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Towards a Critical Text of James Joyce's A
Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
by
Hans Walter Gabler
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the book which James Joyce had been writing for ten years since embarking upon it in Dublin in 1904, was completed in manuscript in Trieste in 1914. Fifty years later, in 1964, the Viking Press published a "definitive text, corrected from the Dublin holograph."[1] Though not critical, and although presenting a text which even the scholar who prepared it does not consider to be truly definitive, this edition of the novel represents the first attempt ever made to relate its printed versions back to the authorial manuscript. For the first time also—though not published with the text—an account appeared of the textual history of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the manuscript of 1913/14 to the Jonathan Cape edition of 1924, the last in which the author himself had a hand.[2] Some problems of the text and of its transmission have there been recognised and solved. The presence of others has not been noticed and sometimes not even suspected. Nor has all available documentary material relating to the textual history of the novel as yet been recorded. In this article, therefore, I propose first to describe and interpret three documents from British libraries, all preserved by Harriet Shaw Weaver and in 1951 and 1952 given by her to the British Museum and to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which clarify essential stages of the publishing history and the transmission of the text, and then to discuss the central issues
The Egoist Tearsheets
The first printed text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was serialized in The Egoist, London, in 1914 and 1915. Tearsheets from The Egoist were in 1915 and 1916 circulated in the sustained, though long unsuccessful, efforts of James B. Pinker, literary agent, of Ezra Pound and above all Harriet Shaw Weaver to find an English publisher—and later, when the firm of The Egoist Ltd. had been founded for the very purpose of publishing A Portrait, to find a printer in England willing to take on the novel in book form. The search[3] ended only when B. W. Huebsch of New York undertook both to publish A Portrait in the United States and to supply The Egoist Ltd. with the sheets for 750 copies[4] which became the first book edition published in England.[5] In its course, successive lots of tearsheets of the serialised Egoist printing were sent across the Atlantic, corrected and uncorrected, and in complete sets of the text as well as in units of two or
The library of the British Museum in London holds a fourth set of tearsheets. It came to the British Museum from the possession of Harriet Shaw Weaver in October 1951. Following Anderson's sigla I shall call it EC-W. This set does not enter the transmission of the text of A Portrait beyond the Egoist serialisation, but it clarifies some aspects of the transfer into print of the typescript, which itself is largely lost, by providing evidence that none of the censoring cuts which affect the Egoist text in its published form were made until the last moment before publication. In its substantive readings Joyce's text was set up as unimpaired as the typescript transmitted it by the compositors of all three printers employed by The Egoist during the serialisation of the novel. The EC-W tearsheets prove that printinghouse editors must be held responsible for the cuts.[7] EC-W contains as an insert the left column of a page-proof of p. 289 (The Egoist, Aug. 1, 1914) which begins Chapter III of the novel. It has the entire five-paragraph passage in print which is then seen to have been removed from the subsequent published version of the full page. A short poem, spaced widely so that it corresponds in length to the excised Portrait passage, seems to have been inserted as a filler where the August 1 installment ends at the bottom of the left-hand column on page 291. Similarly, after the published version of p. 128 of The Egoist, August 2nd, 1915, part of a galley proofsheet is inserted which corresponds to a large section of the text found on p. 128, second column, and p. 129, first column, and contains in print both the brief piece of dialogue censored in publication and the twice-repeated word 'ballocks' subsequently replaced by asterisks. Of particular interest in EC-W, moreover, is the fact that all of Chapter IV is in galley-proof. Herein also the two sentences near the end of the chapter which to Joyce's recorded dismay[8] had disappeared from the published text are found in print. Their removal caused some respacing and resetting of lines and indeed introduced
EC-W, Harriet Weaver's set of tear- and proofsheets of the Egoist serialisation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is now bound in hard covers in a volume of 60 leaves which but for three exceptions—fols. 3-4, 5-6 and 30-31 being conjugate—are separately mounted. The binding was done after the set's accession to the British Museum, and there are signs that before binding it consisted of three, or rather four, individual parts. The text itself came in three separate bundles, with Chapters I and II each by itself, and Chapters III, IV, and V together in a brown paper folder. The British Museum shelfmark is pencilled on each first leaf of these three sections. Because of a bookbinder's decision, moreover, one leaf and two once-folded sheets of errata to Chapters III and IV (with one single erratum for Chapter V) in Joyce's own hand must now be regarded as the fourth section of the set. These manuscript errata lists, although never an integral part of the set of tear- and proofsheets, once accompanied it in a green envelope, as is stated in a note in Miss Weaver's hand on the brown paper folder to Chapters III-V. After binding, the volume as a whole may now be described as follows:
On fol. 1v the Egoist text begins as page 50 of The Egoist of February 2nd, 1914. This first tearsheet is backed by a pasted-on sheet of white paper, now smudged and grey, which serves as a title-page. On it is written in green crayon between rules in green crayon: 'A Portrait of the Artist | as a Young Man'; the roman numeral I is centered in parantheses —also in green crayon—under the lower rule. The writing is probably Joyce's own. In the bottom left-hand corner are three notes in pencil in Harriet Weaver's hand: 'Prepared by Mr Joyce', 'No corrections here H.S.W.' and 'Nor have I a copy of those of first two chapters'. In the bottom right-hand corner is affixed a printed business card reading: 'It is requested that all communications respecting this M.S. be addressed to — James B. Pinker, Literary Agent, Talbot House, Arundel Street Strand, London [—] Folio'. The name and address 'James B. Pinker . . . London' have been struck out in pencil and replaced by the pencilled address in Miss Weaver's hand: 'The Egoist Oakley House, Bloomsbury St. London W.C.'
Fols. 2-6 of the bound volume are the manuscript errata lists referred to above, evidently misplaced by the binder in being inserted here. Fol. 2 is a single leaf and is virtually blank but for the three lines written at the top of its recto: 'Errata | "Egoist." 1/ix/914: p. 330, col.
Fols. 7-16 are the Egoist tearsheets of Chapter I; fols. 18-26 those of Chapter II. In the upper outside corners of fols. 18-26 recto and verso the arabic numbers 1-18 have been written in pencil and been partly cropped. The asterisked divisions between the subsections of both chapters have been underscored, or scored out, in green crayon. In both chapters also all columns and part-columns of Egoist text not belonging to A Portrait have been pasted over with strips of white paper; whole pages have sometimes been pasted together and sometimes been backed with white paper for the same purpose of obliterating extraneous matter.
Fols. 17 and 27 are the front and back covers of Chapter II. 17v and 27r+v are blank. On 17r the inscription, in green crayon, 'A Portrait of the Artist | as a Young Man | (II)' is in the same hand as that on the title-page for Chapter I. In pencil, at the bottom of the page, are again the following notes by Harriet Weaver: 'Prepared by Mr. Joyce'; 'No corrections here.—H.S.W.' and 'Nor have I copy of those of first two chapters—H.S.W.' These cover leaves deserve special attention, and I shall return to them below.
Fols. 28 and 60, again blank but for the inscription on fol. 28r, are of brown paper and were in all probability once conjugate as a folder holding the tear- and proofsheets of Chapters III-V and, in addition, the green envelope with the manuscript corrections to Chapters III and IV. Fol. 28r is inscribed in faded black ink: 'A Portrait of the Artist | as a Young Man. | Chapters III,IV.V' in what looks like the same hand as that writing the pencilled notes over the manuscript corrections to Chapter III (fol. 3r) and was in all probability Harriet Weaver's. Added after the roman numeral V in black unfaded ink, and definitely by Harriet Weaver, is: 'from | The Egoist. see Mr. Joyce's corrections to | chapters III+IV in green envelope'.
Fol. 29r consists of the left column only of a page-proof of the first page of the Egoist installment for August 1, 1914, and contains in print, as described above, the five-paragraph passage from near the beginning of Chapter III which was cut from the published text. The passage, having once been crossed out in pencil, but with the pencil strokes erased, is boxed in orange crayon. Words from a pencilled marginal note only partly legible can be made out as 'Censored, . . . does not appear in . . . Egoist of Aug 1'. Another marginal note in ink between orange crayon lines reads, amusingly: 'This paragraph which was deleted by the prinsters [sic] is to be inserted as marked'. The marking referred to is made in the appropriate place in the margin of fol. 30r. Fol. 29v is blank. The Egoist text of Chapter III occupies fols. 30-36. All extraneous matter is here simply crossed out in pencil and/or orange crayon. An orange crayon note at the bottom of fol. 36v gives the direction: 'go to Chap. IV'. Fols. 37-42 contain Chapter IV in galley-proof, in seven long columns which, except for fol. 42 with columns 'SIX' and 'SEVEN', are printed one to a galley. Each galley, about twice the length of an Egoist page, is folded over once and bound into the present volume for the length of its bottom half only. All versos of the galleys are of course blank. Fol. 42 contains in each of its columns one of the two sentences later censored. They are both underscored and marked in orange crayon. Written in orange crayon between the columns is the note 'deleted by printers [illegible name in parenthesis]'. The bracketed illegible name is crossed out in black ink, and beneath, with an arrow to 'printers', the name is given as 'Messrs Jas. Truscott + Son'.[10]
Fols. 43-59 are the Egoist tearsheets of Chapter V, with all extraneous matter crossed out in blue crayon. Interleaved as fol. 55 is the section of a galley-proof containing in print the censored passages from Chapter V, as already described. This galley, moreover, also has proof-corrections in thin black ink, objecting to the inking of spaces, to broken letters and to spacings between the regular punctuation and the dashes Joyce used instead of inverted commas to set off direct speech. The corrections have been made in the published Egoist text. Later than the proof-corrections is the crossing out in blue crayon of most of the text in this galley, leaving only the censored lines circled in black ink, with the marginal note 'these lines were deleted by printers—to be inserted as in original text'. The corresponding note
Seen as a whole, EC-W contains three further sets of markings which should be recorded. In Chapters I-IV, there are two partly concurrent sets of line-counts. One of them is in short marginal strokes in thin black ink marking every hundredth line of printed text. Starting afresh at the beginning of each chapter, it is almost faultlessly accurate; but it is also purely mechanical, as is shown by the count for Chapter III which begins in the column of page-proof and runs on into the first column of the published text without allowing for the repetition here of lines already counted. The other set, which is present in Chapters I, II and IV only, is in pencil. In Chapters II and IV it, too, marks off roughly every hundredth line, though it is less accurate and usually deviates by several lines from the line-count in ink. In Chapter I the corresponding divisions in pencil fluctuate between 82 and 151 lines in length. In each of the chapters where they appear the pencilled divisions are serially numbered. In Chapter I and II, there are also a few accompanying additions of figures to be found in the margins. In Chapter V there are no line-counts. The tearsheets for this last chapter, however, are the only ones to show a few traces of correction beyond the restoring of censored passages. On fol. 43v, a pencilled marginal note specifies 'dashes all through not inverted commas'; on fol. 46r the twice-repeated misprint 'Epitectus' is each time corrected to 'Epictetus', and in close to 20 instances spread over several pages 'aesthetic' is corrected to 'esthetic' in accordance with Joyce's orthography. Finally, there are throughout the text marginal markings in pencil and indelible pencil which draw attention to a series of apparently undesirable passages of text. None of the restitutions of Egoist censorings are so marked, but there is a clear connection between all the markings in pencil in that they note passages which have to do with urine and excrement—beginning, indeed, on the first page with the sentence "When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold."—or else might be considered to have a blasphemous ring to them.[11] The markings in indelible pencil, present towards the end of
Fols. 17 and 27, the front and back covers of Chapter II, give the initial clue to the interpretation of the evidence set out above. The tearsheets for the first two chapters, as was seen, are separately claimed to have been prepared, with the careful pastings and markings in green crayon described, by James Joyce himself. Corroborative evidence that Harriet Weaver's repeated statement to this effect means what it says comes from the nature of the covers. On closer inspection, they prove to be the two halves of a broadsheet-size thin white cardboard with printed text in Italian which has been pasted over with white paper.[13] Against the light, the entire text of the two halves put together, though cropped at the top, is clearly legible as four columns of print setting out the rights and duties of tenants of apartment houses: when to pay rent; the duty of heads of families to provide separate bedrooms for children of different sexes over the age of six; strictures on sub-letting, on keeping pets, etc., etc. The text ends in one line of type across the bottom of the four columns: 'Il presente Regolamento venne approvato dalla G[iu]nta municipale, nella seduta del 6 Febbraio 1912.' and is signed 'IL CONSIGLIO DIRETTIVO.' Being printed on one side only of a sheet of thin white cardboard, it looks much like the general regulations for tenants such as one often finds affixed somewhere near the main entrances of apartment houses in countries like Germany, Switzerland or Austria. In Italy, apparently, the imposition of such rules has never been, nor is to this day, customary. But Trieste in its authoritarian Austrian days may have had them.[14] Thus, from the handmade covers to the tearsheets of Chapter II, it would seem that it was indeed James Joyce himself who carefully pasted up the installments of Chapters I and II of A Portrait, and that he did so in Trieste, shortly after July 15, 1914, when Chapter II ended in The Egoist. Thereafter, although Joyce did not leave Trieste until June, 1915, he would not have been able to attend to the subsequent chapters in the same manner. For, as we learn from his letter to Harriet Weaver of
The Joyce correspondence, besides allowing some inferences as to how EC-W as a whole came about in its present make-up, makes it possible to trace with some accuracy the history of the first two chapters therein, and incidentally explains the care with which they were prepared. They were the first part, submitted by Joyce himself, of the copy for Grant Richards who, on the basis of the contract for Dubliners, had first refusal of Joyce's books until 15 June, 1919.[16] On July 3rd, 1914, Joyce wrote to Grant Richards: "I shall of course, as agreed between us, give you the opportunity of publishing [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] next year in book. If you cannot find the papers I could send you my copies." (Letters, II, 335 f.), and on April 30th, 1915, to Harriet Weaver: ". . . the first half of the book was forwarded to him by me last July."[17] In an undated letter, probably late in January, 1915, Joyce further informed Richards: "My friend Mr Ezra Pound will send you the fourth, fifth and third chapters of my novel so as to save time" (Letters, II, 336). Richards had apparently undertaken "to give a definite answer within three weeks after the completed MS was in his possession",[18] and Joyce was anxious to press his decision, as in the meantime James B. Pinker had made an offer to act as Joyce's literary agent. Ezra Pound was to negotiate an agreement with him on Joyce's behalf, and Joyce wrote to Pound on March 17, 1915: "The rest of the Portrait of the Artist had better be sent on to Grant Richards as soon as it is ready. . . . If he decides not to publish . . . I am quite willing to entrust the disposal of the rights to Mr Pinker."[19] On March 24, Joyce wrote again to Richards (Letters, II, 337) saying he presumed that the complete copy of the book was now in his possession, but the next day he wrote to Harriet Weaver:
Ballantyne, Hanson & Co., the printers of The Egoist since the February issue (in which Chapter V commenced) had not yet, however, set up type beyond the issue for April 1st. To oblige Joyce, and in order to enable Richards to reach a decision on the book publication, Harriet Weaver therefore, late in March, 1915, risked parting temporarily with the pages of the Chapter V typescript which had not yet been set up.[20] This was technically possible because for the May issue, which was a special Imagist number, the serialisation of A Portrait was to be interrupted. There was consequently a time lapse between installments of two months. On April 22nd, Harriet Weaver informed Joyce accordingly, specifying when she needed the typescript returned.[21] Joyce replied on April 30th, (Letters, I, 79 f.), and on May 7th he wrote to Pinker: "The fifth chapter of my novel must . . . be returned to The Egoist not later than the 20 May as it is needed for the June issue" (Letters, II, 341). On May 18th Richards rejected the novel,[22] whereupon the disposal of the book rights went to Pinker. The copy which Richards had received piecemeal between July, 1914, and April, 1915, must also have gone to Pinker. Certainly the tearsheets Joyce had sent him from Trieste of Chapters I and II did, as is witnessed by the Pinker business card on the front leaf of Chapter I in EC-W.
How much of the rest of EC-W originally belonged to the Richards-Pinker copy is less easy to decide. Chapter V stands apart in the set because it alone has the deletions of extraneous matter in blue crayon and contains no line-counts. Chapters I, II and IV are linked by the line-counts in pencil, not present, as the ones in ink are, in Chapter III. Chapters III and IV in turn are linked by the orange crayon used for cancellations and marginal annotations, and, in addition, by the
It was in July 1915 that Joyce's London friends and agents were most urgently pressed by the author to enter into negotiations about the book publication of the novel with nothing but a wholly unexpurgated text. On July 24th, Joyce read the end of Chapter IV in the January issue of The Egoist as forwarded to him in Zurich and discovered that whole sentences had been left out. He wrote immediately to Harriet Weaver to complain about the carelessness of the printers, adding: "My MSS are in Trieste but I remember the text and am sending the correct version of [the] passages [in question] to my agent. The instalments printed by Ballantyne, Hanson and Co (February to July) are of course carefully done. I hope the other printers did not set up the numbers which I have not seen. . . ." (Letters, II, 355). But they had done so; and when, a week later, Joyce had received and read the remaining issues for 1914 (August 1 to December 15), he wrote even more urgently to Pound:
It was because of Messrs. Partridge+Coopers' stupid censoring of your novel that we left them—that is, they had objected once or twice to things in other parts of the paper, but their behaviour over your novel was the crowning offence. They struck out a passage on Aug. 1st of last year. I could not help it. The rest was set up correctly until they came to the latter part of chapter four where as you have seen some sentences were omitted. I then submitted the whole of chapter five to them. They declined to set it up as it stood + so we left them.
I am sorry to say that Messrs. Ballantyne are now acting in the same way. . . .
Mr Pinker has proofs containing all the deleted matter. I hope you will not have this annoyance when the novel comes to be printed in book form. . . .
The deletions of January 1, 1915, were in print in the Chapter IV galleys, and the Chapter III deletion of August 1, 1914, is contained in the column of page-proof prefixed to the Chapter III tearsheets in EC-W. From the absence of pencilled line-counts in these tearsheets on the one hand and the mechanically uniform application therein of the line-counts in ink on the other, it seems probable, indeed, that Harriet Weaver, acting upon Joyce's letter of July 24th, supplied Pinker with a complete new set of Chapter III tearsheets plus the additional column of page-proof for the beginning of the chapter (rather than with this page-proof only) for the actual purpose of his submitting the novel to Secker. At the time, however, she may hastily have entered therein pencil markings only, now partly erased or over-ruled in orange crayon. The orange crayon markings in their turn, which provide a firm link between the extant sheets of Chapters III and IV, would seem to be later than the pencilled deletions of extraneous matter in Chapter III. They were doubtless made by Miss Weaver also, but at a time when both chapters as they survive were in her hands at once. As the main function of the orange crayon is to mark and draw attention to the censored passages, she may not have applied it to this end until EC-W eventually passed into her hands and was sent by her to various printers and at least one publisher.
After the return of the Chapter V typescript needed as copy for the
Now may have begun the copy's round not of publishers, but of printers,[24] and it was for this purpose, as suggested, that Harriet Weaver emphasized the censored passages for restitution in Chapters III and IV and marked the exact positions of insertion in all three chapters affected by cuts. This seems to have been done in two distinct stages: the markings in orange crayon in Chapters III and IV are earlier, and some at least of the marginal notes and positionings in black ink are later, as witnessed by the black ink superinscription over orange crayon at the end of Chapter IV. Lastly, the manuscript errata lists in their green envelope were included in the set after May 25th and before June 9th, 1916 (see Letters, II, 378-379), and note taken of their presence in permanent black ink on the brown paper folder for Chapters III-V. The pencilled notes on Chapters I and II, finally— 'No corrections here. H.S.W.' and 'Nor have I [a] copy of those of first two chapters. [H.S.W.]'—were obviously also made in two stages, and while the latter would seem the counterparts to the note about 'Mr. Joyce's corrections to chapters III+IV in green envelope', the former may refer to corrections in the sense of reinsertions of censored text and thus correspond to the markings of omissions in Chapters III-V. Again, the latter notes also suggest that EC-W was out of Harriet Weaver's hands when the marked-up tearsheets of Chapters I and II arrived with a letter from Joyce of June 9 (else she might have transferred the authorial corrections to her copy). By this time the publication of A Portrait in New York (and first by John Marshall) was under consideration, to be printed from other copy than EC-W. This set was once more at hand when William Heinemann had been persuaded to read Joyce's novel for himself and Ezra Pound on July 12th urged Harriet Weaver to send him the complete text.[25] She mentions in one of her two letters of September 7th to Joyce that she had sent Heinemann her copy containing "the deleted sentences" and that he had not yet given it back (although he had declined to publish by August 19th). When the set finally returned to her it could serve no further purpose, for the book publication of A Portrait was then firmly in the hands of B. W. Huebsch of New York. There is some reason, incidentally,
As a document relating to the publishing history of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, EC-W is thus of considerable interest. In terms of the textual history of the novel, its relevance, while specific, is yet narrowly circumscribed. Of greatest potential value and importance for the establishing of a critical text are its authorial errata lists. Their position must be assessed in relation to the documents central to the textual transmission, and in particular to EC-A, the printer's copy for H. This entails a reconsideration of the nature and date of EC-A.[26] Anderson describes EC-A as fully and, except for some additional markings clearly made in the printinghouse, uniformly corrected in Joyce's own hand, and identifies it with a set of tearsheets dispatched by Harriet Weaver on March 31st, 1916—and described by her in a letter of that date—to E. Byrne Hackett. Hackett in his turn sent it on to B. W. Huebsch in portions, beginning on May 4th, 1916 (Lidderdale, p. 122). By June 2nd Huebsch thereupon felt able to make a provisional offer, and on June 16th he proposed firmly to publish the book (Lidderdale, p. 123; Anderson, p. 189). But the copy in which he read the text cannot have been the one he eventually printed it from: EC-A cannot be identified as the Hackett copy. For it is a fact that Huebsch not only agreed to printing "absolutely according to the author's wishes, without deletion" (Letters, I, 91), but also made great efforts to obtain copy with Joyce's own corrections. Had he been in the possession of EC-A from the outset, the lengthy exchange of letters about the author's corrections between him, Harriet Weaver and James Joyce himself, extending over more than four months from June 16 to October 24, 1916, would have been pointless.[27]
In May 1916, it looked as if John Marshall of New York was going to publish A Portrait. For The Egoist Ltd. in London, Harriet Weaver was proposing an agreement on the same lines as the one which later
The copy which was thus assembled for John Marshall to print from was described to B. W. Huebsch six weeks later: "I have written to ask Mr Marshall to send on to you his copy of the text which contains Mr Joyce's corrections. . . . Mr Joyce would like the book printed exactly according to this corrected text (the fifth chapter being the original typescript)".[28] For a month Huebsch waited to hear from Marshall and to receive the corrected text from him and then, on August 25, wrote to him in Quebec, while at the same time informing Harriet Weaver that no contact had as yet been established. Probably still confident, however, that the Marshall copy would soon be in his hands, he added that—subject to Pinker's cabled agreement to certain modifications of the publishing contract—"I shall proceed at once with the setting up of the book" (Letters, I, 93). But Huebsch never obtained the corrected text from Marshall. In letters of September 8 and September 20 to Harriet Weaver he again specifically mentions this fact, and thereafter the matter is dropped because Harriet Weaver was supplying him with alternative copy.[29] By September 8, still without copy to print from, Huebsch decided to accept an offer Miss Weaver had made on August 19th (the day she had learnt that William Heinemann was definitely not willing to publish A Portrait in England): "request that you send me the duplicate offered . . . as I presume it contains corrections not to be found in the copy I have." Harriet Weaver had in fact anticipated this request immediately on receiving Huebsch's letter of August 25th in London on September 6th. Without a moment's delay, she had marked up new tearsheets of Chapters III and IV from the authorial errata lists in her possession and posted them that same evening. Tearsheets of Chapters I, II and V she annotated as far as she was able to from memory—that is, she entered in them the kinds of corrections she remembered Joyce had made in the copy for Marshall—and she mailed them with a covering letter to Huebsch the next day; and she cabled to New York that the Joyce corrections were on their way. But, as she emphasized to
From the documentary evidence of the Weaver-Huebsch correspondence, then, it would seem that Huebsch's printer's copy in Chapters I, II and V consisted of Egoist tearsheets corrected by Joyce himself between September 7th and 23rd, and in Chapters III and IV of tearsheets
The First and Second Editions (H and B): Joyce's Corrections and the Printer's Copy for B
With EC-W, Harriet Weaver in 1951 gave to the British Museum a list of corrections to the 1916 New York and London edition (H) of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.[31] It is headed: 'CORRECTIONS. A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. B. W. Huebsch: New York: 1916. The Egoist Ltd: London: 1916.', and bears the typewritten signature on its last page: 'JAMES JOYCE, Seefeldstrasse 73III Zurich VIII.' This is a carbon of a 16-page typewritten list with 364 typewritten entries for 365 separate corrections to be made. It is clear that it is yet another copy of Joyce's 'nearly 400' corrections to the first edition.[32] These are still extant in the original manuscript (Y). Joyce wrote them out in Zurich in April, 1917, and sent them to Pinker in London on April 10th, requesting: "Kindly have them typed (with copy) and forwarded by two successive posts to my publishers in New York" (Letters, II, 393). The corrections are also extant in a typescript ribbon-copy (YT). From the description given of YT (Anderson, p. 197) it would seem that the Harriet Weaver copy of corrections in the British Museum is its carbon copy; I shall call it YTW. A note across the top of page 1 of the list, unsigned and undated, yet doubtless in Harriet Weaver's hand, states:
From Joyce's letter to Pinker of April 10th as quoted, from the fact that he informed Harriet Weaver on July 7th that Pinker had his corrections (Letters, I, 107) and from Harriet Weaver's note on YTW[34] one might be led to infer that Pinker never forwarded the typescript and carbon he had been asked to prepare but kept them until Miss Weaver had been alerted to their existence and took it upon herself to send the ribbon copy to Huebsch very belatedly on August 16th, while using the carbon in preparation of her own second edition. But the Weaver-Huebsch correspondence reveals that the facts were different. The corrections seem indeed to have been typed at Pinker's office, and both the ribbon and the carbon copy must have been sent to Huebsch in the manner ordered by Joyce. Huebsch then returned the carbon copy to London at Harriet Weaver's request. When she wrote her explanatory note on YTW she misremembered the exact details: what she mailed to Huebsch on August 16th, 1917, was not the whole set of corrections, but only a handwritten list with 16 entries which contained 15 of the 17 additional corrections of YTW, plus one correction of a typist's error.[35] This one correction is the clinching piece of evidence: it would not make sense if YTW were not the carbon copy of YT, and its entry in Harriet Weaver's short supplementary list, as indeed this whole list itself, is meaningful only if never typescript and carbon together, but merely the carbon copy alone, was in her hands. The list, on one side of a single quarto-sized sheet of writing-paper,
From the letters, the facts can be filled in in greater detail.[36] In the latter half of April, 1917, Harriet Weaver was beginning to consider bringing out a second edition of A Portrait. Ideally, she wanted another joint operation with New York, but as import restrictions forbade the further purchase of printed sheets, she requested to be allowed to buy moulds of the New York edition instead.[37] She was aware that the text of the first edition needed correction but did not want to ask Joyce to correct it as he was at the time suffering acutely from his disease of the eyes. Instead, she compiled her own list of corrections (YW) and sent it to Huebsch on May 2nd. It arrived in New York on May 15th, the day after Huebsch, in reply to her request of April 18th, had written to Harriet Weaver:
YTW was used to annotate the printer's copy for the second edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, printed in Southport, England, in 1917—by Robert Johnson & Co., the same printers who had been employed on The Egoist by Dorothy Marsden before Harriet Weaver became the editor (Lidderdale, p. 143)—and published by The Egoist Ltd. in London in 1918. This printer's copy has survived, and it was given by Harriet Weaver to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, between March 10th and 19th, 1952. Yet it was not until 1967 that even the Bodleian Library, alerted by Miss Weaver's biographers, became aware of the special nature of the volume which Harriet Weaver had most unobtrusively entrusted them with. She is said to have brought it along one day 'in her open-top bag' (Lidderdale, p. 426). Its relevance to the publishing history and the textual transmission of A Portrait has not yet been recognised or recorded. The volume is bound in the original dark green cloth of the London first edition, but as the body of the book is broken completely loose in the spine, the original binding is now merely folded around it. The book has been given a dark green slipcase for protection. A note in ink by Harriet Weaver is tipped in to the front flyleaf:
The pencilled corrections in this copy of the first English edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were made by me from a list of corrections sent by Mr. Joyce for the second edition, printed in Southport and published by The Egoist in 1917. They do not appear in the third edition (1921) for which sheets were again imported from the U.S.A. but they do appear in Mr. Jonathan Cape's edition (reset) of 1924.
Harriet Weaver
4 Rawlinson Road
Oxford
March 10th, 1952
On collation, the majority of the pencilled annotations in the Bodley copy (HB) is found to be a very faithful transcript of YTW.[39] Of the changes called for in its 381 entries, Harriet Weaver fails to delete one
The observance of Harriet Weaver's annotations by the printers of B was very faithful. In less than half a dozen instances were her directions misunderstood and the corrections not made according to intention. Only one marked correction was not carried out: p. 87.9 in B still reads 'reverie' (for: 'revery') in perpetuation of a typescript
II.
New data about the textual transmission of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have thus emerged from the discussion of three documents from its publishing history. Their influence on editorial decision and procedure has been incidentally considered. It now remains to outline a comprehensive editorial hypothesis on the basis of which a critical edition could be envisaged.
The Text from Manuscript to Print
In its authoritative textual witnesses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents an almost classic case of linear and uncontaminated textual transmission. The faircopy holograph manuscript (D) is the only primary authoritative text of the novel. From it, five texts of secondary authority descend in linear succession: the typescript (T), the first printed version in the Egoist serialisation (E), and the first (H), the second (B) and the third (J) book editions. None of these secondary stages of transmission of the text relates back to any earlier stage than the one immediately preceding it, nor is the text of D ever conflated or 'contamined' with any of the secondary stages of authoritative transmission.[42] In establishing a critical text it should therefore be possible in principle to apply W. W. Greg's editorial rule which postulates that a critical text reproduce the earliest accessible authoritative text in spellings, punctuation and all other accidentals as well as in the body of its substantive readings, and that variants from the texts of secondary authority be admitted only when they are
The external facts with which to fill this hiatus in the textual transmission are these.[45] The faircopy manuscript—bearing the date 'M.S. 1913' on its holograph title-page—was (it is assumed) written out by Joyce between December, 1913, and late October/early November, 1914.[46] Chapters I-III were merely copied over from papers (now
The internal evidence of the D-E variants should confirm or modify the assumed external facts. In the transmission of the text from D to E, the issues most critically at stake are the nature of the typescript, the evidence (if any) of authorial correction and revision before the typescript left Trieste, and the nature and degree of printinghouse interference with the text as it appears in print. Collation reveals most immediately the variation in accidentals. Close to 600 commas have been added in E and superimposed upon a system of commas, colons, semicolons and periods (with only the occasional exclamation or question mark) which, except in its commas, has been left largely intact. As the workmen of three printinghouses in succession set the text for A Portrait, it can be asserted that, on the whole, the additional commas were put in by them. The three printers did very nearly equal thirds of the novel: of the total of 123.5 printed Egoist columns, Johnson & Co. set 41.5, Partridge & Cooper 41.5, and Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. 40.5 columns (approximately). But the distribution of added commas is such that Johnson & Co. in ten installments added no more than 60, or about three commas in each two columns of print, while Partridge & Cooper in 8 installments added 277 (7 per column), and Ballantyne & Hanson in 7 installments 229 commas (less than 6 per column).[47] There is, moreover, a considerable fluctuation in numbers from one installment to the next—Partridge & Cooper added 66 commas on July 1, 1914, their first installment, and only 8 a fortnight later—and even from page to page and column to column. This quite clearly reflects the punctuation habits of different workmen. Moreover, the scarcity of added commas in the Johnson & Co. section of the text—itself undoubtedly the work of more than one compositor—reinforces the conclusion that the later inundation of the Egoist text with commas
The Egoist departure from the manuscript in other accidentals, such as capitalization, and hyphenation or two-word division of compounds, is far more restrained.[48] There is throughout the sections of the three printers a fairly even sprinkling of added hyphenations or compound divisions, and of added capitals. A distinction of typescript and printinghouse characteristics does not clearly manifest itself. On the contrary, it seems likely that a good number of compounds were hyphenated in E because they happened to be divided from one line to the next in T, as a good number of others are evidently hyphenated in print because they were demonstrably so divided in D and thus, by inference, entered the text of T with hyphens. Other hyphenations, such as 'good-bye', or the inevitable printed forms 'to-day', 'to-morrow', etc., were undoubtedly made according to stylesheet by the printinghouse compositors, and sometimes possibly by a typist before them. Typist's and compositors' habits likewise would seem to be the cause of added capitalization, such as the almost invariable spellings Protestant, Jesuit, Jews, Church, Mass, etc. for Joyce's protestant, jesuit, jews, church, mass. But it is very important to note that the added hyphenations and capitalizations, while of course unauthoritative in the Egoist text, are yet not inconsistent with the over-all manuscript styling. A large majority of the hyphenated and capitalized nouns and adjectives which occur in the Egoist text preserve faithfully the manuscript readings. Hyphenations and two-word divisions of compounds as well as capitalizations were largely eliminated by Joyce himself when he corrected the text for H and B. But his new directions then amount to no less than a systematic restyling of the text in print with respect to these accidentals.
If the sometimes excessively liberal addition of commas in the Egoist text is regarded as a special case—and good reason for doing so lies in the fact that Joyce's original punctuation is both unorthodox and extremely light—the general treatment of accidentals in the printed text suggests, even more so than before,[49] that the workmen engaged on E were careful and competent. This creates a certain "climate of opinion" for the consideration of the substantive variants. There is, for example, an astonishing number of omissions of single
Implied by such reasoning is the truth of the assumption that the typescript was only superficially read by the author before being dispatched to London. To infer thereupon from the variants themselves, i.e., from the accumulation of omissions in the extant text of E, that Joyce indeed missed a hundred or more such errors in the typescript would be an argument self-defeating in its circularity unless support for it be found outside the circle. This problem in its turn is secondary to the basic question—which yet remains to be tested—as to whether the author gave any attention at all to the text of the novel after completing the faircopy manuscript (and before correcting E for H). The editorial difficulties presented by the missing typescript would of course be considerably diminished if it could be positively demonstrated that he did not. Answers to the open questions must be sought by scrutinizing those groups of D-E variance which have not previously been analysed, and by relating the omissions to them.
The substantive variants in E—317 in all by my count—are omissions, additions, and substituted readings. The additions are invariably confined to single words. They are few in number and make up a large part of what must be considered corrections of the manuscript text, of which there are 29 in all throughout the novel. These corrections, even if they involve an additional word, are mostly obvious enough, as when "shuffling along . . . in old pair of blue canvas shoes" becomes ". . . in an old pair . . ." (61.19),[51] and they can often easily be accounted for as the unaided work of the typist. That the typist was held to correct without specific directions by the author—or that a compositor far from Trieste did so by force of circumstance, should an incomplete or erroneous reading, real or fancied, have survived into his copy—is rendered likely when a miscorrection occurs, or a pedantic observance of grammatical congruence in tense or number sounds conspicuous. Except when miscorrection or style-sheet rectification of grammar are obvious, an edited text will of course accept the complete rather than the incomplete readings, regardless of whether or not the authority of each single addition can be ascertained. In Chapter V at least, if not before, such editorial policy can be justified by observing three individual one-word additions, two of them corrections of incomplete manuscript readings and one a genuine textual revision, which cannot reasonably be explained as anything but authorial in origin. No typist or compositor would have known how to complete the sentences: "What was their languid but the softness of chambering?" (:languid grace; 233.9), or ". . . a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last by what I call the rhythm of beauty." (:dissolved by; 206.23. 'ended' would perhaps have been an unguided guess), nor can anyone but the author be thought to have changed Cranly's toothpick at 229.33 into a 'rude toothpick', thus weaving once more into the fabric of the text the main characterizing adjective for Cranly. On the strength of these variants alone, authorial attention to the text between D and E must be admitted and taken into account as a real possibility. Automatically, it becomes a major concern of the editorial hypothesis to define its nature and extent.
Thus, the readings substituted in E for good manuscript readings become the focus of attention: they become suspect of being authorized changes. The total number of altered readings is large, but many of them are immediately recognizable as errors (as for example the numerous
John Lawton
Anthony MacSwiney
Simon Mangan (70.25)
These few variants taken together confirm that Chapters I to III received authorial attention at the typescript stage of transmission. Apart from 'chestnuts'>'limes' (24.10) and 'Father' > 'Mr' (30.1), however, there is in Chapter I only one more variant—'in the square' > 'there' (43.24)—for which under the guidelines of the hypothesis here developed authority can be claimed with some confidence. The remainder of the substituted readings in this chapter are either obviously erroneous, or misreadings of Joyce's handwriting, or else too indifferent in character to be made out as authorial in origin. The situation in Chapter II is similar. To Greets > Kickham, Mangan > Moonan, and 'chestnuts' > 'limes' (93.11), it would again seem safe to add only one or perhaps two more variants: 'turning back in irresoluteness' > 'turning in irresolution' (83.31); and 'watching her as he undid her gown' > 'watching her as she undid her gown' (100.35).[52] There is admittedly a group of three further variants which, occurring within a few pages of each other, might suggest an intermittently closer authorial attention to the typescript: 'arching their arms above their heads' > 'circling their arms above their heads' (74.6), 'the old restless moodiness had again filled his heart' > '. . . had again filled his breast' (77.20), and 'the patchwork of the footpath' > 'the patchwork of the pathway' (79.1). However, careful scrutiny of the original readings as they look in Joyce's handwriting makes it virtually certain that "circling' and 'breast' are really misreadings of 'arching' and 'heart'. The apparent cluster is thus reduced to a single variant. By noting further that 'footpath' in several other instances throughout the novel is Joyce's unvaried term for "pavement", one is led to reject 'pathway' as a typist's or compositor's unauthorized substitution.
Thus, where variants in E are substituted for good manuscript readings, Chapter I appears to contain but three, and Chapter II a maximum of five authorial corrections. Of this total of eight, six (or five) show concern with factual accuracy ('Mr' Barrett, and 'limes' [twice]) or internal consistency of the text (Kickham, Moonan, 'limes' again, and 'he' > 'she', if this was an authorial correction). The two others seem concerned with a greater appropriateness ('there' as substituted for 'in the square') or fluency ('turning in irresolution') of
Thus, in the field of substitute readings, where initially all variants were suspect of being authorial in origin, the number of authoritative changes in the Egoist text has been narrowed down to a total of 18. All other variant readings substituted in E for good manuscript readings, that is something like half of the 317 D-E substantive variants, must consequently be classed as unauthoritative. This large group of variants,
Was that then he or an inhuman thing moved by a lower [soul than his] soul? His soul sickened at the thought. . . . (140.1-2).
Confess! He had to confess every sin. How could he utter in words to the priest what he had done? Must, must. Or how could he explain without dying of shame? Or how could he have done such things without shame? A [madman, a loathsome] madman! Confess! O he would indeed to be free and sinless again! Perhaps the priest would know. O dear God! (140.14-20).
He could still escape from the shame. [O what shame! His face was burning with shame.] Had it been any terrible crime but that one sin! Had it been murder! Little fiery flakes fell and touched him at all points, shameful thoughts, shameful words, shameful acts. Shame covered him wholly like fine glowing ashes falling continually. (142.24-30).
As it happens, it is in close vicinity to these passages that a later intentional deletion is recorded. The first of the errata on EC-W, fol. 2, is "delete 'of herrings'" and refers to "Frowsy girls sat along the curbstones before their baskets [of herrings]" (140.26). This may be pure coincidence, and it proves no more than that Joyce was in fact capable of making a cut in A Portrait—an attitude of authorial self-criticism not readily evident otherwise in this text. This deletion has no intrinsic similarity to the four examples of omission in E here considered, and it can hardly be taken to reinforce an assumption that they be of authorial origin. If of course it were true that they all are genuine cuts, then this would indicate that the latter half of Chapter III, portraying
On the whole, then, the variant readings in E caused by the omission of words, phrases and sentences from the manuscript text can now confidently be declared unauthoritative, as can the large majority of those variants in E which are substitutes for good manuscript readings. Conversely: on the basis of the preceding analysis, we consider, out of a total of 317 substantive variants between D and E, only 18 substitute readings, most of 29 corrections of incomplete or obviously erroneous manuscript readings, and possibly six omissions (occurring in four passages in the second half of Chapter III) as authorized. With respect to the body of D-E variance, provisional rules for establishing a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may be set out as follows:
Of the variants in E,
- 1. Admit all corrections of incomplete and erroneous D readings that are not obviously either miscorrections or stylesheet rectifications of grammar and syntax;
- 2. admit 18 authorial corrections and revisions;
- 3. do not admit other substitutes for good D readings, whether or not they seem individually possible as variants;
- 4. do not admit readings in E which are the result of omission of single words, phrases, or sentences of the D text (with the possible exception of 6 such variants in the second half of Chapter III);
- 5. do not admit the E variation in accidentals.[55]
The Typescript
The hypothesis developed in the preceding pages for the total of the substantive D-E variance, an hypothesis which in turn must serve as the basis for a comprehensive theory of the textual transmission capable of governing editorial decision in the establishing of a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has, it is true, a narrow foundation. It depends on an evaluation of those variant readings in E which are substitutes for good manuscript readings; and only if, by this evaluation, it is ultimately correct to accept no more than 18 such variants as authoritative, is it valid editorially to reject the other Egoist readings which belong to this group and, furthermore, to conclude by analogy that a great majority, if not all, of the Egoist variants resulting from the omission of manuscript readings, too, are unauthoritative. It is most fortunate, therefore, that—contrary to previous assumptions—there is no need to trust exclusively in the soundness of a logical construct. Rather, it has in fact been possible to trace large fragments of Chapters I and II of the Trieste typescript against which our hypothetical assumptions can be tested.
The typewritten fragments of the text of A Portrait come from the possession of Dora Marsden, founder of The Egoist, and still its editor when the first ten installments of Joyce's novel were published. They contain the text for most of these ten installments. Of 68 numbered typewritten pages of Chapter I, only pages 1-15, that is the entire first installment plus three sentences of the second, and the single pages 53 and 59 are missing. Of Chapter II, for which the page numbering starts afresh, pages 1-9 and 17-27, plus six lines of p. 28, are extant, which correspond to the first, the third and part of the fourth Egoist installments of that chapter. The last fragment breaks off in the middle of the last Egoist installment of the novel published under Dora Marsden's editorship. There are 71 pages and six lines of typescript in all.
When so much has been established, both the D-T and the T-E variance which occurs within the stretches of text preserved can be more closely analysed. In accidentals, D-T and T-E variation is clearly distinguishable. In both chapters, additional commas are very rarely indeed introduced in T. The Chapter I pages add four commas, the Chapter II pages add three. The typical typescript error in punctuation is rather one of omission of commas. 13 manuscript commas are missing in Chapter I, of which some have been restored in print and some not, and 9 commas are missing in Chapter II, only one of which has been restored in E. The adding of commas to the printed text, although comparatively restrained in Chapters I and II, is thus clearly a compositorial commission. The increase in capitalizations, on the other hand, is pretty evenly distributed between T and E, while the printers again are responsible for the greater part, though not all, of the additional hyphenation of compounds in E. By contrast, it is the rare substantive variant that originates in E. What earlier collation established as D-E variance in substantives is in fact seen to be variation between D and T. This is as it should be according to the basic assumptions of our hypothesis for the transmission from D to E of the entire novel, and it is gratifying to find it confirmed for the sections of T preserved. A grouping of the D-E substantive variants, undertaken hypothetically before for the sake of a coherent textual theory, can now be based on firmer evidence. Moreover, to determine the exact source and point of origin of a variant becomes a practical necessity for defining the nature and degree of authority of the recovered intermediary textual witness.
The omission from the typed text of words, phrases and sentences presents once again the crucial textual problem. D does not indicate any omissions. On the evidence of the typescript, the likelihood does not increase that they represent authorial, and thus authoritative, cuts at a lost stage of transmission between D and T. As T was demonstrably typed from D, such a lost stage could in any case not be thought of as yet another full transcript of the text intervening between D and T. At the most, the possibility of authorial direction in the form of oral or written instructions to the typist might be considered if the need were felt to make the omissions out as authorial cuts. But not a single variant outside the group of the omissions would help to strengthen any speculatively posited authorial attention to the text between D and T. Even the simple corrections evident in T of incomplete or
The typescript thus bears marks which unmistakably show that it was read by James Joyce himself, though they indicate at the same time that his reading, too, did not take the form of a thorough collation against the manuscript. This goes some way towards explaining why, as errors, the many omissions of manuscript readings should have been so consistently overlooked. Moreover, few and far between as are the marks which signalize Joyce's presence, they are also proof that his reading (as hypothetically assumed) was perfunctory only, and probably hasty. In the extant fragments of typescript there are only three instances in all of substantive authorial correction. In addition to the insertion of omitted 'wondering', and of 'there' for omitted 'in the square' the third authorial correction is 'Father' > 'Mr' (30.1). That part of our hypothesis which posited a scarcity of authorial corrections among the Egoist readings which replace good manuscript readings would thus also seem to be confirmed by the typescript. As it has already been shown that the text appears to have been given no authorial attention between D and T, it follows that all variants of this kind, too, were introduced by a typist and are non-authoritative, and that authority belongs to those variant readings only which are seen to have been entered in the author's hand in T. On the narrow basis provided by the extant fragments of typescript, this is an argument mainly by negatives. None of the passages of text in Chapter II where authorial correction was assumed are preserved in T, so that it cannot be positively shown that those variants alone are authorial in origin which were hypothetically singled out as such, although it is apparent from as much text as is extant that no other variants replacing
If it is to be maintained that 'limes' for 'chestnuts' is an authorized variant, an influx of authority in some form must be assumed at a stage of transmission after the typescript was authorially corrected to the extent observable in its extant fragments as here discussed, and before the printed Egoist text as typeset and proofread was published. The assumption as such is strengthened by the observation that 'limes' for 'chestnuts' in Chapter I is not an isolated instance of significant T-E variation. (There is no corresponding variation in the Chapter II fragments.) For the extant text of Chapter I, there is a total of nine substantive T-E variants. In two instances, T copies the manuscript readings correctly and there are marks of the printer's pen or pencil set against them in T which suggest that the subsequent E variants originated in the printinghouse and are therefore unauthorized. In the remaining seven instances, on the other hand, T also varies from D and it is the original manuscript reading which has in each case been restored in E.[62] In three of these seven cases the T variant is an error to which the manuscript reading is the obvious alternative; a compositor or printinghouse proofreader could easily have made the correction. Yet in the remaining four cases the correction of the T error can have been made only from a knowledge of the manuscript reading as restored. There are thus five instances of substantive T-E variation—interestingly enough confined to the second and third Egoist installments—which make it an inevitable conclusion that the text of Chapter I, or part of it, was referred to authority in the course of transmission between extant T (as authorially corrected) and E. In other words, the Egoist text of Chapter I was to some extent authoritatively proofread before publication. One possible explanation of this fact would be that proofsheets of the chapter, or of the two installments
The hypothetical concept of the transmission of the entire text of A Portrait from D to E, such as it was derived from a comprehensive collation and analysis of these two textual witnesses, is thus in no way invalidated by further investigation of the transmission processes as controllable in those sections of the intermediary textual witness, the typescript, which happen to have been preserved. For most of Chapter I and for substantial fragments of Chapter II, that is for those stretches of text which correspond to the extant pages of typescript, the postulates of our hypothesis have been fully confirmed, and a clear differentiation of the several stages of transmission of the text from manuscript to print is amply indicated. The question which remains to be answered is what further inferences may be drawn for the full text of the novel by extrapolation from the positive facts established about the transmission of the first two chapters. The most important fact not yet considered of the extant fragments of T is that each of the first two chapters was typed by a different typist. This is clear from a difference in spelling habits: in the Chapter II fragments of the typescript, the name of the novel's hero is consistently spelled 'Stephan'; it was probably the author himself who painstakingly changed the spelling
When statistical calculations are extended over the remaining chapters of the novel, it is remarkable that the higher incidence of variation and error per column of printed text is confined to Chapter II. The corresponding figures for Chapters III-V (with and without authorial variants, and giving the typist the benefit of the doubt by assuming that the omissions in the latter part of Chapter III are authorial) are 2.4:2.1/2.35:2.35/2.1:1.9. They are thus very close to the incidence of variation in Chapter I (2.3:2.2). Noting that when the printed text introduces Joyce's dashes in dialogue from halfway through Chapter III onwards, it does so not in the strictly faithful manner of the typescript of Chapter II, but rather according to the pattern of that of Chapter I, combining the dashes with additional punctuation, one is tentatively led to conclude that the identical typist was employed on Chapters I and III-V, while a second person typed Chapter II only. The general uniformity of the kind of variants introduced and errors committed would appear to support the conclusion. The uniformity, it is true, extends over all five chapters. The statistics alone would, in the absence of any part of the typescript, not be very reliable as an aid to differentiating typists, since their figures indicate a varying amount
Finally, the facts and inferences can be played with to speculate about the relative timing involved in the completion of the several sections of the manuscript and the typescript. By two typists, Chapters I and II could have been typed simultaneously. At least, it is not impossible to conceive that they were begun at about the same time, or else that their typing overlapped for some days, or a week or two, if it was Joyce's intention to get as large a section of the novel as possible to London as quickly as possible after Ezra Pound's enquiry of December 15, 1913, about printable material. But Chapter II was certainly not completed in typescript when Chapter I was, or they would have been dispatched together. Actually, the same typewriter may have been used for both: there are no typed underlinings in either chapter, and parentheses have regularly been substituted by dashes. Thus it is equally possible that they were typed in short succession after each other. It is not known when Chapter II arrived in London. But Chapter III, although belonging to that part of the novel which is assumed to have existed in final form since 1908, did not get there until July 21 (Ellmann, p. 365). Perhaps a second typist was employed on Chapter II because the first one was unavailable between January and July—unless the completion of the typescript for Chapter III was delayed by an interruption in the writing out of the faircopy manuscript between Chapters II and III, or in the course of Chapter III. Only a physical examination of the manuscript itself might throw light on the circumstances under which Chapter III was copied out and typed.
On August 1 the war broke out, cutting off almost completely all postal connections between England and Austria. On September 1 Chapter III ran out in The Egoist, and on November 11 Joyce managed to dispatch the typescript of Chapters IV and V via Switzerland.
The Book Editions
Our final discussion must be brief of the stages of transmission of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the first printing in The Egoist to the 1924 Jonathan Cape edition. The publishing history has
With respect to accidentals, the situation created by the author's corrections prior to H and to B is somewhat more complex, and for an editor methodically quite intriguing. When faced with the close to 600 additional commas in the text of the Egoist serialisation, Joyce went about restoring the light punctuation of his manuscript with considerable determination. This process continued into Y. His paramount concern doubtless was for the rhythms of his text, the essential qualities of which—"to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm"—had been early adumbrated in the very first paragraph of the narrative essay "A Portrait of the Artist" of 1904. Yet for the flexible rhythms of his novel, its semicolons and its colons, placed and distinguished from each other with great subtlety in the manuscript, are as important as its commas. It is surely
However, Joyce's attention to the accidentals of the text as printed in fact took two directions. As has been noted above, his reduction of next to all capitalization and his preference in print for compounds written together as one word is tantamount to a restyling of the text with respect to these accidentals. In so far as it can be positively ascertained that they were made by the author, the changes are part of the total authoritative correction and revision of E and H. As such, they invalidate, in part, the pattern of the manuscript inscription which cannot be editorially restored whenever positive authorial direction is given to depart from it. Neither, however, should a critical editor (as opposed perhaps to a publisher's editor) for the sake of a new typographical consistency, and in an attempt to finish what the author began, go beyond his alterations. Quite a number of original capitalizations and word divisions in fact survived Joyce's restyling. These cannot but be left untouched in a critical text, which will thus, in the treatment of accidentals, appear thoroughly inconsistent.[64]
Inconsistency of the kind just advocated, however, is really an expression of editorial consistency based on a systematic enquiry into the extent of authority in each substantive textual witness. With regard to Joyce's Portrait, such consistency should be firmly extended to the last of the substantive texts, that of the Jonathan Cape edition of 1924 (J). Because its proofsheets have not been preserved, it presents greater textual problems than H and B. What attention James Joyce
James Joyce, then, obviously took full advantage of the one and only opportunity he was ever given to see A Portrait through the press. This does of course not mean that the edition into which his efforts went ten years after the completion of the manuscript presents a text to override all previous texts. The inevitable deterioration of the text in ten years of transmission has not been remedied in the edition of 1924. Nor has the text been extensively revised. Even a cursory perusal of J will satisfy an editor that the authorial proofreading was not by any means on the scale of Joyce's reading and revising in proof of the text of Ulysses. The comparison with the later work indeed emphasizes the remarkable reticence against change and revision which Joyce showed towards the text of A Portrait at every stage of correction. By analogy to the earlier rounds of authorial correction of the text, it should be expected that the proofreading of J which did take place affected both accidentals and substantives. That Joyce paid attention to the accidentals is proved, for example, when J, restoring the manuscript punctuation, reads: "What is this your name is?" (50.1) against the typescript error perpetuated through B: "What is this? Your name is?" But it is an exceptional case when it can be proved on internal evidence that the author was responsible for a variant in accidentals. Generally, the lack of documentation prevents editorial acceptance of such variation. The substantive variants in J, on the other hand, are susceptible to evaluation by which it should be possible satisfactorily to identify the authorial corrections and revisions. For example, the manuscript sentence: "The doomsday was at hand." (113.11) was transmitted invariant through H. B, by the authorial direction of Y, changed to 'Doomsday', yet J reverts to the manuscript wording 'The doomsday' in what must be considered as the author's final decision on this reading, overruling the revision of Y. Similarly, the typescript error 'fellows' at 43.19 was transmitted unnoticed through B. J restores the singular 'fellow' of the manuscript. Finally, a subtle revision at 77.35, 'moment' for 'movement', indicates the author's care in proofreading. With 'movement' the manuscript had picked up 'a movement of impatience' of 77.28, which itself is a recollection of 74.28 and is only incidentally woven into the description of the situation of tension in the conversation between Heron, Wallis and Stephen on p. 77. Only in the 1924 re-reading of the text did Joyce himself realise that the proper reference of line 77.35 should be to 'a shaft of momentary anger' of 77.12.
When all authoritative stages of the transmission of the novel have been analysed in detail, a comprehensive textual hypothesis to govern editorial decision in the preparation of a critical text may be formulated in a revised set of directions:
- 1. Base a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on the holograph manuscript (D) of 1913/14.
- 2. In accidentals, accept the manuscript system of punctuation. Follow authorial directions as contained in EC-A and Y to restyle the manuscript capitalizations and word divisions.
- 3. In substantives, accept all authorial correction and revision as documented in the fragments of T, in EC-A and Y, or as ascertained by inference from an evaluation of the total body of substantive variance between each of the authoritative editions. Except for the corrections of incomplete manuscript readings in E (in so far as they are not manifest miscorrections or stylesheet rectifications of grammar and syntax), reject all non-auhoritative variation in substantives.
Notes
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The definitive text, corrected from the Dublin holograph by Chester G. Anderson and edited by Richard Ellmann (1964).
Chester G. Anderson, "The Text of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 65 (1964), 160-200. (Quoted as Anderson.) This is a but slightly revised version of the Introduction to Chester G. Anderson, "A Portrait . . . Critically Edited . . .," unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University, 1962.
It is described in much detail, which often corrects assumptions by Anderson (pp. 190 ff.), in chapters 5 and 6 of Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson, Dear Miss Weaver (1970). (Quoted as Lidderdale.)
Contrary to the nomenclature in John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, 1882-1941 (1953), it is bibliographically correct only to speak of one first edition, the first impression of which was published in two separate simultaneous issues variant merely in the two distinct states of the title-page, and issued in two different bindings. The variant title-pages are both conjugate in their sheets and were probably printed by stop-press alteration from separate plates for which the identical typesetting of author and title was used. There is distinct type-damage to four separate letters (the 'e' in 'the', the 'a' in 'a', the 'M' in 'Man' and the 'C' in 'JOYCE') which positively secures the identification. Owing to the absence of B. W. Huebsch's publisher's device from the title-page of the London issue, its typographical lay-out differs in the wider spacing between the two lines each for author and title: the lines 'BY | JAMES JOYCE' have as a block been moved further down the page. Beyond that, the variance of the title-pages is merely in the alternative imprints. This first edition was never corrected but for a few minor alterations in its plates and ran out in 1950 in its 44th impression, while a second American edition, editorially corrected by Harry Levin, began its run in 1947 and went into many impressions and several separate issues, American and English. The edition named by Slocum-Cahoon 'The First English Edition, English sheets' (1918) is in truth the second edition of the novel, and it is the 'first English edition' only in so far as it is the fountainhead of the authorially corrected English line of the text. Of the fifth impression of the original American first edition there was in 1921 once more a separate issue for The Egoist Ltd. in London. This is not the 'third edition' (nor, of course, the fifth). Bibliographically, the reset Jonathan Cape publication of 1924 is the true third edition. As it is reset from the London edition of 1918, it might under the special circumstances governing the textual transmission of this novel be termed the second English edition. It had numerous impressions until it was replaced in 1956 by the reset Jonathan Cape illustrated edition (the third in England).
Lidderdale, pp. 92, 99, and 103 gives vivid accounts of when and how Miss Weaver was forced to give in to the demands for excision; with respect to the sentences omitted near the end of Chapter IV, Harriet Weaver herself wrote in the margin of Joyce's letter to her of July 24, 1915: ". . . the managers of the firm objected to certain expressions. . . . That was why the Egoist changed printers." James Joyce, Letters, II, 355, fn.
The latter correction refers to Chapter V. These were perhaps the two errata of which Harriet Weaver enclosed a slip in her letter to B. W. Huebsch of July 24, 1916.
Partridge & Cooper Ltd., whose name appears in the Egoist colophon, were a subsidiary of James Truscott and Son. These were the managers whom Harriet Weaver had to contend with. Cf. above, note 7, and Lidderdale, p. 91.
With reference keyed to the Viking [Anderson] text, the passages in question are: p. 7.13-14; 43.11-18; 44.32-35; 137.24-30; 138.6-9; 151.5-9; 192.8-11; 200.3-5; 205. 22-28; 206.30-32; 211.29-31; 212.5-7; 242.27-30.
P. 98.35-99.10 and p. 115.31-116.7. The same (?) indelible pencil has bracketed a part-column on p. 71, Feb. 16, 1914 (i.e. Viking [Anderson] p. 22.6-37), but there is no link in contents between this passage and the other two.
The full sheet either was cut from the beginning, serving as a divider between the chapters and a protective end cover, or else was used by Joyce as a folder for Chapter II, in which case the British Museum binder cut it apart and inadvertently turned fol. 27 upside down.
To Professor Giorgio Melchiori of Rome, who was most conveniently at hand in the British Museum reading room when I made this discovery, I am grateful for confirming my guess as to the nature of the document and for supplying the further information here given.
Letters, I, 80; 'the first half' can refer only to Chapters I and II, as no more had yet been published in July 1914.
Late in March 1915 (c. 29 March) Ezra Pound wrote: "Dear James Joyce: I took the final chapter of your novel to Grant Richards this a.m." (Pound/Joyce Letters, ed. F. Read, London 1967, p. 33). In a letter of April 22nd to Joyce, Harriet Weaver specifies that "Mr Pound sent Mr. Grant Richards . . . the part of the M.S. of your novel which has not yet been set up, together with a complete set of the numbers of 'The Egoist' in which it has appeared up to date. I asked for the M.S. to be returned by May 20th. This would give Mr. Richards two months in which to consider it." For access to those of Harriet Weaver's letters to James Joyce which concern the publishing of A Portrait, in photostats of the holograph originals, I am grateful to Miss Jane Lidderdale. While quotations from them here and below are according my own transcription, reference should be made to the edition of John Firth, "Harriet Weaver's Letters to James Joyce 1915-1920", SB 20 (1967), 151-188.
A renewed scrutiny of the inserted galley slip reveals an ink stroke in the margin about half-way down the column which does not stand against a correction to be made. It looks like the line-count strokes of Chapters I-IV, but divides off line 2254 of Chapter V as printed. However, if it may be assumed that the cumulation of 53 lines of italicized verse in the preceding sections of the chapter was disregarded in the count, the marking would be seen to stand against line 2201 of the regular text, reflecting a next to faultless line-count in hundreds. The observation would help to argue for the correctness of our assumptions about the fates of EC-W.
Harriet Weaver had submitted the novel to printers before, while Pinker was still searching for a publisher (see Lidderdale, chapter 6 passim); refusals from printers were coming in ever faster, so she may for some time have been circulating two copies of the text.
Miss Lidderdale's discussion of the dates and events leading up to Huebsch's publication of A Portrait (Dear Miss Weaver, chapter 6 passim) differs radically from Anderson's hypotheses (Anderson, pp. 190ff.). Being much more fully based on documentary evidence, her account serves as my frame of reference.
Anderson, p. 188 f. is aware of the facts. Curiously, he does not recognise the bearing they have on determining the provenance of EC-A.
The reference is here repeatedly to the unpublished Weaver-Huebsch correspondence. I gratefully acknowledge being given permission to use it.—It seems safe to say that Huebsch indeed never received the Marshall copy. For had it passed into his hands, he would, even though not printing from it, have handed it over to John Quinn to whom Joyce in 1917 sold all material relating to the first book edition which Huebsch held, and it would now be found in the Slocum Collection at Yale.
See the account of the events in London on September 6th and 7th, 1916, in Lidderdale, p. 125; and compare with the letter from Harriet Weaver to Huebsch of September 7th as quoted by Anderson, p. 190. This letter is now found attached to a complete set of tearsheets known as EC-B. Nowhere is there any documentary evidence, however, that 'EC-B' was an integral set of Egoist tearsheets from the outset. Rather, from the facts as they now begin to emerge I would infer that the one and only copy which ever became an identifiable unit was the printer's copy. Not even this copy, however, secured integrity until the printers stamped its sheets with serial numbers. It had none before and did probably not then, for example, contain the holograph insert (leaf no. 35). The other sets (EC-B and EC-C) had no natural integrity as physical objects until they became identifiable as catalogued units in the Slocum Collection. I suggest that, at various times, portions of the text (chapters and inserts, sections annotated and not annotated) were shuffled and reshuffled between them, the last time probably by Mr. Slocum himself. For the Quinn sale catalogue still speaks of three sets, each 'containing manuscript corrections by the author and Miss Weaver' (quoted by Anderson, p. 187). But EC-C now has no corrections.
Incidentally, she also gave her own complete run of The Egoist which the British Museum library did not possess before. Cf. Lidderdale, p. 425.
364 is the number of corrections counted by Cahoon in Joyce's manuscript list (Y). I count entries (364) and corrections to be made (365; two separate instances of 'public-house' > 'publichouse' are given one entry). These corrections sometimes involve more than one change. Anderson counts 373 changes (cf. footnote, p. 162). Attempting to apply his criteria, I count at least 379 changes. Yet I believe we are all describing the same body of corrections.
Anderson has no real ground for assuming (footnote, p. 197) that YW was written before Y: Y was completed by April 10th, YW was compiled between April 18th and May 2nd, arriving in New York on May 15th (see below).
The date they were mailed to Huebsch, which is authentic, is suggestive: on August 16, the Brighton printers who at first were going to print the English edition retracted their offer. Thus, Harriet Weaver—despairing momentarily that the book would ever be printed in England—may have wished that all corrections were in the hands of the publisher who alone thus far had the text of A Portrait in print. In the event, of course, only the second Egoist Press edition and its descendants ever incorporated Joyce's 'nearly 400' corrections.
As far as the events go which lead up to finding a printer in England for the second edition, Miss Lidderdale (Dear Miss Weaver, pp. 139 ff.) has drawn upon the Weaver-Huebsch correspondence and largely recorded the relevant details.
Pinker must have kept the corrections on file in yet another typescript copy; for the manuscript original (Y) was sold to John Quinn sometime in June, 1917; by July 10th, Joyce had received Quinn's acknowledgement (Letters, I, 104).
HB is apparently not identical with the copy marked up and given before August 16th, 1917, to the Pike's Fine Art Press in Brighton to print from. They returned a book with 'passages marked in blue pencil' to be 'modified or removed'. (Lidderdale, p. 142). There are no traces of bluepencil markings in the Bodley volume. The discrepancy in the number of corrections between the handwritten list sent to Huebsch on August 16 (15 corrections plus removal of one typing error) and the additional entries in pencil in YTW (17 corrections plus removal of two obvious typing errors) may have its explanation here. The fifteen corrections in the handwritten list may have been the result of annotating the copy for Pike's, the two additional ones may have been added to YTW in preparation of the printer's copy for Johnson's of Southport. As Harriet Weaver then spotted another six misprints and hyphenation errors in the course of annotating HB which were never entered in YTW, it must remain an open question —until all relevant documents can be reexamined in preparation of a critical edition—whether it is merely a happy coincidence that YW and YTW concur in the number of 17 corrections in excess of Joyce's authentic 365.
To complete the record, a set of pencilled notations on the back flyleaf (verso) should be observed: '26-41 234-246 280-292 for Sesame book 1942'. If taken as page references, '26-41' comprises the greater part of the Christmas dinner scene in Chapter I; '234-246' the conversation between Stephen, Davin and Lynch until just before the esthetic theory section in Chapter V; and '280-292' the final conversation with Cranly. I have not investigated the relevance of these jottings.
The corresponding section of the typescript which served as printer's copy for The Egoist happens to survive. Curiously, the typist first spelled 'revery' according to the manuscript, but the final 'y' was altered in ink to 'ie' by an undeterminable agent. Joyce himself did sporadically enter corrections in ink in the typescript, but the 'ie' does not appear to be in his hand. The spelling 'reverie' occurs several times in The Egoist. It was successfully eradicated by Joyce himself in all instances but the present one. It is highly probable that the failure to observe his Y instruction at B: 87.9 was spotted and amended by him when he proofread J.
The texts in the editions of Harry Levin (in The Portable James Joyce and elsewhere; cf. Anderson, p. 167) and of Anderson/Ellmann (1964) are both conflated texts. The latter in particular, which draws on the manuscript, albeit in a not readily controllable manner which on analysis proves to be unsystematic, provides—in the true technical sense of the word—a contaminated text.
It should be noted here that no scholar with bibliographic and paleographic expertise has yet investigated the Dublin holograph. Until it has been fully described and analysed, neither the above dates can be given with full assurance, nor is it possible to say whether or not our present conception of how the text of the novel evolved will need to be modified.
The figures for the Egoist variants here and below derive from double collation (D-E, D-J) which, though done with all possible care, has not been counter-checked. They should therefore be taken as approximations to indicate relations.
To assert that in E "printinghouse stylesheets triumphed almost completely over the copy in punctuation, hyphening, capitalization, and other accidentals" (Anderson, p. 185) is much too sweeping a statement. As regards hyphenation and capitalization it is not true.
I count at least 106 instances of such omission, equalling almost exactly one-third of the total of D-E substantive variance: 19 instances in Chapter I, 28 in II, 22 in III, 9 in IV and 28 in V.
Page/line references are to the 1964 Viking printed text as used in its 1968 reprint in: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Text, Criticism, Notes. Ed. Chester G. Anderson, 1968 (The Viking Critical Library). The quotations, however, give the manuscript readings unless otherwise indicated.
This is a fascinating variant. Stephen also notes "the proud conscious movement of her perfumed head" which accompanies the undoing of the gown. Moreover, the next paragraph in the text makes it clear that Stephen and the young woman stand apart in her room: ". . . she came over to him and embraced him. . . ." "Watching her as he undid her gown", therefore, which very clearly is the manuscript reading, appears to be a genuine Freudian slip of the author. It need of course not have been corrected by him. A typist or compositor would have been capable of spotting the inconsistency.
This revision, to avoid a quibble on Dixon's signet ring, is comparable to the E→H authorial change of 'trunk' > 'body' at 201.14 to avoid a pun on the preceding "whinny of an elephant".
These are provisional rules, as the facts and inferences concerning the subsequent rounds of authorial correction by which they must be augmented and modified have not yet been discussed. Yet they are also the central rules for establishing a critical text, as the results of a comprehensive analysis of the body of D-E variance must form the basis for any editorial hypothesis and procedure. It may be appropriate therefore in their light to indicate statistically whether "the definitive text, corrected from the Dublin holograph . . . published in 1964 by The Viking Press, Inc." has a claim to being definitive. Of the total of substantive variants, that is 317 by our count, 29 (by our count) are corrections in E of manuscript error. This leaves 288 instances on which editorial decision must operate. Giving the editors the benefit of the doubt in the case of the possible six authorial cuts in Chapter III, we find that in 158 out of the 288 instances editorial decision follows the rules here postulated, while in 130 instances it goes against them. The ratio of (what we would regard as) correct to incorrect is thus 55%:45%. Taking into account that several 'correct' decisions were in fact anticipated by the author in the course of his repeated subsequent corrections of the text, this is tantamount to a flat 50:50 ratio of hit and miss. Corresponding figures for the treatment of accidentals—which by reason of Joyce's fairly systematic later restyling of hyphenations and capitalizations could in any case not be based on the D-E variation—have not been worked out. Nor has the treatment in the Viking text of substantive variance in the later editions (H, B, J) been systematically analysed. The impression that it, too, is somewhat haphazard—and in particular so with regard to the J variants on which hypothetical inference must again operate—stems from cursory observation only. It would seem that these facts and conditions are due to the lack of a comprehensive and logically consistent hypothesis of the transmission of the text of A Portrait from the Dublin holograph (1913/14) to the third book edition (Jonathan Cape, 1924). This lack prevents the 1964 Viking edition from fulfilling the standards of a definitive text.
In particular, the typewriter used seems to have had no key for underlining. The underlinings in T which copy underlinings in D to indicate italics in print were done by hand and are missing in all those places in T where E fails to italicize.
This discussion is based on xerox copies of the extant pages which were kindly put at my disposal by Mrs Elaine Bate who now owns the originals, and to whom I am grateful for permission to use the copies for the purposes of this article. Since the article went to press, I have had the opportunity of inspecting the fragments themselves. They are the ribbon-copy typescript originals, on white typewriting paper 22.5 x 28.4 cm., uniformly watermarked CROXLEY MANIFEST BANK | LONDON under a rampant lion, facing left, which holds in its front paws a standard, unfolding over its head and bearing the inscription LION BRAND. The ribbon ink, originally of a blackish colour, has been affected by damp and has largely turned purple. Each of the chapters separately was once stapled together very close to the left paper edge. Every sheet shows holes in the upper right-hand corner which appear to be the marks of the compositor's copy-holder. The rust-marks of paper clips indicate that the fragmentation of the typescript is of an early date, in all probability resulting from the manuscript's handling in the printinghouse. The authorial corrections can without much difficulty be isolated from the several stages of annotation in evidence. Page II.17, which is the first leaf of the last of the extant fragments, bears the inscription in watery-blue ink "Portrait of The Artist as a young Man | by | James Joyce." The handwriting is Ezra Pound's. The Dublin holograph, which I have also meanwhile been able to inspect, shows a series of pencil marks throughout Chapter I which in ten instances divide off page-beginnings of the typescript, and in two instances specify an (authorial?) re-paragraphing of the text, carried out in the typescript.
If it could be assumed that the conditions under which the typescript came about remained fairly constant throughout the five chapters, one would expect to find those corrections of incomplete manuscript readings in Chapter V which appear to be clearly authorial similarly to have been written into the typescript. This would agree with the evidence from authorial correction/revision and definitely indicate one round of authorial attention to Chapter V only.
Proof, that is, as distinct from 'first-degree' inference from facts such as the inscription of the words on the manuscript pages which were observed earlier to render plausible the explanation that the omissions were typist's errors; or 'second-degree' inference to the same effect, taking the form of conclusions drawn by analogy from an analysis of a different group of variants which were inferentially also declared to be non-authorial.
As it happens, 'there' seems on literary grounds to be a definite improvement over 'in the square', referring as it does to both outdoor and indoor locations in that square. The evidence of T creates a paradoxical situation, even an editor's dilemma. 'There', it is true, is confirmed to be authorial, as was hypothetically assumed before the T fragments came to light. At the same time, it is revealed not as a revision undertaken in view of the original reading, but as a spontaneous correction of a typist's error. As an instance of alternative phrasing it was never intended to replace, but rather to restore the reading which had accidentally got lost. What on first sight appears to be an authorial second thought is really an attempt to recover the wording of a first thought. Editorially this means that the original reading 'in the square' should be given preference over the authorial correction 'there', contrary to the general rule by which authorial corrections should replace original readings in a critical text, and despite the subjective judgment that 'there' be preferable to 'in the square' in its context. The editorial decision to adhere to textual logic over literary judgement is inevitable because the situation is not unique in the course of the transmission of A Portrait: when reading the E text for H, and H for B, Joyce belatedly spotted several further typescript errors of omission which he corrected without recourse to his manuscript. The results of his correction always differ from the original readings, though never except in the present case for the better.
These seven instances are: father > uncle > father (26.11); he had got > got > he had got (28.8); or > [om.] > or (32.5); Let it > let us > let it (32.8); opinions > opinion > opinions (34.14); MacManus > MacManns > MacManus (38.27); about it > about > about it (53.1). The variant chestnuts > chestnuts > limes occurs at 24.10.
If it were assumed that as much text as made up the first three Egoist installments was set up at once by the printers on receiving Chapter I in manuscript, then it would be possible to imagine that proofs of installments two and three were passed to and fro between England and Trieste in the last days of January/early days of February, 1914, while the first Egoist installment of February 2nd was already appearing. The change chestnuts > limes is involved, which is identically repeated in Chapters II and III. To ascertain when, where, and by what agent it was introduced into the final Egoist text in its first instance would carry implications for the timing of the completion of both the authorial faircopy and of the typescript for all of Chapter II, and the beginning, at least, of Chapter III.
It is well to emphasize, however, that it appears to have been James Joyce's own concern for a pleasing typographical appearance of his text in print which motivated his changes of such accidentals as capitalizations and word divisions. With this in mind, it may be recalled that the question was raised and left open above (p. 27) whether consistency in the treatment of accidentals should in fact be extended to the adoption of the manuscript system of dashes in direct speech. On pragmatic grounds, I would defer a decision in this matter until, by way of a practical experiment, a few sample pages were set up in type so as to show whether both printers and readers could within reason be asked to cope in full with the Joycean unorthodoxy of punctuation in dialogue. Robert Scholes in "Some Observations on the Text of Dubliners: 'The Dead'" (SB 15 [1962], pp. 200 f.), discusses the matter of Joyce's dashes in Dubliners and the later works. He has reduced Joyce's usage to initial dashes only in his Viking edition of Dubliners (1969).
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