The Book of Lost Books

by Stuart Kelly

  Jerusalem did not provide any divine editorial advice, and Gogol, plus manuscript, returned to Russia, where he became deeply embroiled with the equally unstable Father Matthew Konstantinovsky, who believed everything except the Russian Orthodox Church was inspired by Satan. He encouraged Gogol to enter a monastery and forgo the paganism of literature. God’s wish was clear, and the penance exacted for the publication of Part I was the destruction of Part II.

  At about three a.m. on February 24, 1852, Gogol summoned a servant and ordered him to kindle a fire. He started to feed manuscript pages into it. When the boy begged him not to, Gogol growled, “This is none of your business—better pray.” He clogged the fire with paper, and had to remove the charred bundle, containing Part II and even Part III, and feed them in one by one. When it was done, he crossed himself, kissed the boy, and collapsed in tears.

  He then stopped eating. When he was asked by the attending priest, “What prayer do you want me to read?” he answered, “They’re all good,” and after nine days of self-enforced starvation, died.

  Charles Dickens

  {1812–1870}

  ON MARCH 9, 1870, Charles Dickens gave a private reading to Queen Victoria from his new work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Set in the sleepy cathedral town of Cloisterham, the novel involves the opium-addicted choirmaster John Jasper, who is secretly obsessed with the fiancée of his ward and nephew, the eponymous Edwin Drood. Rosa has also come to the attention of another orphan, the hot-tempered Neville Landless, and when Drood disappears, his watch and shirt-pin found in the river, Jasper immediately accuses Neville of murder.

  Dickens offered the queen the opportunity to know, in advance of her subjects, how the story would conclude. Whether through indifference or the understandable desire not to have the ending spoiled, Victoria declined. Dickens died less than three months later, with The Mystery of Edwin Drood less than half-finished. Its title had become eerily apposite: Dickens left no notes, no plans, and no clues as to the outcome.

  He might have been more careful. Only six years beforehand, Dickens had been on a train that derailed at Staplehurst, leaving only his carriage on the tracks. After helping two ladies off the train, Dickens went back to secure the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend that he had left on-board, and a hip flask of brandy. This brush with mortality did not change his working methods.

  A disappointed public speculated about what would happen to the work: would, perhaps, Wilkie Collins supply an ending? Eager to scotch rumors of a continuation, Dickens’s publishers Chapman and Hall sent a letter to The Times, insisting that “no other writer could be permitted by us to complete the work which Mr Dickens left.” That said, Collins revealed in 1878 that he had been asked to finish the novel, but had “positively refused.” No such firm declarations of principle fettered Collins’s own publishers, who contracted Sir Walter Besant to complete Blind Love ten years later.

  Others had significantly fewer qualms. One Orpheus C. Kerr in New York adapted and burlesqued the plot of Edwin Drood under the title The Cloven Hoof, which appeared in Britain in 1871 as The Mystery of Mr E. Drood. The American market, unrestrained by too strict an interpretation of British copyright law, also produced John Jasper’s Secret in 1872. In 1878, a female writer from the north of England under the pseudonym Gillan Vase wrote another continuation, The Great Mystery Solved. Most curious of all, Charles Dickens also completed the novel through the help of a spirit medium from Brattleboro, Vermont, and even puffed his next, posthumous novel, The Life and Adventures of Bockley Winkleheep.

  Although, in time, the number of full-length impostures and reconstructions dried up, speculation about The Mystery of Edwin Drood did not. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, who had famously, and to Dickens’s chagrin, deduced the ending of Barnaby Rudge, countless bookish sleuths attempted to solve the riddle. Andrew Lang, the polymathic poet, translator, fairy-tale writer, biographer, mythologist, and editor (a man whose talents were so various, it was even claimed he was a committee), and M. R. James, the quintessential English ghost-story writer, both contributed solutions to the Drood enigma.

  To put the conundrum simply: we know the criminal but not the crime. Dickens’s manuscript list of projected titles offers The Loss of . . . , The Disappearance of . . . , and The Flight of . . . , as well as The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Edwin Drood in Hiding and Dead? Or Alive? are also considered. Against this, Dickens’s biographer John Forster maintained that the novelist had told him that “the story was to be that of the murder of a nephew by his uncle.” In the first chapter, as John Jasper enters the cathedral fresh from the opium den, he does so to the “intoned words, ‘WHEN THE WICKED MAN.’” Jasper is the villain, and Drood may or may not be dead.

  Dickens took a great deal of care in the commissioning of covers for his works. The illustration for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Luke Fildes, is no exception. On the right-hand side, Jasper appears to be leading a search for the murderer, and points, inadvertently, to another picture of himself at the cloisters.

  In the novel itself, Rosa seems to attribute to Jasper almost psychic powers of manipulation: she confides to Neville’s twin sister, Helena, that she feels as if “he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken of.” The reader knows, moreover, that Jasper has an unhealthy interest in the graveyard, and has even drugged the stonemason Durdles in order to obtain a set of keys. Durdles also reveals to him the presence of a lime pit “quick enough to eat your bones.” If all this were not sufficient to cast Jasper in a sinister light, it should be added that Jasper mentions to the jeweler that the only decorative accessories Edwin ever wears are his watch and shirt pin, the very articles found in the river. In his opium daze, the reader knows that Jasper fantasizes about strangling.

  So it seems clear that Jasper is the guilty party. But what is the crime? Did he succeed in murdering Drood? Or is Edwin still alive, working to unmask his perfidious uncle?

  M. R. James and Andrew Lang were both of the opinion that Drood was still alive. Chapter 14, which narrates the events leading up to the reconciliation dinner between Drood and Landless at Jasper’s, after which Edwin disappears, is entitled “When shall these three meet again?”, presuming some future reunion (though it could well be the two adversaries and a corpse). In addition, Hiram Grewgious, Rosa’s benevolent uncle, takes against Jasper very suddenly: because (so goes the theory) Drood has secretly informed him of Jasper’s attempt on his life.

  Another twist occurs in chapter 18. It opens with a new character, a “white-haired personage, with black eyebrows.” His name is Dick Datchery, and he has a strange interest in the habits of John Jasper. He announces himself by having the waiter look into his hat, and throughout the descriptions of him, particular importance is attached to this hat, and his shock of white hair. As he walks with the pompous Mr. Sapsea, he “had the odd momentary appearance upon him of having forgotten his hat . . . and he clapped his hand up to his head as if with some vague expectation of finding another hat upon it.” Dick Datchery, it seems, is in disguise.

  Datchery, if you like stories where the murder victim is not actually killed, is Drood in disguise. A variation of this argument supposes that Jasper knocked Drood unconscious and placed the body in the lime pit: Drood revived, but not before his hair was bleached and his skin burned (forensic pathology not being Dickens’s strong point). However, there are minor problems with this solution. For example, Datchery has to ask for directions to Jasper’s house, even though, if he is Drood, he knows full well where his own house is. Or is this a complicated double bluff, a misdirection to convince people he really is a stranger?

  On the other hand, let us suppose that Drood is dead. Unbeknownst to Jasper, Drood was carrying the diamond engagement ring which he was to return to Grewgious. If his corpse is in the lime pit or the Sapsea monument, the ring becomes an incriminating token of identification. He was taking the ring back to Rosa’s guardian as they had agreed to amicably separate. When Jasper hears this he is distraught, because
his murder, motivated by jealousy, was actually unnecessary.

  But if Drood is dead, who is Datchery? Many of the other characters in the story might be in disguise.

  We know that, during their abysmal childhood in Ceylon, Neville Landless and his sister Helena ran away from their guardian, and “each time, she dressed as a boy and showed the daring of a man.” Is Helena putting her cross-dressing to good use, to clear her brother’s name?

  Grewgious has a clerk, a failed tragedian named Bazzard. His acquaintance with the theater might suggest him as the perfect person to don a costume, and act as Grewgious’s eyes and ears around the town. Is he Datchery?

  Then again, there’s Lieutenant Tartar. Both he and Datchery have sunburned complexions and a military air. In addition, there is an odd echo between them: Tartar is, he says, “an idle fellow”; and Datchery describes himself as “an idle buffer living on his means.” Is Tartar Datchery?

  Is Grewgious Datchery? Is everyone Datchery? This is becoming chaotic!

  Perhaps Datchery is simply Datchery: a wholly new character in the plot. It has been mooted that he could be a professional detective, hired by Grewgious to keep tabs on Jasper. Datcherys everywhere and not a clue as to who he really is.

  The novel as we have it ends with Datchery making a connection between Jasper and the “Princess Puffer,” the crone who supplies him with opium and who has observed his psychotic episodes when under the influence. Dickens had already set up the idea of a split personality: “As in some cases of drunkenness,” he wrote, “. . . there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken (thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where).” The drug would, one supposes, reveal the murderous truth that the rational side of Jasper can suppress. The net is undoubtedly tightening, though the conclusion still eludes the reader. In this way, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a gloriously perfect murder novel.

  What is regrettable is not that we lack the neat summing up, but that we do not know how the tantalizing undercurrents of the story would have played themselves out. Despite its quaint Englishness, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is shot through with Oriental images: Edwin plans to become an engineer in Egypt, the Landlesses are criticized for the “drop of what is tigerish in their blood,” lascars and Chinese immigrants flit through the opium smog of the East End. The “large black scarf of strong close-woven silk” which Jasper wears has even been seen as evidence that he is an initiate of the Thug sect.

  And it would have ended, says John Forster, with Jasper. “The originality . . . was to consist in the review of the murderer’s career by himself at the close . . . The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him.”

  Like Jane Austen’s Sanditon, The Mystery of Edwin Drood shows a novelist eager to expand the range of his work. In the opening chapter of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens imagines himself in the hazed mind of an addict with cinematic precision: on waking, the unnamed character seems to see the cathedral spire, which gradually resolves itself into the bedpost. Twins, ghosts, exotic incomers, and repressed residents of small towns; drugs, murder, psychosexual manipulation, and moments of unutterable kindness: Dickens, in his last work, sets up a series of resonances and ambiguities that seem comparable to the films of David Lynch.

  Herman Melville

  {1819–1891}

  THERE ARE A great many novels that remain unwritten: the spark of inspiration might fail to kindle, the work might warp in being molded, the nib might be split by mortality. Agatha, however, is unique, in that two men of genius failed to write it. The original idea that the life story of Mrs. Agatha Robertson, née Hatch, was worthy of some novelistic transfiguration belongs to an elderly lawyer from New Bedford whom Herman Melville met in Nantucket, in July 1852.

  The story of Agatha Hatch (“but you must give her some other name,” Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne) has a moment of high drama, many years of patient, though ferociously painful, suffering, and a denouement of sorts. Setting aside chronology momentarily, the catalyst that unveils the whole story is a Mr. Janney of Missouri, who had become the executor of his mother-in-law’s second husband’s $20,000 estate. He tried to locate the descendants of Mr. James Robertson, and discovered in the process that his real name was Mr. Shinn. However, these assiduous researches bore less fruit than the unexpected arrival of a letter addressed to the deceased. It was from a woman called Rebecca Gifford of Falmouth, Massachusetts, and it called him “Father.”

  Cut back twenty years. Shipwrecked by a sudden tempest, James Robertson is washed up on the shore at Pembroke, Massachusetts, and is nursed back to health by a local girl, Agatha Hatch. The confluence of care, relief, and a brush with death slowly evolves into something like love, and Agatha and James are duly married. He undertakes two further sea voyages, and together they have a daughter, Rebecca. Robertson leaves again in search of employment, and does not return.

  Over the next seventeen years, Agatha is left in limbo. That she does not remarry might indicate she believes her husband is still alive; she has certainly never had any confirmation that he has died. The sea, supposedly, can wait a long time to recapture those that managed to elude a watery destiny. How long does it take for hope to shade into resignation, for acquiescence to crumble into despondency? The fact that would allow grief is endlessly deferred. She makes a living through nursing and struggles to send Rebecca to the foremost Quaker school. Then he comes back.

  He sends a message through her father that he will understand if she does not want to see him, but would like to be allowed to see his daughter. He is cagey about where he has been, and somehow manages to convince them that trying to follow or find him is unwise, possibly even dangerous. He promises to return for good within a year, and settles on them a handsome sum of money.

  Robertson does return, the day before Rebecca’s wedding. But he disappears again, and sends letters asking the whole family to move to Missouri. He sends shawls that seem to have been worn by someone beforehand. Eventually, he confesses to Rebecca’s husband what had prevented him from being with Agatha and his wife. Mrs. Irvin, a widow, became the second Mrs. Robertson, and their daughter married Mr. Janney. Janney mentioned later that his stepfather-in-law had been an oddly suspicious man, who would always wait to find out who visitors were before agreeing to see them. Agatha maintained that she had “no wish to make either of them unhappy,” and that to expose his bigamy would only have driven him further away. Neither Agatha nor Rebecca pressed to have his settlement on the Janneys annulled.

  Melville wrote to Hawthorne, saying that he had considered using the story himself, “but, thinking again, it has occurred to me that this thing lies very much in a vein, with which you are peculiarly familiar. To be plump, I think that in this matter you would make a better hand at it than I would.” Given the rapturous applause that had greeted Hawthorne’s 1850 study of Puritan hypocrisy, The Scarlet Letter, and his subtle characterization of the self-sacrificing, infinitely patient Hester Prynne, one can see why Melville gravitated toward thinking Agatha should be written by Hawthorne.

  Melville was most likely still smarting from many of the less positive reviews of his 1851 novel, Moby-Dick. “So much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature,” thundered the Athenaeum. “Sheer moonstruck lunacy”—the London Morning Chronicle. “Mr. Melville is evidently trying to ascertain how far the public will consent to be imposed upon . . . the very ultimatum of weakness . . . bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English”—the New York United States Magazine and Democratic Review. Having, it seemed, failed so spectacularly with his metaphysical romance of whaling, monomania, and masculine camaraderie, Melville might have thought a stoic, feminine domestic tragedy would certainly be a departure.

  Melville’s letter to
Hawthorne reveals the extent to which he was seriously shaping his own Agatha. Her father is made a former mariner and lighthouse keeper who has made her swear never to marry a sailor. The mailbox Agatha walks to each day is described in a stop-frame sequence of deterioration and moldy decrepitude; an opening long-shot pans across the land and seascape, the cliffs from which she will not fling herself in despair. Her faithless husband is treated empathetically: “the whole sin stole upon him insensibly—so that it would perhaps have been hard for him to settle upon the exact day when he could say to himself, ‘Now I have deserted my wife.’” Nonetheless, it was Hawthorne who should “build about with fulness & veins & beauty” this “skeleton of actual reality”: “And if I thought I could do it as well as you, why, I should not let you have it.”

  Hawthorne started to write an Agatha, but soon tired of it. In October 1852, Melville wrote again, suggesting plot lines, specifically that Robertson’s bigamy might “be ascribed to the peculiarly latitudinarian notions, which most sailors have of all tender obligations of that sort,” an idea Melville is sure that Hawthorne has already pondered.

  By November, Hawthorne has decided against Agatha, and encourages Melville to write the novel himself. Melville agrees, asks permission to use the “Isle of Shoals” name Hawthorne had woven into his fragment, and declares he “shall begin it immediately upon reaching home; and so far as in me lies, I shall endeavor to do justice to so interesting a story of reality.” With that, Agatha vanishes from literary history.