University of Virginia Library

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:

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:

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: 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:

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.