Column Chronicles
 
Books gone wrong by famous authors, part two
 
 
Frank Cotolo
November 14, 2019
 
Here are more long lost remnants of books that never saw the light of day, written by famous authors.
 
Ernest Hemingway suffered from many bad traits and eventually mental illness. He also tossed out a number of books he began to write, though he was either drunk or depressed.
 
"The sun was hot, very hot, it burned through the lens of my eyeglasses that rested upon the table, which was perfectly balanced even though one leg was short, just like the leg of Amando, the great soldier who broke down one day and ran from the battlefield, away from the fighting, far from the blood spilling here and there and Amando was never the same after his courage left him that day, a day much like this day when the sun was so very hot and the eyeglasses balanced upon the table turned out not to be mine."
 
George Orwell tried his had at a new style but abandoned it after writing a few paragraphs.
 
"Equally inspired by the weight of his own flesh and a thought provoked from a meal at a local cafe, Destiny Dullard made his plans to impress upon the human race that he was the sole soul walking the planet to whom the right of personal prerogative belonged and with careful structure could prove this, though at first he felt that only people in the rural areas of Germany would truly understand..."
 
Jack Kerouac took his "beat" writing one step further with the following passage from a book he never completed.
 
"Bing, bang and battle the rattle in the fine toothed truth of the daddy-oh mix and match of this and that. Soothing and filling, the warmth of the birth of the earth inside of the digging daddy's domain was brash with hash and not a cent of cash. What the hell, Nell, it's not cool for a fool to bust up the moment with a crippled idea if it don't come near the cerebrum, dumb, dumb, bing, bat, boom boom and such."
 
Bram Stoker would never be able to top his character Dracula. But he tried with another character that almost ended his writing career entirely.
 
"I am a ghost and yet I am not dead and I am certainly not able to tolerate the pain which I am capable of sharing due to my second head. True, I was not born with a deformity, if two heads on one person is a deformity, but the dentist who cared to expand his medical knowledge with an experiment which I agreed to be his subject said that a second brain in a second head would not affect the first brain, the one I am using to write this in my journal which I hope is found and read aloud to children so that they may learn never to desire a second head upon only two shoulders."
 
Emily Bronte's books still attract many readers but she tried to escape her own style and failed miserably when she wrote the following short story.
 
"Renton Stillborn accented the sound of the storm's thunder when his stomach began to rumble on the porch. Standing before him was his love, the tender Sissfreed. She smelled like after the rain had fallen upon the gray boulders that supported the porch. He was so in love with her that the trees with limbs bending in brittle age seemed new and solid and his own disposition, much like a dead moth, meant nothing to him, for when Sissfreed smiled, all of the sky turned into a yellow panache and the earth was the center of the universe and he loathed his masculinity if there were a glimpse of a chance it would be ignored by her umpteenth beauty. Still, on the porch there lingered the ill will of a moment gone wrong, an imperfect movement between two people with similar, albeit not identical, purposes and Renton had to submit and admit, like the beaver that jolts from its dam-making chores, that his life would be worthless if she took him at his word, a word that he needed to repeat, just as his stomach repeated his dinner, over and over until Sissfreed swore she would purge the memory of him saying it, like the hawk glides into a spiral beneath the dark foreboding clouds that promise to stay dry. But, Sissfreed did not care as much as Renton thought she would care, in fact she did not care at all because she, too, was being eaten away by self-consciousness, much like the groundhog with no hole to hide within and that is why she jumped head first off of the porch, even though Renton acted quickly, like the bunny in the hop dance, to catch her. It was too late. Sissfreed landed on her head. Death won out."
 
Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.
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