Precious little in the way of good news emerges these days from the land formerly known as Mesopotamia, but, in September of this year, the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraqi Kurdistan announced it had discovered 20 new lines from The Epic of Gilgamesh.
This Sumerian legend is one of the world’s earliest known works of narrative poetry and widely held to be the first great work of literature. The new text, etched in cuneiform script on three fragments of a muddied tablet, came to light as a result of the museum’s “no questions asked” policy for smugglers thinking better of taking significant artefacts out of the country. Scholars will now reassess this ancient work with the benefit of new knowledge and fresh insights into guilt, monkeys and a so-far unsuspected environmental angle to the story.
Some works, sadly, never do get found. Take English novelist and poet J Meade Falkner’s fourth novel. Falkner published three novels, the best known being his second, Moonfleet (1898), an 18th-century tale of smuggling set around Dorset and the Isle of Wight. It was followed by The Nebuly Coat (1903) and there would have been a fourth novel to add to his bibliography, had the unfortunate author not lost the manuscript on a train between Durham and Newcastle. Owing to Falkner’s other life as chairman of armaments manufacturer Armstrong Whitworth, there was speculation the manuscript was mistaken by enemy agents for documents relating to weapons manufacture.
The only agent implicated in the mislaying of the original manuscript of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood was alcohol. Commissioned in the middle of the second world war, very little of the play had been written by 1946 when BBC producer Douglas Cleverdon took over responsibility for it. Thomas eventually delivered the manuscript in 1953 and it was duly typed up by Cleverdon’s secretary, who returned the original to Thomas.
With two days to go before he was due to fly to America to give readings from the play, Thomas managed to lose the manuscript. Cleverdon succeeded in delivering copies to Thomas before his departure and, regarding the original, the poet advised his producer that if he could find it – and he gave him the names of some pubs where he might usefully look – he could keep it.
Cleverdon did indeed track down the manuscript to the Swiss Tavern in Old Compton Street, Soho. A happy ending for Cleverdon, then – manuscript lost and found – but Thomas’s death while in the US led eventually to a legal battle with Thomas’s widow over the ownership of the document.
Author and polymath Anthony Burgess’s ownership of his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange was somewhat compromised by its adaptation for film by Stanley Kubrick. The US director based his screenplay on the US edition of the novel, which had lost – or more accurately deliberately excluded – the final, redemptive, 21st chapter. While Burgess initially gave the film a rave review in the Listener, he later changed his mind, partly in response to the controversy surrounding the film and stories of copycat violence.
“The book I am best known for,” Burgess managed to squeeze into his biography of DH Lawrence, “or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate … it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me until I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.”
One imagines the sensitivities of an author whose preferred ending is summarily discounted, and yet, according to Andrew Biswell, Burgess’s biographer and director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Burgess was always “uncertain about how the novel should end”. At the end of part three, chapter six of the original typescript, Burgess wrote: “Should we end here? An optional ‘epilogue’ follows.”
Imagine losing 12 million future sales of your book. That’s what nearly happened to US science fiction writer Frank Herbert with Dune, his epic novel inspired by the moving sands of the Oregon Dunes. Having published his first novel, The Dragon in the Sea, initially in instalments in Astounding magazine and then in 1956 as a single volume via Doubleday, Herbert went round the houses in search of a home for Dune.
Accounts differ regarding the number of publishers who turned him down – some say 23, others more than twice that number – and he resorted to serialisation for a second time before finally striking a deal with a publisher best known for its car manuals. Chilton Books published the first edition of Dune in 1965; it has gone on to be a huge seller all over the world, generate a sequence of follow-up novels, provide a publishing niche for the author’s son Brian, and inspire what some may think deserves to be a lost film directed by David Lynch.
Something that has never existed can be found, despite never having been lost, only through an act of creation. There have been more than 200 editions of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, one of the greatest and most controversial novels of the 20th century, published around the world since its first edition hit the trottoirs in 1955 courtesy of Paris’s Olympia Press. There has even been a book of possible covers by prominent designers for nonexistent editions. But there has never, until now, been an illustrated edition of the novel published in the UK. The Folio Society, however, has succeeded in persuading Nabokov’s estate to allow the publication of such a volume featuring eight specially commissioned paintings by Chilean-born artist Federico Infante. Now that these have been “found”, successive generations of readers can ensure they are never lost.
Nicholas Royle is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and the award-winning author of seven novels and more than 100 short stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Moonfleet, Under Milk Wood, A Clockwork Orange, Dune and Lolita are all available to buy as handsome Christmas gifts in illustrated hardback editions from www.foliosociety.com
