Point Blank: The greatest novel of all is lost out there
By Johan Jaaffar
30 July, 2006
"LOLITA, light of my life, fire of my loins," is the famous first line of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, considered by many as "sheer pornography" when it first appeared in 1955. Others begged to differ. One critic hailed it as "the supreme novel of love in the 20th century". Whatever one’s opinion about the novel, "Lolita" has entered the lexicon to mean an interest in young girls or a sexual attraction that borders on paedophilia. Daniel S. Burt, the compiler of The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time placed it at No. 47. Lolita has never failed to anger, awe and devastate its readers after these many years.
According to legend, Nabokov was so distraught after finishing Lolita, he almost burned it. Perhaps his guilt is best illustrated by these lines, written much later in Poems and Problems: "What evil I have committed? Seducer,
criminal — is this the word for me who set the entire world a-dreaming of my poor little girl?"
He was not alone. Many great writers who had laboured many years to put their best work together, eventually destroyed the scripts or simply lost them.
Would you believe that Elizabeth Hadley, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, lost a bag carrying his precious manuscripts?
All his earlier works were in the bag Hadley carried on the way to Lausanne, Switzerland in 1922. Only two of his early works survived, one of which, "My Old Man", he kept with a friend. The other manuscript was "Up in Michigan", which he left in a drawer after it was rejected by a publisher. "My Old Man" is not The Old Man and The Sea, the novel that is very much associated with Hemingway. This short story was published in 1924 as an anthology, The Book of the American Short Story, edited by Edward J.
O’Brien.
"Up in Michigan" was published in 1938, even though it was written in 1922. The literary value of the lost manuscripts is not quantifiable.
Gustave Flaubert, of Madame Bovary fame, buried boxes of papers in his garden in 1871. What were those manuscripts? Why did he do that? Madame Bovary was completed in 1856 and published the following year. It was years later when he decided to bury the papers believed to be complete literary works. Could it be that he felt no other work could surpass Madame Bovary? Did he destroy inferior works?
The debate on the tragedy of literature lost is interesting. How many of the great writers lost their works due to negligence, natural catastrophe or plain carelessness?
Shakespeare was said to have written a play called Love’s Labours Won but lost it when many of his better known plays became hits during the Elizabethan
era.
One Japanese writer, Ihara Saikaku (1642-93), wanted to be a great novelist. He was said to have destroyed his entire collection of haiku — thousands of them. He was the most prolific haiku composer of all time — penning an average of 17 a minute or a staggering 1,600 a day. He had no qualms destroying the haiku, but he was never considered Japan’s best-known novelist.
Then there was Agathon (457-402 BC), a friend of the great dramatist Euripides. He was a prolific bloke, churning original plays, while others were adapting myths and legends.
He was mentioned by Aristophanes and Aristotle. Yet, none of his plays survived.
Homer was said to have written a "comic epic" but there are no traces of it. Homer is better known as the author of The Odyssey and The Iliad; both epics contain 27,803 lines. The dramatist Aeschylus was said to have written 80 plays, but
the world only has access to seven. There are only seven Sophocles plays from at least 120. Euripides wrote 90 plays, but only 18 survived.
You can read about these incredible stories in Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All Great Books You will Never Read.
Kelly is a literary sleuth who combed the literary wilderness for clues and evidence of great works lost. It is a must-read for those interested in the drama of lost literature — or more precisely, non-existent literature. After all, someone claimed, the best works of literature are never written; or in these cases, never published.
So, the excuse is made palatable: It is not that one did not write it, but somehow did not get published. Or better still, it did not get published because it was lost. In the time before typewriters and computers, authors would have had to painstakingly
rewrite their work for another copy. What a waste of time.
The early Greek dramatists certainly did not have the luxury of doing that. So, too the great pujangga, writers and philosophers of the Malay courts of old. The legend of Flor De La Mar (Flower Of The Seas) illustrates how thousands of Malay works of literature got lost in the sea.
In December 1511, after successfully invading Malacca, one of the fighting galleons sailed home to Portugal. Somewhere along the Straits of Malacca, the ship sank with its priceless cargo — Malay manuscripts and other spoils of war. What was lost on the ship that day is a riddle that has yet to be solved, 500 years later.
If written scripts of La Galigo had not landed in major libraries in Europe, the greatest Bugis epic would have been lost forever. It is said to be the longest poem ever written by man; at 300,000 lines, it
makes The Odyssey, The Iliad, Ramayana and Mahabharata "short" in comparison. What else did we miss? Perhaps somewhere out there lies a work of literature that will never resurface — perhaps the greatest novel of all time. What a tragedy!
