Unfinished Business and Self-Memorialization: Rebecca West's Aborted Novel, Mild Silver, Furious Gold

Many writers' oeuvre contains aborted work—abandoned, unfinished, or unpublished manuscripts—but such work may be unfinished for various reasons. Most obviously, writers sometimes perish before a lengthy manuscript is completed, as was notoriously the case with Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Writers may also abandon works for less obvious reasons: loss of interest in the project, the burden of supporting oneself with another job, or even resistance to the idea of narrative closure. Rebecca West (1892-1983) was a woman of great perseverance and a prolific writer—not only of fiction but also of journalistic essays, travel literature, political studies, and book reviews; she is not generally known for her inability to finish what she started. One example of her tenacity was her so-called "Russian" novel, titled Cockcrow in early drafts. West left off work on this novel in 1944, but finally finished and published it more than twenty years later as the best-selling The Birds Fall Down (1966). A significant amount of West's work was nevertheless unfinished and unpublished at the time of her death in 1983: an epic study of Mexico; five novels, including the final volume of her autobiographical family trilogy, Cousin Rosamund: A Saga of the Century; and her autobiographical memoir, Family Memories. ¹ With the exception of the Mexican study, these unfinished works are all autobiographical and derive from some of her more ambivalent personal relationships. The unfinished but posthumously published Sunflower (1986), for example, fictionalizes her highly emotional transition from a volatile ten-year relationship with H.G. Wells to a brief but failed romantic relationship with William Maxwell Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. ² West's perhaps most conflicted relationship, that with her son by Wells, Anthony West, was to have been fictionally treated in Mild Silver, Furious Gold, a novel West which outlined in a letter to her publisher, but for which she left behind only multiple drafted beginnings that remained undeveloped.

"Unfinished novels are horrid to read" A.S. Byatt proclaimed when she reviewed Sunflower for Books and Bookmen, ³ and some scholars might agree, finding unfinished works to be inconclusive and therefore undeserving of critical attention. Yet one of West's biographers, Carl Rollyson, believes that we find important evidence of her art and craft in West's unfinished works, nonfiction as well as fiction:

In some ways, West's truncated Mexican epic is even more fascinating than her published work, because its multiple drafts reveal how hard she worked at achieving her autobiographical/ historical/ psychological effects. The false starts, the repetitions, the occasional confusions in the ordering of words and phrases—even the illegible words—have a mournful, cryptic fascination. They are her own Mayan ruin. ⁴

West, moreover, was often very specific about the direction she had planned for work left unfinished. In addition to her drafts, she left specific notes, for instance, about the projected ending of Sunflower, ⁵ suggesting that she had no doubts about where she was going after the lengthy completed portion of the novel (267 pages in the Virago edition). She also left behind a four-page typed, single-spaced synopsis of her aborted novel, Mild Silver, Furious Gold.

Such archival evidence about unfinished work reveals conflicted intentions and provides a means to explore the nature of an author's aesthetic choices and tensions—traces usually obscured by final polish, revision, and copy editing. Archival documents and drafts of unfinished fiction expose motivations and writing habits that novels with endings conceal by their formal, public closure. Drafts, revisions, and letters reveal not only the pragmatic reasons a work may have remained uncompleted, but also the private, emotional, and psychological issues which the work raised for its writer, as can be seen in unpublished drafts of Mild Silver, Furious Gold, West's notes for finishing the novel, and her...