Bonfires Regrettable and Otherwise

Charles Allen, in the introduction to his new book, Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, describes the Great Man's horror of biography, reacting "to any perceived breach of his privacy with a hostility bordered on paranoia." Allen goes on to recount Kipling in old age being visited by his old friend and publisher, Frank Doubleday, "who found him shoveling piles of his papers on to an open fire. When asked why, he declared that no one was going to make a monkey out of him after death." Kipling's widow, Carrie, described as the "staunchest of proctors," honored her late husband's wishes by continuing the conflagration after his death.

This, it seems, is a fairly common theme in literary biography: the bonfire. Sometimes undertaken by friends or relations, after the author's death, most infamously by William Gifford who burned Byron's memoirs, declaring they were "fit for the brothel and would have damned Lord Byron to everlasting infamy." That incident of course is understood to have provided the basis, at least in part, for the famous Henry James novella, The Aspern Papers, wherein the lover of a dead poet, rather than sell his letters, nobly burns the lot. James himself urged his own correspondents to "burn, burn," and famously spent days destroying such of his own correspondence as on which he could lay hands. (It is worth noting here, having the Edel edition of James' letters, in multiple volumes, what a fraction of his actual papers dear old Henry succeeded in committing to the flames, out of what must have been one of the most substantial totals in the history of literary letters.) As a regular and enthusiastic reader of both biography and letters, I am grateful for all that escapes the flames, but I think I understand the urge to burn, having done a bit of it myself.

In bonfires like those tended by James or Kipling, there is a reputation to see to and guard. Additionally, in the case of celebrity, which Kipling certainly was, as the most widely read author in English of his day, there is something to be said for a person's right to protect such scraps of privacy as might be allowed by the insatiable inquisitiveness of the public. According to Charles Allen, Kipling's personal tragedies, including the devastating deaths during his lifetime of two of his children, both occasions of enormous public curiosity, and sympathy, let it be said, and the embarrassment of a number of his friends and relations either writing or threatening to write and publish recollections of him in boyhood, etc., led him to an obsessive insistence on letting nothing slip out, ultimately driving him to destroy even his parents' correspondence not just with him, but between themselves.

I had and have no thought of any such reputation or celebrity. (What would be the odds?!) And yet, I too have "seen to" quite a bit of destructive liberation from my own past. Personally, for example, I found the systematic doing away with of the only full-length novel I ever wrote, or am likely to, much better fun than the writing, or reading of it was. I likewise, a few years ago, consigned to eternal forgetfulness all the then surviving journals and diaries of my childhood and youth. Having reread them, one last blessed time, and having found them touching yet terrible, I was relieved that no one else would ever see them.

I doubt this news will be greeted with any regretful sighs by even my dearest friends and readers. You must trust me, no treasures were lost. But, as a reader, and as a generally noisy sort of person, I sympathize with any shudder this kind of confession might involuntarily induce. When my friend Peter died, he was far from his right mind. One symptom of his dementia was a sad paranoia as to the motives of all his many friends expressing the slightest curiosity as to his state of mind. One consequence, of little moment to anyone else, but devastating to me, was that shortly before his death, I discovered that he had weeded from his files twenty years worth of my letters to him, and I had written to him often, and at length. When I looked for my letters, I found only the greeting cards I'd sent him over the years. All the letters were gone. Peter had also almost always kept a journal. I had seen him writing in it many times. I'd even been allowed to read in it, here and there, when some point made therein, he felt, was better said than he might be able to ever phrase it so well again. (I confess here to also having once, when I was living with him, guiltily and greedily scanned the whole of his last journal in search of any reference to myself. Never do this. Nothing in the little he said of me there was in any way unsaid otherwise between us, or specially disturbing to read. It was never the less a considerable shock, perhaps entirely deserved, to see with what infrequency, at least in the assumed privacy of his diary, my name occurred at all.) Peter's journals, and such of his papers he deemed personal and appropriate for preservation, he gave to another friend before his death. When I asked about these after his death, his friend remembered getting them from him, but admitted to me, without apology, she had subsequently misplaced the lot. When I asked after his journals again, sometime later, she no longer remembered, or told me she had no memory of, ever having had any such things from Peter. It is not too much to say I've hated the woman ever since.

There was nothing in the journals of my friend that would be of interest now to anyone other than his brother or myself. Most of what I was shown had largely to do Peter's parents, longer dead now than their son. A few of the entries I was shown had to do with Peter's lovers, of which there were many over the all too brief span of his years, but few of those men are likely to still be alive, or if alive, much concerned with affairs of such antiquity. Peter seldom used proper names, if he knew them, when writing about his more anonymous encounters, and was touchingly forgiving, as I remember, to those he had named, bastards the lot, so far as I remember them. Nothing in Peter's extensive writing would ever, of itself, have been likely to see print, nor had he any pretensions that way. But I still mourn personally the loss of the record of my friend's interior life in those pages, just as I still feel the sting of having none of my own letters to him to read again and be reminded of the most important friendship of my younger life.

But to close this entry on a less mournful note, I should also mention a much happier loss. The last summer, as I remember it, before I left home for good and all, my dear friend E., returning from his freshman year at college, had me over to his parents' house. We may or may not have had something to drink that day, but what I do remember us doing was sitting in a small room off his parent's kitchen, a lovely sort of guestroom -- with a fireplace? -- reading aloud my collected poetic juvenilia and roaring with laughter. Written when adolescence was cresting most tragic, these poems of mine, even after so few intervening years, were uniformly and instantly recognizably as bad as any ever written by a such a sorry and self-important soul as I so obviously had considered myself at the time of their composition. Gods, but they were bad. Blessedly, none survived that last, happy reading. By the end of the afternoon, all but unable to stand with giggling, dear E.'s weak protests not withstanding, I sacrificed the lot to the flames, by way of apology to the Muse.

Should I contribute nothing else to Literature, I at least performed that service. Would that my example were more often emulated by other poets manque, or "poets monkey," as I once assumed the phrase to read. There is much to be said for the cleansing power of fire. Not all fires are bonfires, but mine, however circumspect, made a happy glow.