The Book of Lost Books

by Stuart Kelly

  Even once he was writing, and reading from Under Milk Wood, Thomas’s propensities and fondnesses jeopardized the work’s ever seeing the light of day. In 1953 he wrote to Charles Elliott, of University College, Cardiff, asking a favor:

  Do you remember that I had with me a suitcase & a briefcase, & that I transferred, some time in the evening, some of the contents of the briefcase into the suitcase? Well, anyway, I left the briefcase somewhere. I think it must be in the Park Hotel. I’ve written to the manager; but could you possibly; when & if passing by, drop in & see if it is there? It’s very urgent to me: the only copy in the world of that kind-of-a-play of mine, from which I read bits, is in that battered, strapless briefcase whose handle is tied together with string.

  If the thing isn’t there, do you think you could find out where the hell I left it?

  It was indeed so urgent that, as Paul Ferris, the editor of Thomas’s Collected Letters, notes, he managed to lose it again in America, and then again in London, where it was found in a pub. Luck, for once, was on Thomas’s side. For all his attempts to misplace Under Milk Wood, it refused to be lost. What was lost, however, was the poet himself. The self-styled “Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive” expired only three years older than his hero.

  William Seward Burroughs

  {1914–1997}

  READING NAKED LUNCH is a disorienting experience. This is not solely because of its subjects: the drug-addled hallucination, the riddling sphincters, the paranoid intimations of impending disaster, the sexual degradation that unleashes psychic illumination; nor is it merely a product of the shifting tenses, coalescing characters, and outrageous imagery. The text itself trembles with a sense of instability, a monstrous capacity for paranormal mutation, as if, on finishing it, the reader might start again and find a wholly different book in his or her hands. Naked Lunch is an intoxicating, volatile volume.

  Three different readers, one with a first edition from the Olympia Press in France, one with a U.S. edition, and the last with John Calder’s U.K. edition, would find themselves embroiled in cross-purposes. Was it called The Naked Lunch or Naked Lunch or Dead Fingers Talk? Did everyone experience the fearful déjà vu of finding parts of the first paragraph also on page 170? When Allen Ginsberg, before the book had even been delivered to the publisher, referred to it as “an endless novel that will drive everyone mad,” he inadvertently described the experience of more than just a clutch of bibliographers trying to make sense of its publication history.

  Myths cling to it like stains. Take the title. Burroughs once explained that Naked Lunch referred to a “frozen moment when everyone sees what’s on the end of every fork,” a sickly epiphany when consumption and greed become evident. The first publisher, the genius, pornographer, and maverick Maurice Girodias, was told that it referred to the post-work, pre-dinner period for adulterous relationships, what the French refer to as the cinq à sept. Yet another explanation refers to Burroughs’s first attempt at novel-writing, a detective story he and Jack Kerouac took turns penning, the still-unpublished And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, where, supposedly, Burroughs mistyped “naked lunch” for “naked lust.” Which story is true? In the chaotic, quantum-fractured Burroughsverse, all of them contain a grain, or gram, of truth.

  The book evolved out of what Burroughs had cut from his previous works, Junkie and Queer, as well as the so-called Yage Letters he sent back from Mexico. Given his nomadic existence and manner of working, the fact that anything resembling a manuscript was finally assembled is nothing short of miraculous. Girodias recalled Burroughs in Paris as a “grey phantom of a man in his phantom gabardine and ancient discoloured phantom hat, all looking like his mouldy manuscript,” and insisted, against the testimony of Burroughs’s friends, that the typescript had in part been eaten by rats.

  Brion Gysin, Burroughs’s collaborator, helped him move from London, organizing his twenty box-files, seventeen of which were marked “Miscellaneous.” Paul Bowles offers a manic glimpse of Burroughs at work in Tangiers: he would type, or, when the typewriter was sold to pay for drugs, write longhand, tossing each page onto the floor where a pile of papers, covered with footprints and burying sandwiches, festered like an archaeological midden, occasionally blowing out of the window.

  When it was assembled, nowhere near his entire output was distilled into the various forms of Naked Lunch. The ur-text was possibly a thousand pages long. Some pages, according to Brion Gysin, were later being sold at a dollar a sheet by Algerian street boys, salvaged from a suitcase of papers that Burroughs had hastily abandoned. The primordial swamp of words that had evolved into Naked Lunch was not, however, spent effluvia. Burroughs developed, with Gysin, his “cut-up” technique, where the reams were torn, folded, and patched together to create new works. He believed that such ritualistic incisions could make the words reveal their true meaning: like a forensic shaman, he slaughtered and sacrificed quires and sheaves. The remnants were obliterated, reimagined, transformed, and edited into The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded.

  “The fragmentary quality of my work is inherent,” Burroughs told Allen Ginsberg. The world was a wreck, shattered and splintered, yet full of hidden meanings and dark significances: squinting into the maelstrom might allow a man to realize that he was a sleeper, preprogrammed by occult espionage operatives, who could then escape from the tentacles of their influence. Everything was infected, except filth; everyone was hypocritical apart from the double agents. If you could focus on the undulating pattern of the blur, rather than attempt to clarify the mirage, you might glimpse a quality beyond disillusion.

  If Burroughs were merely a writer of copious first drafts, his manuscripts would be a curiosity, and ample fodder for an eager graduate student. But his methodology creates a kaleidoscope of possible books, an infinite number of sequences, each of which could, hypothetically, have revealed a different story altogether. His published work exists purely by virtue of its attendant swarm of virtual books, winking into and vanishing back out of our particular dimension.

  Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV

  {1917–1977}

  WHEN ROBERT LOWELL was fifteen years old, and had already earned the nickname “Cal” (for Caligula), the poet Hart Crane jumped overboard and drowned. There was no causal link, though it raises a host of disturbing similarities.

  Crane, born in 1899, was only just too young to be in the vanguard of Modernist experimental poetry. He cruised the whole gamut of stylistic innovation: he imitated Pound’s robust Imagism and Eliot’s vitreous ennui before realizing that neither model suited his ambitions or could adequately convey his experiences and enthusiasm. Eliot’s disgust at the burgeoning metropolis and Pound’s hankering after the medieval, the archaic, and the obscure must have seemed equally pessimistic and equally elitist. Crane, as opposed to these self-imposed exiles who berated the philistinism of the States, wanted a “mystic synthesis of America,” a modern epic that lauded Chaplin and the Brooklyn Bridge as much as it shunned the neat, buttoned-up little quatrains of traditional poetry. Crane knew that the Modernists had opened radical new fields of expression, but wanted a voice that could “go through” them toward a different engagement with the present.

  As one of the many self-appointed laureates of America, Crane had a formidable, and internal, opposition to the role. Despite his louche good looks, he was hardly in the running for beau to the Homecoming Queen of the States Muse: high-school dropout, gay, alcoholic, and working in his father’s candy store when he wasn’t writing advertising copy. Eventually he was allowed to go to New York, where he indulged in dangerous affairs and problematic friendships, and gradually assembled the materials that would become The Bridge. He could have stayed at home and been but one more little suburban tragedy, rather than the operatic disaster he made of himself.

  The Bridge (1930) was the Modernist epic, and, as such, critics denied it was an epic at all. Fragmentary and allusive, it was a book of loneliness and crowds: but where was heroism? Where was nar
rative? After winning a Guggenheim fellowship, Crane traveled to Mexico, in order to write another epic on the original encounter between America and Europe: the humiliation of Montezuma II before Cortés. In short, it was a poem that could address the perceived gap between the epic tradition and modern verse. He failed to write it, and became mired in drink, brawls, and opportunistic sex, alienating his friends and frittering away his money. Returning home by boat, he declared to Peggy Cowley, “I’m not going to make it, dear, I’m utterly disgraced,” and bowed out over the railings of the SS Orizaba.

  Robert Lowell also tried to write an epic, when he was at Harvard, a few years after Crane’s death. The subject was the Crusades, and he was rebuffed by the poet Robert Frost, who pronounced that the poem “did seem to go on a bit.” But the whisper of Crane, as poet, man, and symbol, kept needling in Lowell’s mind: Crane’s friend and Lowell’s tutor, Allen Tate, wrote an “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” which Lowell, of old best-Bostonian stock, countered with “For the Union Dead.” Lowell wrote a remarkably sour elegy to Crane, where he ambiguously praised him as the “Shelley of my age” who “scattered Uncle Sam’s / phoney gold-plated laurels.” By 1960, Lowell would, with patrician hauteur, admit that Crane was “less limited” than his contemporaries. Most tellingly, when Lowell was suffering one of his frequent mental breakdowns, he would, as a friend wrote, “talk about himself in connection with Achilles, Alexander, Hart Crane, Hitler and Christ.”

  At school, Lowell had penned an essay entitled “War: A Justification,” foreshadowing his recurrent interest in belligerence, violence, and resistance. The Crusades also provided him with an arena in which to vent his confusions about religion in general, and militant Catholicism in particular. Lowell, like Crane, was also concerned with how best to respond to the advances in aesthetic technique pioneered by the previous generation, and how to introduce American history and landscape into modern poetry. At first, he wrote elaborate, tightly mannered meditations on New England themes, suffused with Catholic symbolism at odds with his Puritan heritage, reminiscent of the Metaphysical poets. But the lure of the epic did not pass away entirely, and when he started on his “long poem,” it had nothing to do with the Mayflower, the Aztecs, or the fall of Jerusalem.

  Lowell imagined that his collection Life Studies was “a small scale Prelude”—an autobiography in meter “written in many different styles and with digression.” The “continuing story” evolved further into the free-verse sonnet sequences of Notebook, which itself was revised into History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. Magpie-like, Lowell stretched the form to accommodate newspaper copy, critical reviews of his work, and even his ex-wife’s anguished letters and telephone calls. As he says in “The Misanthrope and the Painter,” “I pick lines from the trash”; and in the eyes of the poet Adrienne Rich, this stench of the garbage stuck to Lowell. Her review of The Dolphin berated him for the inclusion of “private” materials, and denounced his “bullshit eloquence.” “A kind of aggrandized and merciless masculinity” typified the poetry; and though Rich intended this as a cutting insult, its sense of an almost Homeric palette and intensity applied to the life of a depressive, late-twentieth-century man is also oddly apposite. “History has to live with what was here . . . it is so dull and gruesome how we die, / unlike writing, life never finishes” may not be as thrilling as Achilles’ rage, but it captures a seriousness and resonance that might fittingly be termed epic.

  Unlike Crane, Lowell never reached a quintessence of shame from which he could not return, despite behavior that went far beyond disgracing himself. In a manic period he had allegedly held Allen Tate out of a second-story window while reciting “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” In the asylum he had become inordinately attached to a piece of metal, which he claimed was “the Totentanz” Hitler used to implement the Final Solution. Despite lithium treatment and electroconvulsive therapy, he was readmitted, hurt and crying, time and again.

  One episode stands out, encapsulating Lowell’s productivity, ambitious range, and pitiable megalomania. He discharged himself from Greenways clinic in 1975, and was found in the fashionable L’Escargot restaurant, where he buttonholed fellow diners to help him write an Anthology of World Poetry. He was, he informed them, the king of Scotland.

  Sylvia Plath

  {1932–1963}

  IN A POEM unpublished in her lifetime, “Dialogue over a Ouija Board,” Plath described a glass that spelled out the phrase “IN-PLUMAGEOFRAWWORMS.” Any writer attempting to grasp her life, death, art, and reputation must face a similarly vermicular, seething corpus.

  Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963. She died intestate, and, although she was separated from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, divorce proceedings had not commenced. Hughes therefore became her literary executor, and controlled the copyright of her work, published and unpublished. The management of the estate was given over to Hughes’s sister Olwyn, a move that, despite being pragmatic, was nonetheless highly contentious. Sylvia had not liked Olwyn, a fact confirmed by more than just the lacunae in her eventually published correspondence with her mother; nor did Olwyn like Sylvia, whom she described to one biographer as having “something of the terrorist” about her. Plath’s mother chose not to read her final, unsent letter, which Hughes offered to give her: its final instruction, accusation, or bequest is shrouded. Nor did Plath leave a suicide note.

  At the time of her death, Plath had only published one collection of poems, The Colossus, and a pseudonymous semiautobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. She had, however, been working on a number of projects, as well as continuing to keep her extensive diaries. In 1965, Hughes edited a new selection of her work, based on the collection she had been completing prior to her suicide. Hughes’s Ariel, however, differed significantly from Plath’s Ariel. The forty poems of the published version contained only twenty-seven of the forty-one poems Plath had grouped together as The Rival, then A Birthday Present, then Daddy, and finally Ariel. Some of the excerpted works were eventually released in another posthumous collection, Winter Trees. Hughes wrote in the introduction to Plath’s Collected Poems (1981) that Ariel “was a somewhat different volume from the one she had planned” and that he had “omitted some of the more personally aggressive poems.” In the preface to a selection of her prose, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977), he stated that he had taken the decision to burn her journals for the final months, since he did not want “her” children to read them.

  Robert Lowell, himself no stranger to psychosis, described her poetry as like “playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.” But the effect of reading her work was less dramatic than the consequence of not being able to read it. The revelations about the text of Ariel and the journals opened the floodgates: accusations of censorship and suppression soon developed into a full-blown psychodrama, in which the dead Plath and the still-living Hughes became archetypes of Sapphic self-destruction and chauvinistic manipulation. Burning manuscripts leads, among other outcomes, to scorched reputations. The controversy over subsequent biographies of Plath exacerbated the situation, and, by the early 1990s, when Hughes was poet laureate, it had generated its own critical literature. In 1998, Hughes wrote his own long-verse account of their relationship, Birthday Letters, a myth in a mirror, marbled with the aggrieved release of saying, “I remember.” Their lives are reproduced in other books and a film.

  In such a morass of conflicting and unsettled accounts, there is still one lost work. In 1962–63 Plath was working on a second novel, provisionally entitled Double Exposure, or Double Take. She told her mother that she intended to use her recent, painful experiences (much as she had done with The Bell Jar), and apparently 130 pages of the manuscript were written. According to Hughes, these disappeared at some time before 1970. It is a frustratingly vague verb: lost? shredded? burned? The critic Judith Kroll saw an outline for the novel, and it is generally held that it featured a husband, wife, and mistress. The manuscript, it seems, ha
s its own ghost: the librarian of the Smith College Rare Books Department had to take an unprecedented step and make clear that they did not possess the manuscript, nor was it housed with them under a seal to prevent its contents being made public too soon.

  Though various biographers, aficionados, and devotees would dearly love to apply another prism to the myriad lives of Ted and Sylvia, we might pause to consider, as well as its possible revelations, the hypothetical literary merit of the work. The “double” in both prospective titles has itself a twofold resonance: the reduplication of the wife in the mistress, and the schizophrenic fissuring of the man into husband and adulterer. Plath’s work always had certain elements of the Gothic. The mere title suggests a work that might have been a fusion of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Doppelgänger.

  A sense of the self shattering into competing elements is thought to typify certain psychotic and depressive states of mind, and suicide can be read as a rational effort on the part of one facet to extinguish the others. Did Plath’s novel embody these multiplied impulses? Her doctor had worried that giving her antidepressants to dispel her apathy might unleash the self-confidence to harm herself. Hughes is also implicated in this tragic fracturing: he dissolved into smithereens of “I,” “her husband,” and “TH” when he subsequently described the creative work of her last days. Double Exposure is, perhaps, a suicide note that, in its physical act of writing, defers an action more finally than rasping a tongue over a gummed envelope. Was she, like Nietzsche, keeping herself alive through immaculate imaginings of self-destruction?