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:
Copy of corrections made by Mr. Joyce to 1st edition. Sent to Mr.
Huebsh [sic] August 16, 1917 but were not made before printing of sheets
for 3rd English edition (1921). Were made in 2nd English edition, printed
in Southport, 1917. Were made also before printing of Jonathan Cape
edition of 1924[.]
But although YTW appears to be the carbon copy of YT as described by
Anderson, it differs from YT in that 17 further corrections are interlined in
it in their appropriate positions, in pencil, and in Miss Weaver's
handwriting. Their number establishes a connection to the
two handwritten pages with a total of 70 corrections in Miss Weaver's hand
(YW), now accompanying YT, and bearing a note: 'Sent by Miss Weaver
May 2/17.' In April 1917, then, James Joyce and Harriet Weaver
independently drew up lists of corrections to H.
[33] Anderson states that of the 70
corrections
in YW, 17—all of them departures from EC-A in H—are
omitted from
Y/YT. Harriet Weaver appears to have conflated Joyce's list and her own,
adding in YTW the 17 errors Joyce had missed. The total of entries in
YTW is thus 381, the total of corrections 382.
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,
is still extant among the unpublished Weaver-Huebsch
correspondence.
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:
I have just received from Mr. Pinker a long list of corrections to be
made in the plates, but unfortunately I have just printed a second edition
from the first plates and unless there is a very large demand for the book,
this edition is likely to last for a considerable time. I presume that you have
received a duplicate list of the corrections. Under the circumstances,
probably you would not want me to send you moulds.
But neither from Pinker nor from Joyce had Harriet Weaver received a
copy of the corrections. So, with no hope now of getting the corrected text
from New York in either sheets or moulds, she decided to publish
independently in England, with a reset text. On June 6th, she asked
Huebsch to send her the corrections and suggested he have a copy made for
her so as not to endanger the original in wartime Atlantic transit. Huebsch
was pleased to oblige:
I take pleasure in enclosing a copy of the corrections. . . . I am
keeping a copy of the corrections here for my own use. It will be available
for you if disaster overtakes the copy that I am forwarding.
[38]
It was not until July 28th (or thereabouts) that the carbon copy from
Huebsch arrived in London. But meanwhile, Joyce had notified Harriet
Weaver on July 7th that Pinker had his corrections. She replied on July
18th: "I got your corrections from your agent and the printers now have the
book in hand."
[38a] The printers she
refers to
were the Pike's Fine Art Press of Brighton who on August 16th refused to
print without deletion. Thus, the corrections as Harriet Weaver got them
from Pinker before YTW arrived in London at the end of July did not enter
the transmission of the text.
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
comma, deletes another without warrant and fails to change a third into a
colon. The identification of the volume as the printer's copy for B,
immediately rendered likely by the pencilled alterations and additions in
Harriet Weaver's hand to the copyright and printing notices on the verso of
the title-page, rests mainly on a set of sparse but unmistakable
printinghouse markings. For long stretches of the book, there are little
pencilled crosses at the bottom of verso pages, or the top of recto pages,
at regular intervals of four pages. Sometimes these divide off a syllable or
a word or two at the end of a page or the beginning of the next, and the
first word or syllable of a recto page is occasionally pencilled in at the
bottom of the preceding verso page. B is of course virtually a page-for-page
reprint of H, despite its smaller typeface. But inevitably the text on any
given page in B does not always coincide to the word or syllable with that
of its counterpart in H. Yet in every
case where the text is out by a syllable or a word or two on pages marked
in HB as described, the new page beginnings correspond exactly to the
marked divisions. Typical compositorial notes like 'Line short' or "Two
short', sometimes initialled by the person who wrote them, finally clinch
the matter: the Bodley volume is the printer's copy for B, with the majority
of its compositorial stints clearly marked. A further analysis, not yet
undertaken, would probably make it possible to distinguish from the
markings, from the typographical lay-out of the pages, and presumably
from the treatment of punctuation and the like in the text itself, between
two or more compositors.
[40]
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
spelling which had passed via
Egoist to H.
[41] Thus all YTW corrections, but for
these
exceptions, duly entered the text of B. In addition, another six misprints
and hyphenation errors which had eluded both Joyce and Harriet Weaver
before were marked by her and corrected by the printers. Beyond that, Miss
Weaver took it upon her own authority to remove wholesale, from about the
middle of Chapter III onwards, all intermediary and final dashes in direct
speech, and to introduce alternative punctuation consequent upon their
removal where necessary. This altered the entire system of Joyce's
designation and punctuation of dialogue in so far as it had survived in print.
In the manuscript, there are dashes in place of the 'perverted commas'
which Joyce so abhorred not only at the beginning of every direct speech
but also before and after interruptions (where in print one is accustomed to
commas and inverted commas: i.e. —said Stephen— rather
than. . . .," said Stephen, ". . .), and at the end, where the dash in fact
frequently stands without a further mark of punctuation. In the first printed
text of
A Portrait in
The Egoist, this system of
punctuation, so conspicuously idiosyncratic, has disappeared from the first
two chapters and the first one and a half installments of the third and been
replaced by initial dashes followed by regularized punctuation (though of
course not inverted commas) in the middle and at the end of direct
speeches. In these positions, Joyce's dashes—though not his dashes
as
combining the functions of all punctuation: especially at the ends of
speeches periods have mostly been placed before dashes in
print—break
through only towards the end of the second installment of Chapter III of
August 15, 1914, which was the fourth installment printed by Partridge
& Cooper. These printers had set inverted commas in
A
Portrait (as elsewhere) when they began to print
The
Egoist on July 1, 1914. In their second installment of July 15, which
was the end of Chapter II, and their third, the beginning of Chapter III,
they adopted the styling observable uniformly before in the initial ten
installments printed by Johnson & Co. of Southport. They carried it
over
even into three full pages of their fourth installment, the manuscript text of
which contains the final dash in three individual instances. With two
printinghouses conforming to the same pattern of
variation in such accidentals, one might be inclined to suspect that the
eventual change reflects a change in their copy, i.e. that the typescript made
from Joyce's manuscript reproduces the manuscript punctuation of dialogue
only from the middle of Chapter III onwards. The fragments of typescript
of Chapters I and II which survive—and which will be described in
greater detail below—show that this was not so. They contain all
dashes,
plus (on the typist's own authority) additional punctuation at the ends of
speeches, and sometimes most illogically even before speech interruptions,
in Chapter I, and an exact reproduction of Joyce's own styling in Chapter
II, on which a different typist worked. That it was the first and not the
second typist's styling which was eventually adopted by both the Partridge
& Cooper and the Ballantyne compositors might indicate that the
identical typist typed all chapters except Chapter II (a possibility which, on
broader evidence, will be discussed
later). The move towards a more complete observance in
The
Egoist of the authorial punctuation of dialogue was as such quite
possibly the result of editorial direction. The full system of dashes (though
augmented by regularized final punctuation) manifests itself in print after
Harriet Weaver's taking over as editor, albeit with a delay of three and a
half installments. But the delay is explicable: the first editorial concern was
to get rid of the inverted commas. Reference to the typography of the Joyce
text in the earlier
Egoist issues would have been appropriate
and
sufficient to guide Partridge & Cooper's compositors in the treatment
of
their second installment. Thereafter, dialogue is virtually absent from long
stretches of the text in Chapter III. Harriet Weaver would only have
become alerted to the styling of the typescript as more frequent dialogue
resumed in the chapter's second half, whereupon she may have given
directions that it be fully adopted in print.
This of course is but speculative reasoning. Yet the resulting fact is that the
punctuation of direct speech is inconsistent not only in the
Egoist serialisation but also in the first book edition. It is the
lack of uniformity in the typographical appearance of the book which
Harriet Weaver remedies in her preparation of the printer's copy for B in
1917. She now standardises the punctuation of dialogue according to the
styling of the initial chapters. The over-all appearance of the text in print
is thereby improved in the 1918 edition, however unauthorized this second
editorial intrusion. One hardly feels called upon, therefore, to argue with
Harriet Weaver's restyling. It must at present be left open whether even a
critical edition should revert to the punctuation of the manuscript, unless,
following the manner of the typist of Chapter II, it were to reproduce all
dashes strictly without any additional punctuation in the middle and at the
end of speeches. Yet such procedure would run the very real risk of
ultimately obscuring rather than clarifying the text. Moreover, it should be
observed that the dashes appear very much as a calligraphic feature of the
manuscript which, as visually expressing the individuality of the author in
his handwriting, it would take careful collaboration of editor and printer to
recapture satisfactorily on the printed page. To fulfill the author's objective
of avoiding inverted commas, it would seem sufficient to maintain Harriet
Weaver's styling by preserving merely the initial dash in a direct speech.
Nevertheless, it is true that the interference of typist(s), editor(s) and
compositors has often altered and obscured the original sentence divisions
of the dialogue in the novel. These await full restoration in a critical
text.