![]() ![]() So, you know, the whole history of a kind of suicidal creative is enshrined in the myth of Sappho. The image of Sappho, the self-destructive, suicidal female genius, had such a terrible affect on the way in which female writers were taught how they should behave. So somebody like Sappho - you know, we have seven poems by Sappho. KELLY: Some authors, particularly classical authors, I think, if we did have more of their work, we might have a radically different interpretation of their output. SIMON: How do the manuscripts we can't read, how do they affect an author's reputation and standing? If a play can survive for the best part of, you know, 24 centuries, then I'm sure that Hemingway's manuscripts might turn up as well. And yet in the 1960s, a full play was found. The best example I find is the playwright Menander, who lived in the 4th century, B.C. KELLY: These things do have a strange habit of turning up when you don't expect it. SIMON: Could they, in theory, turn up some day? And to that extent we can't really grieve over the loss of some juvenilia, given that we have The Old Man and the Sea, Death in the Afternoon and all the rest of the great novels. So in a way losing the work is what gives us Hemingway. You know, he'd gone through this juvenilia, his apprenticeship phase. (Unintelligible) had been telling Hemingway to ditch everything that he'd written and start again. It was perhaps the biggest break in his career. Usually after one or two drinks, it has to be said. He claimed that that was the reason he divorced Hadley. He said, you know, if he could've had surgery to forget the memory, then he would've taken it. Hemingway mythologized this to a great deal later in his life. KELLY: Everything he wrote was in a valise which his wife was supposed to bring. SIMON: I think a lot of have heard that at one point in his career early on Ernest Hemingway lost everything that he wrote. It's a wonderful book, Edwin Drood, and in part that's because you can imagine so many possible Edwin Drood endings. So the one person who could've known how Edwin Drood was going to end declined the opportunity. And before he died, he did offer to tell Queen Victoria how it was going to end. SIMON: Charles Dickens died without finishing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. KELLY: It would've been a lost book itself. And if somebody had pressed the delete button by mistake. So for a while, the book only existed as this Internet version on my publisher's inbox. The day I sent my manuscript away from my computer, we were burgled and the laptop was stolen. In one way, this is brought home to me rather remarkably. Manuscripts which are unique, things like memoirs where there is only one copy and hasn't been published, we can almost understand why that might disappear. It's the fact that every single one of them, multiple copy, has disappeared. Therefore, there had to be multiple copies. ![]() KELLY: Well, the things about Love Labors Won, in particular, is because it was a bookseller's list, we know it was printed. SIMON: And yet the thought that a manuscript from so many centuries would be lost before the days they could be put on computer file or disk or even reproduced en masse the way that we do nowadays, that wouldn't be remarkable. I think the real fact is that Love Labor's Won was a separate play and we're so terrified of the thought of having lost something by Shakespeare, we'd rather pretend it was one of the plays we do have. A fragment turned up in 1953, a scrap of a bookseller's list of volumes he sold. It was mentioned by Francis Mears in 1598. KELLY: Originally, it was thought to be the subtitle for another play. And I want to specifically ask you about Love's Labors Won. SIMON: To begin with one of your most prominent examples, it is possible, some people believe, that there is more Shakespeare to be found. STUART KELLY (Author, The Book of Lost Books): Thank you very much for inviting me. Kelly traces books by literary eminences that have simply gone missing over time, some destroyed by their despairing author or burned by his or her embarrassed survivors, lost in luggage, scattered in trash or just mysteriously vanished. ![]() Stuart Kelly's new book is The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read. Take heart, there could've been a whole lot more. Many of us regret that we haven't made time to read all the great books of history. ![]()
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