Imagine Edgar Allen Poe’s brooding poem The Raven had instead been titled The Parrot. The idea has one shuddering like the “midnight dreary”; the very thought conjures the antic squawk of “Who’s a pretty boy, then?”, never mind the indelible line “Nevermore”. It almost happened, though, and is one of the many enlightening editorial roads not taken in Write Cut Rewrite.
A reader can happily rummage across the cutting-room floors of various writers, as they “killed their darlings”, in this smartly presented volume: we see Austen, Bennett, Chandler, Kafka, Imlah, Oswald, Pym, the Shelleys and so on work through cuts, revisions, alternative endings, censorship, an editor’s judiciousness or repurposing a text altogether.
Write Cut Rewrite is packed with fascinating manuscripts, drafts and scraps of work yet to take final form, alongside astute analysis from the authors. (The focus is on modern manuscripts, classified here as no older than the 18th century; and fret not, as there is plenty from the digital age, too.)
There are glimpses of the little paper left behind by Jane Austen, as her manuscripts to a large extent were tossed as soon as published (manuscripts of contemporary male poets were preserved as relics of their genius)
Pity the poor bugger who had to transcribe Beckett’s headache-inducing hand (his manuscript of Not I is one of many pieces of his archive found here). All the same it is fascinating to see what he cancelled in early versions of his writing, forcing himself to revise and rewrite akin to Louise Bourgeois’ aphorism, “I do, I undo and I redo.”
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Oftentimes Beckett would scribble on the right page and doodle on the left, allowing his mind to wander; a necessary distraction, perhaps, for a writer who would polish his words to make them rougher. Christina Rossetti’s poetry notebooks, meanwhile, are things of beauty, written in graceful script – and yet it did not restrain her from ripping off parts of a page containing a rejected stanza (tearing one’s heart out through poetry, if you will).
It’s a book best dipped into, to fully absorb the chimerical creativity: James Joyce’s “notesnatching” working towards Finnegans Wake; glimpses of the little paper left behind by Jane Austen, as her manuscripts to a large extent were tossed as soon as published (manuscripts of contemporary male poets were preserved as relics of their genius, it should be noted); John le Carré grafting for six months on the opening of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; or Wilfred Owen valiantly striving towards “the old lie” in Dulce et decorum est. An ideal excuse for breaking away from your writing desk.
