How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How to Watch Out for Widows

It may be, dear writers, both male and female, that posterity is of no importance to you; but I don't believe it. Anyone, even the sixteen-year-old who pens a poem about the rustling forest, or the woman who keeps a lifelong diary, merely recording "dentist's appointment this morning," hopes that posterity will cherish those words. For, even if some authors actually desired oblivion, today's publishers are irrepressible in the rediscovery of "forgotten minor writers," even when these never actually wrote a single line.

Posterity, as we know, is voracious and easily pleased. In order to have something to write about, any writing by others will do. Therefore, O writers, you must beware of the use that posterity may make of your work. Naturally, the ideal course would be to leave lying around only the things that, in your lifetime, you had decided to publish, shredding daily any other documentation, including third galleys. But, as we also know, keeping notes as you work is necessary, and death can arrive unexpectedly.

When it does, the first risk is that unpublished material will be published, and will reveal that you were a perfect idiot. And if everyone reads the notes written in the notebook the day before you died, this risk is very strong indeed (particularly because the notes are, inevitably, out of context).

In the absence of notes and notebooks, the second risk is that, immediately post mortem, there will be an epidemic of conferences about your work. Every writer wants to be remembered in essays, doctoral dissertations, critical editions; but these things take time and cash. The immediate conference achieves two results. First, it inspires hordes of friends, admirers, young people in search of fame, to scribble hasty reinterpretations—but, as we know, in such cases they dish up only the familiar gruel, confirming a stereotype. And then, in no time, readers fall out of love with writers so blatantly obvious.

The third risk is that private letters will be published. Writers rarely write private letters that differ from those of ordinary mortals, unless the letters are a pretense, as in the case of Foscolo. They can write "send me some Preparation H" or "I love you like crazy and I thank God that you exist"—which is only normal and natural, and it is pathetic that posterity should seek out these documents simply to conclude that the writer was a human being. What did you think he or she was? A flamingo?

How can such misfortunes be avoided? With notes and notebooks, I would suggest leaving them in an unlikely place, while abandoning in a desk drawer a kind of buried-treasure map indicating the existence of these documents but with undecipherable directions for finding them. This ensures both that the manuscripts will remain hidden and that many dissertations will be written on the sphinx-like impenetrability of those maps.

As for conferences: it might be a good idea to leave precise testamentary instructions, asking, in the name of Humankind, that for every conference held within ten years of your death, the organizers donate twenty million dollars to UNICEF. It will be hard to raise the sum, and few will be so brazen as to go against the express wishes of the deceased.

The love-letter problem is more complex. For those yet to be written it is a good idea to use the computer, thus thwarting graphologists; sign them with affectionate nicknames ("Your puppy dog, Fur-rikins"), changing names for each lover, so attribution will prove problematical. It is also advisable to include phrases that, however impassioned, are embarrassing for the addressee ("I love everything about you, even your flatulence"), who will thus be dissuaded from publishing.

Letters already written, especially during adolescence, are beyond revision, however. For these, the best course is to track down the recipient and write a note recalling in tranquillity those bygone days; and promising that even after your death you will revisit the scene, still in the thrall of those memories. This doesn't always work, but a ghost is, after all, a ghost; and the recipient will not sleep well after that.

You could also keep a fake diary, including occasional suggestions that friends and lovers had a tendency to invent and to falsify. "What a delightful liar dear Adelaide is," or "Today Reginald showed me a fake letter from Pessoa: a really admirable job."

1990