Postscript on THE REVIEWING OF SCHOLARLY EDITIONS

It turns out that TLS has printed my letter about Tanselle's tacit defense of Fredson Bowers's editing of William James. I confess that what I put on the blog was a slightly improved version over what I sent to TLS and what got printed. I added "indeed" to the last sentence.

I moved this long suppressed but finally published essay from January as a comment on G. Thomas Tanselle’s review of Sukanta Chaudhuri’s THE METAPHYSICS OF TEXT in the 29 April 2011 TLS, where he ends a paragraph this way:


“We should remember that Fredson Bowers, the most prolific producer of final-authorial-intention texts, said in his edition of William James that the apparatus of variants is of ‘equal ultimate importance’ with the main text, because of the story it tells.”

This example is unfortunate, as I know from studying the manuscript of Pragmatism in the 1970s. In the early 1980s my commissioned article on “The Reviewing of Scholarly Editions” was called “distinguished” but nevertheless rejected for fear a passage on Pragmatism would displease Fredson Bowers. It was published at last, unrevised, in Editors’ Notes for Fall 1991. In that temperately worded passage I explained that Bowers was obscuring the evidence by calling “the manuscripts ‘something close to drafts,’ in so ‘rough’ a state of inscription that they cannot ‘be thought of as normal authorial printer’s copy.’” As I pointed out, “the manuscripts are not rough drafts at all, but perfectly legible fair copy, from which the first printers set very nicely. The printers made a few errors, of course, and since Bowers had relegated the manuscript to an inferior status he did not collate it carefully and did not notice misreadings which have persisted through every printed version”—compositorial misreadings such as “geometrics” for James’s “geometries.”

When Tanselle says that “the apparatus of variants is of ‘equal ultimate importance’ with the main text” of William James’s works, he is not taking account of some words in James’s manuscript which appear neither in the main text nor in the apparatus—those words which Bowers did not print because he wrongly rejected the actual printer’s copy (stint marks quite visible) as too “rough” to become his own copy-text. James’s manuscripts ought to have been copy-text for Bowers’s edition, for words in the manuscript, quite lost from Bowers’s edition, would indeed tell a story, if they had a chance to speak.

John Bryant and the Old Notion of "Truth in Packaging"

John Bryant and the Old Notion of "Truth in Packaging"
This deserves a separate little note, reposted in May for convenience of readers.

This is the full title a book by John Bryant: MELVILLE UNFOLDING: SEXUALITY, POLITICS, AND THE VERSIONS OF TYPEE: A FLUID-TEXT ANALYSIS, WITH AN EDITION OF THE TYPEE MANUSCRIPT.

What can the University of Michigan editors have thought they were doing when they allowed such a title?

There are no "Versions of Typee." There are versions of a handful of passages in Typee.

There exists no "Typee Manuscript" as far as anyone knows. There is NO SUCH THING.

There exist sixteen leaves from the first draft of Typee. As far as we know, this is all--one that had long been in the NYPL-GL, fifteen added as part of the 1983 "Augusta Papers."

16 Leaves and What Do You Get?
---- -- ---- -- ------- ---- . . . .

I have protested to Bryant over the years against the use of misleading terms in applications for federal funding. It is a little late now for NEH and all other charitable funding organizations to take notice, but here is a warning: There is no known manuscript of TYPEE.

Can we not define our projects in ways that look less self-aggrandizing or self-magnifying? The work of transcribing and analyzing 16 manuscript leaves should be honorable enough to be described simply and accurately.

Indeed, making a careful transcription and analysis of the surviving leaves from Melville's first draft of TYPEE would have been an honorable enough enterprise for anyone. I thought my chapter on "The Sailor at the Writing Desk" was well worth doing, as an early attempt to make a narrative about young Melville as a working writer. I know very well how happy I would be to see a more minute analysis of the order in which Melville worked and a conscientious transcription of the words he put down on the paper on those 16 leaves, along with a full depiction of his arsenal of symbols for re-arranging bits of prose. Does anyone want a transcription guided by one person's "rhetorical agenda" instead of a determination to find what the author intended by each word?

I note now (16 April 2011) that Bryant's informative "Melville, 'Little Henry,' and the Process of Composition: A Peep at the TYPEE Fragment" is more accurately titled. A title with "Draft Fragment" or some other wording would have been better, but "TYPEE Fragment" gives adequate warning that Bryant is dealing not with a TYPEE Manuscript but just a fragment (a fragment of the first draft, in fact). Honesty in packaging takes thought, and this September 1986 title in Extracts 67 is not perfect but certainly better than the outright misrepresentations in Bryant's later wording.

John Bryant and the Old Notion of "Truth in Packaging"

This deserves a separate little note.

This is the full title of John Bryant's MELVILLE UNFOLDING: SEXUALITY, POLITICS, AND THE VERSIONS OF TYPEE: A FLUID-TEXT ANALYSIS, WITH AN EDITION OF THE TYPEE MANUSCRIPT.

What can the University of Michigan editors have thought they were doing when they allowed such a title?

There are no "Versions of Typee." There are versions of a handful of passages in Typee.

There exists no "Typee Manuscript" as far as anyone knows. There is NO SUCH THING.

There exist sixteen leaves from the first draft of Typee. As far as we know, this is all--one that had long been in the NYPL-GL, fifteen added as part of the 1983 "Augusta Papers."

16 Leaves and What Do You Get?
---- -- ---- -- ------- ---- . . . .

I have protested to Bryant over the years against the use of misleading terms in applications for federal funding. It is a little late now for NEH and all other charitable funding organizations to take notice, but here is a warning: There is no known manuscript of TYPEE.

Can we not define our projects in ways that look less self-aggrandizing or self-magnifying? The work of transcribing and analyzing 16 manuscript leaves should be honorable enough to be described simply and accurately.

Indeed, making a careful transcription and analysis of the surviving leaves from Melville's first draft of TYPEE would have been an honorable enough enterprise for anyone. I thought my chapter on "The Sailor at the Writing Desk" was well worth doing, as an early attempt to make a narrative about young Melville as a working writer. I know very well how happy I would be to see a more minute analysis of the order in which Melville worked and a conscientious transcription of the words he put down on the paper on those 16 leaves, along with a full depiction of his arsenal of symbols for re-arranging bits of prose. Does anyone want a transcription guided by one person's "rhetorical agenda" instead of a determination to find what the author intended by each word?

I note now (16 April 2011) that Bryant's informative "Melville, 'Little Henry,' and the Process of Composition: A Peep at the TYPEE Fragment" is more accurately titled. A title with "Draft Fragment" or some other wording would have been better, but "TYPEE Fragment" gives adequate warning that Bryant is dealing not with a TYPEE Manuscript but just a fragment (a fragment of the first draft, in fact). Honesty in packaging takes thought, and this September 1986 title in Extracts 67 is not perfect but certainly better than the outright misrepresentations in Bryant's later wording.

THE BOWERSY TALES

THE BOWERSY TALES

“GOD MAKES MISTAKES,  FREDSON DOESN’T”—A sentence vehemently and frequently uttered  by Matthew J. Bruccoli in Chicago in the summer of 1965.

              In 1973 or 1974 the editor of Nineteenth-Century Fiction handed me a copy of BOWERY TALES, the first volume of the Virginia edition of Stephen Crane. He did not want me to review it, as I remember. Perhaps he wanted me to find for myself that it had been cased upside and backwards in an outburst of symbolic bookbinding by some honest workman at Kingsport Press, for it proved to be almost unbelievably error-ridden, to start with, and almost unbelievably incompetent in its textual arguments and textual policies. I was horrified at the shoddy work in a book carrying the Seal of approval of the Center of Editions of American Authors, for this was close to the attacks by Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson on the CEAA, and here I saw evidence that could blacken the Melville edition by association. After agonizing weeks of trying to make sense of what Bowers’s crew had done, fighting off 1930s screen images of a mad-scientist laboratory, I decided that the only way the CEAA could gain any credibility was to rescind the Seal it had granted MAGGIE, the principal work in the volume. I wrote to Bruccoli, the Director of the CEAA, asking that the executive committee rescind the seal on the basis of a long article I enclosed. I will have to check to see if what I sent Bruccoli already contained passages written in collaboration with Brian Higgins, who collaborated on parts of the piece before it was first offered for print, in an annual where I had published in each volume. This became the Parker-Higgins MAGGIE article that no American textual journal would publish for fear of reprisals from Bowers. Bowers achieved this with bluster which began with only slightly veiled threats to sue the individual members of the CEAA Executive Committee if they rescinded the SEAL and perhaps even to sue the parent organization, the Modern Language Association.  A little later he blackballed me from the successor organization, the Center for Scholarly Editions, although he later denied doing so. Here I put bits of documents in sequence.

              Bowers was determined that the public would not know what I had to say about his MAGGIE and that the CEAA never reveal what he wrote in its defense and in denunciation of me. This brings up the great failure of the CEAA. The “vetting reports” from the first ought to have been made available to all editors of CEAA volumes and to all members of the MLA, for they were, at least at first, produced with federal money. By keeping the reports private, seen only by the parties involved and the executive committee, no editors of the other CEAA volumes had a chance to learn from what was being discussed in other editions. This was suicidal. I happened to see what was going on in several editions because I was for a time the most-used vettor, and examining a variety of textual problems in different writers was a powerful fast education. Everyone ought to have had that opportunity to learn.