On Unfinished Manuscripts

by John Aquino on 12/12/12

Unfinished manuscripts represent both a lure and curse for literary executors and attorneys. For some reason, it reminds me of a quote from Alfred Hitchcock about his struggles to adapt for film a play by James Barrie, Mary Rose, which is about a woman who vanishes and returns decades later not having aged a day while everyone she knew is much older. Hitchcock said that what intrigued him about the play—and what also rendered it undramatic—is that it is framed around the question, if the dead  were to return to life, what would we do with them?

Unfinished manuscripts are like that. Forgotten, only to emerge full of promise and hope that can never completely be achieved because the author is, in most cases, dead. Books in search of an author.

Some who have been faced with the decision of what to do with them have simply published the unfinished manuscript, and if that hadn’t been done with Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood there would have been no 1935 Claude Rains film, no Rupert Holmes musical, and no 142 years of efforts to solve the mystery that is unsolvable.

On the other hand, there are those who wish the estate of Ernest Hemingway had not published his unfinished novel The Garden of Eden in 1986, 25 years after Hemingway died, or even Islands in the Stream, published 9 years after his suicide. Works have usually been left unfinished for a reason. But the financial rewards are hard to resist. Both books were even made into movies.

Another approach has been to have someone finish the novel. Raymond Chandler left his eighth Philip Marlowe novel Poodle Springs unfinished when he died in 1959. His estate brought in noted mystery writer Robert B. Parker of the Spencer for Hire series of novels to finish it. When published in 1991, it sold well and it too was made into a movie starring James Caan, although the critical consensus was that it added luster to neither Chandler nor Parker’s reputations. Again, money seems to be a major if not the sole factor in the decisions. Seldom does anyone find an unfinished work that is a great novel that just needs someone to push a few more breaths of air down its lungs to give it life.

I want to focus on two unfinished books that I was briefly connected with. One may have never made it beyond the note-taking stage, the other was started, left unfinished, and may not even exist anymore. But I still have a secret hope that someone will do something with them some day.

The first was to be an autobiography by the actress Jane White. I knew of her primarily from the original cast recording and television version of the 1960 Broadway musical Once Upon a Mattress, in both of which she played the wicked queen Aggravain. 

Jane was a light-skinned actress of African-American and European descent.  Her father was Walter Francis White, a notable civil-rights leader and national secretary of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955. While at Smith College, her white roommate told the school that unless Jane left Smith her roommate would leave. The school told the roommate that she could go and that Jane’s housing assignment would not be changed. The roommate stayed, and so did Jane. The great actor Paul Robeson helped her get her first part. In addition to Mattress, she starred in a number of classical works.

My wife Deborah met Jane in 1988 when Jane was playing the role of Queen Constance in King John at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Deborah was a consultant on the play, and the two became friends. A few years later, Jane was appearing as Volumnia in Coriolanus at the Shakespeare Theatre, and we arranged to take her to brunch at the Hay Adams.

It was such a treat for me because I had first heard her singing the song "Sensitivity" on the original cast album for Once Upon a Mattress when I was nine. I told her this and how I had taken the part of Merton, the Queen’s aide, and sang along with her on the record—really all Merton does is say, ��Madam, I think” a few times and the queen ignores him and goes on and on about how because she is royal she feels the slightest thing wrong with her bed keeps her awake, which is when she devices a plan to put a pea under a mattress of her son's intended. Jane immediately began to sing the song in the restaurant, I said Merton’s few lines, and she was wonderful, remembering every word 30 years after the show’s premiere. People at other tables applauded, her, of course. It was a wondrous time.

She began to tell us of her plans for an autobiography, not only of her time in the theatre but of her father. She was so full of life, so bigger than life, and so excited about the prospect of telling her story. At one point she said, “What I need is for someone to help me write it.” That was all I, or any young writer, needed to hear. “How about me!”,  I said with assurance. Jane stopped chewing, swallowed, and looked at me with the same look that the star cheerleader has when she tells the head of the chess club that she’d like to go out with him but has to wash her hair. What she actually said was even less kind. “Oh, no!” she blurted out, oblivious to whether she was being unkind or not. “I don’t think you’re the right person to tell my life!”

She was right, of course. I was, at the time, the editor-in-chief of a trade magazine, the author of some trade books and a few published short stories.  It would have been a major project, dealing with both the theatre and the civil rights movement. I probably would have muffed it. It hurt, though.

We finished the brunch cordially. I wrote her a letter saying, “If you should ever change your mind…” and never heard back. Deborah kept in touch with her for a while.

Jane died in 2011. She never did publish her autobiography. She did tour in an autobiographical cabaret show. She left her papers to Smith College, and the catalog listing suggests she was indeed squirreling away material for that autobiography.  Maybe there are plans for a biography.  If not, I hope someone does one some day. She was a grand lady.

The other unfinished manuscript was by my friend Malcolm E. Bessom, and it was on jazz. Mack was a music educator and a journalist. He authored two books—Supervising the Successful School Music Program and Teaching Music in Today’s Secondary Schools: A Creative Approach to Secondary Education. Both were very influential in the field. He was editor-in-chief of Music Educators Journal for the Music Educators National Conference, and he was a rock star in music education—witty, funny, warm, and really, really smart. Mack really loved jazz. When we went to music conferences together, he would always disappear and I would find him listening to one of the performances with music that was really swinging. "I knew I'd find you here listening to jazz." "This is dixieland," he corrected me, and I learned there was a difference.

Mack hired me as his managing editor, and most of what I know about magazine publishing I learned from him. I relearned some things over the years, but it started with Mack.

He was so admired and given so much leeway that the executive director of MENC allowed him to use the conference room every day from 1-3. Mack was not to be disturbed. He said he needed the time to just think. Think about possible articles, think about designs for articles. There he would sit, alone, and go through letters he received, brochures for conferences, and just think.

He felt comfortable with me and even invited me into his inner sanctum to bat around title ideas from articles. I remember we were trying to find a title for an article on new right-brain, left-brain research that had supposedly found which part of the brain fostered music appreciation. I was just kidding when I intoned in a radio announcer-like voice, “Who Knows Where Music Lurks in the Mind of Man?”, mimicking the catch-phrase of the radio show The Shadow. Mack said, “That’s it! You got it!” The article won awards for its design, which was inspired by the title.

But soon, everything changed. Mack’s executive director retired, and the new one was appalled when he phoned Mack’s office and was told that he was in the conference room and not to be disturbed. He demanded that Mack be available to him whenever he needed him. Mack immediately resigned.

I tried to talk him out of it, but he said that it was just as well, that he had a book contract for a book on jazz and needed time to write it. That’s how I became an editor before I was 30, taking over for Mack.

I visited Mack at his home a month after he left and asked how the book was going. He said, “I’ve been working on it a month, and I’m two months behind.” He kept procrastinating and stalling. I knew he was writing because he would call me up and read portions  of it to me. But sometime I thought that the six or seven sentences he had read to me were all he had written in a month, or two months.

He became ill and died in 1988 at the age of 48, 12 years after I first met him.

I had been editor of the magazine, but I was not a jazz expert. I decided, though, that I would take the initiative about Mack’s book, and if I needed expert help I would get it. I knew that Mack had been estranged from his family because of his life style. But still I contacted his relatives and said that they obviously owned the copyright in his unfinished manuscript. I said I would like to finish it for him without credit. I never heard back. I contacted Mack’s publisher and was told they had never received a single page from Mack, although he had read portions of it to them too on the phone. I asked them to contact the family, who must have had his possessions. The publisher did and never heard back.

The book was never published. Maybe there wasn’t that much to the manuscript. Maybe his family just discarded it. I like to think it still exists and someone will find it some day and publish it.

And yet, as to unfinished manuscripts, two lines related to movies come to mind. In Graham Greene’s original screenplay for The Third Man, after Harry Lime has been buried the second time, the policeman played by Trevor Howard says to Lime’s friend, Holly Martin, in a line that was cut from the finished film, “Better dead.”  The second is Hitchcock’s: “If the dead were to return to life, what would we do with them?”

Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquinov