John Mullan lists 10 manuscripts whose history are almost as adventurous as the stories contained within
1) TE Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom
TE Lawrence left Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the cafe at Reading station. He telephoned the station from Oxford when he arrived, but the case with the manuscript had gone and was never found. The version we read is an earlier, “inferior” one.
2) Jilly Cooper: Riders
In 1970, Jilly Cooper took the only copy of the manuscript of her novel Riders with her when she went out to lunch and duly left it on a London bus. She never found it, and did not finish rewriting it until 1984.
3) VS Naipaul’s back-catalogue
In the 1970s, VS Naipaul put his manuscripts into storage in a London warehouse. When his wife asked to look at them a few years later she found they were missing. It turned out they had been mistaken for the records of a South American company and had been incinerated.
4) James Michener
Bestselling author James Michener claimed that he dreamed one night in 1960 of writing an epic novel about Mexico. He duly researched and wrote most of the novel, before he misplaced the manuscript. It turned up 30 years later and Michener completed and published the saga.
5) Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood
Dylan Thomas lost the manuscript of Under Milk Wood three times: first in London, then in America, and then again in London. The third time it was discovered, by his friend Doug Cleverdon, in a pub. Thomas had promised Cleverdon that if he could find the manuscript, he could keep it. He died a few days later, prompting a court case over its ownership.
6) Malcolm Lowry: Ultramarine
Malcolm Lowry had the manuscript of his first novel, Ultramarine, which was in a briefcase, stolen from his publisher’s open-top car. Lowry claimed to have rewritten it in a few weeks. He lost a later magnun opus, In Ballast to the White Sea, when his house in Canada burnt down.
7) JM Falkner’s fourth novel
JM Falkner lost the manuscript of his fourth novel on the train between Durham and Newcastle. Falkner was director of an armaments company, and it is possible that it was taken by an enemy agent mistaking it for documents relating to weapons manufacturing.
8) Ernest Hemingway’s early stories
Ernest Hemingway was faced by his wife, Hadley, who was nervously about to admit to having lost his manuscript of all his early stories on a train in Switzerland. Seeing her unease, he leapt to a Hemingway-like inference. “Then you’ve slept with a Negro, tell me!”
9) Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution
Carlyle lent the manuscript of his most ambitious work, The French Revolution, to his friend John Stuart Mill for comment. One night soon after there was a knock on Carlyle’s door. It was a distressed Mill, who told him that a maid had mistaken it for waste paper and burnt it. Carlyle had to rewrite it from scratch.
10) Robert Ludlum’s first novel
Bestselling thriller writer Robert Ludlum wrote his first novel – “a literary effort”, as he called it – while a young man in the US marines. He lost the manuscript after a long drinking session while on leave in San Francisco. When he returned to writing fiction in the 1970s he was cured of literary pretensions.
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Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/23/1000-novels-lost-manuscripts
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