University of Virginia Library

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 result of correction and revision by the author and thus positively supersede the authority of the original readings.[43] The basic text of A Portrait is the author's manuscript. Authorial correction and revision intervened at each stage of transmission between D and J, thus conferring secondary authority on each of the textual witnesses T, H, B and J. It is the extent to which their variants are authoritative which must in each case be determined. For the text in H and B, the documents which contain the intervening authorial corrections and revisions survive. These are the errata lists to Chapters III and IV in EC-W, and EC-A, the printer's copy with Joyce's corrections to Chapters I, II and V, for H; and the 'nearly 400' authorial corrections (Y), plus the printer's copy, HB, for B. Thus the authority, or lack of authority, of the variants in the first and second book editions is demonstrable. The proofsheets of the two, or probably three rounds of correction which Joyce read for J have however not been preserved.[44] The authority of variant readings in J, therefore, can upon close and discriminating analysis of the total B-J variance be established by inference only. Lastly, and most seriously, the typescript made from D and used as printer's copy for E, that is to say one of the authoritative textual witnesses themselves, is almost entirely lost. There is consequently next to no documentary evidence available of possible authorial alterations before the text was typed, nor of typists' omissions or commissions, nor of authorial correction and revision of the typescript; nor can, other than by inference, printinghouse changes in E be separated from the total body of D-E variance. Here lies the rub; for in view of the large and weighty discrepancy in the text between D and E, it is only by successful differentiation of all these separate stages of authoritative and non-authoritative interference which, hypothetically, the text passed through from D to E that a true critical text can emerge.

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

lost) which had contained them in a virtually final textual stage for several years. But Chapters IV and V were in their final form only conceived during these months and written (though doubtless preliminary material existed for them, too) before they were copied to complete the faircopy manuscript. The typescript followed the manuscript in close pursuit, chapter by chapter. As from February 2nd, 1914, onwards the Egoist serialisation, too, was progressing in fortnightly installments, the inference is that each chapter of the typescript was prepared with considerable haste and received only superficial authorial attention before being dispatched to London. No proof of the Egoist text was read by Joyce.

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

was a printinghouse restyling of the text. It strongly suggests that the typescript did not essentially alter the manuscript punctuation.

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

words, phrases and even whole sentences from the text in E.[50] Anderson infers, and I believe quite rightly, that in the majority of cases these are typist's errors. In particular, he persuasively demonstrates (pp. 171 ff.) how the style of Joyce's prose by its repetitive rhetoric lends itself to the omission of phrases and sentences. His explanation of such errors by means of literary analysis can often be strengthened by taking note of the bibliographical evidence: where words and phrases are repeated in the text, their inscription on the manuscript page is frequently such that a typist's eyeskip in copying appears as the most likely mechanical reason for the omission of phrases and sentences. By contrast, the omission of single words which occurs with fair regularity throughout the text is not strictly the same phenomenon, and not as clearly explicable by literary or bibliographical criteria. It should, however, by way of hypothesis, and as a calculated methodical expedient, be acceptable to group all omissions together and provisionally to designate all omission in the extant text of E as an area of typescript error. If an omission is thus taken to be an error by principle of method, the question becomes negligible whether in actual fact it was a typist's or a compositor's blunder. The important consequence within the editorial hypothesis is that all variants in question are regarded as not authorized and that the original manuscript readings would demand to be restored in their place. If, on the other hand, the general rule in individual instances appears inapplicable, very good reasons must be found for a textual omission in E to be accepted as an authorial cut and thus to be editorially respected.

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

substitutions of singular forms for the plural, and vice versa), or at the very least as being 'indifferent' and thus not even cumulatively strong enough to prove their origin as authorial: definite articles alternate with indefinite articles, or articles with possessive pronouns; 'those' stands for 'these', alternative prepositions are introduced, or the relative pronouns 'which' and 'who' replace relative 'that' as it is frequently used by Joyce. Yet other variants, again clearly errors, are accountable for as simple misreadings of Joyce's handwriting: 'jacket' becomes 'pocket', 'cracked' becomes 'crooked', 'harsh' becomes 'hoarse', 'like' becomes 'little', 'Kenny' becomes 'Kenory', 'slap' becomes 'step', 'burned' becomes 'turned', 'diseased' becomes 'disclosed', 'hear' becomes 'bear', 'head' becomes 'lead', 'true' becomes 'fine', the nonce-word 'nicens' becomes the none-word 'niceus', and the sentence "A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky like the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand" is made to read, "A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky line, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand." Once all such variants are discounted, only very few readings remain which deserve closer attention. There should be no doubt, for example, that in the list of Stephen's classmates in Chapter II: the names Greets and Mangan were altered to Kickham and Moonan by the author before they thus entered the printed text in E. There is precedence for the authorial change Mangan>Moonan in the manuscript (Anderson, p. 170). This renders authorial attention here all the more probable, though it just could mean that an observant typist on his own accord had altered the present reading to bring it into conformity with the others. That this was not the case is suggested by the number of instances in which the name Mangan still stands unaltered in E. Moreover, it would not do to seek different explanations for two changes at the same point in the text: and the alteration of Greets to Kickham can be authorial only. Similarly, the retitling of 'Father' Barrett as 'Mr' Barrett at 30.1 in the Christmas dinner scene in Chapter I would seem to be a Joycean correction. Authorial correction and revision further manifests itself where identical changes are spaced out in the text. For example, the 'avenue of limes' which leads up to Clongowes—and it was apparently an avenue of limes—is an 'avenue of chestnuts' throughout the manuscript. In print, the change has been consistently made once each in Chapters I, II and III.

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

expression. Under the criteria by which these eight variants were separated from a host of erroneous or indifferent readings, no variants at all—except the third instance of 'chestnuts' > 'limes' (108.34) early in Chapter III—can be made out with assurance in Chapters III and IV. It is only in Chapter V that the correcting and revising hand of the author is again unmistakably present. The corrections here appear to have been made as reticently, or superficially, as in the first two chapters, but, where they occur, to have been made for similar reasons. Owing to the length of the chapter, their total number is slightly higher than before. Yet six of them, that is two-thirds of a total of nine, are clustered within twelve pages of the printed text. 'His toothpick' > 'his rude toothpick' (229.33), which represents both a stylistic improvement and a concern for greater precision, has already been referred to. Precision and factual accuracy is also the aim of 'Drumcondra' > 'Lower Drumcondra' (188.32), 'unesthetic emotions' > 'not aesthetic emotions' (206.10) and 'northward' > 'southward' (238.23), while improvement of style and expression predominantly motivate the changes 'benevolent mirth' > 'benevolent malice' (210.27), 'ringless' > 'toneless' (227.23),[53] 'old swans' > 'a game of swans' (228.20), and 'brief hiss' > 'soft hiss' (232.31). To this latter variant, the ninth and last in the list: 'brief hiss' > 'swift hiss' (226.27) is related, which however would seem to require emendation. At 232.27: ". . . and a soft hiss fell again from a window above", 'soft' is the original manuscript reading, while at lines 226.27 and 232.31 the manuscript still has 'brief hiss'. In revision, 232.31 follows 232.27 to read 'soft hiss'. But surely it is the sentence at 226.27, which in the manuscript reads "A sudden brief hiss fell from the windows above him . . ." that both occurrences on p. 232 are meant to recall. The revision was presumably retroactive, the author going back to alter 'brief hiss' on p. 226 after having unified the readings on p. 232 to 'soft hiss'. I take it that 'swift hiss' at 226.27 is an error of the E compositor, who misread 'soft' as it was written in by hand in the typescript, and would therefore emend to 'soft hiss' on the strength of the parallel revision at 232.31.

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,

then, seems in view of a projected editorial hypothesis to be practically identical in nature with that of the omissions, and by our comprehensive analysis it is thereby suggested that all substantive variants in E, with the exception of a small number of narrowly definable and identifiable readings, are unauthorized. This is a result attractive in its consistency and, though essentially hypothetical, it gains all possible probability from the three-pronged approach to the evidence as divided into three distinct groups of variants. It should be recalled at this stage, however, that the entire large group of the omissions was approached above with the initial expectation of a total lack of authorial interference and has so far been only provisionally designated as an area of exclusively unauthorized variation. Before final conclusions are asserted the omissions should therefore be briefly surveyed once more with regard to the fact that a certain degree of authorial attention to the text has meanwhile been ascertained. The authorial correction of the text was, it is true, evidently reticent and probably superficial, and to have established it as a fact cannot therefore in principle change our conception of the group of the omissions taken as a whole. The characteristics are far too strong which indicate that they were largely typist's errors which went by unnoticed in the author's reading of the typescript. In the three chapters in particular which contain more than one authorial variant each, there is not a single omission which by its nature suggests that it, too, might be authorial in origin. It is only in the latter half of Chapter III that doubts arise whether all omissions observed should be blamed on the typist (or compositor). At the rhetorical climax of the last of the hell sermons there is a passage which in the printed text has three separate omissions in brief succession: According to the rules established by Anderson for the treatment of omitted phrases,[54] which have in principle been accepted above, there is no alternative to regarding these omissions as three errors of the typist. But thus to regard them means to accept that he nodded three times separately in rapid succession, and yet in a curiously systematic way. On literary grounds, on the other hand—and therefore by reasoning which lies outside the area of textual analysis based on the transmitting documents—it is tempting to see the author at work here, pruning an excess of repetitive rhetoric for the sake of stylistic improvement, and a heightened rather than a lessened impact of the words. Under this aspect, the three separate errors of the typist would appear transformed into a single tripartite authorial cut. Were this to prove the only example in the text where omission became suspect of being authorial in origin, an editorial decision to respect it as such would be very hard indeed to defend, however much one's instinctive literary feeling were averse to restoring the full manuscript wording. But very tentatively something like a case can be made out for a repeated incidence of authorial cuts in the second half of Chapter III, whereby these would become identifiable and separable as a group from the other omissions, and thus editorially acceptable as readings in the variant form of the printed text. Three such omissions occur a few pages after the passage quoted which could also conceivably be due to a desire to reduce a repetitiveness of expression (as indicated):

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

as it does Stephen's intensely painful self-torture, gave particular pains in the writing and was textually fluid for longer than any other section of the novel. However, in the absence of the Chapter III typescript any argument of textual or of literary criticism in relation to the variant passages must remain highly speculative.

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]