University of Virginia Library

II

An editor who has given some attention to such preliminary questions has at least begun to reach an understanding of "authorial intention." But there are a number of further questions which arise as he attempts to make judgments in the light of this conception of intention. Perhaps the most common editorial situation is that in which the editor must decide whether a given variant reading is a revision by the author or an alteration (conscious or inadvertent) by someone else. In these cases, at least one intermediate stage of documentary evidence is lacking, and the editor is trying to determine from the surviving material those changes which the author made in that now missing document. He must also face the question whether it is ever possible to think of changes not made by the author as nevertheless fulfilling, or contributing to, the author's intention.

The basic situation can be illustrated by Sherwood Anderson's A Story Teller's Story (1924). The only surviving prepublication text of this work is the typescript printer's copy, which bears revisions by three people: Anderson himself, Paul Rosenfeld, and E. T. Booth, the publisher's editor. One has direct evidence, therefore, for assigning the responsibility for each of these alterations; but the first printing of the book (Huebsch, 1924) contains additional changes, not marked on the surviving typescript and presumably entered on the now lost proofs. Deciding which of these changes were made by Anderson is the central task in editing this book.[33] What the editor has to do is to familiarize himself with all the available relevant evidence—bibliographical, historical, biographical. He may then find that some of it is

convincing enough to dictate certain decisions. For example, on (or just before) 28 October 1924 Anderson wrote to Rosenfeld explaining why he had cut out some material about Waldo Frank.[34] Since several paragraphs about Frank are present in the typescript but not present in the first impression, one can conclude that this is the deletion referred to and that it was made by Anderson on the proofs. But for most of the alterations in the first impression there is no such compelling evidence; most of the editor's decisions must finally be critical judgments, resulting from an evaluation of what evidence there is, from an understanding of Anderson's habits of revision, and from a familiarity with and sensitivity to his style and ideas. Even the deleted Waldo Frank passage leads the editor to a related judgment, for that deletion is only a part of a considerably longer deletion made in the first impression. Because the entire passage concerns Anderson's reactions to various writers, one may conclude that he probably eliminated all of it, and not merely the part about Frank which he happened to mention to Rosenfeld. But that conclusion is a judgment, supported by a critical argument, not by verifiable facts.

The same observations can be made about situations involving variants between printed editions. In these cases the missing documents are the author's marked copy of the earlier edition (or its proofs, or whatever served as printer's copy for the edition set later) and the marked proofs of the later edition. If no document survives which antedates the proofs of the earliest setting of the text, then of course one is dealing with texts which have already been subjected to the routine of the printing- or publishing-house. Thus the essential difference between this situation and the one described above is that here the editor is working at a greater remove from the author's fair-copy manuscript or typescript; but his approach to the problem remains the same. For instance, neither the manuscript of The Rise of Silas Lapham nor the proofs set from it survive; and the history of the early printed texts, which vary from one another substantively at a number of points, is such that one text might contain the later readings in one part of the book and another the later readings in a different part. So for any given variant, the editor must first try to determine the order of the readings and then decide whether the later one could be an authorial revision or correction. At one point in Chapter 19 Irene's complexion is described as "snow-white" in the serialized magazine text and as "colourless" in the first book edition

(set from proofs of the magazine text); since the publication schedule for the book made it highly unlikely that the book proofs of the last part (Chapters 19-27) were given a proofreading by anyone outside the printer's or publisher's offices and since there was an opportunity for second magazine proofs of this part to be gone over later, one can reasonably conclude (barring the unlikely possibility that "colourless" is simply a compositorial error or that the book publisher's editor engaged in this kind of revision) that the magazine reading "snow-white" is the later reading here. Deciding that it was in fact Howells's alteration is of course a matter of judgment, but a judgment made within the limits imposed by the factual evidence.[35] In the case of Moby-Dick, those limits are wider, because it is known that the publisher's reader for the English edition made numerous substantive alterations and that Melville also had the opportunity to make revisions for that edition; distinguishing the two categories can result only from critical judgments as to which kinds of changes are likely to have been made by a somewhat pedantic reader concerned with expurgation and which are more characteristic of Melville.[36] Fredson Bowers makes the same point in connection with Fielding's Miscellanies, where some parts of the first edition were set from marked copies (not extant) of printed periodical texts: "This is a critical process almost exclusively, with only occasional bibliographical guidance, in which the editor shoulders his proper responsibility to separate the author's intended alterations from the verbal corruption that inevitably accompanies the transmission of a text."[37] Sometimes a statistical analysis of internal evidence can be of material assistance in making a critical choice among variants: tabulating the pattern of recurrences of unusual spellings and other features in Shakespearean texts can help to determine which characteristics of those texts derive from the compositors' preferences and which from the printer's copy itself;[38] or examining each variant in the syndicated appearances of Stephen Crane's stories and dispatches in the light of the quantitative evidence (how many times each reading turns up) can help to establish the reading of the syndicate's master proof. Such evidence must then be subjected to critical scrutiny: the fact that only one out of six newspaper texts of Crane's "The Pace of Youth" reads "clinched" at a point where all the others read "clenched" does not in itself dictate "clenched" as the authorial reading, for Crane invariably wrote "clinched."[39]

Once the editor has made his judgments as to which variants are attributable to the author and which to someone else, he must consider the exact status of the latter group. Are all variants for which someone other than the author is responsible to be rejected outright, or is it conceivable that the author's intention may sometimes be fulfilled by other persons? It is not only conceivable but unquestionably true that others can and do sometimes correct an author's writing and in the process fulfill his intention. An author may write down one word but be thinking of a different one, or in reading proofs he may fail to notice a printer's error which creates a new word. When these erroneous words are plausible in their contexts, they may never be recognized by anyone as erroneous; but when one of them does not make sense, and when the correct word is obvious, anyone who makes the correction is carrying out the author's intention. Frequently an editor may believe that a particular word cannot have been intended but is not certain just what the intended word should be; only his critical assessment of the whole matter can determine whether it is preferable in that case to let the questionable word stand and call attention to the problem in a note or to substitute a word which catches the apparent intended sense (again, of course, with an explanation), even though that word may not be the exact one which the author had in mind. In the typescript of A Story Teller's Story, then, alterations in the hand of E. T. Booth cannot simply be dismissed; they must be inspected carefully, because Booth may have noticed places where the typescript reading certainly (or almost certainly) cannot have been Anderson's intended reading, and there is always the chance that an editor might otherwise fail to detect some of them.

An examination of Booth's revisions, however, leads to a more difficult question. Since Booth was the editor for the publisher, can one

argue that, because Anderson expected his book to be gone over in the publisher's offices, the changes made by Booth become a part of Anderson's intended wording? Or, to put the question in more general terms: can one argue that changes made (or thought to have been made) by the publisher and passed (or presumably passed) by the author in proof constitute changes intended by the author? This question is very different from asking about an editor's alteration of obvious errors. The correction of a reading which the author cannot have intended amounts to a restoration of what was in his mind but not on paper, or of what was in his now lost manuscript but not in print. It does not involve any change of the author's intention. But revisions, as opposed to corrections of outright errors, were not previously intended by the author; if the author then explicity endorses them, he is changing his intention. He is free to do so, of course, just as he may have shifted his intention several times before his manuscript ever left his hands. What is at issue, however, is whether he can delegate someone else to carry out his intention, or part of it. If he says that he expects changes, or certain kinds of changes, to be made in the publisher's offices, can the results be regarded as representing his intention, without shifting the definition of "intention"? One might argue, for instance, that Anderson—aware of some of the shortcomings, by conventional standards, of his spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure—did not "intend" for his writings to be published exactly as he wrote them but "intended" for them to be made to conform with conventional practice. But one might also argue, on the other side, that Anderson's writing as it came from him reflects his intention more accurately than it does after being standardized, and that any intention he may have held regarding publisher's alterations amounted only to his realistic understanding of what had to be done in order to get published (and thus was not part of his active intention in the text).[40]

The importance, for editorial practice, of settling this question in general terms is evident. When an editor faces a choice for copy-text between a fair-copy manuscript (or printer's copy) and a first impression, he needs to have—in the absence of convincing evidence—a general policy to fall back on, a policy based on the inherent probabilities in such situations. Of course, if the editor has convincing evidence— not merely the author's statements but detailed information about the author's methods of going over proofs—he can make his decision on that basis. But, as is more likely to be the case, if the evidence is not sufficient for making a competent decision, the editor must have further guidance. Greg's rationale, pointing out the usual deterioration of a text (particularly its accidentals) from one manuscript or edition to another, leads the editor back to the fair-copy manuscript or the earliest extant text which follows it. There has been some disagreement with this position, however, based on the view that the author's intention encompasses the activities which take place in the step from manuscript (or typescript) to print and that the intention is not "final" until the text conforms to the standards which will make it publishable. Philip Gaskell concludes that "in most cases the editor will choose as copy-text an early printed edition, not the manuscript"; the accidentals of the manuscript, he says, "the author would himself have been prepared—or might have preferred—to discard."[41] James Thorpe agrees:

In support of his view, Thorpe offers examples of a number of writers over the years who have expressed their indifference to matters of spelling and punctuation or have asked for help in making their spelling and punctuation conform to an acceptable standard.

Such arguments for preferring the first edition to the manuscript seem to me misguided. While it is true that most authors have the intention of getting published, such an intention is of a different order from their intention to have certain words and punctuation, resulting in a certain meaning, in their text. The intention of writing something publishable is what Hancher would call a "programmatic intention"; what the editor is properly concerned with, as we have seen, is the author's "active intention" manifested in the work. There is no reason why in some instances an author's active intention might not conflict with his programmatic intention. That an author may submit to various publishing-house alterations as a routine procedure in the process of publication does not amount to his changing his active intention about what his writing is to consist of. To say that he "expects" or is prepared to have certain changes made by the printer or publisher is not the same as to say that he prefers or wishes to have them made; to take his implicit approval of these changes on the proofs (or the printer's copy) as a sign that he is now more satisfied with his text is to ignore the many external factors (Melville's "Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience") which at this stage might prevent him from restoring readings that he actively desired. It is of little help to survey what writers in the past have said on the subject of publishers' alterations of their spelling and punctuation, even if there were a valid statistical basis for concluding, as Thorpe does, that most are "of the indifferent persuasion" (p. 151). Indifference is far from suggesting intention; and the motivation for the indifference would in each case have to be examined in order to know how to interpret the statements. But if the attitudes of writers toward this question cannot be fairly generalized about, the views and practices of printers and publishers can. Printers' manuals, after all, are normative and instructional statements, offering a far more trustworthy basis for generalization than individual authors' expressions of their own attitudes. Thorpe himself, after quoting from various manuals, recognizes that, for most of the period with which he is concerned, "it has been the printers (particularly the compositors and proofreaders) who have

mainly exercised this control over the text in the process of transmitting it" (p. 152). And Gaskell admits that "printers seldom gave authors much choice in the matter" (p. 339). If printers and publishers can be assumed as a general rule to have made alterations in the accidentals of the texts which passed through their hands, and if the attitudes of authors toward those changes have been complex and uncertain, it would seem that, in the absence of additional evidence, an author's manuscript could be taken as a safer guide than the printed text to his intentions regarding accidentals.[43]

Whether there is sufficient evidence in a given case to justify taking the first edition rather than the manuscript as copy-text is a matter of judgment. What the editor must attempt to assess is whether the author genuinely preferred the changes made by the publisher's reader or whether he merely acquiesced in them. The idea that an author can actively intend in his work a revision made by someone else depends in effect on the extent to which the two can be regarded as voluntary collaborators. Since collaboration implies shared responsibility, the "author's intention" in a collaborative effort results from a merging of the separate intentions of the individual authors; the final result is thus intended by each of the authors. A work need not be signed with more than one name, of course, for it to be a collaboration. Nor is it necessary for the authors involved to perform equal shares of the work; indeed, two people may collaborate only on certain aspects of a work, and their joint intention would apply only to the words or elements involved. The facsimile edition of the revised manuscript-typescript of The Waste Land offers a rare opportunity to observe some of the collaboration which can underlie a great work. In certain passages Pound's revisions (such as "demobbed" in line 139) or deletions (as in "Death by Water") actually constitute collaboration, though there are other places where Eliot rejects Pound's suggestions (as in the lines on Saint Mary Woolnoth, lines 67-68). That the work is to some extent collaborative is implied by Valerie Eliot's comment, in her description of "Editorial Policy," that "It has been difficult to decide who cancelled certain lines, especially when both Eliot and Pound have worked on them together."[44] A study of this facsimile does not suggest that an editor should incorporate into the text of the poem the lines which Pound rejected and Eliot did not restore; one can argue that at those points Eliot's intention merged

with Pound's intention, even though Pound's markings are what survive on paper. The fact that Pound went over the poem as a friend and not as a publisher's editor does not alter the essential point: in either case it is possible for someone other than the "author" to make alterations which are identical with the intention of the "author," when the relationship partakes of the spirit of collaboration.

The question, posed earlier, of whether it makes sense to believe that an author can ask someone else to carry out his intention in some respect may now be answered in the negative. By definition, an author's active intention cannot include projected activity and cannot include activity of which he is not in control. The ultimate example of delegated intention in writing would be for a person to ask someone else to write an entire work for him; if he then announced that it represented his "intention," he could only mean his intention to write a certain kind of work (his programmatic intention), for his active intention would not be involved. The same is true regardless of what portion or aspect of a work is at issue, as long as the element contributed by someone other than the author must be described with such expressions as "It is what the author expected to have done" or "It is what the author would have done if he had found time." However, if an author accepts what someone else has done not in a spirit of acquiescence but of active collaboration, the result does represent his active intention. Since the scholarly editor, in establishing a text, is concerned with an author's active intention in that text, he can accept into the text what he knows (or strongly believes) to be initially the work of someone else only when it can be regarded as having been accepted by the primary author as a true collaboration. This approach does not alter the crucial role which the editor's judgment plays in evaluating evidence, but it may provide a useful framework into which that evidence can be placed. It also suggests the relative infrequency with which publishers' alterations can be taken to supersede an author's known practice in a prepublication stage of his work.