Latest news with #LastWords
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on posthumously publishing Joan Didion: goodbye to all that
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 You believe a writer's unpublished work is fair game after their death or you don't, and Didion – it would seem – didn't. Debate about the ethics of posthumous publication has been ignited once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.
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- The Guardian
‘You are free again': farewell letters of executed Belgian resistance fighters found, 80 years on
Christel Van Iseghem was sitting in a radio studio when she heard the last words of her great uncle Norbert, murdered by the Nazis for his role in the Belgian resistance. 'My heart stood still,' said the 71-year-old from Kallo in Flanders. 'This was something I didn't know existed. I sat there shaking, my hands trembling … It means so much to me. He will not be forgotten.' Before his execution in Munich on 27 October 1944, alongside his friend Noël Boydens, 19-year-old Norbert Vanbeveren wrote to his parents that he felt 'a kind of peace and satisfaction in my heart, because our death will have served a purpose after all: that you are free again and no longer have to live under occupation'. Vanbeveren was one of 1,500 Belgian resistance fighters allowed to write to his loved ones before the Nazis murdered him. His letter is one of about 20 that recently surfaced thanks to the Last Words project, a collaboration between the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), the Heroes of the Resistance remembrance association and 15 volunteers, adding to an archive of some 350 letters. Dany Neudt, co-founder of Heroes of the Resistance, read aloud Norbert's words on Belgian radio and is calling for a reappraisal of resistance groups, whose heroism he believes was forgotten in a traumatised silence after the war, while collaboration – including by Flemish nationalists – was seen more sympathetically. Neudt posts every day on social media the story of one 'hero' and organises 'resistance cafe' evenings to share their tales. He wants more people to search attics and archives for examples of these letters of last words. 'War brings out the worst in people … but also the best in humanity, and that is what you see in the stories of resistance.' The liberation of Belgium had begun by the time Vanbeveren was killed, but his father was dead and the letter did not reach his mother. Van Iseghem, his great niece, was the first family member to hear his words, eight decades later. Neudt's search for this archive began after his father died during the pandemic and he began researching his grandfather, Henri Neudt, part of the Geheim Leger [secret army] resistance group, who narrowly escaped deportation to Germany on the 'ghost' train. 'It was the last train going to the Neuengamme concentration camp, but was attacked by the resistance and went back,' he said. 'My grandfather was on that train but nothing was ever said in my family. What a strange situation it is that in Flanders, we know about collaborators but we don't know names of people in the resistance. Even for me, as a historian, this is a blind spot.' Many modern historians believe the fragmented Belgian resistance movement suffered a postwar image problem, according to Nel de Mûelenaere, VUB professor of contemporary history and chair of the Traces of the Resistance project. 'The Flemish-nationalist collaborators, more unified and with support of Flemish-nationalist and Catholic politicians, falsely portrayed themselves as misled young men who were seduced by anti-communism and unjustly punished after the war by the resistance, who were opportunists, criminals, communists,' she said. 'In France, you had General de Gaulle, the idea that France liberated itself by the resistance; in the Netherlands you have Hannie Schaft. In Belgium, it was very much a fractured movement and fractured memory … [of] trauma and repression.' Others, like Ellen De Soete, whose uncle, Albert Serreyn, was executed, argue for a revival of the 8 Mayliberation day public holiday. 'Especially in Flanders, there was a lot of collaboration, and some political parties thought if the stories were forgotten, in a few generations people would not know,' she said. 'It was a way of wiping stories from the collective memory. But now young people do want to know, and a new wind is blowing.'Dr Samuël Kruizinga, historian of 20th-century war and violence at the University of Amsterdam, said reviving resistance stories could be a way for Belgium to move away from black-and-white thinking. 'Acts of resistance were after the second world war quite consciously framed as acts in favour of the Belgian unitary state,' he said. 'There's also the memory of the first world war where Belgium is also under German occupation, and the formal instructions given to Belgians by the government in exile were that swift resistance will only provoke retaliation. This is very consciously trying to reframe and rediscover the enormous personal heroism of people resisting Nazi rule.' De Mûelenaere said that with talk of war in western Europe returning, these letters resonate. 'I was reading one yesterday evening, and it was of a man who lived in a little village very near where my family is from,' she said. 'At the end of the letter, it said: greetings to the family de Mûelenaere. It's a world we can almost touch. We need those stories … and the almost healing idea that ordinary people said no to an authoritarian regime.'
