University of Virginia Library

The Book Editions

Our final discussion must be brief of the stages of transmission of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the first printing in The Egoist to the 1924 Jonathan Cape edition. The publishing history has

essentially been dealt with by Chester G. Anderson. He has also considered many of the editorially relevant facts and inferences to be derived from it in his discussion of the Egoist tearsheets which served as copy for H, and the Y corrections of H for B (see pp. 186 ff., 196 ff.). In so far as a modification of his views proved necessary, this has been given in the course of our analysis of EC-W, YTW and HB. Beyond that, it may suffice to summarize somewhat categorically to what extent the text of the novel as published in H and B may be accepted as authoritative. With respect to substantive readings, all those corrections and revisions represent a final authorial intention editorially to be respected which James Joyce himself undertook in full view of the text as transmitted invariant from the manuscript. There are no problems here in so far as the several rounds of authorial attention to the text are documented in EC-A and Y. The one question not previously considered is whether the Y corrections are the only stage at which the author took influence on the text for B. There are at least two substantive variants in B which would seem to warrant a closer investigation. At 215.27, the text in B reads "When they passed through the passage beside Kildare house . . .", as against ". . . beside the royal Irish academy . . ." in H, and at 96.11 'ineffectualness' (H) is altered to 'ineffectiveness' in B. Neither Y nor HB contain directions for these changes. But as late as November 25th, 1917, more than two months after the Southport printers had begun setting up B, Harriet Weaver was writing to Joyce: "All your corrections have been made, including those you asked for in your last letter." A careful scrutiny of all H-B variants, still to be undertaken, must endeavour to ascertain which were the additional changes which Joyce had requested; there can be little doubt that at least the first of the two alterations quoted were among them.

With respect to accidentals, the situation created by the author's corrections prior to H and to B is somewhat more complex, and for an editor methodically quite intriguing. When faced with the close to 600 additional commas in the text of the Egoist serialisation, Joyce went about restoring the light punctuation of his manuscript with considerable determination. This process continued into Y. His paramount concern doubtless was for the rhythms of his text, the essential qualities of which—"to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm"—had been early adumbrated in the very first paragraph of the narrative essay "A Portrait of the Artist" of 1904. Yet for the flexible rhythms of his novel, its semicolons and its colons, placed and distinguished from each other with great subtlety in the manuscript, are as important as its commas. It is surely

an indication of the author's increasing distance in time from a state of complete immersion in the work that, in the course of his corrections, he was much more permissive towards the printers' alterations of the original semicolons and colons. As for the commas, of course, many of those added by printinghouse compositors were left standing in the text despite all authorial efforts to eradicate them. There can be no question for an editor but that he reproduce in a critical text as closely as is at all possible the manuscript pattern of punctuation.

However, Joyce's attention to the accidentals of the text as printed in fact took two directions. As has been noted above, his reduction of next to all capitalization and his preference in print for compounds written together as one word is tantamount to a restyling of the text with respect to these accidentals. In so far as it can be positively ascertained that they were made by the author, the changes are part of the total authoritative correction and revision of E and H. As such, they invalidate, in part, the pattern of the manuscript inscription which cannot be editorially restored whenever positive authorial direction is given to depart from it. Neither, however, should a critical editor (as opposed perhaps to a publisher's editor) for the sake of a new typographical consistency, and in an attempt to finish what the author began, go beyond his alterations. Quite a number of original capitalizations and word divisions in fact survived Joyce's restyling. These cannot but be left untouched in a critical text, which will thus, in the treatment of accidentals, appear thoroughly inconsistent.[64]

Inconsistency of the kind just advocated, however, is really an expression of editorial consistency based on a systematic enquiry into the extent of authority in each substantive textual witness. With regard to Joyce's Portrait, such consistency should be firmly extended to the last of the substantive texts, that of the Jonathan Cape edition of 1924 (J). Because its proofsheets have not been preserved, it presents greater textual problems than H and B. What attention James Joyce

gave to it can only be inferred from external facts and the internal evidence of textual variants. A complete collation of B and J to ascertain all internal evidence has not yet been undertaken. But more is to be known of the external circumstances pertaining to this last phase of authoritative publication of the novel than has hitherto been realised. As mentioned by Anderson, Joyce reported to Harriet Weaver from Saint-Malo on August 16, 1924, that he had been reading revises for Jonathan Cape for ten days and had dispatched the proofs that day.[65] The company ledgers show that the book went into print on August 28.[66] Antedating the August letter is a letter to Harriet Weaver of July 11, 1924, also from Saint-Malo. It states: "Then Mr Cape and his printers gave me trouble. They set the book with perverted commas and I insisted on their removal by the sergeant-at-arms. Then they underlined passages which they thought undesirable. But as you will see from the enclosed: They were and, behold, they are not" (Letters, III, 99 f.). I take this to mean that Joyce had received two sets of proofs from Jonathan Cape before July 11. The context of the letter ("I left Paris in the usual whirl of confusion . . .") suggests that the second set arrived in Paris after Joyce's eye operation of June 11 and before he left for Saint-Malo on July 6 or 7. Probably this was the set which he showed to Sylvia Beach who records her "amazement at the printer's queries in the margins".[67] The author's refusal to cut at the request of the printers had apparently been accepted by July 11. "The enclosed" in the letter to Harriet Weaver would seem to have been some token of consent from Cape to publish the text entire. The question is whether Joyce voiced his refusal by letter only or in a note accompanying the return of the corrected second proofs. Should he indeed not have had the time or energy to read them in the "whirl of confusion" before his departure from Paris, one might be left to wonder whether the proofs with the printers' underlinings were the revises which were finally not read until August. But Joyce was not only habitually prompt in matters regarding the publishing of his books, but, as the letter of July 11 also records, he was able after the eye operation to see to the proofing of the installments of the French translation of Ulysses due to appear in the review Commerce (Ellmann, p. 573). It is therefore likely that the second proofs were returned before he left for Saint-Malo, however superficially they may have been read. If this was so, the revises which he corrected for ten days in August were the third round of proofs read on the Jonathan Cape text.

James Joyce, then, obviously took full advantage of the one and only opportunity he was ever given to see A Portrait through the press. This does of course not mean that the edition into which his efforts went ten years after the completion of the manuscript presents a text to override all previous texts. The inevitable deterioration of the text in ten years of transmission has not been remedied in the edition of 1924. Nor has the text been extensively revised. Even a cursory perusal of J will satisfy an editor that the authorial proofreading was not by any means on the scale of Joyce's reading and revising in proof of the text of Ulysses. The comparison with the later work indeed emphasizes the remarkable reticence against change and revision which Joyce showed towards the text of A Portrait at every stage of correction. By analogy to the earlier rounds of authorial correction of the text, it should be expected that the proofreading of J which did take place affected both accidentals and substantives. That Joyce paid attention to the accidentals is proved, for example, when J, restoring the manuscript punctuation, reads: "What is this your name is?" (50.1) against the typescript error perpetuated through B: "What is this? Your name is?" But it is an exceptional case when it can be proved on internal evidence that the author was responsible for a variant in accidentals. Generally, the lack of documentation prevents editorial acceptance of such variation. The substantive variants in J, on the other hand, are susceptible to evaluation by which it should be possible satisfactorily to identify the authorial corrections and revisions. For example, the manuscript sentence: "The doomsday was at hand." (113.11) was transmitted invariant through H. B, by the authorial direction of Y, changed to 'Doomsday', yet J reverts to the manuscript wording 'The doomsday' in what must be considered as the author's final decision on this reading, overruling the revision of Y. Similarly, the typescript error 'fellows' at 43.19 was transmitted unnoticed through B. J restores the singular 'fellow' of the manuscript. Finally, a subtle revision at 77.35, 'moment' for 'movement', indicates the author's care in proofreading. With 'movement' the manuscript had picked up 'a movement of impatience' of 77.28, which itself is a recollection of 74.28 and is only incidentally woven into the description of the situation of tension in the conversation between Heron, Wallis and Stephen on p. 77. Only in the 1924 re-reading of the text did Joyce himself realise that the proper reference of line 77.35 should be to 'a shaft of momentary anger' of 77.12.

When all authoritative stages of the transmission of the novel have been analysed in detail, a comprehensive textual hypothesis to govern editorial decision in the preparation of a critical text may be formulated in a revised set of directions:

• 1. Base a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on the holograph manuscript (D) of 1913/14.
• 2. In accidentals, accept the manuscript system of punctuation. Follow authorial directions as contained in EC-A and Y to restyle the manuscript capitalizations and word divisions.
• 3. In substantives, accept all authorial correction and revision as documented in the fragments of T, in EC-A and Y, or as ascertained by inference from an evaluation of the total body of substantive variance between each of the authoritative editions. Except for the corrections of incomplete manuscript readings in E (in so far as they are not manifest miscorrections or stylesheet rectifications of grammar and syntax), reject all non-auhoritative variation in substantives.

With our present knowledge of the publishing history and the nature of the textual transmission of the novel, a critical edition, and maybe even a definitive text, of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not impossible to attain.