Document or Process as the Site of
Authority: Establishing Chronology of Revision in Competing
Typescripts of Lawrence's The Boy in the
Bush
by
Paul Eggert
[*]
An unusually thorny problem can arise in the preparation of a reading
text of a critical edition if multiple printers' copies are extant which were
originally prepared by the author for simultaneous publication (typically, in
New York and London) and if the author revised the copies differently.
Developing practices to deal with such a case—the typescript copies
of
The Boy in the Bush—has revealed a confusion which
the
usual formulation of the goal of scholarly editing glides over. 'Scholarly
editors may disagree about many things', G. Thomas Tanselle observed in
1976, 'but they are in general agreement that their goal is to discover
exactly what an author wrote and to determine what form of his work he
wished his public to have'.
[1] The
editorial method described in the present essay is aimed at achieving that
goal by satisfying Tanselle's attendant call for the critical judgment of
textual cruxes on a case-by-case basis; and it accepts as a matter of course
his clear implication that, often, no single document will fully represent the
author's intention for the work. Consideration of
The Boy in the
Bush typescripts has, however, highlighted the need for a further
editorial distinction beyond that of document and work: a
distinction between the
process of composition and revision
on
the one hand and the documentary
sites of the inscription of
the
process on the other. This distinction, if accepted, can justify a provisional
but potentially clarifying separation of the 'authorial function' from the
'production function' even where the evidence of the former and the
requirements of the latter reside in the very same documents and where the
same person—the author—discharged both.
It is first necessary to outline the particular textual problem.[2]
The Boy
in the Bush is a collaborative novel, but all of the extant manuscript
material is in the hand of D. H. Lawrence and none in that of Mollie
Skinner, an Australian bush-nurse and amateur novelist whom he had met
when he visited Western Australia in 1922 and who, at his encouragement,
wrote and sent him for placement a novel about colonial life in the 1880s.
He believed the novel was unpublishable and so, with her permission,
rewrote it in September-November 1923 in California and Mexico, sending
the manuscript on in two batches for professional typing and subsequently
adding a new last chapter in January 1924 after returning to London and
just prior to correcting the (by now) typed copies. Though widely
dispersed, the autograph manuscript and two typescript copies are extant:
the latter became the setting copies (known as TSIa and TSIb,
respectively[3]) used by his American
publisher, Thomas Seltzer and his English publisher, Martin Secker, both
of
whom published the novel in 1924.
Both TSIa and TSIb contain 543 pages, and bear Lawrence's
revisions and corrections in the page range 167-528. The reason that his
revisions do not appear on pages 1-166 is that in London he revised a now
lost, earlier typescript—one copy only—of this section (which
represents the first batch of manuscript). It was then re-typed (ribbon and
carbon) while Lawrence got on with revising duplicate typescript copies of
the rest of the novel (corresponding to the second batch). When he received
the copies of the re-typed section he simply added them in without further
revising them, thus constituting TSIa and TSIb.[4] In pages 167-528 there are
approximately
180 substantive revisions consisting of about 100 single word changes,
about 65 revisions of short phrases, with the remainder being quite
substantial changes. As he revised TSIa and TSIb Lawrence had had to
bring the novel into line with the new last chapter he had just added which
had given the
novel a significant shift in emphasis.
In the interests of producing a reading text of The Boy in the
Bush as close as possible to the one Lawrence 'would have wished
to see published',[5] the autograph
manuscript was chosen as base text and a procedure envisaged of emending
it from one of the typescripts wherever Lawrence himself had revised
them—provided of course they copied the manuscript accurately.[6] This solution, relying on textual
evidence
unambiguously in the hand of the author, might have swept away the textual
problems in one move were it not for a complicating factor which soon
became evident. Although TSIa
and TSIb (destined to serve as printers' copies) had been typed
professionally, no doubt originally as ribbon and carbon of one another,
they had later been mixed up, becoming composites of ribbon and
carbon—the form in which they are found today. Evidence gradually
mounted indicating that Lawrence was responsible for the shuffling when
revising the typescripts—
differently.
Page 468 of both typescripts provides a striking example of the
process (see illustrations; the handwriting is Lawrence's). On the sixth line
of the first heavily revised paragraph in the TSIa page is the handwritten
sentence starting: 'This had made her rebel . . .'. At first TSIa read 'so
terribly against him' before 'him' was replaced by 'the thought of him'.
Two sentences down a nearly illegible 'But' was replaced by 'Now'. At the
same places in TSIb may be seen 'so dangerously against the thought of
him' and 'Now': TSIb has no erasures of handwriting here. Lawrence may
have revised TSIa, made the additional alterations, and then
transcribed the whose passage to TSIb, changing 'terribly' to 'dangerously',
and making a range of other changes further down the page as he went.
Or, he could have transcribed first, developing the passage
in
TSIb as he transcribed, and then, realising that the typescripts now read
differently, made a rough attempt to match them up.
Belated or half-successful matching-up occurs elsewhere in the typescripts,
suggesting that Lawrence felt the tug of responsibility but lacked the iron
will of consistency necessary to achieve the result. As an author in revision
Lawrence could not help but take the opportunity presented by transcription
to further shape his description of Monica's awed resentment of the novel's
hero; but as a scribe Lawrence's qualities were only mediocre. His mind
was not on that job; and anyway, he may have reasoned, if
the
English and American editions were not exactly the same, what would it
matter?[7]
The evidence of page 468 alone suggests a convenient hypothesis: that
Lawrence always worked on TSIa first and on TSIb second. If so, TSIb
would have been the transcription copy throughout and would contain the
last reading in most cases. But an editor, tempted to embrace such a simple
solution, is apt to be reminded of the situation of the donkey A. E.
Housman describes, hesitating between two equally attractive bundles of
hay;[8] would the editor have shown
one typescript to be a superior source of emendation simply by walking
away from the other one?
If that ignominious fate were to be avoided, closer inspection would
be necessary. A textual collation showed that sometimes TSIa appeared to
have the last reading and sometimes TSIb. An explanation of what must
have happened readily suggested itself. In transcribing changes from TSIa
to TSIb (or vice versa), Lawrence had frequently altered them. Evidently
pleased in some cases with the new reading, he then transferred it back to
the first typescript (but not always); with some longer revised passages he
transferred back only some parts of the new reading. And often he would
enter a revised reading in one copy and fail to transcribe it to the other (or,
possibly, decide not to). The inevitable result was that his publishers would
not receive identical setting copy and that TSIa and TSIb would contain
thirty-seven instances where emendations appear on only one typescript, and
twenty-nine instances where both typescripts are revised, but revised
differently.
[9] The retrieval of a
reading text from this unexpected textual tangle had begun to look decidedly
problematic: would it be possible in relation to the last two-thirds of the
typescripts where the variant revisions occur to discover the last-entered
reading in each case?
To attempt to answer that question it would be necessary to
reconstruct how Lawrence had physically treated the typescript copies as he
revised. The typists had not paginated the last two-thirds of the
typescript[10] and Lawrence's
hand-written pagination of this section involved several attempts to get
right. Had these paginations been carried out as Lawrence revised or after
he had finished revising? Towards the end of the novel he discarded some
pages when replacing them with some pages he typed (amateurishly)
himself. Because the replacements contain exactly the same pattern of
successive cancelled paginations as previous and succeeding pages the
paginations must have succeeded the revision.[11] The alternation of ribbon and
carbon copy
in the two typescripts precisely at chapter-ends[12] further suggests that Lawrence had
been
trying to keep the typed sheets together in chapters as he
revised, and in fact one of the cancelled paginations resulted from his
having left chapter xi temporarily out of the count. These considerations
made it possible to conclude that Lawrence was probably presented with the
typescript copies either in one bundle (ribbon copy of a chapter followed
by its carbon copy, then the ribbon copy of the next chapter followed by its
carbon, and so on)
or in complete, separate bundles.
However, this conclusion did not reveal the order in which Lawrence
revised, for however he pulled the chapters off the pile or piles he went on
to re-collate them pretty much at random. (And he must have known he had
done this when he subsequently paginated; evidently it did not worry him.)
He was not devoting much effort into getting the collation nice and
tidy.[13] It would have served little
purpose for an editor to have notionally re-sorted TSIa and TSIb into ribbon
and carbon copy because textual evidence showed that while Lawrence
frequently revised ribbon copy first and transcribed his revisions and
corrections to the carbon copy, he did not always do so. (Even if he had
meant to do so he could accidentally have pulled pages off the wrong
pile—if there was more than one pile—or he could have
shuffled the
two copies of the particular chapter in his hands as he laid them
down.)
Although it is likely that Lawrence revised a chapter at a time, he
appears to have stopped to transcribe from one typescript to the other after
each page. The evidence lies in his correction of a great number of
misstruck and faint characters—up to ten per page. Where Lawrence
corrects such mistyping on any page the proportion he transcribes to the
other copy is high. If he had waited till he got to the end of a chapter, it is
unlikely that he would have picked up so many by leafing back though.
Moreover, within a chapter there is evidence Lawrence would
occasionally swap from revising say, ribbon copy (and transcribing to
carbon) to revising carbon copy (and transcribing to ribbon); he would
even, on rare occasions, move from one copy to the other while working
on a particular page. (After making an alteration he could have immediately
transcribed, then continued to read down the page on which he had
transcribed the alteration.)[14]
An editor confronting this criss-crossing trail of textual revision might
try to simplify matters: he might decide to take a modified 'best text'
approach and incorporate into MS those revisions appearing in only one of
the typescripts, consigning those in the other to the textual apparatus.
However there is no evidence with The Boy in the Bush that
Lawrence preferred one typescript over the other, so that the editor's
decision, like that of Housman's donkey, would be arbitrary. Another
simplifying technique would be to try to establish a rough chronology of
revision in the competing typescripts by counting all cases where Lawrence
revised a reading in one typescript,
changed it immediately to another reading, and only entered
that
reading into the other typescript. So, for instance, on page 404 of TSIa,
Len Ellis's age is typed 'not seventeen', which Lawrence changed first to
'not eighteen' and then to 'only seventeen'. TSIb has the second revised
reading alone. At such points TSIa is clearly the correction copy, and TSIb
is the transcription copy. Provided such examples outnumbered those where
the contrary was true, the editor might be tempted to prefer TSIb as the
source of emendation throughout.
[15]
But such evidence would not demonstrate the chronology of the documents
as a whole, only the chronology of the revisions at those points. Is there an
alternative to this sort of rough and ready calculation, or is it the best that
can be done?
The answer must depend on the circumstances of the case, but with
The Boy in the Bush it has, in fact, proved to be possible to
establish the chronology of revision, though to do so is to thread back and
forth between the typescript documents. The practice developed for the
purpose made it possible to treat the revision stage as a single version
which is witnessed in its entirety by neither typescript alone but by both.
Taken together, the typescripts witness and can be made to yield a
continuous stage of revision. To have chosen one of the typescripts as the
source of emendation of the base text manuscript would have been to
downgrade the importance of Lawrence's active engagement as an author
in the revisional process. Arbitrarily to favour one document over a process
that was actually witnessed by both documents would have been tantamount
to ascribing textual authority to Lawrence's fallibilities as scribe and
collator—functions which were clearly not uppermost in his
mind.
To have chosen both typescripts and to have prepared a parallel text
edition would not have produced an 'ideal text' either, for such an edition
would also have been based on the extant documentary forms of the text
rather than on the revisional process. This last observation points to the
special significance of the textual situation of The Boy in the
Bush: that it has been possible to distinguish the function of
author-in-revision from his function as a participant in the production
process, working to provide his publishers with copy which would allow the
bookmaking to continue. Of course it was Lawrence's need to provide
corrected copy which gave him the opportunity to engage in a process of
revision, so to that extent the distinction does not hold; but, once he was
involved in it, his dual functions—author-in-revision as against
participant
in the production process—may be usefully distinguished.
Two observations arise from the distinction. First, it may be found
applicable in similar editing situations involving typescript or proof copies
(i.e. where the author is sent two proof sets with one intended as copy for
another publisher's separate type-setting).[16] Second, the distinction, if it is
found to
have a wider applicability, may help clarify those familiar disagreements
about choice of manuscript or first edition as base text where the holograph
manuscript is extant but the author is known to have read proof and
approved them. Both sides in the debate believe the practice they advocate
is aimed at establishing the authorial text; but my distinction suggests they
may be invoking, unawares, different criteria under the same name. The
distinction being proposed might help clarify matters by underlining the
importance of going beyond the question of
whether the
author
was involved at proof stage to conceptualise the kind and level of
engagement he had. The editor would be asking himself whether it were
possible in the particular case to distinguish between the author's
compositional-revisional processes on the one hand and his participation in
the commercial production processes on the other. This is not to claim that
the two processes are separate and discrete for clearly
they are not, only that a clarifying distinction may be able to be made.
Not to ask the question may be to put oneself at risk of
shifting
inconsistently from one criterion to the other whenever a hard decision is
faced.
A summary of the various sorts of evidence encountered and made
use of in dealing with the typescripts of The Boy in the Bush
may be of some interest, for in fact it proved possible to track Lawrence's
zig-zag path of revision with sufficient confidence to allow the preference
of a reading in one or other typescript in all but one case of variant
revision. Taken singly, each sort of evidence is indicative rather than
conclusive, and its relative importance will change depending on the
condition of the documents an editor encounters. When, for comparison, I
checked the typescript copies of Lawrence's travel book Etruscan
Places, some chapters of which exist in three copies all revised by
him, the kinds of evidence differed somewhat.[17] Because the preparation of three
copies
meant two lots of transcription from the
correction copy, the likelihood of revisional development in the process of
transcription increased dramatically. This process left the typescript copies
with more than
The Boy in the Bush yields of what is the best
kind of evidence: an autograph revision in one typescript which was then
cancelled and replaced by a second revision before the second revision only
was transferred to the next copy. Such evidence on any one page of
The Boy in the Bush suggests Lawrence was reading and
revising the first copy and transcribing to the second, so that if a variant
revision appears elsewhere on that page in the two typescripts there is prima
facie (although not conclusive) evidence as to which one was
chronologically later.
The next best evidence proved to be the tiny
revisions—misstruck
characters and marks of punctuation—which Lawrence was especially
liable to overlook, particularly if he had a number of other and more
obvious revisions and corrections to transcribe on the same page. If an
editor were dealing with an author who transcribed chapter by chapter
rather than page by page, then the job would be much easier, for many
more transcriptional failures would be generated as some or many of the
tiny corrections were overlooked. The present method would become
relevant in such a case if, following revision, pages of the typescripts had
been combined at random, thus destroying the integrity of each chapter's
status as a first or second revised copy.
The state of the carbon copy also provided clues (although rarely in
the case of Etruscan Places where the carbon was fairly
evenly
inked): poorly inked carbon copy will frequently fail to reproduce lightly
struck characters, and, if the carbon paper itself was misaligned, ends of
lines may have been cut off or the last line not transferred at all. Where
Lawrence did not correct words rendered illegible in these ways on a
carbon-copy page but did enter other revisions on it, it is likely that he was
reading the legible ribboncopy page and transcribing to carbon—and
of
course vice versa when he corrected them all, particularly if conveniently
combined with, say, a spelling error which he corrected only on the carbon
copy.
The size of the handwriting can also indicate the direction of revision:
two sizes on the one page of one copy may indicate two-stage revision.
Lawrence could have entered his revisions in that copy and put the page to
one side; bringing the corresponding page of the other copy in front of him,
he would then have transcribed the revisions. But if, in transcribing, he
immediately saw the need for another alteration on the same page, this
would mean returning to the first copy to enter the alteration there, his
physical movement of hand and arm being liable to cause a different size
(or slope) of handwriting from the correction he had originally entered. The
ease with which lengthy interlinear revision is squeezed into the available
space may also suggest on which copy the revised reading was entered first.
Only when transcribing would Lawrence be aware of how much space the
reading required to be easily legible and so be able to adjust the size of his
writing and spacing to
suit.
Once the correction copy has been provisionally distinguished from
the
transcription copy for a given page the evidence being relied upon must be
tallied with evidence from surrounding pages (or part-pages), particularly
in the same chapter (if the alternation of ribbon and carbon is by chapter).
One assumes that Lawrence would tend to move from copy to copy in a
regular rhythm of revision and transcription, but one must remain alert to
any and every piece of physical evidence which suggests that, for whatever
reason and at whatever point, he changed the direction. For pages which
bear no variant revisions no decision need be made of course, although such
pages may well have indicative evidence which may help with decisions
having to be made about the chronology of revision on other pages
nearby.
[18] With
The Boy in the
Bush the assumption that Lawrence would naturally revise ribbon
copy and transcribe to carbon proved to be unfounded, but that direction did
seem more usual with the
Etruscan Places
typescripts.
Further specification of the method is probably unnecessary,
especially given that the kinds of evidence and their relative weights will
probably differ from author to author and case to case. The crux of the
procedure may be summarised however as the need to pay attention not just
to the readings normally thought textually significant but also to the
apparently insignificant, to the accidents of typing and transcription, so as
to recover the historical process of revision. It took the present writer a
long while to see these kinds of evidence, even though he had been poring
over the typescripts, pondering the patterns of revision he could see so
much more obviously inscribed. The literary critic in him had to learn to
take its cues from the textual detective. Certainty, he found, was rarely
obtainable; but strong probability was, allowing a more finely honed way
than alternative methods afford of approximating the text of final
revision.[19]
While readers continue to require, and publishers demand, the
finalising of such texts, the critically established reading text based upon a
certain standard, typically that of the postulated recovery of authorial
intention, remains a worthwhile goal. The goal is an idea, the perfect
achievement of which would produce an 'idea-l' text. However the logic of
the present argument,
if extended, is that the 'ideal' text will be more closely approximated when
the processes of composition and revision are, wherever possible,
distinguished from and allowed to take precedence over the extant
documentary forms in which the processes are inscribed. To define the goal
of critical editing as establishing the text which fulfills (typically) the
author's intentions is to elide two kinds of authority: authority deriving
from the author-in-composition and -revision with authority deriving from
the documents he was prepared to countenance or 'authorise' as sufficient
for the production processes to continue. Although evidence for the first
kind of authority can only be derived from the documents, the situation with
the Lawrence texts described here demonstrates that a distinction between
the two kinds of authority at least sometimes can—and, where
possible,
suggests that it should —be made.
Critical editing involves a determined attempt at an act of historical
recovery of the diachronic processes of authorial inscription. I am simply
urging that, where feasible, the editor should refine on the diachronics of
revision and accept the consequences of the distinction I have proposed
even if this means abandoning the integrity of two or more documents
which witness a continuous stage of revision. This is especially the case
when, as with The Boy in the Bush, the so-called integrity of
the documents depends on little more than where the pages and chapters
happened to fall as their author finished with them: whether on the table,
on the floor, or wherever he dropped them.
Notes
