Leave unfinished works alone - let their authors rest in peace
Stephen Moss writing in The Guardian, Wednesday 8 April 2009

The news that bestselling author Michael Crichton, (pic left), who died last year, is to rise from the grave with two new novels raises the thorny issue of completions. Two texts have been discovered on his computer - a historical thriller that is more or less complete and a science fiction novel of which one-third is finished. His publisher, HarperCollins, now plans to rush them into print, with the latter to be completed by a sympathetic writer working from the author's notes and plot outlines.
Don't do it! Leave his work be: publish it as he left it, and let Crichton fans try to work out his intentions for themselves.

The urge to complete - exemplified by the numerous attempts to conclude Charles Dickens' unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood - is based on a misconception: that only a finished work is of interest. The reverse is true: unfinished works are often the most interesting of all.

Schubert was a great non-completer, but happily kept everything he wrote: his two-movement Unfinished Symphony is perfect in its unfinishedness, while the hundreds of attempted completions have sunk without trace. My favourite Schubert piano sonata is No 15 (posthumously nicknamed the "Reliquie"): again, just two completed movements, but flawless. He sketched two other movements, but to attempt a completion would be absurd.

Art relies on a unity of conception: no completer (with one exception) can see into the artist's soul. No one would dream of completing Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi.

Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu was unfinished and the final volume is littered with inconsistencies, but again no one would dare to tidy them up - it is tonally and philosophically complete.

Ditto Kafka's Amerika - enjoy its unfinishedness. Bruckner's Ninth Symphony is missing its projected final movement, yet is a matchless summation of the composer's career. Toscanini preferred not to play Alfano's accomplished completion of Puccini's Turandot at the opera's premiere in 1926. Instead, in the middle of Act III, he laid down his baton, turned to the audience and said: "Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died." What completion could compete with that gesture?

And the exception? Süssmayr's magnificent piecing together of Mozart's Requiem - a magical transmutation perhaps explained by the fact that he worked with the dying Mozart on the score and grasped the meaning beyond the notes.

But in general the rule should be: publish what was written when the artist abandoned the work or died. That is what will happen with David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, which will appear next year, and one hopes with the unpublished works that JD Salinger has supposedly been accumulating since he stopped publishing almost half a century ago. Nabokov understood the complex relations of author, editor, commentator and audience, and in his novel Pale Fire, he ...
• At this point, Stephen had to leave for a suddenly remembered dental appointment.