States of estate
… I was told that Bonnard’s dealer destroyed a number of sketchbooks on the grounds that the triviality of their contents would add nothing to the artist’s reputation, but only detract from it. And a great deal of this sort of thing, this helpful-minded editing, must have happened over the years. It’s different from Samuel Palmer’s son destroying his father’s notebooks, or Ruskin cleaning up Turner’s reputation (if that is what he did) by destroying his sketches of low life. It is not like the holocaust of Blake’s manuscripts occasioned by the horror Frederick Tatham felt at the thought of all these epic poems and plays being inspired by Satan.
It’s more like a respectful act of cleaning up, the kind of respect for the dead shown by the act of body-washing. Not everything in the studio demands to be preserved, and some things are perhaps better destroyed. But of course the judgment of the executor is fallible. As I understand it—or as I was told the story—Bonnard’s dealer was right that the painter’s reputation would not be enhanced by the notebook material, disbanded and mounted as individual drawings, when it was never intended to be seen in this way. But of course I may be wrong. The destroyed works may have contained elusive clues to the artist’s work.
If I look at the old photographic catalogue of the posthumous atelier sale of Degas’s effects—which I do, from time to time—I feel absolutely convinced that all of this material should have been saved. Every piece of paper with Degas’s work on it is of great interest—I think. But I do not know if this intense feeling I have about Degas is not caused, in part, by some judicious act of editing on the eve of the sale. I have no way of knowing what was in the studio at the time of the body-washing.
A few years ago—to pursue the analogy before dropping it—some of the contents of the visionary English painter Stanley Spencer’s studio came up for sale, and I went to the auction house to see if there might be some slight work that I might be able to afford, and that might give me the pleasure of hanging a Stanley Spencer on my wall. There were, it turned out, many slight works, too slight, and as I went through the pile a depression began to sink in, and I began to think the worse of Spencer as a draughtsman. In due course, I came to a series of drawings he had made—no doubt when paper was scarce—on a roll of old-style Izal “medicated” toilet-paper. Unrolling this series of sketches released an evocative antiseptic scent of 1950s gents’ toilets—an association so depressing that it put paid to any residual interest I had in Stanley Spencer as an artist. Indeed I’ve hardly looked at his work since.
The moral is that Larkin’s admirers were not wrong: artists and writers need careful and sympathetic curating and editing, and the first, best way of guaranteeing they get this attention is for them to curate, to edit, themselves. That is why artists burn canvases. That is why writers are not always wrong to consign that tragedy to the flames. And that is also why conscientious executors whose job it is to sort through the accumulated rubbish of a study or a studio are not always wrong to go in there with a stack of bin-bags.
At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see.
And while I am often glad to find that some touching relic—say, Wilfred Owen’s modest library at the English Faculty in Oxford—has been preserved, the fact is that we have now entered a phase when few writers’ libraries will or can be accepted by universities or public institutions. Better to call in the friends of the departed, and give them the pleasure of a choice from the books and possessions. Better to make that dispersal mean something.
As for literary remains, it is striking how different the fortunes of our great poets have been. Auden, who mismanaged his estate in other respects, got the right executor in Edward Mendelson, and has benefited ever since. Eliot, by contrast, half a century after his death, still awaits a satisfactory Collected Poems, not to mention a Collected Prose. And I often think that in the latter case there has been a whole generation that has missed out on Eliot’s uncollected prose, and that there must be much in it which would have engaged them, but that will be of diminishing interest in the future. I mean some of the social and religious writing. For my part I will happily sit down and read, when the Collected Prose appears in the near future, everything that Eliot wrote about literature and other arts. But his views on society do not interest me. Nor do Thoughts on Lambeth.
In the story of Larkin’s estate we find examples of both radical tidying up and extensive preservation. According to Monica Jones, his long-time partner, Larkin told her in his last days to make sure his diaries were destroyed. Jones followed his wishes, and Betty Mackereth, his secretary, took the volumes and fed them into the Hull University shredder. Assuming that Jones was not inventing these instructions (and I think it is a fair assumption: Larkin got very upset when he found that another girlfriend, Patsy Strang, had been reading them), one can hardly argue with what these two women did. But the case of the Collected Poems is not so clear. Larkin’s will instructed his executors to destroy his unpublished work unread. But it also gave them permission to publish what they wished. The legal word for a will which contradicts itself in this way is “repugnant.” Larkin’s will was repugnant in this sense. It doesn’t help anybody.
