Joan Didion on Hemingway: What Her Words Reveal About The Ethics Of Publishing Her Own Diary.

Examining Didion's thoughts on Hemingway's posthumous works to understand how she might have felt about her own private writings becoming public.

Two days ago, it was announced that Joan Didion’s personal diary, ‘Notes To John,’ which was discovered posthumously, is set for an April 22nd release. I immediately wrote here, hoping that this was a Patricia Highsmith situation and that, similar to Highsmith, Didion had also wanted and arranged for her diary to be published eventually. However, shortly after publishing that article, I discovered that Didion had written an essay for the New Yorker in 1998 where she spoke out against the then-posthumous publications of Ernest Hemmingway’s unfinished novels and personal letters. I believe that if Didion didn’t leave explicit consent for her diary or any of her work to be published after her death, we should take her opinion regarding publishing another author’s work posthumously as a guidepost to her wishes.

The cover for Didion’s Diary is set to be published by Knopf Publishing on April 22nd.

In her 1998 New Yorker Essay titled Last Word’s Those, Hemingway wrote and those he didn’t. Didion discusses the publication of Hemingway’s letters and the publication of two novels that were left unfinished at the time of his death. She quotes Hemingway directly to get a perspective on how he might have felt about these works being published.

“His wish to be survived by only the words he determined fit for publication would have seemed clear enough. “I remember Ford telling me that a man should always write a letter thinking of how it would read to posterity,” he wrote to Arthur Mizener in 1950. “This made such a bad impression on me that I burned every letter in the flat, including Ford’s.” In a letter dated May 20, 1958, addressed “To my Executors” and placed in his library safe at La Finca Vigia, he wrote, “It is my wish that none of the letters written by me during my lifetime shall be published. Accordingly, I hereby request and direct you not to publish or consent to the publication by others of any such letters.”

Hemingway would then write to Charles A. Fenton, who was in charge of investigating his letters, urging him to leave his unpublished letters alone.

“Mr. Fenton, I feel very strongly about this. I have written you so before and I write you now again. Writing that I do not wish to publish, you have no right to publish. I would no more do a thing like that to you than I would cheat a man at cards or rifle his desk or wastebasket or read his personal letters.”

Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway made his wishes clear: he did not want his work, especially his letters, to be published. However, this wish would later be disrespected by Hemingway’s widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, who gave permission for Ernest Hemingway: The Selected Letters 1917-1961 to be published.

So, where did Didion stand on this? Didion displayed support for Hemingway’s wishes, showing her own personal dismay at Hemingway’s widow for disrespecting them. Didion alludes to the fact that even writers aren’t safe from the race by others to commercialize and capitalize off of their image and work even after their death, similar to performers and other pop culture icons. Didion writes…

“What followed was the systematic creation of a marketable product, a discrete body of work different in kind from, and in fact tending to obscure, the body of work published by Hemingway in his lifetime. So successful was the process of branding this product that in October, according to the House & Home section of the New York Times, Thomasville Furniture Industries introduced an “Ernest Hemingway Collection” at the International Home Furnishings Market in High Point, North Carolina, offering “96 pieces of living, dining and bedroom furniture and accessories” in four themes, “Kenya,” “Key West,” “Havana,” and “Ketchum.”

Joan didn’t stop there when discussing her disapproval. Here are a few more quotes pulled from the article that I believe could give us at least an idea of what Didion herself would’ve thought of her diary being set for publication.

“The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print. The risk of publication is the grave fact of the life, and, even among writers less inclined than Hemingway to construe words as the manifest expression of personal honor, the notion that words one has not risked publishing should be open to “continuing investigation” by “serious students of literature” could not be calculated to kindle enthusiasm.”

The following two quotes are Didion’s opinion on Heminway’s novel True At First Light being published, not his letters.

Mary Welsh Hemingway shared her conviction, at which she appears to have arrived in the face of considerable contrary evidence, that her husband had “clearly” expected her to publish “some, if not all, of his work.” The guidelines she set for herself in this task were instructive: “Except for punctuation and the obviously overlooked ‘ands’ and ‘buts’ we would present his prose and poetry to readers as he wrote it, letting the gaps lie where they were.”Well, there you are. You care about the punctuation or you don’t, and Hemingway did. You care about the “ands” and the “buts” or you don’t, and Hemingway did. You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t.

“The most chilling scene ever filmed must be, for a writer, that moment in “The Shining” when Shelley Duvall looks at the manuscript on which her husband has been working and sees, typed over and over again on each of the hundreds of pages, only the single line: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The manuscript for what became “True at First Light” was, as Hemingway left it, some eight hundred and fifty pages long. The manuscript as edited for publication is half that. This editing was done by Hemingway’s son Patrick, who has said that he limited his editing to condensing (which inevitably works to alter what the author may have intended, as anyone who has been condensed knows), changing only some of the place names, which may or may not have seemed a logical response to the work of the man who wrote “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.”

Lastly, a comment Didion made regarding F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Last Tycoon being published posthumously.

“I recall listening, some years ago at a dinner party in Berkeley, to a professor of English present “The Last Tycoon” as irrefutable proof that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a bad writer. The assurance with which this judgment was offered so stunned me that I had let it slip into the donnée of the evening before I managed to object. “The Last Tycoon,” I said, was an unfinished book, one we had no way of judging because we had no way of knowing how Fitzgerald might have finished it. But of course we did, another guest said, and others joined in: We had Fitzgerald’s “notes,” we had Fitzgerald’s “outline,” the thing was “entirely laid out.” Only one of us at the table that evening, in other words, saw a substantive difference between writing a book and making notes for it, or “outlining it,” or “laying it out.”

I have contacted Knopf Publishing and Didion’s estate to see if they have any comments about whether Didion herself consented to this diary being published before her death. I haven’t heard back. I really hope that, for her honor, Didion wanted this diary to eventually be published. I find it not only invasive but also disingenuous to publish an author’s personal diary not even five years after her death. I believe literature should be an industry where honor and integrity should be placed above profit. We must remember that as much as we idolize them and as much as we can never get enough of their work, writers are still human, and their wishes and personal opinions should be taken into consideration when publishing their work posthumously.

Click here to read Joan Didion’s New Yorker article.