Famous Last Works

This may become a running feature.  While there has been a cottage industry in books about the last words of various authors, artists, political figures and celebrities, I am more interested in their final works of art.

I would group them roughly into the following categories:

• Accidental last work -- the last work, particularly of a film maker, that would normally only be considered a mid-career film but is credited with transcendental meaning because of the sudden death of the artist.  Intimations of mortality are often read back into poets' work as well, and here I am thinking of Ted Berrigan's Sonnets.
• Summary work -- a film that was completed late in an artist's career and one in which he or she did seem to be trying to synthesize and/or recap a large body of work.  Kurosawa's Madadayo serves as a kind of summary film, though one could argue that Rhapsody in August or particularly Dreams would have been even more apt as a final career note (proving that Kurosawa was more prepared than most).

       Joseph Heller's Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man would seem to fall into the category as well, particularly as it was completed before Heller's death but then published posthumously.

• Staring death in the face work -- these are particularly interesting and come from middle aged artists and writers who have become very aware of their mortality (often due to the onset of cancer).  One work that fits this category to a T is Tony Judt's memoir The Memory Chalet, which was actually dictated to an assistant as he was dying due to complications from ALS.  I will definitely be discussing The Memory Chalet and some of Judt's other late work in future posts.

       Many of Dennis Potter's works were written while staring death in the face, and indeed, many comment about this in a meta-theatrical way.  His final, final works were the scripts for the television min-series Karaoke and Cold Lazarus (starring Albert Finney, who is in a late career stage of his own).  I have not seen either, but will attempt to in the near future.  The scripts themselves are readily available.

• Indian Summer work -- a subset of the staring death in the face work.  These works come about when an artist or writer has been deathly ill but gains enough energy to complete one last, often short, valedictory work.  The two that come to mind most readily are Carol Shield's Unless and Meteor in the Madhouse by Leon Forrest, though my understanding is that the executors had to make some decisions about the Forrest work, since it wasn't 100% complete.

Which leads me to the thorny issue of posthumously completed works

• Desk drawer novels
• All but finished last novels
• Unfinished work, sometimes wrestled into shape by executor
• Completed by committee/hired gun

The first doesn't hold too much interest, from this admittedly narrow perspective.  The last doesn't either (such as the latest attempt to complete Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood).  The second category is probably the most interesting in terms of revealing anything about the author (and I would think Forrest's work probably does fall here).  The third is primarily interesting for editorial decisions.  One of the more famous examples is Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, which 10 years later was published as Three Days Before the Shooting that was three times as long (1100+ pages!) as Juneteenth.  Hard to believe that anyone but the hardest core English lit. major would find it worth tackling that -- or that it should signify anything more than Ellison's crippling fear he would never be able to follow up upon the success of Invisible Man.  My understanding is that Ellison wrote and wrote and wrote but never really found his way in this second novel, and the editors hacked away to make it somewhat digestible.

Another recent interesting case where the editor had to take the exactly opposite case is Nabokov's The Original of Laura where the "book" is literally composed of reproductions of the notecards Nabokov was using to work up the skeleton of the novel right before his death.  No one was brought in to flesh this out (perhaps impossible to even attempt to imitate his style) and the result is really less than a working draft.  If I had to choose between the two, I'd rather read Ellison's overstuffed unfinished novel than a series of notecards.  I suspect I won't ever read either all the way through.

As I read through more of these other, actually completed final works, I will have a few things to say about each, and of course I'll want to keep adding to this list in progress.

Update (10/11/2015): I have been reading the new translations of Clarice Lispector's work.  Her last novel, A Breath of Life falls into this category of a final editor needing to shape the scraps she had written into a book.  Perhaps not quite as extreme as The Original of Laura, since the text was written out, i.e. it wasn't just a glorified outline of a novel, but it's hard to tell if this is really what Lispector would have wanted.  I really am not enjoying this, but then again, I also strongly disliked Água Viva, which is similar in style to A Breath of Life, though it is not her last proper novel (which is The Hour of the Star).  Reading these two in quick succession is basically enough to put me off her for a long time.