To Burn or Not to Burn: The Heir's Ultimate Dilemma

<<< Nothing, but nothing, causes more posthumous difficulties for a writer’s heirs and friends than a request to burn a manuscript after death. It is a crystalline case of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The interested public wants one thing, and the departed loved one has demanded another. Adding to the complexity of the question is the hard-to-dispel thought that if the writer had, in the deepest recesses of her being, wanted to burn the manuscript, she would have done it herself. So the choice is between different kinds of betrayal, of the writer’s wishes or of the readers who are, now, that writer’s last chance of life. To burn the manuscript is to help the writer to die. But is that what she wanted…?

This profoundly unenviable dilemma has been faced by the friends and family of Franz Kafka, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and, perhaps apocryphally, Virgil. When an heir succumbs to the temptation to burn something—as Ted Hughes did with some of Sylvia Plath’s papers, on the not unreasonable grounds that there were things there he did not want her children to read—the burner is inevitably excoriated. It is a subject that gets people, and the literary imagination, going, from Henry James in The Aspern Papers to Hermann Broch in The Death of Virgil (a strong candidate for least readable alleged masterpiece in the European canon). >>>

from "Flashes of Flora" by John Lanchester, New York Review of Books, December 17, 2009.

Comments

[Barbara Hamby]

One of my heroines in this saga is Fanny Brawne, who saved Keats' letters, hid them from her husband, and gave them to her children, telling them how important they were. She mourned Keats for years, eventually had a long happy marriage, but obviously kept her love for Keats locked in her heart. Her letters to him were probably burned when he died in Rome, but his to her are incendiary. I can imagine Fanny reading them over the years.

[Dave Read]

If writers don't want something to be published, and then off-load responsibility for its destruction to posterity, they make a treacherous bargain. That's why god invented lawyers, so that everything will go the way the dead want it to!

[Stewart Johnson]

Well-said, both. All three, actually.