Why is it that, when an author says very explicitly that she does not want her work published, we publish it? Willa Cather’s letters have been restricted since her death, in 1947. She may be spinning in her grave now that a fat volume of those letters has been published. But she’s not the first person whose wishes have been disregarded: it happens to lots of writers, sooner or later.

Ernest Hemingway’s estate decided to publish posthumously his late work “The Garden of Eden,” which Hemingway himself had (wisely) never published. Georgia O’Keeffe’s letters to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, were unavailable, even to scholars, for twenty-five years after her death. Now they’re online, accessible to anyone with a laptop and fifteen minutes.

Maybe the only way a writer can prevent this is to do what Somerset Maugham did: he burned his letters in the fireplace, making a roaring pyre as his horrified secretary stood by. His secretary hid some of the letters, trying to save them, but Maugham caught him. Those, too, he said, and the secretary had to put them into the flames with the rest. Those Maugham letters were never published and they never ever will be.

Martha Cooley’s elegant novel, “The Archivist,” explores these issues—of ownership and privacy, and the demands of scholarship. She considers the lengths to which scholars will go (any), and the arguments they will make (extended, artful, persuasive) to gain access to restricted material. In her book, a determined scholar mounts an assault on a cache of restricted T. S. Eliot letters. The archivist recognizes the scholar’s determination, and decides to remove the material from the assault. He takes the Maugham way, and burns the documents himself. This may be the only way to protect material from the relentless siege of scholarship.

On the other hand, why shouldn’t scholars see the work?

Generally, there are three reasons for writers to restrict material: one, that it’s private, and its release would violate the privacy of someone still living. Another, that it would reveal behavior or information that would embarrass the writer or her friends, and invite disapprobation. A third, particularly important for a writer, is that the work is unsuccessful or unfinished, unprepared for scholarly scrutiny.

All of these reasons, so urgent and compelling in the moment, fade with the passage of time. Georgia O’Keeffe died at ninety-eight, thirty years after the death of her husband. Her restriction of the letters for another twenty-five years after her own death meant that anyone remotely related to them was long gone. Their relationships—to each other, and to those around them—are now seen through a benign scrim. The private actions of people in the past seem remote and tolerable; certainly they seem understandable.

We forgive dead people for their eccentricities; everyone has them. Should we be deprived of Edmund Wilson’s private diaries simply because they reveal his shoe fetishism? We should not, nor will we criticize him for it: his close and obsessive descriptions of the footwear of his lady friends are marvelous. Wilson might have been embarrassed to meet a stranger who’d read these, someone who couldn’t resist a small smile, or a suggestive glance down at her own stilettos—but that couldn’t happen, since the diaries weren’t published until after his death. Then they were mined for the great wealth of material they provided about his critical insights. The shoes were extra, but they, too, expanded our understanding of the way great minds work. They work in unexpected ways—isn’t that the point?

Restricted material is a glowing cache of treasure: scholars will seek it out. They will find a way to read the work; then they will find a way to publish it. And surely, in our information-mad culture—in which secret government documents and copyrighted books are released to the world simply because people who can use technology think they should—we can understand the trend. Humans have an irresistible will to discover and reveal.

The odd thing is that the material won’t really require protection, because once a writer has become famous enough to arouse this great scholarly tsunami of attention, the self-selected scholarly gaze will be relatively benign. Generally, scholars don’t exert themselves over people they despise, but over those they respect and admire. The material will be read by someone who already knows and understands the writer. And writers are judged by their best work: poor work won’t tarnish the writer’s reputation. Early, late, unsuccessful, or unpublished material will illuminate and reveal, but it won’t detract. Scholars who love the great work are the ones who want to spend time with it.

Who has the right to a writer’s work, in the end? By publishing anything at all, the writer puts herself squarely in the public view, and opens herself to the voracious gaze of the monster-public. If the writer wants to make certain that no one will ever see her letters, she always has the fireplace. If she wants to preserve them in some scholarly place, but restrict them, the chances are that scholars will ferret them out. But this scholarly regard will probably be benevolent, and her reputation will be burnished by the revelation.

In the end, death is the determining factor: death means the final abdication of power. No matter what we wish, in dying we relinquish control over ourselves and our work. The work may survive and flourish, but we no longer control it. As Virginia Woolf says, of biography, “Here is the past and all its inhabitants, miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen … and soon the little figures—for they are rather under life size—will begin to move and to speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant, for they thought when they were alive that they could go where they liked; and as they speak we shall read into their sayings all kinds of meanings which never struck them, for they believed when they were alive that they said straight off whatever came into their heads. But once you are in a biography all is different.” The truth is that once you are dead all is different; others will decide how you are seen.

It’s the work that draws the scrutiny. We writers reveal ourselves through our work, and in some ways it’s absurd to think that we can maintain our privacy: we gave up privacy when we mailed off that first manuscript, that manuscript in which we revealed our most burning and intimate selves. No matter what we called the genre, no matter what name we wrote it under, that was us. If it ignited the flame of public interest—and isn’t that what we hoped for?—then that flame will consume us. If we burn the letters, we won’t put out the fire. It will continue, now fueled by speculation. Maybe the real question is not, “Should we restrict our letters after we die?” but “Should we sit down at this desk and start making sentences?” That’s the biggest risk.

Read Joan Acocella on Willa Cather’s letters.

Illustration by Laurent Cilluffo.

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