Unfinished

This imposing house in Kent

was once the setting for one of literature's greatest mysteries.

Our story begins in 1870,

on the 8th June, around about six o'clock in the evening.

On that particular day,

Charles Dickens had been hard at work on his latest novel.

He'd worked for eight hours solid, which was unusual for him -

he preferred working in shorter bursts.

And that evening here at Gad's Hill, which is now a school.

He came down to the dining room

to have dinner with his sister-in-law, Miss Hogarth.

Almost as soon as he entered,

he started complaining of a toothache,

and immediately, he collapsed and lost consciousness and never recovered.

He died shortly afterwards, and he'd never complete his final novel,

even though the first three instalments already being published,

gripping the nation, leaving his audience with this unquenchable thirst for resolution.

The Mystery Of Edwin Drood is one of the most perplexing

and celebrated unfinished masterpieces in English literature.

It's a story that continues to haunt us and entice us.

I'm going to try and prize open our fascination with this

and other unfinished masterpieces

that some of our greatest authors and artists have left behind.

Dickens' death before he got to complete his final masterpiece

is one of the great frustrations of British literature.

And more than 100 years later with a new drama adaptation on the BBC,

we're still trying to solve his riddle

and find the right ending for this tantalising tale.

KNOCKING AT DOOR

Rosa! To your room this minute!

-What is it?

-When did you last see Edwin?

-Yesterday afternoon. Why?

You saw or heard nothing of him last night?

What has happened to Eddie?

He departed my house last night with Neville Landless

and he never came home.

Neville left at first light to walk by the coast.

Thank you, Miss Twinkleton.

What Dickens left us in the few chapters he had completed

was a cast of brilliant characters, and a riveting mystery to solve.

Edwin Drood is the nephew of John Jasper, a choirmaster

who becomes obsessed with Drood's fiancee, Rosa.

Jasper seems respectable, but he has secrets.

He's addicted to opium, and he has designs on the underage Rosa.

So when his nephew disappears, the finger points at him.

There's a certain irony to the fact that

of all the works he could have left unfinished,

Dickens managed to die in the middle of a murder mystery,

leaving behind a whodunnit that could never be solved.

It's fiendishly frustrating.

The full title is The Mystery Of Edwin Drood.

We don't know what's happened to Edwin,

whether Jasper has killed him

and he's buried under the cloisters in the cathedral.

The Mystery Of Edwin Drood is a special case, I think,

of an excitement to want to complete on the part of the reader

because we know that Dickens had a plan for it, cos he always did.

We know that he had a plot

and its incompletion is like

the incompletion one might imagine of an Agatha Christie novel

or a John le Carre novel.

It was designed as a puzzle and it's the perfect puzzle.

We'll never know, I mean, everyone who's tried to - as it were -

complete it, it's like completing an incomplete game of chess,

after two or three moves you don't know where the game is going to go.

One question is whether Dickens himself

knew where this story was going.

The actual manuscript that Dickens left behind still exists,

here at the Victoria and Albert Museum,

so I'm going to take a look at it.

Volume Two.

And we turn to the end.

This is the manuscript of Edwin Drood.

-It looks very...

-This is bizarre, looking at this!

Here is this kind of cacophonous page of writing with crossings-out

and different coloured ink and messy bits and neater passages.

So there's a real sense of a mind at work here.

Cacophonous is a very good word, actually.

Dickens is always working at a frenetic pace, as you know.

One's feeling is when you see this that he's throwing the words down.

Some passages come out totally clear, others he has to revise.

I'm very glad to have seen this

because Dickens has such a teeming, fertile imagination,

it would have been an immense disappointment to find

a very crabbed, precise handwriting style

that he was writing in his original manuscript.

So this is the very last page?

It's the last page.

"And then falls to with an appetite."

And then there's this kind of spiralling flourish.

Of course, this was written within hours of him collapsing

-and having a stroke at Gad's Hill, shortly before he died.

-Yes.

I mean, this was in the final 24 to 48 hours of his life.

He's not supposing that he won't start with renewed energy

the next time he sits down to produce the next chapter.

Don't you love that the last word he wrote was appetite?

There couldn't be a more Dickensian word.

But the thing that's so, in a sense, moving but also slightly frustrating

about looking at the manuscript

is this idea that because you look at it in his own hand,

it feels so intimate and close to him and to the workings of his mind

that this reminds us that we're all locked inside

the fortress of our own solitude, of our own identity and individuality.

This doesn't reveal anything about Dickens, does it,

in terms of what he was going to do with the story?

It FEELS like it must, there must be a clue here

but what we're left with is just this fainter and fainter line

going down the page.

o, no clues in the manuscript, but back at Gad's Hill,

Dickens' ancestor - the biographer Lucinda Hawksley -

might be able to help.

Could we talk a little bit about the whole sort of make-up

of Dickens' imagination?

Do we know where Dickens got the plot for Edwin Drood from?

Was it a figment of his imagination or inspired by real-life events or what?

It was a little bit of both and he started off,

he wrote to John Forster and...

-Who was Forster?

-Sorry, his best friend and his first biographer.

And Dickens wrote to him and said that he was going to do a story

of a young couple who'd been intended for each other from childhood by their families,

who go their separate ways in the world.

A very simple love story is how he almost described it really,

and at the end of the book they would come to their "impending fate" as he called it - marriage.

Then he wrote to Forster in 1869,

so just ten months before he died

and he said that he'd decided to turn it into

a murder of a nephew by his uncle.

We know from his time in America

that Dickens had been very interested in a real-life murder

that had happened there.

There was a chap called Parkman who was a moneylender

and he had a client who was Professor Webster

who owed him around 2,000, which he just couldn't afford to pay.

It was known that Parkman was going to expose Webster.

Parkman went to Harvard to meet the professor and was never seen again.

From that moment on, Webster kept his laboratory locked

and eventually the body or parts of the body were discovered

when the janitor - who'd become very curious by all this -

actually broke through the brickwork to enter the laboratory that way

and found human remains.

It's known that Webster had burned Dr Parkman's clothing

and he'd also thrown the doctor's watch into the river, in the hope...

-That's what happened in the novel!

-Yes.

-The watch appears in the river.

-Absolutely.

-Is the conclusion of this then,

Dickens had killed off Edwin Drood by the time of his death?

I don't know if we can.

That was his intention originally in August of 1869

but I don't know if we can say for certain

because Dickens liked to change and keep his readers guessing.

Part of the reason the mystery is so tantalising

is that it is unresolved, we don't know whether he has been murdered.

Exactly and he does say in the same letter to Forster

that it's a very good plot but it's difficult to bring about.

So, he says he doesn't want to give away all of the plot

because that would make the book unreadable.

So actually, he was even having double thoughts at the time.

For months after his death,

the obituaries mourned Dickens's characters

as much as the man himself.

It's as if the vivacity of the characters

that sprung from Dickens's fertile imagination,

gave them a life off the page

that almost demanded further attention.

This, coupled with the murder mystery format of Drood

was just too much for a clamorous public.

The desire for a finished Edwin Drood became like an itch

that needed to be scratched.

There have been all manner of attempts

to complete The Mystery Of Edwin Drood.

Already in 1873, for example,

which is only three years after Dickens' death,

an American writer called Thomas James

attempted to finish the novel

claiming that he'd been possessed by Dickens's ghost

and the books enjoyed afterlives in a number of different media as well.

I mean, there was a film, a gothic horror movie in 1935

with Claude Rains, who starred in Casablanca,

and my favourite I think,

in the '80s there was a Broadway musical version.

It won five Tony awards. It was the first musical ever

to invite the audience to decide on the ending, every single night.

And certainly for the latest person to finish the tale,

this time for the BBC,

reviving the characters that Dickens so brilliantly sketched

has been the key to completing The Mystery Of Edwin Drood.

I started off looking at the clues that he left behind

and I soon found they were quite self-contradictory.

And some of them didn't work,

and some got in the way of the story, particularly in this book,

where he was writing in such a dark and almost Gothic new style for him.

The characters just spring out of the page at you.

They are the reason people love this book.

In fact, I was helped very much in my wanderings

by Dickens' favourite daughter, Katie,

who counselled everybody at the time.

She said, "Don't get too hung-up..."

I'm paraphrasing!

"Don't get too hung-up on the mystery.

"Remember what my father loved and was good at,

"which was his fantastic

"and strange insight into the mysteries of the human heart."

Fortified by Katie the favourite daughter,

I felt emboldened to go with the characters,

to go where I felt they were going to take me.

In the end, the person whose desires

I most wanted to follow to the end of the story

was John Jasper, the hero of the story.

The dark, controlling, mad figure right at the heart of this story.

I always knew where I wanted to end up with John Jasper,

this wonderful anti-hero.

I always knew where he would end up.

And if you've seen the thing already, you'll know that he ends up dead.

He sort of... He's a tragic hero. He needs to die.

It needs to go so horribly wrong for him that the only outcome is death.

And I hope the nation weeps at the loss of him,

even though he's a really horrible person.

'Choose the light. Our Father, who art in heaven...

'Jasper, won't you join me?

'Our Father, who art in heaven...'

Hallowed be Thy name...

-'Hallowed be Thy name...'

-Jack!

-'Thy kingdom come...'

Thy will be done...

No!

When you talked about your process,

it sounded like you left Dickens behind altogether

and you imagined John Jasper.

Were there ever times when you're sitting at your desk in the room next door

where you would suddenly think,

"This is quite an enormous thing I'm taking on.

"Dickens is one of a handful of the greatest geniuses in English literature

"and I'm now trying to complete the novel

"and in a different medium.

"Is that right? Is it wrong?"

Those questions must have troubled you at points.

Yes, there were points when I felt,

"Oh, Lord, I'll never scale this mountain.

"This is just too difficult.

"I'm just little me and he's Charles Dickens..."

A giant in every way, a man I love and respect.

But I think, because I love and respect him, it's OK.

I think it's OK.

I just sat on his lap and listened to what he said,

and sometimes he did object, so I took it out!

And just tried to do something he would have liked,

but not worrying about what he wanted to do.

I did what I wanted to do with the story, with his characters,

in a respectful and loving way.

I'm sure Gwyneth is ultra-meticulous in reviving Dickens's characters,

but she's aided by the fact

that she's adapting something for TV,

something that was originally designed to be read.

It's an important point to remember,

because when you're making a drama adaptation,

in a sense, you bypass the voice of the author altogether -

his or her distinctive prose style -

and concentrate instead on the words of the characters.

I wonder whether if you're commissioned to complete an unfinished novel

that means in fact you face a tougher challenge altogether?

In most cases, for an ordinary reader,

we feel a connection with the writer of the book.

As in, famously, Catcher In The Rye, where the narrator says,

if you read a really good book,

you want to ring up the author and talk to them.

And all readers recognise that emotion.

And so it becomes very strange if you're ringing up somebody else.

What we expect when we read a novel by Austen or Dickens,

or Laurence Sterne or whoever, is actually a certain voice, really.

And it may be the voice of a character

rather than the voice of the author,

but that's terribly difficult to bring off.

And, in a sense, even if somebody brings it off,

the reader won't read it as the genuine thing -

they'll read it as burlesque or pastiche.

And that already kind of undermines it.

A whole industry has grown up around the unfinished novel,

of so-called "continuators" -

authors who attempt new endings to old stories.

But honestly, how successful can they really be?

There's another great author who left behind an unfinished work.

'Jane Austen also died in the middle of writing her last novel,

'and I wonder whether her fans really care to have it "continued"?'

It was against the blustery backdrop

of a seaside resort in Sussex called Sanditon

that the characters of Jane Austen's last and unfinished novel

lived their brief and aborted lives.

'When Austen began writing Sanditon in January 1817,

'she was already in delicate health.

'She died six months later,

'with just 11 chapters complete.

'But the scene was already set.'

So Sanditon is a new coastal resort with very grand ambitions,

because its inhabitants

are determined to put the town on the map,

and cash in on this recent vogue

for holidaying by the British seaside.

It's quite a claustrophobic community,

but under Austen's expert eye, it offers an opportunity

for whip-smart social satire about hypochondria, commercial greed,

and what happens when a fresh-faced singleton suddenly arrives in town.

I was hoping to read you a bit of description about the town,

but we're enjoying such a blustery British seaside weather

that I'm a bit worried the book's going to blow away!

You'll just have to take it from me

that the book's actually a very good read.

I was going to say that we've come to Sanditon, but we haven't -

-it's Eastbourne!

-Eastbourne.

Because Sanditon is supposed to be an up-and-coming seaside resort.

It's all a terrific joke.

There's this foolish Parker family.

Mr Tom Parker, who actually owns the village, the estate of Sanditon,

is trying to turn it into the best seaside resort.

And we can see that Sanditon

is going to turn into a cold turkey, a dead duck.

All Mr Parker's great ideas

are probably going to fall flat on their face.

We know it's unfinished.

There are 12 chapters, but there may have been up to 30.

But what about the actual quality of the prose?

Are we looking at something which is a final draft up to that point?

Or would this have been revised had she lived?

Well, people do comment that despite the fact she was so ill,

there's no sense of illness in the story.

It's very funny. It rushes along.

And this is part of the sadness of why it's unfinished,

because it was obviously going to be very long and very funny.

How do you feel about the idea of other authors attempting to complete it?

Well, I mean, would you want to copy Jane Austen's style?

COULD you copy her style?

People now and then do try, and it's so obvious that it's not hers.

And they'd have to know an awful lot about the social history of the period,

which all too many of the people who do try and write completions and sequels and continuations,

they just don't, and it's so obvious.

So, to finish, or not to finish? That is the question.

Is it better to have half an original Austen,

or a full story completed by a more recent writer?

'I thought I'd do a bit of a straw poll.'

-Excuse me, hello, I'm Alastair.

-Hi, Alastair.

Excuse me, sir. Hello. I'd like to give you a book.

By Jane Austen - her last novel, called Sanditon,

possibly partly inspired by Eastbourne.

-Are you a Jane Austen fan?

-No!

The only catch is that she died before she completed it.

-You want us to finish it off for you?

-If you could!

You haven't heard of it?

Not that many people have.

-It's partly because she never finished it.

-Ah!

What I would love would be for you

to choose either to take away a copy of the incomplete novel -

just her words -

or there are some people who got to it before you did,

and tried to complete it.

So you get the whole story with this one, but not necessarily the whole story that Austen herself imagined.

The choice is yours, Barry!

I don't mind reading the unfinished one, because you can put your own ending to it.

You'd rather have the incomplete, would you? Because it's shorter?

Yeah, I can see me reading that. It's not going to take me too long, is it?

I would go for the half-finished one.

Half-finished? Right, that's one for you. Can I ask why?

Because the inspiration and the character

came from an original author,

and I don't see how someone else can pick it up and do the same thing.

So the idea of the complete one is a bit of a turn-off because it's not her original...?

It's not her writing. Yes.

You don't think that if the writer was sufficiently brilliant

they could get into the mindset of the original author, and complete it?

If they were that brilliant, why would they want to? Why not just do their own thing?

You're going to give this to me?

It's a gift from me to you, Barry!

-Thank you very much.

-Not at all!

It's lovely in Eastbourne, normally!

-Do I get to keep this?

-Yes. Enjoy it! Bye-bye.

I'll tell you what puzzles me.

If attempting to complete a Dickens is so controversial

or finishing an Austen is always going to be seen as second best,

then, in a sense, why bother in the first place?

Surely it's the literary equivalent of a suicide mission?

Or perhaps our desire as readers

to keep characters alive and here to the end

is so strong that, after all, we don't really mind?

Frank Kermode wrote a book called Sense Of An Ending.

And one of the bases of what he was saying in that book is that

all our ideologies in the West are teleological.

They're going somewhere - the final judgement,

the withering away of the State if you're a Marxist.

And so, to some extent, we're all wired for conclusions.

Very famously, Kermode came up with the observation that

when we hear a clock go "tick tick tick",

what we hear is "tick tock", because we like beginnings and endings.

"Every tick," he said, "is a genesis. Every tock is a feeble apocalypse."

That is, to some extent, how we frame our universe.

So, we're, as it were, motivated like lemmings going over a cliff.

We're motivated to look for endings.

One of the principles of any art is that it's unified.

And so they expect that all the elements in the work somehow

thematically or structurally relate

to all the other elements in the work.

And that it'll all be tied with closure.

-I have a plan, sir...

-Really, Baldrick? A cunning and subtle one?

Yes, sir.

As cunning as a fox who's just been appointed

-Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?

-Yes, sir.

A work of literature takes its meaning from the ending.

Whatever it was, I'm sure it was better than my plan

to get out of this by pretending to be mad.

Who would've noticed another madman around here?

Blackadder Goes Forth

is perhaps the darkest sitcom there's ever been,

because they all die at the end of it.

And if you took that scene off it, it becomes a comedy,

a lighter comedy, in which they might have survived.

And this is important.

So if you have an unfinished story,

then, at quite an important level, it's meaningless.

-Good luck, everyone.

-WHISTLES BLOW

-Go!

So we're culturally hardwired to want an ending.

We expect closure and we desire the meaning

that only endings can deliver.

Fair enough.

But can it ever be the case that all these ingredients are contained

WITHIN an unfinished novel or a painting?

For instance, there's the case of the famous unfinished portrait

of one of America's greatest presidents.

This is a reproduction of the portrait

of the first American president, George Washington.

It was begun in 1796

by the charming, fashionable portrait painter, Gilbert Stuart.

And it went on to become quite a famous image.

It didn't have very auspicious beginnings, for two reasons.

Firstly, the president recently had acquired a new set of false teeth,

which meant that his jaw line bulged in a disturbing way,

which wasn't very flattering, and Stuart had to negotiate that.

Secondly, Stuart normally tried to liven up his sitters

by engaging them with repartee and banter,

but Washington proved to be quite a dry old stick.

He wouldn't really liven up at all until Stuart eventually

engaged him on the president's favourite subject of horses.

But in spite of Stuart's efforts, the painting remained unfinished.

In fact, at some stage, the painter just stopped trying to complete it,

and instead put his efforts into reproducing it almost a hundred times

and selling it in its unfinished state.

I'm curious as to why he did this,

and why the portrait was so desirable nevertheless.

So I've come to a patch of the US in the UK to find out more.

Thank you for inviting me into your office.

I feel like I'm in an episode of The West Wing, but we're in Edinburgh.

The first thing that's obvious when you come into the office

is there is a replica of Gilbert Stuart's famous portrait of George Washington.

And you can see at once, even though it's cropped, the thing was never finished.

Why do you think it was incomplete?

I have a theory that he didn't finish it on purpose,

because it did generate buzz,

it did generate enthusiasm.

People did pay a lot of money at that time for replicas of that painting,

so I think it was his way of creating a commercial interest in it.

What does that portrait mean, if you like, to most Americans?

I think most people who look at portraits of George Washington,

especially this one, because it's one of the best-known,

probably feel a sense of pride and affection for their first president.

And not just in an abstract or historic context, either.

Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Washington

has been copied on to the one-dollar bill,

which has been in circulation in the United States for over a century.

As a result,

it's now one of the most recognisable symbols of America.

The US one-dollar bill is the most widely circulated note in America

and a lot of gentlemanly bets get done with that one-dollar note.

People with their first business frame that first note they got from their first customer.

Do you think most Americans realise the image of George Washington

on the one-dollar bill is based upon a portrait that was never finished?

I would guess most people don't know it's an unfinished portrait, that they haven't seen the whole thing.

-You are American - right?

-Yes.

-So I'd like to give you this dollar bill.

-Thank you!

What does that image mean to you?

That's George Washington, first president of the US.

This is quite a famous image. Do you know what it's based on?

I believe it's a portrait.

This is a reproduction of the portrait. What are your first impressions?

I guess I assumed it would've been a finished portrait.

Does it seem strange that here's this iconic image,

which is very complete on the dollar bill,

and actually, here's this clearly incomplete sorcery?

I think George Washington is such a major figure in American history,

you can fill in the gaps, even if the portrait painter didn't have time.

There are a lot of artistic works throughout history

that are incomplete.

It's one of those unique things.

Maybe you wish it was finished, or want to know why it wasn't, but it doesn't bother me at all.

Now, thanks to it being used in a different context

on the dollar bill, it has a whole set of associations,

a new narrative, if you like, which feels much more finished,

even though Stuart never had any control over that whatsoever.

Yeah, I think so.

I think you could probably ask millions of Americans

what that portrait means to them, what the dollar bill means to them

or what George Washington means to them

and you would get a million different answers.

But yeah, I think sometimes you don't have to finish something

for there to be a complete story.

With his portrait of Washington,

Gilbert Stuart had told the story his audience needed

without actually finishing.

Perhaps the very unfinished nature of the work reflected the fact

that all Americans knew their own story was only just beginning,

and that, like the painting itself, their nation had a way to go.

This sense of what constitutes the story of a work of art

must therefore be essential.

Sometimes it seems that powerful meaning

can even trump polish and finesse.

But how does this work with the written word?

Is there ever a time where a novel or a poem can feel complete

without being finished?

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Kubla Khan is one of the most famous poems in the English language,

memorable not just for its pulsing, musical originality,

but for the opium-induced reverie in which it was conceived.

According to Coleridge, Kubla Khan isn't actually finished at all.

The story goes, that the entire work,

some two or three hundred lines,

came to him, unbidden, fully formed, in a dream, and upon awaking,

flashing with inspiration, he sat down

and began transcribing this poem.

But he only managed to get through a tantalising 54 lines

before he was interupted by a person on business from Porlock, he says.

By the time that he returned to his desk,

his majestic vision had evaporated.

"Passed away," he wrote, "like images on the surface of a stream

"into which a stone is being cast." At least that's his line.

The thing is, the whole story about this humdrum

mystery visitor from Porlock might just be the biggest tease

in English literary history.

At the time, Coleridge considered Kubla Kahan a mere fragment

and not a serious work.

It was only published about 20 years later at the request of his friend,

the poet, Lord Byron.

Andrew, Kubla Khan is such a beautiful poem,

such a well-known poem, but this idea of its fragmentariness,

if we take his word,

then he was interrupted by this fabled man from Porlock.

I think someone once said that if anyone in the history of literature

deserves to be shot, it's this bloke from Porlock!

I mean, do you buy that story?

Perhaps it is an invention, but, actually, I have to say,

it doesn't really bother me very much.

It must be one of the best-known, best-loved poems in the entire English language,

so people can't be feeling too cheesed off not getting what they paid for!

I guess the thing that intrigues me about Kubla Khan is this idea that,

maybe it's not literally unfinished, maybe it is finished,

-but it's masquerading as an unfinished poem.

-Yeah.

By advertising it as an unfinished poem,

which he goes to some lengths to do,

he appears to want to get out of being responsible

for producing a more finished thing. "The dog ate my homework."

That would be one way of reading it.

I think the other way of reading it, and this seems to me more important,

and certainly more powerfully to do with the purposes of the poem,

is to regard it as something which, in completeness,

is something IS the point of the poem,

that what Coleridge is writing about is how our reach exceeds our grasp,

how our creative visions can never be realised entirely,

and so on, and so forth.

In other words, the fragmentary nature of it is the subject,

it's not a failure, it is the subject.

The shadow of the dome of pleasure floated midway on the waves.

Where was heard the mingled measure, from the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

For the Romantics, the creative process was something

mystical and elusive, it was sublime, it was almost God-like,

so, it wasn't all that surprising if things couldn't be finished.

In fact, it was testament to the power of imagination,

that shadowy realm of make-believe inside all our minds,

our heads, that you can never really tame, or transcribe, because,

ultimately, it remains forever measureless to man.

Another famous author left fragments behind him.

By the time that the modernist writer Franz Kafka died in 1924,

he's produced manuscripts of 3 novels,

The Castle, The Trial and Amerika, and not one of them complete.

He left the manuscripts in the hands of his friend Max Brod,

with instructions to burn them, which Brod ignored.

They're now regarded as masterpieces of 20th-century fiction,

their fragmentary nature a reflection of an anxious

and uncertain modern world, where neat endings, or resolutions,

no longer had a place.

Obviously I'm relieved, for the sake of literary history,

that Brod disobeyed his instructions,

isn't there a bigger issue here? Coleridge and Gilbert Stuart,

they knowingly published their unfinished, fragmentary works,

but Kafka himself never intended his novels to be read.

It's pretty clear from everything we know about Kafka's life

that he wanted to have a career as a writer,

I suspect, and it was denied him. So, in those cases it's OK.

I think it is very different from, a writer dies inconveniently

to their family and their publisher, and so they just carry on,

in whatever way they possibly can.

I think with The Trial we have something different,

because I think Kafka was, in some sense, deluded,

or at least hugely over-pessimistic about whether this thing

deserved to survive. I mean, that's the point,

he didn't think it deserved to survive,

and I think he's simply wrong about that.

So, that's OK then, Kafka just got it wrong,

we're all the beneficiaries of his misjudgement,

but what happens when artists or writers

suppress works that just aren't worthy of publication?

What should we do when we come across those?

I'm on my way to meet Dr Jean Moorcroft Wilson,

an academic who recently made an important discovery -

seven previously unpublished poems,

that could completely alter our understanding

of the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Sassoon, like his contemporary, Wilfred Owen,

has always been regarded as someone

who was against the glorification of war.

Instead, he felt compelled to present

its bleak truth to the world.

Sassoon arrived in the trenches in November 1915.

His first poem, The Redeemer,

gives a particularly unsparing account of life on the front line.

We lugged our clay-sucked boots as best we might along the trench.

Sometimes a bullet sang,

and droning shells burst with a hollow bang.

We were soaked, chilled and wretched, every one.

Darkness, the distant wink of a huge gun.

Dr Moorcroft Wilson's discovery was of a series of Sassoon's

unfinished poems that were out of character, to say the least.

One in particular, in contrast to his other work of the time,

depicts war very differently.

This one, Glory 1916, I think, was unpublished

partly because it was unfinished.

Certain decisions hadn't been made,

and certain lines have been duplicated with different versions.

But also because, he perhaps didn't want to be viewed as a man

who hadn't been firm in his movement towards anti-war poetry.

When you say they hadn't been published,

this is his own self-censorship, effectively?

He'd written these poems during the war,

and he'd deliberately decided to suppress the poems you've discovered?

That's all I can conclude. I don't know.

I can't... I'm not in Sassoon's mind.

But I would assume that that is the case, yes.

Because it's not a bad poem, in fact, it's a rather nice poem.

Can we have a look at it?

Yes, of course we can.

So this is a facsimile of the diary itself?

Yes.

This is a facsimile and the poem is opposite the entry for Jan 25th.

You and the winds ride out together.

Your company the world's great weather.

The clouds your plume.

The glittering sky a host of swords in harmony,

with the whole loveliness of light,

flung forth to lead you through the fight.

So he's been in the trenches at this point...

Yes, he's been in the trenches.

..And he's written about the experience as in a poem,

like The Redeemer, which feels quite nightmarish,

and he's suddenly writing glorified war poems?

Yes, and he's comparing himself and his young companion,

who happens to be the man he's in love with in real life,

his young companion, to Sir Galahad.

So, here he is writing Glory 1916. I could hardly believe it!

I had imagined, in my simplicity, that the line

went from glorying war to criticising war, but it doesn't.

It goes backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards.

You're a far cry from a tabloid journalist

rummaging around in someone's bins, but in literary biography,

is this in any way similar?

Essentially, you've found these private notes and diaries

and poems which Sassoon didn't want to see the light of day,

and effectively you are championing them and bringing them out,

and allowing people to engage with them, read them, know them.

That's going to change our understanding of Sassoon.

Is that a morally right thing to do?

I think you're assuming that because he didn't want them published

means that he didn't want them seen.

I don't think he thought they were worthy of publication

because the others were perhaps better.

I think we're really only adding to our knowledge of Sassoon

when we publish this.

And don't forget we only do so with the permission of his family.

We like to think of our artists

and writers as following career trajectories as they develop.

But this suggests something very different.

As a biographer, I love the fact that it suggests something very different.

I much prefer it if he gives me a surprise.

And this gives me the sense that I don't know Sassoon

as thoroughly as I thought I did.

Good. I'm glad about that.

It means I can go on indefinitely writing biographies of Siegfried Sassoon.

You know, thinking about Siegfried Sassoon has made me reconsider

our whole attitude to unfinished works of art and literature.

Because the poem Glory 1916 to me, just seems to creak a bit.

All that Arthurian rhetoric just feels false

and fanciful compared to the blunt and much earthier power

of other poems from the same period like The Redeemer.

So perhaps Sassoon didn't want to publish it for a reason.

And perhaps we should respect those wishes?

Perhaps we don't automatically have the right to publish

an author's unfinished work after all.

I always argue for publishing art

even when it isn't as good as it might be.

There are two alternatives.

One is that we destroy it,

that we actually burn the manuscript ourselves,

in which case I think we're basically Nazis.

Or we lock it away in an archive

and what we say is only scholars can have access to it,

only the rich can have access to it

because they can get on a plane and fly across the world to the archive.

Or even if the archive becomes for sale,

then private collectors can have it and really lock it away.

So, actually publishing is a far more democratic mode

that says this will be available to anyone that can come up with a tenner

and then again we can make distinctions,

we can make judgement calls about what its value might be.

There is a tendency to think that the dead person would have wanted what most suits us.

For example, Ernest Hemingway.

Books have appeared posthumously

which he would never have imagined existing.

They come from collections of notes or things that he left unfinished

and somebody else has shaped them into a book.

I think you have to be so, so careful with that.

In fact, I think it is wrong

because that is a form of literary necrophilia

in which you are completely altering the shape of an artist's life.

Literary necrophilia could also describe the phenomenon

of extending a writer's body of work after their death.

I'm not talking about cobbling together notebooks or unfinished works.

I'm talking about hiring writers to create entirely new stories.

Recently, both Sherlock Holmes

and James Bond have been reincarnated to die another day.

Call me cynical but I'm assuming the reasons for extending franchises like that

are ultimately financial, commercial.

The man I want to ask about this is Jonny Geller,

a literary agent who works here in central London.

He looks after on of the biggest estates of them all,

that of Ian Fleming, author of James Bond.

MUSIC: "James Bond" by Scouting For Girls

# 007, Britain's finest secret agent, licensed to kill

# Mixing business with girls and thrills

# I've seen you walk the screen It's you that I adore

# Since I was a boy I've wanted to be like Roger Moore

# A girl in every port And gadgets up my sleeve

# The world is not enough For the both of us it seems

# So I wish I was James Bond Just for the day

# Kissing all the girls Blow the bad guys away... #

There's a tradition of inviting great writers to carry on the character

and the role of the estate and my help

is to try and keep the integrity of the character alive

with really the intention that people go back

to those great novels that he wrote.

Bond saw luck as a woman, to be softly wooed

or brutally ravaged, never pandered to or pursued.

But he was honest enough that he had never yet been made to suffer by cards or women.

One day, he accepted the fact

he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck.

When you say "integrity of the character", do you mean

literally how we think about James Bond

or Ian Fleming's prose style? Because they could be slightly different things.

It's mixture of both. Ian Fleming's prose style -

so that it's not written in a completely different way

because modern thrillers have a completely different tone and pace.

And the other side of it is would James Bond,

in the way Ian Fleming wrote it, have done this thing?

How consistent is that with the character?

How do you go about choosing the writers who become Ian Fleming?

Actually, fundamentally a love of Ian Fleming's writing.

There's no point just hiring someone who just thinks it'll be a good opportunity

because it will show through.

And every writer who has done the Ian Fleming continuation

including Charlie Higson who had a very successful series of Young Bond,

they grew up reading Ian Fleming and they love it.

That is genuine and it comes through in the writing.

You can't do this cynically, strangely.

Very often authors finish a work

and then find that their audiences,

their readerships won't let them finish it.

So, for instance, Conan Doyle kills Sherlock Holmes,

has him fall in a fatal embrace into the Reichenbach Falls with Professor Moriarty

But then of course the readership, the Holmesians,

those who feel that life is meaningless

unless they have the sleuth of 221B Baker Street, demand that he comes back.

So he's brought back from the dead.

Sherlock is another character who seems to resist endings.

Having survived his own fictional death,

and that of his creator Conan Doyle, he's back.

After almost a century, he's here again,

re-born in Anthony Horowitz's new Sherlock mystery, The House of Silk.

"Indeed, Watson. But there is one thing

"I would particularly like to know,

"for I am beginning to see great danger in this situation."

He glanced at the fountain of the stone figures in the frozen circle of water.

"I wonder if Mrs Catherine Carstairs is able to swim?"

It's interesting that Holmes, Bond, they're genre fiction.

Genre fiction, even more than literary fiction,

depends on the construction of believable characters.

It's always character-driven.

That means we get to know and like the characters.

We do not want them killed off. We are cross if they are killed off.

So, there's a kind of Houdini-like thing.

What does Conan Doyle have to do to kill Sherlock Holmes?

How deep an abyss does he have to fall into not to be able to crawl out again?

It's absolutely fascinating.

However completed a story be, we imagine what happens after it.

Imagining what happens after it

is one of our most important responses to a story that has really gripped us.

You get to the end of The Odyssey and Odysseus is home

and he kills his rivals and he's back with his wife.

End of story. Perhaps the greatest story even told.

But for many people over the centuries,

it's not necessarily the end.

Tennyson wrote a wonderful poem, Ulysses.

Imagine what it would then be like for this epic hero after the end.

Because how could such a person settle down to suburban existence in Ithaca?

I feel quite nostalgic looking at these books in front of me.

I didn't actually own these precise copies when I was little

but they're representative of a particular genre I enjoyed.

Adventure books in which you, as a kid reading the book, shaped the narrative.

So here are several examples.

And one of the big things about these books is that they have many different endings.

Loads of different endings, tens of different endings.

This one says choose from 28 endings. There's one here that has 39 endings.

There are as many as 42 endings. Look how small that book is.

It must be nothing but endings, in a sense.

I think part of the reason these appealed to me so much

is that... I'm trying to think of the purest,

most innocent aesthetic response you could have ever

and it would have been when you're reading a book as a kid

and you're utterly immersed in that imaginary world that the author has created

and you don't want it to end.

The beauty of these adventure books is that they never really did have to end.

You could almost anticipate when the narrative was trying to shape your response

and create an ending and you could defer it.

You could deliberately complicate the narrative

so that it would never come to a conclusion.

But, actually, as an adult these days it's no different.

Perhaps now the idea of never finishing,

never letting go of our favourite characters

is as hard-wired into our narrative expectations

as the need for endings and closure was in Dickens' time.

In fact, you begin to wonder if Dickens were alive today,

whether he would be allowed to finish ANYTHING

or, like the writers of the Archers or EastEnders,

he'd be forever delivering endings that set up new beginnings.

One of the great unfinished works of art,

and obviously I would claim it as this, is Coronation Street.

That sense that you get the feeling it's never going to end.

Corrie, EastEnders, Brookside in its day

or Frasier, Friends, whatever it is.

The point about these are that they're people.

They become part of our lives,

we want them back and we won't let them go.

The television series promises the most,

I believe, remarkable expansion of the storytelling arts ever in history

and this ability to get it in a book or a box and download it

and watch at your convenience

and watch it season after season, hundreds of hours of material.

If the writers can create characters that are fascinating

and empathetic over a long period of years like that,

then the complexity of story will rival life.

Arguably the most influential TV drama series of the noughties,

described as the greatest pop culture masterpiece of its day,

The Sopranos was a story of everyday mafia folk.

Tony Soprano wrestled with the conflicting demands

of being a mobster as well as an ordinary family man.

The series lasted almost a decade before it ran out of steam.

Tony Soprano keeps fascinating us over and over

cos he's got relationships with his family, his professional family,

the FBI, the ducks on his pond, his psychiatrist, all of his mistresses.

And because of this incredible cast of characters,

Tony Soprano is endlessly surprising,

endlessly revealing.

And just when you think you know Tony Soprano, you really don't.

Until you do.

And when they reached that point after eight years,

he was exhausted. There was nothing left in Tony to expose.

The series conclusion was feverishly anticipated.

Would Tony finally get clipped?

A mafia assassination seemed on the cards

but it was a show that continually defied expectations.

So what did happen to Tony Soprano?

Strangely, even after the final credits rolled,

many felt that the story was left unfinished.

Those craving some kind of conclusion,

which they felt they deserved after eight years of watching this particular programme.

They thought they didn't get it.

For those of us weaned on Twin Peaks and The Prisoner,

programmes like this that ended without ending

but in a funny sort of way opened up all sorts of possibilities,

it was the perfect happy ending.

I'm on my way to meet the British film director Mike Figgis

just to have a chat about that famously controversial ending of The Sopranos

because he directed a single episode in season five

and I'd love to hear his take.

I think he's... Ah, perfect. Thank you. He's just in here.

Thanks.

I mean, obviously you didn't direct the final episode,

but it's famously controversial and I'd love to hear your take on it.

Press play.

In the final scene, the Soprano family are due to meet for dinner in their favourite restaurant.

There's an uneasy sense, as there has been throughout the series,

that there may be a price to pay for Tony's violent Mafia lifestyle.

Despite the apparent normality of the diner, the camerawork suggests

that every character who swims into vision could be an assassin.

Mm, onion rings...

Because we'd been brought up on The Godfather and Scorsese's Mean Streets and all the rest of it,

we understand the film genre called, you know, the Mafia.

We expect them to get it.

And actually, given the history of The Sopranos,

we expect them to get it in the most horrifically bloodthirsty way.

The minute we see cars having a hard time parking, and backing in,

we expect a car bomb, or we expect someone to get out and go,

"Lady, can I give you a hand?" And then bombs through the window.

You know what the shot will look like. It'll be shattered glass,

blood sprayed on the glass.

There's only a small number of cliches about how Mafia killings are depicted in film.

As if the tension weren't ramped up enough, there's also the knowledge

that in a matter of minutes, the end must come

and the show must finish.

MUSIC: "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey

Focus on the good times.

Don't be sarcastic.

The song that is used at the end of the entire programme

is Don't Stop Believing, the Journey version.

And it actually ends on "don't stop".

You know, "stop" is the last word. And I do love that because it's using the classic example

of the song that would always be used for a big, joyous, climactic,

happy ending, closure, resolution.

But it's using it at the exact moment...well, the exact opposite.

# Street light people

# Oh-oh

# Don't stop... #

Whoa!

I've never seen that before.

But I can see why it's controversial.

How much more satisfying that was in the long term.

-Why is it more satisfying?

-Because we're still talking about it.

If you can come up with a device

where you, the writer, director and so on, the creators of this,

can take the audience to somewhere where, almost like they close the last minute,

then your imagination can continue with those characters.

And somewhere in that virtual film space, we can conjecture ourselves,

rather like reading a book, what may or may not have happened to all of them.

# Somewhere in the night... #

So, is that it?

Today we have never-endings rather than conclusions.

I think so. I get the sense that in the 21st century,

we want to keep the story expanding and keep the conversation going.

# Don't stop believing

# Hold on to that feeling

# Street light people

# Don't stop... #

# Street light people

# Oh-oh

# Don't stop believing

# Hold on to that feeling

# Street light people... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd