The Daily Telegraph Friday 16 August 2019 *** 23Is there such
a thing as a
lost literary
masterpiece?
With a collection of stories by Proust
recently discovered, Duncan White looks at
the dubious track record of forgotten works
Fitzgerald stories was published.
They were stories he had published
in magazines during his lifetime
but which editors of collections of
his work had not deemed good
enough, what one reviewer
called the “uber-dregs”.
This raises the question:
is it even possible to
rediscover a lost novel,
play or poem that ranks
among an author’s best
work? It’s a powerful
fantasy, and one that is part
of storytelling itself. It is
baked into the premise of
Don Quixote, for example,
in which the putative
author “discovers” the
manuscript of the novel
among scrap papers in
the Alcaná market atToledo. Cervantes was being playful,
of course, but there is also a more
serious point: while one of the marks
of great literature was understood
to be its survival into posterity, that
process was often arbitrary. Literature
can disappear.
The further one goes back, the
greater the losses. The fire that burned
the Library of Alexandria claimed
hundreds of manuscripts, including
dozens of plays by Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides.
From hints in other works, we
know that we have lost Homer’s
comic epic Margites. The first part of
Aristotle’s Poetics survived only by
being translated into Arabic and was
not rediscovered in the West until the
Middle Ages. The second part is lost.
With the advent of print and
other technologies, more writing
was preserved. But a writer still
had a degree of control over what
they chose to leave behind. A pious
Gerard Manley Hopkins burned hisArts
Identity crisis for our
greatest young director
W
hen, in 1945, Laurence Olivier’s
Oedipus finally discovered
the grim truth – that he had
accidentally slain his own father (Laius)
years earlier and married his mother
(Jocasta), bringing parricide and incest
to the heart of Thebes, he let out a
howl that entered the annals of theatre
history. It was a sound so intense it
made those who heard it, according
to the critic Kenneth Tynan, feel as if
they’d been at the Somme together.
The screech was borrowed from
nature: whether an ermine caught inEdinburgh International FestivalOedipus
King’s Theatre★★★★★
By Dominic CavendishH
ave you read the latest
Marcel Proust? Not a
question you expect to
be asked in 2019. This
autumn, a collection
of his hitherto “lost”
stories will be published in France.
The stories were apparently left out
of the 1896 collection Pleasures and
Days because of the “audacity” with
which they deal with homosexual
themes.
“All of them remained secret, the
writer never spoke of them,” claimed
the publisher, Éditions de Fallois.
“Proust is in his twenties, and most
of these texts evoke the awareness of
his homosexuality, in a darkly tragic
way, that of a curse.”
Billed like this, these stories are a
fascinating proposition, an insight
into the developing talent of one of
the great writers of the 20th century
as he grappled with his sexuality. It
is certainly plausible that he would
have kept them secret if they were
too explicit; EM Forster did not dare
publish his novel Maurice during
his lifetime for this reason (it was
published in 1971).
What gives one pause, though, is
that these stories were actually first
discovered in the Fifties. Why had
they not been published before? Itmight be a good idea to check one’s
expectations. Over recent years, a
steady stream of rediscovered works
by literary greats have emerged from
the archives, none of them a patch
on the books that made those writers
famous in the first place.
When The Original of Laura
was published in 2009, Vladimir
Nabokov’s unfinished novel was
described by his son, Dmitri, as an
“embryonic masterpiece”. He was
only half right; it was no more than a
collection of intriguing fragments.
In 2015, Harper Lee published the
rediscovered novel Go Set a Watchman,
which was publicised as the sequel
to her classic To Kill a Mockingbird
but was in fact a first draft. Not only
were questions raised about her
consent in the process (Lee was in her
late eighties and died the following
year), but one bookshop even offered
refunds for readers who felt cheated.
That same year, a new Sherlock
Holmes story was discovered,
although whether Conan Doyle
wrote it is a more compelling
mystery than the story itself. In
2017, it was reported that scholars
had found a Walt Whitman novel,
a play by Edith Wharton, and some
new Plath poems. For scholars
and hardcore fans, this stuff isGETTY IMAGESindispensable, but the appeal beyond
that readership is often pretty thin.
Rediscovered literary work tends
to fall into several categories. There
is juvenilia: stories and poems
written at school or university,
almost all of which is
absolutely insufferable
(check out TS Eliot’s
and Ezra Pound’s early
poetry). Then there is the
unfinished/unpublished
work of the ageing writer,
which rarely adds to their
reputation (or in Ernest
Hemingway’s case, actively
degrades it). Then there
is peripheral work
that the author did
not deem important
enough to collect
or republish, often
sitting in library
catalogues. In 2017
a new collection
of “lost” F ScottThe Mysterious Correspondent and Other
Unpublished Novellas by Marcel Proust is
published on October 9
Cold Warriors: The Writers Who Waged
the Literary Cold War by Duncan White is
published on August 27Until tomorrow. Tickets: 0131 473 2000;
eif.co.ukinsufficiently godly early manuscripts
and Nikolai Gogol torched the second
part of Dead Souls for similar reasons.
Sometimes, the preservation
of a work came down to those
with posthumous control. Byron’s
publisher John Murray, together with
his literary executor and some of his
old friends, destroyed his memoirs
fearing for Byron’s reputation
(although perhaps also worried about
their own). Max Brod defied Franz
Kafka’s wishes and refused to burn his
friend’s unpublished work, including
The Trial.
In the 20th century, great works
were saved from authoritarian
regimes. When the KGB confiscated
the only copy of the Russian writer
Vasily Grossman’s masterful novel Life
and Fate, he was told it would not be
published for centuries.
It was seeing this happen to
Grossman that prompted Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn to start making multiple
copies of all his manuscripts.
Grossman died not knowing that a
group of dissidents would eventually
manage to smuggle the novel out to
the West.
More recently, Irène Némirovsky’s
Suite Française was published more
than 60 years after she was murdered
at Auschwitz. Other literary worksdid not make it out of the maelstrom:
Bruno Schulz’s supposed magnum
opus, Messiah, was entrusted to
friends shortly before he was shot in
the head by a Nazi officer and never
resurfaced; a decade’s worth of work
by Isaac Babel was seized by the KGB
and, like Babel, never seen again.
These are the reasons why neither of
these writers are as well-known as
they should be.
The odds of turning up a lost
masterpiece are remote. There are
some cases that tantalise: the bag
containing Hemingway’s early stories
and first novel that was lost or stolen
at the Gare de Lyon; the manuscripts
in the suitcase Walter Benjamin was
carrying as he fled the Nazis, which
disappeared after he committed
suicide on the French-Spanish
border; the box, buried somewhere in
Normandy, that is thought to contain
a trove of Flaubert’s letters; the novel
Plath was working on before she killed
herself.
Perhaps one of these works will turn
up one day, but until then, we will
have to content ourselves with what
the archives give up: the intimations of
talent, the out-takes and the bootlegs,
the half-formed works.
And spare a thought for the next
generation of readers. The concept
of what constitutes a writer’s archive
is ever expanding. In 2006, Emory
University acquired Salman Rushdie’s
papers, including his computers, hard
drives and all future digital materials.
It is a scenario in which nothing is lost,
whether it’s fledgling ideas for a new
book, or a Booker winner’s high score
on Angry Birds.All-time greats:
Marcel Proust in
1896, right. Left,
Harper Lee, whose
Go Set a Watchman
was published a
year before she
diedIn 2015, a new Sherlock
Holmes story was found, but
the real mystery was whether
Conan Doyle had written itreboot of The Oresteia at the Almeida
in 2015 – the equivalent of a single-
sitting box-set. His tendency with
classics is to shape the text according
to his bold vision, kicking away
inherited baggage. Here he enlarges
Jocasta’s psychological hinterland- making it plain, in a poignant
confessional, that she was groomed
and raped by Laius as a girl. Her
devotion to the baby she had to
abandon (this damaged man she can
now call her son) means “Oedipus”
is her tragedy too. “I can’t lose you
twice,” she says – and (minor spoiler
alert, the play’s been around since
429BC) heads off to kill herself.
The evening usually ends with the
self-blinded king going into exile, as
the chorus proclaim, “Count no man
happy until he dies.” Here, the verse
has been ditched in favour of ordinary
speech, there’s no chorus and the
emphasis falls on Oedipus asserting his
right to gaze on his mother’s corpse. He
was blinded to the truth before – now
he wants to confront it head-on.
Freud, who regarded Hamlet (Icke
has also directed the play, ably) as a
neurotic who repressed his mother
love, might have approved of the
suggestion that the pair remain
smitten. Broadly, the reading intrigues,
although the blind, seer-like Tiresias
looks too glaring an interloper from
a more conventional (classical Greek)
world of gods, fate and foreboding. The
script’s understatement – not helped
by the distancing effect of surtitles - gives the two-hour piece a slight
waiting-room ambience that the hectic
countdown can’t fully dispel.
Icke-world is getting as familiar as
Ikea. Hermetic (often functional and
sterile) environments, a rumble of
sound beneath the dialogue, savagery
lurking beneath clean-cut exteriors.
Oedipus here stares in the mirror and
asks: who am I? Is there an identity
crisis looming for this feted director?
I admire his intellectual mission. I just
wish he’d shake up his house style a bit.
a trap or a baby seal, it’s not quite clear.
No such blood-curdling cry is
heard in Robert Icke’s 2018 version,
presented in Dutch with surtitles
by the Internationaal Theater
Amsterdam, run by Ivo Van Hove,
an inspirational father figure to the
prolific 32-year-old hotshot. Instead,
when the awful revelation arrives – a
moment signposted in advance from
the first second of the show, a large
electronic clock ticking down to zero –
Hans Kesting’s shell-shocked kingpin
goes mute. He has just won a general
election in this topical, modernised
account, promising to purge sickness
from the land. Minutes later, however,
he and Marieke Heebink’s Jocasta are
saying goodbye in intimate fashion –
there’s a half-naked romp on the floor
that leaves Kesting lying abandoned,
legs in the air, like a helpless foetus.
Icke made his name with his
monumental, and coolly modern,True great: a marble bust
said to be of the great
tragedian SophoclesUnderstatement: Robert Icke’s
production of Sophocles’s Oedipus
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trThe oddest show on the Fringe
W
here are all the women?
Where’s the sisterhood? For
four performances only, the
Italian-born American actress and
activist Rose McGowan – one of the
key figures of the MeToo movement –
is on the Fringe doing a solo show.
It’s not every day you’re granted
an audience with a leading light in a
global phenomenon. And the rarity
value has gone up with the news that
the Home Office has refused her an
artist’s visa, forcing her to quit her
London home. She’s hardly on cloud
nine about that.
She’d have a right to feel narked too
by the fact day one of her show – Planet
9 – was barely half-full.
If McGowan was annoyed about all
this, though, there was no discernible
trace on her face – hard to see,
admittedly, amid the low-lit murk in
which she took to the stage, or rather
wafted on to it. Barefoot, with cropped
bleached hair, in a white flowing dress
she might have borrowed from the
Lady of Shalott, she was the essence of
impassive self-possession.
Those of us expecting an hour of
earnest discourse on patriarchy were
disappointed/relieved. She does give a
kind of sermon on Edinburgh’s Mound,
about self-empowerment and fighting
fear, but it’s more in keeping with
Edward Lear than Germaine Greer.
It is, to speak plain, the most bonkers
show I’ve seen for yonks up here.
“I want to take you on a journey
to another, better place,” she calmly
intones, having treated us to a montage
of her life so far, as more substantially
detailed in last year’s memoir Brave.
That book covered her childhoodEdinburgh FringeRose McGowan:
Planet 9
Assembly Hall★★★★★
By Dominic CavendishUntil Sun. Tickets: 0131 623 3030;
edfringe.comBlade Runner, there a Yoko Ono-esque
line such as “Origami that s---, baby”)
is politely appreciative, but the most
rapt person in the room is McGowan,
insisting this is the sound of her in a
better place “after all that madness
died out”.
She wants us to join her in that
zen-like (cult-like?) zone of creative
independence.
I’m not sure she has as many takers
as she has admirers. But her espoused
contentment is oddly stirring, because
it’s so very odd. Behind her flicker
DIY projected images of herself. It’s
almost the last word in narcissism, but
even McGowan’s harshest critic would
detect a need for healing.
I went in inclined to “bash”. I came
out wanting to give her a hug – please
don’t @ me.in a cult joined by her father and
her allegation that she was sexually
assaulted by Harvey Weinstein at
the 1997 Sundance Film Festival that
helped fire MeToo.
She confides that she wants to share
with us the mental hiding place she
went to when she was an alienated kid
of 11, “Planet 9”, a cocoon of soothing
orbs of light and colour.
“I used to wonder what sound
frequency would be on this planet,”
she says, undulating to the first of
several numbers from her yet-to-be-
released album of the same name,
several years in the making.
The applause after each fruit-
loopy number (here a quote fromCocoon: Rose McGowan says ‘Planet 9’ was the place where she went to hide as a childIt’s almost the last word in
narcissism but even her
harshest critic would
detect a need for healingJANE BARLOW/PAРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS