Abandoned Books
Abandoned Books
“I hope he wrote a book. Oh how I hope he wrote a book. Square, will you tell me his name now, the worthy gentleman?”
“Mr. Klopstock, sir,” said Square, shaking his head. “No book.”
“No book at all?”
Square shook his head again. “Mr. Klopstock, he dead.”
- Patrick O’Brien, The Commodore
Kubla Khan
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
London: Edward Moxon, 1830.
Unwritten, but for the 54 lines of the famous fragment.
Waking inspired from an opium reverie, Coleridge rushed to write down his great poem, but he was of course interrupted by the infamous person from Porlock. Held in conversation for an hour, he found his vision had evaporated. This edition, printed as the result of a wager between two inebriated printers, was illustrated by Inigo Thomas, and it boasts a frontispiece by Florent Fidèle Constant Bourgeois.
Llareggub: The Town that was Mad
DYLAN THOMAS
Denbigh, Wales: Gwasg Gee, 1945.
Abandoned c. 1948.
A book of charming but disconcerting poems about the charming but disconcerting residents of the town that Thomas was to use nine years later as the setting for Under Milk Wood. Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, always nagging her two dead husbands; Captain Cat, dreaming of his days at sea, the two Mrs. Dai Breads, Organ Morgan and his music, and Polly Garter, pining for her dead lover. The town’s “Welsh” name is simply “Bugger-all” spelled backwards.
Double Exposure
SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963)
London: Heinemann, 1964.
Manuscript disappeared c. 1970.
In Plath’s words, this novel was “semi-autobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer.” After her death, her mother and her husband, Ted Hughes, traded accusations about its unfinished state and its eventual disappearance: Plath’s typescript mysteriously vanished around 1970. The cover of this edition, with its double portrait of Plath’s young heroine, is quite striking, the righthand photograph being blown away with the wind.
Scorpion and Felix
Skorpion und Felix
KARL MARX (1818-1883)
Berlin: G. Reimer, 1840.
Burned by the author.
Written by Marx at the age of nineteen—along with a good deal of Romantic poetry, in a sort of “intoxicated whimsey”—while studying law at the University of Berlin and running around with all the young Hegelians. It reminds one of Tristram Shandy. It would be interesting to know what the world would be like had these initial efforts been completed and published to the reception that would meet his later work.
Naked on My Goat
LOUISE BROOKS
New York: Scribner’s, 1954.
Burned by the author.
Brooks, an American actress and international movie star, never achieved the same success in her home country and in her mid-thirties withdrew to a life of alcohol and high-end prostitution. Brooks was bright and well-read, and during this period she wrote this tell-all memoir. The title she took from the speech of the Young Witch in the Walpurgisnacht scene of Goethe’s Faust, a speech delivered in the eponymous condition. She later incinerated the manuscript.
Shakespeare in Baby Talk
AARON KLOPSTEIN [RAYMOND CHANDLER (1888 – 1959)]
New York: Alfred Knopf, 1952.
Not written; probably a jest.
Raymond Chandler threatened to write this under the pseudonym of Aaron Klopstein, so it is a book both unwritten and fictive. It consists of several essays and two of Shakespeare’s plays written in baby talk, evidently trying to outdo Charles and Mary Lamb. Of particular interest is the essay on As Ums Wikes It.
The STYLUS
EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809 – 1849)
New York and St Louis: E.H.N. Patterson, 1850. Volume One, Number One.
First issue left unassembled at Poe’s death.
The greatest of the unpublished American literary magazines. Its aim was chiefly “to please, and this through means of versatility, originality, and pungency,” three qualities in which Poe shone like a disintegrating bolide on a winter’s night. Richard Kopley said, “It is wonderful to imagine what this periodical would have had to say about The Scarlett Letter, or about Moby Dick.” Poe died two months before its scheduled publication. It never appeared.