handle with care
the ethics of completing unfinished things
Driving around lately, I’ve caught snippets of a Radio 4 programme by Matthew Syed called The Art of Unfinishing. It’s ostensibly about our cultural obsession with ‘finishing’ things, and ultimately makes the case for why leaving things unfinished is a no-less worthy endeavour than say, ticking them off a lengthy to do list.
Throughout the course of the episode, Syed speaks to two American crafters, Jen Simonic and Masey Kaplan, who were helping a friend sort through their dead mother’s belongings when they ‘found two blankets that were barely started … The stitches were inconsistent, which is common with people’s final projects.’ It transpired that the blankets were intended for the knitter’s two sons, but instead of doing what most of us would do, (gently put them to one side – yes?) Jen and Masey decided to search for people who had the skills to finish the blankets off. Or as they put it: ‘Let’s see if we can get strangers to care about finishing something for someone else.’ This led to the creation of Loose Ends, a charity that matches volunteer ‘finishers’ with projects that are incomplete.
On their website Loose Ends has a criteria which potential projects must meet:
The originator of the project must be deceased, or no longer able to finish the project due to illness or disability.
The project must be partially begun.
The project and its materials must be free of moths and moth eggs. We are unable to accept rotting or mouldy materials.
The project must be clean, and not smell of mothballs or mould. If the original crafter was a smoker, we will do our best to match their project with a finisher who is OK with the smell.
The project owner must want the project to be kept.
I found this list intriguing, as for the past year I’ve been working on two book projects that were incomplete at the time of the author’s death, both from cancer. The criteria provided by Loose Ends raises some salient questions for anyone who has ever tried to work with material left behind by someone no longer living: namely, in what kind of state must the work be in order for someone else to finish it? Is the only circumstance it’s ok to ‘finish’ the work is if the author wanted it to be kept? When it comes to books, I’d also add a final question: how far should ‘finishers’ attempt to extrapolate the trajectory that a writer might have intended the project to take, and can this only be done if they left clear instructions?
Thankfully, I’m not the first person who has encountered these dilemmas. Unsurprisingly, many of our most revered writers left work behind for others to deal with posthumously. The novelist Franz Kafka left explicit instructions for all his unpublished materials to be destroyed upon his death. The friend whom he entrusted this task to ignored this request and published three further novels (The Trial, The Castle and Amerika). Gabriel García Márquez left similar instructions for his sons regarding one of his unfinished manuscripts (Until August) written as he was struggling with dementia, stating that it ‘didn’t work’; but lo, his sons published it anyway! This decision wasn’t met with total enthusiasm with fans of their father’s work. Defending their decision, Gonzalo García Márquez told Radio 4’s Front Row that towards the end of his life his father ‘wasn’t in a position to judge his work as he could only see the flaws but not the interesting things that were there.’
We realised that the book was complete, we realised that we didn’t have to do a lot of editing. There are no additions, there are no great changes. So there really wasn’t any discussion there … we decided, yes, it was a betrayal. But that’s what children are for.
It’s one thing to publish a book that appears to be complete: but what about projects which were clearly unfinished at the time of the person’s death? This criteria applies to one of the books I’ve been editing over the past year, which was written by Pete Betts, a climate diplomat who negotiated the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement on behalf of the EU. Pete died from gliobastoma last Autumn, about four months after we started working together. Since January, I have worked alongside his wife Fiona to get the book ready for publication. I have been surprised, challenged and moved by this process. Although around four fifths of the book was written when Pete died, the final third was severely affected by his declining health, so one of the first jobs I set to work on was transcribing and rewriting chapters which had been dictated by Pete during the final weeks and days of his life.
The question of how much we should infer from the material he left behind has become a through-line of this work: ‘do you think he would put it this way?’ I often ask his wife Fiona. As the book has progressed, my position on extrapolating an author’s intention has shifted. With non-fiction at least, my sense is that whilst it is possible to extrapolate or deepen a person’s argument, it’s risky to try and ‘invent’ or ‘extend’ an argument for which the author left little or no material, even if it feels like the logical direction the book was heading in. Pete’s book is especially sensitive in this regard due to the political ramifications his arguments may have. So, in the same way curators handle delicate artefacts in a museum, I’ve concluded that this is a job where it’s best to don white gloves.
This week marks the US publication of another book that was finished posthumously, but which seems to have taken a more expansive approach to developing the remaining material. When the essayist Leslie Jamison’s friend Rebecca Godfrey died she had been working on a fictionalised account of the heiress and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim’s life, simply called ‘Peggy’. Godfrey’s literary agent, to whom she left instructions about how she envisioned her book concluding, asked Jamison to finish the novel. ‘She didn’t want a truncated [version of it with a] note that says, ‘It ends here because Rebecca died.’ Jamison told the LATimes ‘She wanted a version that could feel like a complete work of art.’
In the same interview Jamison speaks movingly of the way in which these books, even those left unfinished, are ‘living thing[s]’.
There’s also a way that this book feels like a living thing insofar as Rebecca is no longer alive… This book is not her, ‘Peggy’s’ not her, but it is this thing that she made, it contains so much of her, and so it feels like it’s a part of her that’s very much still with us.
I share Jamison’s feelings. To edit or write on behalf of someone no longer living is a deeply intimate task, and for some it can become a way of holding on to them long after the rhythms and rituals of their immediate death have passed. Even though I only met Pete a handful of times, I still find myself having conversations with him about his book, asking, I suppose, for guidance.
Ultimately, every unfinished project, be it a book or blanket, creates a new ethical universe, in which the wishes of the deceased and their close relatives should always be paramount. I am struck, however, by the way in which Loose Ends deliberately seek out strangers, rather than friends of the deceased, to finish their projects. By entrusting a stranger we perhaps protect friends and family from the burden and grave responsibility that ‘completing’ a final project can become.
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Recommendation Corner: Ethics edition
READ:
Taylor has written a great essay about the role of moral worldbuilding in fiction for the Sewanee Review. He asks: ‘how is one to enter into the mind of someone whose acts, by any definition, are evil? How are they to portray people and events beyond what they can possibly imagine themselves sympathizing with?’LISTEN: I’ve been binging political podcasts recently. I’m impatiently waiting for the next episode of The Rest is Politics US with Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci (incredible name - he was once Trump’s comms director for 10 days).
READ: Some bookish types who read this newsletter will probably be knee-deep in the Booker longlist by now. I had already read two books on the list: Enlightenment by Sarah Perry, which I didn’t love, and Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which I did. I’m keen to read Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars but have started with his first novel There There instead. What else should I add to my Booker reading list?
Great piece! What an ethical minefield. My first love (book wise) was Virginia Andrews. I devoured her books when I was a kid and a young teenager. She died in the 80s and left a lot of unpublished, unfinished work which her family spent years rehashing and churning out. It always felt distasteful to me, like she was a cash cow that they resist milking. The quality of the posthumous stuff was poor. But, I can see the value in carrying on unfinished work if it has a deeper meaning. My much loved Aunty Amy, who died of cancer when I was 19, was a keen knitter. She’d half knitted a baby cardigan, which my mother completed five years after her death, as a gift for my newborn daughter. She was born on Amy’s birthday.
This is a really interesting subject that I hadn't thought about before. Thank you.