University of Virginia Library

Printer's Copy for Part of Volume Seven of the W. B. Yeats Collected Works in Verse and Prose (1908)
by
J. R. Mulryne

Among the papers associated with A. H. Bullen now in the Records Office of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Stratford-upon-Avon is an envelope containing unbound sheets from the second edition (1891) of W. B. Yeats's John Sherman and Dhoya.[1] Bullen was involved with Yeats in the publication of Yeats's Collected Works in Verse and Prose (1908), printed at Bullen's Shakespeare Head Press in Stratford. The papers in question relate to that venture, for these sheets, with textual revisions by Yeats, and some annotation by Bullen, served as printer's copy for part of volume seven of the Collected Works. Yeats's revision of his early story, John Sherman, which these pages represent, was scarcely a thoroughgoing one, nor, as I shall indicate below, was it his last revision before the Collected Works were finally published. Yet these sheets and their annotations are of considerable interest in allowing a glimpse of Yeats working on printer's copy for an edition by which he set great store.

The envelope contains, in addition to a blank flysheet, pp. i-iv, 1-170 of the 1891 second edition of John Sherman and Dhoya;[2] that is to say, the pages covering the John Sherman story alone, together with title pages and some preliminary material. The pages relating to the story called Dhoya (pp. 171-196) have not been preserved. A description of the annotations in the papers follows below; all annotations are in ink, unless otherwise stated. I have given page and line references first to the 1891 John Sherman and Dhoya (JSD); then, where appropriate, to volume seven of the Collected Works (CW); and finally, because neither of these is readily available outside large libraries, to the edition of John Sherman and Dhoya by Richard J. Finneran (1969) (F).

The first of these unbound sheets is blank (JSD fly-leaf), with a pencilled '1' on recto and '2' on verso. There follows the half-title page (JOHN SHERMAN | AND | DHOYA; JSD [i]), numbered '3' in pencil, and signed in Yeats's autograph across the top of the page 'W B Yeats November 1891'.[3] The verso page (list of Pseudonym Library books; JSD [ii]) carries pencilled number '4'.

The title page (GANCONAGH | [rule] | JOHN SHERMAN | AND | DHOYA | SECOND EDITION | [Publisher's details at foot]; JSD [iii]) carries a pencilled number '5'. Yeats's handwritten 'Two Early Stories' at the top of the page has been roughly cancelled; so too has 'GANCONAGH', and (as part of the same cancellation) the signature 'W B Yeats' immediately below. Faint single inverted commas in ink around 'GANCONAGH' are just discernible.[4] Following 'DHOYA' Bullen has written in a colon, and, immediately below, 'Two Early Stories'. The rest of the page has been roughly cancelled.

On the verso of this leaf (JSD [iv]) is the number '6' in pencil, and in Bullen's hand 'Republished by courteous permission of Mr. T. Fisher Unwin'. The following recto page (JSD [1]) is numbered '7' in pencil, but the whole page (GANCONAGH'S APOLOGY) is cancelled by a single-line diagonally down the page, with Yeats's (?) delete symbol in the margin. The verso page (JSD 2) is pencil-numbered '8', but is also cancelled, and again carries Yeats's (?) delete symbol. The fly-title page that follows (PART I. | JOHN SHERMAN LEAVES | BALLAH.; JSD [3]) has the roman 'I' cancelled and 'First' written-in in Bullen's hand. A further note in Bullen's hand reads 'transfer to top of next page'. The page is numbered '9' in pencil. The verso is blank (JSD [4]), and is pencil-numbered '10'.

(The following pages are numbered, in pencil as throughout, as far as '12' (JSD 6), after which the numbering ceases.)

The notes below record all the corrections to the text of John Sherman; all are in Yeats's hand, unless otherwise indicated. A few printer's marks (in the form of a rule across the page and in the margin 'slip 4', 'slip 5', 'slip 6', 'slip 13', JSD 21, 27, 32, 76) have been omitted.

• JSD 9, l. 13 To him who had] 'To' cancelled; 'For' in margin (CW 186, l. 10; F 45, l. 13)
• JSD 9, l. 18 to those who] 'to' cancelled; 'for' in margin (CW 186, l. 13; F 45, l. 15)

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• JSD 15, l. 29 gluggerabunthaun and Jack o'] 'gluggerabunthaun and' cancelled; delete symbol in margin (CW 190, l. 28; F 48, l. 13)
• JSD 25, l, 12 out of his] 'his' cancelled; 'its/' in margin, [Just above, in margin, 'Pickworth' in unknown hand.] (CW 197, l. 12; F 52, l. 17) [The fly-title page, 'PART V. | JOHN SHERMAN RETURNS TO | BALLAH.', is erroneously placed between pp. 30 and 31; it should come as pp. 143, 144.]
• JSD 49, l. 3 Saxon schools. Vases of] full-stop cancelled, 'V' cancelled; in margin ';/ l.c.' All this correction is in pencil, in an unknown hand, perhaps the hand that introduced the pencilled numbering. (CW 211, l. 1; F 62, l. 6)
• JSD [51], ll. 15-17 clothes-moth in an antimacassar | thought the end of the world | had come and fluttered out only] 'in an . . . come and' all cancelled; 'only' cancelled; in margin three delete symbols; curving line from 'out' to bottom margin, with 'of an antimacasser' written in (CW 212, ll. 11-12; F 63, ll. 4-5)
• JSD 53, l. 16 the gentleman] 'the' cancelled; in margin 'a/' (CW 213, l. 20; F 63, l. 32)
• JSD 71, ll. 9-10 vegetables. | [Indentation] Perforce this] curving line joining 'vegetables.' and 'Perforce'; in margin 'run on' (CW 224, ll. 19-20; F 71, ll. 3-4)
• JSD 71, ll. 15-16 family. | [Indentation] Now he] curving line joining 'family.' and 'Now'; in margin 'run on' (CW 224, l. 23; F 71, l. 7)
• JSD 123, l. 1 Inniscrewin] 'crewin' cancelled; in margin faint handwritten 'vee' (?) cancelled and 'free/' written in (CW 255, l. 2; F 92, l. 24)
• JSD 130, l. 13 on rather] 'on' cancelled; in margin 'or/' (CW 259, l. 15; F 95, l. 16)
• JSD 146, l. 26 come out of] 'o' in 'come' cancelled; in margin 'a/'; this cancellation and annotation in pencil, perhaps by the same hand that introduced the pencilled numbering (CW 268, l. 9; F 102, l. 5)[5]
• JSD 147, l. 29 this truth?] question-mark cancelled; in margin delete symbol (CW 269, l. 3; F 102, l. 23)
• JSD 151, ll. 27-28 iron | safe] 'safe' cancelled; in margin 'bottle/' (CW 271, l. 3; F 104, l. 3)
• JSD 165, l. 9 south of the town] 'south' cancelled; in margin 'west' (CW 279, l. 9; F 109, l. 25)

All of the above alterations are accepted into the text of the Collected Works. Yeats's revisions go in exactly as he directs, with the exception that 'antimacassar' is correctly spelled. Bullen's annotations, too, are respected, except that 'courteous permission' (see JSD [iv]) becomes in the printed text 'kind permission', and 'PART FIRST' (JSD [3]) becomes 'FIRST PART'—which may indeed have been Bullen's intention. Bullen worked very closely with his printers, and we need not suppose that these slight changes represent any departure from his directions. The pencilled annotations (JSD 49 and 146) are also respected.

The textual revisions in this printer's copy represent a very light re-working of material Yeats had come, by 1906-1908, to regard almost as prentice work. The sub-heading, 'Two Early Stories', presumably offers to

deflect adverse criticism, but this is the only sign that the poet felt in any way defensive about the fiction written more than fifteen years before. Such revisions as he makes are normally towards simplifying his tale's vocabulary, and rendering it less self-conscious and showy—in keeping with the trend of Yeats's other work at this period. The most substantial change gets rid of a rather gauche anthropomorphism (JSD [51]): the clothes-moth who, according to the early version, 'thought that the end of the world had come' before taking to the air, resumes in the Collected Works his animal decorum and, we are told, merely 'fluttered out of an antimacassar'. In a similar if less vivid way, the beetle who in JSD 'crawled out of his hole' (JSD 25), now 'crawled out of its hole'. The rather showy (and obscure) Gaelic word 'gluggerabunthaun' (breezily translated by Finneran as 'emptyrattling-arse'[6]) is deleted, presumably because the expected English readership of the Collected Works would simply not understand it (JSD 15). The change from 'Inniscrewin' to 'Innisfree' (JSD 123) lies in the direction of demystifying the tale and giving it a real location; one presumes that the larger change of the same kind, replacing 'Ballah' by 'Sligo', would have required too much cancellation, and would have led to other (and possibly unacceptable) re-naming. If Mrs. Sheelah Kirby is right in identifying the Old Cummen House as the house by which John Sherman walks in the fifth part of the book (Finneran, p. 136), then the change from 'south' to 'west' (JSD 165) is one of topographical exactness: in keeping perhaps with Yeats's insistence to Katharine Tynan that in this book he worked very closely and exactly with things Irish.[7] The 1891 description of 'unsympathetic' people who 'preserve their characters in an iron safe' (JSD 151) must have seemed to the later Yeats to suggest an absurd little drama of putting away and locking up; such people keeping their characters in an 'iron bottle' may have appeared a less ludicrous image. The correction 'on' to 'or' (JSD 130) is a simple correction of a printer's error, already put right in the New York edition of JSD, dated, like the two English editions, 1891. Yeats's other alterations are of little significance, representing merely an editor's tidying-up of the text in front of him.

One caveat emerges from a study of these papers. Professor Finneran, comparing printed versions of John Sherman, notes (p. 34) that 'in a few places . . . Yeats attempted [through revision] to produce a tighter sentence structure by eliminating unnecessary words and altering the syntax'. The one example of a genuine tightening of syntax in the present papers (JSD 49, l. 3) comes in an entry by a hand other than Yeats's (or at least in an unidentified hand). Of course, Yeats may have initiated, authorised or accepted the change. Yet it may be as well to remember, when commenting on apparent Yeats revisions between printed editions, that not all the changes, even of syntax, may in actual fact be his.

II

The Bullen papers we have examined obviously served as printer's copy for the Collected Works, and all the changes there made are incorporated into the published text. Comparison of JSD with the Collected Works establishes, however, that a further revision intervened before the 1908 text of John Sherman reached the public. We can only conjecture how and when this took place.

The relationship between Yeats and Bullen during the period when the Collected Works were going through the press was not always a smooth one. Various difficulties presented themselves, exacerbated by Yeats's frequent absences in Ireland and elsewhere, and, it seems, by Bullen's tendency to meddle with the poet's text. Yeats insisted on precise and continuous oversight of his work as it went through the press; Bullen, always in financial straits, had to think in terms of keeping his men employed even if the poet's final word on a particular piece of work had not come through. The tension over this matter reached a high point in the summer of 1907. Writing from Coole Park on July 6 of that year, Yeats says:

Unless we construe this as mere bluster, we may take it that Yeats would see and approve each stage in the printing of volume 7 of the Collected Works, going through the press during the following year, 1908. Among the changes introduced into the text of John Sherman at a stage later than Yeats's preparation of copy for the printer are some that are of significance; it seems very improbable that Yeats would have tolerated their introduction by anyone but himself. We may assume that these changes were in fact made by Yeats as he read the volume in proof.

The nature of the changes at proof stage can best be shown by citing a few examples, with some brief commentary on each. The list is not complete, even in the matter of substantive changes, and entirely ignores accidentals. A full collation of the Collected Works printing against the English and American editions of JSD will be found in Professor Finneran's work.

• JSD 10, ll. 19-20 the last evening gnats, making circles on the water beneath] CW 187 l. 6 has 'evening flies' in place of 'evening gnats' (F 45, l. 33); Yeats must have felt this change lay in the direction of factual accuracy.

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• JSD 15, ll. 4-5 among the provincial youths he felt recherché] CW 190, l. 11 has 'distinguished' for 'recherché' (F 48, l. 1). Yeats probably felt that the French word might well have misleading connotations for his English readers; though it could mean 'refined', the sense of 'far-fetched' or 'odd' was strong in English usage.
• JSD 49, ll. 27-29 she would have been more circumspect about revealing her tastes] CW 211, l.18 has 'cautious' for 'circumspect' (F 62 l. 20). Yeats may have thought the original sentence clumsy and with too many emphatic sibilants.
• JSD [111], ll. 10-11 She scolded him roundly for having answered] CW 247, l. 15 omits 'roundly', Yeats presumably thinking it redundant, and preferring plainness.
• JSD [134], ll. 16-17 "I have been reading that sweet 'Imitation of Christ'] CW 261, l. 23 has 'the' in place of 'that sweet'. The ridiculous phrase must have seemed a crude and cheap way of making a character-point by the time Yeats came to revise the CW proofs.

These changes may be said broadly to continue the process begun in the original preparation of copy for the printer. Yeats maintains his concern with the details of expression, and works further in the direction of simplifying his vocabulary. Yet here, as one might perhaps expect, he turns his attention also towards such matters as characterisation and accuracy of detail. At no point does the revision look like a comprehensive one, yet it might be thought characteristic of Yeats that the first level of reconsideration is mainly verbal in character, and only then does the poet's mind turn to other matters. Yet even this view would have to be modified in the light of the evidence here presented; the distinction is not a clear one.

John Sherman is a minor work, and the revision exemplified by the printer's copy at Stratford is far less extensive and revealing than some of the manuscript and typescript revisions of Yeats material recent scholarship has turned up. Examination of the Stratford papers may, however, be of considerable value in dealing with other bibliographical problems of the Yeats canon that call for a knowledge of Yeats's practice in marking up copy for his printers.

Notes