I noticed 'The Eye of the Storm' on 16th October and am still slowly working my way through the kindle version. View not changing: interesting stuff but rather heavy going.
But along comes the NYRB with an article mainly about the publication of a hitherto unknown fragment of a book by the same Patrick White. Some of the article is given over to a discussion of the fact that White left quite explicit instructions to his literary executor to destroy all papers, letters and ephemera that he might have left around. Also to try and recall any of his letters that might be being held by friends and to destroy them too.
Now according to the Statute of Wills (32 Hen. 8, c. 1 - enacted in 1540) (confirmed in essentials by the Wills Act of 1837) an Englishman is free to leave his possessions to whomsoever he might please, the prior situation being rather more complicated, particular in foreign lands where Salic Law might have applied. But according to NYRB, this simple and sensible arrangement is being nibbled away at by the judiciary in the US and in Australia, a judiciary which is no doubt delighted with this extension to their field of interference - or put it another way, one more revenue opportunity. So if I wrote in my will 'everything to Mr. J. Doe', when I die the lawyers are entitled if not enjoined to inquire into exactly what I meant by 'everything' (or, to reprise a bon-mot from Ryan of Ryanair, which bit about everything do you find difficult - 'every' or 'thing'?). Did I really mean 'everything except the bits that my family thought they could sell and make some dosh out of' or 'everything except the naughty bits which can be flogged off to the Mail on Sunday'? Surely I didn't mean to destroy all that literary trivia which would otherwise be food for a thousand PhD's? Surely I meant by everything, everything as understood by a reasonable man, that is to say everything excluding anything of interest? Perhaps by saying everything I was not really specifying, merely suggesting to my executor that he consider what should be kept and what might be thrown away, merely prompting a discussion, rather in the way that I might start a conversation by saying of a dress which looked blue 'I like the red tones in that dress'. Red doesn't mean red, it is just a way of raising a marker about the colour of the dress. Now turning to 'Mr. J. Doe', was this just a witty way of saying everyone, that is to say to the public at large? And so it might go on, with the lawyers clocking up another US$500 every time you dial their number.
It seems that the only answer is to destroy everything yourself before you go. But this is rather like having to trot off to Zurich when it is time to call time on oneself. You have to call time rather earlier than you might otherwise have done because of all the unnecessary travel & pack drill.
I might also say that I am in complete agreement with White. If I had a heritage, I would want to control it. To say what was in and what was out. To get rid of all the juvenilia and all the dementilia. I would want my heritage to be my published work and and I would not want a lot of sleuths creeping about the odd corners of my life demonstrating how this or that bit of the oeuvre came to be. Although I do accept that if you make a lot of money out of the public, they do have prying rights. You cannot be both big public and big private.
PS 1: all rather odd as, in so far as I understand such matters, Anglo Saxon law depends heavily on exactly what a law says, unlike continental law which puts more weight on what it thinks that the writers of a law intended. They might, for example, be influenced by the introduction, the preamble to a bill, or even the context in which it passed into law, as well as by what the bill actually says.
PS 2: rather heavy going on the Lumia today. Tried to download a reader from Adobe to be told that I couldn't do any shopping (for this free item) as my phone was not registered, although it was plugged into the PC which does have a Microsoft account. Logged into that just to make sure. Still no joy. Poke around in the Microsoft help - where all I learn is that plenty of people seem to be in the same pickle - and in the Lumia help where there is talk of a Nokia account. So I set one of those up and it has now verified my email address and is trying to verify my mobile phone number but I don't seem to be able to do the necessary with the text message which has arrived on the Lumia. Pulled it off the PC for the moment to get on with something more interesting - but as with the eye of the storm, I think I am making some progress.
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