Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers [1st ed.] 9783030502768, 9783030502775

Citation preview

Genesis and Revision in Modern British aand d Irish s W te s Writers Edited and with an introduction by Jonathan Bloom and Catherine Rovera

Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers

Jonathan Bloom · Catherine Rovera Editors

Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers

Editors Jonathan Bloom University of Paris-Dauphine Paris Sciences & Lettres Paris, France Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone (EMMA) Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier III Montpellier, France

Catherine Rovera University of Paris-Dauphine Paris Sciences & Lettres Paris, France Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM, CNRS/ENS) Paris, France

ISBN 978-3-030-50276-8 ISBN 978-3-030-50277-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: A typescript page with autograph revisions from Mary Lavin’s story ‘Sam’ circa 1972 in the Mary Lavin Papers is reproduced with the permission of the Literary Estate of Mary Lavin. A manuscript page from A. S. J. Tessimond’s unpublished memoir dated January 1958 is reproduced with the permission of Sadie Williams, literary executor for Tessimond. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The authors, editors, and publisher are grateful to the following copyright holders or their agents for authorizing extracts, quotations, and images from copyrighted and unpublished materials that appear in this book. Extracts from and images of Mary Lavin’s unpublished manuscript drafts in the Mary Lavin Papers, Special Collections, University College Dublin Library, are reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of Mary Lavin; quotations from Lavin’s New Yorker correspondence in the New Yorker Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library appear courtesy of the New Yorker © Condé Nast Publications and the Literary Estate of Mary Lavin. Extracts and manuscript images from the unpublished memoir, correspondence, and unpublished poetry of A. S. J. Tessimond are reproduced here with the kind permission of Sadie Williams. ‘The Handmade Tale: The Paper Medium as the Place for Action’ by Claire Bustarret and translated by Jonathan Bloom was first published in French as ‘Écrire à la main: Le support papier comme lieu de l’action’ in the online journal Ethnographiques.org, n° 31. The images of French manuscripts and notebooks in this English version are reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire de Neuchâtel, Switzerland, the Bibliothèque de la ville de Saint-Brieuc, France, and the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, France. The Chapter 8 epigraph from Studies is reproduced with the permission of Messenger Publications; the Chapter 3 epigraph by permission of Sadie Williams; the Chapter 6 epigraph with the permission of the University of Toronto Press. Finally, the editors wish to thank Bernard O’Donoghue and Sonia Overall for exploring the creative process in their own work. v

Contents

1

1

Introduction: Archival Revelations Jonathan Bloom and Catherine Rovera

2

Vision and Revision in the Manuscripts of William Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats Wim Van Mierlo

17

The Unwritten Waste: Revisions in the Poetry and Memoir of A. S. J. Tessimond James Bainbridge

37

3

4

Inspiration and Narrative in the Short Poem Bernard O’Donoghue

59

5

The ‘Newness’ of Manuscripts Daniel Ferrer

85

6

Unwriting The Waves Christine Froula

101

7

The Writer’s Hunger: Considering a Novel in Progress Sonia Overall

125

vii

viii

CONTENTS

8

To Cut a Long Story Short: The Shaping of Mary Lavin’s New Yorker Stories Gráinne Hurley

145

The Handmade Tale: The Paper Medium as the Place for Action Claire Bustarret and Translated by Jonathan Bloom

169

9

10

11

‘No Speech at My Command Will Fit the Forms in My Mind’: Shaping the Spiritual Through Writing and Typing in George MacDonald’s Lilith Manuscripts Christine Collière-Whiteside Processing Modernism: The Textual Politics of Nightwood Alex Christie

Index

201

223

247

Notes on Contributors

James Bainbridge is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool where he is also Deputy Director of the Humanities and Social Sciences access diploma. His research is focused on romantic-era and twentieth century poetry, principally the works of A. S. J. Tessimond and George Crabbe. He is currently completing a biography of Tessimond using the poet’s unpublished papers. Jonathan Bloom is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Paris-Dauphine, Paris Sciences & Lettres. He has published articles on both sides of the Atlantic and his book The Art of Revision in the Short Stories of V. S. Pritchett and William Trevor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) was nominated for both the MLA First Book Prize and the SAES Research Prize. A member of the University of Montpellier III’s research group EMMA (Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone), and an associate member of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM), he works primarily in twentieth century British literature and genetic criticism. He has been awarded three Harry Ransom Center Fellowships. Claire Bustarret is Senior Research Engineer at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CNRS-EHESS-ENS: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and École Normale Supérieure) in Paris. A specialist in modern and contemporary codicology, she studies the paper medium and material aspects in the production

ix

x

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

process of eighteenth to twentieth century literary, scholarly and scientific handwritten works. She has been co-manager with Serge Linkès of the MUSE database since 2000. She is also a regular contributor to the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM) and has been President of the Association Française pour l’Histoire et l’Étude du Papier et des Papeteries (AFHEPP) since 2019. Alex Christie is Assistant Professor of Digital Prototyping at Brock University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Victoria, where he conducted research on geospatial expression and scholarly communication for the Modernist Versions Project and Implementing New Knowledge Environments. He has co-developed two born-digital projects in the digital humanities and modernism: z-axis research and Pedagogy Toolkit, which was supported by a grant from the Association for Computers and the Humanities. He has published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Reading Modernism with Machines, Digital Literary Studies, and Scholarly and Research Communication, among other venues. Christine Collière-Whiteside is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bourgogne-Franche Comté (INSPE), a member of TIL (Texte, Image, Langage), and an associate member of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM, CNRS). She works on the creative processes of Lewis Carroll, George McDonald and Roald Dahl, the genesis of text and illustration, children’s literature, and the didactics of (re-)writing in mother tongue and EFL. Her publications include Apprendre de l’intime: entre littérature et langues, 2016, with Berchoud and Voise, and Genesis 48: Ecritures Jeunesse, 2019, with Karine Meshoub-Manière. Daniel Ferrer former director of the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM, CNRS/École Normale Supérieure), is chief editor of the journal Genesis. He has worked mainly on Joyce and Woolf but also on Faulkner, Poe, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, Proust, Barthes and Hélène Cixous, painting, digital humanities and the genesis of film. He has published several books on the theory of genetic criticism. Christine Froula is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University, a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and, recently, a visiting professor at the ENS de Lyon. She has published widely on twentieth literature and culture, including Virginia Woolf and

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xi

the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity; Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture and Joyce; To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos, “Proust’s China,” “Scribbling into Eternity: Joyce, Proust, ‘Proteus’,” “War, Empire, and Modernist Poetry, 1914–1922,” “Orlando Lives: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in Global Adaptation and Performance,” and “Goldie’s ‘War and Peace’: Marinetti Meets Aristophanes and Beethoven in Bloomsbury.” Gráinne Hurley holds an M.A. in Modern Drama and a Doctor of Philosophy from University College Dublin, Ireland. Her doctoral research examined the relationship between Mary Lavin and The New Yorker, founded on consultation and the close examination of Lavin’s typescripts and manuscripts and her extensive correspondence with the magazine. Hurley has presented papers on her findings at several international conferences. She has been involved in education for many years and was a lecturer of English literature and a drama teacher. Her other areas of interest include twentieth century American Drama, theatre and censorship, and fiction from The New Yorker. Bernard O’Donoghue is Professor and Emeritus Fellow in English at Wadham College, Oxford. He taught medieval literature and the history of the English language there for forty years. He has published books on medieval European love poetry and modern Irish poetry, seven volumes of his own poetry—most recently Selected Poems (Faber, 2008) and Farmers Cross (Faber, 2011)—and a verse translation of the medieval English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin, 2013). Four of his poetry collections were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, including Gunpowder (Chatto, 1995) which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London. Sonia Overall is Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University, where she leads the M.A. in Creative Writing. She writes fiction, creative non-fiction, performance text and poetry. She has a strong interest in psychogeography, walking-writing and site-specific practices, experimental forms and intertextuality. Sonia has written and abridged work for street theatre and her publications include the novels A Likeness and The Realm of Shells (Harper Perennial) and poetry chapbook The Art of Walking (Shearsman, 2015). Sonia is the founder of Women Who Walk, a network of women using walking in their creative and academic practice.

xii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Catherine Rovera is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Paris-Dauphine and head of the James Joyce research team at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM, CNRS/ENS), Paris Sciences & Lettres. She has worked on the manuscripts of some major British modernist writers and is the author of a monograph, Genèses d’une folie créole: Jean Rhys et Jane Eyre (2015). She is concurrently working on a genetic edition of Virginia Woolf’s reading notebooks and on the newly found manuscripts of Simone and André Schwarz-Bart. Wim Van Mierlo is Lecturer in English and Publishing at Loughborough University and President of the European Society for Textual Scholarship. A specialist of modern literary manuscripts, he is the author of several articles on authorial composition (James Joyce in particular), genetic criticism, reading notes, archives and textual editing. Among his publications is an edition of the manuscripts of W. B. Yeats’s Where There Is Nothing and The Unicorn from the Stars published in the Cornell Yeats Series (Cornell University Press, 2012). He is also co-editor of Reading Notes, a special issue of Variants (2004) and Genitricksling Joyce (Rodopi/Brill, 1999).

List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2

Fig. 5.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3

Fig. 9.4

Page from Tessimond’s memoir, dated January 1958 Page from Tessimond’s memoir, dated January 1962 Raphael, The Triumph of Galatea, Villa Farnesina, Rome Transcription of the list on the inner front cover of the first part of the second draft of the ‘Sirens’ episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses (National Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/9) Transcription of Joyce’s notes for a ‘Lacedemon’ episode (National Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/7/A-B, p. 28) Sonia Overall, summaries Sonia Overall, draft manuscript pages Paul Valéry, ‘La main et l’œil …’ [‘The Hand and the Eye…’], Cahier 219 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, N.a.fr. 19245, f. 77v.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, playing card in file of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel, Ms R 49, f. 24r) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, playing card in file of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel, Ms R 49, f. 24v) Louis Guilloux, composition by pasting in draft of La Maison du Peuple (1927), (Bibliothèque de Saint-Brieuc, MdP010101-A, f. 6r)

55 56 88

90 93 139 140

170

181

182

187

xiii

xiv

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 9.5

Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, copybook for the Essay on the Origin of Languages (Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel, Ms R 11, p. 32), showing corrections made by ‘scraping’ Transcription of George MacDonald’s Lilith B, top of f. 8v Transcription of George MacDonald’s Lilith B, top of f. 3v Transcription of George MacDonald’s Lilith B, top of f. 131v Quotation from Matthew Kirschenbaum Quotation from Bill Brown Quotation from Bill Brown Variants in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood Variants in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood Variants in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood Quotation from Bill Brown

191 207 214 217 227 229 229 234 236 241 244

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Archival Revelations Jonathan Bloom and Catherine Rovera

Accursed who brings to light of day The writings I have cast away! But blessed he that stirs them not And lets the kind worm take the lot!1 —W. B. Yeats

Perhaps only the mysteries of creation and existence have preoccupied humankind more than the secrets of its own acts of creation. Writers, composers, painters, sculptors, engravers, architects and luthiers are all involved in creative processes that lead them to finished artistic works, but in many cases that process, once completed, is all but invisible and cannot be recaptured, reassembled or recreated. In some instances, of course, one can get a glimpse of it, through a well-preserved isolated stage—a scrap of manuscript, a study for a painting, an armature or model for a sculpture or building, an engraved plate, or even a wooden mold for a stringed instrument, but in the fine arts and violin making, we know little about each artist’s process as a whole. Paintings now can be

J. Bloom (B) · C. Rovera (B) University of Paris-Dauphine, Paris Sciences & Lettres, Paris, France © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_1

1

2

J. BLOOM AND C. ROVERA

scanned, and those images can reveal clues about the way in which particular painters worked. For instance, in Paris recently, the researcher Pascal Cotte, who works regularly with the Louvre, scanned the Mona Lisa with a multispectral camera. Underneath several layers of paint, he discovered another woman’s face, larger, unsmiling, with a more pronounced nose.2 The clothing details prove that the original, heretofore unknown ‘Lisa’, had been erased to make room for the iconic face we marvel at today. Yet despite this intriguing revelation, the story of the making of the world’s most famous portrait remains incomplete. In the case of sculptors and luthiers, once the works are crafted, all—or nearly all—of the stone, clay or wood removed to form the work of art or instrument is discarded. We know that Michelangelo’s choice of stone, a piece of marble twice abandoned by other sculptors, for instance, determined David’s posture, but little about how he chiseled it. Stradivarius’s instruments continue to amaze analysts, but his techniques and craftsmanship—even the composition of his varnish—remain mysterious. Astounding, inexplicable architectural achievements abound, of course, from Stonehenge to Tiwanaku and Pumapuncu to the great pyramids, but their construction and, in the case of Stonehenge, functionality, remains unfathomable. Perhaps only writers and composers—providing that they preserve their drafts and notes—occasionally offer us the possibility of tracing their creative processes, making their archives arguably the richest source for examining a creative act. Although the complete paper trail of any given author’s work rarely survives or is available, in many instances enough material remains to tell some of the story of its creation. A close examination of unpublished and published materials from notebooks, diaries, sketches and rough drafts with extensive revisions to typescripts and galley proofs enables scholars to trace the evolution and translation of an original impulse into a final published text. Autobiographical material, correspondence with friends, colleagues and editors can, of course, shed further light on a writer’s approach to fashioning the fictive. And beyond the archival revelations are disclosures in recorded radio and television broadcasts, captured on tape or in transcripts, as well as in authors’ published interviews, essays and book reviews. The value of contextual and source studies is now well established in the field of textual scholarship. But the genetic approach goes beyond the mere observation of primary source material. It is, instead, a reconstruction of ‘the chain of events in a writing process’3 and as such it exposes what happens backstage, behind the scenes or between the acts. In this

1

INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVAL REVELATIONS

3

way, one may view the geneticist as a detective. To begin, genetic critics investigate primary source materials that have somehow been retrieved after their authors have either scrapped or salvaged them. After combing through all the clues or exhibits, they piece them together to reconstruct and ultimately capture the act of creation. In what ways does the study of revisions give us a better understanding of a published work? At various stages, writers choose to add or remove material that, however minor or extensive, can substantially alter their work. The deletion of a passage, for instance, can make way for a perhaps more wide-ranging unsaid that enlists the reader’s participation. How does the actual choice and use of writing tools influence the creative process? Some authors write exclusively by hand, others compose directly on the typewriter or word processor before making autograph revisions, others use a combination of the two, and many employ collage techniques that anticipate the cutting and pasting so easily achieved on a computer. Do writers’ ethical and moral considerations have an impact on their subject matter and editorial decisions? While some writers have been censored by external voices, others may instead monitor themselves. Is it then possible to detect such considerations at various stages of their work? Editorial suggestions for revision may enter into the process as well, after authors submit for publication what they consider to be their final version, and can transform texts just as dramatically—and sometimes enhance or spoil them. The study of the creative process is not, however, limited to the stages that precede the first published text. In some cases, dissatisfied with the initial publication, writers and poets argue for revising or reworking the text and in some cases republishing it. This volume explores the creative process in all these facets. Although famous for its seminal role in establishing literary textual criticism in the 1970s as a legitimate alternative to its more celebrated and influential theoretical movements of that period, such as structuralism and deconstructionism, France was not the birthplace of genetic criticism. In their enlightening introduction to Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avanttextes, Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden point out that although the inspiration for genetic research is often attributed to France, and while it ‘originates much of it, France was nonetheless one of the last countries to become engaged in it, and indeed one must look elsewhere for the origins of genetic criticism’.4 The founder of French genetic criticism, Louis Hay, believes that ‘[i]n the aesthetics of German idealism, we find the modern source of reflection on what Goethe first called the

4

J. BLOOM AND C. ROVERA

“genetic evolution” of a writing’.5 Not surprisingly, poets and writers were the first to become interested in ‘studies dealing with the production of writings, especially literary texts’, long before the critics themselves.6 Therefore, the true founding fathers of modern genetic-critical studies were nineteenth-century early German Romantic poets who understood that tracing the organic composition of a work leads to a greater understanding of the finished product. Goethe believed that the best way of comprehending works of art is to see them in their ‘nascent state’7 and Friedrich Schlegel observed likewise that the most profound understanding of a work comes from tracking its development and composition. A century later in France, yet another famous poet, Paul Valéry, argued that the process itself was even more important than the final product: ‘Creating a poem is itself a poem’, he wrote.8 Scholarly interest in manuscript-based studies and textual criticism emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1950s and 1960s during which a number of English-language scholars focused on individual writers and poets, often devoting entire volumes to the genesis and evolution of one work. Conscious of their importance and aware of posterity, James Joyce and William Butler Yeats saved much of what they wrote, which is why textual scholars who had access to their papers during this burgeoning period had so much material with which to work. A disproportionate focus on Joyce’s and Yeats’s archival material is, of course, only natural. They are arguably the most significant novelist and poet respectively of the twentieth century. Therefore, although there were ground-breaking volumes on Brontë, Hardy, Eliot and Dickinson, not surprisingly, the majority of these manuscript-based volumes focused on Joyce and Yeats, such as A. Walton Litz’s The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1961); David Hayman’s monumental annotated reconstruction of Joyce’s last work, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (1963); Jon Stallworthy’s Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (1963) and its companion volume, Vision and Revision in Yeats’s Last Poems (1969); Curtis Bradford’s Yeats at Work (1965); Michael Groden’s Ulysses in Progress (1977), the most comprehensive and authoritative history of Ulysses ’s evolution. During this productive period, Hayman’s work on Finnegans Wake and Phillip F. Herring’s edition of Joyce’s Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum (1972) ensured that, together with the aforementioned books, work on the James Joyce archive did more to advance modern textual criticism than anything else.9

1

INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVAL REVELATIONS

5

Serendipity played a critical role in reinvigorating textual studies in the late 1950s. Though they each had a longstanding interest in modern literature, two unlikely pioneers of that period, the American A. Walton Litz, one of three 1951 Rhodes Scholars from Princeton, and the Englishman Jon Stallworthy, the 1958 Newdigate Prize-winning Magdalen College graduate, pursued graduate studies in Oxford for ulterior motives; not to become eminent scholars. Reading for a D.Phil. at Merton College enabled Litz to indulge in the city’s rich intellectual, social and cultural life and gave Stallworthy the opportunity to remain in his hometown for a chance to earn an elusive Oxford Blue for rugby. Oddly enough, they began their D.Phils without subjects, but through good fortune and fortuitous guidance became two of the first scholars to work on the manuscripts of the two most important Irish literary figures of the twentieth century: Joyce and Yeats. Oxford University Press published their pioneering book-length textual studies based on their theses within two years of each other that marked the beginning of their distinguished academic careers. Litz was the first Oxford student to do a D.Phil. on a modern writer and one of the first American scholars to work on Joyce in Britain. While at a cocktail party, he heard about Harriet Shaw Weaver who had worked for The New Freewoman, had edited and helped finance The Egoist, an avant-garde literary journal, and lived in Oxford. More importantly, she had been a friend and patron, not only to Wyndam Lewis and T. S. Eliot, but to James Joyce, to whom she provided moral and financial support for years. As his chosen literary executor, she possessed many Joyce manuscripts and letters. Miss Weaver responded to Litz’s note of inquiry by inviting him to tea and lending him some of Joyce’s manuscripts. She gave him valuable assistance with material for his thesis10 and Litz did what he calls ‘hardcore scholarship’ with these manuscripts: Joyce made copious notes and revised constantly. He left layer upon layer of revisions, and you could learn a great deal from the changes he made. For example, very early in Ulysses , Buck Mulligan, taunting Stephen Dedalus with refusing to kneel when his mother died, leans over the balustrade and recites lines from a poem by Yeats, ‘Who goes with Fergus?’ The lines are ‘…And no more turn aside and brood/ Upon love’s bitter mystery/ For Fergus rules the brazen cars.’ This poem becomes a leitmotif, and his revisions show how he added it in later versions.11

6

J. BLOOM AND C. ROVERA

The Art of James Joyce stimulated interest in the James Joyce archive and many of Litz’s protégés, benefitting from his guidance and drawing from a variety of primary sources unavailable at the time of their mentor’s early work, forged distinguished academic careers of their own in the following decades. Like Litz, Stallworthy embarked on a D.Phil. without any idea of what he would work on. Helen Gardner, the Oxford University Department of English Chair, suggested that Stallworthy work on Yeats, citing the ‘[f]ascinating variants’ in the Variorum Edition of the Poems that had just been published and arranged for Maurice Bowra to supervise him. At Bowra’s suggestion, the young scholar wrote to Mrs. Yeats, asking if he could see her husband’s manuscripts. Although the reply never came, Stallworthy traveled to Dublin and met the elusive, reclusive Mrs. Yeats, not through an Oxford connection, but through his father’s personal friend, Dublin’s leading gynecologist Bethel Solomans, who had delivered Mrs. Yeats’s children. After passing Mrs. Yeats’s ‘fairy-tale “test”’ that consisted in deciphering the nearly illegible scrawl in Yeats’s six most difficult notebooks, Stallworthy requested and was granted the manuscripts to the poems that most intrigued him. He spent many hours in her kitchen where she helped him read the drafts that she had rescued from the wastebasket. Of all the pretenders, he was probably the best prepared since he decoded and listened with a poet’s eyes and ears. His apprenticeship with the Yeatses—both the poet and his invaluable widow—taught him valuable lessons and enabled him to witness Yeats’s act of composing ‘musical structures’: As in a master-class, I saw and heard him building his musical structures and saw—what I had always sensed—that it is its musical structure that distinguishes poetry from prose. I learned how he balanced a sentence and built it into a stanza, and how sentence and stanza and poem were undergirded with rhetoric deployed like a sculptor’s armature. I learned how he softened the outlines of his rhetorical framework, and freed his rhythms, as a poem took shape; concealing his artifice until the words on the page might pass for natural speech. I saw, in the unfolding of his career, the development of a fierce self-critical faculty that would strike out a line—even at times a stanza—better than anything I could ever write, because it was not necessary or in some other way failed to contribute to the poem as a whole. He would cut and cut again, but seldom add, other than to replace a word or phrase with a better word or phrase.12

1

INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVAL REVELATIONS

7

This non-theoretical Anglo-Saxon textual-critical approach on both sides of the Atlantic preceded and anticipated genetic criticism in France. Although known mostly as New Critical pioneers, American professors Cleanth Brooks and William K. Wimsatt, who as early as 1956 suggested that David Hayman construct a first-draft version of Finnegans Wake, foresaw the importance of manuscript study and the exploration of what came to be known as ‘avant-textes’ that would pave the way for the genetic-critical approach. In his examination of Yeats’s manuscript drafts during the same period, Stallworthy, believing the ‘cargo […] alone justifies the voyage’, purposely avoided the discussion of earlier critical writings, however valid they may have been: ‘These with their theories and counter-theories, could so easily obscure the patterns of the material itself, that I felt it would be wiser to exclude them’. Instead, these pioneers—the ‘Resurrection Men’—sought to explain the creative process through empirical archival research by using, ‘[l]ike a restorer of stainedglass windows’, a ‘minimum of lead’ to fix ‘a multitude of fragments in place’.13 The detailed English-language studies did not simply see the writers’ manuscript drafts exclusively in relation to the subsequent published work but considered intention and primarily their evolution as well as the myriad possibilities of the author’s unpublished work. Tracing a writer’s drafts and revisions enables archival scholars to witness and showcase the craft of poetry and fiction so often marginalized by the romantic notion of pure inspiration. In some cases, the critic—and by extension the reader— can relive ‘the poem of the act of the mind’14 from draft to draft, as was Stallworthy’s experience with Yeats: Like a locksmith opening a safe, he was searching for the right combination and, as the dials turned slowly beneath the fingers, his trained ear listened for the click of cogs slipping into place. One by one the numbers would come up, until finally the door swung open on a completed poem. He was in fact thinking on paper, and following the track of his pen or pencil, one seems to be at his elbow with the great voice chanting in one’s ear.15

In France, the emergence of critique génétique can be traced back to the late 1960s and to Louis Hay, the father of the school, who was also the founder of the research center now named Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM) and its director until 1986. It is concomitant with a new textual approach to literary texts that may be called

8

J. BLOOM AND C. ROVERA

post-structuralist. Michael Groden recalls, and rightfully so, that Hay and his young fellow critics were ‘thoroughly versed in the writings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and other leading theorists’.16 From its inception, French genetic criticism was thus ‘theoretically self-conscious’17 and that was unmistakably its main point of divergence from the Anglo-Saxon approach. The French genetic critics, however, broke away from a purely metaphysical focus to embrace the more empirical methods of the first practitioners across the Channel. While trying to pinpoint the role of this new discipline and to delineate its fields of study, Hay himself paid tribute to the Anglo-Saxon scholars who had blazed the trail.18 To establish a precise lexicon and methodology for the new approach, Jean Bellemin-Noël coined the term ‘avant-texte’ or ‘pre-text’ in his seminal book Le Texte et l’avant-texte: Les brouillons d’un poème de Milosz (1972). This compelling concept refers to writers’ unpublished notes, sketches, drafts and proof corrections that come before the published version of a given work. The genetic critic’s interpretation of the reasons for alterations between drafts is at the heart of this approach, and, given enough clues to read between the lines, genetic critics’ examination of the process arguably reveals more about the published work than a purely theoretical approach to it. A close examination of a writer’s manuscripts may challenge some authorial assertions as to his or her alleged method of composition. One may have to move beyond an organic conception of literary creation toward a more mechanical one, or vice versa, in interpreting writing practices. In Éléments de critique génétique (1994), Almuth Grésillon drew an insightful distinction between programmed writing (écriture à programme) and a more spontaneous writing process of discovery (écriture à processus ). The former applies to a writer like Zola, who used to do extensive research before he set out to write and invariably followed some kind of pre-established pattern or program. By contrast, the latter applies to a writer like Proust, who did not know beforehand where the act of writing would take him; in this case creation and the writer’s thought processes work in concert. But Zola and Proust are two extreme cases and composition methods are not always so clear-cut. For most writers, the two types of writing, that is to say the premeditated and organic modes of creation, frequently overlap. Some writers may claim that nothing has been left to chance, and that each word reflects a sense of purpose. Others may assert that they rely on a more inspirational or visionary approach. Geneticists must try to distinguish inspiration from

1

INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVAL REVELATIONS

9

craft, as well as to highlight in what instances writers’ impulses may, along the way, have prevailed over their original intent. Moreover, French geneticists have always been acutely aware of the dual status of manuscripts, material and semiotic. Indeed, paradoxically enough, genetic criticism ‘pursues an immaterial object (a process) through the concrete analysis of the material traces left by that process’.19 If geneticists are principally concerned with a specific writer’s creative process, their ambition is also to confront and compare a whole range of writing practices. Codicology, a discipline that focuses on the medium— the paper medium as well as writing implements—through which literary texts are produced, helps geneticists carry out such a comparative study. Viewed from a codicological point of view, manuscripts are material objects, independent of their actual content. Like an archaeologist examining human remains or a forensic surgeon dissecting a corpse, the codicologist handles the original manuscripts as if they were made of flesh and bone and about to yield some of their secrets. With their bare hands— and sometimes some measuring instruments—such specialists investigate the physical aspect of the paper: its size, texture (thickness of sheets, consistency of the pulp, finish), color and watermarks. They also look at the paper medium, which can range from parchment to school notebooks, including notepads, loose sheets, ruled paper and exercise books. Finally, they inspect the ink from the authors’ writing implements such as fountain pens, ballpoint pens, pencils, typewriters and word-processors. In their hands and through their eyes, the paper is simultaneously a raw material, a manufactured product and—of foremost interest to geneticists—a literary artifact. One of the most compelling aspects of genetic criticism has been to reconsider the notion of time in the creative process. Louis Hay emphasized the ‘reality of a temporal unfolding—a historical dimension of the text itself’ that forever alters the way in which scholars consider a writer’s published text. The mere reflection on the genesis of such a text, that necessarily involves the ‘avant textes’, precludes the conventional idea of ‘a fixed structure, crystallized in the unchanging surfaces of the text’.20 Therefore, to glimpse the writing process invalidates and replaces the ‘fixed structure’ by confronting us with ‘a text in movement’.21 In promoting unpublished texts, namely alternative versions of a finished product, as substitutes teeming with potential, genetic critics stopped considering the published or authorized version of a text as the

10

J. BLOOM AND C. ROVERA

only legitimate one. Hay cited Julien Green’s and Julien Gracq’s respective poetic phrases—‘the novel that could have been’ and ‘phantoms of successive books’22 —to describe this phenomenon whereby the published version of a text is just one possibility contingent on others, still haunted by the unborn versions that precede it but have been discarded along the way. This approach mirrors that of the pioneers working on the other side of the Channel years earlier. Manuscript-based studies and genetic criticism converge in this volume, which is entirely devoted to British and Irish writers and poets from 1895 to the present. The focus on the way in which texts evolve unifies the ten new essays in this collection. Drawing on unpublished archival sources as well as analyses of the invisible handwork that produces them, it explores, across genre and gender, the many ways in which writers and editors fashion a work at every stage of the creative process, from the writer’s initial idea to publication and beyond. It also challenges prior assumptions about the part played by inspiration and craft, respectively, and examines how the paper medium and writing implements help or hinder the act of composition, ranging from handwriting and typewriting to hypertext. It reveals the latest developments in such fields as life writing and digital humanities, especially how modern scholars, through the filter of hypertext, interpret modernist texts, and captures living writers and poets themselves reflecting upon their own work in progress. As early as 1805 Wordsworth spoke of the imagination as an ‘unfather’d vapour’ and characterized the writing of poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’; Yeats, by contrast, said that a ‘poem comes right like a click of a box’. Drawing from original manuscript drafts in his comparison of Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Yeats’s ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, Wim Van Mierlo initiates a discussion on origins and outcomes, revealing the confluence of inspiration and composition in poetry writing. Confronting the Romantic tradition of the Visionary Poet head on, his essay questions the accepted notions of inspiration and ‘reclaim[s] revision as an activity cognate to writing’ rather than secondary to original composition. It demonstrates that in the cognitive dynamics of creation, vision and revision, improvisation and (re) drafting are deeply intertwined. Like Wordsworth and Yeats, who were constant self-revisers—even altering poems that had been published—A. S. J. Tessimond believed that a published poem was not necessarily a finished work. James Bainbridge shows that, furthermore, self-revision ‘is crucial to understanding the broader concerns of Tessimond’s life’. Until recently little had been

1

INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVAL REVELATIONS

11

known about Tessimond, who was a promising English poet in the 1930s, and it appeared that he had destroyed the majority of his personal manuscripts shortly before his death. Bainbridge’s article draws upon newly discovered material, namely drafts of poems as well as an unpublished memoir, a portion of which was written while the poet was receiving extensive electro-convulsive therapy. As the treatment was rapidly eroding his memory, Tessimond began to depend on his autobiographical journal as a means to hold on to what had happened in his life, in an obsessive‚ desperate attempt to ‘write the impossible’. This compelling, tragic account pushes new boundaries in life writing and explores a unique poetic struggle, as Tessimond’s medical treatment influences and compromises his constant revisions—his re-making of his life. In exploring inspiration and the fictive in the short poem, Whitbreadprize-winning Irish poet Bernard O’Donoghue offers us the insights of a living poet. He compares the creative processes of Yeats, the late Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and his own. He argues that poets gather their material with an eye to what they want to conclude and examines a few short poems from the twentieth century to see how this process works, including Yeats’s ‘After Long Silence’, Heaney’s poem beginning ‘The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise’, and a poem by Paul Muldoon which seems to deny revelation altogether at the end. Finally, O’Donogue chronicles his own development as a poet and traces the creative process in several of his own poems—one of which seems to be inspired or explained by a particular experience; another tells a received story. He explores whether the short poem behaves structurally like any narrative, or if its structural sequence employs devices that are distinctive to it. Perhaps poets tend to work out the design and end of their short poems before they begin. Revelations such as the emergence of Tessimond’s journal influence the study of many other writers as well. Daniel Ferrer explores the ways in which the sudden appearance of heretofore unknown manuscripts affects genetic critics’ work. While giving us a scholar’s insight into some recent discoveries in the field of modernist studies (the most compelling one being the unknown drafts for the ‘Sirens’ episode in Ulysses that surfaced in 2002), he examines the impact of a ‘new’ manuscript shockwave among Joyce scholars that has the ‘disruptive potential’ to challenge or vindicate some of their prior assumptions—the kind of archival revelation that can just as easily and suddenly influence the study of other canonical writers. In her detailed exploration of the working methods of one of

12

J. BLOOM AND C. ROVERA

Modernism’s other giants, Christine Froula sheds an entirely new light on the intricate and laborious composition of The Waves . The manuscripts reveal Woolf’s painstaking search for a new organic shape for her work in progress—which, she insists in her drafts, should be read ‘ as a novel’. Before it became a play of inner voices or what she terms ‘a series of dramatic soliloquies’, Woolf, inspired by her meditation on ‘The Unwritten Novel’, experimented with various forms and speech modes, namely self-conscious storytelling and Proustian devices, which enriched her search for the ideal form but ultimately had to be discarded. Froula documents this intriguing ‘unwriting’ step by step. Sonia Overall, an English novelist, scholar and teacher of creative writing, analyzes the processes involved in creating and revising her own novel Eden. Like Woolf in her battle with The Waves , Overall is preoccupied with the intricacies of storytelling—especially point of view— and, like her predecessor, through constant experimentation and multiple drafts she eventually distills the essence of her material and discovers the style and form of her novel. Eden is an attempt to reimagine Hemingway’s contentious posthumous work The Garden of Eden, using the published Hemingway text as a springboard to explore the roles of reader, writer, character and editor, and thus create a complex new work of fiction. From an initial idea for a ‘response’ to Hemingway’s novel, the project underwent several changes, including extensive re-plotting, the layering of stories within stories, and complex experimentation in narrative point of view. Quoting widely from her novel in progress, Overall takes the reader into the writer’s workshop and unveils the intricate processes involved in the act of (re)creation. Editorial suggestions for revision may enter into the creative process as well, after authors submit for publication what they consider to be their final version. Although now less celebrated than a number of her contemporaries, the accomplished Anglo-Irish writer Mary Lavin was a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine which published sixteen of her stories from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. Drawing on previously unexamined archival material, including personal correspondence, typescripts, manuscripts and correspondence with New Yorker editors, Grainne Hurley not only reveals the genesis and inspiration for some of Lavin’s stories, but more importantly documents her collaboration with the New Yorker editors whose offers of publication were often contingent

1

INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVAL REVELATIONS

13

upon her compliance with their editorial demands for considerable revision. Hurley also examines how Lavin revised her stories from early drafts to edited typescripts, to published magazine versions and beyond. The three concluding essays take the reader on a journey from the codex to digital humanities. Codicology, which sometimes borders on anthropology and cognitive science, is a relatively new discipline. It has already yielded some surprising and valuable results through its focus on many French writers and artists such as Stendhal, Raymond Roussel or Marcel Duchamp. Encouraged by this success, Claire Bustarret and Christine Collière-Whiteside have applied this methodology to some English-language writers. Codicology not only enables geneticists to explore the ways in which an ordinary paper medium such as a school notebook can be used for a decidedly creative purpose. Bustarret’s analysis of material ‘artifacts’ produced through the act of composition also reveals the various ways in which the writer’s hand manipulates the paper medium. She scrutinizes such influential acts and composition strategies as the folding and unfolding, cutting and pasting, and rotating of the paper medium. This analysis of the invisible hand sheds a new light on the writing practices of many French and English-language writers. Applying this newly fashioned, illuminating discipline to a late nineteenth-century novelist, Collière-Whiteside demonstrates the effectiveness of using codicology to expose George MacDonald’s quirky writing methods. Observing that Lilith (1895) was among the first novels to be typewritten, she examines the crucial role played by the downstrike typewriter in the composition of this fantasy novel. Through a minute analysis of several of the novel’s drafts that include unique triangularshaped textual additions, she reveals how and why the constraints of mechanical writing indisputably altered MacDonald’s writing practice and the structure of his novel. At the extreme end of the publishing spectrum, Alexander Christie displays how editorial changes can be made visible or, even more so, viewable through the practices of electronic textual editing. Showcasing Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as a case study, he questions the myth of ‘one stable, authoritative instantiation of a text’ and explores the ways in which such innovative practices may prompt present-day scholars to rethink the (re)presentation and distribution of modernist texts. He discusses the new challenge of digitizing textual change, while exposing sexual ambiguity and interwar queerness along the way, in a pioneering, cutting-edge reappraisal of modernist studies.

14

J. BLOOM AND C. ROVERA

This unusually diverse multiple-author collection devoted entirely to British and Irish writers explores many facets of the creative process while revealing hitherto unexamined, unpublished writings from numerous archives and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Spanning over a century of writing, the volume explores the creative process in four genres (the novel, poetry, autobiography, the short story), examines the work of major canonical writers as well as award-winning living writers, and counts among its contributors distinguished international scholars and writers working in such wide-ranging fields as codicology, genetic criticism, modernism, life writing, gender studies, electronic textual editing and creative writing. Much can be learned from these pioneering investigations and archival revelations which offer general readers, writers, and critics alike the rare opportunity to witness the hidden craftsmanship at the heart of the creative process.

Notes 1. William Butler Yeats, Collected Works in Verse and Prose volume 8 (Stratford-on-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1908)‚ 199. 2. ‘Cotte, founder of Lumiere Technology, scanned the painting with a 240-megapixel Multispectral Imaging Camera he invented, which uses 13 wavelengths from ultraviolet light to infrared. The resulting images peel away centuries of varnish and other alterations, shedding light on how the artist brought the painted figure to life and how she appeared to da Vinci and his contemporaries’. Jeanna Bryner, livescience.com. 3. ‘A Genesis of French Genetic Criticism’ (Introduction), in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, ed. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 2. 4. Louis Hay, ‘Genetic Criticism: Origins and Perspectives,’ in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, 18. 5. Hay, Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter to Karl Friedrich Zelter, 4 August 1803. 8. ‘C’est l’exécution du poème qui est le poème,’ Paul Valéry, Variété (‘Première leçon du cours de poétique’), in Œuvres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade vol. 1, 1957, 1350. 9. Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1934) was the first book to explore the composition of his novel, but it does not include an exhaustive treatment of the manuscript drafts.

1

INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVAL REVELATIONS

15

10. Ann Waldron, ‘“Litzing” Through Life,’ Princeton Alumni Weekly, 12 October 1994, 19 and conversation with Jonathan Bloom at Princeton University in the Spring of 1982. 11. Ibid., 20. 12. Jon Stallworthy, Singing School: The Making of a Poet (London: John Murray, 1999), 227. 13. Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), preface. 14. Wallace Stevens, ‘Of Modern Poetry,’ in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1942), 239. Stevens’ poem echoes and develops Valéry’s celebration of the creative writing process. 15. Jon Stallworthy, Singing School: The Making of a Poet, 226–227. 16. Michael Groden, Ulysses in Focus: Genetic, Textual, and Personal Views (Gainsville: University Press of Florida), 4. 17. ‘A Genesis of French Genetic Criticism,’ in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, 5. 18. Hay noted that genetic criticism emerged when ‘textual studies drifted away from the strict French metaphysical school of thought to embrace the more analytical Anglo-Saxon tradition’. Louis Hay, ‘Critiques de la critique génétique,’ Genesis 6 (1994): 19. 19. ‘A Genesis of French Genetic Criticism,’ in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, 11. 20. Hay, ‘Genetic Criticism: Origins and Perspectives,’ in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, 21. 21. Ibid., 23. 22. Ibid., 22.

Works Cited Bellemin-Noël, Jean. Le Texte et l’avant-texte: Les brouillons d’un poème de Milosz. Paris: Larousse, 1972. Bradford, Curtis. Yeats at Work. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934. Deppman, Jed, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (eds.). Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Grésillon, Almuth. Eléments de critique génétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994. Groden, Michael. Ulysses in Progress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.

16

J. BLOOM AND C. ROVERA

———. Ulysses in Focus: Genetic, Textual and Personal Views. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010. Hay, Louis. ‘Critiques de la critique génétique.’ Genesis 6 (1994): 11–23. Hayman, David. A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1963. Herring, Phillip F. Joyce’s Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972. Litz, A. Walton. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Stallworthy, Jon. Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. ———. Visions and Revision in Yeats’s Last Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. ———. Singing School: The Making of a Poet. London: John Murray, 1999. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Valéry, Paul. ‘Variété’ (‘Première leçon du cours de poétique’). Œuvres I . Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1957.

CHAPTER 2

Vision and Revision in the Manuscripts of William Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats Wim Van Mierlo

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.1 —W. B. Yeats

There is a peculiar trend in literary criticism that is distrustful of a poet’s second thoughts. A poet who revises his own work (it is often said) is apt to destroy its original intent and with it the poem’s original force. Poets of all periods declare that they would never revisit poems from earlier periods lest they no longer understood what their younger selves were about.Readers and critics equally dislike poets who do revise their work. Many poets, William Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats among them, were frequently criticized for their tinkering. Even when the result was technically better, the outcome was poetry that had lost all of its infelicitous beauty, the imperfections that make a poem more intriguing and human.

W. Van Mierlo (B) Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_2

17

18

W. VAN MIERLO

Revision is generally considered the opposite of inspired writing (Reeves, 110–111). I want however to counter the accepted notions of inspiration and reclaim revision as an activity cognate to writing. The revisionist practices of Wordsworth and Yeats demonstrate quite clearly that second, even third or fourth, thoughts were integral to their composition; they fulfil a creative desire that at times seems less intense than, but nonetheless not qualitatively different from first thoughts. On the one hand, these poets’ beginnings, as the manuscripts testify, lack the elevation of inspiration in the traditional sense. Composition did not always come easily for either of them. On the other hand, the way in which the act of revision is inscribed in their poetics—implicitly in the case of Wordsworth, explicitly in the case of Yeats—supports the view that revision is not secondary to original composition. As avid self-revisers, therefore, Wordsworth and Yeats not only worked over their poems extensively before they saw the light of day, they also saw fit to continually alter them after they had appeared in print. For Yeats the making of a poem was only one part of a larger creative endeavour that consisted of placing the poems together in the context of a book of poetry and the poetry within the oeuvre, which Yeats considered the expression of his ‘permanent self’ (Collected Letters : Intelex #2094; further cited as CL Intelex and item number); assembling the volume and creating the oeuvre were however activities that often necessitated further revisions at the textual level as well. Wordsworth was no less concerned with the architecture of his writings (see Gould ‘Biography and Textual Biography’, 101 and ‘The Resurrection of the Author’, 109–110). In the ‘Preface to The Excursion’ he spoke of The Prelude, his autobiographical poem as the ‘ante-chapel’ of a gothic church, which stood for The Recluse, the great unfinished philosophical poem of his life; continuing the metaphor, he believed that his lyrics and poems ‘that have been long before the Public’ would connect to the great poem in the same manner as a church has ‘little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses’ of that same church, adding however an important proviso: ‘when they shall be properly arranged’ (Selected Poems 469–470). The great edifice that is the work depends on slotting the individual components into their ideal constellation, something which can be achieved only over time and through constantly revisiting what was already written. Crucially, with Wordsworth, revision, revisiting (a place or a past experience) and recollection are coeval within his creative economy important (see Gill Revisitings, 8–9).

2

VISION AND REVISION IN THE MANUSCRIPTS …

19

It is not with the architecture of the work that I will concern myself here, but with a concept of revision that neither negates the spontaneity of creation nor denies the imagination its creative power.2 I will focus on a discussion of ‘origins’ and ‘outcomes’, the point where a poem starts and where it ends during composition, points that are, I will argue, far from clear and fixed. But to get there it is necessary first to confront Romantic tradition head on. The student of literary manuscripts cannot but feel that there is a stark contrast between the traditional evocations of the imagination and the stark materiality of composition. But rather than dismissing these evocations altogether, it is worth looking a bit more closely at cognitive realities and the reality of experience that may lurk behind them. The question is whether inspiration is as unconstrained as Wordsworth and Shelley understood it to be.

The Romantic Imagination Shelley likened inspiration to ‘a fading coal’ which ‘awakened to a transitory brightness by an inconstant wind’ creates a momentary vision, a mental experience of the poem-to-be, but when composition begins inspiration is already on the wane (Shelley 503–504). Wordsworth, likewise, saw the imagination as an uncontrollable force coming out of nowhere like an ‘unfather’d vapour’: ‘all good poetry’, he wrote, ‘is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ that ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’ (Selected Poems 448, 456). The unspeakable imagination that is at the heart of the creative moment thus stands above the mundane act of writing (which in Wordsworth’s case ordinarily caused a great deal of anxiety and even actual physical pain) of turning the vision into words.3 But is pitting inspiration against composition not a false binary? The Romantic legacy has had a deep, lasting impact on how our culture understands creativity. Even a self-proclaimed classicist like T. S. Eliot still characterized ‘writing’ as ‘the poet talking to himself’. He said à propos of the German expressionist poet Gottfried Benn that the poet ‘has something germinating in him for which he must find words; but he cannot know what words he wants until he has found the words; he cannot identify this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the right words in the right order’ (106). Some eighty years before Eliot, Rimbaud had said that the objective of the poet is to ‘find a language’

20

W. VAN MIERLO

(140), which itself points to the Romantic genealogy of the ineffable in postmodern poetics and critical theory. While the Romantic poets put composition below inspiration, they were not completely oblivious to its operations. In fact, an early twentieth-century translation and expansion of Shelley’s simile divides the two more sharply. Identifying two distinct phases in creating poetry, Robert Graves separates an initial ‘trance-like’ state of creation, when the poet suspends ‘his normal habits of thought’ to allow for a ‘supralogical reconciliation of conflicting emotional ideas’, from one in which the poet has ‘dissociated himself’ from what he has produced and begins to text and correct it ‘on common-sense principles’ to make it suitable for public consumption (Graves 3–4). Graves, it would seem, recognizes different, co-existing modes of creativity, whereas Shelley appears not to, yet it is not clear whether both modes also have equal value. Turn Shelley’s theory on its head, though, and one may get a different sense of what he is saying. Shelley evokes in different words what another poet from the period, Coleridge, experienced when he was interrupted by the visitor from Porlock: the loss of the vision of Kubla Kahn that he had seen in his dream. Taken literally, Shelley is right that inspiration is on the wane when composition begins. But the question remains what inspiration is. Is it an idea for a poem that comes to mind in varying degrees of specificity? Or is it the poem itself in word perfect form? Wordsworth’s insistence on memory in the imagination is useful here because it implies a process that is temporal and cognitive; unlike Shelley, Wordsworth does not completely elide the mechanics of composition. In the very least, he recognizes in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads , the same text that contains his famous statement about ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’, that poetry is an artifice: ‘However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious that while he describes and imitates passions, his employment is in some degree mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering’ (Selected Poems 453). The imitative, mechanistic nature of poetry implies that the making of a poem is less the chasing of an elusive visionary moment than the careful consideration of a poetic idea. The vision does not just precede the poem, but, as Eliot contends, is discovered when the poet finds his language. Although this may sound like defining anew the ineffable—the poem being created in and by language—what I am after is not an abstraction or a reification of creativity, but a processual model of creativity that

2

VISION AND REVISION IN THE MANUSCRIPTS …

21

considers the mechanical and mental processes of invention as they appear in the documents in which they left their traces. Poets’ manuscripts do not belie that inspiration exists at all; rather they affirm a more refined, dynamic notion of inspiration. Inspiration is as much the abstract idea that triggers the (writing of) the poem as it is the writing that triggers idea. The poem that eventually emerges from composition is itself a discovery, an outcome never fully envisioned by the poet while the poem is in draft; shapeless, often without direction and in a state of flux until the moment of its completion, the final poem is preordained in its beginnings.4 Poems (with the exception of shorter lyrics perhaps) rarely come ‘whole’, but proceed from the poet’s searching for his expression, for the verbal and rhythmical structures and the imagery of the poem, in the course of composition. For this reason, ‘origins’ and ‘outcomes’, how a poem’s genesis begins and ends, are important features to focus on.

William Wordsworth: Overflow and Interruption Wordsworth’s manuscripts stand testimony to the seriousness and fervour with which the poet undertook revising his poems, a fervour that does not detract at all from the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’ that he sought in poetry but that nonetheless paints a different image of that most ‘romantic’ of conceptions. Wordsworth’s writing methods qualify the notion of inspiration at least insofar as it does not limit the creative energy to an initial, transcendental moment. Poetry can well up from within, spontaneously, effortlessly and unadulterated, but at the same time poetry does not come into existence without the mediation of the material page. The earliest extant draft of Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poem The Prelude, which was begun in the autumn of 1798 but was not published until after the poet’s death in 1850, demonstrates that there was ‘much labouring’ (to borrow Yeats’s expression) in the composition of the poem (Yeats, Collected Poems, 81). The manuscript (known as MS JJ in The Wordsworth Trust collections at Grasmere) makes it apparent that even the opening of the poem did not come whole to the poet. The drafting is convoluted, with sections of the poem, possibly written at different moments in time, almost criss-crossing each other in the space of roughly 21 pages at the back of a small notebook, suggesting the writing did not exactly proceed to a plan; the handwriting in many places is barely legible, seemingly hurried and not without a few cancellations

22

W. VAN MIERLO

and currente calamo alterations; many of the passages remain rough and underdeveloped; and the composition method shows the signs of trial and error, with drafted passages being cancelled and rewritten elsewhere. Nonetheless, and despite second thoughts and constant reworking of lines in the greater part of the draft, it is clear that throughout this manuscript Wordsworth is working in the flow of the moment. The presence of reworking, moreover, does not preclude that parts of the poem existed in the poet’s mind before they were committed to the notebook. Wordsworth was in the habit of composing while walking outside in his garden, up and down the road in front of the house or even, on occasion, while on horseback.5 MS JJ offers some passages, written without interruption, that were indubitably copied down from memory, but as the famous ‘was it for this’ section shows for example even this activity is not always completely straightforward. was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To bled his murmurs with my nurse’s song And from his alder shadows and rocky falls And from his fords and shallows[,] sent a voice To intertwine my dreams[,] for this didst thou O Derwent travelling over the green plains Giving ceaseless music to the. (simplified from MS JJ, DCMS 19, f.91r ; see Prelude 1798–1799, 114– 115 and Cowton and Bushell)

We can surmise from the manuscript that the first seven or eight lines were premeditated because the handwriting is quite regular; the words are formed in a measured, almost leisurely manner, and that in marked difference to the increasingly irregular hand in the lines that follow. The cancellation is not what interrupts the flow, however; rather the retrieval of a ‘chunk’ of poetry from memory stalled progress.6 The segment ends with ‘To intertwine my dreams’, forming a syntactical unit, before the apostrophe ‘O Derwent travelling’, the invocation of the river Derwent near Cockermouth where Wordsworth was born, starts a second segment which only takes shape after Wordsworth took a moment to consider how the lines were to proceed. The positioning of the writing indicates that the only words that were on the page were ‘To intertwine my dreams’ and ‘O Derwent travelling’; being incomplete lines, Wordsworth then built a bridge between them, starting with ‘for this didst thou’. These words

2

VISION AND REVISION IN THE MANUSCRIPTS …

23

were not just forced downwards, as is the case with the line endings in the preceding lines. The gap between ‘dreams’ and the preposition (and the comma, which is a later addition), as well as the position of the aborted and cancelled line ‘Giving ceaseless music to the’, which does not follow the same curvature as the line above it, indicate that there was a certain back-tracking as incomplete lines that came from memory needed some expanding. Unlike Graves’ two phases, however, what we witness here is not the unconscious giving way to common sense, but a dynamic use of paper that complements the workings of the mind. The page as an extension of the mind is more than a metaphor, but involves, as Dirk Van Hulle argues, a creative process that relies on a direct cognitive interaction between mind and paper. More than just a record of the writing, the manuscript serves the poet as an ‘enactive’ tool that engenders creation and stimulates the thinking that happens on paper: ‘The nexus between the mind and the manuscript is constant process of interaction that helps constitute the mind in the first place’ (Van Hulle 207).7 Since the poetic language that is pre-formed in the mind is not necessarily fully formed, syntactically nor rhythmically, composition continues directly and unpremeditatedly on the page.8 In this bit of extempore writing, it is almost as if the lines ‘spring to mind’ on the page. Although they supplement what was composed before, these lines are not ‘second thoughts’, nor are they of a lesser order; on the contrary, their creative force is second to none. This is just a small, but not insignificant fragment of the poem for what it reveals about Wordsworth’s method. The passage is thematically important. The blending of the river’s warbling sound with that of the child’s experience sets up ‘the time of unrememberable being’, a phrase which is an early instantiation of the central dichotomy in Wordsworth’s poetics and that of The Prelude in particular: recollection and experience being at once one and different from one another. The unencumbered experience of childhood cannot be relived, nor remembered even, and yet the poet at least can ‘half create’, as in the famous passage from ‘Tintern Abbey’, what the experience was like. The ‘spots of time’ are a mechanism to recollect and revisit the primary emotion, while The Prelude as a whole offers an explanation for the imagination offers ‘abundant recompense’ for the loss of childhood experience, for although the phrase ‘the time of unremembered being’ disappears from the poem after 1798 the narrative of the ‘Growth of the Mind’ is the narrative of how the poet learnt to hear ‘The still, sad music of humanity’ (Selected Poems 110). The ‘ceaseless

24

W. VAN MIERLO

music’ of the river Derwent ‘tempering / Our human waywardness’ is the key to that ability; the beneficence of Nature experienced and absorbed during childhood remains beneficent to the adult imagination. That this redemptive poetics of memory (see Gill, Revisitings 46) is inscribed in the beginning of The Prelude should be no accident; The Prelude, according to Stephen Gill, is not so much a direct reflection of lived experiences, than a reflection on these experiences in an exploratory exercise of self-analysis that recollects past experience in order to provide them with meaning (Gill, Revisitings 46 and Life 56). The ‘was it for this’ passage, as I have argued elsewhere (Van Mierlo 18–20), was however not the first section of The Prelude that Wordsworth wrote. MS JJ contains a number of loosely connected segments or fragments that were put in sequence, and greatly expanded on, in later manuscripts from 1799. Their assembly points to a different creative economy whose explanation lies beyond the scope of this essay, but it is relevant to note that these segments—another kind of ‘chunk’—are another crucial aspect of Wordsworth’s beginnings, what Swinburne called ‘writing in parcels’ (171). These segments are embryonic, but not quite nuclear; in their own right exploratory of the themes that the poem was to contain, they were written and collected to grow; other poetry would attach itself around them resulting in a slow, organic growth that transformed the initial fragments into a larger whole. Creativity, in other words, is not limited to inspired drafting, but includes other operations of ‘making’ the poem. The record of how the Two-Part Prelude, which exists in two fair copies written out by Wordsworth’s amanuenses, his sister Dorothy and his wife-to-be Mary Hutchinson, was put together unfortunately does not survive, but it is clear that process included a campaign of compilation that saw the further development of segments from MS JJ; they were expanded, added and shunted into place to form a larger sequence. But at least one document survives, the so-called Letter from Goslar, in which Dorothy copied out for Coleridge several bits of her brother’s new poem ‘select[ed] from the mass of what William ha[d] written’. The copy, still without an order of its own, was made from MS JJ, as well as other manuscripts; the letter thus confirms that MS JJ was a portfolio of poetic material that was awaiting development. It would serve as the inspiration for the rest of the poem.

2

VISION AND REVISION IN THE MANUSCRIPTS …

25

W. B. Yeats: The Closing and Opening of a Box From Wordsworth’s beginnings, we now turn to Yeats’s endings. The question that concerns me here—one that is particularly put into relief by the poet who obsessively revises—is how and when the poet knows the poem is actually finished. W. B. Yeats famously said that a ‘poem comes right with a click like a closing box’ (CL Intelex #6335). But when does that click happen? Is it when the ultimate change is applied fixing the poem ready for publication? Is it earlier than that when the poem has reached a full shape, what Sally Bushell calls a text in a contingent state of completion (e.g. in a fair copy) (73, 79), but when further revisions are still to come? Or is it even earlier when something resembling a poem emerges from the chaos of the earliest creative impulses but whose shape is still far from fully formed? The first option seems like the obvious answer. But as the revisionist practices of Wordsworth, Yeats and others suggest, the final moment is still relatively fluid and that publication does not fix the poem. So if post-publication revision—or any other revisionary act for that matter—renders incomplete again what before was complete, we may just as well accept that a poem becomes a poem before it is finished. This idea further blurs the distinction between creation and revision and between art and craft. Even more than Wordsworth’s, Yeats’s composition process has multiple facets. Those I want to concentrate on are the mechanics of writing and particularly the way the page functions within his creative economy. But again, although there are obvious differences in the way Yeats applies his creative energy at different moments in the composition, I will maintain that the source of that energy is not qualitatively varied. ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, written in the spring of 1933, serves as a good case study, particularly because the earliest extant draft has some rather peculiar characteristics: viz. it is not certain whether this is in fact an early draft or not. The writing has a regularity and structure to it that is atypical of Yeats’s beginnings, which are usually highly fragmentary; these beginnings usually consist of only the most rudimentary phrases, images and rhythms. At first sight, this draft, written in one of Yeats’s large vellum notebooks (with designation MBY 545), seems fairly advanced in its development to the extent that stanzas are clearly formed; that they are numbered and headed by a title of sorts—‘Parnell’. Ordinarily Yeats only adds titles and stanza numbers at a late stage in the composition. However, above the title is a note that reads ‘material for verse’, which

26

W. VAN MIERLO

would suggest that the draft is in fact an early one. To channel ideas Yeats often started a poem by way of a prose sketch in which he outlined the main themes and imagery of the poem; the idea was to make the writing a more structured activity. The draft’s unusual nature—being simultaneously rudimentary and advanced—can be partially explained when viewed against the circumstances in which the poem was produced. Following the death of Lady Gregory in May 1932, Yeats experienced a dry spell in which he did not produce any poetry for almost a year. But then he coerced himself into composition. As he later recalled, ‘I decided to force myself to write, then take advice. In “At Parnell’s Funeral” I rhymed passages from a lecture I had given in America; a poem upon mount Meru came spontaneously, but philosophy is a dangerous theme; then I was barren again. I wrote the prose dialogue of The King of the Great Clock Tower that I might be forced to make lyrics for its imaginary people’ (Variorum Plays 1309). The lecture in question was ‘Modern Ireland: An Address to American Audiences, 1932-1933’, written in July 1932 and delivered several times between October and January, which dealt with the question of how Irish history of the last two centuries had influenced the authors of the Irish Revival. In it Yeats also touched on having witnessed the repatriation of Charles Stewart Parnell when he arrived off the boat at Dun Laoghaire quay in 1891. The large notebook which holds the drafts of the poem also contains some drafts and notes for the American lecture. The poem in other words did not emerge ex nihilo out of the poet’s imagination, but from ideas that had preoccupied him previously. Other aspects of the poem also had their origin in existing material, as David R. Clark shows in his introduction to the Cornell edition of Parnell’s Funeral and other Poems. The Cretan of the ‘Tree as Mother, killing the Tree as Son’ was borrowed from The Trembling of the Veil (1922). The poem’s third stanza was recycled from a poem already published in The Dublin Magazine; this unnamed poem was in fact first subjected to substantial revision before Yeats reverted to incorporating the earlier poem wholesale into ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ (Yeats, Parnell’s Funeral xxvi–xxvii). But having those ancillary materials did not make composition any easier. Yeats’s intent was to write an elegy that was nationalist in tone. On its first publication in the Dublin Magazine (April–June 1932), and also on its first book publication in Wheels and Butterflies , the poem appeared without title; but when the poem was included in The King of the

2

VISION AND REVISION IN THE MANUSCRIPTS …

27

Great Clock Tower (1934) Yeats unambiguously identified himself with the Parnellite camp with the title ‘A Parnellite at Parnell’s Funeral’.9 A popular nationalist politician, Parnell led a successful career campaigning for land reform and Irish self-governance. But his reputation came under fire when he was cited as co-respondent in a divorce suit, following his long-term affair with a Mrs Katherine O’Shea; he lost the support of the Catholic church and half of his party and was deposed as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which he had founded. The events badly affected his health; within a year he was dead. His supporters that had remained loyal believed that he had been betrayed by the Irish people. In the poem, Yeats turns to Parnell’s accusers and accuses them in turn of having sold out to the rabble. The fierce sentiment produces some lines in the final stanza that are typical of Yeats’s elegiac style: ‘All that was said in Ireland is a lie / Bred out of the contagion of the throng’ (The Poems 285). The power of the poem arises from Yeats’s characteristically heavy stresses at the beginning of the line: ‘All that was said’; ‘Bred out of contagion’ (my emphasis). The creative and emotional energy that Yeats mustered to produce this final stanza is visible in the manuscript. He needs no less than three pages to set the stanza down just in rudimentary form. The process by which this happens is interesting. Unlike with Wordsworth, there is very little that suggests that the stanza was in any way pre-formed in the mind. Yeats almost always worked directly on paper; nonetheless, he too was an aural poet who ‘intoned’ his lines as he wrote them down.10 In this case, the sonic elements of the poem are also part of the first draft. Not only does he write down a set of rhyme words for intended use—‘eye’, ‘songs’, ‘throngs’, ‘belongs’ and ‘flattery’—he also to some degree appears to be working out the rhythmical elements of the poem; several of the halfformed lines that mark the stanza’s first attempt show the vestiges of an intelligent play with stress while he is, concomitant with the rhyme words, setting down some of the key thematic words of the poem: Judge me Turn me with this solitary eye But separate me In separation from the trampling throng. (MBY 545, p. 336; Yeats, Parnell’s Funeral, 16–17)

28

W. VAN MIERLO

Robert Graves, in a phrase that could have been Yeats’s, believed that poems are ‘rhythmically formed’ in the mind (3), a phrase that gels with Yeats intoning his lines as he wrote them down. More crucially, and again not dissimilar to Graves, Yeats in an early essay on ‘The Symbolism in Poetry’ (1900) attributed a specific creative value to rhythm whose ‘alluring monotony’ would ‘prolong the moment of contemplation’ producing a trance-like effect as a result during which ‘the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols’ (Collected Writings, 117). In the vestigial fragments of ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, the stress alternates between first syllable and the line end, which betrays an ambition to render the gravity and solemnity of the topic. The characteristically strong beat on the first word alternates with a rhythmical delay in the only complete line in which the primary stresses fall on the fourth, eighth and tenth syllable, the last two reinforced by assonance. Being thematically important to the betrayal of Parnell, the word ‘throng’ is meant to resonate through the poem, in the mind and ear of the reader, while aurally it links with—and lingers on—‘separation’. The effect Yeats is seeking to create is to encapsulate the line, if not the stanza, within a rhythmical architecture. The writing is experimental, though, as the poet over and over tries different word variations. In all, the approximately 35 lines of writing in the manuscript will finally boil down into in a regular ottava rima stanza, but it took several stages for the stanza (and the poem as a whole, for the process is repeated with each stanza) to reach that state. The second stage in the composition (f. 338) is an attempt to make those improvisational rhythmical formations more permanent, but the result still remains very tentative. Little advance is actually made; even the stanza’s opening line remains undecided. The ‘throngs’ are still a central image, but no longer ‘trampling’; Yeats tries several alternatives without settling on one. The ‘eye’, a ‘solitary eye’ in the first version that is observing and accusatory, becomes the ‘exacting eye’. The speaker’s ‘separation’ from the throng is given up for a more apt description of the crowd itself in ‘The exultation of the [?hapless] throng’. The main difference is in an element that I have not yet mentioned. An exhortation that is left incomplete in the stanza’s first version is now fleshed out: Only such songs No songs but as rhyme a rat to die Concern me. Discover what belongs

2

VISION AND REVISION IN THE MANUSCRIPTS …

29

To this bare soul & judge it if you can. (MBY 545, p. 338; Yeats, Parnell’s Funeral, 18–19)

In a double gesture, the poem’s speaker retreats from politics in art or folklore, but the songs that he uncovers and admires are radically political. The third stage (p. 334) adds another incremental step in fixing the poem—or rather two or three steps (hence also the double column)— but mainly Yeats seems to be moving elements of the stanza around. He tries combining the I’s ‘bare soul’ with the ‘accusing eye’ in a bid to show how the poet is above accusation, but this does not survive even in the revision on the same page. The opening of the stanza therefore still remains unsettled. The ‘throng’ is now characterized as the ‘contagion of the throng’, no doubt because it fits the rat image, and Yeats considers further evoking the crowd’s ‘fury’. It is again the ending of the stanza that takes more definite form. The idea of the song remains (though it is further revised) and the exhortation to judge the ‘bare soul’, but the object of judgment is no longer the soul itself but the poet, who asks rhetorically ‘Whether I am all brute or half a man’ (MBY 545, p. 334; Yeats, Parnell’s Funeral, 20–23). It is a not unimportant fact that these three stages do not actually appear on consecutive pages in the MBY 545 notebook. Even though in practical terms Yeats was merely using up empty spaces in the notebook, the dynamic behind the way the poet used the page reveals something about the dynamics of the creative process. In other words, not just the constraints of language, but the constraints of the page too challenge the poetic imagination. The slantways direction of the writing on p. 338 and the sideways turn on p. 334 are common occurrences in Yeats’s notebooks. There is a pattern to this, as it usually happens when Yeats was doing second-stage revisions like this. It is a common feature with notebooks; we see with other poets as well. Wordsworth too when working on The Prelude turned his notebook sideways. In his case, the reason is not totally obvious, but it probably served as a way to differentiate between stages of completion: verses that are written vertically across the page in MS JJ are usually in more developed states than those written the normal way up. With Yeats the reason is more apparent, if one assumes that while revising Yeats wanted at the same time to look at what he had written before. The drafts of ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ appear on verso pages. Because the notebook he was using is of a considerable size, turning the notebook by 45 degrees to the

30

W. VAN MIERLO

right meant that when using p. 338 he could more easily flip back to p. 336 without crossing his arms. Holding the pen in the right hand and the page in the left, it was easier to leaf back and forth than when the notebook would be in the normal position. The same goes for p. 334. To be able to flip to p. 338 without getting his own arm in the way, he turned the notebook by another 45 degrees. Understanding how the poet works spatially is thus quite revealing for what it says about the dynamic between writing, revising and reading as creative and embodied practices, but also about the pragmatics of flow and interruption. What all of this aims to show is that the creative energy that drives composition never decreases or never simply moves from unconscious, unrestrained creative exuberance to a revisionist mode that is increasingly mechanical. The poem does not come right with a single, closing click; what takes place is a series of clicks as the initial, inchoate rhythmical formations take on shape and when fragments are turned into lines and lines into stanzas. The process of Yeats’s composition reverses Shelley’s famous simile: with Yeats inspiration does not wane when composition begins, but rather rises or in the very least retains its intensity. The imperfect, rough fragments are what fuels the imagination; they reverberate, crystallize and amalgamate. They are what leads to the discovery of better lines, better images, better narratives and better themes. One such discovery in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ was finding the perfect opening line of the final stanza: ‘Come fix upon me that accusing eye’. Before settling on this line, Yeats had been uncertain about the direction this stanza was to take. He prevaricated over whether the image should be ‘solitary eye’, ‘exacting eye’ or ‘accusing eye’. This was not just a prevarication over words, but also over agency: the choice between alternate moods that affect the ‘I’ in the poem. When Yeats revised the start of the line from ‘Friend fix upon me’ to ‘Come fix upon me’, he retained the rhythmic effect with the strong beat on the first syllable, but he altered the emotional and political direction of the stanza. The apostrophe was in any case somewhat puzzling, for it was not clear who this ‘Friend’ referred to. The imperative ‘Come’, by contrast, may be overly generic, but it saves the ‘I’ from being judged for inaction, ‘self flat[t]ery’ and ‘[?sentimental] dreams’ (MBY 545, p. 338; Yeats, Parnell’s Funeral, 18–19); instead, the poet is now a person of action, swept up in the communal sentiment of political defiance. Judgement is deflected from the poet on to the people who betrayed Parnell.

2

VISION AND REVISION IN THE MANUSCRIPTS …

31

The revision also gives a new sense, immediacy and power to the lines: ‘I thirst for accusation: all thats sung / Or said about this country is a but lies / Bred from the contagion of the throng’ (MBY 545, p. 334; Yeats, Parnell’s Funeral, 20–21). Not strictly new inventions—they had echoed through the preceding versions—these lines suddenly clicked into place in a meaningful way. The point at which this happens in the composition is the moment when Yeats attempted to assemble a complete version of the poem from his heap of semi-formed writing. Still using the same notebook, Yeats began by making a fair copy. The poem receives a new title (‘Somebody at Parnell’s Funeral’); it also gets stanza numbers and a date of completion (‘April 1933’), but it will not let itself be written fair that easily. The second stanza is copied, then cancelled and quickly— almost on the fly—recast. The physical state of the writing again suggests that revision was highly energetic. Even though the differences between the two versions mainly consists of a reordering of words and phrases, the fact that Yeats writes it whole again, rather than using cancellation and substitution at line level, suggests that his imagination is still at work at a high order. At least one more stage was needed: a typescript, which still underwent further revision, including yet another major recasting of the third stanza, before the poem was as good as ready. A final typescript containing only some minor corrections was sent to the Irish Review for publication, and presumably a second copy with minor variants served as text for publication in The Spectator, the text of which was used for the poem’s inclusion in The King of the Great Clock Tower (1943) and A Full Moon in March (1935) (see Yeats, Parnell’s Funeral 37 and CL Intelex #6047 and #6068). I mention these two book publications because for Yeats the creative process does not end with the completion of the poem. Ending (as I mentioned earlier) a period of creative drought, The King of the Great Clock Tower was a short dance play, written in the tradition of the Japanese Noh theatre that stood as a symbol of the state of development of Yeats’s poetic imagination to that point. Its subject matter derived from the dance of the seven veils in Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, a dance that is performed before the martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist. Yeats had wanted to explore the symbolic and visual potential of a woman dancing with a severed head, among others because it linked back to a story and a poem that he had written in the 1890 s about ‘the mother goddess and the slain god’ (Yeats, Variorum Plays 1010), itself based on a narrative that went back to a Jewish legend which was, according to Yeats, the

32

W. VAN MIERLO

source for the Salome legend. (The ‘pierced boy’ slain by the ‘woman with an arrow on a string’ in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ is an allusion to the same myth.) Complementing the play, he also composed four lyrics, one of which was ‘He had famished in a wilderness’ about a woman who denied ordering a man to be beheaded after he had sung her beauty. In the Cuala Press edition of The King of the Great Clock Tower, Yeats included this poem at the end of the Commentary on the play and then boldly followed it with ‘Parnell’s Funeral’. The juxtaposition between folkloric and political poetry was itself a gesture of defiance, the theme of ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, for the lyric deals with the sexual power of women who ‘Have bedded with their fancy-man / Whether a king or clown’. Parnell’s affair with Kity O’Shea, the woman blamed for his downfall, may very well be implied. The lyric contemplates not so much female promiscuity that brings down ‘governed cities’ like Byzantium, but ironically celebrates the act of transgression itself, mocking those who talk of mere ‘cruelty’ (Collected Works I, 587). The lyric is thus perhaps not unlike one of those songs alluded to in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, ‘the nothings that belong / To this bare soul’ of the poet which stands in judgement before the ‘throng’ (Collected Works I, 285–286). Placing these poems alongside each other without a paratextual frame may still seem like a random act, until one considers a second web of allusions that Yeats is spinning. Yeats’s commentary on ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ is predicated on a concept of transitional history, about which he had spoken in his American lectures, that marks the end of four significant moments in Irish history in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He spoke about these moments as ‘Four Bells, four deep tragic notes, equally divided in time’ that marked these periods, the fourth bell having sounded only 40 years prior with the death of Charles Stewart Parnell (Yeats, Variorum Plays 832). When we add to this the opening line of another lyric, which was the first to be composed for The King of the Great Clock Tower in November 1933, we can begin to see the richness of the connections that Yeats is forging. That opening line, in the version that Yeats gives in a letter to Olivia Shakespear, is ‘I wait until the tower gives forth the chime’ (CL Intelex #5968). What Yeats, all in all, is doing is weaving a symbolical-textual web that crosses between poems and plays. In doing so, he is (if my reader will pardon the pun) putting a vision into his revision. Not coincidentally, A Vision, Yeats’s magisterial, mystical book on history and astrology, is an attempt to create a system to explain historical flux. First published

2

VISION AND REVISION IN THE MANUSCRIPTS …

33

in 1925, A Vision was itself subject to constant change and revision; almost immediately after publication he set about revising and expanding it. Despite declaring once in 1931 that finally there was ‘nothing to add’ (CL Intelex #5444), he kept working on it from 1932 to 1934. The recasting of A Vision thus coincides with the composition of The King and the Great Clock Tower and of ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, providing a still-wider, over-arching symbolism. It should be clear from the preceding discussion that the manuscripts of our two poets show inspiration, imagination and creative power in different light from how the Romantics conceived these phenomena. Manuscripts unmistakably show that there is not really such as a thing as a single, instantaneous moment of inspiration; rather what we encounter is a dynamic, if not dialectic, process between thought and writing, mind and paper. The creative process is a self-reflexive process, dependent as much on what is written as on what is not yet written but exists only in the mind. Scholars are now making the point that manuscripts not only allow us to peer in to the private workshop of the writer, but that they also bring us somewhat closer to the cognitive operations that lie behind creation (Van Hulle; Lancashire). Because of this shift in thinking, we can contend that rather than dividing composition into two distinct phases—a largely eruptive phase of spontaneous creation followed by a more rational process of refining and perfecting—the creative energy that goes into writing a poem calls on the same creativity energy throughout the phases of composition, albeit to different effect, regardless of whether we are dealing with an original creative moment or redrafting and revising. Even though composition happens in stages, the fact that whatever rudimentary language may already be on the page does not make revising of that language any more straightforward or ‘common-sense’. Cognitively drudging up a verse ex nihilo or in response to inchoate lines already on the page is not different from one another. The idea of spontaneity then, so essential to Romantic notions of the imagination, is not lost when we consider creation genetically. Inspiration, in other words, remains relevant when looking at the manuscripts of poets if we want to try to externalize what creativity actually is.

34

W. VAN MIERLO

Notes 1. W.B. Yeats, ‘Adam’s Curse,’ Collected Poems, 80. 2. On the construction of Yeats’s œuvre, see Gould ‘Biography and Textual Biography’ and ‘Resurrection of the Author’. Remarkably little has been written on Wordsworth’s self-monumentalization and the arrangement (or classification) of his verse in Poems (1815, and later editions), but see Garrett, 44–53 and Heffernan. 3. ‘I should have written five times as much as I have done but that I am prevented by an uneasiness at my stomach and my side, with a dull pain about my heart. I have used the word pain, but uneasiness and heat are words which more accurately express my feeling. At all events it renders writing unpleasant’ (Wordsworth, Letters, 236). ‘Wm wrote out part of his poem & endeavoured to alter it, & so made himself ill’ (Dorothy Wordsworth, 58); the poem in question was The Pedlar. 4. See Dirk Van Hulle who evokes the absence of ‘preordained design’ in composition using, via Gillian Beer and Charles Darwin, the term ‘dysteleology’. The writing ‘does not “go” anywhere in particular; it simply goes on’ (13; see also 120). 5. ‘At present [William] is walking, and has been out of doors these two hours though it has rained heavily all the morning. In wet weather he takes out an umbrella, chuses the most sheltered spot, and there walks backwards and forwards […]. He generally composes his verses out of doors, and while he is so engaged seldom knows how the time slips away, or hardly whether it is rain or fair’ (Wordsworth, Letters, 477). 6. The generation of poetry in ‘chunks’ can be related to the way the mind generates language. In the last few decades, cognitive linguistics has displaced the structuralist model that believed human beings produce language by activating innate rules stored in the brain with a cognitive model that holds we rely rather on pre-formed word collocations and phrasal units. For a discussion, see Lancashire, 55–61, who connects the cognitive language model to writers’ ‘cognitive capacity’ to produce ‘self-repeating sonnet-sized units’ (226; see also 139). 7. Van Hulle bases his view on a recent theory in cognitive psychology, in particular the work of Andy Clark, David J. Chalmers and Richard Menary, about the extended mind which hold that ‘cognitive processes do not exclusively take place “in” the head, but in constant interaction with an external environment’. For Van Hulle manuscripts are a part of that environment (130). 8. That this results in equally incomplete, or faulty, lines is evident from the line ‘Near my sweet birth-place to the night and day’, written whole but then partially cancelled; it accidentally meshes two halves of the image:

2

VISION AND REVISION IN THE MANUSCRIPTS …

35

the river that gives ‘ceaseless music to night and day’ and its location near the ‘sweet-birth place’. 9. In a first typescript the poem was titled ‘Somebody at Parnell’s Funeral’; in the second it was revised to just ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ (Yeats, Parnell’s Funeral 33 and 37). 10. The evidence of this is often quite clear in the drafts, where Yeats writes a line, cancels it, writes a variant of the line, cancels it, writes it again, cancels it and so on, frequently returning to earlier versions.

Works Cited Bushell, Sally. Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Cowton, Jeff, and Sally Bushel (eds.) From Goslar to Grasmere—William Wordsworth: Electronic Manuscripts. Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust, n.d. http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/GtoG/home.asp. Eliot, T.S. On Poetry and Poets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961. Garrett, James M. Wordsworth and the Writing of the Nation. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2013. Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. ———. Wordsworth’s Revisitings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gould, Warwick. ‘W. B. Yeats and the Resurrection of the Author.’ The Library 6th ser., 16 (1994): 101–134. ———. ‘Biography and Textual Biography: Towards a Life of Yeats’s Text.’ In The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison. Ed. Wallace Kirsop. n.p.: Center for the Book, Monash University, 2007: 96–117. Graves, Robert. Collected Writings on Poetry. Ed. by Paul O’Prey. Manchester and Paris: Carcanet Press and Alyscamps Press, 1995. Heffernan, James A.W. ‘Mutilated Autobiography: Wordsworth’s Poems of 1815.’ The Wordsworth Circle 10 (1979): 107–112. Lancashire, Ian. Forgetful Muses: Reading the Author in the Text. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Reeves, James. Understanding Poetry. London: Heinemann, 1975. Rimbaud, Arthur. Lettres du voyant (13 at 15 mai 1871). Ed. Gérald Schaeffer. Genève: Librairie Doz, 1975. Shelley, P.B. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. Ed. D.H. Reiman and S.B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977. Swinburne, A.C. The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Ed. Edmund Gosse and T.J. Wise. London: William Heinemann, 1918. Van Hulle, Dirk. Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

36

W. VAN MIERLO

Van Mierlo, Wim. ‘The Archaeology of the Manuscript: Towards Modern Palaeography.’ In The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation. Ed. Carrie Smith and Lisa Stead. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013: 15–29. Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journals. Ed. Pamela Woof. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. ———. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Vol.1: The Early Years, 1787–1905. 2nd ed. Ed. Chester L. Shaver. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. ———. The Prelude, 1798–1799. Ed. Stephen Parrish. Ithaca, New York; Hassocks, Sussex: Cornell University Press; Harvester Press, 1977. Yeats, W.B. The Variorum Edition of the Plays. Ed. R.K. Alspach and C.C. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1966. ———. The Collected Works. Vol 1: The Poems. 2nd ed. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997. ———. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Intelex Electronic Edition. Ed. John Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. ‘Parnell’s Funeral and other Poems’ from ‘A Full Moon in March’: Manuscript Materials. Ed. David R. Clark. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. ———. The Collected Works. Vol 4: The Early Essays. Ed. George Bornstein and Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 2007.

CHAPTER 3

The Unwritten Waste: Revisions in the Poetry and Memoir of A. S. J. Tessimond James Bainbridge

By the way for anyone with a very bad memory to try to write the story of his life may sound like the attempt of an idiot to write the impossible; but a bad memory has advantages. It edits and abridges. It prevents you from including too much of the trivial. You remember only the gulfs and peaks of your past. You forget everything but the unforgettable.1 —A. S. J. Tessimond

In February 1952, the poet Denise Levertov, then living in America, resumed a correspondence with a man she had known in London the decade before. They had much news to catch up on, but Levertov also wrote seeking her friend’s opinion on some of her recent poetry. The man she wrote to was A. S. J. Tessimond, a poet who had received some degree of fame in the early 1930s when his work was anthologised alongside that of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, William Empson and C. Day Lewis in Michael Roberts’ collection New Signatures. Whilst Tessimond can hardly be regarded as a well-known poet today, he had been, for a short time, a

J. Bainbridge (B) University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_3

37

38

J. BAINBRIDGE

relatively recognised voice in English poetry. The two collections he had published at the time of Levertov’s letter—The Walls of Glass in 1934 and Voices in a Giant City in 1947—had both been well-received in the literary press. Today, very little is known about Tessimond’s writing process, but this correspondence with Levertov gives great insight into how he viewed the published text. Few of the poet’s manuscripts remained after his death, though an existing proof-copy of Voices in a Giant City reveals something of the ways in which he revised his poetry. What can be deduced from this, alongside the unpublished manuscript of Tessimond’s memoir, is evidence of a remarkable process which goes beyond the writing of poetry into the way that the poet viewed and lived his whole life. Revised manuscripts usually reveal that an author has changed their mind over time. Often, those changes are conscious decisions—a word or phrase at a later point, considered to be an improvement upon what was written before—but they also can reveal that a more substantial change has occurred in the author’s mind. Through the manuscripts of the poet A. S. J. Tessimond, it is possible to detect both these processes at work; through successive drafts it is possible to trace the authorial hand reviewing earlier versions of the text—but also the gradual changes to the writer’s brain wrought both by illness and medical treatment. In her letter of 1952, amongst various questions about the London literary scene, Denise Levertov asked to see some of Tessimond’s more recent poetry. He replied: I’ll send you typescripts of most of the stuff in my second book of verse, if you’d really like them. But, first, I’ll try to get an extra copy of the book itself. I say ‘I’ll try’ because Heinemanns, after selling about 600 copies, destroyed the remaining copies—pulped them in order to use the paper again—without telling me beforehand. So the book’s out of print and getting a copy secondhand is just luck. (Letter to Denise Levertov 1952)

The book which Tessimond refers to in this letter was Voices in a Giant City, which due to post-war paper shortages, had become relatively scarce in the few years since its publication. In this context, the survival of the book’s proof-copy seems even more remarkable, but this proof-copy makes clear that the poet was active in revising the text of his poems.

3

THE UNWRITTEN WASTE: REVISIONS IN THE POETRY AND MEMOIR …

39

Between Heinemann producing the proofs in 1946 and the book’s publication in early 1947, Tessimond appears to have made a number of revisions. The majority of these changes relate to punctuation, but in some cases the alterations are more extensive, and revealingly, the changes that he made were not restricted to the collection’s new works. Many of the poems in Voices in a Giant City had already been published in various magazines and anthologies. Despite this, Tessimond took the opportunity of reviewing the proof-copy to alter the published text. The poem ‘Love Speaks to the Lover’, for instance, had appeared in 1936 in two American publications, Harper’s Magazine and Fiction Parade and Golden Book Magazine. It was subsequently reprinted by the Reader’s Digest in that year’s Anthology of Magazine Verse. In these publications of the poem, the final line reads: ‘Seek, without chart, my Hebrides!’ suggesting that the lover must venture into far-off places without a guide. This is how Heinemann printed the poem in the proofcopy of Tessimond’s collection. However, in the published version of the book, the line is amended to read: ‘Seek, without chart, Hesperides!’ This alteration retains the rhyme scheme of the earlier text, but alters the meaning. Whereas the previously published text referred only to the narrator’s obscurity, now the allusion might also address the lover. The proof-copy also reveals that Tessimond had revised published works before submitting them to Heinemann for the collection, the changes having been made before the proof-copy was produced. The poem ‘The Lesser Artists’ a response to James Elroy Flecker’s poem ‘To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence’ had first appeared in The London Mercury in 1937. The 1946 proof-copy of the poem inserts a new third stanza to the poem: We have discovered a more astringent opium, Eaten a lotus sharp upon the tongue, And hoped by laughing to check hostile laughter, To anticipate scorn by scorn. (Unpublished proof 1946)

However, whilst these lines had been added to the poem prior to the proof-copy’s production, they were removed again before the 1947 publication. What becomes apparent from these changes is that Tessimond did not view a poem appearing in print, as necessarily meaning that the work was ‘finished’. The publication of Voices in a Giant City allowed him

40

J. BAINBRIDGE

a place to reconsider the works in a new light, but it is clear from his correspondence with Levertov that even the 1947 text was not the final version of the poems. In 1952, unable to source a copy of Voices in a Giant City to send to Levertov, he typed out the entire contents of the collection for her to read. The typescript he sent, largely followed the book that Heinemann had printed five years before; the poems, reproduced on individual sheets of foolscap paper, were arranged in the same order, and on the whole the endeavour seems to have been a straightforward attempt to duplicate the published text. Where textual differences appear in these papers, it is not always clear whether they mark an attempt at retrospective editing by the poet, or whether they are straightforward typing errors. For instance, in his copy of the poem ‘Song in a Saloon Bar’, the 1952 typescript renders the line ‘Who we have been, will be, are—’ as ‘Who we have been, shall be are— ’. This replacement of the word ‘will’ for ‘shall’ does not radically alter the poem’s meaning and therefore may not indicate a conscious decision to update the original text, but may be simply an error. Various similar typing errors are evident elsewhere in the 1952 typescript, though Tessimond subsequently corrected the majority of these in pencil. The overall impression is that these papers were intended as a functional reading-copy of the collection, rather than any ‘polished’ version of the text. However, not all the discrepancies between the 1947 Voices in a Giant City and the 1952 typescript can be explained in this way, and these indicate the presence of a more discerning editorial hand. Some works in the collection have sizable differences, which indicate that the poet had reconsidered some of the works post-publication and used this opportunity again to revise certain elements of the poems. Between returning the proofs to Heinemann and the book entering the shops, Tessimond had already begun reviewing the work he had created. At this point, he wrote to his friend, the science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon commenting on some of the works within the collection. In the letter, he draws particular attention to the poem ‘Footnotes on Happiness’ picking out the line ‘It is brittle as sand’ as causing him particular concern. He told Stapledon ‘sand isn’t brittle […] I’m going to alter that in the 2nd impression if there’s a 2nd impression’ (Letter to Olaf Stapledon 1947). Though the book did not reach a second imprint, Tessimond made this amendment to the poem in the typescript he posted to Levertov, here changing the line to ‘It is shifty as sand’. Though his letter

3

THE UNWRITTEN WASTE: REVISIONS IN THE POETRY AND MEMOIR …

41

to Stapledon indicates that this amendment seems to have been decided upon as early as 1947, the typescript makes other changes which suggest that he was still reviewing it as he typed the poem out. The stanza: You cannot say It will keep an appointment, or pass the same street corner twice. Nor say it won’t.

Is altered in the Levertov typescript to read: You cannot say It will keep an appointment, or ˆeverˆ ˆwillˆ pass the same way twice; Nor say it won’t.

In these amendments, the word ‘ever’ is typed above the line on the typescript, and the word ‘will’ added after it by hand. This indicates that Tessimond had considered the line in at least three different versions before settling on the text that he showed Levertov. Another poem to have undergone significant revision in these papers is ‘The Unwept Waste’ which was first published in The Listener on 1 June 1939. It appears in both the proof-copy and in Voices in a Giant City without any amendment to this original printing of the poem. The poem is concerned with a recurring idea in Tessimond’s poetry, the life which is not lived to its full potential. The ‘final tragedies’ in life, it suggests, are not great dramatic events, but the ‘seep, the gradual grey’ of the ‘[u]nwept, unwritten waste’ (Tessimond 2010). To express this, the poem alludes to the ways in which texts might exist in different forms, presenting alternate possibilities. Tessimond suggests that ‘heartbreak-music’ should signal these differences: For what, but for […] A word less, a word more, Might have, so simply, been. (Tessimond 2010)

The differences between versions of a poem that which ‘might have, so simply, been’ depend on the minute differences of its construction. ‘A word less, a word more’ may seem small and unnoticed, but the poem suggests that such minor alterations—the sense of that which is ‘unwritten’—is the fulcrum on which tragedy turns.

42

J. BAINBRIDGE

In the light of this, we should consider the fact that this poem, which acknowledges the importance of alternate possibilities, was sent to Levertov in a markedly different form, offering a much-truncated version of the first stanza: Let funeral marches play, Let the heartbreak music sound For the half-death, not the whole; For the unperceived slow soiling; For the sleeping before evening; For the spoiling of what might have, So very simply, been. (unpublished typescript 1952)

The alterations to the text here indicate much more than a typing error. The first point to note, is that the poem which centres on the ‘unwritten’ waste has had, in 1952 version of the text, five lines effectively ‘unwritten’ by the poet. Gone is the theatrical metaphor of the ‘shifting scene’—an image which recurs in many of Tessimond’s works. Gone also, are the potential events which might have brought an alternate outcome: ‘but for a breath’, ‘an inch one way’, ‘a closed or opened door’ (Tessimond 2010). A bleaker vision is offered in their place; the waste of a life without the potential for accident to bring anything other than this tragic conclusion. In the place of these lines, we find ‘spoiling’, a word which audibly echoes the ‘unperceived slow soiling’ of two lines before. This repetition, building upon the repeated ‘for’ and ‘let’ adds somewhat to the toiling inevitability of the stanza. The published version of the poem shifts between tetrameter and trimeter; the lines which offer an alternate possibility are written in the latter form. In the revised version of the text, the stanza is mainly tetrameter and the final line of ‘Might have, so simply, been’ is broken across two lines, so that the almost conversational word ‘very’ is needed to be added to complete the metre and qualify the word ‘simply’. The changes Tessimond made in this typescript perhaps deliver a more immediate message to the poem. The phrase ‘what […] might have […] been’ which in the published text is begun in line 6 of the poem (but not completed until five lines later due to the interruption of other clauses) is more evident in the revision. Though arguably, it is the interruption of these other possibilities in the original text which embody the ‘unperceived slow soiling’ that the poem describes.

3

THE UNWRITTEN WASTE: REVISIONS IN THE POETRY AND MEMOIR …

43

Alongside the poems from Voices in a Giant City which Tessimond sent to Levertov was a selection from his 1932 collection The Walls of Glass , as well as eleven unpublished and uncollected works. Of these, some have made their way into the posthumous collections edited by Tessimond’s literary executor Hubert Nicholson in the 1970s and 1980s, though several remain unpublished. One poem, ‘The Ad-Man’, which Nicholson printed in the 1978 collection Not Love Perhaps…, exists in the Levertov papers in three distinct forms and perhaps offers us the most comprehensive view of the poet’s editorial procedure. The first of these, referred to here as ‘A1’, is closest to the form of the poem as printed by Nicholson in Not Love Perhaps… and replicated in Tessimond’s Collected Poems . The second version of the text ‘A2’ is a carbon copy of ‘A1’ with revisions made in Tessimond’s own hand in both pen and pencil. The third version ‘B’ is a distinct, different form of the poem, which appears to incorporate revisions made in ‘A2’ and therefore may be assumed to be a later typescript than both ‘A’ manuscripts. Examining only the fourth and fifth stanzas of ‘A1’ and ‘A2’, Tessimond’s revisions to the poem are clear: A1: He uses words that once were strong and fine, Primal as sun and moon and bread and wine, True, honourable, honoured, clear and clean; And leaves them soiled, worn, cheap, diminished mean. Where our defence is weakest, he attacks. Encircling reason’s fort, he finds the cracks. He knows the hopes and fears on which to play; And we who first rebel, at last obey. A2: He uses words that once were strong and fine, Primal as sun and moon and bread and wine, True, honourable, honoured, clear and clean; And leaves themsoiled, ˆshabby / crumpledˆ worn, cheap, ˆdebasedˆ diminished mean. Where our defence is weakest, he attacks. Encircling reason’s fort, he finds the cracks. He knows the hopes and fears on which to play; And we who first rebel, at last obey.

44

J. BAINBRIDGE

The revisions to ‘A2’ reconsider word choices; ‘soiled’ is replaced with two possible alternatives, ‘shabby’ and ‘crumpled’. ‘Cheap’ is replaced with ‘debased’ before being deleted altogether. The version of the poem that Nicholson used for publication opts for the choice of ‘shabby’ and omits both the word ‘cheap’ and its deleted alternative ‘debased’ (Tessimond 2010). But both ‘debased’ and ‘cheap’ are used in the alternative line in typescript ‘B’: He uses words that once were strong and fine, Once real as sun and stars, as bread and wine, Once honourable, honoured, old yet new, Once deeply-rooted roses fresh with dew, Once brave and true and clear and bright and clean… And leaves them cheap, debased, diminished, mean. Where our defence is weakest, he attacks. Besieging reason’s fort, he finds the cracks. He knows the hopes and fears on which to play. We who at first rebel, at last obey.

None of these versions of the text were in Nicholson’s possession, and it is by no means clear which of the manuscripts originated first, nor which may be considered to be the closest to the poet’s final intention for the poem—if, indeed, Tessimond ever considered the work to be finished. Conceivably, ‘B’ offers a significant rewrite to ‘A2’ making use of the earlier considered word choices, but the reverse seems equally possible. Given the ordering within the Levertov papers, and the order given to typescripts of the poems from Voices in a Giant City, it at least seems possible that Tessimond intended B to be read as the ‘final’ version of the poem, but this supposes that for the last sixty years, the pages have remained in the sequence that the poet originally placed them. At the very least, no version of the text can be considered conclusive. As so few of the poet’s papers now exist, the Levertov correspondence is important as it demonstrates a sustained process of revision both postpublication, and in the case of ‘The Ad-Man’ of the poem as it was being composed. The typescripts reveal an attention to subtle changes in vocabulary, and as indicated in ‘The Unwept Waste’, a ‘word less, a word more’ might have considerable consequences. The idea that a poem may be in a constant state of revision, even after it has been published, is crucial to understanding the broader concerns of Tessimond’s life. The fact that few

3

THE UNWRITTEN WASTE: REVISIONS IN THE POETRY AND MEMOIR …

45

of his manuscripts now exist is a result of that process of rewriting, but one which extends far beyond the poetry. The circumstances of what happened to the rest of Tessimond’s papers need examining to make sense of this. The poet was just short of his sixtieth birthday when, getting out of bed one morning in May 1962, he suffered a brain haemorrhage and died. Though the timing of his death could not have been predicted, it is clear that during the year before he died, the poet had begun getting his affairs in some sort of order. In the previous June, he had written his will appointing ‘Hubert Nicholson and/or anyone to whom he wishes to delegate the work’ as his literary executor. This suggests that the poet intended his writing to be looked after once he had died, but intriguingly he did not tell Nicholson of the appointment. In her short biographical sketch of the poet, Tessimond’s friend Frances Richards recalls how in the final days of his life, his Chelsea flat stood stripped of its belongings (Richards 1979). Pictures were taken from the walls, and a year before he died he had all of the walls painted white. It was almost as if his identity was being removed from the flat. Though other reasons can be given for these events, the result resembles a process of editing the documentary evidence of his life. Most intriguingly, when Nicholson began to investigate Tessimond’s literary affairs, he found few remaining manuscripts in the flat. The majority of papers were of poems that were already published and crucially, a major work, a prose memoir which had been the writer’s main literary endeavour since 1950, and was known to have been worked on as late as 1962, only seemed to remain in a few small fragments. Throughout his life, Tessimond had claimed (often with little basis in fact) that he had ‘dried up’ as a poet, but in the final decade of his life he increasingly spoke about the memoir. He had titled the work: Memoirs of a Man Who Runs After Girls , or The Confessions of a Collector of Girls, or The Confessions of a Girl-Chaser and had intended to publish it anonymously, for fear that his friends might bring libel actions against him if he used his own name. He made various suggestions of pseudonyms for its publication—John Carroway, John Fool, John Oxton, John Bell and John God. These were just some of many names that Tessimond would live and write under during his lifetime. He described the memoir as detailing the ‘greater part’ of his life—greater than his poetry or his work as a copywriter for a London advertising agency. The Memoirs of a Man Who Runs After Girls would explain that which was most important to him: ‘sex, friendship and money – the three most important things in life’ he wrote.

46

J. BAINBRIDGE

Though he intended this work for publication, this never occurred, and the memoir was almost certainly never completed. Yet it is clear that the manuscript existed in quite a developed form. In one of his letters to Levertov, he refers to it as a ‘journal’, a term he used throughout its production but seems to have later dropped in favour of ‘memoir’: I’m going on with the tragi-farcical sort-of-journal I started over a year ago and dropped for six months. Soon I shall be sending the first 120 pages to Michael Josephs, the publishers, who said they’d like to see it. I very, very much doubt if anybody will publish it but I’m enjoying writing it. (Tessimond)

This letter makes clear the intention to publish the work and indicates that the manuscript had once been far more extensive than its extant form. It appears that at some point in 1962, Tessimond may have destroyed the manuscript he was working on, but he did so only after he had entrusted carbon copies of the work to his friend the radio actress Joan Hart. Only after Tessimond’s death, did Nicholson learn of Hart’s existence. What remains of the memoir are a series of drafts. The majority of these detail his early childhood and attempt to explain his life up to the present moment. As such, they are formed mainly through reminiscence, though from May 1950 they also give some record of contemporary events in the poet’s life. The memoir offers the most comprehensive source in understanding the narrative of poet’s life. It is predominantly formed of reminiscence—the piecing together of events from his past, in an attempt to set down his life story—though in this it presents more complications than might be expected. We cannot rely on it for an insight into the poet’s feelings about many of these events, written as it was years after they occurred. It is also clear from the series of drafts that the emphasis he gives to particular events changes over time. For example, it is known that the poet broke off an engagement to a girl whilst at university. In a letter to Nicholson from the 1940s, he described this as ‘I got engaged to a girl who was morbidly afraid of having a child’ (Letter to Nicholson, n.d.) but through the successive drafts of the memoir, we see the account somewhat altered, becoming more self-critical and sympathetic towards his former fiancée. What we are reading in the memoir, are not the feelings of the man in his twenties

3

THE UNWRITTEN WASTE: REVISIONS IN THE POETRY AND MEMOIR …

47

who ended the relationship, but those of the man in the final decade of his life. But the memoir offers something else, for alongside telling the story of his past he also writes of his day-to-day existence, and therefore, from 1950 onwards as he begins to write about his present as well as his remembered past, it gives a valuable insight into this as well. He introduces this endeavour as follows: I decided the day before yesterday to keep some sort of journal, record, notebook or autobiographical ragbag. What sort of a journal it will be I can’t yet tell. It may shape and develop a character as it grows. Or it may remain shapeless but still seem worth continuing. I shall probably put a lot in and take a lot out. It may be like one of those films which if they were shown as they were shot would last forty-eight hours without a break but when cut and edited last two. (Tessimond)

From these very first words, it is clear that Tessimond had a view to revise and reconstruct the document as he worked on it. His process for writing it was to first compose in long-hand and then type the manuscript up some time later. The majority of these handwritten drafts were subsequently destroyed, but a few later sections remain. Between these two copies, what is striking is that the text tends to follow the same narrative, but slight alterations are made to the tone or emphasis of some events. Each time that the manuscript was begun anew, Tessimond’s primary concern was to record the present day. In the draft from May 1950, he tries to set down the latest events within his love life, but informed by his interest in psychotherapy he feels that to do so he must first revisit his past in order to understand what has brought him to this point. In subsequent drafts of the memoir, this develops into a long digression into the events of his life from his childhood and early adulthood, often never reaching the present-day concerns that he refers to at the start of the manuscript. After his death, his friend Dawson Jackson put forward the theory that the memoir was abandoned whenever the poet entered a depression (Notes to the memoir 1962) and this seems possible, though at one point in the manuscript Tessimond suggests that the interruption to his writing comes because ‘For the last week or two I’ve been too busy living to write’ (Tessimond). Both explanations for why the manuscript was often abandoned seem likely, but certainly, the points at which writing resumed appear to have coincided with the poet feeling well, and (as implied by

48

J. BAINBRIDGE

the various titles given to the memoir) usually having fallen in love with a new woman. In his poem ‘Any Man Speaks’ Tessimond talks of a man’s life as ‘searching always / For my lost rib’, and this was a view that the poet lived by; that love was a quest to complete himself. As such, the form that the memoir takes of childhood reminiscence leading up to his latest love affair appears to suggest that each new affair was considered to be an ending for him; the search being complete. Each time he resumed writing the memoir, it was to explain how his lifelong hunt for his missing rib was accomplished, though as Nicholson points out the quest was never truly achieved. Whilst ‘forever falling in love afresh’ all Tessimond’s relationships remained unconsummated and he died unmarried without children (Tessimond 2010). The daily observations of the memoir are particularly illuminating pieces of writing, offering a glimpse of the poet’s daily life that we do not find elsewhere. In one draft of it, he argues that such writing is boring: Detailed diaries (‘Had lunch at Lyons and spent 1/- on mothballs at Woolworths’) are an excruciating bore unless you’re a Pepys; and even Pepys would have been a bit of a bore to his contemporaries. (Tessimond)

But aside from a few remaining letters from the 1920s, there is a conspicuous lack of such information about the poet’s habits. Where they occur, we are able to see his ordinary feelings in the moment, rather than through the filter of memory. One particular instance comes at the end of the draft begun in 1950. In a description of an everyday scene, we find him in high-spirits: It’s really Summer today. Hyde Park like a girl shaking out her hair and sunning herself. A day of sun-goldenness, of lucid limpid young-leaf greenness. Town-bird though I am, it gets under even my feathers! At lunchtime, two Shepherds Market cafes have tables outside, one small pathetic table outside each, two girls at each table drinking coffee, trying to pretend they’re in Paris. After working near Shepherds Market for six years I’ve grown very fond of that village square a hundred yards north of Piccadilly, that backwater full of Mayfairish women and office boys, spivs and chaps in Saville Row suits, advertising people and tarts.

3

THE UNWRITTEN WASTE: REVISIONS IN THE POETRY AND MEMOIR …

49

Today two young men with two violins have set up their music desks in the space bounded on the one side by the two adjacent rival poulterers and on the other by the cluster of four public phone boxes (the ones you can never get into, and, when you do, find two A-D Directories and a smell which suggests that somebody has been using the box as a urinal). The two violinists are playing a Bach Double Concerto. A handlettered placard announces that contributions (for which the upturned hat is waiting hungrily on the ground) will help the young men to continue their studies. Though I generally excuse myself from almsgiving by telling myself that my girlfriends (Tessimond)

This is a relatively rare example of Tessimond writing about the present moment, and until the final sentence is not connected to an explanation of how he came to fall in love. However, at this very point, this evocative description of a post-war street breaks off mid-sentence. It ends at the bottom of a piece of paper, implying that it was continued on a subsequent page, explaining that the money he gave to women was a kind of charity in his view. It is not known how much of the memoir beyond this point is missing, whether he continued writing for many pages, or abandoned it after just the one. However, the next surviving section of it is dated ‘November 1956’ (six years later) and begins ‘Eight months ago I abandoned this journal’ (Tessimond). It is tempting to wonder how much of those intervening six years were written down, but it is clear that now much of the manuscript has been lost, including the section mentioned to Levertov from 1952. The selective, self-editing process—the cutting and re-cutting— returning to the start of his life story to tell it again seems to have overtaken any possibility that the work would ever be finished. Take, for instance, the following account of the poet’s childhood written in a section of the document from around 1957: I was born in 19 - - . There were still horsecabs and hansoms clopping along the streets, housemaids and cooks in ordinary middle-class houses, gaslight and croquet, tea in the green light of tall trees leaning over lawns that smelt of summer grass after the gardener had mown it, and Edward VII was king of a Land of Hope and Glory and ˆof a land ofˆ starvation in slums, and Britannia ruled the waves, and ‘the war’ meant theBore War Boer War and stories about Kitchener of Khartoum in the Boy’s Own Paper.

50

J. BAINBRIDGE

My father was an Inspector of Branches in the Bank of Liverpool, and we lived in Birkenhead. Trams and ferryboats across the Mersey grind and splash through my early memories. The trams (like the first London buses I rode on later) had open tops. When it rained, did the people on top hoist their umbrellas or did they all rush downstairs? I can’t remember.

The typed account indicates at least two stages of editing—changes made during typing (with deletions marked by rows of ‘x’s, and additions typed above the line, or marked in the border with a typed slash) and also later amendments made by hand—the poet inserts the words ‘a land of’ in pencil in the margin. However, amongst the drafts of the memoir there is also a section of the journal dated January 1958, around a year after the previous section was written. This draft broadly begins at the same point as the 1957 account. In content it differs only in the contemporary day-to-day events that feature in its pages, but it is handwritten and contains fewer details than the reminiscence from the year before: I was born in a town called Birkenhead,which which stands opposite Liverpool, with the ˆgrey mouth of theˆ River Mersey between and its tugs and liners and ferry-boats [——]between. My father worked for a Liverpool bank: he was an Inspector of Branches, though how and why and ˆjustˆ what he inspected I never knew.

Certain elements of this 1958 account are shared with that of 1957; the ferryboats of the River Mersey feature in both, his father’s occupation is also mentioned. It seems less a revision of the earlier manuscript, than an attempt to retell the story in a different way. Added to this, is a third version of the text, dated June 1961, just under a year before the poet’s death. This time he writes a typescript, which indicates much more substantial editing by hand: I was born in the days when there were lamplighters and hansom cabs,in the streets and ˆwhenˆordinary middleclass families had cooks and housemaids.There was croquet in the green light under the ˆgardenˆ treesin the garden that smelt of grass when the gardener had mown it. There hadn’t been a battle since the Boer War. Or if there had it had been remote from the England that was so pleasant and peaceful for the people ˆmen and womenˆ with money in the bank – and such hell for ˆslum dwellersˆ the people in the slums. (Yes, I know there are still ˆplentyˆ acres

3

THE UNWRITTEN WASTE: REVISIONS IN THE POETRY AND MEMOIR …

51

and acres of slums, in every big town in England, but, now, if they build enough houses, in twenty years’ time you’ve some hope of getting out of your slum. In those days you were too poor to even hope. Or so I imagine.) ˆthe Edwardian slum-dwellers, who hadn’t ˆevenˆ the hope of eventual escape which the slum-dwellers have today)ˆ We lived in Birkenhead. My father worked across the River Mersey in Liverpool. He was an Inspector of Branches for a Liverpool bank. ˆIn my memoryˆ Ferryboats chug and sidle between Birkenhead and Liverpoolˆ.ˆ in my memory Trams grind, p trams with open top decks. If it rained while you were on top and the tram was full downstairs, I suppose you put up your umbrella. And everybody wore a hat out of doors which must have been some protection.

In this account, the author has evidently returned to the first extant version (the 1957 text) in order to produce it. Certain phrases such as ‘ordinary middle-class’ and ‘the green light’ are identical to the earlier text, though much more explanation is given. Compare the anecdote of open top trams in the 1957 account: ‘When it rained, did the people on top hoist their umbrellas or did they all rush downstairs?’ with the 1961 version: ‘If it rained while you were on top and the tram was full downstairs, I suppose you put up your umbrella. And everybody wore a hat out of doors which must have been some protection’, The earlier account is much more concise in its telling, making the point in just 17 words as opposed to the 35 used in the 1961 version. The 1961 text’s consideration about the usefulness of hats seems almost like superfluous concern for the passengers on the trams. To an extent these manuscripts demonstrate the same process of continual editing that we see in Tessimond’s poetry—the text is never wholly finished, but perpetually evolves—and as such might demonstrate the author changing their mind about how the text should appear. However, other events underlie the document’s creation, and a different sense of the changed mind must be understood. Around two years into his production of the memoir, Tessimond read in David Stafford-Clark’s Pelican guide Psychiatry Today, an account of the relatively new treatment of electroconvulsive therapy, commonly known as ECT.2 He had suffered for several years from what his doctors termed ‘involutional melancholia’ and had seen a succession of psychoanalysts in the hope of dispelling these regularly recurring bouts of depression. From 1953 onwards he began having the treatment on a regular basis at St. Thomas’s Hospital in Hammersmith. The psychiatric department at St. Thomas’s at this time was under the direction

52

J. BAINBRIDGE

of William Sargant who had been instrumental in moving therapy away from psychoanalysis towards a mechanistic approach in the years after the second world war. In his memoir, Tessimond writes favourably of this experience: You are given a quick-acting anaesthetic, ‘Just a prick in your arm, it won’t hurt you’ and before you come to, you’re being helped into a comfortable armchair in the cheerful room where you can smoke (shades of Florence Nightingale) and there are reproductions of modern paintings on the walls […] Four to nine shocks at intervals of (generally) a week and gradually, or suddenly, you’re out of the tunnel into the light and sun. Life is worth living, you can even enjoy it.

One of the major changes that Sargant had made at St. Thomas’s had been to redecorate the rooms used for electroconvulsive therapy. In the post-war years, the treatment had been conducted in the hospital’s basement, where recovering patients often reported hallucinations of rats during their recovery—though Sargant pointed out that this was due to there actually being rats loose in the building.3 Sargant’s direction for a ‘cheerful’ space for treatment appears to have had a positive effect on Tessimond in the description above, though in an unpublished poem which he sent amongst his papers to Levertov, a rather bleaker image of the experience is given: Shock Treatment Waiting Room They do not weep. Their fears are clenched in their fingers. Their sorrows are sealed in their eyes. They’re like people in any café. Mothers who come for treatment bring their children with them and husbands bring their wives. Some grumble the new doctor doesn’t quite understand, and talk of their troubles and take no notice of the notice patients are asked to discuss their symptoms with the doctor and not with other patients. But most are patient. Most of the faces are shut.

A significant side effect of ECT is its effect on memory, commonly creating both retrograde and antereograde amnesia, and Tessimond

3

THE UNWRITTEN WASTE: REVISIONS IN THE POETRY AND MEMOIR …

53

became increasingly aware of the impact this was having on his writing. He writes in the memoir that: Three or four times in the last seven years I started this book, wrote 20 or 50 or 100 pages, and tore up all but a few dozen pages. It’s lucky I kept those bits and pieces. For I’ve an atrocious memory made worse by the Electro-Convulsion Therapy (popularly known as Shock Treatment) which has literally saved my life. But E.C.T. comes later in the story. By the way for anyone with a very bad memory to try to write the story of his life may sound like the attempt of an idiot to write the impossible; but a bad memory has advantages. It edits and abridges. It prevents you from including too much of the trivial. You remember only the gulfs and peaks of your past. You forget everything but the unforgettable.

Initially, a memoir produced by a man with a bad memory appears to be an attempt to ‘write the impossible’, but Tessimond argues that poor memory may serve a valuable tool in editing the life into a manageable form. What we find, is that the poet is not just rewriting the journal from its earlier drafts, but is in fact using these manuscripts to replace lost memories. In one of several drafts which recount a trip that he made to Jamaica (an unsuccessful attempt to meet his ‘lost rib’, having fallen in love with an illustration of a woman in an advertisement for bananas) he writes: ‘When did I go to Jamaica? […] luckily I wrote down my memories of Jamaica years ago, before I’d forgotten them’. In the successive accounts that he wrote about this trip, it is clear that he relies less on his memory of the expedition than on the drafts of it he has already set on paper. The alterations made to each of the versions of the text include both stylistic changes of syntax and abridgements of the narrative. These remove extraneous detail, but in each draft, the same series of events are recounted in sequence, indicating that they are based on each other rather than his own recollection. The same process appears true of the three drafts written about his childhood. The 1958 text of the memoir appears to be based on real memory—it does not draw upon phrases used in the 1957 version, but the 1961 text seems to rely heavily upon the earlier typescript. From what can be told from the pages of the memoir, Tessimond’s creative process for the document was as follows. He would write, first in long-hand with pencil, which he would then return to and make corrections. At some point, usually during the same calendar month, he would sit and type these handwritten accounts, producing a carbon copy as he

54

J. BAINBRIDGE

did so. Often these carbon copies would be returned to at a later point and edited in pencil yet further. At various points, large sections of the manuscript were destroyed, and only a few chosen pages preserved. This writing process appears to have befallen another side effect of ECT. Amongst a number of patients who received the therapy, severe changes to their handwriting have been observed. In some studies of the 1960s, handwriting was used as a gauge of recovery time in ECT patients (Naftalin 1969). Ernest Hemingway, who also underwent the treatment towards the end of his life, appears to have been similarly affected; A. E. Hotchner noting that post-treatment the author’s handwriting became cramped to the point at which it became difficult to read (Hotchner 1969), though Edward Shorter and David Healy have suggested that this effect may be a side effect of the antipsychotic drug Chlorpromazine which was often used in combination with ECT during this period (Shorter 2007). The handwritten sections of Tessimond’s memoir alter significantly in sections written directly following periods of treatment. In these, the words are diminished in size and are difficult to decipher—not only to readers of the manuscripts today, but also to Tessimond himself, who complains within the manuscript that he finds sections of it impossible to read. We can observe the effect of this by comparing sections of the memoir written in January 1958 produced some time after a course of treatment (see Fig. 3.1), against sections of the memoir written in 1962 shortly after leaving hospital (see Fig. 3.2). Though the memoir continued being written, the progress of the document into a legible typescript was interrupted by the treatment. Today, opinion on electroconvulsive therapy remains divided. Though the treatment may well have contributed to the poet’s early death from a brain haemorrhage, he writes in the memoir of the firm belief that it had prevented his suicide on a number of occasions. In terms of his creative process, it can be argued to have interrupted the legibility of the memoir, but to greater extent periods of depression appear to have halted the document’s creation altogether, and possibly account for the manuscript’s destruction at various points. The way in which the therapy affected the poet’s memory, however, seems to have had the most striking consequence on the document’s creation. With his own memory of events being either unreliable or wholly absent, the narrative was reduced to a series of incidents which had already been recorded upon paper. The twelve years that the poet spent on The Memoirs of a Man Who Runs After Girls was less a process of writing, than it was rewriting.

3

THE UNWRITTEN WASTE: REVISIONS IN THE POETRY AND MEMOIR …

Fig. 3.1 Page from Tessimond’s memoir, dated January 1958

55

56

J. BAINBRIDGE

Fig. 3.2 Page from Tessimond’s memoir, dated January 1962

That Tessimond began referring to this work as a ‘memoir’ towards the end of his life, rather than a ‘journal’ implies that he may have begun to see the work reaching a sense of wholeness. In 1960 and again in 1962, he produced two title-pages for the manuscript—one in typescript, one

3

THE UNWRITTEN WASTE: REVISIONS IN THE POETRY AND MEMOIR …

57

in pencil—both of which refer to the work by the title ‘memoir’. Journals, which document daily events, indicate an ongoing writing process, whereas a memoir offers a narrative with a more defined sense of an ending. Though what remains of Tessimond’s work does not follow the usual form of a memoir, it does live up to the poet’s first instruction for the work that it may ‘remain shapeless’ and develop its own character. His view of writing as an ongoing activity of revision perhaps meant that especially when writing the story of his life, the document needed to be continually revised so long as he was still living. Where he edited his poetry to produce the best version of the text, it could be said that he was reworking his own life to offer a final impression that he wished to be known by. The removal of objects from his flat and destruction of large sections of the memoir were key to this process, in the hope of preserving some of his own mystery. As he suggests in the poem ‘The Bargain’ ‘always keep / Your final secret self intact, / Entire, untied, untorn, unracked’ (Tessimond 2010). In a life which was shaped by an unreliable memory, the large sections of it which are unwritten are as revealing as the words that do remain. What we find in Tessimond’s manuscripts, is that revision is an ongoing process and that writing, for him at least, can rarely be considered to find its final form. Even after a poem is published, it may be returned to and altered—and the posthumously collected works may exist in different states and deny us a sense of a ‘finished’ version. This desire to revisit works goes hand-in-hand with the strong links between memory and writing in his memoir. When we remember an event in the past, we essentially reconstruct it—rewrite the narrative in our present, with different emphasis each time. Returning to published poems and rewriting them to have different focus, is a similar act. We renew what has gone before in the present. But once memory has failed for the writer—the attempt of writing becomes something else, what Tessimond describes as ‘writing the impossible’. In this case, it becomes even more poignant, because in places where the poet’s memory of events has disappeared completely, it is not the author writing the manuscript, but the manuscript writing the author.

58

J. BAINBRIDGE

Notes 1. A.S.J. Tessimond, ‘The Memoirs of a Man Who Runs After Girls’ (unpublished manuscript, c. 1951–1962). 2. David Stafford Clark, Psychiatry Today (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951). 3. William Sargant, The Unquiet Mind (New York: Little Brown, 1967), 145.

Works Cited Hotchner, Aaron Edward. Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir. New York: Random House, 1969. Naftalin, A.L., Marjorie Haw, and H.G. Bevans. ‘A Comparison of Propanidid and Thiopentone as Induction Agents for Electro-Convulsive Therapy.’ British Journal of Anaesthesia 41 (1969): 506–515. Richards, Frances. A Friendship with John Tessimond. Edinburgh. Tragara, 1979. Sargant, William. The Unquiet Mind. New York: Little Brown, 1967. Shorter, Edward, and David Healy. Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness. New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 2007. Stafford Clark, David. Psychiatry Today. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951. Tessimond, A.S.J. ‘The Memoirs of a Man Who Runs After Girls.’ Unpublished manuscript, 1951–1962, manuscript. Private Collection. ———. ‘Love Speaks to the Lover.’ Harper’s Magazine 172 (1936): 308. ———. ‘The Unwept Waste.’ The Listener, June 1, 1939. ———. Voices in a Giant City. London: Heinemann, 1947. ———. Not Love Perhaps … London: Autolycus, 1978. ———. Collected Poems with Translations from Jacques Prévert. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2010.

CHAPTER 4

Inspiration and Narrative in the Short Poem Bernard O’Donoghue

Of all forms of writing, the lyric poem is probably the one that has most often claimed inspiration for its origin. But a short poem proceeds from that initial point in the same way that any narrative plot develops. —Bernard O’Donoghue

In considering the notion of inspiration as the driving force of creativity in the short poem, I want to suggest that creativity is an amalgam of several things: of something that could be called inspiration to some extent but that acts in combination with other factors that happen in the course of writing or composition. These factors include a resolve to keep going through the work, and a readiness to find developments along the way which were not the original inspiration or even the developed resolve. I want to suggest too that the best, if at first glance surprising, word for these developments that arise along the way is narrative, though that is normally associated with longer forms. The function of narrative development in prose fiction—whether the novel or short story—is clear: having established its setting, the novel works by a sequential logic to a conclusion that resolves in some way the issues with which the narrative has

B. O’Donoghue (B) Wadham College, Oxford, UK © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_4

59

60

B. O’DONOGHUE

been concerned. Something similar happens in longer narrative poems of course; but it also occurs in short poems. ‘Inspiration’ is one word for the resolve that lyric poets set out with, as a description of what they want to say: the first thought. Poets gather their material out of which they will build their poems with an eye to what they want to conclude. Classical and medieval rhetoricians called it ‘invention’: the discovery of the ideas with which the writer or speaker will work. Indeed the second division of the rhetoricians, ‘disposition’ which was concerned with the ordering of the found materials into an effective sequence, is a fitting term for the composition stage that follows the finding of the ideas. I want to look at a few poems from the twentieth century to show how this process works in short poems too. By looking at the manuscripts of Yeats’s great, wistful poem of love in old age, ‘After Long Silence’, for instance, we can see that the sequence of events was only gradually established, as is often the case with Yeats. The meaning of a poem is radically affected by what comes first and last, as well as how it is expressed. Another case I will address is Seamus Heaney’s poem beginning ‘The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise’, that asks how the fact that this is a ‘found’ poem (as Heaney tells us) affects the writer’s freedom to draw conclusions. Does ‘inspiration’ mean something different there? Another compelling example is a poem by Paul Muldoon which seems to deny revelation altogether at the end: ‘which made me think / of something else, then something else again’—but the speaker does not reveal what either of the ‘something else’ was. Finally, I will look at some of my poems: amongst them one that seems to be wholly inspired—or explained—by a particular experience for its meaning, ‘The Iron Age Boat at Caumatruish’; another, ‘Nechtan’, which tells a received story; and two, ‘Ter Conatus’ and ‘The Uvular r’ which move from a single moment to what seems an unrelated end. The short poem behaves structurally like any narrative: it would otherwise be meaningless, in the sense in which we usually use the term ‘meaning’ in literature. But the short poem uses devices that are distinctive to it to determine structural sequence, and it often (if not always) tends to have worked out where it is going before it starts. It is often said, and it is true, that the longer narrative poem which was such a staple of nineteenth-century poetry in English more or less disappeared at the start of the twentieth century, with the advent of modernism. Early in the new century Yeats was still writing longish poems, but often of a dramatic or semi-dramatic kind. And dramatic

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

61

poems (his own term for them) such as The Shadowy Waters or Baile and Aillinn are probably the least read of his poems. From Eliot’s The Waste Land on—and from Yeats’s ‘The Tower’ on—the place of the long poem was taken by similar sequence poems—poems made up of shorter pieces— often very different from each other in subject or form or even length (as in The Waste Land). The more straightforward, connected narrative from the nineteenth century—such as Byron’s or Tennyson’s narratives— seemed to be replaced by the short story in prose. Words like ‘diagetic(al)’ had to be invented—or revived—to describe the narrative aspect of poems (such words had not reached the Oxford English Dictionary by 1973). During the century since The Waste Land, poets occasionally attempted to revive the narrative poem, but rarely with success. For example, Alice Oswald’s impressive and prizewinning book Dart (2002) followed the story of the river in its title, but more as a sequence of ideas than a story in which events happen. Adam Foulds’s impressive The Broken Word (2011) is a series of poems on the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, but it is not exactly a narrative poem. A reading of Wilfrid Wilson’s popular poem ‘Flannan Isle’ (1912), about a mysterious event that happened in December 1900, makes clear what kind of discontinued narrative I have in mind. This is an exciting story about how three lighthouse-keepers disappeared from their watch on a small island in the Outer Hebrides. Much discussed at the time and collected in anthologies of strange tales, its narrative is like an extended ballad, consisting of just over a hundred lines. As the investigators approach the island, We saw three queer, black, ugly birds Too big, by far, in my belief, For guillemot or shag – Like seamen sitting bolt upright Upon a half-tide reef: But, as we near’d, they plunged from sight, Without a sound, or spurt of white.

The poem continues in this vein as a Gothic tale of mystery: Aye: though we hunted high and low, And hunted everywhere, Of the three men’s fate we found no trace Of any kind in any place,

62

B. O’DONOGHUE

But a door ajar, and an untouch’d meal, And an overtoppled chair.

The ending comes as no surprise; the mystery, gripping though it is, is unresolved. We seem’d to stand for an endless while, Though still no word was said, Three men alive on Flannan Isle Who thought on three men dead.

The poem’s narrative momentum keeps the reader’s attention. Have the lighthouse-keepers been turned into mysterious, Gothic birds? Clearly, what keeps this poem going is the development of the story’s events: its marked diagetical power. Such poems are not taken very seriously nowadays. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (unquestionably one of the greatest long narrative poems in English) Pandarus says ‘The end is every tale’s strength’. This is true of narratives of course: the principle of Herodotus’s Solon, call no man happy until his death day (because things can always change for the worse)—and call no narrative a success until it is finished. This presents a major challenge to the novel. Not many novels end satisfactorily in my view—something which is obscured by the reader’s distracting sense of achievement in reaching the end of a 900-page story. The early nineteenth-century novel needed to end, rather flatly, with marriage. Novels like Dostoyevsky’s which raise great metaphysical questions tend not to be able to answer those questions. A moral or philosophical question that can be satisfactorily answered is not a very interesting question. So novel-ending is not easy. If the novel finds it hard to reach a convincing or satisfying conclusion, the strength of the short poem is that it tends to excel at endings, and a few examples enable us to demonstrate this. Perhaps the most successful structure for the short poem has a development—unlike the longer form like ‘Flannan Isle’ which has no turn or volta—that shifts it towards its conclusion. It is easy to think of such arresting endings that have some kind of turn: Milton’s ‘Sonnet on his Blindness’ ends ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’; Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ ends ‘All the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ at the outbreak of World War I. Seamus Heaney’s Clonmacnoise poem1 reaches its end in a way that

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

63

casts a retrospective light over the whole poem so that the meaning floods back through the poem from its ending. In cases like this we tend, especially in English, to say those successful last lines are what the poem is ‘about’, its occasion—what I called at the beginning the resolve that keeps it going. The great critical question asked by the dominant critics in English of the early to mid-twentieth century—led in England by F. R. Leavis and in America by the great moralists like Lionel Trilling and René Wellek—was ‘What is the work about?’ They took very seriously the Arnoldian ‘common pursuit of true judgement’. And in general it is easier for the writer of a short poem to declare what it is about than for the author of a longer work. Leavis worked hard to devise a ‘Great Tradition’ for the moral novel, inexplicably including a stylistic perfectionist like Henry James amongst his moralists—strange in a writer with a mind, Oscar Wilde said, of such subtlety that it could not be penetrated by anything as crude as an idea. What is the moral of The Ambassadors ? The general point is that any piece of writing—indeed any use of language, which is a dynamic rather than a static, picture-like medium— has a fictional polarity to it, in the sense of a development that moves from a beginning to an end. A successful poem does this by a kind of inevitability: a weak or less coherently structured poem not so well. This of course sounds like an absurd truism—a good poem is well structured. But it is of the essence of a short poem that it moves by a kind of process which might be called narrative from beginning to end, just as any story does. It just attempts to be better at it, and more explicitly pointed. Turning back more precisely towards the theme of inspiration, an examination of the development—both internal and external—of the short poem shows that the idea of inspiration varies according to the genre in which the writer is operating. ‘Inspiration’ for the poet has often been thought to be something different from the kind of motivation that prompts the writer of long fiction. The poet hangs around, in Matthew Arnold’s famous line from ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, ‘waiting for the spark from Heaven to fall’. Poets and their critics talk about Muses—a term for the inspiring women that lay behind love poems. Assuming that it is not a spark falling from Heaven, what is it that inspires the writer of the short poem? What starts the process? One instance, Yeats’s wistful masterpiece ‘After Long Silence’, makes a compelling study. Speech after long silence; it is right All other lovers being estranged or dead,

64

B. O’DONOGHUE

Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade, The curtain drawn upon unfriendly night, That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant.2

This was written in 1929 and seems to be about Yeats’s relationship with Olivia Shakespear, his first lover. We know a good deal about their relations: the poem takes us back to an early poem in The Wind Among the Reeds, ‘The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love’ (1898) where Olivia Shakespear (we assume) is described lyrically and poignantly: Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end: She looked in my heart one day And saw your image was there; She has gone weeping away.3

This poem is interpreted as addressed to Maud Gonne whose ‘image’ was in the poet’s heart, but the ‘beautiful friend’ is Olivia Shakespear, who it is often said would in practical terms have been a better match for Yeats. The original mythological title, ‘Aodh to Dectora’, has given way to a biographical interpretation. In the later poem, ‘After Long Silence’, is Yeats perhaps wishing she had not ‘gone weeping away’, since all other lovers are ‘estranged or dead’?4 It is of course more complicated than that, and at the same time simpler in poetic terms. The crude first draft of the poem (all commentators call it a prose draft, but it could be seen as a rudimentary poem of a kind)5 begins ‘Your hair is white / My hair is white’, drawing on one of Yeats’s greatest love poems ‘Broken Dreams’, generally taken as addressed to Maud Gonne: ‘There is grey in your hair. / Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath / When you are passing’.6 In ‘After Long Silence’, the poet is similarly shocked to see the ‘beautiful friend’s white hair. In a sense, that is the poem’s inspiration: its occasion or motivation. Yeats called it a ‘Subject’ for the poem in writing to Shakespear from

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

65

Rapallo when he was ill. But he expended a great deal of effort and reorganization before the poem found its proper form. One way of describing that effort is to see a developing fiction which changes the organization of its details, with a different kind of polarity. The first version moves from the initial shock of recognition—‘Your hair is white’—to a recalling of the time when the two of them were in love and ignorant. The contrast is simple: wistful and evocative enough, but hardly profound—wisdom comes with age and it sounds a poor exchange for youth and ignorant loving. After all, Yeats had already written much more powerfully on the idea that an ‘aged man is but a paltry thing, / a tattered coat upon a stick’ in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. A later stage in the development of the poem begins with a somewhat pointless piece of gallantry which sounds clumsy in the context of age: ‘Once more I have kissed your hand’. But it is in this version that Yeats introduces the poem’s masterstroke: ‘all other lovers being estranged or dead’. We are back with the distress of the beautiful friend who in the earlier poem ‘went weeping away’: now the other lovers who have displaced her are either estranged (like Maud Gonne) or dead (like Florence Farr). So the clichéd ‘Come let us talk of love’ of the first version can be brought to life by developing the idea of talking: what is still possible for the pair of lovers in the poem, and only for them. The poem builds a rhetorical power with the verb ‘descant’, whether or not Yeats could spell it. This forceful speaking word enables the poem to end with a strong expression of the concluding, familiar truths: ‘Bodily decrepitude is wisdom’, and ‘young / We loved each other and were ignorant’. The striking point is that this poem, which hardly seems like a narrative, ends with the same line as in earlier versions, but now with a very different meaning by virtue of having started at a different point and by introducing a more striking medial thought—the other lovers being dead or estranged. One way of describing this would be to say it is a different kind of narrative: its fictive construction and disposition—the processes by which the poem is made—are changed. It is a different story. But where and when was the inspiration for the poem—the point at which he conceived of the ‘subject’, or the moment when some shift in the words of the poem (words such as ‘estranged’ or ‘descant’ or even the repeated ‘unfriendly’) changed the poem’s meaning and narrative? There is a second example from Yeats, an early poem—earlier than ‘The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love’ and the beautiful friend—called ‘A Dream of Death’.7

66

B. O’DONOGHUE

I dreamed that one had died in a strange place Near no accustomed hand; And they had nailed the boards above her face, The peasants of that land, Wondering to lay her in that solitude, And raised above her mound A cross they had made out of two bits of wood, And planted cypress round; And left her to the indifferent stars above Until I carved these words: She was more beautiful than thy first love, But now lies under boards.8

This was originally called ‘An Epitaph’ and has been subject to the same kind of biographical interpretation as the other poems we looked at. Yeats wrote it, we are told, when he heard in 1891 a report from the South of France that Maud Gonne was ill. It is a strange and very beautiful poem, with vague echoes of the play The Countess Cathleen, Yeats’s favourite amongst his plays which he went on revising. The point worth making about this curiously mythological poem (mythological in its inclusion of peasants and boards and cypress) is what Yeats does with the end in the course of revisions. It originally ended in a somewhat clichéd way with ‘the breeze’ and the ‘stars above’, both ‘mournful’. In the final version this has been replaced by a blunter, starker ending which changes the poem altogether; ‘But now [she] lies under boards ’. A change in the middle of the poem prepares the way for this shift: the original line ‘I came and wrote upon a cross of wood’ is changed to give the action to the peasants who raised above her ‘A cross they had made out of two bits of wood’, an inconsequential action to which the stars are ‘indifferent’ ‘[u]ntil ’ (my italics) in the final version the ‘I’ of the poem—the writer— comes to supply the meaning by ‘carving’ words (a verb that operates as the ‘descanting’ did in ‘After Long Silence’ by introducing the trope of artistic language). By the end the poet has taken over the poem to supply the meaning decisively. Ultimately the ‘thy’ of the penultimate line makes us wonder who the female ‘one’ of the first line is being unfavourably compared to. Another Yeats poem to consider, ‘Who Goes With Fergus?’9 is very familiar indeed, the poem that Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus was obsessed with, calling it to mind in the ‘Telemachus’, ‘Proteus’ and ‘Circe’ chapters of Ulysses .

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

67

Who will go drive with Fergus now, And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade, And dance upon the level shore? Young man, lift up your russet brow, And lift your tender eyelids, maid, And brood on hopes and fear no more. And no more turn aside and brood Upon love’s bitter mystery; For Fergus rules the brazen cars, And rules the shadows of the wood, And the white breast of the dim sea And all dishevelled wandering stars.

This poem did actually occur in The Countess Cathleen in 1892 though it is cut out in the final 1912 version. In the play it was sung without obvious relevance by the Countess’s old nurse. Two words in the poem have caused comment: ‘now’ in the first line, which William Empson says requires knowledge of the Fergus story for its effect to be understood (because nobody will want to go driving with Fergus now that he has given up his kingdom), and the explosive hair-word ‘dishevelled’ in the last line. In this case a word from a completely remote register—‘dishevelled’—makes us read back through the poem in an entirely different way (rather as ‘descant’ and ‘indifferent’ did). Daniel Albright notes interestingly that the Greek word for comet is linked to hair, so there is a kind of astronomical consistency in the line ‘And all dishevelled wandering stars’.10 These three poems make us wonder what the inspiration for them was, in the sense of their poet’s motivation or impulsion. The encounter with Olivia Shakespear in old age prompts ‘After Long Silence’; in this case ‘inspires’ is hardly too strong a term. ‘Who goes with Fergus?’ is a kind of tone poem—an analogy which it is not unreasonable to make about a poet who was amongst other things a ‘Last Romantic’ and a follower of French symbolism. And the haunting and haunted scene in ‘A Dream of Death’ was waiting for meaning to be invested in it—a meaning that was surprisingly supplied by a dramatic change of atmosphere at the close of the final version. In all cases, different as the poems are, what happens in their movement towards their ending reveals their meaning and changes the direction in which we had assumed the story was going. We will return to pick up this point at the end.

68

B. O’DONOGHUE

But there are cases that do not involve changes in the versions of a poem but changes within the poem itself make a difference. First, in Seamus Heaney’s magical twelve-line poem (number viii in the ‘Lightenings’ series in Seeing Things )11 it is immediately obvious that we are dealing with something much closer to traditional stories, episodes or anecdotes. The story, which was familiar from A Celtic Miscellany (1951) by Kenneth Jackson, who took it from Standish O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica (1892), comes from a fourteenth or fifteenth-century Irish annal. It tells how the monks of Clonmacnoise were holding a meeting in their church when they saw a ship sailing above them in the air. The ship’s crew dropped anchor on to the church floor and the monks seized hold of it. One of the crew came down to retrieve the anchor but was dragged down by the monks. He appealed to them to release the anchor before he drowned in their element, and they did, so he swam back up in the air with the anchor. Heaney’s poem tells the story pretty closely, but ends with the clinching line: the man climbed back ‘out of the marvellous as he had known it’. What Heaney adds is the idea of the marvellous: one person’s everyday life is another person’s marvel. Heaney begins ‘The annals say’ and goes on to repeat the substance of the story. What the annals say (in Jackson’s English translation) is ‘They saw a ship sailing over them in the air’. Here is the inspiration or stimulus. Heaney goes on to tell the story in a striking iambic pentameter: ‘A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope’ and adds the abbot’s reflection ‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown’. So the first eleven of the twelve lines retell the story faithfully, until the last line’s ‘marvellous’ suddenly casts a retrospective meaning and interpretation over the whole. The crewman, escaping back up to his magical sailingship in the air, is moving away from the marvellous and the unfamiliar as he has encountered it: the strange world of people who live on the ground rather than in his normal element in the air. He has been out of his element—a phrase which was already said to be a cliché in Shakespeare, but which Heaney brilliantly suggests without using the term. The last line gives a retrospective plot to the simple narrative. And then of course all sorts of other meanings flow back through the story, the most remote and unduly explicit of which might be thought to be the implication that two different sections of society (say the two communities in Northern Ireland) should just peaceably accept that the ways of the others are strange and ‘marvellous’, to be tolerated or helped to survive. I am not primarily concerned with such interpretations

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

69

though; more with the way that the poem’s ending becomes its raison d’être and not just the logical ending of the fiction. That is, short poems, which must be read as sequential narratives just as much as any kind of writing, are different kinds of fiction. The motivating inspiration of their origin has to be expressed through the construction of a very brief story with a limited number of functioning images. The particulars of the case are very different in Paul Muldoon’s ‘Something Else’,12 but the balance between the ending and the substance of the poem is similar. In this poem Muldoon begins with what seems like a personal event: ‘When your lobster was lifted out of the tank / to be weighed’, but moves on through a series of linguistic and thematic associations—first by a purely phonetic association, the ‘weighed’ lobster suggests ‘woad’ which suggests ‘madder’, and ‘indigo inks’. But the subject of lobsters evokes Gérard de Nerval leading a lobster through the street on a thread, and the idea of colours suggests Nervals’s line ‘Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine’; ‘Reine’ by rhyme prompts the name of Nerval’s innamorata ‘Adrienne’. Nerval hanged himself on a chain from a lamppost, which made the narrator ‘think / of something else, then something else again’. But we don’t learn what; any kind of association can work—but there has to be some association that made the narrator think again. The title is much more playful than in any of the other poems considered here. It does literally anticipate—or quote—the poem’s conclusion. But ‘Something Else’ has a secondary sense too. In colloquial English— especially in Ireland perhaps, or originally in America?—it means ‘a curiosity’. ‘She is something else’ means ‘something out of the ordinary’; ‘a bit of a card’; ‘a tonic’. For some reason Irish English usage is rich in such expressions. Muldoon’s poem begins with an unusual setting: a couple in a restaurant, it seems, but the ‘you’ is confined to the poem’s first line. Every moment of the poem is going on to something else— changing the subject. The lobster for dinner is ‘weighed’, a word whose meaning—in a classic Muldoonian way—is discarded to shift on to its phonetic closeness to ‘woad’: a specialized colour word, most commonly encountered as the material out of which the Anglo-Saxons made the colour blue. This is linked to other prehistoric colourmaking materials: the madder from the root of which medieval Germanic people produced a reddish-purple dye. ‘Indigo inks’ follow naturally, fugitive perhaps in being less durable and stable than darker ones. In the second stanza we return to the lobster and the often told story of Nerval walking a pet

70

B. O’DONOGHUE

lobster (Thibault by name) along the road on a ‘gossamer thread’—the gossamer to maintain the theme of ephemerality—if there is a theme. The association of ideas leads to Nerval’s tragic suicide: something which makes the voice of the poem think of something else, but we are not told. We might be tempted to speculate about what this something else might be except that this in turn leads to ‘something else again’. We have lost the thread. The effect of this is—at least in the present context of inspiration and motivation—to draw attention to the normal expectation that the end of the poem will yield the meaning of the whole. Muldoon ends with an empty proposition—something else again—which gives us nothing from which we can read a retrospective sense for the poem (in contrast to the ‘Clonmacnoise’ poem). On formal examination, of course, this is a sonnet, like Nerval’s Les Chimères , with a subtle and euphonious series of half—or less—rhymes: ‘promenades’, ‘threads’ and so on. Moreover, Les Chimères is celebrated for its musical quality more than its meanings, even its surreal, associating meanings. Muldoon himself argues for the senses of poem-endings as crucial for their structures in the subjects and titles of his Oxford Lectures, The End of the Poem (with all the punning implications that that title holds, which perhaps even takes us back to Pandarus, quoted at the start here). And we might recall Heaney’s question at the end of his poem ‘The Fragment’, derived from Beowulf : ‘Since when’, he asked, ‘Are the first line and last line of any poem Where the poem begins and ends?’13

The Muldoon poem is an extreme example, but it is a classic illustration of how things happen or come to mind, by association or resemblance, in the course of a poem, to turn it into something else. Finally, I come with some trepidation to my own short poems and their hidden inspiration. I am aware of course that what I have been arguing here may well be dictated by the shape of poems that have been constructed over the years: that the poems and the discussion are at best symbiotic and at worst tautological. I have chosen the first poem ‘Nechtan’ for two reasons: first, like the Heaney poem, it is drawn from a story in medieval Irish annals. When Bran and his more worldly-wise companions Were settling happily in the idyll

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

71

Of the Island of Women, I spoilt it For them – and for me – by being homesick For Ireland. But then we found there was No longer any welcome for us there. Maybe out of resentment for the months We’d spent living in Love’s contentedness, They wouldn’t let us land, so now we’re fated To sail for ever in the middle seas, outcast Alike from the one shore and the other.14

This also resembles the Heaney poem as a received story. The Voyage of Bran is a book of marvels, recounting the travels of the legendary figure Bran and his followers around the North Atlantic where they encounter various wonders and adventures such as lighting a fire on the back of a whale thinking it is an island—the same kind of voyage literature as Hakluyt, Gulliver and the Odyssey. He is the Pagan prototype of St Brendan, though in that Celtic era the secular-religious divide was marginal. One of the places they come to in the North Atlantic is the Island of Women: the Calypso element of the story. They are very happy there until a character called Nechtan—who occurs at several textual points and places in Cornwall and Scotland too—says he wants to go back to Ireland. His companions say he is crazy to want to leave this erotic Paradise, but he insists and they leave for Ireland again. I suppose I was trying to make the story into a kind of emigrant culture morality: to make it fit the circumstances of the Irish in the modern era— for example abandoning the notionally idyllic places in the west of Ireland, such as Dingle, Connemara and The Aran Islands for the comforts of Brooklyn and Queens, with running water and central heating.15 But it is slightly problematic: Perhaps the rush to closure led to the apparent difficulty that the end—‘outcast / Alike from the one shore and the other’—seems to suggest that Irish emigrants, like me in England, are not welcome back home—which is not true. The difficulty arose because the endeavour to make the received story mean something was surprisingly procrustean. That is to say, the poem’s application—the wish to create a poem about emigration through the development of a received story— pulled the story out of shape, losing its original ‘inspiration’ which was just this attractive, wonderful little story.16 If the poem has an intertextual connexion, it might be (rather grandly) with Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ where the country where ‘the young [are] in one another’s arms’

72

B. O’DONOGHUE

is unsuitable for old men. Nechtan’s homesickness for Ireland makes him reject the delights of ‘the island of women’. The second poem, ‘The Iron Age Boat at Caumatruish’ is an example of a different kind of ‘found’ poem, not a text but an experience which was then cross-referenced with previous texts. If you doubt, you can put your fingers In the holes where the oar-pegs went. If you doubt still, look past its deep mooring To the mountain that enfolds the corrie’s Waterfall of lace through which, they say, You can see out but not in. If you doubt that, hear the falcon Crying down from Gneeves Bog Cut from the mountain-top. And if you doubt After all these witnesses, no boat Dredged back from the dead Could make you believe.

Caumatruish is a townland (the smallest Irish rural land-division, corresponding to ‘manor’, or something like that) near Millstreet, Co Cork where I come from. It is a beautiful place by a lake under a mountain waterfall. Forty-odd years ago the farmer who owned the land, Thade Mullane, was draining the land by the lakeshore and dredged up a log boat, preserved by the bog-water and dated by archaeologists to the second century CE. Seeing the holes for the oar-pegs still there so that you could put your fingers into them suggested the proof of Christ’s bodily resurrection demanded by Thomas the Apostle, and the story fell into place after that. Seeing the boat in a beautiful place was an actual experience with an air of historical depth to it, and it prompted the viewer to ponder its significance. It is a kind of willed inspiration, or wish for it. If there is a detail here that changes the narrative, it is the idea that the waterfall is like a dentist’s window through which one can ‘see out but not in’: an image perhaps for the mystery in the Biblical ‘witnesses’. The next poem whose genesis I would like to trace is ‘The Uvular r’: i.m. Joan Hayes.17 The City on Sunday morning: turf briquettes And Calor-gas rounded up in network compounds, And the mist so dense you can hardly see

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

73

The ochres and light greens of Sunday’s Well Across the river. We were the Cork crowd; We always lacked the definition Of the more western voice and land in Kerry. The south Cork coast, kind and all as it was, Wasn’t Dingle. Our gaeltacht was speckled, Consonants that compromised and faded On the mouth’s roof like Communion wafers. That our bruachs were riverbanks; that our local names Took the English word for it: Newquarter, Watergrasshill and Coalpits and Halfway.

Joan Hayes was a friend of mine in Oxford. She came originally from Limerick, but she went to university in Cork and I always enjoyed meeting her at grand gatherings in Oxford where her husband was the President of St John’s College to savour her Cork city accent. She died tragically in a car crash while on holiday in America, and I wanted to write an elegy for her (if the motivating wish to write elegy could be called an inspiration). There are a number of linguistic features I brought in. First, like many cities but more so, Cork is called ‘the City’ to distinguish it from the ‘county’ Cork. I remember walking along the Western Road in Cork through the mist and trying to describe it. The second linguistic detail is the conjunction ‘that’ which is a local curiosity used twice in the third line from the end. In my experience this use of ‘that’ as a kind of narrative connective when there is no narration is peculiar to Cork city: [we said or thought] ‘that our bruachs were riverbanks’ and ‘that our local names took the English word for it’. The central section of the poem—after the early volta in this sonnet structure at ‘We were the Cork crowd’—is the poem’s ‘meaning’: what it is that distinguishes people from Cork, in language and otherwise. From the slight evidence of these few short poems we might attempt to approach a definition of what the shape of the modern short lyric in English tends to be. Terry Eagleton said that the typical poem in that subgenre concluded with ‘a pulled punch in the last line’. That is, the poem builds up through what I have been calling its narrative or fiction towards a conclusion—a conclusion that may have been the poem’s apparent raison d’être at the start—and then pulls back from it. Whether or not that is generally true we can easily think of poems of which it is true; the Muldoon poem here is a classic case in point. Eagleton is certainly right

74

B. O’DONOGHUE

to draw attention to the last line, to the poem’s ending. ‘The end is every such poem’s strength’, as with Pandarus’s tale. Defining the lyric poem is notoriously difficult. It is not defined metrically or by line-length or by poem-length; no single formality defines it. Yet it is clear that the writer initially has some conception of how the poem must be. We have seen Yeats changing the order of events and the detail of the material he includes in ‘After Long Silence’, in an attempt to make the poem say—or, Archibald MacLeish would say, be—what he wants it to. He does impose some traditional formalities too of course; the exquisite final version of the poem has a beautifully understated halfrhyme scheme in its two quatrains. The poem uses repetition in a way we would not expect in prose: ‘unfriendly lamplight’ vies delicately with the ‘unfriendly night’ in the following line. But these details all fit into a development that moves from the release of speech at the beginning to the statement of its significance at the end. That ending was there in the very first, inchoate version of the poem when it was a fairly bland statement of a truth about old age; in its initial inspiration, we might say. What the poet’s skilful shaping has achieved—created by another kind of inspiration—is a development which earns the grand claim that this concluding truth is ‘the supreme theme of Art and Song’. This development is what gives the poem its particular meaning and form. Without that development the formal features—rhyme, repetition, pentameter— would not have made fundamental and definitive changes to the poem whose ‘subject’ was originally conceived by Yeats. There has been a lot of recent discussion about the ‘end’ of the poem— in Pandarus’s sense or more literal senses as in Muldoon’s lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry.18 But the way poets construct the form of the modern lyric poem by incorporating something different between the beginning and the end to balance them, may be as near as we can get to a formal definition of this genre.19 The other matter that arises in the context of inspiration is writer’s block, much invoked and lamented in poetry workshops. The idea is that the original inspiration has not come to fruition. Another way of putting it is to say that the inspiration was not there in the first place. The response of Mallarmé to Degas is much quoted in this context: ‘My dear Degas, poems are not made out of ideas. They are made out of words’. But they do start with the impetus of an idea; ideally the words then take over and construct a narrative that reaches a satisfying conclusion. In the poems we have looked at here, the

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

75

occasion of inspiration—the idea for the poem—is a moment of experience from which the poet can construct a story with a meaning: Yeats meeting Olivia Shakespear in old age or his hearing of Maud Gonne’s illness and the dream it prompted; or in my experience, following a train of thought from observing hay-bales standing in an English field in autumn in the poem ‘Ter Conatus’ which I will come to last. But the narrative within the poem, as in these cases, has to be verbally strong enough to drive forcefully to the ‘tale’s end’. Having drifted on to discussion of my own poems, I want to turn— somewhat self-consciously—to considering how I reached the point at which I began to write these poems at all. It came relatively late in my life. But I was surprised to find recently an old notebook and some sheets of paper on which I had scribbled some attempts at poems in my schooldays in Manchester, though I have always said that I first wrote poems in my thirties in Oxford. Certainly, I was past thirty before I first published poems, or set about writing them in any kind of systematic way. I was keen on poetry; I remember an evening in 1962, in the flat I shared with my sisters in Donovan’s Road, Cork, when I read through ‘The Ancient Mariner’ with excitement and reflected that this is the part of the school curriculum I found most rewarding. (The career plan then was that I should go on mostly with Maths and become an engineer.) I remember too reading Scott’s ‘The Lady of the Lake’, though at that time I was keenest on novels and short stories, especially Dickens’s and Frank O’Connor’s, respectively. Also at that same point I bought four books (or my recently widowed mother bought them for me): the complete Shakespeare, in the big, cumbersome, thick-papered Spring Books edition; the complete Chaucer in the ancient Globe edition, in small print in double columns; the Faber Selections from James Joyce edited by T. S. Eliot; and the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats in the famous red Macmillan edition. At the same time I was being taught English (and Irish) by the inspirational (I use the adjective consciously) Cork actor-director Dan Donovan at Presentation College, Cork, where he read scenes from Macbeth in a voice I can still hear over half-a-century later. I moved from Ireland to England when I was 16 in 1962, and I had to make my mind up: Maths or English for A Level; in that era it was assumed you had to go for one ‘side’ or the other, Arts or Sciences. I think the fact that English was supported by Latin which I had always loved was the main determining factor—as well as Dan Donovan’s inspiration. I did an English degree at Lincoln College, Oxford, with an inspiring tutor W.

76

B. O’DONOGHUE

W. Robson who (like F. R. Leavis) made English literature seem the most important and rewarding thing in the world. I also felt most at home with medieval literature—especially Chaucer and Dante with the familiar world of Catholic Christendom behind them—and I did graduate work in that. At the end of that, in 1971, I became a lecturer in Medieval English at Magdalen College. My primary interest, as perhaps with everyone, was unrequited love, both in life and poetry, but that is another story— though it did have great prominence in the medieval poetry I read and taught. I loved teaching at Magdalen; at least I told myself I did, though in reality I was deeply cowed by the cleverness and social glamour of my students. I had passed through the 1960s without living them. I wrote a poem called ‘Timing the Pigs’ in 1983 about missing the major events of the time: a poor thematic relation of Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Exposure’ in 1975, about missing ‘the once-in-a-lifetime portent’. Less grandly, ‘Timing the Pigs’ reflects When the Beatles were big in ‘sixty-three I was listening to Rachmaninov Two in the quiet evenings. No sex. But I knew I was right. In nineteen-seventy-three though, I bought “Abbey Road” At an inflated price. There was more than you’d think to it, Looked at from a strictly musical angle.20

In the 1970s I began to go to the Magdalen Poetry Society, the Florio Society, run by John Fuller, the tutor with responsibility for modern English literature who was a successful and distinguished poet (and later novelist too). The Florio was the only way of meeting the students outside of the teaching context which was an important part of its attraction. John made the writing and submission of a poem to the society’s meeting an obligatory passport, so the first time I ever typed a poem for anybody else’s eyes was for that. I remember very well the feeling of thrill and daring as I pushed my anonymous poem under the door of John’s teaching room. The poem was ‘Beware the Crab’, an uncomfortable poem about cancer and how the death-knell of the term closes off its sufferers from social contact. As soon as the all-hope-ending word is out we start to shun them, writing them off, not safe until the orange earth’s aspersions

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

77

have drummed with the holy water on their parcels sealing them. And all our duty ended. Back we turn to our own, composing lines of well-weighed sympathy to heal with tears. Placebos can cure us; they’re happy now. Once I stood on a thrush with a broken wing and, when it shrilled, I stamped it into peace. They are a tribe more foreign than the Soviets: extremists, terrorists, beyond the fringe of lunacy.21

The theme here is one I have always been preoccupied by—how the wish for closure makes us fail to live hour to hour as we should. My mother had died painfully of cancer in Manchester in the snowy winter of 1978– 1979, four months after the birth of my first child, Ellen, so it was a very conflicted period. I think the pain of her death was still too recent for me to have consciously dwelt on it in the poem, though I did write two poems on the subject. My mother was a history teacher, and the poem ‘History Remainders’ in the Sycamore pamphlet was a kind of guilt elegy about not having the patience to listen to her enthusiastic discussion of history.22 From this point I think guilt is the dominant emotion in the poems. It is combined in this poem with a sense of failure of memory and concentration. The other poem about my mother’s death was ‘Ebbe?’ in Gunpowder in 1995, drawing on the moment in Canto 10 of Inferno when Cavalcante Cavalcanti in the afterlife learns that his son, Dante’s friend the poet, must be dead because Dante used the past tense ‘ebbe’, ‘he had’, to refer to him. In my poem I dwell on the way that past tenses now apply to my mother: She used to say. Was always. Didn’t like. Such cold, novel preterites.

‘Beware the Crab’ was written a long time before Peter Reading’s searing C, but it has comparable issues with its title. Clearly the title ‘The Crab’ would be adequate, but it got tangled up with Skelton’s poem ‘Ware the Hawk’; indeed I seem to remember that it was in one version headed ‘Ware the Crab’. There are other intertextualities in it; ‘all our duty ended’ is taken from Hopkins’s ‘Felix Randal’, one of my favourite poems. I have more regard for ‘Beware the Crab’ than for most of those early poems (early by my standards: written in my thirties!), and I can’t remember why it wasn’t included in the following volumes like Poaching

78

B. O’DONOGHUE

Rights and The Weakness . I considered including it in The Seasons of Cullen Church in 2016, but in the end I didn’t. ‘The Soviets’ of the second-last line is testimony to the Cold War era of the poem; when I toyed with the idea of reviving it in 2016, I considered replacing them with ‘the Taliban’ or ‘the Caliphate’. The changing of these terms, as of the title, is another instance of the way changes of a poem’s context or development mean that it remains a kind of organic form (rather as Jerome McGann says, poetry and its scholarship never reaches a wholly final form). As for the bêtes noires, so it goes on; perhaps the determined revival of the Cold War in the Trump era demands a new public enemy. One of the recurrent themes I find, looking across my poems now, is impatience with our ideological requirement of an agreed political bête noire in every generation. I suppose I may be particularly sensitive to this as Irish in England. I have been happy and blessed in England. But I do belong to an outsider group: a group that in the era of IRA activity and the Civil War in Northern Ireland was liable to be demonized in England, like the Soviets and in due course the Taliban. There are interesting signs of a revival of this demonization in the discussion of ‘the Irish Border’ after the wretched Brexit vote. Another early poem delivered at the Florio Society was ‘Morning in Beara’ which I think is significant in bringing a subject into my English life that belongs entirely to an Irish context, something which I was generally reluctant to do. The title is a word-for-word translation of an Irish song, ‘Maidin I mBéarra’; it is not immediately obvious how this place name is to be pronounced in English (it is pronounced like English ‘bearer’ with the final ‘r’ silent). Towns, small islands, domus and rus Is the rule in this last wedge of state Sketched over by cartographers. Angled houses through glassless frames Overlook the sound where the gannet Cuts out and falls. The curate Developed a stammer; the economy He founded foundered. His photos even Were blurred, of this corner Where no one comes on purpose. New men came once, unwrapping bales Of something on the beach. They glazed The windows and repaired the thatch,

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

79

Starting a honey-farm in nine rows Of cannabis. But the Council Broke the windows, and in the rafters They hung Vapona for the bees. Back in the status quo, the old woman Takes up her ageless beat again. A mile or so out, You can listen to the shingle’s scramble As the escaping pebbles lose their footing.23

The poem opens with a self-consciously learned application of a rule of Latin grammar to describe a landscape: the rule that the preposition ad meaning ‘motion towards something or somewhere’ is omitted before ‘towns, small islands, domus and rus ’—for example ‘to Rome’ is Romam ire, not *ad Romam ire. The details of the Latin rule might have been exploited further: domus as ‘home’, for example, or rus for the countryside. There is also the interesting question of how small an island has to be to omit the ad. More widely, the poem is a striking mixture of my conflicting lives at the time in which the poem is set: a learned, literary student’s life in Oxford, punctuated by holidays in the Irish countryside and shoreline. The poem was dedicated to my friend Father Matt Keane with whom I stayed in Beara a few times in the late 1960s, in the beautiful, desolate village of Allihies of which he was parish priest. The poem was the first item, as a kind of declaration of subject, in my first book Poaching Rights (Gallery Press 1987). It had previously been published by John Fuller in a Sycamore Press pamphlet Razorblades and Pencils; in fact this is the only fully correct version because I introduced an error in line 11 in Poaching Rights by omitting the crucial word ‘New’: New men came once, unwrapping bales.24

A further matter of regret for me is that Matt Keane found the poem negative about the area. Nothing could be further from my intention and attitude to the extraordinarily beautiful and atmospheric place. It was certainly my ideal poetry setting: a kind of controlled environment like Conrad’s ships, or the places called ‘theoretical locations’ by Tom Paulin. But there is a warning here I think: the romantic taste for desolate places, like nostalgia, is an indulgence, descended ultimately from the eighteenthcentury fashion for the picturesque.

80

B. O’DONOGHUE

The poem also exemplifies a tendency to mix the learned with the everyday, from the Latin rule of the opening, to the borrowing of the end of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ (which of course makes the ‘New’ of ‘new men’ essential): And on the beach undid his corded bales.

The ‘nine rows / Of cannabis’ echo Yeats’s ‘nine bean-rows’ in ‘The Lake-Isle of Innisfree’. ‘The old woman’ at the end is one of those mythological characterizations of Ireland: the ‘sean-bhean bhocht’, the poor old woman. I think many of the poems of that time were trying to negotiate the very different worlds I occupied and was committed to. It might be interesting to compare that poem to a later poem, ‘Ter Conatus’ , first published in the Times Literary Supplement and first in book-form as the last poem in Here nor There in 1999.25 Sister and brother, nearly sixty years They’d farmed together, never touching once. Of late she had been coping with a pain In her back, realization dawning slowly That it grew differently from the warm ache That resulted periodically From heaving churns on to the milking-stand. She wondered about the doctor. When, Finally, she went, it was too late, Even for chemotherapy. And still She wouldn’t haven’t got round to telling him, Except that one night, watching television, It got so bad she gasped, and struggled up, Holding her waist. ‘D’you want a hand?’, he asked, Taking a step towards her. ‘I can manage’, She answered, feeling for the stairs. Three times, like that, he tried to reach her. But, being so little practised in such gestures, Three times the hand fell back, and took its place, Unmoving at his side. After the burial, He let things take their course. The neighbours watched In pity the rolled-up bales, standing Silent in the fields, with the aftergrass

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

81

Growing into them, and wondered what he could Be thinking of: which was that evening when, Almost breaking with a lifetime of Taking real things for shadows, He might have embraced her with a brother’s arms.

The connecting of the learned with the local narrative is similarly evident here. The phrase ‘Ter conatus ’ comes from Virgil’s Aeneid where it is used twice, though the phenomenon it names—the attempt of a living bodily person like Aeneas to make physical contact with someone who is a shade or spirit, being already dead—occurs several times in the Aeneid and in both Homeric epics. The two occasions in the Aeneid when it is expressly used are at the end of Book 2 where Aeneas describes to Dido the loss of his wife Creusa as he and his family are escaping from Troy after the siege, and in Book 6 when Aeneas having found his father Anchises in the Elysian Fields attempted three times to embrace him but in vain; his arms pass through him because he is ‘taking shadows for real things’, to borrow the phrase Dante uses to describe the encounter between Dante and Casella in Purgatorio 2. Here I am applying the literary motif in a literal context to the physical reserve of Irish country people of a generation before mine. The sociological situation described was a common one, where a pair of unmarried siblings lived together on farms all their married lives until one died, leaving the other alone until in due course he or she died too. I suppose it is saying that taking real things for shadows is worse than taking shadows for real things. Curiously, the first prompt for this poem was driving from Oxford to Swindon in late September and seeing the bales of hay which had been left in the fields so the grass grew into them, damaging them: bad husbandry. The story of how that might have happened then grew around it, and the last element was the Virgilian connexion: Aeneas’s poignant attempts to embrace his father’s ghost and to grasp the hand of his wife as she slipped out of reach. So this poem grew in a kind of organic way too: the idea of bad husbandry which was the germ of the poem (something too slight to warrant the larger term ‘inspiration’) in the end has a small part in the poem’s meaning within the story. Perhaps the fact that this poem is slightly longer gives the development of ideas more space to breathe. It is more like a traditional narrative in its scope. I remember in my early writing days being worried that my poems were unduly preachy and didactic: perhaps a product of work on medieval

82

B. O’DONOGHUE

literature. I think in this poem the story setting is dominant enough to resist that charge. The poem also deliberately mixes the learned diction of the title with local language: ‘churns’ is a local term for milk containers; ‘aftergrass’ is commonly used in local farming vocabulary. When the poem was published in the TLS, I received a very gratifying, kind note from John Bayley, admiring the novel term ‘aftergrass’. But, whatever the initial inspiration or conscious motivation was, by the end it is an amalgam of many features of my life and writing: Irish country setting and language; classical parallels; the morality of medieval writing (Chaucer’s ‘take the moralitee, good men’ at the end of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale); family attachment. The stringing of those features together, and their order, is the same kind of narrative construction as we see in longer forms. And I suppose they might be called a kind of collective inspiration.

Notes 1. Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber and Faber 1991), 62. 2. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B.Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1940 &c), 523. Hereafter YVP. 3. YVP, 152. 4. YVP, 523. For an admirable reading of this poem, see Helen Vendler Our Secret Discipline (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 10ff. 5. See Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines. Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford University Press 1963), 209–210. 6. YVP, 355. 7. YVP, 123. 8. Ibid. 9. YVP, 125. 10. W.B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent 1990), 442. 11. Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber and Faber 1991), 62. 12. Paul Muldoon, Meeting the British (London: Faber and Faber 1987), 33. 13. Seamus Heaney, Electric Light (London: Faber and Faber 2001), 57. 14. Bernard O’Donoghue, Here Nor There (London: Chatto & Windus 1999), 1. 15. For this context, see Clair Wills, The Best Are Leaving. Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). This issue is the occasion of several of my poems based on stories about Irish immigrants in England, told to me by Mick Henry, especially ‘The Mule Duignan’ in Outliving (Chatto Poetry, 2003), 56. 16. Though the poem might be interpreted as a text for the times after the destabilising effect of the Brexit vote in 2016.

4

INSPIRATION AND NARRATIVE IN THE SHORT POEM

83

17. Bernard O’Donoghue, Here Nor There (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), 9. 18. Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem (London: Faber and Faber, 2006). 19. The start of the poem is at least as significant of course in the context of inspiration. John Holloway links this to the beginning of St John’s Gospel, ‘In the beginning was the word’. See Chapter 2, ‘Originality’ in The Work of Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 13ff. 20. Only published in pamphlet Razorblades and Pencils (Oxford: Sycamore Press, 1984), n.p. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Bernard O’Donoghue, Razorblades and Pencils (Oxford: Sycamore Press, 1984), n.p. 24. Poaching Rights (Dublin: Gallery Books, 1987), 9. The Weakness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991), 45. Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 19. 25. Here Nor There (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), 52. Selected Poems, 89.

Works Cited Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson. ‘Flannan Isle.’ In Collected Poems 1905–1925. London: Scholarly Press, 1971. Heaney, Seamus. Seeing Things. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. ———. Electric Light. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Holloway, John. The Work of Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Muldoon, Paul. Meeting the British. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. ———. The End of the Poem. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. O’Donoghue, Bernard. Razorblades and Pencils. Oxford: Sycamore Press, 1984. ———. Poaching Rights. Dublin: Gallery Books, 1987. ———. Here Nor There. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. ———. Outliving. London: Chatto & Windus, 2003. ———. Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. Stallworthy, Jon. Between the Lines. Yeats’s Poetry in the Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Wills, Clair. The Best Are Leaving. Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Yeats, W.B. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B.Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1940. ———. The Poems. Ed. Daniel Albright. London: Dent 1990.

CHAPTER 5

The ‘Newness’ of Manuscripts Daniel Ferrer

It is one of the joys—and one of the dangers—of our trade: as opposed to other critics who work with a finite text, the genetic critic has to live with the fact that no archive is definitely circumscribed. We live in the hope that new material will be discovered, but also under the constant threat that this new material will destroy the hypotheses that we have made on the basis of the existing material. —Daniel Ferrer

In 1919, after reading just a few pages of Joyce’s Ulysses (which was being serialized in the Little Review), Virginia Woolf made this note: ‘Possibly one might write about the effect of reading something new, its queerness’.1 It is difficult for us to realize how strange, how queer, how shocking the first chapters of Ulysses were for the reader of 1919. It is difficult for scholars of modern literature, who have read them so often and who have benefitted from so many works of exegesis, but it is difficult even for the first-time readers of today. The innovations of Joyce (at least those displayed in the early part of Ulysses ) have percolated through our culture and even undergraduates have been impregnated with them:

D. Ferrer (B) Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, Paris, France © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_5

85

86

D. FERRER

the queerness has worn out; there is no longer any real shock. On the other hand, the more familiar we are with the text of Joyce, the more we are liable to be shocked by a different kind of novelty, when we discover the work we know so well in a ‘new’ form. The open attitude of Woolf towards what she calls the queerness of the new extends to the unfamiliar aspect of the early versions of the final text, versions that are older than the published text but new to us: the versions that we discover in manuscripts. In A Room of One’s Own Woolf expresses the wish to look at the revisions in the manuscripts of Milton and Thackeray in direct opposition to a footnote of Charles Lamb in which he expresses a violent rejection of such a curiosity: Those variae lectiones, so tempting to the more erudite palates, do but disturb and unsettle my faith. [Note: There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written hand. I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full grown beauty—as springing up with all its parts absolute—till, in an evil hour, I was shown the original written copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the Library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them, after the latter canto of Spencer, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspirations were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again, nor desire the sight of his picture, till it is fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea.]2

The significance of the contrasting attitudes of Lamb and Woolf has been analysed by Christine Froula.3 For Lamb, textual authority ‘is—or rather must seem—timeless, inalterable, “absolute.” A poem transcends its historical beginnings’. In its final form, it ‘is a prelapsarian Eden wherein critique génétique is as unthinkable as the mortal violation of poetry’s sacred borders by the snaky, erring traces of fallible intention preserved in the abhorrent holograph’. On the other hand, ‘Woolf’s desire to see the manuscript—her desire to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil Texts […] implicitly conceives poetic authority antithetically[: ] human, historical, contingent, social’. One might simply add that the final reference, by the prudish Charles Lamb, to Raphael’s nude

5

THE ‘NEWNESS’ OF MANUSCRIPTS

87

Galatea supposed to have been painted on the model of a famous courtesan, accompanied by a bevy of naked nymphs, romping Tritons and cheeky cherubim, points to the transgressive, voyeuristic aspect of such a revelation. It is simultaneously desirable and frightening. There is something of a Charles Lamb in all of us. We have a natural tendency to resist this temptation because we are afraid of the unheimlich feeling of being confronted with different versions of the text we are so familiar with and that suddenly appears under an unfamiliar appearance (Fig. 5.1). The more familiar we are with a literary text, the stranger it is, then, to discover it in a different form in its archive, but the more we have acquainted ourselves with the archive, the more we have studied the manuscripts of an author, the more we are going to be surprized, thrilled, shocked, when we encounter unexpected manuscripts. It is one of the joys—and one of the dangers—of our trade: as opposed to other critics who work with a finite text, the genetic critic has to live with the fact that no archive is definitely circumscribed. We live in the hope that new material will be discovered, but also under the constant threat that this new material will destroy the hypotheses that we have made on the basis of the existing material. The discovery can be very small: just one word that could not be deciphered before suddenly becomes readable because someone has made a suggestion and suddenly it becomes clear to everyone. Or an accepted reading is contradicted by the discovery of a source or a previous draft. We all know that a single word, or even a punctuation mark can make a significant difference. For instance, what had been read as an exclamation mark after the words plunge in in Woolf’s notes on Joyce turns out to be a closing quotation mark.4 ‘Plunge in’ is between inverted commas because it was already surrounded by quotes in Woolf’s source: so the words turn out to be not an exclamation by Woolf (perhaps an anticipation of the famous ‘What a plunge!’ on the first page of Mrs Dalloway) but a second-degree quotation (May Sinclair quoting J. D. Beresford about Dorothy Richardson), which changes their status considerably. On the other hand, we are sometimes confronted with a massive transformation of the archival situation. A quarter of a century ago, in 1989, the Bibliothèque nationale de France received a call from one of the Paris storage houses, about a trunk that had been opened because it was unreclaimed. Inside the trunk, the almost complete drafts of Raymond Roussel’s works were found. Before this stupendous discovery, critics had to rely entirely on Roussel’s own statements in his famous Comment j’ai écrit certains de

88

D. FERRER

Fig. 5.1 Raphael, The Triumph of Galatea, Villa Farnesina, Rome

5

THE ‘NEWNESS’ OF MANUSCRIPTS

89

mes livres and no real genetic study of his work was possible. Suddenly, a whole new world became available.5 In between these two extreme cases, we can think of the holograph draft of A Room of One’s Own, mentioned in Woolf’s correspondence but unknown to the scholarly community, until someone realized that it was quietly sitting in the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.6 Or the ‘John Quinn draft’ of the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses . Joyce had claimed that he had written eight versions of the episode, but only one draft was extant (Buffalo V.B.19). In a letter accompanying the fair copy that he had sold to John Quinn, he mentions that he is ‘throwing in’ a rough draft. But it was only 79 years later that the heirs of Quinn discovered the manuscript and sold it to the National Library of Ireland.7 The change brought in by these two discoveries was not as radical as in the case of Roussel, in which a mass of documents became extant where there was nothing before. Joycean and Woolfian scholars were already blessed (or cursed) with a huge, accessible, archive. In the case of Joyce, most of it was reproduced in the Garland edition of the James Joyce Archive: 64 large volumes of facsimiles, many thousands of manuscript pages.8 It was not expected that anything substantial was still liable to be discovered: a few letters and a few sheets of proofs might resurface from time to time, but not much more. The sale of the Quinn manuscript, however, was the first tremor that triggered a series of earthquakes.9 In the next few years, the landscape of Joyce studies was distinctly modified by the arrival of successive waves of unknown manuscripts: manuscripts that were known to have existed, even if they were lost (for instance missing parts of extant drafts) but also manuscripts that were completely surprizing to us. One can imagine the excitement (we really did feel like a watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken) but also the traumatic effect caused by each of these revelations. In order to show how complex the assessment of such massive new evidence can be, I will give a few examples and, so as not to assume an artificial position of superiority, I will first describe some of the consequences for my own research. Among the considerable material that emerged in 2002 (the so-called Leon papers), there was some fascinating new material for the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses . This was particularly interesting for me from a specific point of view: Joyce had claimed that the chapter had the structure of a fugue and that it contained ‘all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem’.10 Considering this claim, I had written that, according to all

90

D. FERRER

available evidence, this was a hoax. I considered that polyphony was a fundamental element of the chapter, but that, contrary to what Stuart Gilbert and many others had tried to demonstrate, there was no close formal correspondence with anything that could be called a Fuga per canonem.11 At first, this seemed to be confirmed by the newly discovered first draft of the episode because what most interpreters had understood as the basic ‘voice’, or sometimes as the main ‘subject’ of the fugue (Bloom)

FUGA PER CANONEM 1)soggetto 2) contrasoggetto (reale in altro tono : in raccorciamento) 3) sogetto + contrasoggetto in contrapunto 4) esposizione (propost[a] - codetta) 5) contra esposizione (nuovi rapporti fra i detti : parecchi)

(divertimenti)

6) Tela contrappuntistica (episodi) 7) Stretto maestrale (blocchi ravvicinantesi) 8) Pedale

Fig. 5.2 Transcription of the list on the inner front cover of the first part of the second draft of the ‘Sirens’ episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses (National Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/9)

5

THE ‘NEWNESS’ OF MANUSCRIPTS

91

was entirely absent from that first version of the episode.12 But this new archive also revealed the beginning of a second draft of the episode and this seemed to contradict my theory, because it was written in a notebook and on the inside of the cover of this notebook, there was a list in eight parts entitled Fuga per canonem (Fig. 5.2). The items of this list seemed to be related to the structure of a fugue, as if Joyce had reminded himself of these elements before beginning to redraft the episode (although nobody could quite understand the logic of the arrangement of these items). After much searching, the source for this list was discovered.13 Joyce had taken notes in a dictionary of music but the nature of those notes revealed that his reading had been very superficial and it was clear that Joyce had made no effort to really understand the structure of a fugue and that he had been content to note a few terms as they came in the dictionary entry, selecting the most conspicuous ones from a typographical point of view. This is not untypical of Joyce’s attitude towards some of his sources: he was often more interested in a kind of token reference to the text (even if the allusion is imperceptible)14 than in a deep understanding of the contents. In the case of ‘Sirens’, Joyce intended to refer, in a kind of magical way, to the intricate structure of the most demanding form of polyphony, but the claim that his episode had the structure of a fugue and that it contained ‘all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem’ is preposterous and can indeed be considered as a kind of hoax. If I felt more or less vindicated in this case, it was very different for another statement that I had made. I had attempted to prove that the importance of Homer in Ulysses was to a large extent retrospective. Of course, given Joyce’s youthful interest in the character of Odysseus and his stated intention to write a story called ‘Ulysses’ as early as 1914, it would have been ridiculous to say that the reference to the Odyssey was an afterthought, but I had suggested that what started as a vague allusion, a kind of cultural alibi, progressively acquired more and more importance. As the basic aesthetic project of the book was altered, intertextuality became essential and Homer became the principal intertext. Moreover, I had argued that the most important aspect of the Homeric intertext was not, as T. S. Eliot had famously argued,15 the structural, systematic parallel, but the way the Homeric gravitation field progressively warped the textual continuum.16 At first, my hypothesis seemed to be confirmed by the discovery of a notebook, probably the earliest of the extant Ulysses

92

D. FERRER

notebooks, in which the notes are organized by subjects and not organized according to Homeric Episode, as is the case of the later notebooks. This clearly suggested a change of method and of purpose, in the direction that I had indicated. But I had not paid sufficient attention to the crucial importance of one of the ‘new documents’.17 It is a page of notes, entitled ‘Lacedemon’, on the last page of the notebook that contains the first drafts of the ‘Proteus’ and ‘Sirens’ episodes (Fig. 5.3). Re-examining these notes leads to new conclusions. I have been able to demonstrate that the notes are quite early (earlier than the earliest extant draft for Ulysses ) and that they consist in a series of detailed notes on the Butcher and Lang translation of the Odyssey, with a number of suggested parallels between the Homeric incidents on the one hand and Irish history, Joyce’s personal and family history, and the novel that he was planning on the other hand.18 Given this new data, it is no longer possible to maintain that the notion of a close and detailed correspondence with the Homeric text is a relatively late idea. It was on the contrary present at a very early stage. But the kind of correspondences that are tentatively sketched in this document do not indicate the elaboration of what Eliot calls ‘a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ that can be conceived as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering’. Even at this very primitive stage, they already go in so many different directions and they open such various fields of associations that they tend to produce a dispersion rather than a control of meaning. The next example is related to the beginnings of Finnegans Wake. Among the Finnegans Wake drafts that had been deposited by Harriet Shaw Weaver in the British Library, there was one enigmatic page (BL 47480-267v), dating from the Spring of 1923.19 It was clear that it was somehow connected with the almost contemporaneous ‘Tristan and Isolde’ sketch (BL 47481-94), but it was impossible to define precisely the logical and chronological relationship. In this passage as well as in the related sketch, a clownish Tristan is trying to seduce a vulgar Isolde. The surprizing thing is that this ridiculous Tristan recites a poem, of a kind that we would not have expected in his mouth: in his girleen’s ear that loveless lover sinless sinner, breathed: Gaunt in gloom The pale stars their torches Enshrouded wave Ghostfires from heaven’s far verges faint illume Arches on soaring arches, Nights’ sindark nave

5

THE ‘NEWNESS’ OF MANUSCRIPTS

93

Lacedemon

Menelaus

d. Alector= Megapenthes

S.

J.H. Parnell SD’s brother Ulysses Uncle Hubert Sheperd of people = O’Rourke Captain O’Shea Joe Casey

Bastard Child of Sorrow Tristan Man of Sorrows

1. 1. Wedding song : clowns 2. Eteoneus: boorish valet 3. Horses fed (Man & Beast) 4. Bathed by maidens (Casey) 5. Menelaus does not ask names 6. Menelaus eats his bit? tanist. 7. Telemachus admires 8. Menelaus complacent 9. Menelaus wandering Cyprus, Phenicia, Egypt, Libya, Ethiop, Sidonia 10. Menelaus tells of brother (J. Stephens ?) 11. Menelaus – Memory of the Dead 12. Menelaus – “poor dear Ulysses” 13. Menelaus has recognized Telemachus 14. Telemachus covers face & weeps 2. 15. Helen distaff, wooling, silver basket 16. Helen recognizes Telemachus (?) likens to Ulysses (voice of SD) 3. 17. Pisistratus introduces Telemachus 4. 18. Menelaus was going to do a lot for Ulysses 5. 19. Pisistratus weep broth – Antilochus whom he never saw (harpist*) all weep 6. 20. Helen pours Nepenthe (Lotus?) 21. Helen tells of Ulysses (beggar)

Slave : Menelaus = Helen

=

Kitty O’Shea Aunt Josephine Mollie Bloom Madame Casey

(Achilles’s son)

d. 22. Menelaus tells of wooden horse (uncle Hubert & bailiff) Ulysses resists Helen’s voice Protean voice of others all sleep 23. Telemachus tells tale of woe on Ulysses Menelaus is indignant about suitors 24 Prophesies U’s return, tells of how U threw Philomeides 1. Eidothea & Menelaus 2 . School of seals 3. Ambrosia 4. Menelaus outwits Proteus 5. Questions him 6. Drowned Aias 7. Agamemnon’s death Mur[der] 8. Shepherd of the People 9. P tells of U’s | to Agam[emnon] 10. M in Egypt piles a barrow 11. T speaks of poor I. 12. sleepless T. dreams Ath 13. Go to swineherd 14. M proposes tour 15. Lunch 16. Gifts Helen M 17. M sends greetings

Fig. 5.3 Transcription of Joyce’s notes for a ‘Lacedemon’ episode (National Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/7/A-B, p. 28)

94

D. FERRER

Seraphim The pale stars awaken To service till In moonless gloom each lapses, muted, dim Raised when she has & shaken Her thurible And long and loud To night’s nave upsoaring A starknell tolls As the bleak incense surges cloud on cloud Voidward from the adoring Waste of souls’

The poem sounds familiar to readers of Joyce, and for a very good reason: it is one of Joyce’s own poems, a poem that he had partially published five years earlier in the journal Poetry, under the title of ‘Nightpiece’ and that would be gathered four years later in Pomes Penyeach. The status of this surprizing piece was the subject of a controversy between the two scholars that probably knew the extant Joyce archive better than anyone else, David Hayman and Danis Rose.20 Hayman noted the thematic relevance of the poem to Tristan and Isolde and believed that it played an important part in the early development of Finnegans Wake, while Rose argued that there was no relation between the poem and the surrounding text, that Joyce just happened to use a piece of paper on which the poem was previously written and wrote the ‘Tristan and Isolde’ sketch around it. In 2006, a batch of recently discovered manuscripts (6 large manuscript sheets, related to the transition period between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) shed new light on the subject. On first analysis, they might seem to support Rose’s position. They include a fair copy of the page in question, in which the poem is absent: it seems to be replaced by a short banal dialogue. There is, however, a blank line and this must be taken as an indication that something is missing. And in the ‘Tristan and Isolde’ manuscript in the British Library (BL 47481-94), which now appears as a rewriting of this fair copy, Joyce’s poem is indeed replaced by poetry of another kind: The handsome six foot two rugger and soccer champion and the belle of Chapelizod in her quite charming ocean blue brocade with iris petal

5

THE ‘NEWNESS’ OF MANUSCRIPTS

95

sleeves & an overdress of net darned with gold well in advance of the fashion, bunnyhugged scrumptiously in the dark where they dissimulated themself behind the chief stewardess’s cabin while with sinister dexterity he alternately rightandlefthandled on & offside fore and aft her palpable rugby and association bulbs. She murmurously asked for some but not too much of the best poetry quotations reflecting on the situation something a stroke above its a fine night and the moon shines bright and all to that for the plain fact of the matter was that by the light of the moon of the silvery moon she loved to spoon before her honeyoldmoon at the same time drinking deep draughts of purest air serene. He promptly then elocutioned to her a favourite lyrical bloom in decasyllabic iambic hexameter: —Roll on, thou deep and darkblue ocean, roll!

Joyce’s poem is replaced by ‘some but not too much of the best poetry’, ‘a favourite lyrical bloom’ ‘a stroke above its a fine night and the moon shines bright’: a famous line of Byron. Moreover, the enigmatic verso, which was unaccountable as long as it was isolated, now appears clearly as the last page of a complete early sketch, and in the full context of this sketch, the poem makes much better sense: it is only one example of the systematic discontinuities of tone that characterize the passage. And finally there is one decisive argument. In another one of the newly discovered pieces, Joyce includes another of his published poems (‘Tutto è sciolto’), putting it, this time, in the mouth of four grotesque senile lechers. This strange usage of his own poetic production is then part of deliberate strategy of self-distancing. David Hayman’s insight is thus confirmed, but we now have a much more complete understanding of the situation.21 The lesson to be drawn from these examples is not that newly discovered documents bring fresh data that help to solve old problems, which is self-evident, but that new documents provide evidence that is usually not decisive in itself. Each document only becomes meaningful in its relation to other documents; its significance is usually not manifest but a matter of construction. But we can go further than that: I would like to suggest that every working manuscript, because it represents a field of virtualities preceding the closure of the final text, has the same potential for subverting our understanding of the work as a ‘new’ manuscript. The essence of genetic criticism is precisely to study manuscripts in this light: it is concerned with invention (or innovation), as opposed to textual criticism, which is concerned with textual repetition (and its failures) and uses

96

D. FERRER

manuscripts to eliminate textual deviations.22 But invention is only a transition between phases of repetition and it is only possible to apprehend it when it is stabilized through repetition, so that we have to make a deliberate effort to reanimate, to reenergize it. In this respect the unexpected emergence of new manuscripts is a useful reminder of this disruptive potential.

Notes 1. Virginia Woolf’s reading notebook entitled ‘Modern Novels (Joyce)’. A transcription has been published by Suzette Henke as in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 642–645. In the manuscript of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf insists on the harsher side of this ‘newness’: ‘because of the difficulty[,] this newness[,] one cannot remember more than two lines of any good living poet’, Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of a Room of One’s Own, ed. S.P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 19. 2. ‘Oxford in the Vacation,’ The London Magazine, Volume 2 (X) (October 1820): 367. 3. Christine Froula, ‘Modernism, Genetic Texts and Literary Authority in Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of the Artist as the Audience,’ Romanic Review 86, no. 3 (1995): 514–515. 4. See Suzette Henke, loc. cit. and Daniel Ferrer ‘“The Conversation Began Some Minutes Before Anything Was Said…”: Textual Genesis as Dialogue and Confrontation (Woolf vs Joyce and Co),’ Études britanniques contemporaines, Automne 2004. 5. Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale 43, 1992, passim. 6. See S.P. Rosenbaum’s introduction Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own, op. cit. 7. See the catalogue of the auction: James Joyce’s Ulysses: The John Quinn Draft Manuscript of the ‘Circe’ Episode, Thursday, 14 December 2000 (New York: Christie’s, 2000). 8. The James Joyce Archive. General Editor Michael Groden. 63 folio vols. Garland, 1977–1978. 9. The large sum that was paid for it may have acted as a powerful incentive for new discoveries. 10. Letters I , ed. Stuart Gilbert (Viking Press, 1957), 129. 11. Daniel Ferrer, ‘Miroirs aux sirènes,’ Europe, numéro spécial James Joyce, January 1984 and ‘Echo or Narcissus,’ in James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, ed. M. Beja, Ph. Herring, M. Harmon and D. Norris (Illinois University Press, 1986).

5

THE ‘NEWNESS’ OF MANUSCRIPTS

97

12. See Daniel Ferrer, ‘What Song the Sirens Sang… Is No Longer Beyond All Conjecture. A Preliminary Description of the New “Proteus” and “Sirens” Manuscripts,’ James Joyce Quarterly 39, no. 1 (Fall 2001): 53–68. 13. See Susan Brown, ‘The Mystery of the Fuga Per Canonem Solved,’ Genetic Joyce Studies, no. 7 (Spring 2007). The search was particularly difficult and Susan Brown’s discovery was particularly ingenious, because the notes were taken in Italian from a text in English. 14. Daniel Ferrer, ‘Allusion et absence d’accès: du cas particulier de Finnegans Wake au cas général de l’avant-texte,’ in L’Allusion et l’Accès, ed. P. Vernon (Presses Universitaires François Rabelais, 2005). 15. In ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth,’ The Dial, November 1923. 16. Daniel Ferrer, ‘Ulysses de James Joyce: un homérisme secondaire,’ in Révolutions homériques, ed. G.W. Most, L.F. Norman, and S. Rabau. Seminari e convegni, 19, Pisa, Edizioni della Normale, 2009, 137–147 and ‘Retrospective Homer,’ in A Joyceful of Talkatalka from Friendshapes for Rosa Maria Bosinelli, ed. R. Baccolini, D. Chiaro, C. Rundle, S. Whitsitt (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2011), 53–68. 17. Although I had given a first description of it in ‘What song the sirens sang… is no longer beyond all conjecture,’ loc. cit. 18. ‘An Unwritten Chapter of Ulysses? Joyce’s Notes for a “Lacedemon” Episode,’ in James Joyce: Whence, Whither and How. Studies in Honour of Carla Vaglio, ed. Giuseppina Cortese, Giuliana Ferreccio, M. Teresa Giaveri, and Teresa Prudente (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2015). On line at www.item.ens.fr/index.php?id=579477. 19. It appears on the verso of another important early manuscript (‘Roderick O’Connor’). 20. See David Hayman, The ‘Wake’ in Transit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) and Danis Rose, ‘The Beginning of All Thisorder of Work in Progress,’ James Joyce Quarterly 28, no. 4 (summer 1990). 21. See James Joyce, Brouillons d’un baiser. Premiers pas vers Finnegans Wake, bilingual edition, Daniel Ferrer ed., French transl. Marie Darrieussecq, Gallimard, Coll. Du Monde entier, 2014. 22. Daniel Ferrer, ‘Production, Invention and Reproduction: Genetic Criticism vs. Textual Criticism,’ in Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, ed. N. Fraistat and E. Bergmann Loizeaux (Wisconsin University Press, 2002) and Logiques du brouillon: modèles pour une critique génétique (Paris: Seuil [collection ‘Poétique’], 2011).

98

D. FERRER

Works Cited Brown, Susan. ‘The Mystery of the Fuga Per Canonem Solved.’ Genetic Joyce Studies 7 (2007). On line at https://gjs.flw.uantwerpen.be/articles/GJS7/ GJS7brown. Eliot, T.S. ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth.’ The Dial (1923). Ferrer, Daniel. ‘Miroirs aux sirènes.’ Europe 657, no. 58 (1984): 99–106. ———. ‘Echo or Narcissus.’ In James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium. Ed. Morris Beja, Philip Herring, Maurice Harmon, and David Norris. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1986: 70–75. ———. ‘What Song the Sirens Sang… Is No Longer Beyond All Conjecture. A Preliminary Description of the New “Proteus” and “Sirens” Manuscripts.’ James Joyce Quarterly 39, no. 1 (2001): 53–68. ———. ‘Production, Invention and Reproduction: Genetic Criticism vs. Textual Criticism.’ In Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Ed. Neil Fraistat and Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002: 48–59. ———. ‘“The Conversation Began Some Minutes Before Anything Was Said…”: Textual Genesis as Dialogue and Confrontation (Woolf vs Joyce and Co).’ Études britanniques contemporaines 23 (2004): 47–67. ———. ‘Allusion et absence d’accès: du cas particulier de Finnegans Wake au cas général de l’avant-texte.’ In L’Allusion et l’Accès. Ed. Peter Vernon. Tours: Presses Universitaires François Rabelais, 2005: 15–25. ———. ‘Ulysses de James Joyce: un homérisme secondaire.’ In Révolutions homériques. Ed. Glenn W. Most, Larry F. Norman, and Sophie Rabau. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2009: 137–147. ———. Logiques du brouillon: modèles pour une critique génétique, Paris: Seuil, 2011. ———. ‘Retrospective Homer.’ In A Joyceful of Talkatalka from Friendshapes for Rosa Maria Bosinelli. Ed. Raffalea Baccolini, Delia Chiaro, Chris Rundle, and Sam Whitsitt. Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2011: 53–68. ———. (ed.). Brouillons d’un baiser. Premiers pas vers Finnegans Wake. Transl. Marie Darrieussecq. Paris: Gallimard, 2014. ———. ‘An Unwritten Chapter of Ulysses? Joyce’s Notes for a “Lacedemon” Episode.’ In James Joyce: Whence, Whither and How. Studies in Honour of Carla Vaglio. Ed. Giuseppina Cortese, Giuliana Ferreccio, M. Teresa Giaveri, and Teresa Prudente. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2015. On line at www. item.ens.fr/index.php?id=579477. Froula, Christine. ‘Modernism, Genetic Texts and Literary Authority in Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of the Artist as the Audience.’ Romanic Review 86, no. 3 (1995): 513–526. Hayman, David. The ‘Wake’ in Transit. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. The James Joyce Archive. Ed. Michael Groden. 63 folio vols. Garland, 1977–1978.

5

THE ‘NEWNESS’ OF MANUSCRIPTS

99

James Joyce’s Ulysses: The John Quinn Draft Manuscript of the ‘Circe’ Episode. Thursday, 14 December 2000 (auction catalogue). New York: Christie’s, 2000. Joyce, James. Letters Vol. 1. Ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press, 1957. Lamb, Charles. ‘Oxford in the Vacation.’ The London Magazine 2, no. 10 (1820). Rose, Danis. ‘The Beginning of All Thisorder of Work in Progress.’ James Joyce Quarterly 28, no. 4 (1990): 957–65. Rosenbaum, S.P. (ed.). Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of a Room of One’s Own. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Woolf, Virginia. ‘Modern Novels (Joyce).’ In The Gender of Modernism. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990: 642–645.

CHAPTER 6

Unwriting The Waves Christine Froula

I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. […] I think there is something lacking. I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. I press to my centre. I dont care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there. I incline now to try violent shots— at London—at talk—shouldering my way ruthlessly—& then, if nothing comes of it—anyhow I have examined the possibilities. —Virginia Woolf, Diary

The author would be glad if the following pages were read not as a novel. —Virginia Woolf, The Waves: draft

In a 1927 essay, ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future,’ Virginia Woolf considers the conventions of fiction and in effect prophesies The Waves. ‘There will be among the so-called novels one which we shall scarcely know how to christen,’ she writes, with ‘something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose.’ This new form will ‘stand

C. Froula (B) Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_6

101

102

CHRISTINE FROULA

further back from life’ and give ‘the outline rather than the detail’; little concerned with ‘houses, incomes, occupations,’ it will express characters’ feelings and ideas ‘closely and vividly, but from a different angle’ and ‘give the relation of the mind to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude.’1 The essay’s unmentioned touchstone is a strange vision that came to her after she finished To the Lighthouse: ‘I wished to add some remarks […] on the mystical side of this solitude: how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with. It is this that is frightening & exciting […]: One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none I think’ (Diary 3:113, 30 September 1926). This enigmatic fin evoked ‘some semi mystic very profound life of a woman,’ an intimation of an abstract, Post-Impressionist self-portrait (Diary 3:118, 23 November 1926). She thought it might take form as ‘a new kind of play […] I cant now see what. Away from facts: free; yet concentrated; prose yet poetry; a novel & a play’ (Diary 3:128, 21 February 1927). Five years after this first sighting, the fin appeared in aesthetic form as The Waves (1931). The Waves is the most ‘so-called’ of Woolf’s own so-called novels. Nearly six hundred draft pages into it, she turned over a leaf and scribbled: ‘The author would be glad if the following pages were read not as a novel.’2 Right: The Waves is not—not—not—a novel, unless for the instant between the second crossed-out ‘not’ and the third it is. The wavering syntax of negation so late in the game signals Woolf’s arduous struggle to wrest into being a sustained work of fiction that is ‘not’ a ‘novel’; a work of art which she imagines in various diary entries as a play, a poem, a play poem, a prose play poem, and ‘a series of dramatic soliloquies’ (Diary 3:312, 20 August 1930). After long labor, she can see what it is ‘not’ if not quite what it is and, very delicately, indirectly, and conditionally, evokes a reader in the same boat. She is not writing a novel and hopes it won’t be read as one. The Waves bodies forth Woolf’s prophecy of a fusion of fiction, drama, and poetry with such striking originality and formal beauty that it gives no inkling of how extremely laborious was its making. The word ‘novel’ was not the problem. Rather, the genre’s bulky baggage—narrator, story, plot, character, dialogue—occluded the ‘fin’ and exerted strong drag on her effort to imagine and compose an aesthetic form in response to it. Before she began, Woolf wrote her nephew Quentin Bell that she was meditating ‘an entirely new kind of book. But it will never be so good as it is now in my mind unwritten’ (Letters 4:35, 20 March 1929).3 J.

6

UNWRITING THE WAVES

103

W. Graham, editor of the two holograph drafts, Elizabeth Heine, Julia Briggs, Cambridge editors Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers, and other scholars have constructed narratives of The Waves ’s genetic history from some 800 extant manuscript pages, uncorrected proofs, diary entries, letters, essays, reading notes, sources, and related works. My version of this history springs from a recent experience of reading the early manuscripts in Graham’s edition from a perspective of close familiarity with The Waves. How, I wondered, did this stunning masterpiece emerge from all this bad writing? Why does this obtrusive third-person narrator keep interfering between me and the characters? What made this Bad Narrator, as I came to think of her, necessary in the first drafts? And how did Woolf manage to keep her eye on the ball—or fin—through these hundreds of pages, written and then discarded? Writing The Waves, I came to think, was inseparable from active, effortful, determined unwriting of the ‘masses of irrelevance’ Woolf produced under the influence of conventions she would eventually jettison as she pursued her quest to give aesthetic form to the enigmatic ‘fin’ (Diary 3:303, 1 May 1930). Thinking about the making of this fiction-that-resembles-no-other as a feat of unwriting leads us back to a moment earlier than any yet charted in accounts of The Waves ’s composition. The fin that appeared in 1926 signaled the world that The Waves bodies forth, but the desire, the technique, the doubt of fiction and the freedom from narrative convention that enabled Woolf to see in it poetry, fiction, and the future and that impelled her to chase the fin and net it in words: these we can trace to an epiphany of 26 January 1920. That day, the day after her 38th birthday, Woolf reflected, I’m a great deal happier than I was at 28; & happier today than I was yesterday having this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel. Suppose one thing should open out of another—as in An Unwritten Novel—only not for 10 pages but 200 or so—doesn’t that give the looseness & lightness I want: doesnt that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything? My doubt is how far it will {include} enclose the human heart—Am I sufficiently mistress of my dialogue to net it there? For I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist. […] conceive mark on the wall, K[ew]. G[ardens]. & unwritten novel taking hands & dancing in unity. What the unity shall be I have yet to discover: the theme is a blank to me; but I see immense possibilities in the

104

CHRISTINE FROULA

form I hit upon more or less by chance 2 weeks ago. I suppose the danger is the damned egotistical self; […] is one pliant & rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself without its becoming […] narrowing & restricting? […] Anyhow, there’s no doubt the way lies somewhere in that direction; I must still grope & experiment but this afternoon I had a gleam of light. Indeed, I think from the ease with which I’m developing the unwritten novel there must be a path for me there. (Diary 2:13–14, emphases added)

In this new ‘direction’ lie Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), A Room of One’s Own (1929)— and The Waves, for which the diary entry seems almost a blueprint awaiting a theme, the ‘fin passing far out’ which becomes ‘Fin in a waste of waters’ (Waves 189). In this breakthrough moment, ‘an unwritten novel’—the story composed two weeks earlier, already lapsing from singular work of art to lower-case category—joins other experimental stories in a ‘dance’ that gestures toward an open-ended project: ‘developing the unwritten novel.’4 ‘An Unwritten Novel’ inspires, well, an unwritten novel, and more unwritten novels premised on the unwriting of the novel, the dismantling of fiction’s conventions in order to bring the genre closer to contemporary life.5 By 1908, Virginia Stephen was already thinking about ‘how I shall re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes,’ and a fictional novelist in The Voyage Out wants ‘to write a novel about Silence. […] the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.’6 Twelve years later, ‘An Unwritten Novel’ opened a creative path that reaches its furthest verge, and most breathtaking vista, in The Waves.7 A couple of weeks before indicating that her work-in-progress The Waves is ‘not’ to be read as a novel, Woolf stars the eureka moment of 1920 in mapping her creative history for her new friend the composer Ethel Smyth: The Unwritten Novel was the great discovery […] That—again in one second—showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it—not that I have ever reached that end; but anyhow I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacobs Room, Mrs Dalloway etc.—How I trembled with excitement.8 (Letters 4:231, 16 October 1930)

6

UNWRITING THE WAVES

105

‘Not that I have ever reached that end’: When she writes this letter, Woolf is some 550 pages into The Waves, almost halfway through the second full draft.9 Although ten months of hard work remain, she has the book in view and is about to re-write the section in which the six voices respond to Percival’s death. What made the story ‘An Unwritten Novel’ so potent a form—and event? It exudes, of course, an Escher-like fascination as its first-person novelist-narrator, thrown together by chance with a stranger in that quintessential social condition of pre-aviation modernity a train compartment, makes up the stranger’s so-called life, partly in the third person, partly in the (rare) second person, in silent address to the protagonist herself: ‘you in the corner, what’s your name—woman—Minnie Marsh; some such name as that?’ (‘Unwritten Novel’ 117).10 From a few observed details, the narrator spins a fantasy of a lonely, threadbare spinster, haunted by an accidental ‘crime’ in her past, darning a glove while visiting her offensively patronizing sister-in-law, ‘Hilda’ (116).11 Still silently addressing ‘Minnie,’ she speeds the moment to its crisis: ‘what is happening? Unless I’m much mistaken, the pulse’s quickened, the moment’s coming, the threads are racing, Niagara’s ahead. Here’s the crisis! Heaven be with you! Down she goes. Courage, courage! Face it, be it! For God’s sake don’t wait on the mat now! There’s the door! I’m on your side. Speak! Confront her, confound her soul!’ (‘Unwritten Novel’ 120–121). Here ‘real’ life intervenes. The novelistnarrator is much mistaken. The ‘real’ woman on the train speaks; the narrator responds, ‘“Oh, I beg your pardon! Yes, this is Eastbourne,”’ and helps her with her luggage. The woman then says, ‘“I’ll wait by my bag, ma’am, that’s safest. He said he’d meet me…. Oh, there he is! That’s my son.”’ Watching them go, the narrator reels ‘confounded’: ‘A strange young man…. Stop! […] Minnie!—Miss Marsh!—I don’t know though. […] Off they go […] Well, my world’s done for! What do I stand on? What do I know? […] Who am I? Life’s bare as bone’ (‘Unwritten Novel’ 121, emphasis added). A moment later ‘life’ surges up, once more rousing the narrator’s desire to fathom the opaque lives around her. As mother and son recede, her unheard call metamorphoses into an impassioned apostrophe within her self-portrait as flummoxed but undaunted storyteller: Mysterious figures! Mother and son. Who are you? Why do you walk down the street? Where to-night will you sleep, and then, to-morrow? Oh, how

106

CHRISTINE FROULA

it whirls and surges—floats me afresh! I start after them. People drive this way and that. The white light splutters and pours. Plate-glass windows. Carnations; chrysanthemums. Ivy in dark gardens. Milk carts at the door. Wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you, turning the corner, mothers and sons; you, you, you. I hasten, I follow. This, I fancy, must be the sea. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves. If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me—adorable world!12 (‘Unwritten Novel’ 120, emphases added)

Out of the seeming ‘real life’ beneath which moves a more real life, the narrator spins a fiction, sees it punctured, and is off again in pursuit. The story’s potency as a gesture toward a path for future work is less its ‘crude demonstration of counterfictional evidence’13 than the voice of the virtuosic novelist-narrator who, leaping acrobatically among grammatical persons and pronouns (I, one, you, he, she, they), moods (imperative, indicative, optative, inquisitive), and rhetorical figures (address, apostrophe, metaphor, simile) while rafting down a turbulent present tense, makes the story out of its own unmaking.14 She is, we might say, the very persona of modern fiction, or at least of ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) with its famous crescendo ‘Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”’—far from being ‘like’ contemporary fiction, which is far from being like the experience of ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ (149). So ‘An Unwritten Novel’ foregrounds modern ‘life’ in the throwntogether strangers-on-a-train urbanity of a world in which technology accelerates time and collapses distance—and, for the novelist, perpetually kindles desire to capture something of the profound mystery of other lives and minds, jostling together in close anonymity. Depicting the novelist’s hunger for ‘life,’ the story stages epistemological and ethical questions attendant on representing modern lives, glimpsed yet hidden, and the paradoxical necessity of fiction therefore.15 The seemingly trivial story dramatizes the novelist’s chasing after ‘life’ with a net of words—and inevitably failing to catch it—as the essence of the fictive. Staging a narrative sensibility that, paradoxically, deploys fictional illusion to tear through fiction’s veil and commits itself not to ‘truth’ but to fiction’s inherently uncertain pursuit of ‘life,’ it highlights fiction’s unreality and, no less, its necessity. ‘An Unwritten Novel’ dramatizes the absolute opacity of other minds as no less fundamental to fiction than to ‘life,’ necessitating ever new fashionings of the fictive.

6

UNWRITING THE WAVES

107

The narrator’s exhilarated apostrophe to unknowable people in an adorable world recalls ‘Modern Fiction’ and foretells the diarist’s trembling excitement at her ‘great discovery’ of a path toward unwritten novels. But Woolf cannot simply venture down an existing path. The revelation that befalls her ‘in one second’ only beckons her in a ‘direction.’ To write her unwritten novels, she has to break a path, novel by novel—fell trees, uproot saplings, chop out underbrush, pull off strangling vines, and, as she writes of The Waves, ‘by violent measures— like breaking through gorse’ clear away even those new forms she has invented for her own earlier novels and the ‘masses of irrelevance’ they are causing her to produce (Diary 3:285, 303; 26 January, 1 May 1930).16 The problem posed in ‘An Unwritten Novel’—the radical hiddenness of other minds and lives—also impels The Waves, but Woolf is no longer after the life of ‘Minnie Marsh’ or any ‘real’ person. Now she is after ‘the life of anybody’—a tentative subtitle on the first draft’s title page: ‘The Moths? / or the life of anybody. / life in general. / or Moments of Being / or The Waves’ (1.1).17 Key to this problem as ‘An Unwritten Novel’ depicts it, and as all scholars of The Waves ’s genesis recognize, are the conception and construction of the narrator. But the self-conscious first-person novelistnarrator who writes and unwrites the fictive in ‘An Unwritten Novel’ becomes an invasive encumbrance in the drafts of The Waves. ‘An Unwritten Novel’ makes its entertaining narrator an ephemeral, local, existential ground of fiction’s power to place us in its created world: ‘What do I stand on? What do I know? […] Who am I?’ In The Waves ’s early drafts, Woolf experiments. There is, first, a thwarted declaration of intent, followed by an involuntary two-page sketch in a third-person omniscient voice briefly punctuated by the first-person plural: What I want to do is to write the first words of Moths. More it was a silent b No; I am superstitious & will not write another word. Then the day fell into the sea: the sun went down. & those who watched it saw no green light: […] the earth our heads are burning. All the world seemed like a pit of darkness into which their lives, which were as hot as coal, were dipping. […] (Appendix A, 63)18

108

CHRISTINE FROULA

The oscillating grammatical person (those…our …their) broaches the question that will require some three hundred pages to solve: ‘Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device which is not a trick’ (Diary 3:257, 25 September 1929). In the first draft, an omniscient narrator describes a moth on a wall and dawn sounds—birds, the sea—coming through an open window of a room where a table holds a book, a newspaper, a young plant. In a simile, this narrator posits a quasi-Proustian mind lost in recollection: ‘They interrupted each other, as if the mind of a very old person, man or woman, had gone back to the dawn of memory … without attempting to make a coherent story.… The folds of the table cloth were in fact those long tables at which children learn their lessons’ (1.2–3, emphasis added). Soon the narrator works this figure of an old person musing at the dawn of memory into a scenario: a solitary firstperson storyteller sees scenes of children’s lessons in the ‘folds of the table cloth,’ a ‘crease in the napkin,’ as Proust’s Marcel sees Combray rise from his cup of tea (1.3–4). ‘I am here trying to telling the story of the world from the beginning,’ thinks ‘the lonely person , man or woman, young or aged, for it does not matter—[…] the power that centralises, what must else be lost’ (1.6). In contrast to the embodied, exuberant narrator of ‘An Unwritten Novel,’ this first-person narrator, stripped of character and desire, figures abstract mind, a sheer impersonal power to gather and order traces of an impersonal time past. Some 760 draft pages and several lost typescripts later, the world of which these are the first sketchy brushstrokes blooms complete. Selfconscious storytelling and Proustian device have vanished; omniscient narrator and lonely mind are absorbed into the interludes’ remote, impersonal voice, whose continuing presence in the sole word ‘said’ sustains and authorizes (gathers, orders) the six voices’ otherwise ephemeral speech— ‘what is otherwise lost,’ what would be ‘lost’ without it. Writing and unwriting, Woolf carves out an austere new form that indeed fuses poetry, fiction, and drama in the sequenced arias of voices meditating in the solitude of that ‘fin,’ that stark apprehension of being from which even ‘oneself’ is absent. Now it is Bernard, the storyteller who isn’t one, who voices the skepticism toward plot, story, event, and character enacted in ‘An Unwritten Novel’ while ‘the story of the world from the beginning’ announced by the lonely mind unfurls beyond his reach, abstracted in the sun’s slow trajectory through the interludes—a backdrop for ‘people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky’ (Waves 107).

6

UNWRITING THE WAVES

109

These faceless people leaning like statues against the sky appear to belong to Woolf’s early idea of The Waves: ‘I think I have kept stoically to the original conception,’ she reflects on beginning to draft Bernard’s final soliloquy. ‘What I fear is that the re-writing will have to be so drastic that I may entirely muddle it somehow. It is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky’ (Diary 3:300, 9 April 1930; cf. 1.343f, dated 7 April).19 They return us, these faceless people leaning like statues against the sky, to the fundamental question of standing –the ground of narrative authority: ‘What do I stand on? What do I know? […] Who am I?’ (‘Unwritten Novel’ 121). If ‘An Unwritten Novel’ leaves the narrator with nothing to stand on but her own existential desire and voice, in unwriting The Waves Woolf wrests authority from her and gives it to strangers on a train—‘people without faces’ because (unlike ‘Minnie Marsh’) we know them from inside, by their inner voices; ‘like statues’ because being, even fictive being, is heavy and must be stood on something; ‘leaning against the sky’ because modern fiction stands on no firm ground—as if ground were somehow sublimed into sky. The vicissitudes of The Waves ’s composition make clear how much easier said than done it is to lean fictional people like statues against the sky. Late in 1929, after four months and about 125 draft pages, Woolf alights on this question of standing as she takes stock of her work-in-progress: There is something there […] but I can’t get at it, squarely; […] Is there some falsity, of method, somewhere? Something tricky?—so that the interesting things aren’t firmly based? I am in an odd state; feel a cleavage; here’s my interesting thing; & there’s no quite solid table on which to put it. It might come in a flash, on re-reading—some solvent. I am convinced that I am right to seek for a station whence I can set my people against time & the sea—but Lord, the difficulty of digging oneself in there, with conviction. Yesterday I had conviction; it has gone today. Yet I have written 66 pages in the past month. (Diary 3:264, 5 November 1929, emphasis added; cf. 1:126)

‘Something there’ but no way to get at it; an ‘interesting thing’ but no ‘solid table’ to put it on; a search, requiring conviction, for a station whence. This curious phrase hints at a solution that thus far eludes her. A station from which, not on which, to set her ‘people’: a metaphysical ground or platform not for them but for a narrator, or at least for narrative authority, from which she can launch and propel them. ‘A station

110

CHRISTINE FROULA

whence I can’ suggests at once groundedness and movement: a place for the writing voice to ‘stand’ whence, that is, from which she can set her people against time and the sea: a station or place from which she can push them off, move them forward with ‘conviction’—authority strong and steady enough to support them. Under the aegis of ‘An Unwritten Novel,’ ‘a station whence’ also evokes that signal trope of modernity the railway system: Stationary platforms whence people board trains to station themselves in compartments that move through the world; stations whence they depart, whither they travel, wherein they arrive and change. If this seems a stretch, it brings into sudden relief not only the myriad trains and stations that thread The Waves ’s abstract landscape but, here as in the story, the figural power they exert to ‘ground’ the voices in the world, modern life, and indeed ‘life.’ Bernard, fearful of going to school for the first time, sees ‘the awful portals of the station gape; “the moon-faced clock regards me”’ (Waves 30). Susan narrates her railway journey home for summer holidays in the continuous present of train travel: ‘Here in this vast station everything echoes and booms hollowly. The light is like the yellow light under an awning. Jinny lives here. Jinny takes her dog for walks on these pavements. People here shoot through the streets silently. They look at nothing but shop-windows. Their heads bob up and down all at about the same height. The streets are laced together with telegraph wires. The houses are all glass, all festoons and glitter; now all front doors and lace curtains, all pillars and white steps. But now I pass on, out of London again; the fields begin again; and the houses, and women hanging washing, and trees and fields. London is now veiled, now vanished, now crumbled, now fallen. The carbolic and the pitch-pine begin to lose their savour. I smell corn and turnips. I undo a paper packet tied with a piece of white cotton. The egg shells slide into the cleft between my knees. Now we stop at station after station, rolling out milk cans’. (Waves 61–62, emphases added)

Thinking of being asked to stay with a young woman’s family, Bernard draws ‘imaginary pictures’ that begin with a train journey. ‘Let me suppose that I am asked to stay at Restover, King’s Laughton, Station Langley three miles. I arrive in the dusk’ (Waves 79). On a train approaching London, he describes the fair, strange, majestic city where

6

UNWRITING THE WAVES

111

‘Factories, cathedrals, glass domes, institutions and theatres erect themselves. The early train from the north is hurled at her like a missile. We draw a curtain as we pass. Blank expectant faces stare at us as we rattle and flash through stations. Men clutch their newspapers a little tighter, as our wind sweeps them, envisaging death. But we roar on. We are about to explode in the flanks of the city like a shell in the side of some ponderous, maternal, majestic animal. She hums and murmurs; she awaits us. ‘Meanwhile as I stand looking from the train window, I feel strangely, persuasively, that because of my great happiness (being engaged to be married), I am become part of this speed, this missile, hurled at the city’. (Waves 111, emphasis added)

He becomes attached to his temporary station on the moving train and its fleeting utopian community: ‘I am numbed to tolerance and acquiescence. My dear sir, I could say, why do you fidget, taking down your suitcase and pressing into it the cap that you have worn all night? Nothing we can do will avail. Over us all broods a splendid unanimity. We are enlarged and solemnised and brushed into uniformity as with the grey wing of some enormous goose (it is a fine, but colourless morning) because we have only one desire—to arrive at the station. I do not want the train to stop with a thud. I do not want the connection which has bound us together sitting opposite each other all night long to be broken. I do not want to feel that hate and rivalry have resumed their sway; and different desires. Our community in the rushing train sitting together with only one wish to arrive at Euston was very welcome. But behold! It is over. We have attained our desire. We have drawn up at the platform. Hurry and confusion and the wish to be first through the gate into the lift assert themselves. But I do not wish to be first through the gate, to assume the burden of individual life. I […] now wish to unclasp my hands and let fall my possessions, and merely stand here in the street, taking no part, watching the omnibuses, without desire; without envy; with what would be boundless curiosity about human destiny if there were any longer an edge to my mind. But it has none. I have arrived; am accepted. I ask nothing’. (Waves 111–112, emphases added)

Bernard’s reflections translate everyday urban modernity into the abstract human—mortal—condition at the heart of The Waves. The ‘agony’ and ‘horror’ of Percival’s absence as he enters a taxi, and of his death later in India, seize Neville: ‘Now the cab comes; now Percival goes. […] How

112

CHRISTINE FROULA

signal to all time to come that we, who stand in the street, in the lamplight, loved Percival?’ (Waves 147, emphasis added). Bernard addresses a silent eulogy to the anonymous crowd: ‘let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have had to respect him’ (Waves 154, emphasis added). Jinny, aging, sees life moving toward death in the crowds descending to the Tube: ‘Here I stand […] in the Tube station where everything that is desirable meets—Piccadilly South Side, Piccadilly North Side, Regent Street and the Haymarket. I stand for a moment under the pavement in the heart of London. Innumerable wheels rush and feet press just over my head. The great avenues of civilisation meet here and strike this way and that. I am in the heart of life. But look—there is my body in that looking glass. How solitary, how shrunk, how aged! I am no longer young. I am no longer part of the procession. Millions descend those stairs in a terrible descent. Great wheels churn inexorably urging them downwards. Millions have died. Percival died. I still move. I still live. But who will come if I signal?’ (Waves 193, emphases added)

For Rhoda trains evoke the terror of an arrival she can never accomplish, stations but a temporary, illusory stability that upholds other people but not herself: ‘There were lamp-posts,’ said Rhoda, ‘and trees that had not yet shed their leaves on the way from the station. The leaves might have hidden me still. […] Coming up from the station refusing to accept the shadow of the trees and the pillar-boxes, I perceived, from your coats and umbrellas, even at a distance, how you stand embedded in a substance made of repeated moments run together; are committed, have an attitude, with children, authority, fame, love, society; where I have nothing. I have no face.’ (Waves 222–223, emphases added)

And Bernard, summing up, figures ‘the life of anybody’ as the imperative to reach a station, catch a train, hang onto one’s ticket even sleeping, even until death: ‘What with the chorus, and the spinning water and the just perceptible murmur of the breeze we are slipping away. Little bits of ourselves are crumbling. There! Something very important fell then. I cannot keep myself together. I shall sleep. But we must go; must catch our train; must walk back to the station—must, must, must. We are only bodies jogging

6

UNWRITING THE WAVES

113

along side by side. […] Here is the station, and if the train were to cut me in two, I should come together on the further side, being one, being indivisible. But what is odd is that I still clasp the return half of my ticket to Waterloo firmly between the fingers of my right hand, even now, even sleeping’. (Waves 234–235, emphases added)

Woolf’s quest for a station whence propels the metaphysical strangerson-a-train scenario far beyond that of ‘An Unwritten Novel’ with its passionate interactive narrator. In The Waves, once Woolf writes and unwrites the lonely mind and ousts the Bad Narrator, the elusive ‘station whence’ emerges as the ontological plane of the interludes’ abstract narrator, whose single word ‘said’ grounds—secures, authorizes—her ‘people’’s silent speech. How then does Woolf make her way to this station? By persisting, by outwaiting failure and, again perhaps fortuitously, by thinking of trains at the key moment when the Bad Narrator cedes authority to the firstperson. Halfway through the first draft, she pauses to note my blundering on at The Waves. I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. […] I think there is something lacking. I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. I press to my centre. I dont care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there. I incline now to try violent shots—at London—at talk—shouldering my way ruthlessly—and then, if nothing comes of it—anyhow I have examined the possibilities. (Diary 3:275, 26 December 1929, emphases added).

The new attack she plans here correlates with an outline in the manuscript: ‘Prelude / Education / Soliloquy / The Town / Conversation / Death’ (1.192v). London, ‘The town,’ is soon elaborated: ‘A train coming in. / The people getting out / A list [lift?]. / how they seem separate / Up in the lift./ The boy with bad trousers. / The streets / A usual Wednesday Monday / Midweek. a / gasometer & factory chimneys’ (1.206v). On December 30, a third-person past-tense narrator adapts Conrad’s famous view of ‘monstrous brooding’ London from the perspective of Marlow’s Nellie to that of a traveler ‘by train or by car’20 : The gasometers & factory chimneys, appearing in outline, […] seeming to encircle & act […] as sentinel, over the city which was […] all mist, were impressive as palaces or cathedrals, could one

114

CHRISTINE FROULA

forget what their function was, could one have endowed them with some ceremonious purpose. […] Seen from a distance, London was mysterious & sad—[…] so quiet, & so immense, & so fallen it seemed into […] mood of profound meditation; a monstrous brooding, a Perhaps one felt the power […] that was massed in all that vast conglomeration of houses, for now separate ridges of houses stood out, & church spires—the more for the silence. It was only coming in by train or by car that one saw the thing itself. […] before one, as a whole; the hive, the mother or It contained such a roar & volume of sound; but now London enveloped, contained, folded all that in its deep maternal, or at least, breast. But each time the train stoppe shot into a station & stopped […] to let people in & out, or flashed through past rows of rather blank expectant faces, & paper stalls & placards, so the vastness & the quiet & the brooding were broken, […] receded; & it became more & more difficult for the whole peaceful mass to assemble again. The train boring its way so pertinaciously into London made the sides of the great edifice which had lain so momentous & untouched crumble in: it was riddled & attacked; & only flying fragments—ribbed hills—jutting houses—fast flying streets—were left. […] Arrived in the station there was complete chaos. (1.207–1.208, emphases added)

And so on, for five more pages. After further weeks of work, such ‘violent shots’ deliver the hard-won breakthrough that Graham and others remark: the gradual attenuation of the Bad Narrator as the ‘people’ of The Waves begin to speak dominion over their world, create it by fiat from their first-person vantages. On 3 January 1930, Woolf reaches the scene’s second part: ‘Conversation margin: Conversation:’ (1.214) and drafts some twenty-three pages in her people’s voices (1.214–237)—even Percival’s (1.218). The Bad Narrator intrudes now and then and takes over at the end, but their speech prevails. On January 26, ten years to the day after the epiphany of the unwritten novel, Woolf senses that she has at last, by violent measures—like breaking through gorse—set my hands on something central. Perhaps I can now say something quite straight out; & at length; & need not be always casting a line to make my book the right shape. But how to pull it together, how to compost it21 —press it into one—I do not know; nor can I guess the end—it might be a gigantic conversation. The interludes are very difficult, yet I think essential; so as to bridge & also give a background—the sea; insensitive nature—I dont know. But I think, when I feel this sudden directness, that it must be right:

6

UNWRITING THE WAVES

115

anyhow no other form of fiction suggests itself except as a repetition at the moment. (Diary 3:285, 26 January 1930)

‘It was in the dialogue she wrote for this “conversation” that the idiosyncratic style of direct reported speech…—“said Bernard,” “said Louis”—appeared at length for the first time,’ write the Cambridge editors; ‘Woolf continued to employ passages of omniscient description from a third-person narrator, but reported speech narrative… was used with increasing regularity from this point onwards’ (xlvii).22 Yet these terms—‘dialogue,’ ‘conversation,’ ‘direct reported speech,’ ‘reported speech narrative’—don’t quite fit the inner voices Woolf now begins to bring to the fore in The Waves. These speech modes are but ‘stations’ on her way to the formal solution she will perfect by another seven months’ work. It’s not enough to replace the Bad Narrator with her people’s sovereign ‘I’s, framed by the interludes’ impersonal narrator whose ‘said’ is their ontological guarantee. As Woolf notes, ‘The test of a book (to a writer) [is ] if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. As this morning I could say what Rhoda said. This proves that the book itself is alive: because it has not crushed the thing I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration’ (Diary 3:297–8, 17 March 1930).23 Woolf has created a live form that doesn’t crush ‘the thing’ she wishes to say; her thought issues ‘quite naturally’ in her people’s voices, perfectly ventriloquized. Eleven days later, she is elated, having ‘survey[ed] the whole book complete’ and ‘felt the pressure of the form—the splendour & the greatness—as—perhaps, I have never felt them.’ She has yet to perfect the ‘architecture’24 and to fill the voices’ sails, but these problems she can solve: I […] find it the most complex, & difficult of all my books. How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in which every life shall have its voice—a mosaic—a—. I do not know. […] I have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think something is there; & I propose to go on pegging it down, arduously, & then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry. […] It is—whatever I make of it—a large & potential theme. […] At any rate, I have taken my fence. (Diary 3:298, 28 March 1930, cf. 1.296–298, 1.300f)

By early August, her people are talking away in what Graham calls the ‘pure present’25 while she listens and echoes: ‘The rain pelts—look at

116

CHRISTINE FROULA

it (as the people in The Waves are always saying) now’ (Diary 3:311, 6 August 1930).26 Two weeks later, as if watching a crystal grow in solution, she notes, ‘The Waves is I think resolving itself into a series of dramatic soliloquies … in the rhythm of the waves. Can they be read consecutively?’27 (Diary 3:312, 20 August 1930; ca. 2.500). ‘Casting about […] for some rope to throw to the reader’ (Letters 4:204, 28 August 1930), she utterly transforms the London passage (drafted the previous December) by making it Bernard’s soliloquy: “All London” said Bernard, “lies under mist. Guarded by gasometers, watched by factories, she lies there sleeping. […] Not Rome itself is more majestic. Every time I look out of the train window I see so more. Separate ridges fledged with houses rise from the mist. We are bound upon the assault of London. The early morning train to the city is like a shell aimed at her heart. As we flash through stations I observe blank expectant faces turned upon us. But we do not stop. But we are going to explode we are going to bore our way right into the heart of the city. We are compact tightly packed like a missile thrown at the flank of some ponderous & majestic animal laid couchant. What is the rarest of all sensations? To be the multitude. […] Who am I? Nobody. This is at once a relief & an annihilation. […] No struggle will really avail. But I am aware: […] I am numbed to a tolerance. […] (2.515, 3 September 1930, emphases added)

What has happened? What strange crystal has formed in the laboratory of Woolf’s draft pages? Where other people’s hidden, ‘real’ lives and minds stop the narrator of ‘An Unwritten Novel’ in her tracks, The Waves diffracts the world through its people’s inner voices. The key is not simply the banishing of the Bad Narrator nor yet the giving over of the novel’s world to the six first-person voices but the creation of a form in which they say ‘the thing’ the author wants to say quite naturally. ‘I want “She”,’ Woolf mused before plunging into the first draft: ‘A mind thinking. They might be islands of light—islands in the stream that I am trying to convey: life itself going on. […] Autobiography it might be called. […] But who is she? I am very anxious that she should have no name. […] I want “She”’ (Diary 3:229–230, 28 May 1929). She is ‘She’: self, voice, life abstracted to figure the self, the voice, the life of anybody. ‘She’ is ‘the station whence’ all the voices issue; ‘she’ is all those islands of light in the streaming ‘life of anybody’ from sunrise/birth to sunset/death. Inventing and mastering this stylized inner ‘speaking

6

UNWRITING THE WAVES

117

voice’ lightly attached to the interludes’ abstract natural world, Woolf endows the voices with the supple freedom and existential power of ‘a mind thinking.’ ‘I’—here, Bernard—slips into ‘We,’ ‘the multitude,’ ‘Nobody.’ What is revealed is no actual person’s unique inner life but an abstract aesthetic simulacrum of ‘anybody’’s. Look within, say the voices chorusing from these late draft pages, and life, it seems, is not very far from being ‘like this’—as who should say, ‘The rain pelts—look at it.’ The book is alive. As the narrator of ‘An Unwritten Novel’ shows by her extravagant use of apostrophe, the soliloquizing lyric voice requires no addressee, or rather, it conjures one out of the air. Yet almost as soon as she appears, Rhoda asks, ‘O! to whom?’ and again: ‘O to whom? she asked’ (1.38– 39).28 To whom do The Wave’s inner voices address themselves? Such a question would seem not to apply to novels any more than to poems or plays or playpoems, or if it does the answer is obvious: to us, the readers. But The Waves is ‘not’ a novel, and Woolf’s slow labor to bring the inner voices to the fore makes Rhoda’s question worth some thought. A possible response emerges from that crucial moment just before the six voices began to take over the book: the diary entry in which Woolf resolves to blunder on trying ‘violent shots’ to get at ‘something lacking’ that is also ‘something there’: ‘I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. I press to my centre. I dont care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there’ (Diary 3:275). Continuing this entry, Woolf seems—only seems, I think—to change the subject to report tea talk with Clive Bell. Her diary voice—the self confiding to itself—conjures two other addressees, two ‘yous,’ through that powerful trope apostrophe: first, the absent Clive; then, in an uncanny yet ‘quite natural’ swerve, her dead brother Thoby: And I always feel, how jolly, how much hunting, & talking & carousing there is in you [Clive]! How long we have known each other—& then Thoby’s form looms behind—that queer ghost. I think of death sometimes as the end of an excursion which I went on when he died. As if I should come in & say well, here you [Thoby] are. And yet I am not familiar with him now, perhaps. Those letters Clive read made him strange & external. (Diary 3:275, 26 December 1929, emphases added)

Thoby Stephen, who died of typhoid at age 26 in 1906, is The Waves ’s spirit-dedicatee and the model for Percival, the book’s silent central figure whom the inner voices idolize and see off to India and mourn when he

118

CHRISTINE FROULA

dies there, thrown by his horse. Is it Thoby/Percival, something lacking that is something there, who calls out these voices, and whom they address? ‘Thoby’s form looms behind’ the old friendship Woolf describes: Through Thoby she met genial Clive long ago, and ‘that queer ghost’ still haunts their talk, present and absent as ghosts are. And more: Held at her ‘centre,’ this ghost shapes that vision of life and death elaborated in the trains and stations of The Waves: ‘I think of death sometimes as the end of an excursion which I went on when he died. As if I should come in & say well, here you are.’ The diary entry’s quick turn from floundering after ‘something there’ in her work-in-progress to this haunted conversation catches the subterranean flow of imagination through contingent ‘life’ to which genetic textual histories attune us. Here, ‘Thoby’s form,’ ‘that queer ghost,’ looms behind not only Virginia’s friendship with Clive but her book’s still crystallizing metaphor of trains and stations, that archetypal journey ‘the life of anybody’ which one takes as abstract ‘I,’ multitude, nobody, clutching one’s ticket even asleep. Together, diary entry and work-inprogress figure Thoby’s death as the station whence Virginia’s post-1906 life departed—‘an excursion which I went on when he died’—and her figured death as an arrival at the station where he waits ‘As if I should come in & say well, here you are.’ Pressing to her ‘centre,’ she finds ‘something there’: A death and a grief, a station whence she can set her people against time and the sea, lean them against the sky. Could this uncanny ‘you’ be the fundament on which The Waves stands—the low B-flat of its cosmos, a profound bass note beyond range of human hearing?29 Is this ghost the silent auditor whose presenceabsence calls out the voices and who waits, silent because dead, at the destination Bernard reaches on behalf of all? Is this unfamiliar ghost, who rises (fittingly for ‘the life of anybody’) ‘strange & external’ from Clive’s letters, ‘there’ at the station where Bernard speaks the last word?30 ‘Overcome by the beauty’ of The Waves, Vanessa Bell found the clue or clef Woolf stumbled on over tea with Clive, the ghost The Waves renders ‘strange,’ ‘external,’ abstract: ‘there’s the personal side, the feelings you describe on what I must take to be Thoby’s death,’ she writes. ‘But that’s not very important, and it’s accidental that I can’t help such feelings coming in and giving an added meaning. Even then I know it’s only because of your art that I am so moved. I think you have made one’s human feelings into something less personal […] you have found the “lullaby capable of singing him to rest”’ (367).31 If the search for the

6

UNWRITING THE WAVES

119

wellsprings of The Waves carries us back to the epiphany of ‘An Unwritten Novel’, both its laborious composition and Vanessa’s recognition intimate an earlier, deeper source—the (un)familiar ghost who is its alpha and omega: the ‘station whence’ these lives of anybody issue and the station where ‘She,’ one, anybody must, like Bernard, arrive.

Notes 1. Essays 4:435. Woolf delivered a version at Oxford on 18 May and published the essay on 14 and 21 August 1927 in the New York Herald Tribune. 2. J. W. Graham, 1976, 2.582v (late October/early November 1930). My citations for present purposes follow Graham’s draft numbering rather than that of the Cambridge editors, who differentiate as drafts what Graham classes as false starts. 3. Cf. Diary 3:219, 28 March 1929, on plunging into this ‘adventure’. 4. See ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘The Mark on the Wall’; and cf. ‘Sympathy’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 108–11). 5. Woolf sets ‘An Unwritten Novel’ on the day after the signing of the Peace Treaty at Versailles (114). 6. Letters 1:356, 19 August 1908; The Voyage Out (1915), 216. Virginia began work on this, her first novel, in 1908; for formal reasons, The Voyage Out is not that re-formed novel despite its incorporating certain Post-Impressionist elements within its Edwardian frame, as in Rachel and Terence’s engagement scene. 7. Two years after glimpsing that ‘gleam of light’, Woolf exulted that in Jacob’s Room (1922) she had ‘found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice’ (Diary 2:186, 26 July 1922). Further experimentation produced Mrs Dalloway and the much-revised manifestos ‘Modern Fiction’ and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,’ which defend the strange fruits of her Georgian generation’s labors. Bearing out her 1920 discovery, Woolf’s ‘path’ of ‘developing the unwritten novel’ branches into this essay’s sketch of a modern novelist chasing after the fleeting human soul figured as Mrs Brown, a stranger on a train. To the Lighthouse contains the austere, abstract ‘Time Passes’ section that her friends ‘dared’ her to write; Orlando’s immortal ‘life’ makes free with time; A Room of One’s Own considers women novelists’ distinctive placing of emphasis and accent; thence to The Waves. Later experiments produced the novel-essay The Pargiters and the daring betweenness of Between the Acts, in which the village pageant shatters conventions of history and art to make visible the interpenetration of the work of art and the life that surrounds it at

120

CHRISTINE FROULA

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

the moment the pageant fulfills its radically innovative form. Within this history, I suggest, The Waves has special status as an ‘unwritten’ novel. As far as I can determine, the phrase ‘trembled with excitement’ occurs only here in Woolf’s oeuvre. See Graham 2.560, dated 23 October 1930. Draft 2 begins on page 401 and ends on page 743, followed by drafts of interludes. On Woolf’s use of trains and railways, see also Bowlby and Briggs. ‘Hilda’ shares her name with Hilda Lessways (1911), exhibit A of outworn novelistic convention in Woolf’s essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.’ This passage (which Woolf later adapts for Orlando) owes something to Conrad’s view that ‘the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all’ but is ‘purely spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate but … never for despair!’ (110); cf. ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919/1920): ‘we reserve our unconditional gratitude for Mr Hardy, for Mr Conrad, and in a much lesser degree for the Mr Hudson of The Purple Land, Green Mansions, and Far Away and Long Ago’ (147). Bowlby, 262n3. Woolf’s narrator shares an interest in literary genesis inasmuch as her adventurous ‘I’ and the story itself foreground her story’s making and unmaking. See Reynier’s study of ethical questions in Woolf’s short stories. ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) had launched this metaphor of contemporary writers breaking uncharted paths: ‘all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. … we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier warriors, whose battle is won … we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is for the historian of literature … to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert’ (Common Reader 146, emphases added). Woolf mused, ‘I am not trying to tell a story. Yet perhaps it might be done in that way’ (Diary 3:231–2, 28 May 1929). This sketch ‘was written either late in 1928 or in the first three months of 1929’ (Graham, Appendix A, 63). The Waves appeared on 8 October 1931 in London; on 22 October in New York. On approaching the end of draft 1, she reflects: ‘What I now think (about the Waves) is that I can give in a very few strokes the essentials of a person’s character […] boldly, almost as caricature. I have yesterday

6

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

UNWRITING THE WAVES

121

entered what may be the last lap. Like every piece of the book it goes by fits. & starts. I never get away with it; but am tugged back. I hope this makes for solidity; & must look to my sentences. The abandonment of Orlando & Lighthouse is much checked by the extreme difficulty of the form—as it was in Jacob’s Room. I think this is the furthest development so far; but of course it may miss fire somewhere. I think I have kept stoically to the original conception. What I fear is that the re-writing will have to be so drastic that I may entirely muddle it somehow. It is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky’ (Diary 3:300, 9 April 1930). Cf. Conrad’s description of ‘the monstrous town … a brooding gloom in sunshine’ (Heart of Darkness 5); and Note 12 above. Perhaps ‘compose’? A Writer’s Diary has ‘comport’ (150). Cf. Graham; Heine. Woolf was then working on the Hampton Court soliloquies; for ‘what Rhoda said,’ see 1.287–288, 1.296–298. ‘Its not the writing of the Waves that takes the time, but the architecture: and its not right yet, and God knows if my eyes not out, and I’m only moving round in a circle’ (Letters 4:354, 7 July 1931). Graham, ‘Point of View in The Waves ’ (194ff). As far as I can determine, the phrase ‘the rain pelts’ occurs only here in Woolf’s writings. In other words: Can the Bad Narrator be jettisoned once and for all? The passage shifts between third- and first-person: ‘& she hastened to the spot whence I had come, with her garland That I might there present it – O! to whom?’ (1.38). ‘Interpreting the “Song” of a Distant Black Hole.’ 17 November 2003. www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/universe/black_hole_sound.html accessed 30 April 2018. Later that year Woolf had a fainting spell that approached a near-death experience: ‘I was walking down the path with Lydia. If this dont stop, I said, referring to the bitter taste in my mouth & the pressure like a wire cage of sound over my head, then I am ill: yes, very likely I am destroyed, diseased, dead. Damn it! Here I fell down—saying “How strange—flowers”. In scraps I felt & knew myself carried into the sitting room by Maynard, saw L. look very frightened; said I will go upstairs; the drumming of my heart, the pain, the effort got violent at the doorstep; overcame me; like gas; I was unconscious; then the wall & the picture returned to my eyes; I saw life again. Strange I said, & so lay, gradually recovering till 11 when I crept up to bed. […] But this brush with death was instructive & odd. Had I woken in the divine presence it wd. have been with fists clenched & fury on my lips. “I dont want to come here at all!” So I should have exclaimed. I wonder if this is the general state

122

CHRISTINE FROULA

of people who die violently. If so figure the condition of Heaven after a battle’ (Diary 3:315, 2 September 1930). Having published The Waves, she felt her powers stirring: ‘Oh yes, between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody, at last, the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning--if The Waves is my first work in my own style!’ (Diary 4:53, 16 November 1931). 31. Vanessa interprets Bernard’s summing up: ‘No lullaby has ever occurred to me capable of singing him to rest’ (Waves 243). Had Bernard such a lullaby, the dead [Thoby] Percival would be its addressee; so The Waves sings a requiem for ‘anybody’.

Works Cited Bell, Vanessa. Selected Letters. Ed. Regina Marler. London: Moyer Bell, 1998. Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt, Inc. 2005. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. New York: Norton, 2006. ———. Some Reminiscences [A Personal Record] (1912). London: Electric Book Company, 2001. Graham, J. W. ‘Point of View in The Waves: Some Services of the Style.’ University of Toronto Quarterly 39 (1970): 193–211. ——— (ed.). Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Heine, Elizabeth. ‘The Evolution of the Interludes in The Waves.’ Virginia Woolf Quarterly 1:1 (1972): 60–80. Reynier, Christine. Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader: First Series (1925). Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1986. ———. The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. 2nd Ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989. ———. The Diary. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1977–1984. ———. The Essays. Ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart Clarke. 6 vols. Vol. 3: 1919–1924 and Vol. 4: 1924–1928. London: Hogarth, 1991, 1994. ———. The Letters. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. London: Hogarth, 1975–1980. ———. ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1917). In Complete Shorter Fiction. 83–89.

6

UNWRITING THE WAVES

123

———. ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919). In The Common Reader. 146–154. In Essays 4:157–165. ———. ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1923). In Essays 3: 384–389. ———. ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future’ (1927). In Essays 4: 428–441. ———. ‘An Unwritten Novel’ (1920). In Complete Shorter Fiction. 112–121. ———. The Voyage Out (1915). San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968. ———. The Waves (1931). New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1959. ———. The Waves. Ed. Michael Herbert and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ———. The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts. Transcribed and ed. J. W. Graham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. ———. A Writer’s Diary. Ed. Leonard Woolf. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1954.

CHAPTER 7

The Writer’s Hunger: Considering a Novel in Progress Sonia Overall

The reader must allow that there are two books: the abridged published novel and the manuscript. But as a writer, I know that it is more complicated than this. Whatever one may think of the death of the author, of the abandonment of authorial intention, of the text as an absolute to be read hermeneutically, I know that, as a writer, there are always many versions of a novel. Scenes dreamed up on train journeys or in the shower that never make it onto paper. Necessary omissions and sacrificed scenes; dead ends and forgotten scraps from notebooks. —Sonia Overall

Some books change us. I first read Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden in my early twenties, in the summer after my graduation. Over that summer, I came to realise with absolute clarity what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted, like Hemingway’s protagonist David Bourne, and Hemingway himself, to be a writer of fiction. The seeds of the novel I have recently completed in draft, and which I will discuss in this paper, were sown with that first reading of The Garden of Eden.

S. Overall (B) Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_7

125

126

S. OVERALL

Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden explores shifting identities, the loss of innocence, rites of passage. Nothing in the garden can remain. The book was lent to me by someone who was, like me, an aspiring writer, who wanted their world to change, or could at least see it changing, and who was in the midst of disintegrating personal relationships. The book spoke to both of us—new to me, known to him—and we lived through it vicariously. I still have the copy that I borrowed from this friend. It appears as an artefact in the novel that it inspired. I have often come back to The Garden of Eden as a reader, and I knew for many years that I wanted to write about it, too. How this would come about was unclear for some time. Abridging texts and traditional tales for performance made me consider the act of retelling, of taking story or text and re-crafting it, interrogating it, and creating something new from it. I began to wonder if it was possible to address a text and, by writing a new novel, to answer the questions it posed. To have a dialogue of sorts, something more complex than that of author-reader, and perhaps less cynical than some of the metafictional novels I had encountered. Could I write an intertextual novel? What would that look like? I had already tried my hand at textual intervention, but perhaps not pushed it far enough. I wanted to explore the creativity of reading itself, not just within one book, but across books.

Forming the Story My desire to write about and across texts found root in an initial rereading of The Garden of Eden. At first, my plan was to write a response to Hemingway’s novel, a defence of sorts. I would create a contemporary character who would read Hemingway’s novel, explore its subtleties, consider its flaws and perhaps live vicariously through it, as I had done years before. My first outline of the novel, scribbled (as so often) on the back of an envelope, involved two characters simultaneously reading Hemingway’s book. At first, I imagined them meeting through a reading group: the book would open them up as individuals, make them restless, bring them together. There would, of course, be a destructive ending. The outline for this novel was straightforward enough, an allegory answering an allegory. Before I even began plotting the novel I realised that much more was needed. I abandoned the reading group idea: it was too easy, too familiar. No intelligent, critical reader would be interested in two independent,

7

THE WRITER’S HUNGER: CONSIDERING A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

127

slightly bored adults falling into an affair because of a story they had read. In the biblical Garden, there is everything to lose and this is why the trespass matters. In my skeletal story very little mattered, because there was no imbalance between the characters, no outside forces to negotiate, and nothing was truly at stake. I needed to make the coming together of these two readers transgressive. It became obvious to me that an academic institute was an ideal setting for my story: a tutor and a student brought together by a shared reading of Hemingway’s book. Having read other Hemingway novels, and knowing a little about his biography at the time, I was mindful of the recurrent theme in his life and work of the older writer and the younger muse. I also knew that plenty of stories had been written about male academics making fools of themselves over young female students, with varying degrees of empathy and success. This was not a route I wanted my book to take, but I did want to explore that sense which I have had, and which perhaps many colleagues in academic institutes have experienced, that shared ideas and enthusiasms make for strong kinship. I see my students as fellow practitioners, part of a community of readers and writers. It strikes me as highly probable that an academic in this situation can become attached to a student. And when that attachment crosses a line, there is trespass. Which is what my novel needed.

Developing the Characters This was the process that led to my first protagonist, Penelope, a tutor in Modernism, who becomes infatuated with an undergraduate student, Max. Max expresses an interest in Hemingway’s work, and Penelope—usually referred to as Pen in the text—encourages this interest by suggesting he read Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. Outside her usual area of expertise, Penelope rereads the novel herself, and her experience of this informs my text. The book becomes an excuse for the two readers to meet, a common ground for discussion, and ultimately a source of coded messages through which they communicate. A conversation in the rain with a disenchanted first-year student gave me the context for Penelope and Max’s first meeting, and I quickly wrote a draft of this scene, which appears with the following revisions in an early chapter of the novel: Her feet are wet; she needs new boots. She wants to go home, to be at home already, to be transported there without having to find a place to

128

S. OVERALL

park the car half way up the road and get soaked walking back to the house. She should leave. She should leave him there in the rain. She drives over and lowers the window. Max? she says. It is Max, isn’t it? She knows who it is. Betray nothing, her voice says. Reveal nothing. A boy in the rain, a boy drenched and listless and lovely in the rain. His eyes are no longer narrow. His pinched nose is a funnel, a slipstream, a sloping eddy. He is soaked. His hair curls a wet cowlick on his cheek: a flapper swirl, a Regency flourish. Rain streams from wet hair into open collar. Are you alright? she says. You’re getting very wet. He shrugs. It’s just rain, he says. It’s freezing, she says. Do you need a lift? I can take you into town. He looks at the puddles. Behind him rain bounces hard on college steps. Okay, he says. Okay, thanks. She drives. The rain beats. Max O’Grady is silent as they reach the railway crossing. The lights start to flash; Pen stops the car. As the gates descend Max O’Grady puts his head in his hands and sobs.

Penelope and Max gave me the vehicle for unpacking Hemingway’s book. I was aware of the extended creation of The Garden of Eden and of its contentious posthumous publication, and as I read around the book, I became increasingly interested in Hemingway’s own complex relationship with it. David Bourne is a thinly veiled version of Hemingway himself; David’s Grau-de-Roi honeymoon mirrors that of Hemingway and his second wife Pauline. If one accepts these parallels, the book’s genesis can be traced back to Hemingway’s experiences in 1927. Biographers place the first manuscript notes of the novel in 1946,1 with an initial burst of creative energy lasting several months. But with no clear plan or structure Hemingway began to lose his way: over the next fifteen years, the book swelled to 200,000 words and contained a major subplot with ‘mirror’ characters for David and Catherine. Hemingway frequently shelved the novel to work on other projects, including Across the River and into the Trees (1950) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). The volume of words that makes up The Garden of Eden manuscript suggests that this is a project the writer could neither contain nor control. Despite frequent forays into shaping and editing, the novel faltered and was never completed.

7

THE WRITER’S HUNGER: CONSIDERING A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

129

The manuscript drafts of The Garden of Eden are in the Hemingway Collection of the Kennedy Library. I have never seen them. There is no complete facsimile of the manuscript versions or of the typescript bearing Hemingway’s annotations. The published novel represents a fraction of these original sources: a reduction of over 2000 manuscript pages to 265 printed ones. Much has been written about the wisdom of publishing such an edited version, and numerous scholars have explored the injustices done to Hemingway as a result. While I agree with many of their arguments, I am also inclined to accept the published book on its own merits. The reader must allow that there are two books: the abridged published novel and the manuscript. But as a writer, I know that it is more complicated than this. Whatever one may think of the death of the author, of the abandonment of authorial intention, of the text as an absolute to be read hermeneutically, I know that, as a writer, there are always many versions of a novel. Scenes dreamed up on train journeys or in the shower that never make it onto paper. Necessary omissions and sacrificed scenes, dead ends and forgotten scraps from notebooks. Hemingway’s manuscript drafts will contain some of these, but not all. What is lost between his first monumental sprawl and the paperback on the shelf are the many nuances, regrets, revisions and undeveloped ideas that go into a work of fiction. Hemingway did not leave a complete book ready to be trimmed, but died before he had finished working out all the possibilities. This information intrigued me, and I decided I must use it in my own work. These thoughts pointed to another level of dialogue between my text and Hemingway’s, and I decided that to continue the conversation, Hemingway himself must be present in my novel. I began a second narrative strand exploring his writing of The Garden of Eden; his struggles with the book, biographical elements that weave through it, and elements of his writing practice. I imagined moments when the writing would not come, and others where the story begins to tell itself. I immersed myself in Hemingway’s biography, reread his work and allowed my imagined version of him to write, digress, and at times despair. I drew on what I had learnt of Hemingway’s writing processes, but also my own; of the habits and rituals of a day’s creative work, of the need to keep life and work separate, and of how one so often influences the other. I considered how long gaps between writing can cause significant changes to a manuscript; how stalled projects gnaw at a writer’s confidence. I pieced together a chronology of when and where Hemingway worked on the novel, and

130

S. OVERALL

created triggers of inspiration and lapses of focus to fit these. As the narrative developed, I began to edit these sequences, shifting them around to suit the larger chronology of my novel, splicing into the existing Penelope narrative to create a call and response between the chapters. I now had two narrative voices. Hemingway as writer and Penelope as reader answered each other across my novel. But I sensed that another dimension was needed. What remained unexplored was the chasm between Hemingway’s manuscript and the posthumous novel, and I wanted to attempt to cross that division. I began to experiment with one of the voices from Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, working with a character who could address the reader directly and challenge the parameters of the text. The focus of the published novel The Garden of Eden is David Bourne, a young American writer. David is newly married to an American heiress, Catherine. As Hemingway’s alter ego, it is David whose thoughts we are privy to, and who exercises much of the reader’s empathy. Yet it is Catherine who shines through the text. She is by far one of the most complex of Hemingway’s female characters, and she is given some truly powerful lines. What appeals to me as a novelist is how Catherine acts as a foil for her writer-husband. She is apparently proud of his work, but claims that she does not ‘interfere’ with his process. Despite this, she attempts to steer his subject matter, sets about getting a publisher and illustrators for a work he has abandoned, and destroys the manuscripts of short stories she does not approve of. In the published book, Catherine is a writer’s nemesis. How different is the Catherine in Hemingway’s manuscript? Without access to the whole, I can only piece together quoted passages from the research of others. But as a writer of fiction, it doesn’t really matter. The challenge for me is to get inside Catherine and give her an extended life in my own work. To make her my own. I decided to use Catherine in a third narrative strand for my novel, but rather than simply continue her story beyond Hemingway’s book, I wanted to experiment with the idea of her as an anarchic force that cannot be contained by a text. I have the sense, when my writing is going well, that the characters I create continue to develop, even to act, when I down tools, leave my desk and walk away. If I am forced to leave a long gap between writing sessions, there is the danger that when I come back to them my characters will have become unfamiliar, difficult to control. Hostile, even. This may sound fantastical, but having spoken to other fiction writers, I know I am not alone. I also doubt I am the only reader to

7

THE WRITER’S HUNGER: CONSIDERING A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

131

feel frustrated or concerned about leaving characters unattended when I am obliged to put aside a gripping novel. What do they do, these creatures of the imagination, when we are not looking? If they were capable of self-awareness, or of some level of autonomy, how would they choose to act? In Eden, Catherine is a fictional character in Hemingway’s manuscript, who gains sufficient consciousness to question her role, challenge the authority of the writer and, ultimately, influence the editing process beyond the life of her creator. In Hemingway’s book, Catherine wishes to act as editor for her writer-husband, overseeing the publication of his unfinished autobiographical narrative. In Eden, she completes this role by shaping Hemingway’s unfinished manuscript and influencing the edition that is finally presented to the world. As a character, she has more power over the novel than the author himself. She is what becomes of our creations when we are looking the other way.

Three Voices Creating a consistent, authentic voice is one of the great challenges— and joys—of fiction writing. As a student, I was infected by Modernism, and my early writing experiments show a fascination with the possibilities of multiple narration that has never been fully exorcised. I began this novel, as I usually do, with a first-person narrator, in this case Penelope, speaking in the present tense. I knew immediately that this approach wasn’t going to work when writing about Hemingway himself. I wanted to give Hemingway a voice, but I was fearful of lapsing into pastiche or parody. Instead, I chose to write Hemingway’s narrative as he often approached his own narrators, using the third person, with the enabling device of free indirect speech to zoom in and out of that character’s thoughts. Below is an extract from the Hemingway narrative in Eden. This comes from an early point in the book, when Hemingway finds himself distracted from making progress on the David Bourne manuscript by ideas for a trilogy based on his war experiences. As is frequently the writer’s lot, another project is beginning to form on the sidelines, intruding on his existing novel. He was ready for the war book now. It would be more than just a single novel. He had spent a good while thinking about this and now he was

132

S. OVERALL

certain. He wanted to write about the war as a trinity. There was the land war with its shells and artillery fire and the smell of corpses. That was a hungry war where soldiers were half-starved. In a land war you were so tired you could sleep anywhere. Usually that meant on the ground. But the ground was your enemy and so you embraced your enemy whenever you laid down to sleep. Land war made traitors out of everyone. Then there was the sea war. That was removed and cold and somehow clean and spectral. There was fire there and water of course but there was also depth. Sea war was about being surrounded. When you fought in a boat or a sub and you were hit you knew that you would die because the element that held you up would also claim you. That was the pact you made as a sailor. If it wasn’t the enemy that killed you it would be the sea and if you did last in the sea for a while then it would be sharks or fatigue or just the lure of letting go and sinking down into the cold quiet away from war. Then there was the air war, which was the most godlike of all wars because no amount of augury could tell you when it would strike. Air war was fire from above and it would hit soldiers and civilians with equal detachment. It would take out farms and camps and schoolrooms and hospitals and bridges. It would take out soldiers and their wives and their mothers and their children born and unborn. Air war was unconcerned with the fate of the scuttling creatures of the land or the floating round-bellied creatures of the sea. Everything was alike from the air, and so nothing was of any worth.

The section goes on to consider the writer’s process. How much is autobiography? How do themes emerge? How do nebulous ideas eventually shape themselves into distinct narratives? He had started this story in several places. It was a swarming stream of ideas that linked together and he had no intention of plotting or planning it. The books were all one at the moment but he knew that there would be a time when they would separate and form themselves distinctly like shifting continents. There was the stuff about war and the types of war. There was plenty there about fishing in the Gulf and about his boys, and about how it would be to have his boys alone without their mothers or any other women coming between them. There was grief and the sheering numbness of it and the way that work and drinking and being at sea can help to fill the days of grief, and how grieving is like holding a great lid over yourself, a solid dome that can be scratched and bumped against but never broken. There was much about Paris too, about his early days starting out and learning his craft. There was a good deal about poverty and about marriage and of course about love and getting it and losing it

7

THE WRITER’S HUNGER: CONSIDERING A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

133

without noticing. When he looked hard at it he could see that what kept cutting through all of these things was the story of the young American writer and his apprenticeship and the women that loved him and his work or didn’t love his work and so tried to destroy it. It was the story about loving more than one woman and of how you go on fooling yourself that one wife or lover can be the everything that you want, and that you try to be the everything for them, and that this will, as you know, never work.

After considering the options, Hemingway decides to return to his study to work on the story of David Bourne, refocussing the action in the novel and the development of The Garden of Eden manuscript. That was the part he needed to go back on. He needed to get that young American writer and his wife down before he wrote himself too far away and lost sight of them completely. He finished off the beer. Men and women and work. Original sin. We are all bitched from the start, he thought. Then you try to throw writing into the mix and wonder why nothing ever comes off like it should do.

The treatment of voice above allowed me to write in the same narrative spirit as Hemingway’s novel. It also gave me the scope to show Hemingway’s writing process, allowing me access to his imagination alongside passages of explication that would be impossible in the first person alone. Once I had tasted the liberties of free indirect discourse, I returned to Penelope’s voice and rewrote those early pages. The first person was, I realised, too restrictive, and there were also issues of authorial distance. Although I was drawing on some of my own experiences for Penelope’s character, I didn’t want to be too closely identified with her. One of the tricks of fiction is to lure the reader into believing that someone real, distinct and separate—not me, not the writer—is having these thoughts, speaking these lines. A writer does this by trying on voices like so many hats. This was not happening with Penelope’s voice. I still hadn’t found the right hat. Rereading those draft pages, I realised that Penelope’s voice was too simple, lacking distinction. I was not getting at the essence of her character, her unique way of seeing. Specificity is key to an authentic voice, and I wanted Penelope to be obsessed with details. I also wanted her voice to reflect her reading and her academic life, to speak of Modernism in some way. I turned to the writing of Gertrude Stein, mindful of her early influence on Hemingway’s writing. In Tender Buttons , I found the

134

S. OVERALL

litany of details, stream of consciousness techniques and free association that I needed to give Penelope’s voice an edge. I rewrote her first chapter with the gloves off, using lists, repetition, imagery and word association, allusions to and quotes from Stein’s work. Penelope’s character called for self-reflection, internalisation and of course speed, as witnessed in her snowballing infatuation with her student, Max. As such, her voice needed to run away with itself in some way, without becoming too muddled. The more I wrote of this narrative strand, the more I was aware that the voice reflected Penelope’s desire to escape—to be liberated, to find itself again—but that this was offset by attempts to rein herself in. This tension was key to Penelope’s character: the licence of infatuation versus the responsibilities and obligations of domestic and academic life. I have employed occasional footnotes in Penelope’s narrative to demonstrate a tendency to analyse, reflect upon and justify her thoughts. In a nod to Gertrude Stein, I have made Stein the focus of Penelope’s research, and the subject of a book she is working on. The following extract is from the first section of Penelope’s narrative, picking up after the earlier quoted passage above. Penelope offers Max a lift into town after an event at the university: following an emotional outburst, Max expresses doubts about his studies and mentions recent strains in his personal life. Penelope offers support while acknowledging to herself that she finds Max attractive, leading to conflicting emotions and a blurring of roles. Max O’Grady asks to be dropped off on the east side of town. He points out a pub and they pull up outside. The rain eases a little. They sit in the car. The wipers continue to squeak and slosh, squeak and slosh. They continue to sit. Thank you, he says. You are welcome, she says. She thinks: this is the moment that something happens. This is the point of exchange. He opens the door a little, hesitates. The light comes on above his head. His wet hair so black it is blue. His eyes so blue they are almost black. She thinks: beautiful boy, blue boy, good bye. Sorry I was such an idiot, he says. You are anything but, she says. Thanks. He swings a leg out of the door.

7

THE WRITER’S HUNGER: CONSIDERING A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

135

You can come and talk to me, she says. Whenever you need to. You know where my office is. Thanks. Don’t quit, Max, she says. Just get drunk and sleep it off. You’ll be fine. He gets out, unfurling onto the curb, black legs and red satchel and jacketed elbows. He turns to close the door and his face hangs there and she thinks, oh fleeting thought, of taking this elfish face in her hands, of kissing this tapering chin. Look, he says, would it be okay to come and see you tomorrow? I mean, should I book a tutorial? Just come to my office, she says. My timetable is on the door. Thanks, he says. Then he is gone. Driving home she reaches out, touches the passenger seat. The fabric is sodden. A damp tissue balled-up on the dashboard. She thinks: in loco parentis. She thinks: this boy needs someone to look out for him. She thinks: it was only the rain. The rain is wrong, wet weather means an open window. She thinks: too much Stein. Too easily led, too ready to make connections where there are none. But there is a connection. There was. She is sure of that. She thinks: he needed and I was there and that is all. All, all, all.

A few pages later Penelope has another encounter with Max, who has requested a change of course so that he can join Penelope’s seminars. Penelope is about to leave her office to deliver a lecture when Max appears. Again, the use of repetition and lists to create a sense of confusion that follows owes much to Stein, who is alluded to in the ‘tender’ button of Max’s digital recorder. […] Jacket, bag, books, door. At the door, fist raised to knock, the boy: Max O’Grady. Hello, he says. Hello and hello and hello. She is about to leave and he knows it and that is why he has come, for Steve Sanders has told him that it is too late to change courses but, could she, may he, would she, record some of the seminars anyway? He holds out a tube, metallic, a digital recorder; his friend Joe Fisher is in her group and he will do it, press the buttons, oh tender, record them, the discussions, if she doesn’t mind. She nods and listens and takes him in again and the blueness and blackness of him and

136

S. OVERALL

says, yes, she could do that, she could pass the recorder on to Joe Fisher at the end of today’s session. She could do that. She could. Max O’Grady beams and leans in the doorway, hand on red satchel strap, thankful, polite, mouth succulent, lupine. Oh, she thinks. Oh oh no. Then he is gone again and she closes the door behind her and locks it and checks her watch, five minutes, breathes, leaves. So. So. Max’s recorder in her jacket pocket. Through the corridors and down the steps she feels it swing hard against her hip as she walks. Thup. Thup. Thup.

By this point in the writing process, my instinct to write multiple firstperson narration was thoroughly quashed. It was clear that first person would not work for Catherine either, and I felt that her anarchic quality would be lost in the formalities of third person, however freely written. I also felt that I wanted to involve the reader directly in the novel, to address and challenge them, and to give them a role in the fiction. I decided to pursue this by identifying the reader with Catherine’s voice using the second person, present tense. This form has the potential to be interrogative, imperative and thoroughly disconcerting, drawing the reader into the role of the character. I used this aspect of the voice to reflect Catherine’s own dawning autonomy, as she shifts from passive character in Hemingway’s text to active creator in mine. Below is a passage from Catherine’s narrative strand. At this point, Catherine has already begun to question her role in Hemingway’s text. She is real, and yet she is not real. She has noticed that although Hemingway appears to be with her when he writes in public spaces, he never introduces her to anyone that joins them. Catherine frequently elides her writer-creator Hemingway and writer-husband David Bourne, regarding them both as agents of control. In the previous section of her narrative, Catherine has tested the boundaries of her own reality by leaving the world of the text while Hemingway is distracted, focussing on another part of the action. In the absence of other characters, Catherine revisits a location in the novel and realises that the setting appears sketchy and two dimensional. On the return home, she suddenly realises that she has acted through her own volition, in isolation. From here on, Catherine secretly explores her new-found autonomy. It is the beginning of seeing. You notice the edges of things. You walk along a street with David and see, at the end, a half house. There is no roof. Only two walls, the walls that make a corner nearest to you. David

7

THE WRITER’S HUNGER: CONSIDERING A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

137

does not notice. Do not point it out to him. You want to reach the end of the street to see, to round that corner. What would be there? What is there? You know there would be nothing. What would that nothing look like? Like your dreams, like what passes for dreams? What happens to the road beyond the house? Is there a desert? A fog? Could you balance along it, walk the perimeter like the edge of a plate? You do not find out. He, David, Ernest, steers you a different way.

Catherine realises that these fuzzy edges, gaps in Hemingway’s fictional world, also apply to her. She has an alarming realisation that her body is not fully realised and she is not in control of her physical actions. In bed, David touches your neck, your back. You cannot see his face. You feel the soles of his feet with your toes. Something about this sickens you. Why? Look down, look away from David. There is the long mirror at the foot of the bed. There is the movement of the sheet. You see it reflected. There are your feet. You scrape your toes against David’s soles. You dig with your toenails. He does nothing. Try again. Harder! Nothing. Where are they? Feel, feel for the catch of fabric beneath. You must have toenails. You had them before, didn’t you? You sit up. Pull your feet toward you. Check your toes—count them between thumb and finger. They are there—five on each foot, a nail to each. But they were not there. For a moment, they were not. No. You will not have this. Tell him, Ernest, that this will not do. Call him. He is there, because you are there with David. You look hard at the mirror. David’s body is beneath yours. You see it rise and fall. You see your body rise and fall. You see your limbs moving, your hand touching your cheek. No! That wasn’t you! Did you do that? Did you touch your face? Stop, hold yourself still. In the mirror the sheets move, your hand strokes down: throat, breast, onto David’s knee. You are facing the mirror and he is behind you now, beneath you. But you did not move. You hear him moan. You hear yourself moan. This will not do. You tell him, Ernest: it is not you doing this. So where are you? Where is he? In the mirror your body stretches, slumps, rolls away. You sit, frozen, watching. David kisses your shoulder, gets out of bed, goes into the bathroom. For a moment you are there, watching in the mirror. The light tips and the ceiling moves and you are falling, returning. Gone.

Catherine’s horror leads to the realisation that she is a composite, created from parts of Hemingway’s personal experience and fantasy. Catherine

138

S. OVERALL

wishes to challenge her creator over the limitations of her characterisation and the supporting role she is forced to play: it is increasingly apparent that she will rebel against this portrayal. That is what writers do, he will say. He, Ernest. We take the best and the worse and we shake them up a little. We pour them over a little ice and pass them round. That is what he does with you. He has made you out of pieces of others, his wives and lovers and women he has seen in cafés and bars and on the backs of magazines. He has shaped you and named you Catherine and married you off to a stripped-down matinee-idol version of himself and sent you off together on an everlasting honeymoon. You are breasts and eyes and sun-bleached hair and long legs and always willing. You eat well and drink a little and admire his expertise with a fishing rod. You remark on how well he dives and swims. How fast he rides a bicycle. You sleep late together and take siestas in the cool hotel room with the long windows. You wear matching clothes. You are the mould and the pressing: the American heiress with no ambition; the penniless American writer with plenty. But this is not you. Not the you that you feel.

Editing and Structure After writing opening chapters for each character, it was clear that switching between these narrative strands—putting on and taking off each voice—could prove difficult. To avoid any blurring between voices, I focussed on writing one narrative at a time, making notes of what was needed in responding chapters without being tempted to ‘change roles’. With a sizable amount of Hemingway’s narrative written, I turned my attention to Penelope and continued the dialogue between these chapters. I wrote brief summaries of the action and themes for each chapter onto slips of paper which could be shuffled and laid out like playing cards until I found the correct order (Fig. 7.1). Once I had decided on the basic structure of the novel, I returned to complete Hemingway’s section, then printed everything I had written. Printed draft pages gave me a clear indication of what more was needed. How much of the story should be told through Penelope’s perspective? How closely should her narrative arc follow Hemingway’s? Where should Catherine break through? I began to piece the book together with post-it notes serving as holding pages for unwritten sections. This allowed me

7

THE WRITER’S HUNGER: CONSIDERING A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

139

Fig. 7.1 Sonia Overall, summaries

to consider areas to edit or expand, so that action continued and voices segued effectively (Fig. 7.2).

Analysis and Process Creative writing students sometimes express concern about analysing a work-in-progress, as if it is a perilous act: that when we write creatively, we are working unconsciously, and that over-analysis can destroy this delicate process. This brings to mind Hemingway’s notion that it is unwise to think about a story too much, for fear of ‘spooking’ it.2 Certainly, there is a point where creativity can be stymied by analysis, and perhaps this can become fatal for some stories. But I found a consideration of process very useful while writing and planning this novel. It may be because so much of the novel itself is about method, process and approaching action. The characters display varying levels of procrastination and avoidance, opportunism, recklessness and abandonment. These psychological processes are reflected in acts of reading, writing and editing in the novel. I have been able to explore what it means to be self-aware when writing and to think about aspects of the novel as conscious constructions. This may be less liberating than ‘letting it happen’ or ‘being outside’ the writing process,

140

S. OVERALL

Fig. 7.2 Sonia Overall, draft manuscript pages

but in this case, and especially with the voices I have employed in the novel, that self-consciousness has proved useful and necessary.

Themes There is one question that fills me, and probably most writers, with dread: what is your novel about? I am not sure that I have explained what my novel is about over the course of this paper: not because it is too dense, but because what it is about changed with the act of writing it, with each draft and read-through. Sex, longing, identity, reading and writing, escapism and fantasy, the life of a book, how easy it is to use creativity as an excuse for morally questionable acts: all of these themes and more are at play in my novel. I could narrow them down according to priority, but it is difficult to be more specific. When I reached what was, perhaps, the mid-point of the whole writing process, I had a small epiphany about what I was trying to achieve. I tried to keep this in mind as I worked on drafting the novel, and continued to use it as a lodestone for editing and completion. Reading Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden again—and I have read it several times from cover to cover and returned to the beginning, or

7

THE WRITER’S HUNGER: CONSIDERING A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

141

dipped into it at random—I realised that one of the overarching themes of the novel is that of hunger. Eve’s desire to eat the apple comes from a hunger for knowledge, for self-awareness and independence. Hemingway frequently struggled with titles, but his choice here is apt. His novel is a paean to appetites and their satisfaction—for food, drink, exercise, sex— but beneath all of these is the writer’s hunger, a restlessness that must be answered creatively. David’s hunger; Hemingway’s hunger. I recognise this hunger and the restlessness it produces. It is not something I was aware of when I first read the novel, although I had already experienced the frustrations of not actively writing. I may not have attempted to exorcise this hunger as Hemingway did, or as David does in Hemingway’s novel, but the restlessness has transferred, and I think it is this which has pushed me to exploration and experimentation, and changed my writing. It has made me more conscious of the craft, of the act of writing itself. And it has allowed me the freedom and confidence to change my mind as I write—to have a more fluid approach to constructing a long narrative—than I have experienced in previous projects. I will end with two extracts from Eden. The first is from Penelope’s narrative, and it speaks of how Hemingway’s book leaves me, and of how I would hope, ultimately, to leave my own readers. It’s an ambition every writer must share. Pen closes the book, looks up blinking into the room. She had forgotten this: to read and to be so far inside a world that to come up is to be thrown helplessly out, a hooked fish on the riverbank. Not only the leaving, the resenting of it: worse, she cannot remember how else to be. She stands, goes into the kitchen, clicks on the kettle. Her knees buckle, her head swims. She is amazed at herself, at finding herself standing there: the café gone, the couple gone, the waiter no longer lingering discretely, polishing glasses at the bar. She sees the cupboards lining the walls, the butcher’s block in the corner pendulous with ladles, the clock above the sink. The window is dark, steamed-up, a fog fenced by mobbing shapes of trees swaying in the garden. She doesn’t know herself. She doesn’t want to know herself.

Hemingway must have the last word. This section appears at the very end of Eden. Hemingway has woken early and made a significant resolution. Aware that he will never complete the manuscript that will become The Garden of Eden, he revisits it one last time, sitting on the floor

142

S. OVERALL

and reading a section. The scene is from the beginning of the published version of The Garden of Eden: David Bourne is fishing, and has hooked a huge fish that he draws along the canal, creating a procession in the small French community where he and Catherine are on honeymoon. This scene echoes through my novel and is visited in each of the narrative strands: I see this moment as one of a series of puncture-holes that pierces the text, an aperture through which the reader can thread all three strands together. The writer’s wife saw them through the window of the hotel and called down to them. He could see her waving to the young writer. Wait for me! she said. She came out of the hotel and followed them, the young writer and the fish and the waiter and the people of the village. The writer led them to the edge of the canal and guided the fish towards the bank. They could see the size of the fish under the surface of the water. The waiter scooped the fish out of the water and held it up. It was a huge sea bass. The people cheered. It was not the young American they were cheering for. It was the fish that amazed them. He was clear again now. There had been times at the clinic when he’d thought he was in Michigan fishing with Nick Adams. Other days he had called his wife by his first wife’s name. He hadn’t seen his first wife for years now. His second wife was dead. His third was in England. His wife was asleep in her room. He had been confused. The confusion was gone now and the great clarity was back. He needed that clarity. He didn’t want to make any mistakes and screw it up. He didn’t want to make things more of a mess for his wife. His boys were men now. He wasn’t worried about them. As a young man he had seen what happened to his own father and it had made sense enough to him. He was indestructible. He had always known this was how it would be. He had felt death coming for a long time. In the white room in the clinic he had seen the black dog he’d heard people talk about. He was walking on the hard road from the river at the bottom of the hill and he heard it behind him. The dog’s paws made a gentle padding sound on the hard road. The sound was steady. He had turned around to look at the dog and it had looked at him and kept on coming behind him. When he woke up in his bed in the clinic he remembered the dog and listened for the sound of its paws and its hot breath. He could hear the dog in the room with him but he could no longer see it. He remembered it now. If he waited he would be sure to see it again.

7

THE WRITER’S HUNGER: CONSIDERING A NOVEL IN PROGRESS

143

The young American writer and his wife sat on the terrace of the café. The fish had been weighed and put onto a block of ice. The people of the town busied themselves with the mackerel catch and the big sea bass. They were amazed that such a big fish could be landed by the young American writer using only a bamboo rod and line. The wife asked the writer about what would happen to the big fish. The writer explained that the fish would be taken inland and sold at one of the big markets. The fish was too big to be cooked there. Perhaps the fish would be eaten in a restaurant in Paris. Whatever happened and whoever cut it up the fish was gone. The writer and his wife would eat a small sea bass in the restaurant instead. They would eat it with lemon and fried potatoes. Somehow the writer had managed to catch a big sea bass but now it was out of his hands. The sun would be up soon. He needed to get ready. He put the script back in the case and closed it. He stood up slowly, gripping his knees. He picked up his glass and raised it to the case. Salute, he said. He drank off the whisky and put the glass on the table. He went to the door and opened it. He looked back at the room for a moment and took in the case and the desk and the typewriter and the shelf of books. Then he shut the door again behind him. At the end of the corridor the dog was sitting quietly, waiting for him.

Notes 1. See, for example, Carlos Baker’s biography Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969), 538. 2. As quoted in Michael Reynolds’ biography Hemingway: The 1930s (1997), 135.

Works Cited Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. London: The Literary Guild, 1969. Hemingway, Ernest. The Garden of Eden. London: Grafton Books, 1988. Overall, Sonia. Eden. Unpublished manuscript, 2019, typescript. Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: the 1930s. New York and London: Norton, 1997. Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons [1914]. Axminster: Uniform Books, 2012.

CHAPTER 8

To Cut a Long Story Short: The Shaping of Mary Lavin’s New Yorker Stories Gráinne Hurley

When I rewrite my stories I am really learning about writing. I am looking to the future, not the past. In a way, I am learning how to improve stories I haven’t yet written, stories that are only forming in my mind. Mary Lavin

Genetic criticism posits that the most rigorous basis for the study of artistic composition is not on the ‘final’ text but the examination of the ‘avant-texte’ (‘pre-text’), that is, the accumulation, tracking and analysis of an author’s notes, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs and correspondence that precedes the published version.1 It upholds that such an approach gives readers greater knowledge of the ‘final text’ in chronological, biographical, historical and cultural terms. Accordingly, the examination of Lavin’s pre-publication material relating to her New Yorker stories, specifically, ‘In a Café’ (1960), ‘Tom’ (1973), and ‘Eterna’ (1976), enables us to trace the genesis and evolution of her stories, and assist in giving a chronology to her textual changes while providing a

G. Hurley (B) Independent Scholar, Dublin, Ireland © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_8

145

146

G. HURLEY

genetic record. The exploration of this archival material also casts light on the New Yorker’s editing procedures and considers how Lavin’s stories were fashioned, in collaboration with her editors, in order to ready them for publication in the magazine. However, for Lavin there was never a ‘final’ version of a story, per se, as she continued to revise and hone her stories even after publication. The first version of Lavin’s stories tended to be formed in her head before she wrote them, as she explained in an interview in 1979: I can leave a story aside indefinitely, maybe for years before writing it. The manuscript of a first draft is almost impossible to read, either by me or anyone else because I feel that once I start a story, I must get it all down on paper as fast as possible or else I’ll lose it, whereas I think I would remember it forever if I hadn’t started to work on it.2

Lavin feared losing a story before she could write it down. Once she had put pen to paper, the process of revision began. Lavin’s letter to her chief New Yorker editor, Rachel MacKenzie reveals her urgency to get her numerous concepts down on paper: ‘I have so many stories I want to write & I have to spend so much time jotting down drafts I despair of ever finishing any single story’.3 She usually wrote several stories simultaneously and did ‘a great deal of cutting’ while producing as many as ten drafts for each and continually whittled them down to their essence,4 often taking ‘several months to finish a story’.5 This approach was to Lavin’s advantage when she became a contributing author to the New Yorker, notorious for its rigorous editorial procedures. Once she had come to be familiar with the New Yorker’s editorial processes, she explained to MacKenzie that she preferred to forward her works-in-progress to the magazine and await feedback, as it enabled her to move on to a fresh story: ‘It’s only a very rough version but if you don’t mind reading it like this, it helps me, as I can get on with a new story, & I always like to let a story settle as I write (like a frame!) before I go at it again’.6 Her method seems closely allied with New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross’s belief in the value of the exacting editorial process. Ross acknowledged that the editing style of the magazine could make writers anxious and ‘self-conscious’, but rather than viewing it as a deterrent he saw it as constructive and helpful. His advice was to get the story written: ‘and then at the end (with the help of an editor) pick up the chips’.7 Lavin was appreciative of the magazine’s editing and viewed

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

147

her New Yorker submissions as an opportunity to workshop her stories and hone her writing skills: ‘As usual I am grateful for the sharpening of both the story and the author! I always think—why couldn’t I see that myself!’8 This approach corresponds with genetic criticism’s assertion that the creative and writing practices are fundamental to the finished text and that they constitute a ‘poetics of process’.9 Lavin had a first-reading agreement with the New Yorker which published sixteen of her stories over an eighteen-year period (1958– 1976).10 Although she enjoyed a successful and lucrative relationship with the magazine, she still suffered a number of rejections over the years. The length of her stories was usually the main concern for the editors as space was limited in the publication, and they generally favoured more succinct stories. As a result, her stories were typically cut and tightened up. Lavin found it difficult to discard passages edited out of her stories and felt compelled to continue working on and tightening up cut material, in the hopes of saving it from omission. She believed cuts to be ‘a very integral part of the original conception of the story’.11 Nonetheless, Lavin proved an amenable writer in her dealings with the editors and while she was generally acquiescent to most changes and was happy to make significant revisions to stories in order to comply with the New Yorker’s demands and get her stories accepted, she agreed to them only if she felt those changes were appropriate and that they would not adversely affect the stories in any way. Given her process of continual revision and refinement of her work, Lavin could allow alterations she did not necessarily agree with, because she recognised that it was only one form of the fluid text.12 In some cases, she retained the changes made by the New Yorker editors in later publications of her stories, while in others she restored her original version. Even though Lavin needed to produce a finished product in order to be a commercial writer, she still perceived the result as an ongoing work-in-progress.

‘In a Café’ (1960) One of Lavin’s most popular stories, ‘In a Café’, was initially rejected by the New Yorker in April 1958. The key stumbling block was its length, but another aspect of the story was of minor concern: an early version of the story and Lavin’s correspondence with MacKenzie reveal that she had originally conceived the main protagonist in the story, Mary, as a writer.13 This detail was out of step with the magazine, which preferred not to

148

G. HURLEY

include stories that focussed on writers.14 Such narratives did not fit with the New Yorker’s ethos because it was of the opinion that a self-referential story was indulgent and would appeal only to a limited niche audience. In her role as an editor, MacKenzie inevitably viewed texts as fluid and adaptable; her job was to make stories fit the magazine’s requirements. Over two months after its submission, MacKenzie informed Lavin that the story had potential but she did not believe that the character being portrayed as a writer was important to the plot.15 In October of that year, after extensive revision, Lavin sent MacKenzie a condensed version. The magazine’s criticism of the story clearly registered with Lavin as she informed MacKenzie that she had cut it by 20 pages and omitted any mention of Mary being a writer.16 Both Lavin and MacKenzie believed the story to be improved and after further editing—mainly cutting—by the magazine, ‘In a Café’ was accepted for publication.17 In the New Yorker version of the story, the main character, Mary, is neither identified as a writer nor given a profession. Contrary to MacKenzie’s opinion that this detail was not important to the story, however, it is clear from a very early version that the protagonist’s profession as a writer is in fact integral to the narrative.18 Mary’s identification with the painter, Stielher, springs from her own artistic sensibility, and she believes his interest in her is the result of a mutual, unspoken recognition between artists: It was surely because they were both preoccupied with the same creative impulse that made [sic] Johann Stielher, a stranger, express[ed] a wish to meet her again. It was so stupid of Maudie to laugh at him. What did she know of an artist’s mind? If Maudie had not been with her, it would have been so different. She would, for one thing, have got him to discuss his work. She might even have taken up his invitation to go and see his paintings. Why had that seemed so unconventional and impossible? Because of Maudie; that was why.19

In the New Yorker version, Lavin revised this passage as follows: It was so like Maudie to laugh at him. What did she know of an artist’s mind? If Maudie had not been with her, it would have been so different. She might, for one thing, have got him to talk about his work, to explain the dissimilarity between the loose style of the pictures on the wall and the

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

149

exact, small sketches he’d been drawing on the margins of the paper. She might even have taken up his invitation to go and see his painting. Why had that seemed so unconventional—so laughable? Because of Maudie, that was why!20

Lavin compensated for the removal of Mary’s profession as a writer in the revised version by having her observe and recognise the painter’s different creative styles, which reveals her to have an appreciation and understanding of art. In the revised story, it is not the kindred feeling of fellow artists, but an assumed shared appreciation that connects them to each other, even though Mary is not herself an artist. This makes her reflections and notions seem somewhat more affected than in Lavin’s original concept of the story. In the early draft, Mary is shown to pay great attention to the detail of the scenes around her because, as a writer, she is constantly observing and analysing situations: … If she were describing the little [sic] café in the beginning of a short story, no, say a novel, that would be less exacting, she would have seized upon it, and then she would have ransacked thesaurus and dictionary for a profane word that would evaluate it to it. Forgetting that she was not composing a paragraph, Mary frowned. It was a pity not to be able to use the word liturgical. It would link up with the ecclesiastic suggestion from the earlier reference to stained glass. But the next minute she remembered that there was nothing obligatory about describing the place! Well, it passed the time, and occupied her mind.21

We are told that she no longer writes, or at least has not written ‘anything worthwhile or serious’, with the implication that she gave up writing upon marriage.22 Despite this, she is still engaged with the process of writing. When her husband dies, she is told that she will have to ‘knuckle down to her writing now’ and ‘take it [writing] up again!’ Offended, she scoffs: ‘–-Take it up again! Such a phrase—as if it were playing the piano, or riding a bicycle!’23 However, she muses that it was ‘perhaps, after all, a bit like riding a bicycle! You could not unlearn an art. See how just there a moment ago her mind had seized so avidly upon the word liturgical: that was [sic] the inescapable preoccupation. of art.[sic]’24 The fact that she had stopped the physical act of writing did not put an end to her creative and imaginative processes or prevent stories forming in her head.

150

G. HURLEY

Lavin understood that mental composition could not be turned on and off at will. The removal of the protagonist’s profession changed the context of the story considerably, yet Lavin reworked it so that the essence of the character and her motivation did not change. In the revised New Yorker version, she revealed that the character lost ‘a semblance of identity’ firstly in marriage, and secondly in widowhood. In the early draft, there is an additional loss of self: giving up her writing upon marriage. Lavin revised the story so that the bereaved Mary, despite owning a farm in Meath about which there was ‘something faintly snobby’, is not out of place in the bohemian café, by virtue of her being a widow, not a writer: ‘There could be nothing—oh, nothing—snobby about a widow. Just by being one, she fitted into this kind of café’.25 Ultimately, Lavin must have felt that the New Yorker’s key revision improved upon the text since she chose not to restore references to the character’s profession in later versions of the story. The collaborative process of editing often ended in changes congenial to Lavin. In this instance, we witness the magazine playing a direct role in influencing and altering a story considerably in order to suit its idiosyncratic house rules and, in turn, Lavin not only acquiescing to its directive but also embracing the change. The multiple versions of Lavin’s stories offer an insight into her decision-making process as regards the New Yorker’s suggested changes to her work. As we have seen, she evidently viewed certain cuts and changes as improvements to a text and subsequently retained them in later versions. Other edits were acceded to with regret and, it seems, solely to facilitate publication in the magazine. Such a practical approach was essential for a writer whose output was her livelihood, and in Lavin’s case, she made these sacrifices knowing that she could reinstate any cuts in future versions of the text. While Lavin acknowledged that overall the changes to ‘In a Café’ represented improvements to the story, the loss of some details was a cause of genuine disappointment. It was a rule at the New Yorker that stories and poems set at a particular time of year must be published in the corresponding season.26 The magazine hoped to place ‘In a Café’ in a winter or early spring issue and its requirement that texts be seasonal necessitated the removal of a reference in the story to nesting birds.27 Lavin resisted the cut because for her the birds evoked the linnets of a W. B. Yeats’s poem, presumably ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, which contains the line: ‘And evening full of the

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

151

linnet’s wings’ (line 8).28 Ultimately, however, she had to agree to the removal of the unseasonal line. The edited New Yorker version reads: If one were to put a hand between the railings now, it would be with a slight shock that the fingers would feel the little branches, like fine bones, under the feathers of mist. It was the time at which she used to meet Richard.29

In a later collected version of the story, however, Lavin took the opportunity to restore her nesting birds: If one were to put a hand between the railings now, it would be with a slight shock that the fingers would feel the little branches, like fine bones, under the feathers of mist. And in their secret nests small birds were making faint avowals in the last of the day. It was the time at which she used to meet Richard.30

Lavin’s reinstated line restores the sensuality of this passage. The image of the birds’ nest is maternal and evokes homemaking, while the word ‘secret’ suggests concealment, complicity, and security. Harmony and partnership are implied in the birds’ declarations, which coincide with the time the character meets her beloved. Here, the birds could be seen as having an almost erotic significance. Also, corresponding to a detail in Yeats’s poem, it is evening time when the birds sing. The reference is doubly significant because earlier in the story Mary recalls hearing birds singing at the moment of her husband’s death: She was standing beside him when, outside the hospital window, a bird called out with a sweet, clear whistle, and hearing it she knew that he was dead, because not for years had she really heard bird-song or bird-call, so loud was the noise of their love in her ears. When she looked down it was a strange face, the look of death itself that lay on the pillow. And after that brief moment of silence that let in the bird-song for an instant, a new noise started in her head, the noise of a nameless panic that did not always roar, but never altogether died down.31

Hearing birdsong upon her husband’s death forces the character to recognise that she is alone and also makes her aware of the outside world from which she had detached herself while married. Hearing the bird call at the end of the story has a similar effect upon her. It brings to mind her

152

G. HURLEY

husband and jolts her back into reality, and as a result, it becomes the first occasion on which she has been able to visualise him since his death. The restoration of this detail in subsequent publications of the story demonstrates that despite the adjustments demanded by the New Yorker, Lavin did not always feel the editing was fitting, even if the changes requested seemed minor and entailed merely the removal of a single line or, indeed, the substitution of a single word. Later publications of ‘In a Café’ show that Lavin tinkered with the wording used in the New Yorker version, rearranging and replacing individual words. For instance, ‘preoccupied her’ became ‘caught her attention’, while ‘apprehensively’ was changed to ‘urgently’. British spelling replaced American spelling, dashes were usually replaced with commas, and exclamation marks are more plentiful in the New Yorker version. In some cases, Lavin reduced the wording for economy of style, for example: ‘say back’ is changed to ‘reply’. At other times, she augmented the text to achieve more clarity and detail, as when the following sentence: ‘The sketches before him were so meticulous, the paintings so…’32 was revised to read: ‘The sketches before him were so meticulous, the paintings so— impressionistic’.33 Lavin added just one word in order to complete a thought not articulated in the New Yorker version, in which the description of the artwork is left unexpressed and suspended, showing that the widow is struggling to identify its stylistic slant. The information is withheld, leaving it open to interpretation. This fits in with the magazine’s aversion to stories with neatly tied-up endings. On occasion, Lavin makes small changes that introduce slight shifts of emphasis in a passage. The following lines, for example, appeared in the New Yorker version of ‘In a Café’: ‘Don’t you want this?’ she cried, as she saw that the small slip of paper with the specialty for the day that had been clipped to the menu card had come off and was caught on the rough sleeve of her jacket.34

In a revised version, Lavin’s nuanced additions subtly alter the passage: ‘Don’t you want this too?’ she cried, thankful, warm, as she saw that the small slip of paper with the speciality for the day that had been clipped to the menu card with a paper-bin [sic], had come off and remained under her elbow, caught on the rough sleeve of her jacket.35

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

153

Her addition of the words ‘thankful’ and ‘warm’ makes the widow more sensitive and friendly towards the artist and captures her mixed emotions. Lavin clearly drew on an early version of the story which reads: ‘Oh, don’t you want this too?’ she cried, as suddenly she saw that the small slip of paper with the specialty for the day that had been clipped to the menu card with a paper clip had come off and remained under her elbow, caught perhaps on the rough sleeve of her jacket.36

In restoring the words ‘remained under her elbow’, in the post-New Yorker version, Lavin elaborates upon the mishap with the menu and highlights the social clumsiness and awkwardness of the widow, and in turn amplifies her character. Here, we see evidence that, for Lavin, the text was unfixed and the process of revision fluid. Lavin’s changes to the following line highlight the importance she placed on the choice of each word: Never once since the day he died had she been able to call up his face again.37 Never once voluntarily since the day he died had she been able to see his face again.38

In the second example, Lavin’s simple addition of the word ‘voluntarily’ emphasises that the widow has no control over her memories. Whenever Mary tries to envision her husband, she ultimately fails, due to her extreme grief and his absence. With the insertion of ‘voluntarily’, Lavin draws out the specific nature of how grief is experienced, and adds complexity to the psychology of the character. In changing ‘call up’ to ‘see’ Lavin has substituted a forced action (call up) with an involuntary and spontaneous one (see). The word ‘voluntarily’ negates the words ‘call up’, and by changing it to ‘see’, Lavin manages to reinforce the sense of her protagonist’s helplessness. Other revisions are lengthier. In extending the following New Yorker line, Lavin highlights the difference between Mary, the widow who is unable to escape the memory of her dead husband and move forward with her life, and the newly widowed and younger Maudie, who it is assumed will marry again:

154

G. HURLEY

Maudie was so young, so beautiful. There was nothing about her to suggest that she was in any way bereft or maimed.39

The revised passage introduces sharply etched reflections that heighten the contrasts between the two women’s experience of widowhood: Maudie was young, and beautiful. Looking at her, it seemed quite inaccurate to say that she had lost her husband: it was Michael who had lost her, fallen out, as it were, while she perforce went onward. She didn’t even look like a widow. There was nothing about her to suggest that she was in any way bereft or maimed.40

Lavin expands upon the older widow’s resentful perception that because the younger widow is also beautiful and neither looks nor behaves like a widow, she is somewhat disassociated from her state, both subjectively and objectively. To Mary’s eyes, it seems that life continues on regardless for Maudie, who is left relatively unscathed by her husband’s untimely death, whereas Mary is rooted in the past, destined to grieve and be pigeonholed forever as a widow. In the following extracts, Mary has just informed the newly widowed Maudie that she is intentionally not offering her sympathy and is taken aback at Maudie’s appreciative and knowing reaction. The New Yorker publication reads: Mary looked at her in surprise. So Maudie apprehended these subtleties, too?41

The following reworked version develops the older widow’s frustration with well-intentioned sympathisers and the unwanted, rehashed and tactless platitudes which were typically doled out to the widow: Mary looked at her in surprise. Her mind rang back over the things people had said to her, and the replies: Them: It’s a good thing it wasn’t one of the children. Her: I’d give them all for him. Them: Time is a great healer. Her: Thief would be more like, taking away even my memory of him. Them: God’s ways are wonderful. Some day you’ll see His plan in all this.

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

155

Her: Do you mean, some day I’ll be glad he’s dead? So Maudie apprehended these subtleties too?42

In this passage, we see how Lavin can shock when she expands upon the exchanges for dramatic effect. While the empty clichés offered to Mary are intended as words of comfort and sympathy, they only serve to infuriate her. It is a sentiment echoed in many of Lavin’s stories. Strangers impose their advice upon the widow and in so doing blur both her own sense of identity and her memory of her deceased husband. Once more, Lavin returned to an earlier version of the story: It was so true. Mary looked at her in surprise. She could think of a dozen examples of what to reply. ‘God’s ways are wonderful. Some day you’ll see His plan in all this.’

Mourner: ‘You mean some day I’ll be glad he’s dead?’ Sympathiser: ‘Time is a great healer. Take my word for it. Time heals everything. In a few years time everything will seem different.’ Sympathiser: ‘It’s a good job you have the children. It would be worse if it was one of them. Mourner: Fools! I’d give them all for him. ‘You’ll feel better in the course of time. Time is a great healer.’ How acute of Maudie to have apprehended these discrepancies so quickly.43

We see Lavin both restoring and honing her original concept, which again reflects her approach to the art of composition and the fluidity of the text, which for her was always evolving. Curiously, Lavin changed the surname of the male artist in the New Yorker story from Johann Stielher to Johann van Stiegler. Perhaps this revision was in order to increase associations with art as it brings to mind names like van Eyck, van Dyck and van Gogh. Also, in the New Yorker version he is a teacher of German in a college, whereas in the later version he is an art teacher. This may have been because the New Yorker liked to situate stories and characters, and although Lavin makes it clear in the early draft that he is a foreigner in the story, she does not state where he is from. However, by making him a German language teacher, the reader’s assumption that he is from Germany is strengthened. Changing

156

G. HURLEY

him to an art teacher for the later version suggests that Lavin wanted to emphasise his life as an artist. Even though Mary is not a writer in the story, the reader could infer that she was based on Lavin herself, due to their shared experiences. Like Lavin, her namesake is a widow with a farm in County Meath. Lavin acknowledged that the story was somewhat autobiographical and confessed that she found such stories difficult to write: ‘Its [sic] one of those semi-autobiographical story [sic] —like “In a Café” & “The Middle of the Fields”—that I loathe anyway & find very hard. It will be so wonderful to be dealing with purely imagined material again—it never blurs or goes out of focus as the other does’.44 Lavin’s daughter, Elizabeth Walsh Peavoy, revealed that the fictional café was based on The Clog, which was located on South King Street, ‘the Greenwich Village of Dublin’.45 Akin to the character in the story, Lavin frequented this café shortly after her husband’s death and, according to Elizabeth, it became part of her new life.46 Conjecture might identify Lavin as the older widow, Mary. However, Elizabeth Cullinan, a fellow New Yorker writer and friend of Lavin’s, revealed that it was not, in fact, the older woman with whom Lavin identified herself, but the more recently widowed, younger character, Maudie.47 The disclosure is perhaps an unexpected one and demonstrates that while as readers we might discern autobiographical elements in Lavin’s story, the unreliability of our assumptions as to the details of those elements can be surprising.

‘Tom’ (1973) In sending the manuscript of ‘Tom’ to MacKenzie on 19 July 1972, Lavin wrote that she would be making many small changes but wanted her editor to see it at that stage.48 She was greatly relieved when the magazine accepted the story on 1 August 1972, as she had endured eleven rejections or ‘failures’, as she referred to them, from the magazine prior to its acceptance.49 Typical of Lavin’s writing approach, she informed MacKenzie that she had rewritten most of them, and would work on the rest over the winter, recognising that they were ‘far too long—not just for you but for their own good!’50 However, ‘Tom’ was a more fully formed story, as she revealed to MacKenzie that she had written more in the previous eighteen months than ever before: ‘I think I feel I must get it all down—& prune later –except Tom which just shaped itself’.51 This would suggest that a large part of the story was composed

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

157

and revised in her head prior to transcription, and perhaps explains why some stories were more easily written than others. ‘Tom’ was another story with semi-autobiographical features and was titled after Lavin’s father, Tom Lavin. In it, the narrator recalls memories of her mother and father. In fact, it was so closely autobiographical that Lavin’s ‘main problem’ with the story was whether she should include her father’s surname also and thus cement the historical context.52 In a note for MacKenzie on the manuscript, Lavin wrote: There was one place where it seemed essential when the old sweetheart remembers him. I felt she would say ‘Tom Lavin’ after all those years. But with a few small changes I think ‘Tom’ could pass. I would like your opinion. I think I might not mind too much after all.53

Tom’s surname is omitted from the New Yorker version and in subsequent publications. While there is no evidence of MacKenzie’s recommendation on this matter, it would appear that she felt the text did not require the inclusion of his surname. In the story, the narrator informs us that her father ‘had made a late, romantic, but not happy marriage. All the same he and my mother stayed together their whole lives through. They drew great satisfaction to the end of their days on this earth from having kept faith with each other’.54 The narrator’s mother lives in the past and clings to her memories. That her marriage is a grave disappointment to her does not go unnoticed by the child: ‘Long before I knew what passion was, I knew there was no passion between my parents’.55 Lavin enjoyed a close relationship with her father, who was a self-made but uneducated man. Despite his lack of formal education, he was ambitious for his daughter in the arenas of both education and sport. The New Yorker version reads: ‘Although my father had a deep and a strong mind and was the subtlest human being I ever knew, he had had small schooling. He could read and write, but with difficulty’.56 In the story, the narrator suspects that his lack of education prevented her mother from marrying him in the three years following their first meeting and might also have been the reason her mother did not keep her father’s love letters: I think she suspected from his handwriting his lack of schooling, and it would not be long until his letters proved her right. I have often wondered what became of his love letters to my mother. What did she do with them?

158

G. HURLEY

Surely bad spelling and grammar would not be cause for a woman to destroy her love letters?57

The narrator then recalls a letter her father wrote to her after seeing her play in a hockey match: Dear Little Daughter, This is a Pound For Pin Money and I hope ye will win. I was very Much Disopinted how you Plead you Seem to wait till the Ball Came to you that is Rong you should Keep Moving and Not to stay in the One Place. God Luck, Dadey.58

In an early draft of the story, the subsequent paragraph reads: Dadey is nothing unusual. It’s just Daddy spelt his way. I wish he hadn’t written ye for you, because his pronunciation was faultless. That “ye” looks like stage-Irish and makes his idiosyncrasies in spelling seem unbelievable. I have however still got the faded pink page on which he wrote that letter. [Anyway in Ireland we do say ye although we don’t write it, proving there is difference between speech and writing.]59

Lavin noted in the margin: ‘I feel the first part of this must be left in but the second part is banal? What do you think?’60 Here, Lavin is practising self-editing and perhaps also anticipating the magazine’s response. The editors must have concurred with Lavin as the text has been shortened in the New Yorker version to read: ‘Dadey’ is nothing unusual—just ‘Daddy’ spelled his way. I wish he hadn’t written ‘ye’ for ‘you’—it looks like stage Irish.61

The magazine’s version is more concise and does not elaborate upon the difference between spoken and written language. An example of the importance of linguistic precision to Lavin is confirmed in the following cut made by the magazine. In the galley proofs, the line: ‘My father had made his memories mine’62 was edited to read: ‘My father made his memories mine’.63 Lavin queried the cut of ‘had’, asking, ‘why cut had—seems important to me’.64 The New Yorker editors restored Lavin’s original line. The magazine also edited the following line: ‘I thought those memories of mother’s had vitiated all passion in her’, substituting ‘blunted’ for ‘vitiated’.65 Lavin conceded

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

159

that: ‘Vitiated may be a bit much but blunted is not right’.66 She suggested changing the sentence as follows: ‘I thought those memories of my mother’s had used up all passion in her’, which is the line published in the New Yorker.67 Authenticity was also important to Lavin, as evidenced when she strongly objected to the magazine’s suggestion that her father had played hockey in his youth, by noting in the margin of the galley proofs: ‘No—no—no. Hockey a later, English game’.68 The magazine instead used her suggestion of the Gaelic game of hurley (hurling):69 I should explain that in his day he had been a great athlete—a champion hurley player, but at a time when everyone on the team was expected to score from any place on the field at any time and however he could.70

Clearly, Lavin did not accede to changes without careful thought, and she was prepared to quibble over single words if she felt they did not ring true. Each word was carefully selected and of the utmost importance to the crafting of her stories. Nevertheless, Lavin recognised the value of the outside eye and liked to understand an editor’s reasons for changing her work. When the New Yorker editors removed the following quotation from ‘The Wanderer’: ‘Whither has gone the horse, whither has gone the man’, Lavin enquired about the reason for its removal in order to help her decide whether she should keep it or cut it when the story appeared in book form.71 MacKenzie explained that William Shawn had requested that the story be substantially condensed and the editors felt that the quotation was not essential.72 Although the magazine considered the deletion an insignificant change to the story, MacKenzie nevertheless recommended that Lavin reinstate the quotation for publication in book form because Lavin was keen on it and there was more scope in such publications.73 The need to plan for different modes of publication also explains why Lavin’s revisions were an integral part of her working process. When she revised, not only was she improving upon her stories and learning the art of composition, she was also tinkering with them for different markets.74 In a later version, the phrase ‘lepping stone walls’ was altered to ‘leaping stone walls’. ‘Lepping’ is Irish slang for leaping. While it is curious that an Irish publication would not retain the phrase, which was perhaps due to the dated vocabulary, it is even more curious that the

160

G. HURLEY

New Yorker kept it, as generally the magazine avoided the use of colloquialisms that might be unfamiliar to an American reader. In the story, when her father revisits his hometown of Frenchpark, Roscommon, there are references to Drumshanbo cemetery. The New Yorker publication reads: ‘“In Drumshanbo cemetery”, he said quietly, pointing to where in the distance I could see a small, walled cemetery, dotted with marking stones not much different from the rough field stones that surrounded the little plot’.75 However, Drumshanbo cemetery changes to Cloonshanvil cemetery in the collected version. Given that Drumshanbo is in Leitrim whereas Cloonshanvil is in Roscommon, the latter is more likely to be correct. It would appear that this is a detail that escaped the normally rigorous fact-checkers at the New Yorker, as it would not be possible to view Drumshanbo cemetery from Frenchpark since it is approximately thirty-three kilometers away. The later change when the story was published in collected form increases the accuracy of the detail. Overall, despite some minor practical changes, the story was not heavily re-edited and did not differ dramatically from the New Yorker version. Although the modifications to the text were not substantial, they nevertheless demonstrate that Lavin returned to her stories, even her masterpieces, and continued to revise them.

‘Eterna’ (1976) Lavin’s final story in the New Yorker, ‘Eterna’, was published on 8 March 1976. Again, we see how Lavin’s perseverance and revisions sometimes paid off, since some originally rejected stories were eventually accepted. ‘Eterna’ was first sent to the magazine in 1961, under the title ‘The Bog Light’. On 21 June 1961, MacKenzie rejected it because its situation was ‘too stock’ and she discouraged Lavin from reworking it, despite her obvious skill for doing so.76 Lavin’s driving motivation was to make a sale to the magazine but she was not surprised by the refusal, as she admitted in a letter to MacKenzie that she merely took a chance in reworking an old story: ‘It was only a gamble—an old story dressed up hastily, & I wasn’t a bit disappointed’.77 Even though Lavin informed MacKenzie that she was ‘truly appalled & ashamed of it’, she did not give up on it completely and thought she would revisit it.78 This again demonstrates that even when Lavin was unhappy with a story, she still believed she could rework it and improve upon it. She viewed her work as a responsive entity and therefore believed that there was always scope to recover it.

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

161

Lavin rewrote the story and, having ‘jazzed it up a bit’79 and gone through various working titles, including ‘Ignus Fatuus’ and ‘Outside the Gallery’, she resubmitted it in 1975 under the title ‘Perpetua’.80 Among numerous drafts of the story is a handwritten version of it in a notebook.81 The story was accepted and was edited by Derek Morgan. There is no correspondence between Lavin and Morgan in the New Yorker archive but, according to Lavin’s notes, he went through the proofs at length with her over the telephone. She made some notes on personalised headed paper that were ‘for when New York call’ in order to do the ‘proofs by phone’.82 Her daughter, Caroline, recalled that her mother was constantly on the phone with her New Yorker editors ‘trying to get the words right’.83 Certainly, the documents relating to ‘Eterna’ bear this out. On a galley proof, Lavin noted: ‘proof reading done over at least a 9 hours phone call—in two parts—’ and that ‘Derek Morgan worked on this over the phone for several hours, several nights and then the schedule was put [sic] forward a month!!!’84 The title ‘Perpetua’ had to be changed as William Shawn recalled that the magazine had run a Donald Barthelme story with the same title in the 12 June 1971 issue.85 ‘Perpetua’ was not only the title of the story, but also the name of the nun featured in it. Lavin re-titled it ‘Eterna’, and consequently renamed the nun. After the story was published, Lavin made a note on the letter from the New Yorker, which accompanied the returned manuscript of the story, that she would ‘change it back to Perpetua if collected some day’.86 In the same note, she explained the origin of the new title: when she could not find a suitable title, her second husband, Mick, a former Jesuit priest, suggested ‘Eterna’.87 Although Lavin had never heard of a Saint Eterna, she was ‘delighted it was reasonably close to Perpetua in its connotations’.88 After she sold the story, Mick told her that he had invented the name.89 The concocted name is significant, since an Irish Catholic nun would have to have taken a canonised saint’s name when joining the convent, even as a novice. While this error went unnoticed by the New Yorker fact-checking department, other inaccuracies did not. In a draft of the story, Lavin referred to Monet’s painting ‘The River Seine’, housed in the National Gallery of Ireland. However, the New Yorker researched this and found that the title, according to both the Shell Guide to Ireland and Putnam’s Guide to the Art Centers of Europe, was ‘River Scene’.90 The magazine questioned whether chestnuts would be in bud in February, to which Lavin responded: ‘In Ireland yes’.91 It

162

G. HURLEY

queried the line: ‘The town was badly lit, but when they got out of it, and the stars began to pierce the sky’ with the observation: ‘Even though rain is “easing off” would the sky be this clear this suddenly?’92 Lavin suggested ‘had eased off’ in the margin, which was published in the magazine.93 Again, this reveals the precision demanded by the New Yorker; every detail needed to be accurate. Lavin both shared and appreciated the magazine’s concern for such accuracy and attention to detail. Although Lavin’s stories were expertly edited for the New Yorker, she did not view these versions as definitive or superior and she continued to re-shape them. In editing her New Yorker stories, she internalised to some extent the role of the New Yorker editors and, in turn, re-edited their changes as she saw fit. Revision was an ongoing process for Lavin and the fact that the New Yorker usually wanted her work cut significantly served to encourage and aid this practice. The process of revision and re-publication does not negate earlier versions, nor does what some consider to be a final or finished text. As far as Lavin was concerned, there was never a final version of her work and her revisions demonstrate a commitment to improving the stories. Revision was viewed as an opportunity to correct her work as she did not wish to leave ‘slovenly work behind’ her.94 In an interview some years before her death, Lavin noted that many people were critical of her rewriting her earlier stories. She confided that she did not share Seán Ó Faoláin’s belief that an author’s work should remain as it was when it was written, and she defended the reworking of her stories: If young people read your work I think you owe it to them to try and do the best you can do with your craft. And if you see faults and get a chance—in a second edition or an anthology—to correct them, I think it is only proper to do so. I thought this when I was a young writer, and I still do. There’s another defence to be made for this re-editing. I’ve brought forty years of experience to rewriting some of my work.95

Lavin felt a duty towards the reader. In the same interview, she quoted a verse by W.B. Yeats: The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song Should know that issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.96

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

163

However, Lavin asserted that in rewriting she was not remaking herself but learning the craft of writing for future stories: ‘When I rewrite my stories I am really learning about writing. I am looking to the future, not the past. In a way, I am learning how to improve stories I haven’t yet written, stories that are only forming in my mind’.97 Lavin’s tireless revision, even after publication, was part of a creative process which she acknowledged enabled her to improve upon her stories and her craft. It also gave her ultimate control over her stories, so that, despite intervention from the New Yorker, Lavin remained the final author and editor.

Notes 1. Jean Bellemin-Noël coined the term ‘avant-texte’ in his 1972 book Le texte et l’avant-texte:Les brouillons d’un poème de Milosz. See also Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes, ed. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004) for an exposition on genetic criticism. 2. Catherine Murphy, ‘Mary Lavin, an Interview,’ Irish University Review 9, no. 2 (Autumn 1979): 207–224. 3. The New Yorker Records, 20 March 1961 (Box no. 787, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1961). Lavin’s initial submissions to the New Yorker were handled by Edith Oliver and Mary D. Rudd. Rachel MacKenzie took over as Lavin’s editor in 1958 and remained her editor until her departure from the magazine in 1975, when other editors handled her work including Charles McGrath and Derek Morgan. 4. The New Yorker Records, 9 September 1960 (Box no. 779, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1960). 5. Leah Levenson, The Four Seasons of Mary Lavin (Dublin: Marino Books, 1998), 114. 6. The New Yorker Records, 31 December 1958 (Box no. 761, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1958). 7. Harold Ross, letter to Mrs Norton Baskin, 30 November 1945 (qtd. in Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker’s Harold Ross, ed. Thomas Kunkel). 8. Lavin, letter to MacKenzie, the New Yorker Records, 10 September 1960 (Box no. 779, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1960). 9. Dirk Van Hulle, ‘Modernism, Consciousness, Poetics of Process,’ Modernism Volume 1, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 321–337. 10. The first-reading agreement was a contract offered to some contributors which gave the magazine first refusal of work in return for an annual

164

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

G. HURLEY

retainer. The agreement afforded Lavin a certain security, as she revealed to Maev Kennedy in an interview that she: ‘felt as grateful to the New Yorker in those early days as she was for the Guggenheim Fellowships which she was awarded in 1959 and 1960, because they gave her financial security to risk everything on the short story, a perilous business’. ‘The Saturday Interview: Maev Kennedy Talked to Mary Lavin,’ The Irish Times, 13 March 1976. Lavin, letter to MacKenzie, the New Yorker Records, 10 September 1960 (Box no. 779, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1960). John Bryant defines the fluid text as “any literary work that exists in more than one version. It is ‘fluid’ because the versions flow from one to another”. See The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 1. The New Yorker Records, 7 April 1958 (Box no. 761, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1958). Ibid. Wolcott Gibbs’s tenth rule in his guide ‘Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles’, stated (quoting Harold Ross) that that ‘Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer’. He advised that any articles containing ‘authors, reporters, poets, etc.’ were undesirable and, if these professions featured, they were to be changed to another profession or removed altogether’ (Reprinted in Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Harold Ross, ‘Genius in Disguise’). The New Yorker Records, 23 June 1958 (Box no. 761, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1958). The New Yorker Records, 29 October 1958 (Box no. 761, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1958). The New Yorker Records, 7 July 1959 (Box no. 770, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1959). MacKenzie and Lavin continued to work on the story after its acceptance. The story was selected by the magazine for inclusion in the collection Stories from the New Yorker 1950–1960 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960). Mary Lavin Papers, ‘In a Café,’ typescript, undated early version, Box 7, 1–46 leaves. On the title page of the typescript, Lavin has written ‘Early Version’ and noted that it ‘must be a very early version. The end is not fully developed’. Mary Lavin Papers, typescript, undated early version, ‘In a Café,’ Box 7, 1–46 leaves. ‘In a Café,’ the New Yorker, 13 February 1960, 37. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘In a Café,’ typescript, undated early version, Box 7, 1–46 leaves. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

165

25. ‘In a Café,’ the New Yorker, 13 February 1960, 32. 26. Ross often reprimanded his copy editors for any inaccuracies that got into its pages, and in a note to his editors, he reminded them of the necessity to check for errors: ‘I wish that all you gentlemen would watch not only for typographical errors—not so much for typographical errors in fact—as for such things as oversights in writing and editing, wordings which will sound untimely when appearing in print (such as mentions of overcoats, straw hats, and other seasonable things as well as events), uniformity in style, and all such things’. Harold Ross, letter to Rogers, E. M. Whitaker, Hobart Weekes, Reed Johnston, and Fred Packard, 14 June 1929 (qtd. in Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker’s Harold Ross, edited by Thomas Kunkel). 27. The New Yorker Records, 9 December 1959 (Box no. 770, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1959). 28. Lavin, letter to MacKenzie, the New Yorker Records, 19 January 1959 (Box 779, Lavin, Mary, 1960). The letter, erroneously dated 1959 instead of 1960, was in response to a letter from MacKenzie dated 9 December 1959. 29. ‘In a Café,’ the New Yorker, 13 February 1960, 39. 30. ‘In a Café,’ In a Café (Dublin: Town House, 1995), 201. 31. ‘In a Café,’ the New Yorker, 13 February 1960, 33. 32. Ibid. 33. ‘In a Café,’ In a Café, 189. 34. ‘In a Café,’ the New Yorker, 13 February 1960, 33. 35. ‘In a Café,’ In a Café, 189. 36. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘In a Café,’ typescript, undated early version, Box 7, 1–46 leaves. 37. ‘In a Café,’ the New Yorker, 13 February 1960, 33. 38. ‘In a Café,’ In a Café, 188. 39. ‘In a Café,’ the New Yorker, 13 February 1960, 34. 40. ‘In a Café,’ In a Café, 191. 41. ‘In a Café,’ the New Yorker, 13 February 1960, 33. 42. ‘In a Café,’ In a Café, 190. 43. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘In a Café,’ typescript, undated early version, Box 7, 1–46 leaves. 44. The New Yorker Records, 14 February 1962 (Box no. 794, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1962). 45. Elizabeth Peavoy-Walsh, Preamble, In a Café (Dublin: Town House, 1995). Brendan Lynch in his book Parsons Bookshop locates the café in Clarendon Street (89). 46. Preamble, In a Café, XIII. 47. Author’s interview with Elizabeth Cullinan, 20 October 2009, New York.

166

G. HURLEY

48. The New Yorker Records, 19 July 1972 (Box no. 861, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1972). 49. The New Yorker Records, Postmarked 5 August 1972 (Box no. 861, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1972). 50. Ibid. 51. The New Yorker Records, 5 August 1972 (Box no. 861, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1972). 52. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Tom,’ typescript, 15 July 1972, Box 12. 53. Ibid. 54. ‘Tom,’ the New Yorker, 20 January 1973, 34. 55. Ibid., 35. 56. Ibid., 34. 57. Ibid., 36. n. 58. Ibid. 59. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Tom,’ typescript, 15 July 1972, folder 1 of 2, 37 leaves. 60. Ibid. Lavin’s comments are written in ink over a pencil note which reads ‘Repetitive’. 61. ‘Tom,’ the New Yorker, 20 January 1973, 36–37. 62. Mary Lavin Papers, typescript, ‘Tom,’ 15 July 1972, folder 1 of 2, 37 leaves. 63. ‘Tom,’ the New Yorker, 20 January 1973, 34. 64. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Tom,’ corrected galley proofs, 18 October 1972, Box 12, folder 2 of 2, 17 leaves. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. ‘Tom,’ the New Yorker, 20 January 1973, 36. 71. The New Yorker Records, Lavin, letter to MacKenzie, undated letter from 1973 (Box no. 867, Lavin, Mary 1973). 72. The New Yorker Records, 15 January 1973 (Box no. 867, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1973). 73. Ibid. 74. All of Lavin’s stories originally published in the New Yorker were printed again, either in magazines or journals and/or collections of her works and in various anthologies. Several of her collections bore the titles of her New Yorker stories. 75. ‘Tom,’ the New Yorker, 20 January 1973, 40. 76. The New Yorker Records, 21 June 1961 (Box no. 787, Lavin, Mary 1961).

8

TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT …

167

77. The New Yorker Records, there are two dates written on the letter: 27 June and 29 June, 1961 (Box no. 787, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1961). 78. The New Yorker Records, 28 June 1961 (the date of 21 June 1961 is crossed out). Box no. 787, FOL: Lavin, Mary 1961. 79. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Perpetua,’ Lavin’s notes on covering letter from the New Yorker returning the manuscript of the story, 7 March 1979, folder 23, Box 10. 80. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Perpetua,’ typescript, 20 February 1975 (the date of 20 February 1975 is printed on the title page and Lavin has also handwritten a date of 4 March 1975 on the same page, which presumably relates to the date of her handwritten revisions on the text), Box 10. 81. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Perpetua,’ notebook, 8 April 1975, Box 10. 82. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Perpetua,’ manuscript, 31 January 1976, notes for galley proofs. Title: ‘Eterna,’ Box 10. 83. ‘Mary Lavin: A Personal Perspective,’ lecture delivered by Caroline Walsh, Trevor/Bowen Summer School, Mitchelstown Literary Society, 25 May 2008. 84. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Perpetua,’ manuscript, 18 December 1975 D. Morgan Before March 1976, Box 10 and ‘Perpetua,’ galley proofs, 18 December 1975 D. Morgan Before March 1976. 85. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Perpetua,’ ‘Mr. Shawn’s queries on “Perpetua,”’ 1 December 1976, folder 20, Box 10. 86. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Perpetua,’ 7 March 1979, Box 10. Lavin’s notes on covering letter from the New Yorker returning the manuscript of the story, 7 March 1979, folder 23, Box 10. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Mary Lavin Papers, ‘Perpetua,’ galley proofs, 18 December 1975 D. Morgan Before March, 1976, Box 10. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. ‘Eterna,’ the New Yorker, 8 March 1976, 34. The magazine also changed English spelling for American spelling: ‘septicaemia’ was changed to ‘septicemia’, ‘Manoeuvre’ became ‘maneuver’, and ‘parlour’ was changed to ‘parlor’. Fitzwilliam Square, a business area in Dublin’s city centre, is changed simply to Dublin. 94. Maev Kennedy, The Irish Times, 13 March 1976. 95. L. Robert, and Sylvia Stevens, Studies, ‘An Interview with Mary Lavin,’ An Irish Quarterly Review 86, no. 341 (Spring 1997): 43–50. 96. The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, II, preliminary poem (1908).

168

G. HURLEY

97. L. Robert and Sylvia Stevens, Studies, ‘An Interview with Mary Lavin,’ An Irish Quarterly Review 86, no. 341 (Spring 1997): 43.

Works Cited Bellemin-Noël, Jean. Le texte et l’avant-texte: les brouillons d’un poème de Milosz. Paris: Larousse, 1972. Bryant, John. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Deppman, Jed, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (eds.). Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant- Textes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Kennedy, Maev. ‘The Saturday Interview: Maev Kennedy Talked to Mary Lavin.’ The Irish Times, 13 March 1976. Kunkel, Thomas. Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker. New York: Random House, 1997. ——— (ed.). Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker’s Harold Ross. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. Lavin, Mary. In a Café. Dublin: Town House, 1995. ———. ‘In a Café.’ The New Yorker, 13 February 1960. ———. ‘Tom.’ The New Yorker, 20 January 1973. ———. ‘Eterna.’ The New Yorker, 8 March 1976. Lavin, Mary, and Catherine Murphy. ‘Mary Lavin: An Interview.’ Irish University Review 9, no. 2 (1979): 207–224. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477285. Levenson, Leah. The Four Seasons of Mary Lavin. Dublin: Marino Books, 1998. Lynch, Brendan. Parsons Bookstore: At the Heart of Bohemian Dublin, 1949–1989. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2007. Mary Lavin Papers. James Joyce Library, Special Collections, University College Dublin. New Yorker Records, 11 September 1957. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Robert, L., Mary Lavin, and Sylvia Stevens. ‘An Interview with Mary Lavin.’ Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 86, no. 341 (1997): 43–50. http://www. jstor.org/stable/30092397. Van Hulle, Dirk. ‘Modernism, Consciousness, Poetics of Process.’ In Modernism Volume 1. Ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007): 321–337. Walsh, Caroline. ‘Mary Lavin—A Personal Perspective.’ Trevor/Bowen Summer School 2008. Mitchelstown Literary Society, 25 May 2008. Yeats, W.B. The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, II. London: Chapman & Hall, 1908.

CHAPTER 9

The Handmade Tale: The Paper Medium as the Place for Action Claire Bustarret Translated by Jonathan Bloom

In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, redirected and re-sealed. —Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter

Anticipating Jean-Claude Schmitt’s observation that hand movement during the act of handwriting consists of drawing organized signs on a

C. Bustarret (B) Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France J. Bloom University of Paris-Dauphine, Paris Sciences & Lettres, Paris, France © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_9

169

170

C. BUSTARRET

Fig. 9.1 Paul Valéry, ‘La main et l’œil …’ [‘The Hand and the Eye…’], Cahier 219 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, N.a.fr. 19245, f. 77v.)

surface, either directly by hand or with the assistance of a writing instrument,1 Paul Valéry proclaimed that writing is a complex activity in which the inseparable physical and intellectual processes deserve equal attention. One of the many illustrated observations that fill the poet’s notebooks questions whether it is the eye that guides the hand when it writes a line, or the hand that precedes the eye (see Fig. 9.1). Valéry’s annotated drawing captures the essential elements of the writing process: the hand moves in the foreground, seen from below, equipped with a writing instrument whose point draws a wavy line on a sheet of paper over which the poet’s face leans, with eyes supposedly gazing at the hand in the act of writing.2 But actually, having failed to estimate the amount of space he needed for the drawing, Valéry began too close to the edge and was blocked by the spiral binding on his right from completing the sketch satisfactorily. Perhaps his failure to draw the eyes as if they are looking down is responsible for eyes that seem to be looking, not at the sheet underneath the handwriting, as the text indicates, but at the opposing blank page, or contemplatively into the distance, unimpeded by the spiral binding. The unusual viewpoint might be the table’s or the sheet’s itself, although the sheet is not visible. Does such an inversion of viewpoint validate Anne-Marie Christin’s historical perspective on writing practices3 and turn the medium—here the paper—into an integral element of the drawing process, common to writing and designing? Only by reducing the act of writing to the tracing of a cursive line— ‘the line’—can Valéry alter the usual perception of the writer.4 From

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

171

this perspective, all textual production, globally considered a chain of processes, just vanishes. In contrast, Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life (1990), defined writing as ‘a sequence of articulated operations, both physical and mental’, which transpires ‘on the actual blank page’, an ‘itinerant, gradual and regulated practice like a walk’. Here, the eye-hand coordination involved in the act of writing is part and parcel of a temporal unfolding on the neutral paper medium. The product of the graphic act is no longer a line but a text, which the reader perceives as a sequence of lines that extend to one or more pages. The given medium helps determine the writer’s vision and provides an adequate space for the act of writing: ‘[A]n autonomous surface is positioned under the eye of the writer, who thus gives himself free rein to do as he wishes’.5 Although de Certeau cites the paper medium as one of the three ‘defining elements’ constituting the act of writing, he paradoxically terms it a blank space or ‘non-lieu’. Does he mean a utopian, invisible element of the act? For those interested in the written artifacts, the medium’s abstract, elusive status is nonetheless revealing. Both of these approaches to writing involve paper, Occidental writers’ preferred medium for over five centuries, but both authors have ignored how the medium itself contributes to the act of writing. Whether ‘writing’ is an equivalent of inscribing (as for Valéry) or composing (as for de Certeau), the study of this practice tends to overlook the role of the medium. As soon as one focuses on the movements integral to the act of writing, the paper medium recedes into a blind spot. In her criticism of Barthes’ fascination with handwriting gestures, Anne-Marie Christin aptly theorized about this denial of the medium’s fundamental role. She, by contrast, affirmed ‘the autonomy of the written space’, ‘which is to say that it is not only a surface, but a manipulable object ’.6 The purpose of this essay is to use a variety of holograph drafts now available in various repositories, on dedicated websites or in recent facsimile editions of exceptional quality,7 to explore and interpret writers’ hand movements in contemporary manual writing. I do this to offer a new assessment of the paper medium in the writing process. In opposition to the usual focus on inscribing gestures, which many graphists, neurologists, anthropologists, and historians of writing, as well as paleographers and specialists of genetic criticism, have analyzed, I shall examine various hand movements which do not themselves produce letters, symbols, or signs, but contribute nevertheless—at least in my hypothesis—to how the written object is structured.8 For this purpose, the method I shall use will

172

C. BUSTARRET

be codicological, which means that I shall conduct a detailed examination of various written materials. Field research in everyday writing practices9 enriches this examination. What does the hand do when, as it is writing, it folds, turns over, cuts, pastes, tears off, or assembles the medium upon which it writes— to mention only some of the most usual physical manipulations which give shape to the written object? How does the paper medium, materially modified by these actions, lend itself to the often disjointed process of the ‘hand writing’, to quote Claude Simon in reference to the frontispiece drawing of Orion Blinded (1970)—featuring his desk at the very moment his hand uses the pen? How does each writer exploit the malleable properties of a given material as he or she goes along, fashioning not only a manipulable object, but also an appropriate space where he or she can easily act? Among the practices we observe, how can we distinguish idiosyncratic originality from the common application of writing techniques such as they have been taught at school or even in professional training, and are also influenced by the everyday surroundings that extend well beyond the desk? These are the questions that arise from both Valéry’s sketch and de Certeau’s definition: it seems that the poet’s and the historian’s common effort to capture the act of writing prevents them from seeing the medium, although like Poe’s purloined letter it lies just under their hands.

Writing: A ‘Manual Gesture’? In a 1967 essay entitled Variations on Writing, whose anthropological focus flows from his reading of the work of Leroi-Gourhan, Roland Barthes defined writing as a primarily ‘manual gesture’, which he called ‘scription’ and whose result he called ‘scripture’. He therefore suggested we give renewed attention to the writer’s body as well as to the material interactions he or she performs. Barthes saw that the act of writing not only ensured that recorded marks should last, but also that it was ‘a boundless practice into which the subject enters fully’. He added that ‘this practice is therefore quite unlike the mere transmission of messages’.10 By singling out the material aspects of writing, we see that the act of writing produces artifacts and not only ‘texts’ or ‘messages’. If we use Poe’s clue-based model with which this essay begins, our examination of manuscripts will be limited to what we can infer about the writers’ hand movements. For example, a folded sheet whose edge is

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

173

‘chafed’ shows that both hands have acted to invert the pre-existent fold, made by other hands with a paper knife. Far from being meaningful in themselves, the various material clues that preserve a past action require a series of correlations, which must take into account a whole set of ‘ways of doing things’ pertaining not only to the genetic case file of a written work, or even to an individual who performs specific physical acts, but also to the contemporary writing techniques proper to a particular social and historical context—so far as we know it. In the wake of Roger Chartier’s ground-breaking work, historian Jean Hébrard published in 1999 a thorough historical study of the mediums of personal writing, which he based on the observation that ‘the surfaces on which these innumerable ink marks get inscribed are neither described nor taken into consideration’. While proposing tools with which to compare different professional norms of writing‚ and tracking their evolution since the sixteenth century, the study revealed the researcher’s limited ability to assess where writers were ‘freewheelers’ acting outside the norms, whether scholars or those less literate appropriated such norms. These limitations result from insufficient knowledge of the paper market at the time and the ways in which various writing mediums were commonly used.11 Indeed, it is only through an overview that the material study of writers’ manuscript drafts can help us reconstruct the writing processes, especially within the scope of genetic criticism. Until now, in as far as they make use of material descriptions only to date or to classify manuscripts, textual geneticists have tended—with a few exceptions—to ignore the diversity of hand movements which underlies the main ‘operations’ of writing such as inscribing, deleting, reordering, and replacing. Nevertheless, the material analysis of a variety of handwritten corpuses‚12 and some scholars’ attention to scribal production as a graphic activity‚13 prompt us to object to Barthes’ use of the singular when he defined writing as ‘a manual gesture’. The act of writing cannot possibly consist of one sole physical gesture. Not only does it require a great number and variety of hand movements, but the combination of these corporal movements is, according to de Certeau, one of the characteristics of ‘bricolage’—the makeshift way sequences, procedures, and ‘chains of writing’ develop. Outside of literary studies, there have been several analyses of writing in such places as factories, companies, legal offices, and hospitals and they have clearly demonstrated the extent to which the materials themselves influence the

174

C. BUSTARRET

act of writing.14 Conscious that writing is a practical act,15 several anthropologists have added a codicological dimension to their ethnographic research, while some historians of the book have begun to undertake ethnographic surveys.16 In a Malian cotton concession, in French agricultural holdings or in Ethiopian archives, the historians’ attention to the making and manipulation of written objects enabled them to determine which relevant material elements were actually characteristic of a specific writing context. They occasionally confirmed this through observation in the field. To establish a repertoire of writing gestures, can we, by default, resort to writers’ written and spoken testimonials? Although some of them, like Valéry or Simon, are fascinated by the ballet of their own hands on the diminutive stage of their desk,17 what they have to say about the scribal act does not always give a comprehensive account of their constant involvement with the writing medium, which nonetheless plays an essential part in the action. As Pierre Michon observes, ‘When at an early or later stage of life we take to writing, we are unaware that the artifact with which we are tinkering may, one day, if we are lucky enough, be called a “manuscript”’. Even experienced writers are not necessarily conscious that ‘tinkering’ is actually a technical practice.18 Michon, like many writers, tends to ignore the medium’s role and the stages of the creative process: I am not in the slightest a devout believer in pencil writing: if at the age of four I had been taught to use my ten fingers on a keyboard, I would have forged an organic connection between this horizontal display and my own mind instead of the one between the hand writing and my mind. I am therefore inclined to believe that I would have written the same things directly on my computer. [italics mine]19

Michon seems to limit himself to subsuming the technical aspects of writing as part of an acquired ‘organic connection’, and in his view the action of the hands consists in producing‚ not written objects, but a text. Although it proves dependent on historical constraints and on practical circumstances, the personal choice of writing materials plays nonetheless an influential role in the ‘ways of doing’ which pertain to the ‘techniques of the body’ that Marcel Mauss analyzed.20 Actually, Michon’s insistence on the ritual and liturgical nature of the system echoes Mauss: ‘So the pen, the paper, the body movements captured on the medium, the little drama performed on it, with its high stakes—all that adds up to

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

175

an overall set of ritual objects and a ritual dance which must imperatively be just right and well structured, so that the right text can emerge’.21 Annie Ernaux, for her part, also insists on the physical involvement which associates hand movement with that of the entire body, which is more constrained when the writer works on a computer, whereas handwriting ‘offers more freedom’: ‘I am not defending an archaic writing tool such as the pen or the pencil against the use of the computer’, she keenly adds, ‘for what I defend is the hand—the hand in its direct connection with the mind thinking’.22 What matters therefore is no longer to make out whether what prevails is the hand or the mind, as Valéry tried to do, but to examine their efficient interaction: Christian Jacob makes reference to the sleight of hand as well as its intelligence to consider the most diverse artifacts—including textual ones—‘spaces of knowledge’.23 To figure out the specific status of the supportive medium within the scribal setup—i.e., the conditions required for the manual fabrication of a written object—I propose to question specifically the unwritten traces which are the result of the interactions between the ‘dance’ of the hand and the ‘things’ that the writer uses to write. Among the scribal movements which do not involve the use of writing instruments, I shall hereafter examine three associated ‘pairs’ of gestures: folding and unfolding; moving sideways and turning over; cutting and pasting together. The latter involve two movements which are crucial for managing the medium: detaching and attaching. However, so far all of those physical manipulations have been largely overlooked because they are such an integral part of the composition process.

Folding, Unfolding: The Medium as Three-Dimensional Space? Folding and unfolding are two fundamental gestures in the culture of the codex. Through them, the material mediums do not just offer the writer a two-dimensional writing space: they constitute three-dimensional manipulable objects. Entitled The Gorgeous Nothings , the recent facsimile edition of some of Emily Dickinson’s poems shows the reader, with a remarkable host of details, a collection of tiny manuscripts, most of them pencil-written on salvaged envelopes. Stamps and parts of addresses remain and show that the American poetess recycled the envelopes of the letters she received, thus turning them into a medium for writing. In so doing, she was probably complying (as J. Bervin has written) with the

176

C. BUSTARRET

practical tips of house management handbooks‚ such as ‘Keep old letters to write on the back’, found for instance in Lydia Child’s The American Frugal Housewife (1830).24 Nevertheless, although the recipient usually opens the envelope’s topside, the manipulations which enable the envelopes to be reused are unconventional: they appear to be the result of a singular creative ‘skill’. To write on the inside of the envelope, Dickinson usually unfolded it after cutting the two edges with a paper knife or a pair of scissors, which preserved only one of the original folds. Therefore, the format she obtained had only one vertical fold in the middle, just like the double page of an open notebook—what codicologists call a bifolium. Whether or not she used the whole surface at her disposal—its irregular outlines were the result of how she cut the edges—Dickinson almost invariably wrote down the lines of her poems in two columns, on either side of the only fold that was kept. The fold therefore served as the axis which separated them (Emily Dickinson, Amherst College Library, A 339). She only drew a hasty vertical stroke to fulfill this function when the piece of envelope she used did not have any fold ‘pre-inscribed’. Her idiosyncratic transformation of envelopes into paper scraps—while preserving their folds—perhaps enabled her, in refolding them, to conceal her poems and restore the envelopes’ secrecy. These minimal gestures, folding and unfolding, are nonetheless among the most usual ones in Occidental written culture, and have been so since the invention of the codex, a medium made of sheets which are folded and bound together. Initially, these sheets were made of parchment, replaced over time by paper. In the early centuries A. D., the codex supplanted the ancient manuscripts’ traditional roll (volumen), made of sheets pasted together end to end that required the movements of rolling up and unrolling.25 Even without considering the structure of the printed book, not to mention that of everyday broadsheet newspapers—two written objects which already dominated the written culture of New England in the middle of the nineteenth century—the gestures of folding and unfolding cannot be dissociated, even today, from the manipulation of bound writing mediums. Opening or closing a copybook, a notebook, a datebook, a register—whether writers hold the objects in their hands or put them down on a desk,—allows them to start and complete the writing activity and to work out with precision how long a working session will last.26 Outside these limits, both the writers’ preparation of the writing medium and its final treatment involve hand movements, such as the

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

177

folding of letters before they are sent. The envelope itself consists of a folded and sealed sheet of paper, i.e., of a sort of wrapping which preserves, to a greater or lesser extent, the secrecy of the message.27 When applied to loose sheets, the act of folding was one of the copyists’ and secretaries’ everyday practices. They methodically prepared the writing mediums in the format that the writer requested or that the rules of protocol prescribed. We must remember that until the nineteenth century, handmade paper was sold folded in folio format, because wet sheets were spread out and dried on lines or ropes. To obtain a quarto size, which was the standard format for rough drafts in the eighteenth century, the secretaries or the writers themselves began by unfolding the bifolium and cutting it into two equal halves, following the fold that already existed; then, he or she refolded in half the sheet obtained in this way. The size of the new bifolium, which was easier to handle than the folio format, prefigured that of school copybooks of the second half of the nineteenth century.28 As we see, the fold was constantly used as a guideline to cut the paper. The small index sheets in octavo or sextodecimo format that Buffon’s collaborators prepared for him, or those that Barthes obtained by dividing into quarters a sheet of wove ‘typing’ paper, were the result of a similar process (folding a sheet into four or eight parts before writing). We can see therefore that the size of the medium, modified as the case may be by folding, is not only a product of writers’ individual habits, but also of their more or less standardized interactions with the supportive material at their disposal. We often tend to forget that folding was also necessary to divide into two equal columns the writing surface of working manuscripts such as those of Condorcet or Hugo. They used the column on the right to write out a fair copy and used the one on the left to make corrections and additions. This long-standing convention, adopted from accounting practices, as J. Hébrard has demonstrated, proves how popular such practices were in a variety of writing situations.29 This system can apply either to the task sharing between authors and their secretaries, who are in charge of copying out the text, or to successive revisions in the same hand on the sheet’s surface—rather than on the page, for the fold inevitably impacts the back as well as the front. Malian villagers, for example, fold their personal notebooks in this way to carry them.30 The constitution of a satisfactory material situation requires a compromise between the writer’s needs and the available paper products, and specific gestures often facilitate this compromise. Although he began

178

C. BUSTARRET

living in France in 1937, Emil Cioran waited until the end of 1947 before writing his first book in French, Précis de décomposition (1949). Its handwritten drafts composed on standard size typing paper (270 × 210 mm) include some unfolded bifolia of larger dimensions taken from fine-lined standard size notebooks. The Romanian-born philosopher would move them sideways by a quarter of a turn to unfold them vertically.31 This process enabled him to obtain loose sheets whose dimensions (328 × 218 mm) were similar to those of the paper Cioran used in Romania before going into exile. Whereas the traditional two-column system enables writers to visualize two successive drafts, Dickinson uses this two-column layout differently, by tailoring it for her short verse—as if the columns, usually from left to right, are successive pages.32 Dickinson relied on the presence of the central fold and on the role it played in the drafting of her poems. These examples prompt us to consider the close connection between the inscribing surface, which we call the page, and the three-dimensional object, which the writer manipulates, i.e. the sheet (or the envelope), with two inseparable but reversible sides—the front and the back—subject to a variety of positions.

Moving Sideways, Turning Over: Mobility of the Medium Conventional form and structure such as the printed margins, lines, and grid patterns on the sheets of school copybooks—which teach students how to make the most of the page—usually determine the writer’s positioning of the writing surface. In using such copybooks to compose the rough drafts of their works, many writers’ corporal memory of their school writing experience has influenced their daily practice, like Colette‚ who confessed in My Apprenticeships: ‘Having found and bought at a stationer’s shop some copybooks similar to the ones I used at school, their laid paper, with its grey lines and red vertical margin, […] irritated my fingers with a kind of renewed itching to do boring exercises and to passively execute an assignment’.33 Do the hands, then, only carry out their ‘own will’ as determined by the object, in contrast to de Certeau’s Cartesian conception when he wrote of a page ‘which sets up, at the same time as a space for writing, the mastery (and the isolation) of a subject in front of an object ’?34

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

179

Sometimes, turning a horizontally lined paper and writing across the then perpendicular lines, as Dickinson or Cioran occasionally did, is nothing but a by-product of other gestures, such as tearing and unfolding. However, an initial rotation effects an actual change in the medium’s form, such as when writers reuse a posted letter. For example, Condorcet kept a formal letter signed by D’Audibert-Caille, dated 9 April 1791 (Library of the Institut de France, Ms 865, ff. 152–153), in which the writing itself was confined to the front of a large folio sheet of laid paper. To jot down his notes on the assignats (paper banknotes which the revolutionary government issued), he refolded the letter in halves, moved it sideways by a quarter of a turn, and obtained a quarto bifolium, but only used pages 1 and 4 of it, in two columns.35 Written mediums that have multiple orientations are a special case. Apart from the one-off additions in the margin which are perpendicular to the orientation of the body of the page, as we can see in the manuscript of Casanova’s The Story of My Life,36 the systematic adding of perpendicular written lines to spare paper was a normal practice in correspondence.37 Most often, a writer’s multiple usage of the material medium consists in dissociating, on the same page used several times, the different stages of writing,38 as Stendhal did when he wrote down in May 1834 his ‘composition plan’ for Lucien Leuwen (City Library of Grenoble, Ms R 301, t. 1, f. 376), about which Jacques Neefs has published an essay.39 This typical cumulative practice consists of short unconnected notes which are meant to be copied out and transferred later, such as Casanova’s commentary on a letter from Voltaire that he noted down—among other memories—on the corner of a laundry bill.40 A large number of sheets that Hugo turned over in order to use them again—for instance those in his file for The Man Who Laughs 41 —show back pages covered in dozens of annotations jotted down in all directions, which he accumulated while writing the novel.42 By turning over and rotating bound volumes such as copybooks and notebooks, horizontally and vertically, writers can give themselves at least two distinct points of departure within a single volume. Every day throughout his journey in the Orient, Gérard de Nerval would turn round the small handmade notebook he had first used in Cairo and whose last pages contain only his accounts—kept day after day from 7 February to 1 April 1843—whereas the first ones are mostly filled with notes on his readings and comments on the Egyptian city, which come after a map and a freehand sketch.43 Furthermore, turning a bound medium one has already used ‘the right way up’‚ in order to begin again ‘the wrong

180

C. BUSTARRET

way round’ by starting on the last page, follows from the principles of domestic thrift that handbooks similar to Emily Dickinson’s advocated.44 This method enables the user to distinguish between unrelated subjects without using a new medium, as we can see in a large number of Marcel Proust’s scratchpads or datebooks. The author of Remembrance of Things Past used this method to separate from his main work in progress some short pastiches he wrote in parallel and a heterogeneous series of draft paragraphs and notes which cover only a few pages (copybook 25, datebook of 1906).45 There is seemingly no explanation for scratchpads he used exclusively upside down, including several which contain his notes for By Way of Sainte-Beuve.46 In the longer term, this choice could enable the writer to distinguish between different forms of writing, as merchant Jean-Joseph Aubert did in 1825 when he decided to reuse an old school copybook again, after a long period, to start a commonplace book containing mostly management notes along with records of family events.47 The writing medium then enjoys a new phase of life, more or less unconnected with its initial use. When it becomes systematic, this act of turning the writing medium over or around requires writers’ disciplined management of their paper supply; Gustave Flaubert’s multiple drafts demonstrate such an approach. As a rule, the author of Madame Bovary, who would write his drafts on one side only of the large folio sheets on which he worked, boasted about taking his relentless pursuit of stylistic perfection so far as to produce twelve successive versions of certain pages of his novels; ‘Monsieur de Buffon sometimes went up to fourteen’ (Letter to his niece Caroline, 14th of July 1876). After exhausting the space available for corrections, and copying out the revised version on a separate sheet, the novelist would ‘cancel’ the then useless pages with a large St Andrew’s cross that covered the entire written surface: a scribal ritual that enabled the verso sheets to be reused.48 He would then turn over these ‘deactivated’ bundles of sheets that he set aside as his book gradually progressed, in order, eventually, to use the blank sides. Thus, it was most often the case that the content of the fronts and backs is completely unrelated. Flaubert’s practice of using both sides but disassociating the use of the front from the back is widespread. Finally, recycling-conscious writers are obliged to turn over unbound pieces of paper previously used for printing or writing. Emily Dickinson’s envelopes, turned inside out, so to speak, are a good example of this: most

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

181

often, she would write on the blank inside. But there is another famous example. Among Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s holograph drafts are twentyeight playing cards which the philosopher turned over to jot down a few notes on the back, for in his time, in France or in Geneva, nothing was printed on the back of cards. He would use them at his desk, scribbling down a sentence or an addition he meant to insert in the manuscript of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which he was writing at the time. But he would also carry them with him as an unbound scratchpad whenever he went for a walk (Figs. 9.2 and 9.3). He nonetheless failed to mention this material detail when he wrote in Book III of The Confessions : ‘I could never do anything with a nib in my hand, sitting at a desk and bent over my paper. It is when I go for a stroll among rocks and woods, it is at night, in my bed, when I cannot sleep, that I write in my mind…’.49 The use of the playing cards, both turned over vertically and horizontally, was standard practice for many eighteenth-century scientists and writers, and research has shown that the backs of cards were in fact an informal writing medium used for

Fig. 9.2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, playing card in file of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel, Ms R 49, f. 24r)

182

C. BUSTARRET

Fig. 9.3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, playing card in file of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel, Ms R 49, f. 24v)

many purposes in everyday life.50 In the first third of the century, several methods of teaching, reading, and writing recommended the reuse of the blank side of this smooth and stiff paper medium, easy to manipulate and to classify.51 This practice, found in library card catalogs as early as the end of the seventeenth century, which merely anticipated the cardboard index card, became obsolete in France as soon as printed patterns adorned the backs of playing cards (1820). In private hands, in the early twentieth century, as a consequence of the shortage of paper during the First World War,52 the habit of salvaging, keeping, and using the blank side of printed material became widespread. Some writers, such as Paul Valéry and Marcel Duchamp, did this almost compulsively. They would jot down their notes on the backs of wedding or obituary notices, bills, invitations, advertising handouts, chess instruction leaflets, etc. Such a massive distribution of printed paper with trivial content, exposed so that both sides were visible among holograph drafts, fed the Surrealists’ passion for things to collect. Their search and discoveries fill their private notebooks and diaries, as Michel Leiris explains in Scratches.53 The very act of turning the paper over, which earlier implied the invalidation of the initial text, came to have a double meaning, since the words

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

183

initially printed on the notices, bills, flyers, and leaflets were preserved but subservient to the new creation. Poets and novelists, however, occasionally integrated some of the printed words into their drafts, either by copying them onto an intermediate medium—such as notebooks in James Joyce’s case—by having a secretary transcribe them54 or by cutting up such printed matter. The Dada movement prized the latter, which Dos Passos‚ and later Gysin and Burroughs‚ turned into an accepted method of writing. These various examples prove that the writer’s manipulation of the paper medium—moving it sideways (according to the lateral axis) and turning it over (according to the longitudinal axis)—proves to play a pivotal role, not only in economizing paper, since it favors recycling, but also in the writers’ tactile relationship with the various writing mediums which constitute their working material.

Cutting, Pasting: The Paper Medium’s Supporting Role Whether it is part of the operation of copying out or becomes a substitute for it, the practice of ‘cutting and pasting’ comes from old scribal techniques scholars and scientists used as early as the Renaissance to make the most of their reading notes.55 While taking reading notes, writers can either choose to annotate books in their margins‚ or copy out quotations from the printed text in a notebook or on a separate sheet of paper.56 Contemporary writers confront similar organizational choices when working with their own notebooks or drafts. The composition process and use of the paper medium are necessarily interdependent. Blaise Pascal, for example, appropriated the aforementioned working methods for his own composition process by writing his fragments on large sheets that he later cut into narrow strips of paper to facilitate thematic organization.57 In Proust’s case, the act of cutting and pasting sheets became a habitual composition technique which enabled him to constantly reconfigure, without limits, the topography of his work in progress. The use of the paper medium in this process anticipated the interactivity that electronic interfaces have formalized today.58 A great variety of situations justify a preliminary cutting up of the writing medium, in its initial use and in its reuse. Before he began working, Emile Zola reformatted the beige loose-leaf wove paper on which he wrote the Rougon-Macquart cycle to create a special format (200 × 155 mm) that was unavailable commercially. Some Malian

184

C. BUSTARRET

villagers cut up their personal notebooks to distinguish them from the professional uses of the same mediums and therefore to ‘appropriate a writing space’.59 Instead of turning over a folio copybook that he had already used to jot down his reading notes, Benjamin Constant cut off the first six used sheets and pasted the seventh to the inside of the back cover when, on the 22nd of January 1804, he started copying out his diary on the recycled copybook.60 The act of cutting and pasting, which creates a new use of the medium—providing that these acts were indeed those of Constant’s own hands—suggests that he kept his diary and reading notes separate. Analyses of the interaction between cutting and pasting reveal the combined economical and dynamic force of these two acts.61 This interactive editing technique complicates analysis of the altered writing medium, which in its collage-like state is nonetheless revealing. When rewritten, sheets or parts of sheets are cut off either to be eliminated or to be shifted. Writers used this displacement until the advent of carbon copies; photocopying eliminated it. The sequence of cutting and pasting was an alternative to recopying. Proust may have proceeded in this way to ‘spare himself copying chores’.62 But does this non-scribal operation consist of merely the relocation of a part of the text from one medium to another? Doubt remains about this. Leiris, for instance, acknowledged that ‘[his] laziness to copy’ was not the only motive for his pasting ‘various randomly scribbled sheets’ in the ‘squared copybook with a blue cover’, which he used as a diary. Sometimes he ‘inserted [them] just as they were’ […] ‘because of the fetishist value [he] attached to these original documents—still steeped, in their very materiality, in the circumstances in which [he] had written them’.63 While the act of copying, which requires time and effort—even if frequently done by a secretary—consists in transferring the recopied passage from its initial context to a new one, the act of cutting not only saves writers time, but also enables them to relocate a written passage without altering its original graphic and material characteristics. Those characteristics are significant in the writer’s visual and kinesthetic memory. Copying preserves the integrity of the original document, whereas cutting, relocating, and pasting, by altering it, make the modification irreversible. Some writers regularly employ this risk-taking editing technique while writing. The working files of Madame Bovary reveal that Flaubert produced the famous episode of the ‘agricultural fair’ by cutting a long text he had previously written in longhand (Councillor Lieuvain’s speech,

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

185

based on a report published in Le Nouvelliste de Rouen) into short sequences, from which he developed, as a counterpoint, the amorous dialogue between Emma and Rodolphe. To create ironic echoing effects between the two scenes in the course of his successive versions, the novelist left blank spaces on the large sheets he used for the sentimental scene, which he reserved to affix the cut pieces of the political speech with wax. Flaubert, who by his own admission worked ‘on ten pages at once’, used up to eighty sheets of rough drafts to achieve this montage, including some backsides of previous versions and, according to Jeanne Goldin, a few cutting and pasting mistakes, such as truncating a sentence he meant to retain, inverting the front and the back of a sheet, or pasting a passage in the wrong place.64 While copying creates homogeneity, pasting enhances the contrasts and accentuates heterogeneity. The notebooks of Remembrance of Things Past are well known for displaying the contrast between the simplicity of the basic material Proust used and the complexity of his composition process which transformed that material into exceptional written artifacts.65 He used several notebooks simultaneously and employed a variety of procedures— graphic and non-graphic—to incessantly expand and reorder the writing surfaces. The graphic acts consist of, but are not limited to, crossreferences, organizational directives and symbols, such as links and arrows, or prospective and retrospective outlines. The non-graphic ones are, for example, the extension of the double page through the addition of lateral and fold-out ‘paperoles ’, or strips of paper pasted to the edge. Such manipulations—notably Proust’s cutting, which is the most conspicuous among them—are contrary to the principle of linear continuity taught at school.66 Throughout his notebooks, the novelist used scissors for two main editing techniques that we now describe as ‘cutting and pasting’ and ‘copying and pasting’. The first one consists of displacing or relocating an already written sheet (or portion of a sheet) within the same notebook, or from one notebook to another. Since the cutting simultaneously affects both the front and the back of the paper, this relocation is radical, for it is irreversible. The act of cutting and pasting recurrent in the drafts makes his self-editing instructions (‘To be put here’ or ‘Bit to put somewhere’)‚ which punctuate the margins and are sometimes jotted down in the course of writing‚ tangible instead of remaining unrealized.67 The purpose of this process is to find appropriate or suitable places for the selected fragments.

186

C. BUSTARRET

The second process consists of writing to measure on a sheet of blank paper—most often letter paper—the revised passage which Proust pasted over the previous version.68 Proust adapted the size of his characters and the spacing of his lines in order to fill as best as he could the predetermined space. Moreover, in the case of more complex manipulations, there was nothing to prevent the two operations (cutting and pasting; copying out and pasting) from being combined.69 The extent of the alterations which involved cutting and pasting shows that the writer, who worked on several copybooks at the same time, would, while writing, rely on his visual—and even tactile—memory of several hundred interdependent written sheets. Proust, functioning in the dual role of ‘operator’ and ‘scriptor’ that Barthes describes, relied on extensive self-directed editing notes to guide him through his elaborate non-linear composite drafts.70 Indeed, in the rough draft copybook entitled ‘Vénusté’ (Pulchritude, copybook 54, 1914), Proust refers to the writing medium itself in spatial terms and it is the same in the case of revisions he completes or requests: ‘After the small bit that ends on the papers pasted on the side […]’, ‘Add what follows to what I have written here’, or ‘After the passage I wrote in the margin of this copybook […].’ Although used in this non-sequential way, the copybook nonetheless defies the writer’s idiosyncratic manipulations by setting against the ‘operator’’s hands the inescapable limits of the bound medium: ‘Here I find myself stopped, for the following pages are covered in writing. What comes next starts 33 pages further, on the front’, we read in the margin of sheet 55 (front). Such routine, flexible manipulations constantly challenge the standard copybook or page formats.71 They involve not only the ‘operator’’s craftsmanship but also the ‘writer’’s ability to invent concrete, original solutions in order to overcome material constraints.72 These practices deserve to be the subject of comparative research: Proust’s spatially multi-dimensional system contrasts with sequential montages such as those which Louis Guilloux employed, in particular his use of loose-leaf graph paper in 1927 for the composition of La Maison du peuple 73 (Fig. 9.4). André-Georges Haudricourt, when he transposed a scientific correspondence to turn it into a large-scale essay, L’Homme et la charrue à travers le monde (1955), or Roland Barthes, when he worked out the composition of Camera Lucida (1980),74 employed elaborate montages consisting of successive layers which require painstaking work that was dearly achieved. In contrast, Marguerite Duras’s abundant cutting at, for example, certain stages in her writing of The Ravishing of Lol Stein

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

187

Fig. 9.4 Louis Guilloux, composition by pasting in draft of La Maison du Peuple (1927), (Bibliothèque de Saint-Brieuc, MdP010101-A, f. 6r)

188

C. BUSTARRET

(1964), appears at first glance to be a linear montage but is in fact a complex collage in which what has already been either handwritten or typed is intertwined with the rewriting. There are, however, some material clues—such as Barthes’ ballpoint handwriting on adhesive tape that assembles the overlapping fragments— which confirm that the author himself executed the cutting and pasting. But other corpuses raise some interpretive problems which prove difficult to resolve. We do not know, for instance, who removed text by cutting off paper from Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts. The American poetess sometimes used scissors to remove one or several lines of her poems, but after her death her relatives did the same, in particular to censor the expression of homosexuality which would have been regarded as scandalous.75 And in the original collection of Pascal’s Pensées, how are we to distinguish the author’s manipulations from the posthumous changes by others—changes that make the significantly reworked final page layout so controversial?76 Attention to such questions makes us realize that the supposedly original manuscript is merely an illusion; its original state cannot be determined, since we do not know by whom or when the manuscript was altered. One of the greatest challenges of codicological research is to solve such puzzles.

Detaching, Attaching: The Paradoxical Dynamics of the Paper Medium In a wide variety of situations, our observation of non-graphic acts, which interact with the writing medium and transform it, reveals that loose sheets tend to be grouped in bundles (folded or pinned together) or files, copybooks or notebooks (sewn or fastened), whereas in contrast bound objects tend to produce loose sheets (detached, cut off, or torn off). Fascinated by the physical aspects of the paper medium, Victor Hugo, in William Shakespeare, reported the testimony of Racan who—so he said—would ‘have seen this morning M. de Malherbe himself sewing with thick grey thread a white bundle of sheets in which there will soon be sonnets’.77 In contrast to this assembling method, Raymond Roussel used bound school notebooks to compose the first drafts of Impressions of Africa as if he were using a notepad with detachable sheets: after each working session, he systematically detached the few pages that he had just used.78 Besides, we can observe that index cards—whose French name (fiches ) comes from the verb ficher (insert)—can be pasted

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

189

or pinned inside large size notebooks or copybooks, or else assembled by a string or a rod in a filing cabinet. Hébrard was right to insist on making a fundamental distinction between the use of loose sheets and bound mediums. However, to assume that loose sheets are discontinuous and reconfigurable objects, while bound supports are stable, linear, and fixed sequences, is simplistic. The longevity of certain procedures is surprising. Although the act of sewing sheets together began to disappear with the introduction around 1840 of factory-made notebooks and copybooks, evidence of it still exists in Walter Benjamin’s archives,79 where some library index cards have been assembled together in this way. The resort to pinning, which Charles-Louis de Montesquieu often used in the early eighteenth century,80 was still in practice in 1886 when Jules Vallès mentions it in L’Insurgé, and even as late as the twentieth century, when American novelist Eudora Welty used pins to make rapid, ‘repositionable’ modifications.81 Completely different writing situations may prompt the writer to paste together separate sheets of paper end to end in order to turn them into a scroll. That is how an imprisoned Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade tried to hide his rough draft of The 120 Days of Sodom, whereas in contrast Jack Kerouac would show off the speed of a frantic typing improvisation while writing On the Road; but both used the pasting technique and the antique scroll format. Hugo, who would retrieve the smallest ‘sliver’ of his unused rough drafts for an unspecified future use, and Duchamp, who would keep only a tiny fraction (often the top right corner) of sheets that he deliberately eliminated, also resorted to the same act of tearing off and thus broke with the conventional use of a standard page. Although Barthes thought that writing is inseparable from the ‘need for discontinuity’ (1973), codicologists capture in manuscripts the alternation between continuity and discontinuity. In the nineteenth century, the loose-leaf sheet became a widely used writing medium for administrative purposes. The mechanical production of paper and the invention of the typewriter cylinder facilitated this change and marked a turning point with far-reaching consequences.82 This observation should be backed up by larger scale arguments. From the work done in the scholars’ offices during the Renaissance83 to contemporary field study, the act of extracting and assembling has facilitated the circulation and manipulation of written objects.84 The index card or the sheet of paper, ‘which can be filed, pinned up to the wall and combined with other ones’, constitutes the

190

C. BUSTARRET

mobile space which enables objects of knowledge to ‘exist on a scale that a few can apprehend just by looking’.85 A historical study of the transmission of non-graphic acts of writing would need to reconsider the role of copyists and amanuenses. Roger Chartier has rightly insisted on the predominant role they played in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.86 Beside their contribution to the standardization of their administrative duties, we can imagine that these professional scriveners also worked out a variety of techniques to meet the growing requirements of writers, such as Montesquieu, who were by then experienced in the manipulation of the paper medium, not to mention the voracious writing machinery devised by the revolutionary governance.87 Chartier rightfully observed that all writing has a material dimension: ‘Understanding this shared “scribal culture” demands that we situate the practices which produce it, both in their creative autonomy and in the limits which constrain them’, and that ‘we spot the paradoxical crossing of infringed constraints with restricted freedom’.88 A codicological approach contributes to this understanding by combining the study of deliberate emendations and the memory of the various places upon which they are produced.89 Attention to the material dimension of writing habits not only provides valuable insight into the professional writer’s craft through close scrutiny of particular professional groups’ specific hand movements,90 it reveals in a corpus of ‘personal notebooks’ the contrasted stakes of the ‘shared writing activity’, as Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye has aptly demonstrated.91 Although the writers were indeed concerned about making the most economical use of the paper medium, they derived pleasure from the creative transformation of graphic norms. Rousseau, for instance, would take as much time to prepare the copybooks meant for The Confessions as he would to work on the revision itself: ‘to scrape and rescrape [sic] until he made holes in the paper on which he then pasted patches’92 in order to cover the mistakes he had made while copying. As we can see from the following image, he used the same techniques in his revisions for Essay on the Origin of Languages (Fig. 9.5). Ultimately, not only are the acts of folding and unfolding, moving sideways and turning over, cutting and pasting, or creasing, piercing, burning, carrying, and classifying constantly combined with one another, but they are performed in close interaction with the graphic acts of adding and deleting which have been deliberately left out of the present essay. Such manipulations call into question the conventional standards of the page or

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

191

Fig. 9.5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, copybook for the Essay on the Origin of Languages (Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel, Ms R 11, p. 32), showing corrections made by ‘scraping’

192

C. BUSTARRET

the notebook, and establish continual alternation between attaching and detaching. The written object thus becomes tangible, three-dimensional, and mobile, while turning the writing medium into a place of action—a place as stimulating as it is restrictive for the writer at work. These manipulations, although non-graphic, are therefore an inextricable part of ‘what is happening’ when one writes, as Claude Simon put it.93 In his view, the temporality of the scribal act narrows to a perpetually mobile point: ‘No one ever writes about what would have happened (or been thought of) before one sets out to write. What we write is happening (and being thought) at the time of writing.’

Notes 1. Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘The Rationale of Gestures in the West: Third to Thirteenth Centuries,’ 1991: 60. 2. Claire Bustarret, “La ‘main écrivant’ au miroir du manuscrit,” 1998: 431– 447. 3. Anne-Marie Christin, ed., Histoire de l’écriture, 2012 (2001). 4. Paul Ryan, Paul Valéry et le dessin (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang International Verlag, 2007). 5. Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, 1. Arts de faire, 1990: 200. 6. Anne-Marie Christin, ‘Espaces de la page,’ 1989: 165. 7. Emily Dickinson, The Gorgeous Nothings, 2013; Marta L. Werner, Emily Dickinson’s Open folios, 1996; Mauriac Dyer Nathalie, ed., Marcel Proust, Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. 2008–2018. 8. Claire Bustarret, ‘Couper, coller dans les manuscrits de travail du xviiie au xx e siècle,’ 2011: 353–375. 9. Claire Bustarret, ‘Découpage, collage et bricolage: la dynamique matérielle du brouillon moderne,’ 2004: 109–120; Béatrice Fraenkel, ‘Actes d’écriture: quand écrire c’est faire,’ 2007: 101–112. 10. Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte précédé de Variations sur l’écriture, 1973: 55–56. 11. Jean Hébrard, ‘Tenir un journal. L’écriture personnelle et ses supports,’ Cahiers RITM 20 (1999): 23, 49. 12. Centre d’Etudes Proustiennes, ‘Les cahiers de Marcel Proust conservés à la Bibliothèque nationale: inventaire matériel et descriptif,’ Bulletin d’Informations Proustiennes 1 (1975): 13–17; Claire Bustarret and Anne-Marie Basset, ‘Les Cahiers d’Impressions d’Afrique: l’apport de la codicologie à l’étude génétique,’ 1994: 153–166; Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, L’Atelier de Montesquieu, Manuscrits inédits de La Brède, 2001; Nicolas Rieucau, ‘Descriptif matériel,’ in Condorcet, Tableau historique des progrès de

9

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

193

l’esprit humain, 2004: 1137–1199; Micheline Hontebeyrie and Françoise Haffner, eds., Le laboratoire génétique, ‘feuilles volantes’ et cahiers, 2005. Jacques Neefs, ‘Marges,’ 1989: 57–88; Louis Hay, ed., ‘Sémiotique,’ Genesis 10 (1996); Claire Bustarret, ‘Les instruments d’écriture, de l’indice au symbole,’ Genesis 10 (1996): 175–192; Catherine Viollet, ‘Écriture mécanique, espace de frappe. Quelques préalables à une sémiotique du dactylogramme,’ Genesis 10 (1996): 193–208; Aurèle Crasson and Louis Hay, eds., ‘Verbal, Non Verbal,’ Genesis 37 (2013). Anni Borzeix and Béatrice Fraenkel, eds., Langage et travail. Communication, Cognition, Action (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2001); Béatrice Fraenkel, David Pontille, Damien Collard, and Gaëlle Deharo, Le Travail des huissiers. Transformations d’un métier de l’écrit, 2010; Gwenaële Rot, Anni Borzeix, and Didier Demaziere, ‘Introduction. Ce que les e´ crits font au travail,’ Sociologie du Travail 56, no. 1 (2014): 4–15. Fraenkel, 2007: 101–112. Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, ‘Tenir un cahier dans la région cotonnière du Mali. Support d’écriture et rapport à soi,’ Annales Histoire Sciences sociales (2009): 855–885; Nathalie Joly, ‘Écritures du travail et savoirs paysans, aperçu historique et lecture de pratiques. Les agendas des agriculteurs,’ Ruralia 2 (1998): 2–6; Anaïs Wion, ‘Aux frontières de la codicologie et de la diplomatique. Structure et transmission des recueils documentaires éthiopiens,’ Gazette du livre médiéval 48 (2006): 14–25. Robert Pickering, Paul Valéry, la page, l’écriture, 1996; Annie ClémentPerrier, ‘Étude de mains. Petite esquisse d’un motif simonien,’ Poétique 105 (1996): 23–40; Claude Simon, ‘Attaque et stimuli,’ in Claude Simon, ed. Dällenbach Lucien (Paris: Seuil, 1988). Pierre Michon, ‘Fait à la main,’ in Brouillons d’écrivains, 2001: 187–188; Bustarret, 2004. Michon, 2001: 187. Marcel Mauss, ‘Les techniques du corps’ (1936), 2013. Michon, 2001: 187. Jacques Anis and Jean-Louis Lebrave, eds., Texte et ordinateur: Les mutations du lire-écrire (Nanterre: Université Paris X, Centre de Recherches Linguistiques, 1993): 335–337. Christian Jacob, ‘Introduction’ and ‘L’éloge de la main est aussi celui de la pensée,’ in Lieux de savoir 2: Les mains de l’intellect, 2011: 11–28, 31–37. Dickinson, 2013. Hébrard, 1999: 14. Béatrice Fraenkel has rightly insisted on the disarray caused by the move to computing of many writing-based professions, such as bailiffs, because of the need to manipulate tangible written objects on a daily basis (Fraenkel, et alii, 2010: 133).

194

C. BUSTARRET

27. See also Unlocking the Secret of John Donne’s Letters, MIT, http://cool. conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/bpg/annual/v34/bp34-07.pdf. 28. Claire Bustarret, ‘Usages des supports d’écriture au xviiie siècle: une esquisse codicologique,’ Genesis 34 (2012): 37–65. 29. Hébrard, 1999: 23, 40. See also Écrire aux xviie et xviiie siècles, Genèses de textes littéraires et philosophiques (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000). 30. Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, Le fil de l’écrit. Une anthropologie de l’alphabétisation au Mali (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2013): 209. 31. Nicolas Cavaillès, ‘Suicide, Décomposition, Corruption. Genèse et dialogisme du Précis de Décomposition de Cioran,’ PhD diss., Université Lyon III, 2007: 223. 32. Dickinson, 2013: 45, 46. 33. Colette, Mes apprentissages (1936), in Œuvres, ed. Alain Brunet and Claude Pichois, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1991): 995. 34. De Certeau, 1990: 199. 35. Bustarret, 2012: 44. 36. Gérard Lahouati, ‘Le long travail (le manuscrit de l’Histoire de ma vie de Casanova),’ Genesis 34 (2012): 106. 37. Cécile Dauphin, Prête-moi ta plume… Les manuels épistolaires au xixe siècle (Paris: Kimé, 2000). 38. When they reuse for a personal purpose an old school copybook or a professional notebook, Malian villagers cover the smallest blank spaces by writing in all directions other than the conventional one; yet A. MbodjPouye (2013: 224–225) did not find evidence of the writers’ rotating the whole notebook. 39. Neefs, 1989: 75–77. 40. Lahouati, 2012: 100. 41. Victor Hugo, manuscript of The Man Who Laughs, https://gallica. bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53045866c/f61.image.r=Hugo%20L’Homme% 20qui%20rit.langFR. 42. Jean Gaudon, “Victor Hugo, un écrivain sans ‘brouillons’,” in Brouillons d’écrivains, ed. Marie-Odile Germain and Danièle Thibault (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2001): 57. 43. As C. Pichois has noted, the present arrangement, in which the sheets are all bound in the same orientation, probably follows from an old binding mistake: a large oil stain, which appears either at the top or the bottom of the sheets, indicates that when they were being used, the sheets were positioned in a different way (Gérard de Nerval, Œuvres complètes, t. II, ed. Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1984): 1664). 44. Dirk van Hulle, «Économie textuelle: recyclage chez Proust, Mann et Joyce», Genesis 18 (2002): 100. 45. Many thanks to Pyra Wise (Equipe Proust, ITEM, CNRS) for these examples.

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

195

46. Marcel Proust, Cahier 26 in Cahiers 1 à 75…, 2010: XXIX. 47. Hébrard, 1999: 29. 48. Flaubert l’Education sentimentale, BnF, NAF 17601, f. 1r, https://gal lica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6000085s/f8.image. 49. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions. Autres textes autobiographiques, in Œuvres Complètes, t. I, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959): 114. 50. Claire Bustarret, ‘La carte à jouer, support d’écriture au xviiie siècle. Détournement, retournement, révolution,’ in Socio-anthropologie 30 (2014): 83–98. 51. Marcel Grandière, ‘Louis Dumas et le système typographique, 1728– 1744,’ Histoire de l’éducation 81 (1999): 35–62. 52. Valérie Tesnière, ed., Exposition Vu du Front, représenter la Grande Guerre (Paris: BDIC, Musée de l’Armée, 2014). 53. Michel Leiris, La Règle du Jeu, 1. Biffures (Paris: Gallimard, 1975): 181– 183. 54. Dirk van Hulle, ‘Économie textuelle: recyclage chez Proust, Mann et Joyce,’ Genesis 18 (2002): 91–103. 55. Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 56. Daniel Ferrer, ‘Introduction. Un imperceptible trait de gomme de tragacanthe…,’ in Bibliothèques d’écrivains, 2001: 7–27. 57. Pol Ernst, Géologie et stratigraphie des pensées de Pascal, 1996; Dominique Descotes and Gilles Proust, ‘Un projet du Centre International Blaise Pascal: l’édition électronique des Pensées ’, Courrier du Centre International Blaise Pascal 30 (2008): 2–14. 58. Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, ‘Tables de travail informatiques: de l’écran graphique au papier interactif,’ in Lieux de savoir 2: Les mains de l’intellect, 2011: 172–191. 59. Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, 2009. 60. Jean Hébrard, 1999: 139. 61. Claire Bustarret, ‘Couper, coller dans les manuscrits de travail,’ 2011: 353–375. 62. Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer, ‘Déchiffrer. Transcrire. Cartographier. Lier. Proust ou le manuscrit apprivoisé,’ Genesis 27 (2006): 19–34. 63. Leiris, 1975: 182. 64. Jeanne Goldin, Les Comices agricoles de Gustave Flaubert. Transcription intégrale et genèse dans le manuscrit g223 (Genève: Droz, 1984). 65. Claire Bustarret, ‘Les cahiers de La Recherche, un labyrinthe de papier?’ in Proust aux brouillons, 2011: 17–28. See for instance Marcel Proust, Cahier 54 and Cahier 26, in Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2008 and 2010. 66. Hébrard, 1999: 19.

196

C. BUSTARRET

67. Marcel Proust, La recherche du temps perdu, copybook 53, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Dept. of Manuscripts, N. a. fr. 16693, f. 22 bis v. and 22 ter, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b60000881/f31.image.r= Marcel%20Proust%20%20NAF%2016693.langFR. 68. Pyra Wise, ‘Les paperoles: du papier à lettres dans les cahiers de Proust,’ in Proust aux brouillons, 2011: 29–42. 69. Isabelle Serça, ‘Genèse de l’interpolation: l’art du montage,’ in Proust aux brouillons, 2011: 43–60. 70. Anne Hershberg-Pierrot, ‘Proust et les notes de régie,’ Proust aux brouillons, 2011: 69. 71. Louis Hay, ‘Défense et illustration de la page,’ Genesis 37 (2014): 33–53. 72. Didier Schwint, ‘La routine dans le travail de l’artisan,’ Ethnologie française 35, no. 3 (2005): 521–529. 73. Claire Bustarret, ‘La matière graphique des manuscrits de Louis Guilloux,’ in L’Atelier de Louis Guilloux, 2012: 25–40. 74. Jean-Louis Lebrave, ‘Point sur la genèse de La chambre claire,’ Roland Barthes, Genesis 19 (2002): 79–108. 75. Martha Nell Smith, ‘Censure familiale et éditoriale: Emily Dickinson. Les omissions ne sont pas des accidents,’ in Genèse, censure, autocensure, 2005: 149–160. 76. Descotes and Proust, 2008. 77. Gaudon, 2001: 67. 78. Bustarret and Basset, 1994. 79. Walter Benjamin, Archives. Images, textes et signes, ed. Archives W. Benjamin (Paris: Klincksieck, 2011): 26. 80. Volpilhac-Auger, 2001. 81. Viollet, 1996: 203. 82. Delphine Gardey, Écrire, calculer, classer. Comment une révolution de papier a transformé les sociétés contemporaines (1800–1940) (Paris: La Découverte, 2008). 83. Blair, 2010. 84. Bruno Latour, ‘Drawing Things Together,’ in Representation in Scientific Practice, 1990: 19–68, and ‘Le topofil de Boa Vista ou la référence scientifique -– montage photo-philosophique,’ Raison pratique 4 (1993): 187–216. 85. Bruno Latour, La science en action (Paris: La Découverte, 1989): 545. 86. Roger Chartier, ‘Culture écrite et littérature à l’âge moderne,’ in ‘Pratiques d’écriture. Une histoire de la culture écrite,’ Annales, Histoire Sciences sociales 4–5 (juillet-octobre 2001): 790. 87. Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing, Powers and failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone Books, 2012). 88. Chartier, 2001: 801. 89. Ferrer, 2001.

9

90. 91. 92. 93.

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

197

Fraenkel, Pontille, Collard and Deharo, 2010. A. Mbodj-Pouye, 2013: 274. Rousseau, 1959: 831. Claude Simon, Orion aveugle. Les Sentiers de la création (Genève: Skira, 1970): 172.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Le Plaisir du texte précédé de Variations sur l’écriture. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly Information Before Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Bustarret, Claire and Anne-Marie Basset. ‘Les Cahiers d’Impressions d’Afrique: l’apport de la codicologie à l’étude génétique.’ Genesis 5 (1994): 153–166. ———. ‘Les instruments d’écriture, de l’indice au symbole.’ Genesis 10 (1996): 175–192. ———. “La ‘main écrivant’ au miroir du manuscrit.” In Language and Beyond. Le langage et ses au-delà. Actualité et virtualité dans les rapports entre le verbe, l’image et le son. Ed. Paul Jorens and Aline Remael. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998: 431–447. ———. ‘Découpage, collage et bricolage: la dynamique matérielle du brouillon moderne.’ In Imaginaires de l’écran, Screen Imaginary. Ed. Nathalie Roelens and Yves Jeanneret. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004: 109–120. ———. ‘Couper, coller dans les manuscrits de travail du xviiie au xx e siècle.’ In Lieux de Savoir 2: Les mains de l’intellect. Ed. Christian Jacob. Paris: Albin Michel, 2011: 353–375. ———. ‘Les cahiers de La Recherche, un labyrinthe de papier?’ In Proust aux brouillons. Ed. Nathalie Mauriac Dyer and Yoshikawa Kazuyoshi. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011: 17–28. ———. ‘La matière graphique des manuscrits de Louis Guilloux.’ In L’Atelier de Louis Guilloux. Ed. Madeleine Frédéric and Michèle Touret. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012: 25–40. ———. ‘Usages des supports d’écriture au xviiie siècle: une esquisse codicologique.’ Genesis 34 (2012): 37–65. ———. ‘La carte à jouer, support d’écriture au xviiie siècle. Détournement, retournement, révolution.’ In Socio-anthropologie 30 (2014): 83–98. Certeau, Michel de. L’Invention du quotidien 1. Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Chartier, Roger. ‘Culture écrite et littérature à l’âge moderne.’ In ‘Pratiques d’écriture. Une histoire de la culture écrite.’ Annales, Histoire Sciences sociales 4–5 (juillet-octobre 2001): 783–802.

198

C. BUSTARRET

Christin, Anne-Marie. ‘Espaces de la page.’ In De la lettre au livre, Sémiotique des manuscrits littéraires. Paris: CNRS, 1989: 141–168. ——— (ed.). Histoire de l’écriture. De l’idéogramme au multimédia (2001). Paris: Flammarion, 2012. Crasson, Aurèle and Louis Hay (eds.). ‘Verbal, Non Verbal.’ Genesis 37 (2013). Dickinson, Emily. The Gorgeous Nothings. Ed. Marta Werner and Jen Bervin. New York: Christine Burgin/ New Directions, 2013. Ernst, Pol. Géologie et stratigraphie des pensées de Pascal. Paris: Klincksieck, 1996. Ferrer, Daniel. ‘Introduction. Un imperceptible trait de gomme de tragacanthe…’ In Bibliothèques d’écrivains. Ed. Daniel Ferrer and Paolo D’Iorio: Paris: CNRS, 2001: 7–27. Fraenkel, Béatrice. ‘Actes d’écriture: quand écrire c’est faire.’ Langage et société 121–122 (2007): 101–112. Fraenkel Béatrice, David Pontille, Damien Collard, and Gaëlle Deharo. Le Travail des huissiers. Transformations d’un métier de l’écrit. Paris: Octares, 2010. Gardey, Delphine. Écrire, calculer, classer. Comment une révolution de papier a transformé les sociétés contemporaines (1800–1940). Paris: La Découverte, 2008. Hay, Louis. ‘Le manuscrit: langage de l’objet.’ Bulletin de la Bibliothèque nationale 2 (1978): 77–84. ——— (ed.). ‘Sémiotique.’ Genesis 10 (1996). ———. ‘Défense et illustration de la page.’ Genesis 37 (2014): 33–53. Hébrard, Jean. ‘Tenir un journal. L’écriture personnelle et ses supports.’ Cahiers RITM 20 (1999): 9–50. Hontebeyrie, Micheline and Françoise Haffner (eds.). Le laboratoire génétique, ‘feuilles volantes’ et cahiers. Bulletin des Études valéryennes 98–99 (2005). Paris: L’Harmattan. Hulle, Dirk van. ‘Économie textuelle: recyclage chez Proust, Mann et Joyce.’ Genesis 18 (2002): 91–103. Jacob, Christian. ‘Introduction’ and ‘L’éloge de la main est aussi celui de la pensée.’ In Lieux de savoir 2: Les mains de l’intellect. Ed. Christian Jacob. Paris: Albin Michel, 2011: 11–28 and 31–37. Latour, Bruno. La science en action. Paris: La Découverte, 1989. ———. ‘Drawing Things Together.’ In Representation in Scientific Practice. Ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990: 19–68. ———. ‘Le topofil de Boa Vista ou la référence scientifique –montage photophilosophique.’ Raison pratique 4 (1993): 187–216. Mauriac Dyer, Nathalie. ‘Déchiffrer. Transcrire. Cartographier. Lier. Proust ou le manuscrit apprivoisé.’ Genesis 27 (2006): 19–34.

9

THE HANDMADE TALE: THE PAPER …

199

——— (ed.). Marcel Proust, Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008–2020. Mauriac Dyer, Nathalie and Yoshikawa Kazuyoshi (eds.). Proust aux brouillons. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Mauss, Marcel. ‘Les techniques du corps’ (1936). In Sociologie et anthropologie (1950). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013. Mbodj-Pouye, Aïssatou. Le fil de l’écrit. Une anthropologie de l’alphabétisation au Mali. Lyon: ENS, 2013. Michon, Pierre. ‘Fait à la main.’ In Brouillons d’écrivains. Ed. Marie-Odile Germain and Danièle Thibault. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2001: 187–188. Neefs, Jacques. ‘Marges.’ In De la lettre au livre. Sémiotique des manuscrits littéraires. Paris: CNRS, 1989: 57–88. Pickering, Robert. Paul Valéry, la page, l’écriture. Clermont-Ferrand: Publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, 1996. Rieucau, Nicolas. ‘Descriptif matériel.’ In Condorcet, Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, Projets, Esquisse, Fragments et Notes (1772–1794). Ed. Jean-Pierre Schandeler and Pierre Crepel. Paris: Institut national d’études démographiques, 2004: 1137–1199. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. ‘The Rationale of Gestures in the West: Third to Thirteenth Centuries.’ In A Cultural History of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Jan Bremmer and Hermann Roodenburg. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Schwint, Didier. ‘La routine dans le travail de l’artisan.’ Ethnologie française 35, no. 3 (2005): 521–529. Simon, Claude. Orion aveugle. Genève: Skira, 1970. Smith, Martha Nell. ‘Censure familiale et éditoriale: Emily Dickinson. Les omissions ne sont pas des accidents.’ In Genèse, censure, autocensure. Ed. Catherine Viollet and Claire Bustarret. Paris: CNRS, 2005: 149–160. Viollet, Catherine. ‘Écriture mécanique, espace de frappe. Quelques préalables à une sémiotique du dactylogramme.’ Genesis 10 (1996): 193–208. Volpilhac-Auger, Catherine. L’Atelier de Montesquieu, Manuscrits inédits de La Brède. Napoli: Liguori Editore and Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001. Werner, Marta L. Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios. Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Wise Pyra. ‘Les paperoles: du papier à lettres dans les cahiers de Proust.’ In Proust aux brouillons. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011: 29–42.

CHAPTER 10

‘No Speech at My Command Will Fit the Forms in My Mind’: Shaping the Spiritual Through Writing and Typing in George MacDonald’s Lilith Manuscripts Christine Collière-Whiteside

I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind. Already I have set down statements I would gladly change did I know how to substitute a truer utterance; but as often as I try to fit the reality with nearer words, I find myself in danger of losing the things themselves, and feel like one in process of awaking from a dream, with the thing that seemed familiar gradually yet swiftly changing through a succession of forms until its very nature is no longer recognizable. —George MacDonald

George MacDonald (1824–1905) was hailed by C. S. Lewis as a mythmaker, the ‘greatest genius’ in the ‘mythopoeic art’ (Lewis x–xi), not

C. Collière-Whiteside (B) Christine Collière-Whiteside, University of Bourgogne-Franche Comté, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, France © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_10

201

202

C. COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE

so much as a wordsmith than as an inventor of completely new stories. Indeed, MacDonald is now mostly known for his works of fantasy rather than the realistic Scottish three-decker novels he was famous for in Victorian times. A former minister, MacDonald wrote both types of texts to convey spiritual truths and used fantasy for its power to express what is inconceivable, to achieve the impossible task of putting into words the evanescent truths of godly wisdom and describe the journey of one human soul toward a divine state of being. In his last fantasy, Lilith, published in 1895, he pursues his attempts at finding apt metaphors for otherworldly elements, portals between worlds, and other planes of existence, as evidenced by its original titles, ‘Anacosm’ (meaning ‘between worlds’ or ‘through worlds’) and ‘a tale of the seventh dimension’.1 Lilith was also among the first novels to be typewritten. ‘Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts’2 wrote Nietzsche to a friend in 1882 when his failing eyesight led him to use one of the very first typewriters, the Malling Hansen writing ball. If the tools a writer uses are not passive conduits through which thought travels unadulterated from mind to paper, as Goody showed, how did the use of a typewriter affect MacDonald’s writing? The typewritten ‘avant-textes’ of Lilith kept at the British Library shed some light on the question. They consist of a series of eight successive versions of the novel, referred to as Lilith A to Lilith H . The particularly complex Lilith B draft includes seven puzzling triangular-shaped insertions on the back of some pages, which give a fascinating insight into the way the typewriter affected the writing. The ninth version, Lilith H, was published in 1895.

The Lilith Drafts Lilith A is a manuscript version, dated March 1890, written on less than half of the right-hand pages of a ready-bound copybook. It is much shorter than the other versions and quite different in terms of the characters, episodes, and overall story—the quest of a son for his father and the redemption of them both at the end of a journey through the allegorical world of the seven dimensions. It was probably intended as a gift as it is relatively free of corrections, but it does bear a number of emendations. Moreover, the consistent use of only one side of the pages and a systematically blank left margin suggest that it was at one point a working document. Lilith B, C, D, and E are typescripts bearing handwritten

10

‘NO SPEECH AT MY COMMAND WILL FIT THE FORMS IN MY MIND’ …

203

autograph corrections, and F , G, and H are proofs, with handwritten, autograph corrections.3 The major changes to the story occur between Lilith A and Lilith B, as the quest for a lost father becomes the tale of the evil princess Lilith’s redemption. Lilith B is in fact composed of two main layers, referred to as B1 and B2, typed with two different typewriters, which can be distinguished mainly by the size of the letters as ‘pica’ and ‘elite’, but also by a few slight differences in the typeface itself (mostly visible on the letters f and t). B1 is no longer extant. The pages of the typescript were heavily revised, so much so that instead of having the whole corrected typescript typed afresh to produce a new clean typescript for further revision, which is how Lilith C and the following versions were produced, B2 was in fact made up of pages from B1 bearing handwritten revisions alternating with new pages typed with a different typewriter, which were added to the first version but often replaced one or several pages of B1, which are now lost. On some of the pages, more than 80% of the B1 text is crossed out in ink. Several pages include text typed with both machines, sometimes on the back of the page, sometimes on the same side. Thus, folio 16, for instance, was first covered entirely with text typed with the pica machine. Then, near the middle of the page, a portion of the pica text was crossed out by hand in ink and replaced by new text typed with the elite machine between the crossed-out lines of pica. The new text, in this instance, was longer than the original, and the typewriter had to be used in such a way as to reduce the side margins and allow the text to protrude on both sides so that it fit within the available space. Corrections were added in ink afterward and at every possible stage of the process. At the end of the draft, many pages consist of a cut-and-paste collage of pieces of pages typed by the two machines. MacDonald described the process in a 1893 letter to his daughter Winifred: ‘I am a little tired having been hard at work cutting and killing and re-embodying and shifting, and trying generally to restore order, and draw out hidden meanings from their holes’.4 The resulting document is complex. The whole process appears to have been done gradually, new pages being typed as needed when the proliferating emendations made the draft indecipherable or when the new version was much longer than the original. This process was interrupted once, when MacDonald sent the first 138 pages to a professional typist whose corrected typescript formed the basis of Lilith C, before MacDonald used the same extensive revision process on the rest of B1.

204

C. COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE

The typewriters used on this draft were therefore at the heart of this chaotic creative process, instead of being confined to those intermittent periods of suspension when authors send their drafts to professional typists who incorporate their revisions and produce a clean typescript. To analyze what role the use of a typewriter might have had in this creative process, we have to ascertain who used it and how, how skilled they might have been and what kind of machine they used. Mark Twain is usually credited with being the first writer to use a typewriter for literary creation, and certainly claimed so, although evidence shows that he did not use one for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and that he did not actually type himself when working on a literary text. He indeed tried the Remington as soon as it appeared in 1874, but seems to have used it only to dictate to a typist, or as a party trick to impress his guests with the speed at which he could type a particular short text he had memorized (Wershler-Henry 225–230). George MacDonald’s son Ronald claims that his father ‘was among the first of literary men … to make use of the typing-machine; the bulk of his work, from the year 1880, being composed by this means, and worked upon afterwards with the pen; he always cheerfully accounting [sic] the machine a great saving of labour’ (MacDonald R. 48). Indeed, Balliol College has a typescript of MacDonald’s 1880 book of poetry, The Diary of an Old Soul with autograph corrections, which was ‘used as printer’s copy for the edition privately printed in 1882’. It also has ‘an earlier typescript of certain passages’5 of the work, but it is not known if the typist was MacDonald himself. Apart from the Lilith series of drafts, dated between 1891 and 1895, only one other typescript from the 1890s is known, a heavily revised typescript of his novel Heather and Snow, published in 1893.6 MacDonald’s letters in that period were usually handwritten; only three typed letters are known, two of them dated 1893 (Weinrich 80 n.18) and one, more interestingly, dated 1886. It seems to have been typed by someone who had just started using a machine, as it is typed entirely in capital letters, apart from the signature at the bottom, with some words crossed by typing capital Xs over the words, and other corrections and additions made by hand.7 The first downstrike typewriter to be mass-produced, that is typewriters which allowed the text being typed to be visible, was the Daugherty Visible in 1893 (before the more famous Underwood in 1895),8 although upstrike models, known as ‘blind writers’ because they hid the text, continued to be produced for some time. Ronald MacDonald’s assertion that his father used a typewriter as early as the 1880s would mean

10

‘NO SPEECH AT MY COMMAND WILL FIT THE FORMS IN MY MIND’ …

205

that George MacDonald must have started with upstrike machines, but evidence from the manuscripts suggests that when working on Lilith B he used a downstrike model which allowed him to see the text for both the B1 and the B2 versions. Thus, the top of f. 8 was first typed with the pica machine, then crossed out with the elite machine using the letters ‘o’, ‘s’, or ‘x’ repeatedly, before the typist added some text with the elite machine in between the crossed-out lines. Similarly, on the B1 layer of the typescript, the ‘pica’ layer, there are examples of lines typed upside down in a margin for lack of space (f. 33) or vertically on the right side of the paper (f. 85, f. 121). This would have been difficult to achieve with a ‘blind’ upstrike model. The Daugherty Visible was first produced in 1893, the same year as MacDonald’s letter to Winifred describing his work on B2, so he must have acquired one as soon as they appeared. This places the typing of B1 in the first half of 1893 and suggests an intense campaign of rewriting. A particular feature of the Daugherty Visible, whose entire keyboard and type basket could be removed and replaced with another typeface, explains the difference in characters (pica and elite), one for each revised version (B1 and B2). These manipulations show the typist’s great ease and familiarity with this writing instrument. Sometimes the typist inserted the page in the machine merely to type a new page number (f. 32, f. 34), or a short note such as ‘See Back’ (referring to an addition inscribed on the back of the page). Such a directive had to be typed at the point of insertion, which obliged the typist to position the paper accurately (f. 159). Indeed, the typist displays great creativity on those pages, as if trying a new machine for the first time and experimenting with its possibilities, and uses the typewriter in ways that approximate the freedom of handwriting in terms of layout. Thus, the typist takes control over the invisible grid that the typewriter imposes on the paper—and in which the text has to fit—and even makes use of it for creative purposes. The typed triangular additions, which must necessarily have been typed on a front strike machine, are a particularly remarkable example of this. The machines MacDonald used have a monospaced typespace, as typewriters had for a long time; each character, including punctuation and spaces, occupies the same width since the axis of each letter is equidistant from the axes of the previous and the following letters.9 This particular characteristic allows the typist of Lilith B to create geometrical shapes with great precision, simply by adding the same number of characters at the beginning and the end of each line. Thus, the typed triangle at the back

206

C. COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE

of f. 123 is obtained by lengthening each line by two characters, one on each side of the triangle, while the triangle at the back of f. 8 started the same way for the first six lines, before the typist changed the slope on the left by adding between five and seven characters on each line, perhaps the result of experimentation with the tab mechanism. Yet, other aspects of the B1 and B2 typescripts suggest that the typist’s eyes were on another version that he or she was copying (Weinrich 98– 99). Thus, several times a page, lines end with truncated words: the typist did not realize that he or she had reached the end of the line and did not have enough room to finish those words. The final word is then typed afresh at the beginning of the next line, and the few letters at the end of the previous line are then struck out by hand during the handwritten revisions phase. More strikingly, there is often no margin left at the bottom of the page and the last line often curves down halfway, indicating that the typist did not anticipate the end of the sheet. Weinrich believes that there must have been at least two typists. MacDonald would often indicate new paragraphs with a right square bracket, rather than an indentation, at the beginning or in the middle of lines, both when he was typing or writing by hand. Therefore, we can assume that he typed these idiosyncratic passages (Weinrich 125), while others, probably family members, typed other portions of the text. This creative use of the typewriter is not anecdotal, as MacDonald himself typed a significant number of pages. They include the triangular-shaped insertions, most of which bear witness to his typical use of the right square bracket (see Fig. 10.1).10 Whether or not there were one or more typists, the document shows evidence of two modes of typing. In some parts, the typist merely copied the new corrected text to produce a more readable version but other parts are examples of what Wershler-Henry calls ‘generative typists’, that is ‘those typists whose dictating voice is physically absent from the scene of production, such as novelists, essayists, and other creative writers’ (Wershler-Henry 233–234). In this mode of typing, the author conceives the text directly on the keyboard instead of using the typewriter only for a mechanical reproduction of the initial, handwritten creation. Touchtyping methods had been in use since the beginning of the 1880s for upstrike, ‘blind’ typewriters (Wershler-Henry 231) so that MacDonald, in spite of his old age, would have had plenty of time to learn this technique

10

‘NO SPEECH AT MY COMMAND WILL FIT THE FORMS IN MY MIND’ …

207

Fig. 10.1 Transcription of George MacDonald’s Lilith B, top of f. 8v

and be able to compose directly on the machine. Certainly, his enthusiasm for this new technology that his son describes allows us to think it possible.

Typing and Inventing Comparing the successive versions of a passage shows MacDonald looking for his ideas, inventing the allegorical world of his fantasy as he was writing it, through the writing process itself. The first versions of the text are often clumsy and overly detailed, as if he was not only looking for the right word, but also spelling out for himself all the steps of a particular argument, or all the components and characteristics of a device he was inventing and picturing in his mind as he was writing. Thus, on f. 8, from Lilith B1, he describes an optical apparatus which will allow the hero to enter another dimension, which the character will discover for the first time. The narrator has just observed that the mirror does not seem to reflect the light that falls upon it. The B1 version (i.e., the typed version, without any manuscript corrections) reads: I looked up at the roof where it [the light] entered, and saw that the light fell not perpendicularly but slantingly upon the face of the mirror. ‘Is it possible,’ I said to myself, ‘that the light that falls on Next I perceived

208

C. COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE

that the light did not fall direct from the roof on to the mirror out from somewhere else, and that it was only by the illumination of the dust in the room that I saw it fall on the mirror at all. I looked and saw that the light which seemed to go to the mirror and not come back from it came from another mirror, which received the light that entered by the opening in the roof. I noted that the angle at which it approached the mirror in front of me, and then the truth flashed upon me: somebody had been at some time experimenting with polarized light on a large scale, and the whole chamber had been arranged arranged, perhaps constructed for the purpose.11

The line that is typed over and the ungrammatical sentence (‘I noted that the angle at which it approached the mirror in front of me, and then the truth flashed upon me’) show the author leaving a train of thoughts unfinished to take a new direction, tentatively trying to invent this curious device as he writes. We can see him working out the complex trajectory of the light step by step, multiplying the indications of direction, and producing awkward sentences (‘the light did not fall direct from the roof on to the mirror out from somewhere else’, ‘the light which seemed to go to the mirror and not come back from it came from another mirror’), even if we consider that the author, as well as the narrator, might be trying to represent the confusion the protagonist was experiencing at the time of his discovery. The next version of this passage on f. 15 of Lilith C is more concise, and those clumsy, labored indications have disappeared: Again I looked up at the roof where the light entered and saw that the light which fell upon the face of the mirror, did not come direct from the roof. I saw also that it was only by the illumination of the dust through which it came that I could tell it reached the mirror, for the mirror reflected none of it; light seemed to pass through it, and disappear. At last I discovered that the light from the opening in the roof fell first upon another mirror, high in a corner, and from that was reflected upon the mirror beside which I stood. The truth flashed upon me: someone had at some time been experimenting with polarized light, and the chamber had probably been constructed, and certainly arranged for that purpose.12

Through the revision process, the description becomes less mathematical, losing the technical references to angles such as ‘not perpendicularly but slantingly’ or ‘I noted that the angle at which it approached the

10

‘NO SPEECH AT MY COMMAND WILL FIT THE FORMS IN MY MIND’ …

209

mirror’ for a more vague and abstract description (‘did not come direct from the roof’). On the other hand, it acquires more descriptive details such as ‘high in a corner’ or ‘beside which I stood’, allowing the reader to picture the hero within the room. Other examples show how MacDonald worked as a ‘generative typist’. In the novel, the hero repeatedly travels from one world to another, or from one dimension to another, using an eclectic range of objects as portals. These heterogeneous objects are meant to symbolize the correspondences between worlds, in the Baudelairian sense of the word. Doors are particularly important, especially doors in libraries, doors covered with shelves and books, or opening onto nests of drawers containing papers and manuscripts. In one particular episode, Adam invites the hero to sleep in his cottage among seemingly dead people, suggesting the life he is living is but death compared to the life of the redeemed Christian he will find on awakening. The cottage’s multiple identities on different planes of reality, or different degrees of spirituality, include a library, a charnel house, and a cemetery, as if each book corresponded to a body and a soul. The comparison of the successive versions of this passage allows us to witness MacDonald at work not only as a wordsmith but as an inventor. In Lilith A,13 the narrator, frightened by this offer, simply walks out of the cottage/charnel house onto the moor that surrounds it, whereupon the cottage vanishes. In Lilith B, the pica text of B1 on f. 33 and 34 has the narrator run out of the charnel house into the adjoining cottage instead of onto the moor, and he explains how this turned out to be a change of spiritual dimension: Instead of the door of the cottage, that was like a coffin, I found that I had pulled open the door of a small closet in the wall of the library in our own house, and instead of the simple walls of the humble dwelling I but saw, close to my eyes, the nest of drawers that was within the strong little door. I lifted my eyes and saw the books all about. I looked behind me in some terror. The dead were not there, or if they were, I could not see them, hid in the seventh dimension or somewhere as mysterious.14

This passage is typed at the top of f. 34 and an elite addition was then inserted just before, typed in the bottom margin of f. 33, first in the same direction and then upside down, presumably to make it possible to type so close to the edge of the sheet. Yet, in spite of these efforts to make sure the addition fitted between the end of f. 33 and the top of f. 34

210

C. COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE

and some handwritten corrections that attempt to smooth out the seam between B1 and B2, this B2 addition actually tells a different version of the shift from cottage to library, so that two versions of the narrator’s escape coexist here on the same page. In the B1 version, the narrator had twice previously compared this door to the lid of a coffin leaning against the wall,15 thus creating the expectation of a small, man-sized space on the other side, which finds its exact counterpart in the ‘nest of drawers’. The very concrete detail ‘close to my eyes’ and the repetition of phrases suggesting that the character is inside the thickness of the wall rather than having passed through it (‘in the wall’ and ‘within the … door’) effectively evoke a claustrophobic space. The narrator then finds a manuscript in his father’s handwriting in a drawer. In this version, the spatial similarity of two corresponding three-dimensional spaces—that create the same physical feeling of being surrounded by walls—ensures the link between dimensions. In the B2 addition, this correspondence is between two small objects instead: ‘The latch of the cottage door was, as I remembered, strangely high. I raised up my hand to it and the moment I laid hold of it I found myself standing before one of the bookcases in the library of my own house, with a vellum bound manuscript in my hand, which I had apparently taken that moment from one of the shelves’.16 The little closet and the nest of drawers disappear, which strengthens the narrative since they had never been mentioned before, but the spatial and visual correspondence between two dimensions is lost. A metaphorical, more abstract, correspondence between spiritual planes replaces it, the idea that books, or texts, are doors onto new worlds for inquisitive minds. In Lilith C, the two versions present in Lilith B are conflated into a new sequence: the latch of the cottage becomes the knob of a little drawer in a previously mentioned little room in the library and the narrator then opens the drawer and finds the manuscript in it.17 Although the pairing of a door latch and a drawer knob is more satisfying than that of a latch and a book, the transition is still quite abrupt and random, whereas the previous B1 version suggested a physical continuity in the narrator’s feelings of enclosure even after the change of surroundings, which more effectively conveyed the strangeness of the situation. The many mechanisms allowing the narrator to travel between the ‘seven dimensions’ in the final version, such as doors and mirrors to go through, trees to climb or portraits, and complicated contrivances

10

‘NO SPEECH AT MY COMMAND WILL FIT THE FORMS IN MY MIND’ …

211

involving polarized light, give the novel an untidy feeling, a lack of coherence, even after some of them, such as the magic ring from Lilith A, were dropped. The number and nature of the different ‘dimensions’ are never quite clear, and the draft offers too many theories to account for their correspondences: synesthesia (chapter IV), gravitation (chapter VI), geometry, with the recurrent conceit or ‘doors in’ and ‘doors out’ for instance. One wonders to what extent typewriting might have affected the conception of these worlds, and how it might have changed MacDonald’s creative habits. Although several of MacDonald’s handwritten manuscripts are available, mainly preserved in the George MacDonald Collection in the Brander library in Huntly, they all belong to the later stages of the genetic process, what Pierre-Marc de Biasi calls the compositional and textualizing phase, with rough drafts that constitute a whole. Thus, it is difficult to say if MacDonald was the kind of writer who puts pen to paper only after having made a detailed outline of the whole story, or if he tended to write directly and invent with pen in hand. Although the Lilith documents also belong to the textualizing phase, they show that even as MacDonald was writing he was not only looking for the right words but for the actual objects and events that would tell the best story. He seems to describe the very difficulties he was experiencing in devising things that do not exist in the real world when he makes his narrator explain, after his first visit to the ‘seventh dimension’: I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind. Already I have set down statements I would gladly change did I know how to substitute a truer utterance; but as often as I try to fit the reality with nearer words, I find myself in danger of losing the things themselves, and feel like one in process of awaking from a dream, with the thing that seemed familiar gradually yet swiftly changing through a succession of forms until its very nature is no longer recognisable.18

Typing in Shapes: Triangular Additions What can we make of the triangular additions that can be found on the back of some of the pages of Lilith B? There are three handwritten ones: one in red ink, on f. 3v, and two in black ink, on f. 131v and f. 160v. The other four, on f. 8v, f. 123v, f. 159v, and f. 177v, were typed using

212

C. COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE

the elite machine and then corrected by hand, either in red ink (f. 8v) or in black ink. They all belong to the B2 stage of composition as most of them are inscribed on the back of elite typewritten pages. The triangle on f. 123v, written on the back of a pica page, was typed with the elite machine. On f. 8, part of the pica original text was replaced by interlinear corrections typed in elite, which, for lack of space, had to be continued on the verso where they were typed in the shape of a triangle, before some final handwritten revisions were made on both sides. The revision process that leads from B1 to B2 seems by and large to have followed the order of the novel, starting at the beginning of the B1 manuscript and continuing page after page all the way to the end, as indicated by folio 139, which was in fact taken from the Lilith C bundle, after MacDonald had half of the revised B2 manuscript (up to f. 139) sent to a professional typist to be typed clean.19 It seems the first typed triangle might have been the one in elite at the back of f. 8, whose front is in pica typeface. It bears revisions in red ink, so that the manuscript triangle in red ink on f. 3v necessarily followed it. The other two handwritten triangles must also have been posterior, as they are handwritten revisions, and the triangles typed in elite on the back of pages themselves typed in elite must have come later too: they are all in fact additions meant to be inserted into the text on the recto. Since the typed triangles all bear handwritten revisions, it is possible that the typed revisions were first, followed by handwritten revisions, but the author might also have worked section by section, or even have alternated between typed revisions and handwritten ones as he seemed quite at ease with the typewriter and would not have hesitated to use it to add even a few words on a page. It is therefore impossible to tell in what order the triangles were typed, except that f. 8v was the first. If George MacDonald used a downstrike typewriter for the first time when he started to work on Lilith B, he would have been able to read his own text as he was typing it and to watch the sheet of paper rise, bearing those regular rows of letters. He might have felt the excitement of a child with a new toy, even though he was already familiar with typewriters, and he might have yielded to the temptation of playing with the possibilities it offered in terms of layout and graphics, and in particular to make use of the striking regularity the monospaced type created. Although the first triangular insertions are to be found at the beginning of the manuscript (f. 3 and f. 8), the fact that there are seven of them, reaching as far as f. 177, suggests something deeper than mere play. The

10

‘NO SPEECH AT MY COMMAND WILL FIT THE FORMS IN MY MIND’ …

213

typing of the triangle on f. 123v required great patience as the typist rigorously followed the pattern, increasing each line by only one character at each end for 23 lines before breaking the pattern. This meant the typist had to visually monitor the increasing line lengths (see Fig. 10.1) and could not simply touch type. The typist’s choice of a triangular shape cannot have been a private code enabling the author to immediately tell the fronts from the backs of the folios since all the pages were numbered, and some typed verso additions are not in the shape of triangles. Moreover, the additions are short enough not to fill up a whole page and the risk of confusion would have been negligible. Most additions throughout the manuscript are in the usual rectangular shape. A possible explanation could be that MacDonald experimented with a triangular layout in order to solve a practical problem. When writing a piece of text for insertion in the middle of a block of text that is already written, one repeatedly needs to check the original version to ensure textual coherence. While writing the addition on the back of the page bearing the original text, the writer must turn over the piece of paper to look at the recto, which constantly interrupts the act of writing. Starting in the middle of the page rather than on the left allows one to fold back one of the upper corners of the page diagonally and read part of what is on the recto while still being able to read the insertion one is typing on the verso. For the handwritten triangles, one can imagine the author writing with one hand while still holding the paper folded with the other, the pen spontaneously following the direction of the fold, thus creating a slanting margin that followed the fold. However, this procedure does not explain why this slope exists both on the right and on the left, thus creating a triangle and not a right trapezoid. Moreover, the point in the text on the recto where the triangular text must be inserted would have to be situated in the top third of the page, which is the case in only two of the occurrences of triangular additions. Another hypothesis is that after starting to type the insertion on the back, the author realized he had started too high on the page to allow himself to fold back the top of the page and look at what was written on the recto, and he decided to write short lines to move down faster and free up the top of the sheet, but the comparison of the point where the additions are inserted with the position of the corresponding triangles on the versos makes this hypothesis unconvincing. We must therefore look for the explanation for those odd shapes within the text that constitutes them.

214

C. COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE

Out of seven triangular additions, six appear in the context of the invention of some fantastic device, close to some technical and visual description. Indeed, the f. 3v triangle appears in the paragraph that describes the most important ‘portal’ between dimensions, which was not present in Lilith A. In Lilith B1, the narrator describes a door in the wall of the library, leading to the little room full of old books which we have already mentioned. The door has been covered ‘with the seeming backs of books’ and the handwritten triangular insertion on f. 3v explains how the illusion of real shelves on the door was created: instead of a twodimensional painting of rows of books, it is a three-dimensional illusion, as mock-books, ‘two inches deep’, have been stuck on the door, so as to be ‘flush with the backs of the other books when the door was shut’ (Fig. 10.2). The deception goes further: To complete the illusion, and possibly for the sake of thereby better conceal [sic] the existence of the door itself, some skilful inventor, and probably more skilful workman, had represented as shoved in on the top of the other books in one of the shelves, as one sometimes sees done by an untidy person, another book and that so far a real one that some presumably worthless volume had to all appearance been taken and cut through to such a size that it would shove into the narrow depth left at the top of

Fig. 10.2 Transcription of George MacDonald’s Lilith B, top of f. 3v

10

‘NO SPEECH AT MY COMMAND WILL FIT THE FORMS IN MY MIND’ …

215

the sham rows: there it was fixed immovably. You could even open a little way the part that projected, for they were parchment covers it had, and see that it was a manuscript volume.20

But MacDonald’s experiments with the layout of the text might better explain those curiously shaped additions in relation to this truncated manuscript. Later in the novel the narrator opens the volume as far as he can and copies out what is visible: the ends of some lines of a poem and the beginnings of other lines.21 MacDonald imagines in B2 a special implement that allows the hero to throw light on the parchment, ‘an oldfashioned horizontal-scissors-sort of a thing, holding a bit of long wound up taper between its jaws—I mean blades’,22 which will disappear from later versions. In the B2 version, MacDonald meant to insert here the fragments of the poem the narrator copied out, as a note to himself indicates: ‘put these in here after I have written the poem’.23 MacDonald might have been toying with the idea of printing those manuscript fragments laid out exactly as they appeared to the narrator, in a triangular shape, although his attempts do not form the right shape: the lines should be parallel to one side of the triangle, not to its base, or be written horizontally, with the lines becoming shorter and shorter to create a diagonal. If that was the case, the idea never went any further, and in Lilith C, the poem’s text is only revealed much later when Adam reads it.24 This parchment will prove pivotal in the story. The novel suggests repeatedly that books are portals into other dimensions, their outer crust of paper and vellum being a mere shell for their true spiritual nature, just as the bodies of men relate to their souls. Although it was impossible at first for the narrator to remove the truncated book from the mock-shelf, the character of Adam, who can see through appearances and knows the true nature of things, will later not only take the book out but take it out whole, and read aloud the poem it contains, thereby forcing the villain, Lilith, to show herself and submit to him.25 This episode occurs only two pages before the triangular additions on f. 159v and f. 160v, although the contents of those additions apparently bear no relation to the shape of the text and simply describe the feelings of the narrator about Lilith and the sexton/Adam. MacDonald might still have been planning to include the incomplete poem at the beginning of the novel and was perhaps trying out different layouts for it. The text with whose layout he experimented could be any text, and he might have used the additions on f. 159v and f. 160v as opportunities to try out different layouts, which would explain

216

C. COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE

why those additions are triangular although their content has nothing to do with triangles. What is probably the first triangular addition, on f. 8v, occurs only a few pages before the first mention of the mock-books door and the mutilated parchment, and might have been another experiment with the layout of the cropped poem. This addition presents two ways of creating a slanting edge, first with single spaced lines, increasing in length equally at each end by one character and then with double spaced lines, increasing in length by 8–4 characters on the left and 5–1 character on the right, perhaps through the use of the tab on the left (see Fig. 10.1). Even though the f. 131v addition is situated about only twenty pages before Adam’s reading of the whole poem, it could also be the result of experimentation with layout. Nonetheless, the typist could have achieved the required effect of a page cut diagonally using other techniques than gradually lengthening the lines at each end, as is the case with all seven triangular additions, whether typed or handwritten, for instance by inserting the paper differently. We must therefore look further into the reasons for the presence of those triangular insertions. In the passage where the f. 8v triangle is added, the narrator explores the garret of his house, just under the slanting roof (‘with a not infrequent chance of breaking my head on some low angle of the roof’).26 The text of the addition shows him discovering an enclosure in the middle of the attic, which is then revealed to contain the conical chimney and the system of mirrors which uses polarized light to open a portal into another dimension (see supra). We saw how much trouble MacDonald took crafting the description of this apparatus, his mind busy with complex geometrical shapes and angles, and this might explain why he typed that insertion in the shape of a pyramid, as if to visualize the contraption he was inventing. Similarly, the contents of the text that forms the handwritten triangle on f. 131v describe a conical hall made of black marble slabs in the evil princess’s palace, with a round opening at the top letting the light in, which reminds one of the devices in the garret of the narrator’s house. The black marble hall is a place that shifts between dimensions, where shadows play on the walls, a place later revealed to be a projection of Lilith’s guilt: ‘I knew that, in that ellipse of blackness, I had been in the brain of the princess, sharing in the terrible things that her memory brought up before her’.27 The drafts show that MacDonald was particularly concerned with the precision of the geometrical facts in this description, as he takes pains to explain how the slabs join to create the shape of a beehive, or how the sun’s rays come in through the opening (Fig. 10.3).

10

‘NO SPEECH AT MY COMMAND WILL FIT THE FORMS IN MY MIND’ …

217

Fig. 10.3 Transcription of George MacDonald’s Lilith B, top of f. 131v

The asterisk that crowns the third of the triangular insertions, on f. 123v, suggests mystical or arcane symbolism related to that of associated triangles or pyramids. In fact, MacDonald does not draw on any preexisting symbolism as much as might be expected for such a novel, but angles and triangles haunt the story throughout. Some conceits seem to belong to the genre of science-fiction, such as the use of mirrors and ‘polarized light’, or the way rays of light whose incidence on the flat surface of the painting is carefully calculated illuminate and give depth to portraits of ancestors. In other cases, MacDonald seems to borrow ideas from Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, for instance when he makes the devil’s otherness apparent by depicting him as two-dimensional, and casting no shadow.28 This obsession with geometry is particularly true of the B1–B2 stage of development with its numerous examples of MacDonald’s imagination working to picture things in space in three dimensions. The persistence of these singularly shaped insertions in different parts of the text suggests that these additions are akin to doodles, odd half controlled half involuntary tracings one makes when one’s mind is elsewhere. They might not tell us that

218

C. COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE

the author actually intended to print some of the text as triangles in the final novel, but might simply be the result of MacDonald’s preoccupation with shapes, angles, and directions and their ability to represent the characters’ spiritual journeys and battles through metaphorical correspondences. They also provided him with mechanical, painstaking tasks involving great concentration, such as copying a text while counting the exact number of characters, quite uninteresting tasks in themselves, but so absorbing that they paradoxically free up the mind from conscious reasoning. Doodling with a typewriter, as strange as it may sound, might have been MacDonald’s ‘mythopoeic’ method to tap into the deepest sources of his imagination. MacDonald wrote two fantastic novels in which he invented a truly new genre—one at the beginning of his writing career, Phantastes (1858), and the other at the very end of it in 1895, Lilith. It is tempting to think that his new writing tool, the downstrike typewriter, might have allowed him to return to the genre of fantasy. Like the desolate country the narrator of Lilith travels through, crisscrossed by dry channels where once flowed fertile waters—an ordeal that brings him closer to his redemption—the typewriter and the invisible rows and columns it projects onto the blank page where the author tries to exist as a creator, as a maker of myths, provide both the obstacles and the means for the pilgrim to progress. It is possible that the constraints of mechanical writing allowed him to unleash the power of imagination from the preexisting patterns of known texts, myths and legends, and let his mind explore new possibilities for fantasy. In his essay on ‘The Fantastic Imagination’, published in 1893, while he was writing Lilith, MacDonald emphatically refuses to explain the meaning of his fairy tales. What matters is the world he has invented, and its capacity to evoke beauty and possibly some meaning for the reader, a meaning which is not necessarily the one he intended and might be superior to it. The typewriter may have been just the right creative instrument for him, ‘not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him’.29

Notes 1. Lilith B, f. 1, Variorum 1, 7. 2. Letter to Peter Gast, February 1882, in Briefwehsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin, 1975–1984), quoted in Kittler 200.

10

‘NO SPEECH AT MY COMMAND WILL FIT THE FORMS IN MY MIND’ …

219

3. The transcription of Lilith A published by Johannesen in Lilith: A Duplex includes the crossed-out passages but does not reproduce the layout of the original manuscript pages. The transcriptions of manuscripts B, C, D, and E published by Johannesen as Lilith: A Variorum Edition are not diplomatic transcriptions either and only include the typed text, leaving aside the handwritten additions and corrections. 4. Letter to his daughter Winifred, 14 June 1893, The Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, quoted in ‘Introduction,’ Lilith, Variorum I , 3. 5. Balliol College Archives and Manuscripts, Web, http://archives.balliol. ox.ac.uk/images/Mynors%20catalogue/Mynors418.jpg, consulted on 10 January 2016. 6. Apart from the Lilith manuscripts, held at the British Library, manuscripts of MacDonald’s works are mainly held at the Brander Library, Huntly, in the Special Collections of the University of Aberdeen and at Balliol College Library, Oxford. The manuscripts held at the Brander Library all date from the 1860s and 1870s, except for Heather and Snow. 7. MacDonald George, letter to his cousin James dated 28 March 1886, reproduced in Shaberman, Raphael B., George MacDonald: A Bibliographical Study, 137. 8. Beeching Wilfred A., Century of the Typewriter, 1974. See also The Typewriter Database, http://typewriterdatabase.com/189x-daugherty-visible. 1430.typewriter and The Virtual Typewriter Museum, http://www.typ ewritermuseum.org/collection/index.php3?machine=daugh&cat=kf, both consulted 19 July 2013. For a demonstration of this typewriter, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7STUMs_imqE, consulted 20 July, 2013. The patents for the Daugherty Visible described in the Typewriter Database are dated 1891 and 1892, which is also the date given by Polt (http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-history.html, consulted 19 July 2013) so it is even possible that MacDonald had heard of it before 1893. 9. For a detailed history of the different meanings of the word ‘pica’, an exhaustive explanation of how this typeface came to be the standard one for typewriters, then came to mean the size of the letters (as opposed to the elite size for instance), see Ponot, ‘Pica, élite et les autres ou les caractères de la machine à écrire.’ 10. See, for instance, the typed square bracket at the beginning of the triangular insertion on f. 177v and the handwritten brackets at the beginning of the triangle on f. 8v (see fig. 1), f. 159v or f. 160v. 11. Lilith B, f. 8, Variorum 1, 14. 12. Lilith C, f. 15, Variorum 1, 238. 13. Lilith A, f. 35, Lilith: A Duplex, 297. 14. Lilith B, f. 34, Variorum 1, 35. 15. Lilith B, f. 25 and f. 28, Variorum 1, 27–28 and 31.

220 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

C. COLLIÈRE-WHITESIDE

Lilith B, f. 33, Variorum 1, 35. Lilith C, f. 65, Variorum 1, 260. Lilith, First and Final, 9. See Weinrich, 156 for a detailed description of f. 139. Lilith B, f. 3, Variorum 1, 9. Lilith B, f. 15, Variorum 1, 19. Ibid. Ibid. Lilith C, f. 294–297, Variorum 1, 354–356. Lilith B, f. 150–155, Variorum 1, 138–142. Lilith B, f. 8, Variorum 1, 13. Lilith B, f. 145, Variorum 1, 134. Lilith, First and Final, 122–123, chapter XXII. ‘The Fantastic Imagination,’ 9.

Works Cited Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. London: Seeley & Co., 1884. Beeching, Wilfred A. Century of the Typewriter. London: Heinemann, 1974. Bockelkamp, Marianne. ‘Objets Matériels.’ In Les manuscrits des écrivains. Dir. Louis Hay. Paris: CNRS éditions, Hachette, 1993: 88–101. Bustarret, Claire. ‘Les instruments d’écriture, de l’indice au symbole.’ Genesis 10 Sémiotique (1996): 175–192. de Biasi, Pierre-Marc. ‘What Is a Literary Draft? Towards a Functional Typology of Genetic Documentation.’ Yale French Studies, 89, Drafts (1996): 26–58. Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Lewis, C. S. Introduction. Lilith, a Romance. Ed. George MacDonald. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. MacDonald, George. ‘The Fantastic Imagination.’ 1893. In The Complete Fairy Tales. Ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999. ———. Lilith. 1890–1895. MS and TS Add. 46187 A-H. British Lib., London. ———. Lilith: A Duplex (also Lilith: First and Final ). Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1994 (includes Lilith A and the final published text). ———. Lilith: A Variorum Edition in 2 Volumes. Ed. Rolland Hein. Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1997 (Volume 1 includes Lilith B and C, volume 2 Lilith D and E). MacDonald, Ronald. From a Northern Window: A Personal Reminiscence of George MacDonald by His Son. Eureka, CA: Sunrise Books Publishers, 1989.

10

‘NO SPEECH AT MY COMMAND WILL FIT THE FORMS IN MY MIND’ …

221

McGillis, Roderick F. ‘George MacDonald—The Lilith Manuscripts.’ Scottish Literary Journal: A Review of Studies in Scottish Language and Literature 4, no. 2 (1977): 40–57. Polt, Richard (ed.). The Classic Typewriter Page. Est. 9 December 1995. Web. 19 July 2013. http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/. Ponot, René. ‘Pica, élite et les autres ou les caractères de la machine à écrire.’ In La machine à écrire hier et demain. Ed. Roger Laufer. Paris: Solin, 1982: 143–154. Raeper, William. George MacDonald. Tring: Lion Publishing, 1987. Robert, Paul (ed.). The Virtual Typewriter Museum, Est. June 2001. Web. 10 January 2016. http://www.typewritermuseum.org/. Shaberman, Raphael B. George MacDonald: A Bibliographical Study. Winchester, Hampshire: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990. The Typewriter Database. Web. 10 January 2016. http://www.typewriterdatab ase.com/. Weinrich, Elizabeth Jane MacDonald. ‘The Genesis of George MacDonald’s Lilith: A Study of Prepublication Documents.’ Diss. University of Georgia, 1999. 4 August 2010. https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/weinrich_elizabeth_ j_199912_phd.pdf. Wershler-Henry, Darren. The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. London: Cornell UP, 2007.

CHAPTER 11

Processing Modernism: The Textual Politics of Nightwood Alex Christie

As electronic texts, images, and editions are used to share manuscript materials, including the creation of online archives and versioned electronic texts, and as many modernist texts begin to enter into the public domain, the scholarly representation of modernist literary production is moving increasingly into digital space. Just as modernist texts carry material histories embedded in specific networks of literary production, the digital counterparts used to represent those texts carry their own material histories that are embedded in contemporary networks of electronic production. —Alex Christie

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this chapter (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_11) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. A. Christie (B) Centre for Digital Humanities, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_11

223

224

A. CHRISTIE

Note to the reader: This chapter was originally written as an interactive, web-based publication. The interactive version of this chapter is available in the Supplementary Material section of the eBook. Elements of the webbased format that are central to this chapter’s argument are retained in the print-based version.

In the typescript of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, T. S. Eliot replaces the word ‘obscene’ with ‘unclean’. Eliot alters Barnes’s description of Nora’s dog as ‘barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching’ to read ‘unclean and touching’. This editorial change on the part of Eliot does not appear in the published editions of the novel. Beside Eliot’s change on the typescript, Barnes has written: ‘Sample of T.S. Eliot’s lack of “imagination” (as he said)’. This brief editorial conversation between Barnes and Eliot is an instance of the networks of literary production that enabled the making of modernist literature. The rise of publishing in magazines and multiple editions, across different countries, publishers, and venues in the twentieth century, enabled the proliferation and transformation of multiple versions of literary texts. The drafts and editorial changes that shaped the production of these texts, which often involved the collaboration of multiple editorial agents, also reveal telling histories about the changes that occurred to these texts over time. Sometimes these textual changes are as benign as Eliot’s ‘unimaginative’ shift from ‘obscene’ to ‘unclean’. In other cases, these changes reveal controversial material that was cut from an early draft and other details that significantly alter the issues at stake in the work. In the instance of Nightwood, a novel known for its representation of lesbian desire in interwar Paris, typescript changes to the novel reveal sets of editorial decisions that fundamentally change the novel’s description of queer identity. These editorial changes can be made viewable through the practices of electronic textual editing. The rise of digital scholarship in the humanities presents new opportunities for representing the publication histories of modernist texts and for distributing them online. As electronic texts, images, and editions are used to share manuscript materials, including the creation of online archives and versioned electronic texts, and as many modernist texts begin to enter into the public domain, the scholarly representation of modernist literary production is moving increasingly into digital space. Just as modernist texts carry material histories embedded in specific

11

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

225

networks of literary production, the digital counterparts used to represent those texts carry their own material histories that are embedded in contemporary networks of electronic production.1 In much the same way that printed texts exist as historical products of editorial agents, publishing processes, and networks of textual transmission, digital texts are formed by the complex interrelation of component objects, tools, and collaborative laborers. Electronic textual editing can therefore be theorized as a practice through which contemporary methods and networks produce scholarly content that considers, reflexively, the historical methods and networks of modernist production. Through the concept of processing modernism, I explore how the computational processing deployed to produce electronic scholarly texts reengages the processes of composition and revision being represented onscreen. This approach takes up Katherine Hayles’s argument that cultural, political, and theoretical issues do not crystallize in one stable, authoritative instantiation of a text, but instead migrate and change across platforms and media; as she writes: ‘Since no print books can be completely encoded into digital media, we should think about correspondences rather than ontologies, entraining processes rather than isolated objects, and codes moving in coordinated fashion across representational media rather than mapping one object onto another’ (Hayles 270). Processing modernism refers at once to the theoretical and cultural issues that emerge throughout the editorial process of a work’s production and also to the digital processes through which such issues are constructed on screen.2 Taking editorial revisions to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as its case study, I therefore relocate modernist production within contemporary debates surrounding digital production in the academy. Nightwood is a novel that deals heavily with the question of queer desire. Locating instances of desire as layered representations that exist across multiple instantiations of the text reveals a hidden politics of the work. The novel’s representation of queer sexuality is processed across the typescript revisions used to produce the first published edition of the novel, for which significant revisions to the representation of homosexuality were introduced by the editorial oversight of T. S. Eliot, Frank Morley, Emily Coleman, and Barnes, herself. Examining these revisions reveals a hidden sexual politics of the work, a politics which is first embedded in the material history of the book and then reconfigured through the process of digitization. As it deploys electronic textual editing to reveal the sexual politics of Nightwood’s textual genesis, this chapter simultaneously interrogates how and

226

A. CHRISTIE

where those politics continue to play out through the electronic genesis of digitized, collated versions of the novel’s typescript changes.

Understanding modernist texts (in their both original and electronic forms) as politicized by their component materials requires reading the literary artifact through its processes of production. Processing modernist texts for electronic representation involves a series of contributing agents, including text encoders, web developers, and project directors. Similarly, the rendering of electronic texts on a computer screen relies upon processes of collating and integrating multiple files and sources which constitute the networked, component parts of the digital text. As Matthew Kirschenbaum explains: ‘What appears to be a homogenous digital object at the conceptual level…may in fact be a compound object at its logical and even physical levels, with elements of the database drawn from different file systems distributed across multiple servers or social media’ (Kirschenbaum 3–4). As it exists in networked environments, the electronic literary object depends on the interrelation of various technological mechanisms, mechanisms which reveal material networks of scholarly production. Kirschenbaum continues (12–13) (Fig. 11.1).

image/jpeg

Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination Matthew Kirschenbaum Google Book MIT Press

11

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

227

Fig. 11.1 Quotation from Matthew Kirschenbaum

Underlying scholarly acts of representation online exist networked material infrastructures that support those acts of representation. Through Kirschenbaum’s distinction between formal and forensic materiality, the material components of academic production online can be read as analogous to their modernist counterparts, counterparts which are both represented and remediated as they pass through contemporary networks of digital production. In the instance above, the formal materiality of the image refers to its unbroken representation onscreen, eliding its status as material bits of data that are produced, hosted on servers, downloaded across telecommunications infrastructures, and

228

A. CHRISTIE

complied by a web browser. The forensic materiality of the digital object refers to its material existence on a Google Server (after being scanned and OCRed—processed—for digital representation), from which I accessed an instantiation of Kirschenbaum’s book. As Johanna Drucker writes of Kirschenbaum’s approach, ‘This decision to ‘read’ digital artifacts through the detailed understanding of their production is highly informative’. Just as a genetic approach renders visible the material details that inform the production of modernist texts, forensic materiality exposes the material histories of the digitized text. Using this approach, I conceive both modernist literary representation and the scholarly representation of modernist texts as acts whose material histories politicize the representations of the literary objects that rely upon them. My deployment of process as both a modernist and a scholarly act of textual representation seeks to address expansions to the modernist canon by revisiting the representation of modernism, itself as a scholarly act that intervenes in the politics of modernist literary production. Reading literary representation through its materials of production relies on a hermeneutic that locates the formal materiality of the literary text (the image) as a product that elides the politics of its modes of production (its process). Electronic scholarly texts seek to reveal the material histories of the literary artifact by digitizing drafts, manuscripts, and published editions. However, in the process of rendering textual change visible, electronic scholarly work exposes the material histories of the literary object by suppressing the material histories of the digital artifacts that come to stand in for it onscreen. The process of representing textual change online therefore reactivates the politics of literary production, requiring a hermeneutic that accounts for the component materials of both the analogue literary artifact and its digitized electronic counterpart. In order to read the forensic materiality of texts through their formal materials, I rely on what Bill Brown calls a materialist hermeneutic. This hermeneutic recuperates the suppressed politics of the literary artifact through its materials of production, locating the artifact as embedded in what Brown refers to as a material unconscious (Brown 4–5) (Figs. 11.2 and 11.3).

11

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

229



image/jpeg

The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play Bill Brown Google Book Harvard University Press

Fig. 11.2 Quotation from Bill Brown

Fig. 11.3 Quotation from Bill Brown

230

A. CHRISTIE

Through Brown’s materialist hermeneutic, the formal literary artifact emerges as a representation, an image, whose suppressed material components expose its status as the product of a historical politics. Whereas Brown deploys the material unconscious through a historiographic focus on the everyday, wherein neglected things reveal the suppressed politics of late nineteenth-century recreation, I read the material unconscious of the book through its suppressed drafts, typescripts, and editorial changes. It is through the variants between these witnesses, the ‘sites of [textual] contradiction or incomplete elision’, that the repressed forensic components of the formal literary artifact emerge. The point of this approach is not to read editorial revision as an expression of an editor’s politics; I do not intend to make an argument about the unconscious intentions of Nightwood’s editors. Reading the material unconscious of the book does not seek to psychologize the literary artifact either. Instead, subjecting textual representation to a materialist hermeneutic dredges up the hidden base materials that inform its literary representations. The material unconscious of the electronic literary artifact exposes the elided politics of the historical texts that inform its representation, but which inhere in the production of that representation rather than within the representation itself. In the case of Nightwood, the representation of sexuality in the first published edition of the novel exists as the product of editorial changes which modified the novel’s construction of queer identity. Exposing these changes through a hermeneutic that focuses on the drafts and typescripts across which the representation of sexuality was changed therefore unveils a changing and complex engagement with the question of queer sexuality. The material unconscious of Nightwood’s representation of sexuality inheres its struggle to describe and define how sexuality functions for its queer characters, particularly in relation to changing constructions of queerness in the first half of the twentieth century. The textual materials that underpin Nightwood’s representation of sexuality expose the novel’s invisible grappling with the question of queer identity. Furthermore, the process of exposing the material unconscious of the literary artifact by rendering its variant drafts and typescripts visible onscreen generates a series of digital objects that reactivate and rework the unconscious of their analogue referents. Whereas Brown deploys a materialist hermeneutic to reveal the repressed materials of the literary artifact, I argue that the use of this hermeneutic to generate electronic scholarly representations of textual change overturns the distinction between the

11

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

231

historical text and the digital text. As it exposes and reengages the invisible politics of the literary artifact, the digitized text exists as a layered archival object through which the process of scholarly representation reveals, but also remediates, the material unconscious of the literary text.3 My inquiry into the politics of the publication history of Nightwood is thus simultaneously an inquiry into the politics of rendering that history viewable onscreen.

Composed across multiple drafts, followed by three copies of the typescript, the published text of Nightwood is invisibly marked by the editorial hands of Emily Coleman, T. S. Eliot (who collaborated with his colleague Frank Morley), and Barnes herself. Coleman collaborated with Barnes throughout the novel’s long process of composition, including multiple early versions that were sent to various publishers and rejected. It was not until Coleman contacted T. S. Eliot, persuading him to look over the manuscript, which he did in collaboration with Frank Morley, that publication became possible. With the editorial guidance of Eliot and Morley, Barnes published the novel at Faber and Faber. Three copies of the typescript used in this process of revision exist: the ribbon copy, the first carbon copy (sent first to Coleman, and then to Eliot and Morley), and the second carbon copy (which Barnes kept). Notable changes throughout this process include the removal of a character named Catherine, who was merged with Nora (this took place over the novel’s early drafts, before the introduction of Eliot), and the excision of significant references to male homosexuality (occurring across the copies of the typescript). Cheryl J. Plumb takes the second carbon (the one which Barnes kept) as the copy text for her scholarly edition of the novel, which restores the vast majority of cuts made for the 1936 first edition, published by Faber and Faber. Although my goal is not to ascribe intention to these changes, which are often attributed to the blue pen of Eliot, I do interrogate how the process of editorial revision changes the representation of sexuality in Barnes’s novel. By examining the process of revision of the novel, peeling back the forensic layers that reveal the novel’s material history, a material unconscious of the text’s engagement with sexuality surfaces on page and screen alike.

232

A. CHRISTIE

As Nightwood’s thematics unveil the invisible, unexamined underside of queer desire, so too does its publication history expose the suppressed question of queer identity that is processed out of the published edition. These changes center mainly on the doctor’s status as ‘inverted’. The published edition of the text creates ambiguity surrounding the sexual identification of the doctor, who appears to be, at moments, a crossdresser and, at others, transgender. As he tells Nora in ‘Go Down, Matthew’: ‘I call her [god] ‘she’ because of the way she made me; it somehow balances the mistake. He got up and crossed to the window’ (Barnes 159). Similarly, in ‘Watchman, what of the Night!’ the doctor laments: ‘am I to blame if I’ve turned up this time as I shouldn’t have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as big as the king’s kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner?’ (97) The doctor then goes on to discuss his experience finding men in the pissotières (public toilets which often served as places of sexual activity for French gay men in early twentieth-century Paris) at night. The doctor’s description of his sexuality, coupled with his acts of transvestitism, blurs the distinction between homosexuality and a transgender identification. The lack of overt references to the doctor’s sexual acts does not help. This ambiguity surrounding the doctor’s identity generates a slippage between sex and gender, since it remains unclear whether the doctor is expressing his status as transgender or articulating his sexuality through the discourse of inversion. ‘Sexual inversion,’ a concept used to understand homosexuality in the early twentieth century, read homosexual identity as the inversion of an opposite sex and its associated characteristics: a homosexual man was understood as a heterosexual woman living in a male body; in the same way, a homosexual woman was understood as a male heterosexual inhabiting female anatomy. However, since the doctor never explicitly identifies as homosexual, and never explicitly identifies his sex characteristics, the status of his sexuality hovers in an indeterminate realm where the bar of signification delineating sex and gender remains suspended indefinitely. Although the doctor desires men, the gender identification accompanying that desire remains ambiguous. Through the doctor’s indeterminate sexuality, the novel therefore suspends the historical (gendered) management of female bodies and reproduction (associated with heterosexuality) in a state of irony. The man who manages the reproducing bodies of the novel is not quite male, his only practice as a doctor is to provide abortions, and the children

11

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

233

he helps birth carry equally indeterminate identities (Guido appears to have no sexual desire). The doctor’s ambiguous sexuality also complicates his relationship to the novel’s central triangle of desire, as it disrupts essentialized constructions of femininity that may be coded onto Robin’s queer relationships. Although the doctor desires men, the gender identification accompanying that desire remains ambiguous; the doctor’s identity therefore demands that the reader not collapse Robin, Nora, and Jenny’s sexual identities back onto singular, essentialized understandings of femininity (nor readings of female homosexuality as male heterosexuality in disguise). As the figure through whom the physical and sexual identities of Barnes’s queer bodies are routed, the doctor’s ambiguous identity opens an indeterminate space in which the sexual dynamics of their relationships play out. The representation of the doctor’s indeterminate sexuality, which suspends essentialized readings of queer identity associated with the concept of inversion, is shaped by the process of textual revision. To borrow again from Kirschenbaum, the formal materiality of the doctor’s queer body is constructed by the invisible forensic materiality of the text, through which changes to the representation of sexual identity are rendered viewable. These changes reveal the suppression of overt references to the doctor’s self-identified homosexuality, clearly aligning his sexual identity within the discourse of inversion. Plumb’s version restores a variant in which the doctor tells Jenny: ‘You see before you, madame…one who, in common parlance is called a ‘faggot,’ a ‘fairy,’ a ‘queen.’ I was created in anxiety’ (64–65). Further variants establish the doctor’s sex characteristics as male. Variants surrounding ‘Tiny ‘O’Toole’, which refers to the doctor’s genitals (obliquely in the published edition and explicitly in the original version), further reveal the doctor’s identity as inverted. In ‘Go Down, Matthew’, the doctor describes an episode in which he had prayed in a church as an attempt to confront his sexuality (Fig. 11.4). Changing ‘I spoke to Tiny O’Toole’ to ‘I took out Tiny O’Toole’ shifts the concreteness of the reference to the doctor’s genitals. Whereas the figurative presence of Tiny hovers in the published text, the variant in the original version constructs Tiny not as an ambiguous, metaphorical referent to the doctor’s genitals, but a concrete referent to his male genitals (performed through the act of ‘taking out’). This shift in concreteness concordantly shifts the significance of the doctor’s anguish. The lines ‘What is this thing, Lord’ and ‘what is permanent of me, me or him?’

234

A. CHRISTIE

Fig. 11.4 Variants in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

change with the changing status of Tiny O’Toole. In the presence of the ambiguous referent, the construction of the ‘thing’ and the opposition between ‘me [and] him’ expresses an ambiguous tension between the male and the female. In the presence of the clear referent, however, the doctor’s frustration with his male ‘thing’ is clearly constructed through a tension between the doctor’s female gender and masculine sex, or through the discourse of inversion. The variant scenes thus provide variant readings of the doctor’s sexual frustration. The original version embodies this pleasure in the doctor’s male genitals, which like ‘the roaring lion goes forth’. The published version similarly encodes the doctor’s body with the language of masculine desire, but fails to provide any concrete indication of its physical characteristics, opening an ambiguous realm in the slippage between sex and gender. The original version also restores a significantly more concrete, physical alignment of Tiny O’Toole with male homosexuality in ‘Bow Down’. The doctor recounts: …which brings me to the night I popped Tiny out to relieve him of his drinking, when something with dark hands closed over him as if to strangle the life’s breath out of him and suddenly the other, less pleasing hand, the

11

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

235

hand of the law, was on my shoulder and I was hurled into jail, into Marie Antoinette’s very cell…We, the two blasphemed queens, she blasphemed twice, for wasn’t it the rule in her day that an expecting queen should have to deliver herself amid all the rabble they call the royal suite? (26–27)

This scene, as it appears in the original version, clearly establishes Tiny as a metonymic identifier of the doctor’s inverted identity toward the beginning of the novel. The doctor’s self-alignment with Marie Antoinette strengthens his self-identification as inverted. When considered in conjunction with each other, these twin variant scenes locate expressions of the doctor’s sexuality within topographic markers of state and religious power, in which his physical body—and the expression of his sexuality through corporeal attributes of that body—is managed by the authoritarian protocols of church and state. The doctor’s sexuality therefore becomes a stress-point for grounding the representation of desire in the historical and political contexts of the modern city, as the prison and church operate as topographic metonyms of the power structures they embody. The two locations are also just beside each other geographically: the prison in which Marie Antoinette was held (Conciergerie) and the church in which the doctor prays (St Merri) are on opposite sides of le Pont St Michel (separated by Châtelet). This historiographic correspondence is suppressed by the cuts made for the published edition of the novel.

The representation of sexual difference, as the doctor’s homosexuality is made more ambiguous in the printed edition of the novel, recapitulates the process of textual difference. As it is constructed across the variant editions of Nightwood, the representation of male homosexuality (as the concept of inversion is de-emphasized with the excision of overtly homosexual content) emerges as a formal construction that is underpinned by the forensic materiality of the first published edition. In the process of revealing the suppressed underside of sexuality, Nightwood, itself unveils an invisible material unconscious of its processed text, an unconscious that grapples with the representation of queer sexuality as it is understood through binary, essentialized constructions of sex and

236

A. CHRISTIE

gender. Subjecting the published edition of Barnes’s novel to a materialist hermeneutic, enacted by revealing its draft materials and enabled through the electronic representation of those materials, unearths a suppressed, unconscious engagement with the question of queer identity, an invisible politics of desire that lies buried in the base materials that compose the novel’s publication history. The material unconscious of Nightwood’s representation of queer identity and the politicization of that identity through historical constructions of sexuality and through the historiography of Paris are further constructed through the acts of nighttime wandering that enact Matthew and Robin’s queerness. Immediately following the scene where the doctor laments: ‘am I to blame if I’ve turned up this time as I should have been…’ occurs an anecdote in which the doctor describes his experience of meeting men in the pissotières (the public toilets) at night (Fig. 11.5). As before, the formal representation of the doctor’s sexuality is processed by the forensic materiality of the versioned text, as the scene

Fig. 11.5 Variants in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

11

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

237

shifts in the original version to a more overt representation of nighttime cruising. The published text represents the doctor’s act of finding men in the pissotières as more passive, whereas the inclusion of searching and finding ‘circular cottages of delight’ in the original version clearly establishes that the doctor is actively seeking men in the toilets at night. This versioned representation of the doctor’s inverted masculinity, as his ‘roaring lion goes forth’, is simultaneously grounded in the mediative context of urban geography. The doctor’s argument that ‘certain things…show from what district they come… [so]you are…gunning for particular game’ suggests that different types of sexual partners are found in different areas of the city. Through the act of sexual classification, by which the cruiser classifies the social value of the object of desire he seeks, geography becomes a spatial medium for expressions of social and cultural distinction. As his voice cracks on the word ‘difference’, the doctor emphasizes different permutations of social distinctions in the act of meeting in the pissotières, a difference which is grounded in the material geography of the city. The difference to which the doctor alludes is, perhaps unsurprisingly, also different from itself, as the doctor’s own sexual interaction differs between the two texts, as his role becomes more predatory in the original version. The textual and geographic difference in Nightwood’s representation of the doctor’s sexuality is also grounded in a changing historiography of Paris (as it politicizes the doctor’s homosexuality). The doctor’s preference for La Place de La Bastille again aligns his queer identity with the French Revolution, a historicization and politicization of revolution that only exists in the original version of the text (in which the doctor also aligns himself with Marie Antoinette in the Conciergerie prison). The doctor identifies the expression of his sexuality with the geographic figure of overcoming oppression (La Bastille) and the restriction of his sexual expression with another geographic figure of revolution (Conciergerie). The free expression of the doctor’s sexuality is therefore associated, through the history of Paris (as it recalls the historical event of the French Revolution), with the political act of revolt. This historical and political valence of the doctor’s inversion is edited out of the printed text, only rendered viewable by processing the forensic material that underlies Nightwood’s formal features. Doing so reveals a changing politics of queer representation, as the discourse of inversion is initially used to invoke a revolutionary expression of marginalized desire, one that sees queer identity as a reaction to heterosexuality (rather than an ambiguous

238

A. CHRISTIE

construction that undoes dominant constructions of sex and gender). This representation of queerness is then excised to precisely undercut the essentialized constructions of sex and gender upon which its bold and reactionary expression of homosexuality relies. Furthermore, the changing representation of the doctor concordantly changes the status of the other queer characters in the novel. Matthew exists as a figure through whom the queer identities of Robin, Nora, and Jenny are routed. He serves not only as the narrative intermediary between them, who recounts their sexual encounters, but also as a figure who manages their bodily identities. His status as queer doctor, whose understanding of sexuality encodes the identities of the female bodies he manages as both confidant and abortionist, locates Matthew as a central character through whom female queerness is refracted. Matthew’s status as doctor hinges upon his exterior identification as male. Reading that identification through the discourse of inversion alters the doctor’s interaction with the women in the novel, constructing ‘Watchman, What of the Night!’ as a scene in which the masculine Nora seeks advice about women from the feminine Matthew. Representing the doctor’s homosexuality through the discourse of inversion, particularly as it is grounded in the relationship between sexuality and geography, alters the queer identities of the novel’s female characters, as their identities pivot around that of the figure who manages (both literally and figuratively) Barnes’s female bodies. The doctor’s sexuality further exists as a point around which the identification of Robin and Nora’s queer relationship pivots. The sexual identities of Barnes’s queer characters operate through distinct modes of geographic traversal, making spatial experience an embodied act through which desire is unfolded and enacted. Robin’s somnambulism, which causes her to wander the streets at night and meet strange women, inverts the doctor’s act of nighttime cruising; whereas the doctor meets men in the confined space of the Bastille toilets, Robin seeks strangers in the open streets and cafés of the Latin Quarter. The doctor’s sexual anonymity is encased and enclosed within the walls of the pissotière. Robin’s anonymity is elusive and expansive, dispersed across the stream of Latin Quarter nightlife. The discourse of inversion suggests that Robin’s nighttime wanderings are the unconscious manifestations of her inverted masculinity, a masculinity which seeks gratification through predatory acts of sexual engagement at night. In this context, Robin’s impulsion

11

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

239

seeks out new partners becomes coded as the surfacing of her repressed interiorized masculinity. …without knowing she would do so, [Robin] took the turn that brought her into this particular street…[and Nora] looking at every couple as they passed, into every carriage and car, up to the lighted windows of the houses…trying to discover not Robin any longer, but traces of Robin, influences in her life. (Barnes 63–64)

Through the concept of inversion, as it constructs queer identity in the original version, Robin and Nora’s spatialized sexualities represent queerness as dependent upon heterosexual categories of romantic interaction. As men trapped in women’s bodies, Robin involuntarily seeks female prey (whereas the doctor voluntarily seeks male prey), and Nora attempts to reconstruct her desire for Robin through the spatial act of voyeuristically observing heterosexual couples on the street. The removal of inversion as structuring queer identity in the printed version disrupts fixed, essentialized readings of queer desire: the linkage between Robin and Nora’s wanderings now exists along a slippery spectrum of gender identification, in which the sexualities at stake do not exist in opposition to, but rather in the shadow of, the hegemonic gender constructions that hang over them. Rather than being a figure whose identity determines how the reader locates, isolates, and contains the marginalized sexualities of his female confidantes, the doctor rather operates as a figure who troubles any fixed understandings of queer identity in the first edition of the novel. A controversial construction of queer desire hovers beneath the formal surface of Barnes’s Nightwood, one that relies on the historical concept of inversion in order to define the categories of queer sexuality. It is only by revealing the invisible underside of that representative framework, much like Nightwood, itself reveals the suppressed sides of sexuality, that the electronic text reveals the novel’s editorial process as one embroiled in the changing twentieth-century politics of desire.

The material unconscious of Nightwood’s representation of queer identity, and the politicization of that identity through historical and spatial

240

A. CHRISTIE

constructions of sexuality, is further processed into the novel’s final scene. Here, Robin’s sexuality engages with the unleashed, animal figure of Nora’s dog, culminating in a violent, playful, and above all ambiguous conclusion. Nora’s uncertain relationship to the dog, as their encounter hovers in an indeterminate space between violence and playfulness, between aggression and arousal, creates a shocking and defamiliarizing conclusion that leaves the raw expression of Robin’s sexuality in a state of defamiliarization and irresolution. Through its tactics of narrative ambiguity, the conclusion thus performs the uncertainty and the power of Robin’s sexuality. However, the performative ambiguity of the denouement exists as the product of a series of editorial modifications that significantly altered the novel’s ending. As the final scene is processed across the three copies of the typescript, the defamiliarizing effects of the passage are reduced, along with the inclusion of more explicit sexual parallels between Robin and the dog (Fig. 11.6). Interact with this quotation online at http://axchristie.github.io/pro cessingmodernism. The novel’s ambiguous conclusion can be read as an editorial response to the more explicit sexual connections between Robin and the dog that exist in earlier versions of the text. Content removed from the typescript explicitly links Robin’s sexuality to the animal image of the dog that proceeds that variant in the text. The phrase ‘the dog, the model of what she was about and the terror of what she was to do’ connects Robin to the description of the dog, ‘his forelegs slanting…his hackles standing, his mouth open, the tongue slung sideways over his sharp bright teeth’, that follows. The connection between Robin’s repressed sexual energy and the dog’s masculine wildness draws, again, from the discourse of inversion, by suggesting a continuity between Robin’s suppressed sexual vitality and the dog’s savage masculinity. Further variants in the second carbon reinforce the sexual link between Robin and the dog, including the description of the dog ‘like something imploring a bird, a mistress [Robin]’ and, most prominently, inclusion of the words ‘and waiting’ in the final sentence. The image of the dog, who has implored Robin like a bird or a mistress, lying across her knees in waiting adds an explicitly sexual register to the final scene. The inclusion of Robin’s question to the dog: ‘‘Where?’ ‘Where?’’ continues to characterize the scene as a playful, sexualized act. The violence and the ambiguity of the novel’s final scene, particularly as it enacts the unleashing of Robin’s suppressed sexuality, house an unconscious engagement with the sexualized description of

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

Fig. 11.6 Variants in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

11

241

242

A. CHRISTIE

masculine prowess, which lies interred in the editorial materials (running parallel to Robin’s suppressed sexual vitality) that underpin the scene. The above materialist reading of the changing representation of Robin’s sexuality, as it is facilitated by the machine act of processing and displaying the variant versions of the conclusion, is also deeply problematic. The parsing acts of JSON and XML-TEI processing, used to generate the interface that layers the variant versions of the scene beside each other, construct a continuity between fundamentally incompatible representations of sexuality (inversion and sexual ambiguity). TEI encoding, highlighting connected variants with JavaScript and CSS, and layering the three versions of Nightwood’s conclusion beside each other in an HTML file, does not simply represent the way queer sexuality is represented in the novel. Instead, processing Barnes’s text intervenes in the representation of queer identity (reactivating Barnes’s modernist process of composition through the computational process of digitization). The interface used to process Nightwood positions sexual inversion as a direct antecedent to the sexual ambiguity that is represented in the published text, rather than seeing it as a historical concept from which sexual ambiguity makes a discontinuous break. The logic of parallel segmentation holds as a structural cognate for the discourse of inversion, in which gender and sexuality always exist as paired opposites of each other. But this logic cannot hold when gender and sex are irreconcilably of indeterminate categories, as entities whose unknowable relationship fundamentally upsets the very act of description and classification that would enable their neat identification in the first place. The logic of sexual ambiguity is self-defeating: because sex and gender cannot be defined in relation to each other, these terms cannot carry any singular (let alone oppositional) definition on their own. The interface used to represent the process of constructing the published text of Nightwood (generated through XML, JavaScript, JSON, CSS, and HTML and then rendered visible through the interface onscreen) actively reconstructs a historical narrative through which those representations change over time. But this narrative is fallacious, authored through the logic of the editing interface and, itself, discontinuous from the very history it seeks to faithfully represent. The interface ironically uses the method of inversion to structure sexual ambiguity as another version of the historical binary between masculinity and femininity. Rather than expressing queerness as always already existing before binary constructions of sex and gender, the interface and encoding practices used to represent the changing sexual

11

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

243

politics of the novel display non-essentialist constructions of homosexuality as a direct response to earlier essentialist constructions of queer identity. In revealing the material unconscious of Barnes’s representation of an ambiguous queer sexual identity, the process of revealing textual change onscreen (re)constructs sexual ambiguity simply another version in a continuous chain of representations of sex and gender. The XMLTEI locations and CSS highlights (background-color) used to connect the variants across the versions of the text generate the illusion of a historically unbroken representation. Rather than allowing us to understand Nightwood’s final representation of queerness as a discontinuous break with its earlier investment in inversion, the process used to bring Nightwood into electronic space elides the fissures that exist across Nightwood’s versions by connecting discontinuous representations of sexuality. The process of electronic textual editing used to represent Nightwood’s changing representations of interwar queerness reveals the sexual history of Barnes’s book; in so doing, it troubles the historical constructions of queer sexuality upon which the textual history at hand rests.

Processing Nightwood does not recover the material unconscious of Barnes’s text. Instead, it actively (re)constructs the text’s engagement with queer identity as it re-presents the representations that exist across the original versions of the text. In this way, digitization reactivates and reworks the historical process of editorial intervention. The relationship between contemporary processes of electronic scholarship and the modernist processes of editorial intervention is not analogous; the scholarly act of re-presenting the modernist process of representing sexuality in Nightwood actively intervenes in the historical politics of the work. Digitized representations of textual change disrupt the distinction between the historical text and the (online) archival text at the point where it intervenes in the politicized (re)production of the literary artifact. Underpinning the formal representation of the digital object lies the forensic materiality responsible for processing it, including a series of people, platforms, labor, and metadata, the material conditions of which are often rendered invisible onscreen. The digital modernist object layers two networks of material production, whose geographic, political, and

244

A. CHRISTIE

institutional contexts make viewable their invisible politics. As Barnes’s processed text represents the invisible underside of sexuality in interwar Paris, the processing of that text re-conducts the modernist representation of queer sexuality through contemporary circuits of institutional collaboration and production. Reading processed texts in electronic environments therefore demands that the historical, literary artifact and its contemporary, electronic archival counterpart be read as layered objects of critical inquiry. Understanding how the process of electronic scholarship reconfigures the unconscious materials of the literary text fundamentally alters the scope of textual scholarship in electronic environments. Processing modernism is not merely a method for re-presenting modernist modes of production online. Rather, it is an event through which scholarship reactivates, reconfigures, and reenacts the key issues at stake in modernist modes of literary production. To return to Bill Brown’s deployment of the material unconscious (Fig. 11.7). Whereas Brown locates the material unconscious by dislodging the archival text from the historical text, or rather by repositioning the archival text within the material contexts of its historical moment, I locate the space of the electronic archive (and more specifically the process of electronic textual scholarship) as a site that works through the material unconscious of the historical text as its bibliographic materials are re-politicized by the electronic processes that enact their digital transformation.

Fig. 11.7 Quotation from Bill Brown

11

PROCESSING MODERNISM: THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF NIGHTWOOD

245

If we are to understand processing modernism as a practice by which the component material properties of the literary object reveal the unconscious politics of that object, then processing becomes not only a computational method, but also a theoretical exercise in which scholars work through enduring conceptions of modernity and its objects. Processing modernism works with modernist literature through networks of production, performatively undertaking the modernist enterprise with the literary representation of modernity as its object of inquiry. Rather than being passive acts of explanation and representation, instances of electronic textual scholarship actively rework the issues at stake in their source materials. Processing modernism therefore emerges as an epistemological act through which scholarship rebuilds, remakes, and refashions modernism, itself. By processing modernism, we remake our images of the modernist enterprise anew.



Notes 1. My work with Nightwood was produced through the Modernist Versions Project and Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) in the Maker Lab in the Humanities and in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. The digital tool I use to represent the textual history of Nightwood, called ModVers, was created by Daniel Carter at the University of Texas—Austin School of Information for the Modernist Versions Project. The project code is available online at https://github. com/danielcarter/jquery.modVers. 2. Hayles continues: ‘The issue goes to the heart of what we think a text is, and at the heart of the heart is the belief that work and text are immaterial constructions independent of the substrates in which they are instantiated. We urgently need to rethink this assumption, for as long as it remains intact, efforts to account for the specificities of print and electronic media will be hamstrung. Without nuanced analyses of the differences and similarities of print and electronic media, we will fail to grasp the fuller significance of the momentous changes underway as the Age of Print draws to a close and print—as robust, versatile, and complex as ever—takes its place in the dynamic media ecology of the twenty-first century. For this we will require a more workable sense of materiality than has traditionally been the case with theories of textuality that invoke it only to dismiss it as something to be left behind through the labor of creating the ideal work’ (270–271).

246

A. CHRISTIE

3. In Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin outline immediacy and hypermediacy as central to the double logic of remediation. As they argue, remediation’s attempt to create immediacy demonstrates a double impulse that is simultaneously invested in multiplication and intensification, drawing attention to the mediated status of the object at hand through the very attempt to make that object more immediate. Although this study does not immediately concern itself with the visual media for which Bolter and Gruisin’s work is best known, the same double logic of remediation applies to electronic texts. Digital scholarly editions make the textual and theoretical issues in a work’s genesis immediately accessible; in so doing, they draw attention to the hypermediated nature of those issues that emerge not in the physical pages of archival material, but between click and drags on the computer screen. Making cultural arguments about genetic criticism, when undertaken with digital texts, therefore requires a critical awareness that issues status as rendered immediate by the logic of hypermediacy, or visually accessible only through the artifice of the electronic interface. Responsible engagement with the cultural issues revealed through digital textual editing therefore requires negotiating the shifting boundaries of access and artifice; it is such an engagement that this study undertakes.

Works Cited Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. Paris: Faber & Faber, 1936. Print. Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts. Ed. Plumb, Cheryl J. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. Print. Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and Economies of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996. Web. 10 October 2013. books.google.ca/books?isbn=0674553810. Drucker, Johanna. ‘A Review of Matthew Kirschenbaum. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT University Press, 2008.’ Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 2 (2009). Web. 20 September 2015. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000 048/000048.html. Hayles, N. Katherine. ‘Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality.’ Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2: 263–290. Print. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Mechanisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Web. 10 October 2013. books.google.com/books?isbn=0262113112.

Index

A Archive(s), 2, 14, 87, 91, 224 Arnold, Matthew ‘Scholar Gipsy, The’, 63, 80 Artifact(s), 9, 13, 126, 171, 172, 174, 175, 185, 226, 228, 230, 231, 243, 244 Avant-texte, 7–9, 145, 202

B Barnes, Djuna, 223–245 Nightwood, 13, 223–245 Barthes, Roland, 8, 171–173, 177, 186, 188, 189 Bell, Clive, 117, 118 Bellemin-Noël, Jean, 8 Brown, Bill, 228, 230, 244

C Casanova, 179 Certeau, Michel de, 171–173, 178 Chartier, Roger, 173, 190 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 62, 75, 76, 82

Cioran, Emil, 178, 179 Clive. See Bell, Clive Codex, 13, 175, 176 Codicological, 172, 174, 188, 190 Codicologist(s), 9, 176, 189 Codicology, 9, 13, 14. See also Codicological Coleman, Emily, 231 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 20, 24 Colette, 178 Composition, 4, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18–23, 25, 26, 28, 30, 33, 59, 60, 103, 109, 119, 145, 150, 155, 159, 175, 183, 185, 186, 212, 225, 231, 242 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 177, 179 Constant, Benjamin, 184 Craft, 7, 9, 10, 25, 126, 141, 162, 163, 186, 190 Craftsmanship, 2, 14 Creative process, 1, 2, 3, 7, 9–12, 14, 23, 29, 31, 33, 53, 54, 163, 174, 204 Critique génétique, 7, 8, 86

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 J. Bloom and C. Rovera (eds.), Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5

247

248

INDEX

D Dante, 76, 77, 81 Dickinson, Emily, 176, 178–180, 188 The Gorgeous Nothings , 175 Digital humanities, 10, 13, 224 Digitization, 225, 242, 243 Draft(s), 2, 6–8, 11–13, 21, 22, 25–27, 38, 46–48, 50, 53, 87, 89–92, 103, 105, 107–109, 113, 116, 127, 129, 133, 138, 140, 145, 146, 149, 150, 155, 158, 161, 171, 173, 177, 178, 181, 185, 186, 188, 202–204, 211, 216, 224, 230, 231 Duchamp, Marcel, 182, 189 Duras, Marguerite, 186

E ECT. See Electroconvulsive therapy Editing, 40, 45, 49–51, 53, 128, 131, 138, 140, 146, 148, 150, 152, 158, 162, 184, 185, 242 Editorial process. See Editing Electroconvulsive therapy, 11, 51–54 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 5, 19, 20, 75, 91, 92, 224, 225, 231 Waste Land, The, 61 Epiphany, 103, 114, 119, 140 Ernaux, Annie, 175

F Fantasy, 13, 202, 207, 218 Ferrer, Daniel, 3, 11, 85 Flaubert, Gustave, 180, 185 Madame Bovary, 180, 184

G Genesis, 4, 9, 12, 107, 128 Genetic

criticism, 3, 7–10, 14, 95, 145, 147, 173 critic(s), 3, 8, 9, 11, 87 Geneticist(s), 8, 9, 13, 173. See also Genetic, critic(s) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3, 4 Gonne, Maud, 64–66, 75 Graham, J.W., 103, 114, 115 Graves, Robert, 20, 23, 28 Groden, Michael, 3, 4, 8

H Hay, Louis, 3, 7–10 Hayman, David, 4, 7, 94, 95 Heaney, Seamus, 11, 59–82 ‘annals say, The’, 11, 60, 68 Clonmacnoise. See Heaney, Seamus, ‘annals say, The’ ‘Exposure’, 76 ‘Fragment, The’, 70 Seeing Things , 68 Hébrard, Jean, 173, 177, 189 Heinemann, 38–40 Hemingway, Ernest, 12, 54, 125–143 Across the River and into the Trees , 128 Garden of Eden, The, 12, 125–143 Hemingway Collection, The, 129 Old Man and the Sea, The, 128 Homer, 81, 91 Odyssey, The, 71, 91, 92 Homosexuality, 225, 231–235, 237, 238, 242. See also Queerness Hugo, Victor, 177, 179, 188, 189

I Inspiration, 7, 8, 10–12, 18–21, 30, 33, 59, 60, 63–65, 67–72, 74, 75, 81, 82, 130

INDEX

J Jacob, Christian, 175 Journal, 11, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 56, 57 Joyce, James, 4, 5, 11, 66, 75, 85–96, 183 ‘Circe’, 89 Finnegans Wake, 4, 7, 92, 94 (James) Joyce Archive, The, 4, 6, 89, 94 ‘Lacedemon’, 92 ‘Nightpiece’, 94 Pomes Penyeach, 94 ‘Proteus’, 92 ‘Sirens’, 11, 89, 91, 92 ‘Tristan and Isolde’, 92, 94 ‘Tutto è sciolto’, 95 Ulysses , 4, 5, 11, 66, 85, 89, 91, 92, 94

K Kerouac, Jack, 189 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 226–228, 233

L Lamb, Charles, 86, 87 Lavin, Mary, 12, 145–163 ‘Eterna’, 145, 160, 161 ‘In a Café’, 145, 147, 148, 150, 152, 156 ‘Middle of the Fields, The’, 156 ‘Tom’, 145, 156, 157 Leiris, Michel, 182, 184 Levenson, Leah, 163 Levertov, Denise, 37, 38, 40–44, 46, 49, 52 Litz, A. Walton, 5, 6 Art of James Joyce, The, 4, 6

249

M MacDonald, George, 13, 201–218 Diary of an Old Soul, The, 204 ‘Fantastic Imagination, The’, 218 George MacDonald Collection, The, 211 Heather and Snow, 204 Lilith, 13, 201–218 Phantastes , 218 MacKenzie, Rachel, 146–148, 156, 157, 159, 160 Mauss, Marcel, 174 Medium(s), 9, 170, 171, 173–175, 177–179, 184, 189 Memoir, 11, 38, 45–54, 56, 57 Michon, Pierre, 174 Modernism, 12, 14, 60, 127, 131, 133, 225, 228, 244, 245 Modernity, 105, 110, 111, 244, 245 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de, 189, 190 Morgan, Derek, 161 Morley, Frank, 231 Muldoon, Paul, 11, 59–82 End of the Poem, The, 70 ‘Something Else’, 69 N Nerval, Gérard de, 69, 70, 179 Chimères, Les , 70 New Yorker, The, 12, 145–163 Nicholson, Hubert, 43–46, 48 O O’Donoghue, Bernard, 11, 59–82 ‘Beware the Crab’, 76, 77 ‘Ebbe?’ , 77 ‘History Remainders’, 77 ‘Iron Age Boat at Caumatruish, The’, 60, 72 ‘Morning in Beara’, 78

250

INDEX

‘Nechtan’, 60, 70 Overall, Sonia, 12, 125–143 Eden, 12, 125–143 Poaching Rights , 78, 79 Seasons of Cullen Church, The, 78 ‘Ter Conatus’, 60, 75, 80 ‘Timing the Pigs’, 76 ‘Uvular r’, The, 60, 72 Weakness, The, 78

P Paper, 9, 146, 170, 212, 215 Paper medium, 9, 10, 13, 169–192 Pascal, Blaise, 183, 188 Poe, Edgar Allan, 169, 172 Proof-copy, 38, 39, 41 Proof(s), 8, 39, 40, 103, 145, 158, 159, 161, 203 Proust, Marcel, 108, 180, 183–186 Remembrance of Things Past , 180, 185

Q Queerness, 13, 230, 236, 237, 239, 242, 243. See also Homosexuality Quinn, John, 89 ‘John Quinn draft’, 89

R Raphael, 86 Revision(s), 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 13, 18, 19, 25, 29, 31, 33, 39, 42–44, 50, 57, 66, 86, 127, 129, 146, 147, 150, 153, 155, 159, 160, 162, 163, 186, 203, 204, 206, 208, 212, 225, 230, 231, 233 Rimbaud, Arthur, 19 Romantic (poets), 10, 19–21, 33 Rose, Danis, 94 Ross, Harold, 146

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 181, 190 Confessions, The, 181, 190 Essay on the Origin of Languages , 190 Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 181 Roussel, Raymond, 13, 87, 89, 188

S Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François de, 189 Sargant, William, 52 Shakespear, Olivia, 32, 64, 67, 75 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 19, 20, 30 Simon, Claude, 172, 174, 192 Stallworthy, Jon, 5–7 Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making , 4 Stapledon, Olaf, 40, 41 Stein, Gertrude, 133, 134 Tender Buttons , 133 Stendhal, 179 Stephen, Thoby, 117, 118 Swinburne, Charles, 24

T Tessimond, A.S.J., 10, 11, 53–57 ‘Ad-Man, The’, 43, 44 ‘Any Man Speaks’, 48 ‘Bargain, The’, 57 Collected Poems , 43 ‘Footnotes on Happiness’, 40 ‘Lesser Artists, The’, 39 ‘Love Speaks to the Lover’, 39 Memoirs of a Man who Runs after Girls, The, 45, 54 Not Love Perhaps…, 43 ‘Shock Treatment Waiting Room’, 52 ‘Song in a Saloon Bar’, 40 ‘Unwept Waste, The’, 41, 44

INDEX

Voices in a Giant City, 38–41, 43, 44 Walls of Glass, The, 38, 43 Textual criticism, 3, 4, 95 critic(s), 7 editing, 13, 14, 224, 225, 243 Thoby. See Stephen, Thoby Tool, 130, 173, 202. See also Writing, tool Twain, Mark, 204 Typescript(s), 2, 12, 13, 31, 38, 40–44, 50, 53, 54, 56, 108, 129, 145, 202–204, 206, 224–226, 230, 231, 240 Typewriter(s), 3, 9, 13, 189, 202–206, 212, 218 Typewriting, 10. See also Typewriter(s) V Valéry, Paul, 4, 170–172, 174, 175, 182 Vallès, Jules, 189 Variant(s), 6, 230, 233, 240, 242, 243 Virgil, 81 Aeneid, The, 81 Vision, 10 W Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 5, 92 Welty, Eudora, 189 Wershler-Henry, Darren, 204, 206 Wilson, Wilfred ‘Flannan Isle’, 61, 62 Woolf, Virginia, 12, 85–87, 101–119 Diary, 102–104, 107–109, 113, 115–117 diary, 102–104 Jacob’s Room, 104 Letters , 102, 104, 116 ‘Modern Fiction’, 106, 107

251

Mrs Dalloway, 87, 104 Orlando, 104 ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future’, 101 Room of One’s Own, A, 86, 89, 104 To the Lighthouse, 102, 104 ‘Unwritten Novel, An’, 12, 104–110, 113, 116, 117, 119 Voyage Out, The, 104 Waves, The, 12, 101–119 Wordsworth, William, 10, 17–33 Lyrical Ballads , 20 Prelude, The, 10, 18, 21–24, 29 Selected Poems , 18, 20, 23 ‘Tintern Abbey’, 23 Wordsworth Trust collections, The, 21 Work-in-progress, 10, 12, 104, 109, 118, 139, 146, 147, 180, 183 Writing implement(s), 9, 10 instrument(s), 170, 175, 205 medium(s), 173, 174, 176, 177, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 188, 189, 192 practice, 9, 13, 129, 147 process, 2, 9, 38, 54, 57, 133, 136, 139, 140, 170, 171, 173 tool(s), 3, 202

Y Yeats, William Butler, 1, 4–7, 10, 11, 17–33, 59–82, 151, 162 ‘After Long Silence’, 11, 60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 74 ‘Aodh to Dectora’, 64 Baile and Aillinn, 61, 66, 67 ‘Broken Dreams’, 64 CL Intelex, 18, 25, 31–33 Collected Letters . See Yeats, William Butler, CL Intelex

252

INDEX

Countess Cathleen, The, 66, 67 ‘Dream of Death, A’, 65, 67 Full Moon in March, A, 31 King of the Great Clock Tower, The, 27, 31–33 ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree, The’, 80, 150 ‘Lover mourns for the Loss of Love, The’, 64, 65 ‘Modern Ireland: An Address to American Audiences, 1932–1933’, 26 ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, 10, 25, 26, 28–30, 32, 33

‘Sailing to Byzantium’, 65, 71 Selected Poems , 18–20, 23 Shadowy Waters, The, 61 ‘Symbolism in Poetry, The’, 28 ‘Tower, The’, 61 Vision, A, 32, 33 Wheels and Butterflies , 26 ‘Who Goes With Fergus?’, 66, 67 Z Zola, Emile, 183