University of Virginia Library

V

Fredson Bowers's life of scholarship was so productive and so controversial that his name, if not always his ideas, became known to nearly everyone in the field of English and American literary scholarship and to a great many in related fields. He was unquestionably one of the most famous scholars of the twentieth century. The sheer bulk of his publications was sufficient in itself to attract attention: a complete collection of his scholarly works would consist of 172 volumes (his eight books and six pamphlets, sixty-eight volumes of scholarly editions, forty-five volumes of SB, and thirty-three anthologies and twelve editions to which he contributed), plus two hundred issues of periodicals containing pieces by him. (These figures include the three volumes of Beaumont and Fletcher not published during his lifetime, but they exclude those volumes of editions for which he was a consultant and which contain no prose by him.) He published some seven thousand pages of scholarly expository prose, amounting to something like three million words (inclusive of the textual essays in his editions, but not counting the hundreds of pages of discursive notes and other apparatus in them). When one adds to this record the million and a quarter words he wrote on music and his writings

on dogs and stamps (along with the activities that lay behind them), his participation in other enjoyments, and his services to his profession, one tends to think of him in nineteenth-century terms, for many people today seem to believe that twentieth-century distractions have made such full lives scarcely possible.

A life so full of satisfactions is indeed an accomplishment. His life was significant, however, not merely for the quantity of his endeavors, or the wonder that he could engage so productively in so many of them (a wonder hardly lessened by the knowledge that he suffered from insomnia and never owned a television set); even more important was the nature of his productivity. His presence had a major impact on the history of bibliography—and on the perception of bibliography by those not directly engaged in it. Not only did he symbolize a whole field of scholarship; but people also thought of the field more often as a result of his presence, and saw more often the broad relevance of it. That the texts of verbal works are affected by the material means of their transmission —and therefore that the study of literature in the broadest sense entails the study of books and manuscripts as physical objects—are concepts not yet widely understood by readers in general, or even by all scholarly readers. But more people have probably been exposed to these ideas by Bowers than by any other person. He was a worldly scholar, not only in the sense that his scholarship was an element in a richly varied life but also because he cared nearly as much about promoting an understanding of his field as about contributing substantively to it. His influence was felt through his roles as publicist and catalyst in addition to his activities as research scholar.

An examination of that influence can usefully begin with a consideration of the style and tone of his writing, for his reputation—from the beginning—was linked to the personality conveyed by them. Although SB and the Principles were sufficient to earn him the respect of bibliographical scholars early in his career, they alone do not account for the special position he quickly came to occupy in the minds of many people, outside as well as inside the small circle of committed bibliographical scholars. The picture of him was more likely to be that of the advocate, the publicist, the polemicist, for it was he who often, and insistently, called their attention to the field and forced them to consider its indispensability for their own work. He tirelessly pressed the claims for "the bibliographical way" (to echo the title of his 1958 Kansas lecture); and he perennially made statements like this one from his earliest proselytizing talk (at the University of Pennsylvania in 1949): "No matter

what the field of study, the basis lies in the analysis of the records in printed or in manuscript form." The justice of his general position cannot be questioned; but the manner in which it was presented caused some people, if they were not already receptive, to resist what seemed to them a hard sell.

Advocates are often inclined, through temperament or the repeated necessity of being assertive, to overstate their cases, or to irritate some of their audience through too candid a depiction of the follies requiring correction. There is no doubt that Bowers was occasionally—or, as some thought, more often than that—guilty of these charges. Everyone who has read Bowers must have a collection of favorite examples of his scorn. "First let me," he once said (in the Pennsylvania talk), "utterly cast aside the kind of gossiping about books which is written by and published for amateur collectors and which reaches its nadir in some so-called bibliographies of modern authors or in book-collectors['] manuals." On the same occasion he asserted that library schools "do not know enough to teach analytical bibliography as I understand it, and this deficiency sometimes also means, unfortunately, that books cannot be recorded accurately in libraries." And we recall the curator who was an "outworn cataloguer" deposited in the rare-book room "as a reward for faithful service where the world will pass her peacefully by and no extraordinary demands will interfere with her equable latter years" (the University of California lecture in 1966). These snippets suggest why his talks (and the published papers they became) did not always win him new friends. But his blunt attacks did not arise from a love of controversy: as he said in a letter of 8 February 1986 (echoing similar statements in earlier letters), "I dislike controversy and the acrimony of the scholar." (Nicolas Barker, in his obituary of Bowers, put the matter well: "He was a powerful but never a joyful antagonist." Barker added, with reason, that Bowers's forcefulness "concealed a more tender regard for the sensibility and foibles of his adversaries than they appreciated.") The positions he took were not motivated by petty animosities or perceived slights but always by his deep commitment to the advancement of his field.

The movement of his prose was of a piece with his enthusiasm as an advocate. His sentences, often loosely constructed, seemed to rush along and, as they piled up, to envelop a subject. (He once described to his oldest son—in a letter of 27 February 1981—how, as he typed from a half-finished manuscript, "the thing sort of took over by itself and so without regard to my manuscript I went ahead composing on the typewriter until the end.") His was not a tight, elegant, balanced style but a flowing and encompassing one. John Carter, a highly conscious stylist, said in the

Times Literary Supplement early in Bowers's career (4 September 1948) that Bowers wrote "in a style sometimes lacking in limpidity." This comment, coming from a person sympathetic with Bowers's aims, was a relatively kind version of what many reviewers (largely British) spelled out in frank detail—noting examples of overly complex sentence structure, fuzzy syntax, and imprecise diction. But there was another point of view, which can be represented by Philip Young, though he was no admirer of Bowers's editorial practice. In an unfriendly examination of the Hawthorne edition (collected in Three Bags Full, 1973), he conceded that Bowers "writes rather well." Young did not elaborate, but one understands the virtues he must have had in mind. Bowers's prose had the strength that comes from immersion in a subject and from an analytical intelligence alert to the ramifications of every point. The density and complexity of his writing reflected both detailed learning and a delight in exploring exhaustively the implications of an observation.

This is not to say that such attributes cannot also underlie a spare, orderly prose; and in fact there were times when Bowers's sentences became uncomplicated in syntax and marched along in inexorable order, particularly in extemporaneous talks. (Those of us present at the small conference that brought together six Soviet editors and six American editors, held at Indiana University on 8-11 April 1976, will not forget an afternoon at the Howells edition headquarters when Bowers explained the rationale and procedures of critical editing; speaking without notes, he moved from one point to the next with a simplicity and clarity that not only reflected his familiarity with the subject but also revealed in action the workings of a keen intelligence.) Bowers's temperament was expansive, however, and in his case wide knowledge and acuteness of mind resulted normally in an exuberant prose that had the power of undisguised emotional involvement. Stylistic infelicities tended to be lost amid the onrush of ideas and examples, abetted by conversational clichés. This kind of prose is obviously not to everyone's taste, but it is by no means an ineffective way of using the language. (And it was certainly not unrevised: surviving drafts of his work show extensive rewriting, and in a 1982 interview for a student magazine Nancy Hale said that she had learned the importance of revision from— in the words of the interviewer's summary—"her husband's unceasing modification of his own work.") Bowers's ear, trained by wide reading in English literature and vast amounts of writing from the age of sixteen on, was thoroughly attuned to the nuances of English; and if some individual sentences suggested the reverse, his prose when taken in larger units was generally very effective indeed.

The language of such discourse can give rise to serious problems, however, when an imprecise word, used for promotional effect, can be seen, upon reflection, to detract from the intellectual integrity of what is being said. A prime example is Bowers's use of the word "definitive" in connection with critical editions (a usage that fortunately declined in his later years). Those who already understood the nature of critical editing recognized that he was employing "definitive" in a special sense and that the word was rhetorically effective in helping him emphasize the rigor, discipline, and thoroughness of the bibliographical way. They knew, and realized he knew, that no product of critical judgment can ever be definitive. But not everyone knew: some people have been put off by what they regarded as an excessive claim, and others (less critical-minded) have come away believing bibliography and textual criticism to be more definite and factual than they are. In this way a tension sometimes developed, within a single piece, between the charged language of advocacy and the calmer and more precise discourse of the scholarship being advocated.

The dominant attitude that always came through, however, was one of uncompromising rigor, and that in itself has been enough to bring his work under attack from those who were made to feel defensive of their own less rigorous ways. Being an active advocate affords unlimited opportunities for giving offense in one way or another, both to the people one wishes to win over and to those who are already converted. If Bowers had written a quieter, less impassioned prose, he might have irritated fewer people, but his message would have received less attention—an outcome not in the long-term best interests of the field. In any case, Bowers's personality did not give him that option: he was not inclined to see any necessity for tempering his opinions in order to win support—and, indeed, no doubt felt that a forthright approach would ultimately command more respect. The persona that emerged from his writing is one that many people have taken pleasure in attacking; but the number who have thereby been blinded to the integrity and coherence of his position are relatively few (if sometimes vocal). The review of The Bibliographical Way in the Times Literary Supplement (19 February 1960) is paradigmatic: it took obvious enjoyment in declaring that Bowers's examples "are delivered like straight lefts to the jaw" and that readers might be "more amenable to conversion if the missionary acted less like Pizarro or Cortes"; but it nevertheless called the essay "required reading." Bowers's forceful lectures outlining the place of bibliographical and textual research in the world of scholarship form a major segment of his output and have been "required reading" for

a great many people. His advocacy of his field, which through the printed form of his lectures will continue to be influential, was one of his great accomplishments.

Bowers's role as a catalyst of bibliographical advances, closely related to his role as a publicist, benefited from the same qualities. The easy way in which prose flowed forth profusely from him, for example, enabled him to give copious advice, in the form of extremely long letters, to SB contributors, or potential contributors who had submitted articles for consideration. It was not uncommon for them to receive letters of six, eight, ten, or more single-spaced—and sometimes unparagraphed—pages (often with a postscript in his notoriously difficult handwriting). Frequently such letters were the by-products of the actual process of reading: he would go through articles at the typewriter (one of his trusted old machines, which he pecked at with two fingers of his left hand and one of his right and which produced pages that were recognizable at a glance to dozens of correspondents), and he would type out a running commentary as he read. This procedure sometimes resulted in his having to say, at some later place in a letter, that an earlier point he had made should now be disregarded; but even these adjustments of opinion were useful to the authors, who were thus alerted to spots in their articles that might at first be misleading or misunderstood. The authors always knew that their work was receiving Bowers's concentrated attention and that his suggestions grew out of an understanding of—and respect for—what they were trying to accomplish.

From the first volume of SB to the last one that he edited, his shaping hand was reflected throughout the published contents. When Curt F. Bühler reviewed the first one (in PBSA, 1949), he explained why it was not a "breach of good taste" for him to undertake a review when an article of his was included in the volume: "there may be advantages in these special conditions since I can testify, not only as a contributor but also as a very minor assistant in regard to another paper, to the great care exercised by the editorial board [essentially Bowers]. It is not too much to say that Professor Bowers virtually rewrote a whole section of my own contribution." Another such instance, the next year, has recently been described by George Walton Williams, who as a graduate student had been asked to give one of his papers to Studies:

This kind of care—if usually less dramatic—was lavished on contributors for the next four decades.

There was another, and even more significant, way in which he influenced the work that appeared in Studies: the solicitation and encouragement that brought the material to him in the first place. Solicitation of articles, which he engaged in continually, was of course a compliment and an incentive to the authors; but equally important was his recognition of bibliographical talent at an early stage and his supportive (if rigorous) criticisms that helped to give both reassurance and direction to those possessing it. He frequently invited his graduate students to contribute to Studies, when he saw that they had appropriate material, and thus helped to launch several of them on notable careers as publishing scholars. As for those who were not his students, Bowers's record of discovering talent extended from Allan Stevenson and William B. Todd, in the first volume, to Adrian Weiss, whose exciting and innovative investigations of Renaissance type fonts appeared in the final three volumes that Bowers oversaw. In the last of them, which was published nine months after Bowers's death, Weiss movingly recorded his indebtedness to Bowers:

It is a pleasing coincidence that Weiss's article dealt with A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, the subject of Bowers's earliest substantial scholarly paper (and, further, that it concerned shared printing, the detection of which had caused Bowers a problem in his first contribution to The Library). But the significant point is that Weiss was giving voice to sentiments that had been felt by many earlier contributors as well. I can testify myself to the friendly support that underlay his letters to me, from the time of our first correspondence about SB in 1962; his encouraging inquiries (and, sometimes, tentative hints) regarding my work in progress were as important to me as his sensitive and shrewd comments on the work actually submitted. I cannot imagine being read by a more responsive and understanding reader, or receiving more constructive and meaningful encouragement. I know that my feelings are shared by many others; thus a considerable portion of the contents of SB might never have existed without his perceptively chosen words at the right moments.

Although SB was certainly Bowers's creature, it did not always speak for him. He conducted it with an open-mindedness that surprised some people, who thought that the assertiveness of his own writing indicated a lack of openness to other points of view. But just as the uncompromising quality of his public statements emerged from a principled and reasoned position, not from personal pique or stubbornness, so his standards for SB concerned cogency and scholarly responsibility, not a particular line of thinking. His position was revealingly illustrated by his response to a short piece I sent him in early 1969, criticizing one of the "notes" in that year's volume of SB: he said that he had planned to answer that note himself in the next volume but was pleased that the reply could now come from someone else. It is not common for an editor to print a contribution in one number and take exception to it in the next; but his willingness to do so was in line with his conception of SB as a place for the interplay of ideas, not the promulgation of a party line. On one occasion, nearly a decade earlier, he published a paper and a rejoinder to it in the same volume: John Russell Brown's defense of modernized editions and Arthur Brown's of old-spelling editions appeared side by side in the 1960 volume.

He made no secret about his disagreement with certain other articles he had accepted. In his 1975 volume of collected essays, one of his new footnotes commented on D. F. McKenzie's "brilliantly argumentative article," "Printers of the Mind," published in SB in 1969:

This was not the only occasion on which Bowers objected to McKenzie's distrust of analytical bibliography as reflected in this article; but he knew that the article deserved a hearing. Two other new footnotes in his 1975 volume referred critically to an article by Hans Zeller that had just been published in SB: in one he characterized its attitude as a "fetish" (p. 499), and in the other he questioned its use of the word "critical" to describe its approach (p. 527). The policy he always followed in SB was concisely stated in a letter to David J. Nordloh on 17 January 1970: "Studies in Bibliography is always prepared to consider articles about textual theory and practice whether or not they coincide with my own beliefs."

Bowers was obviously an active journal editor who influenced the production as well as the final form of the material that he published. The resulting publication has been at the heart of bibliographical developments since its founding. During the first half of the twentieth century, The Library was the journal that conveyed the excitement of being at the center of a growing field; and although its standard of excellence did not diminish in the second half of the century, SB nevertheless became the place after 1948 where one witnessed most dramatically the exploration of new techniques and new areas. One of the remarkable aspects of the impressive succession of SB volumes is that they were the product of a single sensibility. (Bowers's editorial longevity surpassed McKerrow's fifteen years as founding editor of the Review of English Studies and even Pollard's thirty-one-year editorship of The Library.) During this long period he proved himself to be a great editor, in an additional sense to the one usually thought of—for editing a journal is different from editing the text of a classic work of literature. Yet one of the distinguishing marks of his handling of SB is his understanding of the connections between the two. (His experience in thinking about textual matters surely lies behind his sensitive treatment of certain aspects of contributors' manuscripts—recognizing, for instance, that it is more sensible to let British scholars retain their British spellings than to enforce a formal consistency from article to article.) To create a journal that is indispensable to a field, and to maintain its vitality and stature over an extended period, are rare achievements. The role that SB has played in the history of twentieth-century bibliography can hardly be overestimated, and the influence that Bowers

exerted through SB is thus one of his enduring legacies. And when one thinks of the additional ways in which his influence operated through the writings and actions of others (his students and the many people who sought, and generously were given, his advice), one sees that his catalytic activities behind the scenes had effects as far-reaching as his promotional activities on the podium.

Of his own direct contributions to bibliographical and textual study, those concerned with descriptive bibliography may appropriately be considered first. It was the area in which he made his earliest extended contribution, the Principles, a book that remains his most widely known and influential piece of work; and he brought his focus back to descriptive bibliography at the end of his life, feeling that his Restoration bibliography in progress would be the essential capstone to his career. As he wrote me on 22 October 1985, "It is now . . . clear to me that this is a cap that must be put in place if I am to feel any real and lasting satisfaction." At that point the work had been a part of his life for forty years, a continuous thread in the fabric of his endeavor; but as an item on his agenda it frequently had to yield to other projects. It had been uppermost in his mind in the late 1940s, and again at the end of the 1950s, when it was his Guggenheim project (at that time, according to his Guggenheim application, he had completed his "basic examination" of copies and anticipated that a year "should largely finish the project"); and it surfaced intermittently after that whenever he was in a library and had time to examine some Restoration quartos. Reflecting on Greg's death during his Guggenheim year, he gave most attention to A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration and stated, "Among Greg's many achievements this seems to me to rank as perhaps the greatest"—an achievement that was "something of a miracle." Having written the Principles, Bowers was in a position to see "the originality of mind and the depth of comprehension that went into the detailed formulation" adopted by Greg in his Bibliography. (Eight years later, reviewing Greg's collected essays, he called Greg's collation formulary "an example of creative scholarship of near-perfect proportions.") But what particularly struck Bowers in 1959, given his impatience with abstractions divorced from concrete instances, was the way in which Greg's Bibliography put theory into practice: "in the Bibliography the concrete illustration of the adaptability and simplicity of his comprehensive system was so much more overwhelming than the previous bare statement of theory that common acceptance of his principles as the norm for modern bibliographical writing inevitably followed." Bowers

had produced his own statement of theory (by no means a "bare" one); but he would not be satisfied until he, like Greg, had completed a great bibliography to exemplify it.

The fact that Bowers felt so strongly about descriptive bibliography and returned to it from textual criticism with an increased sense of its importance may surprise some people, who think of descriptive bibliography as less stimulating. But his final elevation of it was a striking reflection of the view of the field depicted in the Principles, which makes clear the intellectual excitement of its subject. The book shows that the practice of descriptive bibliography is a form of history, with all the same challenges and rewards. Although this point is not discussed explicitly at length, it in fact is the most fundamental and striking insight conveyed by the book—conveyed by its author's practice of treating bibliographies as pieces of writing (not as compilations), by his emphasis—in describing how bibliographers work—on the analysis and interpretation of physical evidence, and by the habit of mind he displays in working through particular examples. That descriptive bibliography is a demanding form of historical scholarship underlies every sentence of the book. Although there were a few earlier scholars who understood these points, none of them produced a detailed manual of practice.

The Principles moves well beyond what had previously been written, in two directions: it refines the formulary of collation by examining it in greater detail than had ever before been attempted, reinforcing the discussion with an extraordinary array of examples; and it places the collation in a larger context, offering a comprehensive plan for describing all features of books from all periods. The thoughtfulness of the exposition, which seems to cover nearly every contingency that might arise, remains impressive, even to readers who have gone over it many times. Those who have had occasion to work carefully through every statement of the book have emerged with some minor amendments but have also gained renewed respect for the quality of mind that produced such a structure of argument. The book's great achievement is to have made readily accessible, for the first time, a detailed and comprehensive practical guide to bibliographical procedure, building upon the best that had previously been written on the subject and reflecting a thoroughly considered rationale. It became standard upon publication, and it will remain so.

Such an accomplishment is not diminished by noting that it left some work undone and that some of its conceptual approaches may need adjustment. In treating the details of typography, paper, and binding, for example, the book was charting far less explored territory

than was the case with signature collation, and there is correspondingly more that one now might feel needs to be added to those discussions. On some larger theoretical issues, a few questions also must be raised: whether, for instance, the traditional approach to signature collation sufficiently distinguished an account of physical structure from a record of printed signatures; and whether the concept of issue could justifiably exclude binding if the binding was the publisher's. When the Principles was published, Bowers (like nearly everyone else) was less experienced in handling books after 1700 than earlier ones, and his account therefore needs more supplementing in its later parts. The failure to think through the implications of issue for volumes in publisher's bindings is an instance of the less perceptive coverage of modern books. Several scholars in recent decades have addressed some of these problems, and more will be said about them in the future, and about other trouble spots in the Principles. (Someone, for example, should publish an adequate index to it.) But such work is in the nature of the maintenance and alteration that a grand edifice inevitably requires, despite the soundness of its basic structure.

It is not surprising that when Bowers made remarks supplementary to the Principles, notably in his 1967 Bibliographical Society address, a dominant theme was "degressive bibliography," for any decision to abridge the quantity of detail in bibliographical entries reflects a sense of priorities regarding the purposes served by those entries. Thus whether the emphasis of a bibliography is on literary history and biography (in which case the description of impressions and editions after the author's death may be shortened) or on printing and publishing history (in which case such impressions and editions are no less interesting than those of greater textual significance) is a basic issue to be considered. However this matter is decided, Bowers left no doubt about another: the length of an entry cannot be allowed to determine the amount of investigation performed. The space one devotes to reporting the results of research, in other words, has no bearing on the effort required to determine what one is willing to assert are the facts. There can be no question that he was right on this score; but the propriety of the proportions embodied in published bibliographical accounts will always be a subject of debate, for it can no more be settled finally than the emphases in any other kind of historical account can be prescribed.

Whether descriptive bibliographers should be expected to collate texts and whether textual scholars have surpassed bibliographers in sophistication are perhaps finally rather unimportant jurisdictional disputes; what matters is that the work be done, by those who understand

how to do it, not how much of it is reported in bibliographies and how much in editions. Bowers's efforts to distinguish these scholarly genres may in the long run seem dated; but his cogent explanation of the relationships between the two provides a grounding of perennial value. His approach to descriptive bibliography, both in concept and in procedure, has been immensely influential—having been taught to thousands of graduate students in literature departments and library schools and having been followed by dozens of bibliographers in writing their bibliographies. (The basic form of entry used in the Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography was designed by him.) A great many people in the book world would join with B. J. McMullin in calling the Principles their "professional 'bible.'" Even though Bowers's Restoration bibliography remains to be completed by another hand, his contribution to descriptive bibliography stands as one of the great achievements in modern scholarship.

Bibliographical analysis is a tool of descriptive bibliography, but analysis can of course take place independently of an intention to write a full bibliographical description; and Bowers engaged in analysis in his earliest bibliographical articles, a decade before the Principles. By 1938 he had achieved some sophistication in the use of headlines for analysis; and when he and Charlton Hinman presented papers on headlines at the English Institute in 1941, they were—as matters turned out—offering a preview of how analytical bibliography would develop after they returned from war duty four years later. There is a historical neatness in the fact that the fiftieth anniversary of the Bibliographical Society occurred in 1942 and that for the occasion F. P. Wilson wrote his now-famous account of "Shakespeare and the 'New Bibliography,'" for these events proved to mark the close of one phase of the development of analytical bibliography. What was prophetic about the prewar Bowers and Hinman articles was not simply that they presaged the shift in major activity to America but that they emphasized new techniques for extracting, from physical evidence, details of the printing procedures underlying particular books. As Helen Gardner remarked in her revised edition of Wilson's essay, nearly three decades later, the greatest advances in the intervening years had been in the study of the printing of Shakespeare's plays, and she spoke of this work as the product of "what we must call the 'newer bibliography.'" The earlier development of the field, from Pollard (who was himself a link with the analytical study of incunabula) through McKerrow and E. E. Willoughby to Greg (whose writings were the climax of the prewar phase), resulted

of course from the continued exploration of physical evidence; and the "newer bibliography" represented no turning away from this trend. Its distinctiveness lay largely in its more intense focus on minute physical details, particularly on damaged types, and in its repertory of techniques (which expanded rapidly in the postwar years) for organizing those details into page-by-page case histories. Bowers played a critical role in this renewal of vitality in the field both through his early articles (several of which remain—despite later amendments—classic treatments of bibliographical detection) and through his encouragement of analytical work in SB, which resulted in an efflorescence of compositorial study, produced by an impressive assembly of able young scholars.

As the years passed, Bowers did not concentrate on this kind of work, as Hinman did, and his accomplishment in this area is not as great as Hinman's. In 1968, T. H. Howard-Hill asserted (in Shakespeare Studies), "Professor Bowers' own direct contributions to the advance of Shake-spearian bibliographical scholarship have been small, and rarely definitive." Few would contest the view that Bowers's essays in analytical bibliography have not been as important for understanding the printing of Shakespeare's—and other Renaissance dramatists'—plays as have the writings of a number of other scholars; and some of the conclusions he reached (as on Elizabethan proofreading) have since been challenged or overturned. Nevertheless, there remain a considerable number of accomplished and convincing analyses, particularly within the textual introductions to his various editions. As he well knew, inferences drawn from bibliographical evidence rarely reach the level of certainty, and new analyses may modify previous conclusions. But he also recognized that conclusions, however provisional, must be drawn in order to proceed; and the vast body of his editorial work demonstrates the essential role of bibliographical analysis in the textual criticism of authors from the Renaissance to the present. The exemplary role of his analyses, given his prominence and the visibility of his editions, is a major reason (along with his fostering role as editor of SB) for according him a significant place in the history of analytical bibliography; but one should not overlook the substantive contribution made within those editions, where order is brought (with more or less certainty) to the bibliography of several dozen important works.

There is yet another, and equally important, way in which Bowers was of service to analytical bibliography. Although one may regret that he never wrote an equivalent to the Principles for this aspect of bibliographical investigation, he did in effect write the prolegomena for such

a book in his 1959 Lyell Lectures, Bibliography and Textual Criticism. The book is subtle, rigorous, and absolutely fundamental, aiming at nothing less than a characterization of the habit of mind required for recognizing, and then responsibly employing, inductive bibliographical evidence. One might perhaps take from it (once again) the conclusion that bibliographers are historians, confronting the same problem that all historians face: how to weigh the preserved evidence in order to reconstruct past events. These points would seem to be unexceptionable and uncontroversial, and indeed the book has been generally neglected; yet it has a role to play in debates about the foundations of research in book history. A suspicion of analytical bibliography, publicized in McKenzie's "Printers of the Mind," exists in other quarters as well—such as among those historians of the book who work in the tradition of the French school of histoire du livre and stress the role of books in society. Recourse to archives, as these writers maintain, is certainly important; but they have difficulty in accepting the great store of existing books as an archive itself, containing primary evidence of printing processes. Anyone who understands that fact finds it a truism that the scrutiny of physical evidence in books cannot be abandoned; but the point is strangely difficult for some people to accept. Underlying this difficulty is a failure to perceive bibliography as historical research and interpretation; therefore Bowers's book ought to be assigned reading for those engaged in such discussion and ought to become increasingly prominent in future methodological controversy.

Bowers's impact in the field of textual criticism and scholarly editing is symbolized by the extent of his own published work in this area—three theoretical books, some two dozen major essays, and more than five dozen edited volumes (of works by thirteen authors from five centuries)—to say nothing of some forty-two additional volumes for which he was textual adviser (in the Dewey and Fielding editions), and a number of posthumous volumes in series for which he provided textual plans or procedures (the editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William James's correspondence). If, in descriptive bibliography, he did not live to produce a major demonstration of his principles in action, he provided ample testimony to the way his theories of editing could be applied in practice. He emerges from all this work as the preeminent authority of his time on the textual criticism of post-medieval writings; he was also—and this does not automatically follow—the most influential as well. His advice and his practice have not, it is true, been universally accepted;

but they have been so widely analyzed that even those who take a different line can scarcely be unaware of how their own views have been affected by the debate.

Many of the criticisms inevitably refer to specific textual decisions, or classes of decision, in particular editions. Since any critical edition rests on critical judgment, there will always be grounds for legitimate disagreement on individual cruxes or groups of related ones. Some critics, however, argue as if they believe that only one correct text, or responsible edition, of a work can exist; they do not seem to see that one can disagree with certain judgments in a critical edition and yet understand how those judgments can be defended, and thus still have respect for the edition as a whole. The same critics might well see this point in connection with a critical essay but have not learned that a critical edition is equally the product of judgment, which is necessarily subjective. Bowers embraced the opportunity for judgment in critical editions, regarding judgment not as a necessary evil but as a powerful tool for historical reconstruction. To Bowers's mind, textual criticism—as Ignas K. Skrupskelis (associate editor of the William James edition) has appropriately remarked—was "a means of controlling and stimulating the critical imagination," both for the editor and for the reader. (It is noteworthy that in a 1961 talk with the title "Future Needs for Editing" he emphasized the role of "practical criticism" in literary scholars' lives, stating that research should lead "to a better understanding of works and a greater capacity to teach their artistic values.") He was nevertheless fully aware of how tenuous some critical decisions are and was surprised when other people failed to understand that more than one outcome can be defended. On the controversy over his adoption of Crane's revised ending of Maggie, he wrote in a letter of 24 October 1981:

Bowers was more reasonable and open-minded than many of his critics. The magnitude of his achievement in elucidating the textual histories and providing critical texts of such a large number of important writings is not lessened by disagreements about some categories of emendations, or by the realization that no critical text can ever be the only defensible one.

There are, however, appropriate grounds for dissatisfaction with certain aspects of Bowers's editorial performance. For example, he had a tendency to engage in the partial regularization of punctuation and spelling. A given author's practice in these matters may of course be a matter of judgment; but, despite his usual statement that authorial preferences were honored, he often seemed to begin with the assumption that an author was consistent in pointing and spelling, or intended to be (an assumption that results in an unwarranted contraction of the area in which critical judgment can operate). And to regularize or normalize on the grounds that an author expected such alteration (a standard occasionally appealed to) seems at odds with his regular rejection of other instances of possibly tacit approval by the author. Another lapse is his attempt to justify omitting punctuation and spelling variants from the historical collation on grounds of principle rather than simply of expense. In the textual essay in the Dewey edition, for example, he said, "since the editors will have adopted as emendations of the copytext all such accidentals variants that seem to be either authoritative or advisable changes, no useful purpose would be served by listing the hundreds and hundreds of publishers' or printers' unauthoritative normalizings of the text on which they worked." In fact, several purposes would be served—the most obvious being that readers would have the opportunity of judging for themselves whether all those variants are "unauthoritative." In the Crane edition, Bowers dismissed the idea of collating multiple copies of magazines containing contributions by Crane: "no useful purpose would be served by multiple machine collation of magazine copies in search of textual variation." Yet magazines are printed objects, just as books are, and they are subject to the same possibilities for variation among supposedly identical copies. Also in the Crane edition, the apparatus for Crane's syndicated newspaper pieces is illogical, reflecting a failure to think through the implications of radiating texts for apparatus: after recognizing that no one of the radiating texts can be a copy-text in Greg's sense, Bowers still chooses one of them (for economy, the one closest to his reconstructed text) as a "copy-text" for purposes of the apparatus and does not report variant accidentals in the other equally authoritative texts.

Furthermore, an alarming number of inaccuracies exist in the apparatuses to Bowers's editions; some of the errors have been put on record in the editions themselves (in the last volume of the Crane edition,

for example, is a section of nine pages listing errata in the previous nine volumes), and others no doubt remain to be detected. Perhaps there would have been fewer errors if Bowers had not undertaken so many editions and felt obliged to work so fast. An additional problem related to his prolific production of editions, with contents covering such a broad span of time, is that it has unfortunately fueled the already prevalent misconception of editing as a mechanical or technical skill, which—once learned—can readily be applied to any writing. Bowers certainly knew that the critical judgments required by critical editing must grow out of a thorough knowledge of the writers being edited and their times: in Textual and Literary Criticism, for instance, he spoke of the necessity of having a "feeling for its [the past's] idiom, and above all the knowledge of its language for which no amount of enthusiastic dilettante sensibility can adequately compensate" (p. 10). But many people concerned with literature (even among the scholarly public) do not understand the point. No one would wish that Bowers had edited fewer authors simply to avoid this situation; but it is a regrettable fact that his actions sometimes exacerbated it. That he sometimes failed to follow through the implications of his arguments has led Paul Eggert to assert, "Bowers's concentration on questions of editorial methods and standards was not accompanied by an equivalent, philosophic interest in their underlying assumptions." Although this statement is perhaps too harsh, there is no doubt that Bowers was temperamentally less interested in concepts than in procedures. One of the consequences—one that Eggert discusses in some detail—is that he did not clearly work out the relation of authorial expectation to his concept of authorial intention.

These various concerns about Bowers's editing do not raise the question of his editorial goal—the construction of texts representing their authors' final artistic intentions. His preference for texts that were as unaffected as possible by the processes of publication (or dramatic production) was a source of some criticism nearly from the beginning; and in his later years those who conceived intention to include expectation, or viewed authorship as social and collaborative, became more vocal. To them, Bowers's concentration on writers as individual creators, rather than writing as the product of a social milieu, seemed unrealistic and old-fashioned. Others believed that his emphasis on "final" intention minimized the importance of textual evolution and instability. These views all reflect valid approaches to textual study that have been neglected and deserve to be pursued; but they do not discredit an interest in final authorial intention, which must remain one of the few available paths to an understanding of writings from the past. When Bowers's

editorial career began, it would have been hard to conceive that by the end of his life editions focusing on final authorial intention would be received grudgingly by a number of critics, who found the basic aim misguided. His unswerving devotion to it was quite proper, however; changing fashions in literary scholarship do not alter the basic value of a "Bowers edition," and the majority of readers are still interested in works from the past as the products of individual minds. In his immense series of volumes he set a style for scholarly editions—both in concept and in form—that was widely imitated. Other styles will follow, and other critical editions of the same works will inevitably appear. But his masterly charting of textual histories and his judgments as to the intended wording of numerous texts will continue, into the indefinite future, to affect the way readers approach the authors he dealt with.

His influence on scholarly editing was of course also felt through lectures and other writings; and his introductions to the rationale of critical editing—like On Editing Shakespeare (1955), Textual and Literary Criticism (1959), "Textual Criticism" (in the 1963 MLA pamphlet), and "Scholarship and Editing" (PBSA, 1976)—are still, and seem likely to remain, among the best examples of their genre. In all his editorial writing there is an unflagging insistence on the importance of critical editing to reconstruct authorially intended texts; although he recognized the value of facsimile editions, he felt passionately that documentary texts cannot bring one as close to past intentions as can texts that are the joint product of documentary evidence and informed judgment. His resistance, in some of his late lectures, to the "social" approach to textual criticism came not from closed-mindedness but rather from the belief that a socialized concept of literary production did not lead to textual criticism at all, for an emphasis on texts as they emerged from the process of publication seemed to require the diplomatic or facsimile reproduction of texts. A late lecture like "Greg's 'Rationale of Copy-Text' Revisited" showed the supreme importance to him of the exercise of critical judgment, which he felt should not be hampered by any set of guidelines, even Greg's "Rationale." (Critics who have accused Bowers of dogmatism in pushing the claims of Greg have not taken this important paper to heart.) Those late lectures were the last in his long series of writings on the eclecticism of critical editing, which have set a standard of argument and eloquence that those taking other positions must attempt to equal. He has thus been a powerful force for raising the level on which editorial discussion must be conducted. At the beginning of his Rosenbach Lectures in 1955 he had remarked on the "comparatively little discussion" of the principles for editing printed,

rather than manuscript, texts; they have now of course been very much discussed, and the sophistication of his essay revisiting Greg, emerging as it did from a long line of his own essays and responses to them by others, is a measure of the extent to which he is responsible for the profoundly changed environment in which editors of modern writings work.

This view of Bowers's achievement makes clear why any serious discussion on a bibliographical theme is bound to involve issues on which he took an illuminating and provocative stand, and why anyone with the slightest exposure to descriptive bibliography, analytical bibliography, or textual criticism has come across his name. The extent of his influence is suggested by the frequency with which one encounters references to him—references sometimes trivial in themselves, yet revealing, like Roy Stokes's allusion to the "grey eminence in Charlottesville" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 1979). The graduate students of 1963 who read Frederick C. Crews's The Pooh Perplex no doubt saw something of Bowers in the supposed contribution of "Smedley Force"; at any rate one can maintain that without his presence it is not likely that there would have been a chapter of that book asking "why are there no watermarks in Winnie-the Pooh? Why are there no chain lines? Why no colophon? Why no catchwords? No signature? No cancelland or cancellans?"

If one turns to the Oxford English Dictionary to learn what cancelland and cancellans mean, one finds that quotations from Bowers's Bibliography and Textual Criticism are among the citations offered. Quotations from him appropriately appear in the entries for other bibliographical terms as well, such as collational, copy (as in "copy-text"), ideal (as in "ideal copy"), impression, inner (as in "inner forme"), Q (standing for "quarto"), recto, and skeleton (as in "skeleton forme"), among others. While they were at it, readers for the OED used his writings to illustrate some nonbibliographical words, which indicate how colorful his prose could be: blue-nosed, furor poeticus, heurige (page 3 of Bibliography and Textual Criticism yields, "a headache can be especially acute the morning after tasting Heurige, the new wine"), and stand-off, among others. All told, the second edition of the OED contains fifty-nine quotations from Bowers (forty-four from Bibliography and Textual Criticism, ten from the Principles, four from Textual and Literary Criticism, and one from his 1952 PBSA article, "Bibliography, Pure Bibliography, and Literary Studies"). Bowers also wrote the articles on "Textual Criticism" (1959) and "Bibliography" (1960) for the Encyclopaedia

Britannica and thus was a prominent representative of his field in two of the most widely used reference works in the English-speaking world.

His fame by now extends beyond that world, as one can see from the work of Roger Laufer and Wallace Kirsop (e.g., Australian Journal of French Studies, 1966); or from Katia Lysy's translation of "Multiple Authority" into Italian (in Pasquale Stopelli's 1987 anthology, Filologia dei testi a stampa), Conor Fahy's eleven-page Bibliofilia obituary of Bowers in Italian (1991), and his Italian translation of "A Digest of the Formulary" (from the Principles) in Bibliofilia (1992); or from Sachiho Tanaka's translation of Textual and Literary Criticism into Japanese (1983), Akira Takano's exposition of the Principles in Yōsho no hanashi (1991), and Hiroshi Yamashita's teaching of Bowersian bibliography and textual criticism at Tsukuba. As Yamashita wrote David Vander Meulen on 22 July 1991, "Mr. Bowers's influence in Japan has been quite great not only on English literature but also on Japanese literature"—an influence that owes much to Yamashita's own compositor studies of Spenser and his textual work on Rashomon and Natsume Soseki. The depth of Yamashita's feeling for Bowers—both as individual and as spokesman for an approach—is suggested in a letter he wrote me on 1 June 1992:

Peter Davison's obituary of Bowers in The Library (1991) mentions the same occasion in Birmingham: Bowers's work is naturally still best known in the English-speaking world, which produced a wide array of admiring and affectionate obituary tributes like Davison's—among them Nicolas Barker's in the London Independent (15 April 1991) and David Vander Meulen's in the Johnsonian News Letter (1992), along with a substantial gathering of recollections in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1991 (1992) and a "Fredson Bowers Commemorative Issue" (Second Quarter 1991) of the Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand. The awe with which Bowers's attainments were viewed in all of them was conveyed by the opening of Barker's piece: "To revolutionise any branch of human study is an achievement: to do it twice is a triumph. Fredson Bowers brought this off." (The two fields are of course bibliography and textual criticism.)

If the so-called "new bibliography," emphasizing the place of physical evidence in literary study, can be designated—as it often is—an Anglo-American approach, we must recognize that Bowers played the pivotal role in causing "American" to be a part of this epithet. What had been essentially a British movement became an active field in American scholarship through the force and breadth of his published writings and through his personal influence. The central position of his work across the whole spectrum of bibliographical-textual studies is what places him in direct succession to the great triumvirate of Pollard, McKerrow, and Greg. One can name other first-rate bibliographical scholars between Bradshaw and Bowers, but none of them matches those three for the size and quality of a body of work that encompasses bibliographical description and analysis and critical editing. And Bowers outdistanced his great predecessors in the range of detail at his command—without recourse to the discoveries of others—to support general observations. Bowers is their rightful heir in the double sense that he built on their achievement and that what he built ranks with their achievement in range and distinction.

Comparisons of Bowers with Greg have often been made. F. C. Francis, for instance, in his Feldman Lecture (A Bibliographical Ghost Revisits His Old Haunts, 1972), said that Bowers "wears the mantle of Sir Walter Greg with such conspicuous success," and he elaborated on the parallel between the two. G. Blakemore Evans, in his review of Bowers's collected essays (Library Quarterly, 1977), stated that Bowers, "both by precept and example, has done more for those first cousins, bibliography . . . and textual criticism, than any other man in this century except W. W. Greg—a single exception Bowers would himself be the first generously to admit." Not everyone would admit it, but the ranking is not

important. Joost Daalder, in a somewhat different comparative evaluation, believed that Bowers "was probably not quite as extraordinary a scholar as Greg" but was "a better literary mind." There is much to be said for this view; but both men were so extraordinary that the only point in making such judgments is the possibility of arriving at a more precise sense of their achievements.

Bowers himself had some doubts about Greg's critical abilities, for in his review of Greg's collected essays (Times Literary Supplement, 28 September 1967) he described Greg's "blind side" as those instances "when the daring of a logically pursued but highly speculative critical argument obscured his usual fine discrimination between fact and fantasy." Regarding a nonbibliographical essay of Greg's on King Lear, Bowers believed that "the end result may be more valuable for the exposure of the simple facts about the dislocations of time than for the critical conclusions drawn from the evidence, which are in part strained." But Bowers firmly believed in the necessity of linking bibliographical and literary considerations; and—whatever he thought of the outcome of Greg's critical thinking—he could still say, "One of Greg's most striking characteristics as a scholar was that in the end his technical skill, as for example in palaeography, was always placed at the service of textual and other forms of criticism." From the beginning Bowers's emphasis was on literary values, and he would not have disagreed with F. W. Bateson's point (in The Scholar-Critic, 1972) that the function of bibliography in textual criticism is "negative—to exclude the irrelevant or to correct what is historically impossible." It is therefore ironic that Bateson, who felt that Greg "was not a literary critic" and who called Bowers "Greg's most enthusiastic American disciple," thought that some of Bowers's arguments illustrated the "dead-end into which textual criticism is driven if it ignores aesthetic considerations." Bateson was not the only person, however, to misunderstand the role of judgment in bibliography and to be misled by Bowers's emphasis on bibliography into thinking that he was more interested in mechanical routines than in literary considerations.

The ultimate reputation of Bowers's literary criticism depends on the readers of his editions, where thousands of his literary judgments are embedded. When all these judgments, and the notes discussing some of them, are counted in his literary criticism, as they should be, his position as a critic is seen to be of enormous proportions. Even if one focuses on the more limited body of his critical essays, he remains a prominent critic through his influence on the study of Hamlet and revenge tragedy generally. In 1991 Robert Y. Turner said (in Shakespeare

Quarterly), "Fredson Bowers was one of three or four scholars who set the pace and direction for literary studies of the English Renaissance during his generation. The names of Alfred Harbage and Madeleine Doran come to mind as his peers, but not many others." Whatever group of names one finally fixes on, the fact is that Bowers belongs there, judged not as a "textual" or a "bibliographical" scholar but simply as a literary scholar. A love of literature, as deep as the love of music so movingly depicted in his 1961 Richmond lecture, underlay his literary judgments and his willingness to spend endless hours investigating textual evidence. I believe that Ignas K. Skrupskelis was correct when he said (in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1991) that Bowers "did what he did not because he thought it was useful but because it was part of his enjoyment of literature." Skrupskelis then significantly enlarged the point: Bowers's enjoyment of literature and his enjoyment of editing were a part of his enjoyment of a life filled with enthusiasms—for dogs, music, stamps, cars, contract bridge, food, wine, single-malt Scotch, the stock market.

The sense of his life as one activity followed by another, punctuated by satisfactions, is conveyed by a passage in his uncharacteristically self-reflective letter of 22 October 1985 (from which I have quoted several times):

Whatever he thought of his mental abilities, nearly everyone else saw in him an extraordinary intelligence. But the mood of the passage in other regards—the brisk and unsentimental attitude, the delight in intellectual puzzles and "analytical thinking," the eagerness for the next challenge—does seem accurate. He once described the rewards of bibliographical work, which overshadow the drudgery, as "a generative excitement of exploring the unknown" and of "drawing some maps of terra incognita" (Clark Library lecture, 1966). The terra incognita of the past yields some of its secrets to bibliography, which he described near the beginning of Textual and Literary Criticism as "the only sure foundation on which to rear the necessary wide acquaintance with the whole complex of the past" (p. 10). He pursued the work with joy and vigor, as he pursued all his interests, and the maps that resulted will serve as guides for an increasing number of fields.

In thinking about the place of Fredson Bowers in the history of scholarship, we must remember how intertwined in him were the publicist and the scholar, and how interrelated were the responses each aroused. The value of securing for the field a larger place in the scholarly public's consciousness is undeniable, and Bowers's success in this regard was directly related to his stature as a productive scholar: we listen more attentively, if not always with agreement, to the publicist who is not a popularizer but who has actually produced some of the work that makes the field important. If Bowers had not chosen to play this larger role, the state of bibliography today would be less vital and populous, even though he had made his scholarly contributions. It must be admitted that there is a less fortunate side to these connections: temperament and feelings influence scholarly judgment, and some scholars who—for whatever reason—have been offended by, or who disapprove of, the stance of the polemicist may criticize the scholarship without having been open-minded to what it had to say and without fully understanding it. This personal element has entered into commentary on Bowers's scholarship; it is one of the side-effects of his unique position.

What we should concentrate on in the future is a productive criticism

of his work. I think it can be said that in descriptive bibliography, in analytical bibliography, and in textual criticism an understanding of his treatment of the basic issues is an essential ingredient of future progress: his work may need, here and there, some revising and extending, but to proceed without recourse to it would be folly. In matters of consequence, the last word can never be said; the highest praise is not that one's work has ended debate but that it is indispensable for further discussion. Reciting Bowers's accomplishments is therefore only the beginning of a proper assessment; our debt to him is adequately acknowledged only when we understand that our discussions, now and in the future, must build on his. To find that some of his practices or conclusions require rethinking or amplification is not to diminish his achievement; indeed, it is the best way to underscore his accomplishment, because it reveals that whatever we say takes its bearings from what he has already said.

In Nancy Hale's The Life in the Studio, we read, "With their instinct for making something, artists tend to respect the past as something also made." The bibliographical way, like all other paths to the past, requires the shaping vision of the scholar-artist. Bibliographical clues, like the objects she found in the studio, serve as "keys to release the life that trembles behind them in the void," a life that one "otherwise would never have suspected was there." She might have been describing her husband's writing. And he understood the ways in which his work was similar to hers: in 1982 he told an interviewer, "I think some of my wife's intuitiveness has rubbed off on me." The effort to establish what a printer did, or what an author thought, at a particular moment in the past is not essentially different from any other exercise of the historical imagination. There are responsible ways, and irresponsible ways, of marshaling the preserved evidence to create a picture of the past. What we have cause to admire in Fredson Bowers's work, whether or not we agree with every detail of it, is his responsible and imaginative fashioning of bibliographical evidence into a coherent view of certain kinds of past events. His writings have made, and will continue to make, the bibliographical way of thinking a presence in many people's lives, through the artistry of his creative scholarship.