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Last Words: In Defense of Unfinished Works
Lawrence C. Connolly

While recovering from cholera in the summer of 1849, Edgar Allan Poe resolved to put his chaotic life in order. He quit drinking, made plans to marry his childhood sweetheart, began raising money for a literary magazine, and started work on a story that would become known as “The Lighthouse.”

A few months later, his magazine unrealized and his story unfinished, he died in a hospital ward reserved for patients suffering from the effects of alcohol.

“The Lighthouse,” generally regarded as the master’s last work of fiction, wound up in the hands of Poe’s self-proclaimed literary executor Rufus Wilmot Griswold and remained unpublished for sixty years.

Presented as a series of journal entries, the unfinished story tells of a troubled man who seeks refuge on a remote island 200 miles off the coast of Norway. There, accompanied by a dog named
Neptune, he plans to tend a lighthouse and finish a book he has been struggling to write on the mainland.

Naturally, as this is a Poe story, things do not go as planned.

Once sequestered on the island, Poe’s protagonist realizes that solitude is not all it’s cracked up to be, and rather than writing his book, he obsesses about the lighthouse, particularly the way its 160-foot-high exterior belies a 180-foot-tall interior and the fact that its basis rests on a fragile foundation of chalk.

Running just under 750 words, the fragment suggests a setup similar to Stephen King’s The Shining, with Neptune the dog filling in for Danny and Wendy Torrance. But what exactly Poe had in mind for the entire piece can never be known, even if the manuscript does provide a few clues.

Consisting of four neatly written pages, the fragment has a small blank section atop page 1 (likely reserved for the title) and a larger space at the bottom of page 4.

Kenneth Silverman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, wonders if that gap on the final page might be intended to convey the protagonist’s sudden demise.

I suppose that’s possible.

Consider the manuscript’s final lines, in which the narrator worries that the lighthouse might collapse on top of him:

It seems to me that the hollow interior at the bottom should have been filled in with solid masonry. Undoubtedly the whole would have been thus rendered more safe:—but what am I thinking about? A structure such as this is safe enough under any circumstances. I should feel myself secure in it during the fiercest hurricane that ever raged—and yet I have heard seamen say that, occasionally, with a wind at southwest, the sea has been known to run higher here than anywhere with the single exception of the western opening of the Straits of Magellan.

No mere sea, though, could accomplish anything with this solid iron-riveted wall—which, at 50 feet from high-water mark, is four feet thick, if one inch ........ The basis on which the structure rests seems to me to be chalk ......

Is Silverman on to something? Could that truly be the end of the story? The final word “chalk” coupled with the ellipsis might suggest that such was Poe’s intent, that at the very moment the protagonist discovers the chalk substrate, the foundation spontaneously gives way, and the hapless narrator is crushed beneath 180 feet of twisted iron.

Of course, such a conclusion means that the doomed protagonist would have been composing his journal entry in real time, notebook open and pen in hand as he explores the lighthouse. It’s a bit of a stretch. Yet Poe would not be the only author to employ such a device. Consider, for example, the final line of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1938 story "The Diary of Alonzo Typer":

Too late—cannot help self—black paws materialise—am dragged away toward the cellar. . . .

Still, everything that comes before Poe’s final ellipsis suggests the setup for a longer story, one with a fully realized narrative arc about a frustrated writer who will soon find himself caught between the southwest wind, the high sea, and his own insecurities.

Moreover, although the narrator’s final entry does indeed end with an ellipsis, it is followed by the date “Jan 4,” indicating that Poe likely intended at least one additional journal entry.

And if nothing else, the fact that Poe did not give the work a title should be proof enough to consider the work unfinished.

Indeed, the work remained untitled until 1909, when literary critic George Edward Woodberry dubbed it “The Light-House,” a title that remained the only posthumous addition to the story until 1953, when Poe scholar Thomas O. Mabbott asked Robert Block if he would consider finishing Poe’s story.

Block, who would soon become known as the author of Psycho, accepted Mabbott’s offer and soon wrote a fully realized story of 6,000 words that appeared in the January-February 1953 issue of Fantastic Magazine, with a cover promising readers “A new Edgar Allan Poe Masterpiece.”

Interestingly, despite adding over 5,000 words to the narrative, the Block version, like Poe’s fragment, ends with both the collapse of the lighthouse and a final ellipsis:

The lighthouse is trembling. The beacon flickers above my head and I hear the rush of waters in their final onslaught. There is—yes—a wave, bearing down upon me. It is higher than the tower, it blots out the sky itself, everything …

Nearly a decade later, in the April 1982 issue of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, the story was reprinted along with an introduction recounting Block’s experience of working with the fragment. Block writes:

As a lifelong reader and admirer of Poe, I couldn’t resist. And thus it was, more than a century after Poe’s death, that I found myself collaborating with him. In order to do so I had to analyze his style and adapt myself to it. Equally important was an analysis of the story-content; on the basis of what he’d written, I had to anticipate that which he had left unwritten.

Clearly, Block sought to honor the author’s intent, and the result is an interesting addition to his (Robert Block’s) body of work. It is not, however, Poe’s story. We cannot know for certain where the master would have taken his tale had he lived to complete it … or even if he would have completed it at all.

Over the course of a career, a writer accumulates a surfeit of notes, false starts, first drafts, and manuscripts not yet ready or never intended for publication. And this brings us to a question that has become ever more important to us in the age of artificial intelligence. Namely, should authors demand that their unfinished works be destroyed rather than left for posterity?

Harlan Ellison had an answer. Writing on his website in response to a Usenet discussion about unfinished works, he wrote in part:

I’ve instructed Susan [Ellison] and my assistant, immediately on the striking of my passing […] to destroy all of my unfinished stories, burn and stir the ashes of any manuscripts in progress, do the same to any novels-in-progress, flense all notes and snippets, tear out all the pages of my working notebooks and in-progress files and, in short, make it impossible for anyone to ghost-write, collaborate-to-completion, or “finish” anything incomplete at the moment of my death.

Ellison made this decree before the rise of large language models that began devouring and cloning the voices of human writers. And although the burn-all-manuscripts directive may have seemed a bit extreme a decade ago, the precaution demands reconsideration in the age of AI.

Consider, for example, a recent Boston Globe article titled “I want AI to tell me how the story ends,” in which journalist Nathan Dunne writes:

[With AI] there is an entire realm of unfinished novels that could be completed. We could discover what happens to Jane Austen’s Charlotte Heywood in “Sanditon” or how Cecilia Brady copes with her grief in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon.” Then there’s Kafka’s “Amerika,” Nabokov’s “The Original of Laura,” and the mystery of Sylvia Plath’s second novel, “Double Exposure.”

The fallacy here is that, despite Dunne’s enthusiasm for the powers of AI, it cannot actually help us “discover what happens” in any of the unfinished works he mentions. To be sure, I feel we would learn even less about the author’s intent by letting non-living machines speak for writers who are no longer alive to speak for themselves. In other words, it’s one thing to have a writer of Robert Block’s stature channel the work of a past master; it’s quite another to expect a machine to do the job.

Fortunately, US copyright laws prohibit the unauthorized appropriation of unfinished manuscripts for 70 years following an author’s death. After that, everything (alas!) is fair game. Still, whether the work is done by human or machine, I concur with law professor Patricia J. Williams, whose Yale Review essay “When AI Speaks for the Dead” proclaims that “We, the living, cannot, should not, finish the unfinished sentences of the dead.”

#

Lawrence C. Connolly’s play Edgar A. Poe Presents: Tales of Mystery, Horror, and Imagination opened last November at Pittsburgh’s New Hazlett Theatre. His latest novel, Minute Men: Execute & Run is out now from Caezik Science Fiction & Fantasy. Find him at LawrenceCConnolly.com

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	Last Words: In Defense of Unfinished Works Lawrence C. Connolly While recovering from cholera in the summer of 1849, Edgar Allan Poe resolved to put his chaotic life in order. He quit drinking, made plans to marry his childhood sweetheart, began raising money for a literary magazine, and started work on a story that would become known as “The Lighthouse.” A few months later, his magazine unrealized and his story unfinished, he died in a hospital ward reserved for patients suffering from the effects of alcohol. “The Lighthouse,” generally regarded as the master’s last work of fiction, wound up in the hands of Poe’s self-proclaimed literary executor Rufus Wilmot Griswold and remained unpublished for sixty years. Presented as a series of journal entries, the unfinished story tells of a troubled man who seeks refuge on a remote island 200 miles off the coast of Norway. There, accompanied by a dog named Neptune, he plans to tend a lighthouse and finish a book he has been struggling to write on the mainland. Naturally, as this is a Poe story, things do not go as planned. Once sequestered on the island, Poe’s protagonist realizes that solitude is not all it’s cracked up to be, and rather than writing his book, he obsesses about the lighthouse, particularly the way its 160-foot-high exterior belies a 180-foot-tall interior and the fact that its basis rests on a fragile foundation of chalk. Running just under 750 words, the fragment suggests a setup similar to Stephen King’s The Shining, with Neptune the dog filling in for Danny and Wendy Torrance. But what exactly Poe had in mind for the entire piece can never be known, even if the manuscript does provide a few clues. Consisting of four neatly written pages, the fragment has a small blank section atop page 1 (likely reserved for the title) and a larger space at the bottom of page 4. Kenneth Silverman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, wonders if that gap on the final page might be intended to convey the protagonist’s sudden demise. I suppose that’s possible. Consider the manuscript’s final lines, in which the narrator worries that the lighthouse might collapse on top of him: It seems to me that the hollow interior at the bottom should have been filled in with solid masonry. Undoubtedly the whole would have been thus rendered more safe:—but what am I thinking about? A structure such as this is safe enough under any circumstances. I should feel myself secure in it during the fiercest hurricane that ever raged—and yet I have heard seamen say that, occasionally, with a wind at southwest, the sea has been known to run higher here than anywhere with the single exception of the western opening of the Straits of Magellan. No mere sea, though, could accomplish anything with this solid iron-riveted wall—which, at 50 feet from high-water mark, is four feet thick, if one inch ........ The basis on which the structure rests seems to me to be chalk ...... Is Silverman on to something? Could that truly be the end of the story? The final word “chalk” coupled with the ellipsis might suggest that such was Poe’s intent, that at the very moment the protagonist discovers the chalk substrate, the foundation spontaneously gives way, and the hapless narrator is crushed beneath 180 feet of twisted iron. Of course, such a conclusion means that the doomed protagonist would have been composing his journal entry in real time, notebook open and pen in hand as he explores the lighthouse. It’s a bit of a stretch. Yet Poe would not be the only author to employ such a device. Consider, for example, the final line of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1938 story "The Diary of Alonzo Typer": Too late—cannot help self—black paws materialise—am dragged away toward the cellar. . . . Still, everything that comes before Poe’s final ellipsis suggests the setup for a longer story, one with a fully realized narrative arc about a frustrated writer who will soon find himself caught between the southwest wind, the high sea, and his own insecurities. Moreover, although the narrator’s final entry does indeed end with an ellipsis, it is followed by the date “Jan 4,” indicating that Poe likely intended at least one additional journal entry. And if nothing else, the fact that Poe did not give the work a title should be proof enough to consider the work unfinished. Indeed, the work remained untitled until 1909, when literary critic George Edward Woodberry dubbed it “The Light-House,” a title that remained the only posthumous addition to the story until 1953, when Poe scholar Thomas O. Mabbott asked Robert Block if he would consider finishing Poe’s story. Block, who would soon become known as the author of Psycho, accepted Mabbott’s offer and soon wrote a fully realized story of 6,000 words that appeared in the January-February 1953 issue of Fantastic Magazine, with a cover promising readers “A new Edgar Allan Poe Masterpiece.” Interestingly, despite adding over 5,000 words to the narrative, the Block version, like Poe’s fragment, ends with both the collapse of the lighthouse and a final ellipsis: The lighthouse is trembling. The beacon flickers above my head and I hear the rush of waters in their final onslaught. There is—yes—a wave, bearing down upon me. It is higher than the tower, it blots out the sky itself, everything … Nearly a decade later, in the April 1982 issue of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, the story was reprinted along with an introduction recounting Block’s experience of working with the fragment. Block writes: As a lifelong reader and admirer of Poe, I couldn’t resist. And thus it was, more than a century after Poe’s death, that I found myself collaborating with him. In order to do so I had to analyze his style and adapt myself to it. Equally important was an analysis of the story-content; on the basis of what he’d written, I had to anticipate that which he had left unwritten. Clearly, Block sought to honor the author’s intent, and the result is an interesting addition to his (Robert Block’s) body of work. It is not, however, Poe’s story. We cannot know for certain where the master would have taken his tale had he lived to complete it … or even if he would have completed it at all. Over the course of a career, a writer accumulates a surfeit of notes, false starts, first drafts, and manuscripts not yet ready or never intended for publication. And this brings us to a question that has become ever more important to us in the age of artificial intelligence. Namely, should authors demand that their unfinished works be destroyed rather than left for posterity? Harlan Ellison had an answer. Writing on his website in response to a Usenet discussion about unfinished works, he wrote in part: I’ve instructed Susan [Ellison] and my assistant, immediately on the striking of my passing […] to destroy all of my unfinished stories, burn and stir the ashes of any manuscripts in progress, do the same to any novels-in-progress, flense all notes and snippets, tear out all the pages of my working notebooks and in-progress files and, in short, make it impossible for anyone to ghost-write, collaborate-to-completion, or “finish” anything incomplete at the moment of my death. Ellison made this decree before the rise of large language models that began devouring and cloning the voices of human writers. And although the burn-all-manuscripts directive may have seemed a bit extreme a decade ago, the precaution demands reconsideration in the age of AI. Consider, for example, a recent Boston Globe article titled “I want AI to tell me how the story ends,” in which journalist Nathan Dunne writes: [With AI] there is an entire realm of unfinished novels that could be completed. We could discover what happens to Jane Austen’s Charlotte Heywood in “Sanditon” or how Cecilia Brady copes with her grief in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon.” Then there’s Kafka’s “Amerika,” Nabokov’s “The Original of Laura,” and the mystery of Sylvia Plath’s second novel, “Double Exposure.” The fallacy here is that, despite Dunne’s enthusiasm for the powers of AI, it cannot actually help us “discover what happens” in any of the unfinished works he mentions. To be sure, I feel we would learn even less about the author’s intent by letting non-living machines speak for writers who are no longer alive to speak for themselves. In other words, it’s one thing to have a writer of Robert Block’s stature channel the work of a past master; it’s quite another to expect a machine to do the job. Fortunately, US copyright laws prohibit the unauthorized appropriation of unfinished manuscripts for 70 years following an author’s death. After that, everything (alas!) is fair game. Still, whether the work is done by human or machine, I concur with law professor Patricia J. Williams, whose Yale Review essay “When AI Speaks for the Dead” proclaims that “We, the living, cannot, should not, finish the unfinished sentences of the dead.” # Lawrence C. Connolly’s play Edgar A. Poe Presents: Tales of Mystery, Horror, and Imagination opened last November at Pittsburgh’s New Hazlett Theatre. His latest novel, Minute Men: Execute & Run is out now from Caezik Science Fiction & Fantasy. Find him at LawrenceCConnolly.com Home Contents
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