Against instruction

Virgil died at Brundisium in September of 19 BCE, returning from a working trip to Greece. According to the ancient Life of Virgil preserved through the grammarian Donatus, he asked his friends Varius and Tucca to burn the Aeneid because he had not finished his revisions. Augustus, who had been with him on the journey, forbade the burning and commissioned Varius and Tucca to edit the poem for publication with the lightest possible touch. The Aeneid appeared within a few years of his death and has been read continuously since.

Kafka died of laryngeal tuberculosis on June 3, 1924. Two notes were found in his desk addressed to his friend Max Brod; both asked that every unpublished manuscript, letter, and notebook be burned unread. Brod had already told him in conversation, years earlier, that he would not do it. Within four years he had published The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and the unfinished novel that became Amerika (1927). He also preserved the diaries and letters and edited successive editions across the next three decades.

Nabokov died July 2, 1977 in Montreux, leaving an unfinished novel on 138 handwritten index cards, with the working title The Original of Laura. He had asked his wife Véra and his son Dmitri to destroy the cards if he did not finish them. Véra could not bring herself to do it and died in 1991 with the cards intact. Dmitri kept them in a Swiss bank vault for another eighteen years, publicly debating in interviews whether to honor the instruction. He published them in 2009 with Knopf, reproduced as scans of the originals and perforated for hypothetical re-ordering — an edition that lets the reader see exactly what was on each card.

Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who published almost nothing during his lifetime; his poems circulated only among a few correspondents. After his death from typhoid fever in Dublin in June 1889, his manuscripts passed to Robert Bridges — his closest literary friend, later Poet Laureate. Bridges held them for almost thirty years, releasing only a handful into anthologies. The first collected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins appeared in 1918 from Humphrey Milford at Oxford. Bridges’s preface argues the long delay was a judgment about when the prosody would be readable. The 1930 second edition coincided with his own death; that was the moment Hopkins’s influence began.

Wittgenstein died of prostate cancer on April 29, 1951 in Cambridge. The Philosophical Investigations existed in typescript and had circulated among his students for years; he repeatedly withdrew it from publication, dissatisfied with its form. His literary executors — G.E.M. Anscombe, Rush Rhees, and Georg Henrik von Wright — published it in 1953 from Blackwell, in Wittgenstein’s original German with Anscombe’s English translation on facing pages. The decision was theirs; he had never given consent.

Emily Dickinson died in Amherst in May 1886, having published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime, all anonymously. Her sister Lavinia found a wooden box in Emily’s room containing roughly 1,800 poems, many bound by Emily into hand-stitched booklets (the fascicles). Lavinia was not the literary sister; her letters give little sign she could read what she had. She enlisted Mabel Loomis Todd (a family friend, entangled in a long affair with the Dickinsons’ brother) and persuaded Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Emily’s correspondent of two decades) to co-edit. Poems by Emily Dickinson appeared in 1890 from Roberts Brothers, heavily smoothed — meter regularized, titles added, dashes removed. The first edition that preserved Emily’s original punctuation and lineation came from Thomas H. Johnson’s three-volume variorum in 1955, nearly seventy years after her death; R.W. Franklin’s revised variorum in 1998 is now the standard scholarly edition. Emily had written, in poem 788 of Franklin’s count: Publication is the auction of the mind of man.

John Kennedy Toole completed A Confederacy of Dunces in the mid-1960s and submitted it to Robert Gottlieb at Simon & Schuster, who corresponded with him for two years requesting revisions and ultimately did not publish. Toole killed himself near Biloxi, Mississippi, in March 1969, age thirty-one. His mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole, spent the next decade pushing the manuscript on publishers; most refused even to read it. In 1976 she got it into the hands of Walker Percy at Loyola University New Orleans, who, in his foreword to the 1980 LSU Press edition, describes opening it warily and finding himself unable to stop. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.

Fernando Pessoa died in Lisbon on November 30, 1935. He had published only a slim volume of patriotic poetry, Mensagem, the year before, and a scattering of poems in literary magazines under various invented authorships. He left behind a wooden trunk with tens of thousands of unordered fragments — poems, prose, notes — written across some seventy fictional personalities he had invented for himself. The largest prose work, the Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), existed only as scattered fragments attributed to a half-real persona named Bernardo Soares. The first Portuguese edition appeared in 1982, edited by Jacinto do Prado Coelho with Maria Aliete Galhoz and Teresa Sobral Cunha. Two more substantially different editions followed (Sobral Cunha’s own, 1990–91; Richard Zenith’s, 1998), each making different selections and orderings from the trunk. There is no canonical version. The book exists because the editors chose to give it a shape Pessoa did not.