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Joan Didion entered the fray on the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s unfinished final manuscript in an essay titled Last Words in 1998: “You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t,” she wrote. You believe a writer’s unpublished work is fair game after their death or you don’t, and Didion – it would seem – didn’t.
Debate about the ethics of posthumous publication has been ignited once more, this time with Didion at its centre. After the writer’s death in 2021, about 150 pages were found in a file next to her desk. These were meticulous accounts of sessions with her psychiatrist, from 1999 to 2003, focused mainly on her adopted daughter Quintana, who was spiralling into alcoholism. Addressed to her husband, screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, this journal has been published under the title Notes to John. “No restrictions were put on access,” we are told in a brief, anonymous introduction, presumably the ghostly hand of her literary estate.
The history of posthumous works is a long and contentious one, from Virgil’s Aeneid to the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s Until August last year. Márquez’s sons excused their “act of betrayal” in publishing this abandoned novel against the Nobel laureate’s wishes as a service to his readers. In 2009, Vladimir Nabokov’s son published his father’s incomplete last work, The Original of Laura, 30 years after his death, despite his instructions that the novel be destroyed.
Harper Lee’s “lost” manuscript Go Set a Watchman (discovered in a safe deposit box) caused a sensation when it was published in 2015. Lee was 89 and in very poor health. It became the fastest-selling novel in HarperCollins history. But the critical verdict on all these recent “rediscoveries” was that the authors had good reasons not to want them published.
However, it is not always a case of publish and be damned. Most famously, we would not have Kafka’s The Trial had his executor, Max Brod, not ignored his demand that it be burned. “Don’t pull the Max Brod-Kafka trick on me,” Michel Foucault reportedly warned his friends.
Henry James made a “gigantic bonfire” of his archive. Thomas Hardy followed suit. Philip Larkin’s diaries, more prosaically, were committed to a shredding machine and then the University of Hull’s boiler house. “What he wished to be remembered would be remembered,” Larkin wrote of Hardy. “What he wished forgotten would be forgotten.”
How much of Notes to John was meant to be forgotten? Didion wrote two memoirs: The Year of Magical Thinking, after Dunne’s sudden death in 2003, and, later, Blue Nights, about her relationship with Quintana, who died in 2005 at the age of 39. In both, her daughter’s addiction is gracefully elided.
Didion was America’s literary celebrity. Aged 80, famous for her sunglasses, the author became the face of luxury fashion house Celine. Today, her image is printed on tote bags for bookish hipsters. Notes to John is a further offering to the cult of Joan. What could be more irresistible than her therapy notes?
It seems unlikely that Didion, that most reticent of people and most exacting of writers, would have welcomed these intimate, unedited journals seeing the light of day. But it is implausible that she would have been unaware of the inevitability of their publication. In Notes for John we see Didion bare-faced. We see her pain. But still she remains an enigma.
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