Percey Shelley

“As the dust settles after all the to-ing and fro-ing over Kafka’s papers,” observes MIchael Rosen in a thoughtful report for the Guardian, “it seems a good time to ask some questions about who, exactly, owns literature.” Yes, it’s another provocative moment in our recently intensifying questioning of copyright and the public domain.

Rosen notes that “We can easily envisage an owner owning a manuscript while we collectively own and know the piece of literature it contains. But in the case of the works of Kafka that are lying in those safes, we’re not allowed to do that. Both the manuscripts and the literature are in the possession of the owners.”

And he notes it’s not the first time we’ve confronted the withholding of important works of literature by long-dead writers by document owners:

On July 14, 2006, the Guardian reported that a lost poem of Shelley, Poetical Essay, had turned up, and was now in the possession of a “London bookseller”. “This is a wonderful discovery,” the author of the article wrote. “Few Shelley scholars ever believed the poem would resurface and some even doubted its existence.” ….

We know of at least three people who were able to read the poem: the owner, the seller and Professor Henry R Woudhuysen. He published an article about it in the Times Literary Supplement on July 12, 2006. It’s a fine piece of humane and interested criticism. Notice how it ends:

“ The … copy of the Poetical Essay is all the more remarkable for its unexpected emergence and for the insights a full study of it will give into Shelley’s development as a poet and political thinker.”

But that full study has yet to take place, as the “London bookseller” sold the poem, and “it has disappeared into an ownership that will not show its face.”

Rosen calls it a scandal, and says it’s equally scandalous that “no one seemed too bothered about it.”

Meanwhile, the recent release of a previously unpublished Mark Twain memoir brought up similar questioning in the comments section of a report on Boing Boing:

I’m not a copyright lawyer or anything, and neither is the writer friend who I asked about this, but my friend said that when a work is newly edited, the edited work is considered a new, copyrightable whole for the purpose of publication.

If true, this would mean that, if you somehow snuck the manuscript out of Berkeley and published it verbatim, that would be in the public domain—but the newly edited edition counts as a whole new, fully-copyright-protected work (probably published by the corporate entity of Berkeley and/or the Clemens estate).

In short, it seems there are ways, after all, to trump public domain.

Franz Kafka

Following up on an earlier report: “A judge at Tel Aviv District Family Court on Tuesday rejected a request for a gag order on the contents of a box containing manuscripts written by Franz Kafka,” reports a Haaretz story by Ofer Aderet. “Eva Hoffe, the Israeli woman who inherited the documents, was asked to pay court costs to the National Library and attorney Ehud Sol, the manager of the estate of Kafka’s close friend Max Brod.”

Perhaps more importantly: “Judge Talia Pardo also instructed attorneys Tuesday to prepare a detailed list of the items in the safe deposit boxes to be published ….”

Then comes the shocker, apparently leaked to Aderet by a witness to the forced opening of the safe deposit where the box of documents was kept last week:

Haaretz has learned that a huge amount of documents found in the safe deposit boxes are letters and manuscripts belonging to Kafka and Brod. Also in the box is a handwritten short story by Kafka that has never before been seen.

From a research point of view, the handwritten manuscript is of great value since Kafka’s publications over the years had been edited by Brod.

As you probably guessed, the fight over ownership of the documents is only intensifying. Once again Haaretz does not clarify why Hoffe, who seems to clearly own the documents, is having them taken away from her. But it does report that both the Israeli National Library and Germany’s Archive of German Literature have staked claims to ownership of the documents.

Expect it to get even more intense soon: “Several more safe deposit boxes are due to be opened by court officials and lawyers in Tel Aviv, where more documents and manuscripts of the two authors are expected to be found.” There are also safe deposit boxes containing Kafka documents in Vienna.

Kafka famously ordered that all his documents be destroyed upon his death.

Max Brod with his secretary, Esther Hoffe, Eva Hoffe's mother

“After months of legal wrangling, one of the 10 safe deposit boxes in which documents belonging to the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924 ) and his close friend Max Brod (1884-1968 ) were hidden for 40 years” was opened last Monday in Tel Aviv, according to a report by Ofer Aderet in Haaretz. It was, apparently, an emotional scene:

Witnesses who had been inside the bank at Kikar Hamedina when the team of lawyers arrived said Eva Hoffe burst into the building in an attempt to prevent the safe from being opened, shouting “It’s mine, it’s mine!”

Hoffe is the legal owner of the documents, according to the report, having inherited them from her mother, who had been Max Brod’s secretary and friend for decades and had inherited the Kafka documents from Brod, who had in turn inherited them from Kafka. She was reportedly in discussions with the German national archives about selling the collection to them.

The Haaretz story doesn’t reveal any more of what happened to Hoffe after she tried to disrupt the opening, and other key aspects of the report that are murky — it seems to establish that Hoffe legally owns the documents and question that simultaneously. Nor does it explain upon what grounds the state of Israel could thus declare a kind of cultural eminent domain to take away Hoffe’s private property. Yet Haaretz is no disinterested party: The boxes are being opened as the result of a lawsuit to make them public filed by Haaretz itself.

Now, it reports,

The team of lawyers will draw up an inventory of the documents they find in the boxes and present it to the Tel Aviv court. Judge Talia Pardo Kupelman will then determine the documents’ status - whether they are the private property of the Hoffe sisters, who can then do with them whatever they want, or whether they constitute a literary treasure that must be transferred to a public archive.

As to what might be in those security boxes: “Researchers and experts from Israel and Germany believe that some of the boxes may contain manuscripts by Kafka, widely considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, or documents that can shed additional light on the mysterious life of the artist ….”

Nobelist William Faulkner at work.

Christie’s auction house has announced that it will be holding “A rare auction of signed William Faulkner books and personal items,” according to an Associated Press report. The bidding is set for this Tuesday at Christie’s in New York.

The lot contains signed first editions of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s work, including The Wild Palms and Absalom, Absalom!, along with personal items such as his Canadian Royal Air Force uniform. (Because of his height, 5′5.5″, Faulkner could not join the US Army during WWI, so he joined the Canadian Army and then the British Air Forces. He did not see any fighting, however.)

According to the AP report, “Christie’s said the lot is a nearly complete representation of Faulkner’s work. The estimated values range from $1,200 for a British first edition of Sanctuary to $120,000 for a presentation copy of The Marble Faun that Faulkner inscribed to his mother and father. The book also was dedicated to his mother.”

A 1936 Western Union telegram to his 3-year-old daughter, wishing her “plenty of ghosts, goblins, witches and cats and owls on Halloween,” is also on the block, as well as letters from Faulkner to his mother that he signed from “Billy.”

Bill Griffith, curator at Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home in Oxford, MS, thought it ironic that the notoriously private Faulkner’s personal items should be up for public scrutiny. He told the AP, “‘I think he would be shocked that a telegram to his daughter is going up for auction for $2,000. When I first took over as curator, I thought his privacy thing was a little coy, but he was serious about it. He wanted to be left alone.’”

This is considered a definitive offering of Faulkner memorabilia and Christie’s estimates that the lot of 90 items is expected to bring more than $1 million.

You’ve probably heard stories about J.D. Salinger like the ones cited by Hillel Italie in an Associated Press wire story: “In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home. A year earlier, author and former Salinger girlfriend Joyce Maynard had written that Salinger used to write daily and had at least two novels stored away.” Italie notes that Salinger’s daughter, Margaret Salinger, also said her father was writing regularly and even “had a precise filing system for his papers: A red mark meant the book could be released “as is,” should the author die. A blue mark meant that the manuscript had to be edited.” Renata Adler and other Salinger acquaitances have told your faithful MobyLives reporter that Salinger himself showed off the black notebooks he kept his work in to visitors (although never letting them actually read what was in those notebooks).

So what, exactly, did he leave behind, and will it be published? Gordon Lish tells Italie that Salinger told him he was still writing about the Glass family, the stars of his published work. Jay McInerney tells Italie he heard Salinger was writing mostly about “health and nutrition.” McInerney also makes an interesting observation about the potential quality of that work — Salinger’s last publication, the 1965 short story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” was borderline gibbreish. “I have a feeling that his later work is in that vein,” says the Bright Lights, Big City author.

As for whether there are publications to come, well, Italie reports the following responses to his effort to find out:

Richard Wright

Yesterday, Julia and Malcolm Wright, representing the estate of Richard Wright, author of Native Son, repeated their opposition to the Google Book Settlement.

Today, Thursday, January 28, is the deadline for authors to opt out of the settlement.

According to a New York Times report by Mokoto Rich, a statement by the Wrights (a PDF of the statement is available in Rich’s article) warns that the “settlement would effectively grant” Google a “monopoly on content” and that “Copyright law is effectively being amended by a private transaction…”

Comparing the Google proposal to the Patriot Act, the Wrights predict the consequences of the settlement to be “so far-reaching and so packed with heavy ramifications for the future of human society, that only multi-national public arbitration would be appropriate.”

The statement notes that the Wright’s joined the Steinbeck estate in opposing the settlement in May of last year. Last week a Times story reported that the Steinbeck estate has since stated that “the majority of the problems that we found to be troubling have been addressed.”

A Guardian story reported on Friday that Ursula Le Guin has submitted a petition, signed by 367 writers, to Judge Denny Chin asking that “the United States also be exempted from the settlement. We ask that the principle of copyright, which is directly threatened by the settlement, be honored and upheld in the United States.”

The petition begins by noting that the Google settlement was negotiated by the Authors Guild, “without consultation with any other group of authors or American authors as a whole. The Guild cannot and does not speak for all American writers.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

What do an author’s financial records have to say about their work? Plenty, says William J. Quirk, who found himself in a unique position to examine the career of no less than F. Scott Fitzgerald after coming into possession (via a colleague who worked with Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie Fitzgerald) of the great writer’s personal financial records, including his tax returns and budget ledgers written in his own hand. And in an essay for The American Scholar, Quirk says “the returns and the ledgers reveal a great deal about Fitzgerald — how he lived and how he struggled.”

For example:

“To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money—at least until his wife Zelda’s illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue.”

The records also reveal that some things in the book business haven’t changed all that much — Fitzgerald, even as someone who “from the beginning, was recognized as a major American writer,” didn’t get rich off his famous books. He made far more money off writing for magazines and Hollywood. Says Quirk, “His best novels, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), did not produce much income. Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.”

That’s not the only thing that suggests a writer’s lot is not all so different than it was a century ago. Quirk also details how Fitzgerald — whom the records reveal to have been “impeccably honest” in his reporting to the IRS, at a time when there was far less regulation to be so — struggled to understand his place in the gray area of official American culture inhabited by artists:

On his 1924 tax return, he deducted $2,450 as a business expense for a “trip to Europe for the purpose of obtaining material for stories, etc.” Fitzgerald understood that personal expenses like meals, clothes, and rent are not deductible. But Section 162 of the Internal Revenue Code allows a deduction for the ordinary and necessary expenses of carrying on a trade or business. There is no doubt that being an author is a trade or business. Fitzgerald regularly deducted his recurring expenses—typing, rent, and so forth—without any problem. What about a trip to Europe to gather material? … Fitzgerald’s reasonable argument simply is that the line between personal and business, in his case, didn’t exist. But the IRS has always insisted there is a line—even if it has to be artificially drawn — and when it objected to the deduction, Fitzgerald decided to give it up.

Note, however, one error of scholarship on Quirk’s part: He cites Fitzgerald’s novella May Day as being part of a group of short stories written by Fitzgerald (in a desperate effort to make enough money to get back to novel-writing) in the winter of 1923-24. However, May Day was actually first published in July, 1920 in H.L. Menken’s Smart Set magazine, and collected in 1922 in Tales of the Jazz Age.

John Updike when he was a senior at Harvard in 1954

“Harvard University has acquired the manuscripts, correspondences, and other papers of John Updike, a celebrated member of the Class of 1954 who kept a Harvard library card and frequently visited the campus to research the contemporary culture that enlivened his acclaimed fiction,” reports Tracy Jan in this Boston Globe report.

The new John Updike Archive will be substantial: “Lined up, the entire archive stretches 380 linear feet. It spans 1,500 books, including Updike’s collection of his own work, published in foreign languages and English, as well as books Updike reviewed — with his pencil marks underlining the text, making notes in the margins, or bracketing a particularly well-turned phrase. The papers also include photographs, files of brochures and fliers used in his research, sample dust-jacket designs, and letters from such literary figures as Kurt Vonnegut and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as from fans.”

The collection is so big, says curator Leslie Morris, not only because Updike was prolific, writing right up until his death at age 76 last January, but also because he was “a perfectionist …. He produced multiple drafts of his poetry and prose, revising the computer printouts with pens and pencils, objects that Morris said the library has also acquired.”

Once catalogued, the collection will be open to the public and promises to be revealing: “A close examination of the manuscripts and correspondence reveals the cultural transformations reflected in Updike’s works. In the first edition of ‘Rabbit, Run,’ the 1960 novel that launched Updike into literary stardom, editors and publishers pushed him to remove many of the sex scenes, considered too explicit for the time ….”

The school did not announce what it paid for the collection.

Max Brod

As if fairly well known, on his deathbed, Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to destroy all his writing. Brod didn’t, of course. He in fact went on to publish a lot of that writing, although not all. And when Brod died in 1968, he left all his papers — said to include thousands of “letters, drawings and manuscripts by Kafka himself” — to his “close friend” Esther Hoffe. As journalist Ofer Aderet observes, “by rights the papers he left behind … should by now have been safely ensconced in an archive, a museum, or a library, open to the public, to scholars and to Kafka’s many admirers.” But as Aderet details in this report of Haaretz, “Instead, they are in private hands, apparently being kept in a residential apartment and a number of safes in Tel Aviv,” where Hoffe resided until her death two years ago. Not only that, it seems Hoffe’s daughter, Eva Hoffe, has been selling off various papers, including those of Kafka, “to the highest bidder.”

So now the Israel National Library has taken her to court to ask that Eva Hofe be forced to “hand the papers over to the library so they could be sorted, catalogued and made available to the public.” The resultant hearings, reports Aderet, have been “replete with emotion, suspense, shouting and threats.” Says one observer, “Brod would turn over in his grave if he knew how his estate ended up.”

As Aderet details in a fascinating, in-depth report, “What happened between Brod’s death and the year 2007, when Esther Hoffe died at the age of 102, can only be seen as a betrayal. But unlike Brod’s betrayal of Kafka, thanks to which the world has enjoyed the creations of the great writer, Hoffe’s betrayal of Brod only distanced the writings from the public at large.”

Stephen James Joyce

A Stanford University scholar who wrote a biography on Lucia Joyce, the troubled daughter of James Joyce, has won a years-long battle against the Joyce estate, which had blocked her usage of certain reference material in the book, causing it to be withdrawn from publication. As a report at the Stanford News details, Carol Loeb Shloss had first won the right to republish her book Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake with the expurgated material restored in a 2007 court decision, and now the Joyce estate has finally agreed to pay her litigation costs for that case to the tune of $240,000.

Shloss won her case thanks in part to the support of the Stanford Law School, which Shloss says first got behind her when faculty member (now Harvard professor) Lawrence Lessig heard about the Joyce estate’s forcing her to withdraw the book and said “That’s disgusting.”

As it turns out, the Joyce estate, led by Joyce’s grandson Stephen James Joyce, “had become notorious in scholarly circles for its conflicts with scholars, authors and Joyce enthusiasts,” with a “history of suits and threats of suit ….” In fact, says the Stanford News,

Stephen Joyce has stopped countless public readings of his grandfather’s works and discouraged a generation of research. At one point, he told a prominent Joyce scholar that he was no longer giving permission to quote from any of Joyce’s work. He told one performer, who had simply memorized a portion of Finnegans Wake for an onstage presentation, that he had probably “already infringed” on the estate’s copyright, according to a 2006 New Yorker story. (The performer later discovered that Joyce did not have the right to block his performance.) Shloss herself recalls a conference where a scholar had Joyce’s words projected on a screen rather than risk pronouncing the words in a recorded session.

Lucia Joyce

Which is why Shloss says her victory is “a breakthrough, not just for me but for everybody who has to deal with a literary estate. This has been going on for decades. Scholars are not wealthy people. We don’t have easy access to the legal system to determine and vindicate our rights if someone threatens us with a lawsuit. You just have to give in.” Now, she says, “estates know they can get hurt. They know that scholars have resources now. They just can’t be bullies.”