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Notes
This essay is a revised form of a paper given to an editing session at the 1989 MLA Conference in Washington, D. C. Thanks for helpful commentary are due to Fredson Bowers, Hans Walter Gabler, Peter Shillingsburg and David Vander Meulen. The essay has also benefited from the 'Afterword' to Gabler's Garland edition of Joyce's Ulysses (3 vols., New York, 1984), and his 'The Text as Process and the Problem of Intentionality', Text, 3 (1987), 107-116.
'The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention', Studies in Bibliography, 29 (1976), 167; cf. also his 'Recent Editorial Discussion and the Central Questions of Editing', Studies in Bibliography, 34 (1981), 23-65. As a result of the impact of post-structuralist ideas and Continental styles of textual criticism upon Anglo-American editing, this agreement is less general than it formerly was. For a survey, see D. C. Greetham, 'Textual and Literary Theory: Redrawing the Matrix', Studies in Bibliography, 42 (1989), 1-24. For an account of editorial orientations which marginalise authorial intention, see Peter Shillingsburg: Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, English Department Occasional Paper 3, Faculty of Military Studies, Duntroon, A.C.T., 1984 (2nd ed. Athens, Ga.: U. of Georgia P., 1986); and 'An Inquiry into the Social Status of Texts and Modes of Textual Criticism', Studies in Bibliography, 42 (1989), 55-78. However, if Chris Tiffin's description of the ideal of 'recuperating final authorial intention' as a 'most venerable and tenacious' concept means that critical editions will continue to be prepared according to this goal for some time yet, then the present illustration of the dynamics of authorial intention in revision may be of some evolutionary value: Tiffin, 'Final Intention, Revision and the Genetic Text: Editing Rosa Praed's My Australian Girlhood' in Editing in Australia, ed. Paul Eggert, English Department Occasional Paper 17 (University College ADFA, Canberra, A.C.T. / New South Wales U. P., Kensington, N.S.W., 1990), p. 132. My own feeling is that the critically established reading text will continue to have a place but that its pre-eminence can no longer be assumed: see my 'Textual Product or Textual Process: Procedures and Assumptions of Critical Editing' in Editing in Australia, pp. 19-40.
Some complexities of the textual situation not relevant to the present discussion are ignored here; for these and for otherwise uncited factual observations made in this essay see the Cambridge U. P. edition of the novel (1990).
Items E55f and E55e in Warren Roberts, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 2nd ed. (1982). The manuscript is made up of items E55a and E55b; Roberts gives locations.
Pp. 528-543 are the typing of the new last chapter of manuscript and received only spelling corrections.
No proofs survive, but in view of Lawrence's known correcting of the novel's proofs for Martin Secker it was also decided to take some readings from the first English edition; and because Lawrence corrected a duplicate set of Secker proofs for Seltzer (so that the latter could check his own independently set proofs against them), a few readings have also been taken from the first American edition.
Whether Lawrence consciously reasoned thus cannot be known, but he was aware that he was preparing copy for two separate typesettings and at this stage he did not know that Seltzer's proofs would be checked in-house against a duplicate, authorially corrected set of Secker's (see previous note).
'The Editing of Manilius', in Housman's Collected Poems and Prose, ed. Christopher Ricks (1988), p. 377.
This exposes a fundamental flaw in the Romantic idea which Aldous Huxley circulated about Lawrence as an author who never revised but instead rewrote his works entirely —as of course he famously did with Lady Chatterley's Lover. (See Huxley's Introduction to his edition of The Letters of D. H. Lawrence [1932], p. xvii).
The cancelled paginations were occasioned by Lawrence's errors in paginating. The evidence at this point, together with the regularity of the pattern of cancelled paginations in TSIa, indicate that TSIa and TSIb had already been assembled into discrete bundles (see next paragraph) before being paginated and that therefore pagination-stage succeeded revision-stage. (The paginations are, moreover, in pencil whereas the revisions are in ink.) Lawrence paginated TSIa first: it has the bulk of the cancelled page-numberings. By the time he got to p. 468 of TSIb he had got the numbering right, and so it has only the one page number (see illustration). Thus the cancelled paginations do not assist in determining the sequence of revisions.
With the exception of 3 pages (pp. 315, 425, 524) plus 3 others, the result of carbon reversal. The typescripts of Women in Love (TSIa and TSIb: items E441d and E441e in Roberts, A Bibliography) follow a similar pattern (information from David Farmer). So does the surviving partial typescript, most of whose twin is lost, of Aaron's Rod: see L. D. Clark's Cambridge edition (1987), pp. xxxiv-xxxv.
The psychology of a modern-day equivalent readily explains this inattentiveness: a teacher collating photocopies of a multipage handout he has prepared for his students is apt to feel that because he has already put the 'real' effort into writing the document, and because the collation of discrete copies is in comparison a merely mechanical matter, he can afford to let his attention wander. The results are usually unfortunate.
P. 2 of TSIa and TSIb of Women in Love furnish an earlier example of this: see photo-reproduction in Charles L. Ross, The Composition of 'The Rainbow' and 'Women in Love': A History (1979), pp. 157-158.
Lindeth Vasey uses this method, but with additional evidence, in her Cambridge edition of Lawrence's Mr Noon (1984).
The problem may also have parallels with textual situations dating from before the invention of the typewriter. Washington Irving's Conquest of Granada (1829) is one (ed. Miriam Shillingsburg, 1988). Irving wrote the autograph manuscript in Spain and gave it to Spanish scribes to copy. Because their uncertainties with the foreign language varied from slight to entire, the copying tended to be slavish rather than regularising in habit. Where the scribe could not recognise a word, a blank was left for Irving to fill in later: with the exception of one chapter his markings appear on almost every page. However, rather than just fill in the blanks by reference to the autograph, he sometimes thought of wordings he preferred and proceeded to alter the autograph to match. Sometimes he thought of a further improvement in this transcription and so had to return to the scribal copy to enter it. Occasionally the revisional track did not run to completion, leaving variant revised readings. Irving sent the autograph to his American publisher via his nephew, Pierre Irving who, believing the manuscript was inadequately pointed, took upon himself the job of re-punctuating it in such a way that the original punctuation was frequently obliterated or at least made dubious so often as to prevent its use as base text. Thus the editor adopted the scribal copy as base text on the grounds that it more reliably transmitted the authorial punctuation than did the autograph manuscript. She emends the base text from the autograph wherever it has a later substantive reading than the scribal copy.
Roberts, A Bibliography, items E117b, E117c and E117d. The investigation of these typescripts was too brief to allow a conclusion to be reached as to the applicability of the present method to the editing of Etruscan Places.
A revision entered on only one copy presents other difficulties: the author may have forgotten to transcribe, decided not to, or only thought of the new wording while transcribing other revisions and then neglected to enter it back into the correction copy. These considerations—which necessarily lack textual evidence—are imponderable. But what such revisions certainly show is that the author did intend to, and did, make the change at some point in the revisional process. The fact that the autograph change appears in one document and not in the other does not give the document in which it appears any superior authority except at that point—where it witnesses a step in the revisional process absent in the other copy.
From typescript revision stage(s) onwards textual transmission characteristically takes divergent paths towards separate publication (although crossover at proof stage can occur: see note 6). These divergent routes might suggest that the techniques of editing medieval or ancient literature would be applicable. But the problem under discussion is not the winnowing out of scribal corruption, for the author himself is responsible for most of the variance. When transcribing revisions he is of course acting in a scribal mode, but being the author he is liable, in any act of transcription, to change suddenly from scribal to revisional mode.
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