Washington Post looks at what they call the great “might have-beens”
1. The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil.
The man of the title may not have qualities, but this novel certainly does, among them the brilliance of its depiction of Austria in its last years as an imperial power. The novel’s omniscient narrator refers to his nation as Kakania, a sniggering pun on the formula kaiserlich-königlich (imperial-royal), which described a dual form of government almost as puzzling as the Christian Trinity. But the comedy soon makes room for more serious matters, such as Musil’s analysis of the relationship between an Aryan racist and his half-Jewish girlfriend. A fine English translation of what is likely the final scholarly word on the text appeared in 1995; it runs to two volumes and almost 1,800 pages, but Musil intended to write much more before he died in 1942.
2. The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Compared to Musil’s effort, this book is a shrimp, a mere 190 pages, several of which are taken up by fragments and notes. Drawing on his own years of writing scripts in Hollywood, Fitzgerald set out to produce what might have been the definitive Tinseltown novel, only to die with a mere half-dozen chapters written. Nonetheless, he left a memorable portrait of his protagonist, producer Monroe Stahr, and as Edmund Wilson noted in his introduction to the first edition (1941), “Even in its imperfect state, [it is] Fitzgerald’s most mature piece of work.”
3. Cousin Rosamund: A Saga of the Century, by Rebecca West.
We’re on firmer ground here, in that West finished and published the first volume of a projected trilogy or perhaps even tetralogy. That would be The Fountain Overflows (1956), a scintillating portrait of an intellectually and artistically talented family made miserable by the husband/father’s abandonment. West wrote enough to fill two more volumes, the posthumously published This Real Night (1985) and Cousin Rosamund (1986), but ultimately admitted that in trying to encapsulate the 20th century in the tale of one English family, she had asked too much of herself (or, probably, any writer).
4. Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, by Roger Martin du Gard.
After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937, Martin du Gard spent almost 20 years working on this massive work, which even in its unfinished state runs to nearly 800 pages. Ostensibly the life story of the title character, who is holed up in his Normandy estate during the German occupation of France in World War II, the work is best read as an anthology of loosely related novellas, one of which rivals Mann’s Death in Venice in its sensitive depiction of gay love. The English translation came out in 2000.
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.
I know, I know: Technically, Twain’s masterpiece comes to an end, but we might have been better off if it hadn’t. Twain ran out of inspiration after Huck made his wrenching decision to go to hell rather than hand Jim over to the slave-catchers. Some years later, the author decided to conclude his story by bringing back Tom Sawyer, and the silly result is perhaps the biggest letdown in all of fiction. John Seelye, among others, has written an alternative ending, but my solution is simply to stop reading at the end of Chapter 31 and pretend that the misbegotten rest of it never happened.
To celebrate what would have been