reader/writer and longtime writing prof urges Albee enthusiasts: “Get over it.”
While it’s difficult for many of us to understand Albee’s final dictate that no black actor play the blond supporting character, Nick, in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” it’s easy for many of us in the dedicated creative writing community to high-five his protective gesture of “dead hand control,” as such beyond-the-grave power is nicknamed, preventing a deceased writer’s manuscript-in-progress from being staged or shared.
Writers—great writers—especially as time goes by, are probably the best judges of their own obsessive processes, or they wouldn’t churn out and publish the hard-won final products that they do. What advantage lies in reading Nabokov’s incomplete index-card scribbled novel, The Original of Laura, transcribed by his adoring son 100 percent against the author’s wishes? What advantage, for that matter, in picking up Harper Lee’s unfortunately named and almost universally panned second book, Go Set a Watchman, brought to print only after the singular novelist fell into the clutches of dementia?
If scholars require subpar works to understand the full trajectory of a prolific genius’s craft, they need look no further than the least successful sampling of those manuscripts the clearheaded author sent into the living world.
Obviously, James Joyce was a singular visionary—whether he’s your shot of literary whiskey or no. I personally consider A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to be a fabulous novel, an entertainment, a truly great work—but same time, the least important published work of Joyce’s career. (Consider academia: I’m not alone.)
And yet a 1945 New York Times story by William Troy, “Stephen Dedalus in the Rough,” trumpets the release of a posthumous partial first draft James Joyce’s autobiographical Portrait, Stephen Hero, a work that the author’s wife elected to publish after Joyce’s death, despite the fact Joyce had burned part of it, despite his request she please not.
One paragraph of this vintage newspaper story intrigues me.
“What did Joyce learn about his profession between the two drafts of his first novel?” Troy asks. “Primarily he learned, as Gertrude Stein once observed to Hemingway, that ‘remarks’ do not make literature. He learned selection, concentration through the telescoping of disparate materials in some single concrete symbol or situation, the beauty that comes from controlled relations. Novel-writing was not to be just ‘talking into a typewriter’; the novel was not a catch-all for whatever passed through a writer's head; as an art it had to be grounded in the intelligible and not the abstract. The medium of this art being words, and the essence of art discipline, the discipline of the novelist lay in the appropriate use of words.”
Amen. Selection is art, and vice versa. It was then; it is now, perhaps more than before. Novel writing isn’t the same as it used to be. Most of my writer friends have prestigious agents. Many of my friends have written fine books. Did they “talk into the typewriter”—or cellphone—and simply submit them? Nope. They worked and reworked, revised and resubmitted. Are they selling these thoughtful books? In short: rarely.
When someone we know sells a book to a New York publishing house, my friends and I rejoice—jealousy notwithstanding—because we know the odds, like the narrowing market, are stingy. Those contemporary literary artists whom we pray today will linger in a literary canon—Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson, Philip Roth, let’s say—must likewise select their message for artistic expedience, write it, refine it, and offer it to an increasingly distracted public.
Will my students who choose to pursue a Ph.D. in literary criticism wind up bereft without the full spectrum of Albee, without all of Joan Didion’s random brilliant notebook musings, without every scrap of Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? In fact, with the furious pace of life as it is, I think they’ll be grateful for the dead hand control that (sometimes) leaves them without superfluous clutter to sift through, that leaves them free to Google and surf and talk to librarians who might not themselves be able to dredge up the wonderful J.D. Salinger’s earliest and most vague Glass family shards to strive to glue together.
As I tell my students, “Time is shorter than ever. Read better books. If you must, try to write them.”