University of Virginia Library

The Typescript

The hypothesis developed in the preceding pages for the total of the substantive D-E variance, an hypothesis which in turn must serve as the basis for a comprehensive theory of the textual transmission capable of governing editorial decision in the establishing of a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has, it is true, a narrow foundation. It depends on an evaluation of those variant readings in E which are substitutes for good manuscript readings; and only if, by this evaluation, it is ultimately correct to accept no more than 18 such variants as authoritative, is it valid editorially to reject the other Egoist readings which belong to this group and, furthermore, to conclude by analogy that a great majority, if not all, of the Egoist variants resulting from the omission of manuscript readings, too, are unauthoritative. It is most fortunate, therefore, that—contrary to previous assumptions—there is no need to trust exclusively in the soundness of a logical construct. Rather, it has in fact been possible to trace large fragments of Chapters I and II of the Trieste typescript against which our hypothetical assumptions can be tested.

The typewritten fragments of the text of A Portrait come from the possession of Dora Marsden, founder of The Egoist, and still its editor when the first ten installments of Joyce's novel were published. They contain the text for most of these ten installments. Of 68 numbered typewritten pages of Chapter I, only pages 1-15, that is the entire first installment plus three sentences of the second, and the single pages 53 and 59 are missing. Of Chapter II, for which the page numbering starts afresh, pages 1-9 and 17-27, plus six lines of p. 28, are extant, which correspond to the first, the third and part of the fourth Egoist installments of that chapter. The last fragment breaks off in the middle of the last Egoist installment of the novel published under Dora Marsden's editorship. There are 71 pages and six lines of typescript in all.

Upon collation against both D and E, a great number of readings, variant and invariant, in the text of these typewritten pages immediately suggest that they are indeed part of the Trieste typescript. Yet wherever there is no significant variation between the text in the typescript and in E, the process of transmission could of course be thought of as reversed. Order and direction of transmission are determined by those readings or typographical characteristics only which are invariant between D and the pages of typescript but variant between these and E. It is thus above all the reproduction in full of Joyce's manuscript system of dashes in dialogue in the typewritten pages, as against the absence of intermediate and final dashes in all dialogue in Chapters I and II in E,[56] which places the text of these pages firmly between that in D and in E and identifies the fragments as part of the Trieste typescript (T). Consequently, such instances of variation between D and T as the apparent, or indeed obvious, misreadings of Joyce's handwriting also attain value as evidence to secure this identification. They demonstrate, furthermore, that T was copied directly from D. That the extant fragments of typescript in their turn were used as printer's copy for E is not merely rendered likely by the circumstances of their preservation, but is also demonstrable from errors of a typographical nature in the typescript,[57] and by a large number of marks (crosses, queries, and the like) which would seem to have been added in the printing-house.[58]

When so much has been established, both the D-T and the T-E variance which occurs within the stretches of text preserved can be more closely analysed. In accidentals, D-T and T-E variation is clearly distinguishable. In both chapters, additional commas are very rarely indeed introduced in T. The Chapter I pages add four commas, the Chapter II pages add three. The typical typescript error in punctuation is rather one of omission of commas. 13 manuscript commas are missing in Chapter I, of which some have been restored in print and some not, and 9 commas are missing in Chapter II, only one of which has been restored in E. The adding of commas to the printed text, although comparatively restrained in Chapters I and II, is thus clearly a compositorial commission. The increase in capitalizations, on the other hand, is pretty evenly distributed between T and E, while the printers again are responsible for the greater part, though not all, of the additional hyphenation of compounds in E. By contrast, it is the rare substantive variant that originates in E. What earlier collation established as D-E variance in substantives is in fact seen to be variation between D and T. This is as it should be according to the basic assumptions of our hypothesis for the transmission from D to E of the entire novel, and it is gratifying to find it confirmed for the sections of T preserved. A grouping of the D-E substantive variants, undertaken hypothetically before for the sake of a coherent textual theory, can now be based on firmer evidence. Moreover, to determine the exact source and point of origin of a variant becomes a practical necessity for defining the nature and degree of authority of the recovered intermediary textual witness.

The omission from the typed text of words, phrases and sentences presents once again the crucial textual problem. D does not indicate any omissions. On the evidence of the typescript, the likelihood does not increase that they represent authorial, and thus authoritative, cuts at a lost stage of transmission between D and T. As T was demonstrably typed from D, such a lost stage could in any case not be thought of as yet another full transcript of the text intervening between D and T. At the most, the possibility of authorial direction in the form of oral or written instructions to the typist might be considered if the need were felt to make the omissions out as authorial cuts. But not a single variant outside the group of the omissions would help to strengthen any speculatively posited authorial attention to the text between D and T. Even the simple corrections evident in T of incomplete or

obviously erroneous manuscript readings could have been made by a typist on his own initiative; it need not be assumed that the author was consulted for them. The correction of one incomplete manuscript reading, indeed, which was not caught by the typist is entered in T in the author's hand ('wondering' [66.23]), thus allowing the inference that the others of its kind in fact were done by the typist and consequently, on the evidence of this group of variants, no authorial correction intervened between D and T.[59] All further circumstantial evidence considered above, moreover, which suggested that the variants due to omission of manuscript readings were errors in typing is in no way invalidated by any new evidence from the typescript. The onus for the considerable degree of deterioration from manuscript to print of the text of A Portrait is still largely on a typist. He had to take all blame in absentia before. Now the extent of his inattention to the text can be more firmly assessed. With respect to omissions, the typewritten pages reveal that errors of omission were corrected, the corrections always being typed in, in only a few instances when they were caught in the course of the typing. A systematic reading by the typist of the finished typescript against copy seems not to have taken place. Beyond that, there is only one instance in the entire 71 pages and six lines of typescript preserved where the author himself caught a typist's omission and corrected it. It is this instance alone which must take all burden of proof,[60] in so far as proof can be supplied by the typescript, that the omission of manuscript matter in print was due to typescript error and does not represent intentional authorial cuts. The manuscript sentence: "Perhaps that was why they were in the square because it was a place where some fellows wrote things for cod" (43.24) is rendered in the typescript as: "Perhaps that was why they were because it was a place. . . .". The author adds 'there' above the typewritten line, indicating the place of insertion by a caret between 'were' and 'because'. Clearly, 'in the square' are words erroneously omitted by the typist. The error was caught by the author (as so many of its kind were not) and corrected without collation against the manuscript.[61]

The typescript thus bears marks which unmistakably show that it was read by James Joyce himself, though they indicate at the same time that his reading, too, did not take the form of a thorough collation against the manuscript. This goes some way towards explaining why, as errors, the many omissions of manuscript readings should have been so consistently overlooked. Moreover, few and far between as are the marks which signalize Joyce's presence, they are also proof that his reading (as hypothetically assumed) was perfunctory only, and probably hasty. In the extant fragments of typescript there are only three instances in all of substantive authorial correction. In addition to the insertion of omitted 'wondering', and of 'there' for omitted 'in the square' the third authorial correction is 'Father' > 'Mr' (30.1). That part of our hypothesis which posited a scarcity of authorial corrections among the Egoist readings which replace good manuscript readings would thus also seem to be confirmed by the typescript. As it has already been shown that the text appears to have been given no authorial attention between D and T, it follows that all variants of this kind, too, were introduced by a typist and are non-authoritative, and that authority belongs to those variant readings only which are seen to have been entered in the author's hand in T. On the narrow basis provided by the extant fragments of typescript, this is an argument mainly by negatives. None of the passages of text in Chapter II where authorial correction was assumed are preserved in T, so that it cannot be positively shown that those variants alone are authorial in origin which were hypothetically singled out as such, although it is apparent from as much text as is extant that no other variants replacing

good manuscript readings are authorial of which this was not expected. The same is true for the much longer fragment of Chapter I. Of the three variants in this chapter hypothetically assumed to have been authorial, the assumption has been confirmed without reservations for one ('Father' > 'Mr'), and with some modification, not touching the fact of its authorial origin, for a second ('in the square' > 'there'). The third member of the group, however, is still invariant in T: the manuscript 'avenue of chestnuts' leading up to Clongowes is still an 'avenue of chestnuts'. The reading must have been altered between T and E.

If it is to be maintained that 'limes' for 'chestnuts' is an authorized variant, an influx of authority in some form must be assumed at a stage of transmission after the typescript was authorially corrected to the extent observable in its extant fragments as here discussed, and before the printed Egoist text as typeset and proofread was published. The assumption as such is strengthened by the observation that 'limes' for 'chestnuts' in Chapter I is not an isolated instance of significant T-E variation. (There is no corresponding variation in the Chapter II fragments.) For the extant text of Chapter I, there is a total of nine substantive T-E variants. In two instances, T copies the manuscript readings correctly and there are marks of the printer's pen or pencil set against them in T which suggest that the subsequent E variants originated in the printinghouse and are therefore unauthorized. In the remaining seven instances, on the other hand, T also varies from D and it is the original manuscript reading which has in each case been restored in E.[62] In three of these seven cases the T variant is an error to which the manuscript reading is the obvious alternative; a compositor or printinghouse proofreader could easily have made the correction. Yet in the remaining four cases the correction of the T error can have been made only from a knowledge of the manuscript reading as restored. There are thus five instances of substantive T-E variation—interestingly enough confined to the second and third Egoist installments—which make it an inevitable conclusion that the text of Chapter I, or part of it, was referred to authority in the course of transmission between extant T (as authorially corrected) and E. In other words, the Egoist text of Chapter I was to some extent authoritatively proofread before publication. One possible explanation of this fact would be that proofsheets of the chapter, or of the two installments

concerned, were sent to Joyce in Trieste. No further indication, it is true, derives from a collation of corrected T and E that this was the case, nor is any documentary evidence available from letters or the like to show that Joyce ever proofread any part of the Egoist text. Yet if the typescript used as Egoist printer's copy was the only copy of T which ever existed, the variants observed would allow no other conclusion.[63] If however, T was typed, say, with a carbon copy, and thus existed in duplicate, one might assume that the copy of T which did not serve as printer's copy contained the additional corrections, entered by hand by the author and/or typist, and was used for proofreading by some agent other than the author. No immediate proof is available which of these explanations, if any, is correct. Nevertheless, authoritative proofreading assuredly took place between corrected T and E. It did not broadly affect the text, and the few variants involved assert their authority mainly on their own strength.

The hypothetical concept of the transmission of the entire text of A Portrait from D to E, such as it was derived from a comprehensive collation and analysis of these two textual witnesses, is thus in no way invalidated by further investigation of the transmission processes as controllable in those sections of the intermediary textual witness, the typescript, which happen to have been preserved. For most of Chapter I and for substantial fragments of Chapter II, that is for those stretches of text which correspond to the extant pages of typescript, the postulates of our hypothesis have been fully confirmed, and a clear differentiation of the several stages of transmission of the text from manuscript to print is amply indicated. The question which remains to be answered is what further inferences may be drawn for the full text of the novel by extrapolation from the positive facts established about the transmission of the first two chapters. The most important fact not yet considered of the extant fragments of T is that each of the first two chapters was typed by a different typist. This is clear from a difference in spelling habits: in the Chapter II fragments of the typescript, the name of the novel's hero is consistently spelled 'Stephan'; it was probably the author himself who painstakingly changed the spelling

back to 'Stephen' in almost every instance. Moreover, Joyce's system of dashes in dialogue is regularly complemented by additional punctuation at the end, and sometimes rather illogically also in the middle, of direct speech in Chapter I, whereas in Chapter II the manuscript punctuation of dialogue is copied faithfully without additional marks of punctuation. Statistics derived from the incidence of substantive variance further corroborate a differentiation of typists. There is an average of 2.3 substantive variants per printed column in the 27.5 columns of Egoist text for Chapter I, as against an average of 3.9 per column for Chapter II. Leaving out of account the 3+5 variants which in Chapters I and II are with some certainty authorial corrections and revisions, the figures are 2.2/3.7. These figures comprise substantive variants of typescript and printinghouse origin. But since it can be positively established that the printinghouse compositors were responsible for only a minority of the substantive D-E variants—in the sections of the text preserved in typescript, the compositors in Chapter I introduced 9 out of 53, or roughly the sixth part of the substantive variants, and in Chapter II 3 out of 29, or approximately only one-tenth—the averages per column of printed text give a fair indication of the relative trustworthiness of the two typists. The Chapter II typist was significantly less faithful to copy in substantives (though more so in accidentals); his spelling 'Stephan' may even suggest that his native tongue was not English.

When statistical calculations are extended over the remaining chapters of the novel, it is remarkable that the higher incidence of variation and error per column of printed text is confined to Chapter II. The corresponding figures for Chapters III-V (with and without authorial variants, and giving the typist the benefit of the doubt by assuming that the omissions in the latter part of Chapter III are authorial) are 2.4:2.1/2.35:2.35/2.1:1.9. They are thus very close to the incidence of variation in Chapter I (2.3:2.2). Noting that when the printed text introduces Joyce's dashes in dialogue from halfway through Chapter III onwards, it does so not in the strictly faithful manner of the typescript of Chapter II, but rather according to the pattern of that of Chapter I, combining the dashes with additional punctuation, one is tentatively led to conclude that the identical typist was employed on Chapters I and III-V, while a second person typed Chapter II only. The general uniformity of the kind of variants introduced and errors committed would appear to support the conclusion. The uniformity, it is true, extends over all five chapters. The statistics alone would, in the absence of any part of the typescript, not be very reliable as an aid to differentiating typists, since their figures indicate a varying amount

only, and not a difference in nature of variants and errors. But once a second typist for Chapter II has been identified by several aspects of his extant handiwork, it is of no great consequence that he happened to be prone to the same kind of failings towards the manuscript as was the typist for Chapter I. What is important is inferentially to conclude that he was responsible for Chapter II only, and thereupon to recognise that both the statistical figures and the uniform nature of the variants, that is quantitative and qualitative arguments together, go to indicate that Chapters I and III-V in the typescript were the work of one other person, and one only. If, then, this conclusion is correct, it should greatly aid an editor in his evaluation of the total body of the D-E variation in substantives and, in particular, increase the assurance with which he posits that only a small minority of the substantive variants in E are the result of authorial correction and revision of the typescript.

Finally, the facts and inferences can be played with to speculate about the relative timing involved in the completion of the several sections of the manuscript and the typescript. By two typists, Chapters I and II could have been typed simultaneously. At least, it is not impossible to conceive that they were begun at about the same time, or else that their typing overlapped for some days, or a week or two, if it was Joyce's intention to get as large a section of the novel as possible to London as quickly as possible after Ezra Pound's enquiry of December 15, 1913, about printable material. But Chapter II was certainly not completed in typescript when Chapter I was, or they would have been dispatched together. Actually, the same typewriter may have been used for both: there are no typed underlinings in either chapter, and parentheses have regularly been substituted by dashes. Thus it is equally possible that they were typed in short succession after each other. It is not known when Chapter II arrived in London. But Chapter III, although belonging to that part of the novel which is assumed to have existed in final form since 1908, did not get there until July 21 (Ellmann, p. 365). Perhaps a second typist was employed on Chapter II because the first one was unavailable between January and July—unless the completion of the typescript for Chapter III was delayed by an interruption in the writing out of the faircopy manuscript between Chapters II and III, or in the course of Chapter III. Only a physical examination of the manuscript itself might throw light on the circumstances under which Chapter III was copied out and typed.

On August 1 the war broke out, cutting off almost completely all postal connections between England and Austria. On September 1 Chapter III ran out in The Egoist, and on November 11 Joyce managed to dispatch the typescript of Chapters IV and V via Switzerland.

Provided that the typescript was completed in the regular order of the chapters, I would tend to infer that the typing of Chapters III to V proceeded at a fairly even pace between July and October, and consequently that there was no last-minute rush in the writing of the novel itself. The hiatus in publication between September 1 and December 1 has been taken to indicate that The Egoist caught up with James Joyce too soon (Ellmann, p. 365; Anderson, pp. 182 ff.). But surely it was primarily due to the outbreak of the war. It was probably an editorial unwillingness to have to break off in the middle of a chapter in case The Egoist would not be able to continue publication at all which made the installments of Chapter III on August 1, August 15 and September 1 as long as they are. At the rate of publication of the previous chapters, Chapter III would probably have lasted until October. Chapter IV is short, and if it was begun to be typed soon after completion of Chapter III in late July, it ought to have been ready sometime in August and could, but for the war, have been dispatched to London to succeed Chapter III without gap in The Egoist. After Chapter IV, there was still Chapter V to be typed, which is by far the longest chapter, constituting almost one-third of the entire novel. It is the state of its text in E which indicates that it was probably completed in typescript under no special time pressure. It has the lowest incidence of substantive variation and error and, moreover, it was given greater authorial attention in the typescript than any of the previous chapters. By contrast, Chapter IV is perhaps the only chapter which appears not to have been authorially corrected at all. Had it, by November, been sitting about in typescript for so long that Joyce in the end forgot to read it? Or was Chapter IV perchance the last of the chapters to be written? It is perhaps significant that it is the only chapter of which several of the faircopy manuscript pages still show signs of thorough stylistic revision. It is also the chapter which Joyce in July 1915 claims to remember so well as to be able to restore the censored sentences without the aid of his manuscript. A thorough analysis of the manuscript might throw light on the question, and also quite generally serve as a test to whether the preceding speculative inferences about the successive completion of manuscript and typescript are tenable.