14 May 2013 03:43:52
In this highly entertaining book, the author and bibliophile Rick Gekoski goes in search of some of the great missing works of art and literature, using a mixture of careful detective work and some erudite speculation. His choice of subjects is an eclectic one, ranging from the familiar (Byron's scandalous memoirs and Graham Sutherland's unflattering and subsequently destroyed Churchill portrait) to the unexpected. A particularly engaging vignette is that of Mark Hofmann, a book dealer-cum-forger who eventually resorted to murder in order to maintain an increasingly bizarre pretence that, had it worked, would have made him millions. The unifying factor among all the people and situations that Gekoski discusses is his belief that art and literature reflect the society in which they are created, and that their destruction is an indictment on those in that society who fail to honour their achievements. Arguably, as he suggests, we respect Larkin more thanks to the posthumous shredding of his unexpurgated (and apparently horrific) diaries, but their contents would have been an invaluable insight into the mind of one of the 20th-century's greatest writers.
Gekoski isn't afraid to offer some controversial opinions, and a couple of politically focused late chapters on Iraq and Benin add a welcome sense of outreach and engagement to what might otherwise have been a charming but slight meditation on posterity. One finishes the book exhilarated and amused, and with a desire to find James Joyce's long-lost juvenile poem Et Tu Healy, which Gekoski tantalisingly presents as the holy grail of missing artefacts.
