MYSTERIES OF THE INCOMPLETE

 

Few things induce more frustration or spark imagination like unfinished work of a literary canon. The more of it completed the more tantalizing the evidence. What was a writer thinking when their vision was cut short, either voluntarily or by tragedy?

Death is the primary culprit in aborting works in progress but occasionally outside interference and even an author’s temperament have played a part. No matter, here is where readers become sleuths piecing a guess of what the finished work could have looked like. Sometimes notes were left behind but at other times the clues are more obscure, derived, for instance, from knowing the writer and their time. It’s detective work through biography. Harder and more frustrating is evaluating how the work, if completed would have measured against the writer’s body of work.

Of course, despite the patterns, cases are unique…and so are the fates of these half-formed works. Jane Austen was working on a novel which would come to be titled Sandition in 1817 but progress was halted by illness and death within a few months. This was unlike her short story “The Watsons” from over a decade earlier that she gave up on. But Austen was a meticulous note keeper and left her writing to her sister and confidant Cassandra who kept the work alive until, passing it down from family member to family member, until it finally saw publication more than a century after Austen’s death. The most curious aspect of Sandition is its afterlife, having attracted other writers with creativity to “finish” the work.

This was not dissimilar to the trajectory of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, a fable that took on many different forms (one even was to involve Tom and Huck who, incidentally, were also featured in a variety of story fragments throughout Twain’s career) before ultimately remaining incomplete at the time of Twain’s death in 1910. It was then polished and presented as a finished product, somewhat dishonestly, by Albert Bigelow Paine in 1916.

Henry James left two unfinished novels at the time of his death, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, the latter’s history being the more interesting. James began working on it in 1900 but discarded it for other work which would, it must be said, collectively make up his best period. However depression from the start of the war and battling loneliness in 1914 brought him back to this long ago abandoned work, but the revived interest did not last long and he dropped the project again. However, his notes were detailed and leave no uncertainty about the ending.

The same cannot be said about Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon, two works published almost eighty years apart on two different continents and under distinct conditions, and yet both have continued to mystify readers. Fitzgerald’s story was an insightful saga of the rise and fall of a Hollywood mogul (modeled after Irving Thalberg) in the 30s, but the work completed ends before very much happens and speculation has taken over, but clues are scant.

Dickens’s work is perhaps one of the most talked about unfinished novels if only because it has, by its very nature, sparked the most discussion. It seems almost planned that Dickens’s grand unconcluded work would be a murder mystery and though an “official” answer as to who the murderer is has been provided by a least three of Dickens’s associates (his illustrator Luke Fildes and no less than Dickens’s son Charles among them)the suspense has never fallen.

Finally, readers have virtually nothing to go on to guess at what could have been in that famous suitcase containing all of Ernest Hemingway’s writing up to that time when it was lost on a train in Paris in 1922. Clearer is the direction of a novel he was working on later in life, published as a short story posthumously as “The Last Good Country”, as well as the novel his short story “A Train Trip” was intended to serve as the beginning of. Indeed, much of the work Hemingway neve saw published finally saw the light of day including the memoir of his Paris years, A Moveable Feast, as well as Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden.

Among the greatest gifts of literature is the inspiration of imagination, stimulation, and discussion. By leaving their readers fragments of works they at one time saw as parts of a larger whole, some of the greatest writers in history have left us in a state of curiosity and wonder that has kept us looking deeper and, as always, wanting more.