MSS: Modern Manuscript Studies

Manuscript Studies v. Genetic Criticism

2011-08-03T15:15:00.004+01:00

Recently someone who I hadn't seen in some time asked me whether I was still working on genetic criticism. I said that I was -- in fact I was about to give a paper on the typescripts of The Waste Land at the conference we were both attending. Yet genetic criticism is a term I generally do not use to describe my work on modern literary manuscripts. The name of this blog, for one, indicates that I see myself as doing something differently. Generally I don't object to genetic criticism -- neither as a designation for the study of a writer's creative process, nor as a field of investigation, so my choice to name what I do by another name was not motivated by any polemic. Nonetheless, the result is that I'm possibly the only one using the term modern manuscript studies.

So why? I felt the need to put the study of modern literary manuscripts on a slightly different footing than that of my compères of the Institut des textes et manuscrits in Paris, where the traditions and methodologies of critique génétique were founded. Insofar the early practioners at ITEM built on, but also set themselves apart from, notions of "écriture" as propogated by poststructuralism, they turned to the study of writing in its material manifestations as it can be observed in authors' manuscripts. The methods they developed focussed on the procedural and temporal aspects of writing, and they continued in the first instance to be interested in the text of the manuscripts.

A manuscript contains of course much for than text or writing. It also consist of paper and ink; it has a specific size, weight (or quality) and colour; the writing that appears on it has a particular, very often determined by the physical dimensions and qualities of the paper as well as the circumstances in which the writing took place. Furthermore, the manuscript has a very particular function, which might be different from other manuscripts -- think, for example, of cheap school copybooks which many writers of the twentieth century appear to use for rough drafting: this type of object almost expects a mode of writing that is quite distinct from, say, the preparation of fair copy on regular-sized A4 paper. Apart from a function, manuscripts also have a purpose -- creating a text is different from preparing a text for publication -- each of which comes at a different moment in what one can call the "biography of the work".

In other words, each manuscripts consists of different entities or components of which the text is only one, and each of these components needs to be understood in its own right as well as in relation to the all the other ones. Moreover, the manuscript and all its components also relate to a broader context: the habits and idiosyncracies of the writer, the writer's life and his work, the writer's time and culture, and so on. As objects, manuscripts are embedded in their time and place: they answer to a broader set of habits and customs that, just as for the mediaeval period, fit in with the habits and traditions of the culture, and that despite the idiosyncracies of every writer.

The ITEM scholars were never blind to the practical and philological exigencies of studying manuscripts. Deciphering, preparing the avant-texte required skills and techniques to analyze the physical attributes of the manuscripts. But all-too often this kind of work was, on the one hand, devalued as preparatory; on the other hand, that preparatory work was only half formalized in proper methodologiescal principles and did in any case not go far enough regarding some of the physical detail of the manuscripts. Palaeography and codicology in the study of mediaeval manuscripts are well-established fields, but similar kinds of investigation are virtually non-existent for the modern period.

Some change, to be fair, is now now taking place in this respect, and some work is being done for instance on codicology. Even so, one of the drawbacks of the genetic focus is that the purview has always been on manuscripts that reveal the traces of creation. Any manuscript, in other words, that does not shed light on this process is declared of no interest.

Hence, my perspective is a broader one. I do not believe that the study of manuscripts is relevant only to understanding the creative process. Manuscripts can be of interest in their own right -- and their entire history (including their afterlife as they leave the author's hands and move into the hands of the publishers and possibly later the hands of the collectors) deserves to be studied.

One final polemic point though -- I resist using the term genetic criticism for there are those who see it as a form of literary criticism. It is true that the study of composition can shed light on the meaning and understanding of the final work, but to see the study of manuscripts as simply another heuristic method seems greatly reductive and goes counter to the larger historical enterprise that is the history of the book.

Manuscripts: On Access and Representation

2011-01-29T16:06:00.008Z

Last Friday (28 January) Abigail Williams was invited on the Radio 4 Today show to talk about her work on the manuscripts of Jonathan Swift’s Letters to Stella. After a brief word on the use of spectrography to analyze cancelled text, Williams was quickly diverted by Evan Davies into pondering the Swift’s unusual relationship with the two young women who feature in the letters and the “little language” he invented to address. The item on the Today programme was certainly, I thought, pleasing: it would help bring manuscripts to the attention. But was it a missed opportunity?

I can imagine it certainly isn’t simple to talk about manuscripts on the radio. It isn’t simple to talk about manuscripts tout court.How do you represent them? How do you engage people and make them understand them? On occasion in walk into the John Ritblat Gallery at the British Library took look at some of their treasures on exhibit: Sidney’s Arcadia, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or the opening section of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—a manuscript that I know very well.It’s a fantastic sight to see all those wonderful documents there together. Somehow, though, the sight is also bewildering, as I press my nose against the glass of the display cabinet in a vain attempt to get closer to the materials. It is clear that a manuscript is very unlike a painting or a sculpture in an art museum. Every man or woman in the street can walk into the Tate or the National Gallery to see paintings by great artists like Picasso or Rogier van der Weyden; but when they come to the BL asking to see the working copy of Keats’s Hyperion , they are politely turned away.

Libraries and public repositories increasingly turn to the digital medium to facilitate access to the rare and valuable materials in their care. The BL has Turning the Pages, showcasing among others the illustrated fair copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and a notebook by William Blake. The Bodleian Library has recently launched their Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts, which virtually reunites all extant Austen manuscripts held in Oxford, London and New York. And still running at the National Library of Ireland after 4 ½ years is a ground-breaking exhibition on the life and work of W.B. Yeats, where the artefacts on display are supported by digital facsimiles on near-by computer screens which allow the visitor to browse, zoom, consult transcriptions and access further information. The aims and intended audiences (not the mention the underlying technologies that support them) are, however, in each case different.

The Dove Cottage and Wordsworth Museum (who have their own Digital Wordsworth: From Goslar to Grasmere is organizing a conference on “Innovative Interpretation of Manuscripts” at the Jerwood Centreon 3-4 March. The key issue for discussion is (and I quote from the conference brief) that "[t]oo often manuscripts are displayed as flat and passive conveyors of text, supplemented by transcriptions and long explanations used to illustrate points, but not interesting in themselves”. A group of specialists, including Louise Boyle, Jeff Cowton, Luca Crispi, Nat Edwards, Philip Martin, Steve Martin, David McClay, David McKitterick, Jeffrey C. Robinson, Tracy Wilkinson and myself, will be talking about diverse ways manuscripts can be interpreted and made to come to live, how they can be investigated and made to inspire and incite from the stories they have to tell.

The plasticity of the manuscript; the flattened text

2010-09-07T21:00:00.007+01:00

This is a rejoinder (or conjoinder, rather) to Carrie Smith’s fine post on the Reclamation and Representation conference blog about Spelling and strikethrough, typing manuscripts and silent editing. The kind of “silent editing” that she describes in Christopher Reid’s edition of The Letters of Ted Hughes is all too a common a practice. To smooth over minor slips of the pen seems for most a sensible thing to do; a minor intervention to help readability can only be a minor offence. Yet it begs the question, as Smith rightly asks, how much of the editor is there in the text. What annoys me most about it, I guess, is that it is always done in the name of the reader: it is the reader (editors or publishers claim) that do not want such troubling detail. These are usually also the kind of editors that find footnotes or annotations disturbing.

I don’t find slips of the pen disturbing. The Oxford Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats (under the general editorship of John Kelly) is in a fine example of an edition that retains detail of the hand that wrote the letters and thus gives a sense of the man behind the letters.

There are other features, too, that don’t find their way into printed editions. Among Ted Hughes’s letters to Leonard Baskin in the British Library (some of which Reid included in his volume) are written on “aerogram” paper, a type of blue, lightweight, gummed paper that could be folded to form an envelope which was used for airmail. Inevitably the “letter” sometimes overran the space on the paper, and Hughes would squeeze in a few extra lines, an ending, a greeting or a PS, to the sides of the page. None of this is ever found in a print edition of letters. Nor are any of the other features that one customarily finds in autograph letters—the space left between date, header, address; the inward-tapering left margin, and so on.

So there is a larger issue—an issue that has to do with the differences between manuscript and print. Print flattens text. A manuscript has three dimensions; the printed page has only two. The manuscript page, like the printed page, has width and length; the text moves—generally—from the top left corner to the bottom right. Generally, I say, because the writing on the manuscript can move in any direction in a way that print (barring some exceptional cases) does not. Print is limited by the sequentiality of the text; words appear in a strictly linear order. The text on the manuscript, by contrast, can move in any direction; the process of writing creates an order that is relational. Furthermore, as the text in the manuscript is not subjected to a strictly linear form, the temporal element of the manuscript is highlighted: the time of inscription becomes more apparent through the apparent simultaneity of textual elements—through co-existence of different moments of inscription—within one space.

The printed page of course has its own spatial possibilities; from the use of marginal glosses and footnotes in learned books to the dancing words of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, examples of the versatility of mise-en-page abound. But it is simply that the manuscript naturally lends itself to an exploitation of all the dimensions of the page. Every manuscript is, in a sense, a palimpsest, even when the words are not actually written on top of one another. This is the plasticity of the manuscript.

The printed page, moreover, is not well suited to capture the elasticity of hand-writing: words written hastily, words written with great care; words crammed in a corner; words written on top of other words; words that are malformed. Print cannot quite adequately handle these. And yet they are what makes a manuscript a manuscript. They tell you something about the moment of inscription, the psychology of the writer, the circumstances in which the words were written.

An example of this can be found in an annotated copy of W.B. Yeats Poems (1901), now at Senate House Library, which contains some very sloppy pencil marginalia in an almost childish hand among otherwise reasonably clear and legible notes. The conclusion that the annotator, the poet and artist T. Sturge Moore, had taken his book with him and was writing on an unstable surface immediately presented itself. Or perhaps the surface was stable, but the writing hand was being rocked about by motion? It seems likely that Sturge Moore was reading his book on the train.

Besides handwriting, print can still at best only approximate the idiosyncratic features of a manuscript. With proper page-making skills, and a powerful DTP software package, one can go a long way towards capturing the irregular elements of a manuscript. It wouldn’t be totally impossible, for example, to produce a diplomatic transcription of one of Swinburne’s drafts, with his beautiful drooping, ever-expanding, never-ending lines. But the more detail is added, the less clear the printed text actually becomes. With a manuscript like this, the fact that one has practically no leading—the spacing between the lines—on sections of verse that curve downwards one above the other, could make the printed text actually less legible than the manuscript.

So print is less flexible. But approaching the point differently, one can accept that this is precisely the function of print. The printing press may have been invented to increase the rate at which texts can be duplicated and disseminated, but one of its effects was that it has standardized text. A book produced in the sixteenth century does not look essentially different from a book published in the twenty-first century. The coming and going of blackletter printing in Germany is certainly the best indication of how this standardization works. Even the world wide web still in many respects emulates the printed page, despite claims about a digital revolution. Print flattens text—indeed. But it is supposed to do so. And this has important implications for the way we perceive manuscripts.

Just a few months into the writing of his new book, Finnegans Wake, James Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver, on October 1923, sending him some new drafts: “Today I send you the rough sheets with a plan of the verse and a forgot¬ten page of H.C.E. But please don't read them yet—in fact, they are illegible”. He was not exaggerating. Joyce’s much-reworked early drafts, though sometimes written in a large, clear hand, are challenging for anyone to read, because of their inchoate nature and elaborate overlay. Soon after Joyce would send Weaver a fair copy or typescript which would be much easier to read. But illegibility seems to be part and partial of his practice. About a month earlier he had written to her about another piece he had completed: “I had it typed at once in order to read it”. This time for his own benefit. There’s a point, in other words, at which the manuscript reaches saturation. The page, literally, has its limits; as the striations become so intricate that the page is bursting at the seams, the need to have the text flattened arises. The writer, after all, must also be a reader. Writing cannot forever dwell in the realm of the possible; if composition wants to move forward, the text needs to be fixed at some point, even if for a brief moment.

To return to the issue of silent editing—what position, then, should the editor or transcriber take? When editing documents, one should not interfere with the text of the document. That should be the first principle, and so I personally wouldn’t regularize occasional, but obvious errors and slips of the pen. But as an editor one has a duty towards the printed text as well. In their edition of Finnegans Wake (The Houyhnhnm Press, 2010), Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon have rendered the opening line thus: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle & Environs”. In the phrase “to Howth Castle and Environs” from the 1939 text, they emended “and” to “&”. They did so on the grounds that that was what Joyce first wrote in his manuscript (in a draft from 1926), and that (they argue) Joyce preferred the ampersand over the “distancing effect of the word ‘and’ in this context”. Editorially, critically, this is not a wholly straightforward decision, however. The “&” was indeed changed to “and” without Joyce’s express authorization on the galley proofs for the 1939 Faber edition— though remarkably after having been left to stand by several typists and typesetters as the text was transmitted in typescript and page proof through several iterations, including serialization in transition magazine. Now the ampersand is a ordinary feature of a manuscript—a symbol used for brevity, economy—that would in normal cases be normalized in print. The fact that it did not happen for so long has created an editorial problem.

Joyce’s typists and typesetters have, in other words, inadvertently acted as good documentary editors, until someone finally did erase the manuscript feature. This example shows just how plentiful the issues are when confronted by the idiosyncrasies of the minutiae in a manuscript. Editors (including editors like Reid) are not always conscious of these features—and the “manuscript culture” they encounter—in the manuscripts in front of them. Documentary editors, by contrast, are faced with a plethora of issues which they have to solve practically and with consistency. What, for example, if the slip of the pen is not really a slip? What when it poses a problem not unlike the ampersand in Joyce? What, in other words, if the misformed word is neither an abbreviation, nor a slip, but something not fully formed like this:

This detail from a manuscript by Lady Augusta Gregory for The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), a play she wrote in collaboration with W.B. Yeats, has a phrase which reads “that work in the business”. The word “the”, however, does not look like the; it rather looks like “te”. Yet to transcribe it that way would be pedantic, if not nonsensical. “Te” is not a standard abbreviation, the way it was customary up until the eighteenth century to shorten “the” to “ye” or “which” to “wh” or “wch”. The use of these abbreviations had something to do with the physical processes of writing by hand and using a quill and ink. (The disappearance of many of these abbreviations can, I guess, be attributed to the introduction of the steel pen nib.) Similarly, Lady Gregory “te” is a kind of elision effected for ease of writing and for speed, so that the pace of the hand can better keep up with the flow of the brain.

The straight slip of the pen is of course similar. What causes the writer to write one word for another is a momentary cognitive lapse; the intended word takes a different shape as the hand is forced to jump, like a faulty record or CD to keep up, with the flow of inspiration. The difference between the slip of the pen and “te” is that the slip is not a mistake that occurs consistently.

The case might therefore be made in favour for diplomatic transcription of “te”, but then the problem really has no end. What is it that the transcriber actually sees: is it “te”? Or is it “the”, with its letters rung together? Or even “th”? Take this example from the same folio, which reads: “but the weight of the business falls on Henry & myself – I wouldn’t”

The words “falls”, “myself” and “wouldn’t” show the same signs of being swiftly formed as “the”, but they are clearly no abbreviations or contractions, yet one needs some imagination (and a practiced eye) to decipher the individual letters of the double “ll” in “falls” and “my” in “myself”; even the standard contraction in “wouldn’t” is interesting because it has the apostrophe, but no separation of the letters “n” and “t”. Looking again at the first example, one can ponder whether “that” is that or this, two words that in Lady Gregory’s hands are not easy to distinguish. In this case it is “that” for the word fits syntactically with the rest of sentence, but the untrained would first take this word as “this”.

Such detail is intriguing and cumbersome at the same time. Pragmatically one sometimes has to flatten the text and opt for what is intended, not for what one sees, or thinks one sees, on the page. Ultimately, the plasticity of the manuscript is not something that can rendered in a perfect way, but as long the business of editors is to edit, they need to make decisions. However, what has to be kept in mind is that the text that results from the editorial process—whether through silent editing or diplomatic transcription—is a representation, not a reclamation of the manuscript.

Back on the Road

2009-03-18T13:08:00.014Z

At the end of January I travelled to Birmingham to see the manuscript scrollof Jack Kerouac's On the Road on its European tour, only to find out that I was a day late: the exhibition at the Barbar Institute of Fine Arts had closed the previous day. As a solace, I spent a productive afternoon working on some manuscripts of John Drinkwater's poetry in the University of Birmingham Library, and I bought a copy of the catalogue Jack Kerouac: Back on the Road, prepared by R.J. Ellis.

The catalogue is not the nicest-looking item, nor is it very well written (it mainly seems to consist of the extensive captions used in the exhibition), but it is very informative and it has a large number of interesting images of the scroll as well as photographs of Kerouac, different book covers and some other items that were included in the exhibition. The catalogue provides an overview of the biographical background to the narrative of On the Road, an elucidation of the circumstances under which the novel was written, and the life of the text before it finally appeared in print in 1957, when the book was published by Viking in New York.

That version of On the Road was substantially different from Kerouac's original outpouring on the typewriter, writing the novel in about twenty days in April 1951, fuelled (it is alleged) by nothing more than numerous cups of coffee. Those differences, though significant from a textual point of view, do not greatly alter the themes and structure of the novel; they can largely be described as tinkering with the language, with one exception, and that is the changing of the name of the real-life Neal Cassady to Dean Moriarty. Before Kerouac produced this revised version, however, the On the Road project was the subject of more radical alterations: in fact, it was revised several times, taking on at times radically different forms, one of which was a version which Carl Solomon was considering for Ace Books in January 1952. While Solomon believed he was getting a revision of the original, by now "legendary" typescript, Kerouac had produced something much wilder and much more experimental, and what Kerouac had offered was a radically altered set of fragmented prose pieces, which during a period of burgeoning creativity, had emerged from the linear plot of the scroll to form a series of interpolated narrative collages, which its author at one point likened to James Joyce's Ulysses. When Kerouac became aware that Solomon would probably not take the new On the Road, he typed another, more compact and straight version for a pulp paperback, also promising a longer, but still essentially novelistic version for possible hardback publication.

All of this suggests quite clearly that On the Road was not a text (or not one text), but a project that came to exist in quite different emanations. Although ultimately the aim was to publish a book, the production of On the Road was much more conceptual, never striving towards one specific form, but resembling the work of a painter who time and again paints the same identical setting or theme.

On the opposite side of these revisions, lies the original creation. Much has been made of the sponteneity of On the Road, both in its final form (final meaning simply "published", because in a sense, bearing in mind Donald Reiman's concept of "versioning", publication in 1957 merely put a halt to the successive creative reimaginings of On the Road) and in the typescript's unique form. Not long before he typed the book during those three weeks in 1951 in Joan Haverty's appartment in Queens, New York, he had announced: "I'm going to get me a roll of shelf-paper, feed it into the typewriter, and just write it down as fast as I can, exactly like it happened, all in a rush, the hell with these phony architectures and worry about it later". What he meant by "worry about it later" probably took on quite a different meaning from what he himself had anticipated. However, he was not exactly creating his book novel ex nihilo either, but used extensive notes and diary entries that he had made during his four cross-country journeys.

In the mean time, I have managed to follow the scroll to Dublin, where it was displayed at the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. Apart from appreciating the document's remarkable features, I was also able to determine another aspect which slightly qualifies the question of spontaneity. The scroll, it is now believed, consisted of tracing paper (rather than shelf-line paper or teletype paper) which Kerouac cut to size along the side to make it fit the typewrite platen and pasted together in twelve sections to form a continues typescript of 119 feet and 8 inches to form (in Allen Ginsberg's words) "a magnificent single paragraph several blocks long, rolling, like the road itself". These sections, however, were pasted together after the typing was finished. The typing at bottom and top of sections 1 and 2 does not cross the place where the two sheets were taped together. The typed text does not flow parallel to the paper's edge, but is slightly oblique; it was impossible to feed the paper through the typewriter in a straight manner, and because of this one would expect the typed, densily lineated text to run across the divide if the sheets had been pasted together from the start. As this is not the case, the typing was completed before the sections were pasted together. This sounds only logical: how otherwise would Kerouac have anticipated that he needed 36 1/2 meters of paper to complete his book?

The scroll has since travelled to the Russell Library, Maynooth College (National University of Ireland), and will now soon return to the United States.

Genetic Criticism

2009-01-18T17:43:00.006Z

Two academic events that might be of interest.

The Centre for Textual Scholarship (CTS) at De Montfort University (Leicester) is organizing a seminar on "Genetic Criticism: Directions and Challenges" (21 January 2009), with Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp) and Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway, University of London).
The Maison Fran çaise d'Oxford is hosting a two-day workshop, organized by Paolo d'Iorio, on "Genetic Criticism: Editions, Principles, Practices" (2 and 3 February 2009), with Daniel Ferrer, Almuth Grésillon Nathalie Sarraute and others. The second day will a see a number of hands-on sessions with the manuscripts of Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, Marcel Proust and some English and French scientific writers (though, since not in the archive, this no doubt will be using facsimiles). There is a flyer for this event; contact me if you would like a copy.

Ted Hughes Archive comes to British Library

2008-10-15T10:43:00.005+01:00

Yesterday The British Library announced the acquisition of an important archive of papers, letters, diaries and manuscripts of Ted Hughes, including draft materials for The Birthday Letters as well as other manuscripts dating from earlier periods. This makes the BL the biggest repository of Hughes materials after the Woodruff Library at Emory University, and complements the collections the BL already owns, which consists of correspondence between Hughes and Leonard Baskin and correspondence with Keith Sager. Both of these also contain numerous typesripts and duplicate xerox copies.

The press has picked up on Hughes's emotional investment in Birthday Letters, but in itself this is not a "new" element. In a letter to Keith Sagar, Hughes wrote: “Poetical effects incidental. Very self-exposing, I suppose, unquashed—my attempt to write about those things without aesthetic exploitation or concern for my artistic reputation. I no longer give much thought to that. Except to write clearly and expressively. Simply. No style. Plain. It will bring the sky down on my head, if I publish it—about 90-100 pieces. But so what. The sky’s fallen anyway” (15 August 1997, BL Add MSS 78760-194v).

What will be new is the evolution and development of the poems: “Once I’d determined to do it [publish Birthday Letters] and put them together & started repairing them wherever I could, & writing the few last ones, I suddenly had free energy I hadn’t had since Crow” (Ted Hughes to Keith Sagar, 18 June 1998, BL Add. MSS 78761-21). It will be interesting to see what "repairing" actually meants and how incidental style and poetical effect really were.

The earliest drafts for Birthday Letters, which Hughes originally planned to call "The Sorrows of the Deer", are in a notebook, which goes on display at the BL in The Sir John Ritblat Gallery as of 15 October.

Frankenstein in Oxford

2008-10-09T12:34:00.003+01:00

Here is an event that passed me by unfortunately -- Frankenstein Day at the Bodleian Library on 7 October 2008. The occasion was the launch of Charles E. Robinson's new edition -- or restoration rather -- of Mary Shelley's novel as The Original Frankenstein, removing Percy Shelley's approximately 5000 changes that he made in the manuscript. For the occasion, the library also created a display of the draft notebooks (in Mary and Percy’s Shelley’s handwriting) and the fair copy that was sent to the publisher. It is interesting to note the difference between the announcement on the Oxford Media pages and its complement on the Bodleian library pages. The difference has something to do, I think, with the aims of the edition. In trying to reach a wider audience, The Original Frankenstein is a purification of sorts, worthy in its own right, but slighly suspect as well. (And not only if you adhere to D. F. McKenzie's "sociology of the text".) The edition, we are told, "allow[s] us for the first time to read the story in Mary’s original hand" -- for the first time, that is, if we forget Professor Robinson's facsimile edition (and transcription) of The Frankenstein Notebooks in the Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics Series. Incidentally, neither the drafts nor the fair copy survive in toto, so no restoration can be entirely pure. On the plus side, The Original Frankenstein does print both texts (the "original" reconstruction and the original as published), while the book "is part of the Library's continuing campaign to make its riches more accessible for study and enjoyment".

An interesting development. . .

2008-10-07T15:17:00.004+01:00

Intertextuality--or one author's recreation of another writer's work, as in James Joyce's rewriting of Homer, or J.M. Coetzee "sequel" Foe to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe--seemed to me to be too immaterial a concept to be useful to studying composition histories. That is until I came across T. Sturge Moore's idea that revision—whether it is revising one's own work or that of someone else's—is simply what writers do. He felt that the poet has a duty to revise the work of another poet, for “[p]oetry dies when no new elements accrue to it; and so does each poem when, far from attracting correction and amendment, it no longer meets and weds with fresh thought and sentiment in those who read it”. Practicing what he preached, he set himself loose, in the privacy of the margins of his books, to “correct” John Gawsworth, W. B. Yeats and other poets, and to “author” a prologue for Oscar Wilde’s A Florentine Tragedy, which was published in 1908.

To this type of revision, Dacre Stoker, great-grand-nephew of Bram Stoker, has added another twist. It was announced this week (though incidentally not for the first time) that his sequel to Dracula, titled Dracula: The Un-Dead, was bought simultaneously by Dutton US, HarperCollins UK and Penguin Canada, and with film rights being acquired by AEI. The twist is not in that the novel/film, co-written by screenwriter Ian Holt, is yet another re-imaging of the famous vampire story, but that Stoker went back to the archive and used Bram Stoker’s notes and discarded drafts to write his own version, which is said to be set in London in 1912 and features Quincey Harker, the original hero’s son, as the main character. Add another interesting titbit: Stoker turned to the project because he felt that so many film adaptations had not remained faithful to his great-grand uncle’s original: “I found it exceedingly sad that all of the trash Hollywood had put out monumentally sullied Bram's and my family's literary legacy" (my emphasis).

The word “sullied” may be a favourite word of literary heirs. I don’t expect that Stephen Joyce will any time soon produce a sequel to Finnegans Wake using the notes that Joyce continued compiling after he had published his last book.

Be that as it may, intertextual processes have become a crucial part of manuscript studies.

Literary Manuscript Masterclasses at Oxford

2008-10-06T15:31:00.004+01:00

The Bodleian Library and the University of Oxford English Faculty are organizing a series of four masterclasses in the autumn term on a number of modern manuscripts. Each session a librarian and a scholar will talk about one manuscript, in the presence of the document itself. The series will start on 27 October, with Professor Kathryn Sutherland and Andrew Honey on Jane Austen's 'volume the First', followed by Professor Michael O'Neill on Shelley's Notebook containing "The Symposium", "A Defence of Poetry" and "On Love", Professor Christopher Ricks on T.S. Eliot's "Marina" and Professor Jim McLaverty on Pope's Essay on Criticism. Details and full programme are available here.

Sunny Dunny

2008-01-23T21:30:00.000Z

Sunny Dunny on his blog has purchased the facsimile of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (Faber and Faber, 1971) and, being a creative writer himself, ruminates about the survival of draft material in the digital age. This is a topic that also came up, inter alia, at the Study Day on the James Joyce Manuscripts at the Institute of English Studies. As media change--from handwriting to typewriting to writing on the computer--so do writing habits and (possibly) the writing experience, the methods of composition, and so on, but also of course the means by which manuscripts are preserved. One thing is certain: the survival of manuscripts for posterity remains a matter of luck, regardless of the medium which has produced. Any writer bent on destroying his drafts will do so, and yet s/he can never be certain to have destroyed all. Time will tell whether in 100 years' time there will be less manuscripts that have survived from the early twenty-first century than from the early twentieth-century. Yet I would be that the difference would not be enormous.

Emma Darwin

2008-01-09T15:42:00.000Z

Emma Darwin, a novelist living and writing in London, has posted a rather eloquent defense of literary autographs and their use in the classroom on her blog, This Itch of Writing, saying that "to have first drafts of great literature is like being able to see an aerial photograph in stereoscopic vision". After explaining how she discussed a draft of Blake's "The Tyger" with her creative writing students, she expressed the regret that it is not any easier to get hold of such drafts. Librarians and public funders please heed!

MSS: Modern Manuscript Studies Seminar

2007-12-18T11:51:00.000Z

The MSS: Modern Manuscript Studies Seminar is organizing a special Study Day on the Manuscripts of James Joyce.

Date: 8 January 2008
Time: 13.30-18.00
Venue: N336, Senate House, Institute of English Studies, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Speakers:

Hans Walter Gabler: "Modernist Texts Under Construction: Case Studies from the Manuscripts of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf"
Geert Lernout: "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks and Beyond"
Scarlett Baron: "'We adopt others' phrases': Joyce, Flaubert, and intertextuality"

For more information, please visit http://www.sas.ac.uk/events/visitor_events.php?page=ies_seminars&func=results&aoi_id=160

All are welcome.

Winterson on Rowling Manuscript

2007-12-08T21:25:00.000Z

Jeanette Winterson comments in The Times on the manuscript of J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard that is included in the Christmas sale of books and manuscripts at Sotheby's. The proceeds of the item, which is "treated like an illuminated manuscript", will go to charity.

MSS: Modern Manuscript Studies Seminar (Autumn 2007 Programme)

2007-09-26T09:10:00.001+01:00

The Programme for the Autumn 2007 term of the MSS: Modern Manuscript Studies Seminar at the Institute of English Studies:

4 October 2007
Venue:Room NG14
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Speaker: Sally Bushell (University of Lancaster), "Place, Space and Wordsworth's Manuscripts"

1 November 2007
Venue:Room NG16
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Speaker: Jessica Gardner (Head of Special Collections, University of Exeter Library), "Literary Archives and the curatorial love affair with Daphne du Maurier"

20 November 2007
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Venue: Room NG14
Speaker: Tracy Brain (Bath Spa University), "Representing Sylvia Plath"

All sessions are held in Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU.

Manuscripts in the News: Kerouac and Tolkien

2007-08-15T10:00:00.000+01:00

In September Viking is releasing an edition of the original “scroll” manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, along with a 50th anniversary edition of the novel itself. The manuscript’s original features—it consists of hundreds of typed pages taped together to form a roll of about 36 ½ m—are well known since it made the headlines in 2001 when it was bought at Christie's in New York for £1.7m by James Irsay, the owner of an Indianapolis football club, who subsequently took it on a road tour. (It is not unique, though, as D.A.F. de Sade's manuscript of 120 journées de Sodome, which he hid in a niche while he was locked up in the Bastille, similarly consists of sheets and scraps of paper taped together.) The fact that it is a scroll represents for some the nonstop flow of Kerouac's writing, as he banged out the book on his typewriter in a mere three weeks in 1951, though one can clearly see the numerous corrections and alterations. According to John Sampas, Kerouac's brother-in-law and literary executor, Kerouac made revisions to the original text during the 6-year period when he was trying to place the book with a publisher.

The manuscript is now kept at the University of Indiana. It is currently on exhibition at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts, from June 15 through October 14, 2007. A video of the curator unrolling the manuscript can be seen here

HarperCollins' are said to be bringing out through their Voyager imprint a 70th anniversary edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, together with a two-volume The History of the Hobbit, which will contain the previously unpublished manuscript version of the novel. No further information as yet on the Voyager Books website.

Summer Sale (Results)

2007-07-13T14:34:00.000+01:00

Some results from the summer sale at Sotheby's on 12 July: the Beckett letters sold for £57,600; the Ted Hughes letters sold for £3,600; the Heaney fair copy of "Elegy" sold for £2,040. The Kipling manuscript and typescript apparently did not sell.

Another letter, an item of business correspondence from James Joyce to Henry D'Avray, dated 11 August 1920, sold for £5,760.

Summer Sale

2007-07-10T14:08:00.000+01:00

The highlight during Sotheby’s summer sale of English Literature and History on 12 July will certainly be the set of 17 letters and 77 postcards Samuel Beckett sent to his aunt Peggy Beckett and his uncle James between 12 February 1965 and 23 February 1978. The letters are mainly of biographical interest and contain much detail about his daily life, health, travel plans and family news, but there are a good many references to his work, particularly the endless and strenuous rehearsals of Krapp’s Last Tape and Waiting for Godot, as well as his literary preoccupations such as proof reading and translating, not to mention social obligations and the never-ending stream of letters that needed to be answered. A recurrent motif seems to be how tired and overwhelmed he is, and in one wry, ironic moment, having arrived in his house in Ussy where the weather was terrible, he writes: “Back here yesterday to try a brief stay. […] Everything wopping wet under a black sky. Only bright spot a blackbird”. Given the interest of these materials to professional biographers and to the editors of Beckett’s correspondence (to be published by Cambridge University Press), university libraries will be certain to compete for this collection. (In December 2006, another cache of letters to Beckett’s artist friends Henri and Josette Hayden sold at Sotheby’s for €360,000.)

The same can probably not be said for the correspondence between Ted Hughes and Sir Christopher Lever about the Save the Rhino Appeal. These letters, however, give an insight in Hughes’ ecological engagement, and they demonstrate how his poetry, his passion for fishing and his charity work all flowed into one another. The correspondence begins in October 1986 with a request for Sir Christopher Lever for a manuscript poem to be auctioned at a special charity event at Sotheby’s. Hughes happily obliged and entertained a number of spin-off ideas to raise more money: he arranged for publication of the poem in the Sunday Telegraph; he negotiated with British Airways and Charles Branson of Virgin to insert the poem as a fold-out in their in-flight magazine on African routes; and he suggested a limited edition to be published by The Rampant Lions Press. The limited edition, in any case, seems to have fallen through, but the letters give quite a good insight about Hughes’ expertise in limited edition publishing. Students in the history of the twentieth-century book will want to read these documents for the details they contain about paper and papermaking, book sizes, costs and so on.

Other manuscript items included in the sale are an autograph fair copy containing 24 lines of Seamus Heaney’s “Elegy”, inscribed to Shozun-Tokenaga and presumably specially copied for him. The manuscript shows no variant readings from the printed version and has thus association value only. Nonetheless, such items are important to understanding the value poets—and the culture as a whole—put on manuscripts.

There is also an autograph fair copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “White Horses”, presumably dating from 1897, which was used as printer’s copy. At the top of the document is an instruction to the printer as to where he has to return the proof. The manuscript contains several small alterations and a cancelled and revised version of stanza 9. The differences between the deleted and the rewritten stanza, however, are minimal; while not exactly a currente calamo revision, the impression is that Kipling anticipated the changes to be greater than they actually would turn out to be, as he was recomposing the poem in his head. With this manuscript, is also a corrected proof.

Last week Christie’s sold a postcard from James Joyce to Sean O’Casey from May 1939 on The Irish Times’ misattribution of Finnegans Wake to the Irish playwright.

MSS: Modern Manuscript Studies--Aims and Objectives

2007-06-28T15:39:00.000+01:00

The purpose of this blog aims to raise awareness about manuscripts and manuscript culture covering the period from 1700 to the present as an object of study in literary history, historical bibliography and the history of the book. It seeks to complement the research seminar I convene at the Institute of English Studies with information about and discussion of modern manuscripts, literary drafts, notebooks, composition histories; methodologies and approaches for study; tools and resources for research; the collecting and archiving of manuscripts in national repositories , major research collections and private collections, and so on.

As with the seminar, the goal is to stimulate critical interest and encourage discussion in an area that is contributing greatly to the understanding of authorship, literary production and the nature of writing and aesthetics in the period 1750 to the present. The field of modern manuscript studies is a fairly young but expanding area of study that is generating new and exciting research. The need to widen participation and to stimulate critical interest and encourage discussion in an area that is contributing greatly to the understanding of authorship, literary production and the nature of writing and aesthetics during this period is significant, as well as the necessity to train younger scholars and postgraduate students.

The objectives that I originally envisaged for the seminar are still valid:--

to broaden the scope of historical bibliography and the history of the book;
to practice literary history as an archeology of the (literary) text
to explore a common language and demonstrate analytical methods;
to encourage a cross-fertilization of national and international traditions
to exchange experiences among scholars working on different authors and within different disciplines

The unique features of the modern manuscript in the period since the eighteenth century will be looked at in all their aspects: its text, its composition, its history, its editions. Topics and areas for discussion will include:

processes of writing, mechanics of (literary) creation
notebooks; reading notes; authors’ libraries
problem of revision: drafting; revising on typescripts or proofs; rewriting the œuvre
authorship; intentionality; relationship between writer and publisher
manuscript as material object and cultural artefact: collecting, preservation, circulation; role of archives; function and nature of facsimiles
problems of transcription and representation; recording of variants; editing versions
philology; historical bibliography; textual criticism; textual genetics (critique génétique criticism; critica della varianti; Textgenese)