But nine days later—we don’t know whether it was from cholera or arsenic—he was dead. If we add the emotional power of this music, which wrung tears from the composer himself, to the fact that Tchaikovsky wanted his symphony to be “a program of a kind that will remain an enigma for all,” we find in the Pathétique everything it takes to foster legends and embody the myth of the last work.
Sometimes artists signify explicitly that a creation is their last. In the film Limelight, a bit of a tearjerker, Charlie Chaplin lends Shakespeare’s last words to the character Calvero (a double for himself), before closing his eyes: “The heart and the mind . . . what an enigma!” (Calvero’s face is covered, he is carried off. . . .) Chaplin would in fact produce two more films: A King in New York and A Countess from Hong Kong. His actual last work was supposed to be The Freak, the story of a young girl who grows wings—a part he intended for his daughter Victoria. But he never made the film.
Claude Roy recounted the death of Su Dongpo (1037–1101). On July 26 of his last year, the Chinese poet wrote one final poem:
I though I would end my days in this hamlet of Hainan,
But the Sky sent the Fairy to recall my soul
And I perceived from afar, very far, but for real
There where the sky is low and where the eagles fly
The earth’s green head of hair
The continent at last!
On July 28, it was very hot on the boat bringing him back from exile. He turned his back to the wall of his bunk and expired.
After an operation for lung cancer gave him what he called a “permis de séjour”—a permit for living—my friend Claude Roy wrote a poem every day, a kind of exercise in survival. Did he consider these poems his last work?
For there will come a time
When everything will have been for the last time.
Molière coughed up blood and wrote a farce about a hypochondriac. He died during the third performance.
The temptation to write a book in the guise of a last will and testament can surface at any moment. “This book should be read as one might read the book of a dead man,” Victor Hugo wrote in the preface to his Contemplations.
He announced to Jules Janin, “This book could be divided into four parts which would be entitled: My dead youth—My dead heart—My dead daughter—My dead country. Alas!” But to Paul Meurisse, he spoke of a “volume of calm verse.” And to another correspondent, he confessed a concern for décor: “I am putting the last few gold stars on the rather somber sky of the Contemplations.”
As Kafka said, “You speak endlessly of death and you don’t die.” One can write what one considers a final work and then suddenly have doubts. That was the case for Gide when he finished So Be It: or The Chips Are Down. So he added: “No, I cannot assert that with the end of this notebook all will be finished; that all will be over. Perhaps I shall have a desire to add something. To add something or other. To make an addition. Perhaps. At the last moment, to add something . . . I am sleepy, to be sure, but I don’t feel like sleeping. It strikes me that I could be even more tired. It is I don’t know what hour of the night or of the morning . . . Do I still have something to say? Still something or other to say?”
He confessed, with a touch of humor: “It wasn’t part of my plan to live to be this old.”
What freedom in this, his last work, precisely because the author thinks it is the last? “The blank page lies in front of me. My intention is to write anything whatsoever on it.” “With a dispirited pen,” he skips from the memory of an accident he witnessed in his childhood, to his current anorexia (physiological and intellectual), to Ida Rubinstein, Stravinsky, Copeau, and André Barsacq, and from there to Péguy, to his journey to the Congo, to Oscar Wilde, Charles du Bos, Suarès. . . . He accumulates anecdotes and even funny stories, jokes. Memories flow without any order, gay, sad, or even tragic, such as the death of Eugène Dabit in Sevastapol during their trip to the Soviet Union. He is amused or upset and always says what he thinks.
Death is not like Tribulat Bonhomet, the character in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s famous story, who decides to kill swans in order to hear their beautiful songs. Our swan song can be sublime or cacophonic, or there can be no song at all: Death expects nothing of us. Chekhov entitled one of his one-act plays “The Swan Song” and gives this speech to an old actor: “I’m like a squeezed lemon, a cracked bottle.” But we can transpose and attribute the actor’s curses to a writer at the end of his tether: “Ah! I’m a foolish old man, a poor old dodderer! . . . Old age! . . . I can play the fool, and brag, and pretend to be young, but my life is really over now. . . . I have drained the bottle, only a few little drops are left at the bottom, nothing but the dregs.”
Proof that the work will be the last one sometimes emerges in the course of things. In 1963, Audiberti decided to keep a diary for a year. “Getting down to work, recounting my existence for an entire year, spent like all the other years watching films, complaining about cars, inhaling the stench, the odors of the rue des Rosiers under the first star, looking for an apartment, asking Jesus Christ to explain himself once and for all, I was unaware until the month of June that I would suddenly find myself face-to-face with a parade of officiating priests, males and females in white coats who brandished snakes made of plastic and swords of various lengths, and that these surgeons and nurses were locking me into a vicious cycle with no exit in sight.”
And that is how his diary of a year became his last work. Audiberti, who died in 1965, had found a title for it which, in its extreme brevity, carries a tremendous emotional charge: Dimanche m’attend [Sunday awaits me].
The story of Audiberti’s last book is a specific case of the rather general tendency of writers to want to publish their diaries once they feel their hour approaching. I’m reminded of Roger Vrigny. After having written a dozen or more works of fiction and nonfiction, he decided to publish excerpts from his journal. There’s no doubt but that a sense that his days were numbered incited him to reveal the secrets he called Instants dérobés [Stolen moments].
Rereading his “stolen moments,” I came across one page that tugged at my heart. He writes about “all of our ways of manipulating our pain, to occupy it, to distract it—while other people haven’t the slightest clue.”
Marc Bernard’s last books, Tout est bien ainsi [It’s fine that way] and Au fil des jours [As the days go by], are essentially diaries; sometimes sad, haunted by the death of his wife Else and by his own death, which had become a foregone conclusion; sometimes gay, for life continued around him nonetheless. He wrote “without a harness, lost on the page, without knowing where it’s leading me.” Au fil des jours was published just after his death.
While the plague held sway in Venice, Titian transformed a Pietà into an ex voto against the epidemic, a tragic work of art where we can recognize the painter in the features of a prostrate old man looking up at the Virgin. Titian didn’t have time to finish his work because the plague caught up with him. Today he has a mausoleum in the Frari church in Venice and his painting is exhibited in the Accademia museum.
That we are incapable of knowing how much time we have left inspired this thought of Bulgakov’s, in The Master and Margarita: “Yes, man is mortal, but that’s only half the trouble! The problem is that he is unexpectedly mortal, that’s the trick! And in fact, he can’t even say what he’ll be doing tonight.”
Alexandre Dumas, in the supreme moment, is supposed to have said, “I will never know how it ends.” Was he talking about his novel Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, about the Grand dictionnaire de cuisine [Dictionary of cuisine] that he would leave unfinished, or about something completely different?
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the preface to the Philosophical Investigations that would become his posthumous work, expressed regret: “I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.” Vladimir Nabokov never finished his last novel, The Original of Laura. At first, he
added a subtitle: Dying Is fun. But only a few drafts were ever committed to paper until his son had it published, thirty years later. On October 30, 1976, less than a year before his death, Nabokov wrote Victor Lusinchi of the New York Times: “in my diurnal delirium [I] kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible. Perhaps because of my stumblings and fits of coughing the story of my poor Laura had less success with my listeners than it will have, I hope, with intelligent reviewers when properly published.”
Those unable to see the fatal moment nearing, who can’t imagine that their writing could ever be rudely interrupted, leave in the hands of the public a text, generally unfinished—i.e., a rough draft. What a mess Pascal left us with his book Pensées! No matter how much you twist and turn it, rearrange its parts, it isn’t a posthumous work. It’s just papers—notes made by someone who was planning to write an Apologia for the Christian Religion. But it isn’t even a draft of that Apologia.
In his notes for The First Man, Camus wrote, “The book must remain unfinished.”
His premature death in a car crash gave this note a tragic significance. Actually, what Camus meant was that he imagined a monument, a sort of War and Peace, spanning the life of an individual and the history of a century, with its upheavals, its wars—an open-ended epic. He only had time to write the beginning—not even the beginning but the draft of a beginning. And these pages, which have been read as a touching history of a childhood, have moved readers far more than his carefully composed, constructed, deliberate books. There is an even more paradoxical fact, which raises yet another question about what we must consider a last work. While Camus was writing The Fall, a hopeless self-castigation and a bitter settling of scores with Parisian intellectuals, he began to take notes for The First Man, which, on the contrary, was full of love and confidence in humankind. What was he really feeling? Did these works alternate in importance for him? We might conclude that The First Man had preoccupied him for years, while The Fall was only a parenthesis, the expression of a mood. The contradiction is perhaps only superficial. Clamence, the narrator of The Fall, is guilty. But Cormery, in The First Man, turned his back on his country, his relatives, his roots, and hated himself. . . . In both cases, the vision is pessimistic. And, in both cases, there is the theme of exile, which always haunted Camus, who felt exiled his entire life.
As he was writing Clamence’s bitter soliloquy, perhaps this exiled Camus discovered some tenderness by accessing another role for the exile: remembering childhood in the country he has lost. Thus The Fall and The First Man would be two sides of the same sensibility.
While Camus wrote that The First Man “must remain unfinished,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his agent when he started to work on The Last Tycoon: “It is a short novel, about 50,000 words long, and should take me 3 to 4 months.” It wasn’t short enough, since he couldn’t finish it. At the time of his death, he was only on the first episode of the sixth chapter.
Some writers have experienced the disgrace of being told that they ought to consider their new work as the final one. Take Boileau’s famous jab to Corneille: “after Attila, stop!” [après l’Attila, holà!] Which didn’t prevent Corneille from going on to write Titus and Berenice, Pulcheria, Surena. Though Boileau did wait for Corneille to die (1684) to publish his epigram (1701).
With certain authors, including some of the very greatest, we cannot speak of a last work. With them an entire life’s work is constantly put back on the loom, and so is condemned to remain unfinished. Nietzsche, Proust, Musil are in this category. Nietzsche wavers between the desire to construct and a totally free form. Only death stopped Proust from pasting strips of paper onto his manuscripts and his page proofs. With Musil, we never stop digging away at the mass of unpublished pages that supplement The Man Without Qualities. Critics attribute his inability to finish to masochism. But is having more and more to say, trying to reach perfection, really masochistic?
Georges Bernanos couldn’t see an end to Monsieur Ouine, and he began to believe that the book would be as posthumous as it would be unfinished. He began writing the novel in 1931 and didn’t write the final sentence until 1940. In 1934 he confessed to Robert Vallery-Radot: “My famous novel is a lugubrious urinal. I’ve started to have enough of pissing sadly against the same wall. Will I ever finish it?” His last work is the Dialogues of the Carmelites. He finished in March 1948, just as he was obliged to take to his bed, three and a half months before his death.
Saint Bonaventure, the Franciscan philosopher nicknamed the Seraphic Doctor, supposedly had the unique privilege of continuing his memoirs after his death. Chateaubriand was jealous: “I don’t hope for such a privilege, but I would like to resuscitate at the ghostly hour—at least to correct my page proofs.”
This chimeric wish was provoked by his worries about his Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb. More than once, this monument, which he intended to be posthumous, was in danger of becoming anthumous. That was due to the financial problems that always plagued the viscount. He gave some readings from the Memoirs in February and March 1834 and accounts of those readings were published. In 1836, one can find fragments of the memoirs in his “Essay on English Literature.” Yet he complained, “I prefer to speak from the bottom of my grave.” In 1836 he sold the Memoirs to a company, which paid him, promising they would publish nothing from them until after his death. Nonetheless, he gave a new reading in 1845.
The affair took a worrisome turn in October 1844. The company sold rights to Emile de Girardin to publish excerpts from the Memoirs in his newspaper, La Presse. An unhappy Chateaubriand later wrote about seeing his Memoirs reduced “to bits and pieces”: “No one can form an idea of what I have suffered in being compelled to mortgage my grave.”
The stockholders grew impatient. The writer was living too long. Publication of the excerpts began on October 21, 1848. Chateaubriand died on July 4. He had nearly missed his mark. . . .
In my opinion, the true last work of Chateaubriand is not the monumental Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, but his Vie de Rancé [Life of Rancé], a departure from all his previous work. “It was to obey the orders of my confessor that I wrote the story of the Abbé de Rancé. The Abbé Séguin often spoke to me about this work, for which I had a natural repugnance.”
René received his instructions in the humble abode of that ancient refractory priest at 16, rue Servandoni. Vie de Rancé would be his last book. “My first work was finished in London in 1797, my last in Paris in 1844.” There followed a rather grandiloquent speech bringing together Tacitus, Louis XVI, and Bonaparte. “What am I doing in the world?” He concluded, “I used to be able to imagine the story of Amélie; now I’m reduced to writing Rancé’s story. I’ve changed angels with the changing years.” Which doesn’t prevent Vie de Rancé from being an admirable book whose modern style surprises us: “Madame de Montbazon went to her eternal infidelity.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau worried about the integrity of his manuscripts even more than he worried about the judgment of posterity. Fearing his enemies, he did not want to publish the Confessions during his lifetime, but he was afraid that distorted versions would be circulated in order to discredit him after his death. So, this man who had made a living copying musical scores now took to creating the copies himself. According to Alice Kaplan and Philippe Roussin, “He hoped to guarantee the posthumous fate of his manuscripts by asking his protégés to prepare them for publication at the proper moment, and in 1774, he made a ‘Declaration regarding different reprints of his work,’ anticipating and disavowing editions that would falsify, alter, disfigure, or mutilate his work.” Such problems have led today’s editors—including the editors of Rousseau in the series of classics called the “Bibliothèque de la Pléaide”—to take manuscript study to heart. We have moved from an era of the Work to the era of the Text. Which has encouraged
the development, in France, of a school of criticism known as génétique littéraire—literary genetics. The last work is not designated by the author; it consists instead of a heteroclite collection of unpublished drafts and materials assembled by an editor.
Whether or not to publish a memoir or a diary after death is a choice certain authors make at the end of their lives, in the hope of having some small chance of survival. I have known writers who speak constantly about their diaries and, in my job as an editor, I have dreaded having to read them one day, suspecting that the thousands of pages would be devoid of interest.
Louis Guilloux didn’t use his memoirs as a weapon, but rather as armor. Any time he didn’t want to answer a question—about his trip to the Soviet Union with Gide, for example—he declared, “I’m saving it for L’Herbe d’oubli [Weeds of oblivion]. That was the title he had planned. The beginning of L’Herbe d’oubli has been found, but only the beginning.
Is Meslier’s Last Will and Testament a last or a first work? Meslier, a humble preacher in the era of Louis XIV and Louis XV, lived quietly in a village in the Lorraine. His will was discovered after his death—a profession of atheism and revolt. Meslier recommended that nobles be hanged and strangled with the entrails of preachers. Contrary to what one might expect, his scathing attack was not ignored. A hundred or so copies circulated until the text reached Voltaire, who guaranteed its survival.
In Saint Petersburg, I saw the desk where Dostoyevsky finished writing The Brothers Karamazov. “I stay at my table and I write literally day and night,” he declared as he was writing book XX and the epilogue. The novel was published in December 1880. He thought of a sequel, but he died on January 28. Just behind the desk there is a dark couch. Dostoyevsky died on this couch. The desk and the couch, inseparable.
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