Classics Updated

By BRUCE HANDY

Anyone with a rooting interest in culture has surely had the experience of having a crush on an artist, of tearing through all of a novelist's books or rapidly buying all of a musician's CDs--the aesthetic equivalent of downing a pint of Haagen-Dazs--only to find oneself still hungry, frustrated with the limits of a canon. In the case of an artist with famously lost, botched or unfinished works, this hunger can be particularly keen. I know, having recently been driven to buy a bootlegged CD of material recorded for Smile, the legendarily unfinished Beach Boys album that could have been the greatest pop record of the '60s--Brian Wilson said he was writing a "teenage symphony to God"--if it hadn't collapsed under the weight of Wilson's ambition and mental illness. I love this CD. I love its raw beauty, but even more, I love its wasted promise. (This is a boy example; girls can substitute Sylvia Plath's burned journals.) I also love the illicit access to Wilson's half-finished thoughts, to Wilson himself. Does this make me a romantic or a mild kind of stalker?

Either way, I have lots of company. Thanks in no small part to the commercial opportunities opened up by the VCR and the CD player, this decade has seen a flood of previously unreleased, unfinished or reworked art. Directors' cuts of movies from Nights of Cabiria to Natural Born Killers restore lost scenes; boxed sets of just about any recording artist you can think of--Why not the Zombies?--disgorge hours of studio outtakes. These have also been boom times for posthumous publication, with recent "new" work by Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Mitchell; next year Ernest Hemingway will give us his fourth book as a dead person. Publisher Charles Scribner 3rd says Hemingway fully intended these manuscripts to see the light of day, but cautions other authors that if they don't want work published, they had best destroy it themselves.

Excavations can pose tricky dilemmas. Who wouldn't want to hear a new Beatles song, and yet who would want to hear Free as a Bird more than once? Sometimes the appeal is more than mere novelty: a discarded thought can be more revealing, more intimate than a finished work; it's like catching an old friend off guard. A yen for uncooked art, for malleable art, is also more in keeping with our crude, relativistic times.

"There's no such thing as an absolute version anymore," says Bill Laswell, a musician and record producer who proved the point this summer with his remixed album of classic Miles Davis recordings, probably a jazz first. There is also a new version out of the 1958 film Touch of Evil; it is unique for having been re-edited according to the dictates of a 58-page memo written by Orson Welles after the film had been taken away from him by Universal Pictures. Welles, of course, is the patron saint of lost, botched and unfinished works. The reissue, says its producer Rick Schmidlin, is "kind of an attempt to defend his genius." Indeed, the film is now better in many of its particulars, though you still have to buy Charlton Heston as a Mexican detective. Anyway, as Schmidlin readily notes, there's no way of knowing what Welles (or Davis or Hemingway) would have ultimately signed off on, and I'm not going to worry about it. I'm going to worry about all those J.D. Salinger stories squirreled away in New Hampshire.