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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
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