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Bringing Out the Archive: Memories
David Hayman
It
came pretty much ‘out of the blue’, though I had heard rumblings. Walton
Litz called to ask if I would join the team contemplating a facsimile edition
of all the Joyce manuscripts. He told me that Gavin Borden, the
head of the facsimile publication house, Garland Press, was so enthusiastic
about Joyce and especially about Ulysses that the edition was his
dream. It was 1975, and suddenly, what had seemed impossible when I started
work on my First-Draft Version nineteen years earlier was seriously
contemplated by a serious scholar with a palpable publisher. Of course
I agreed though it took me a while to believe that anything would come
of anything that quixotic. Was there really a market for those images?
Would the estate grant permission? Could a private press really swing the
expense? Etc.
My
First-Draft
Version had been produced with the help of the most modern technologies:
eye-killing micro-film projectors, portable typewriters, colored pencils
and snail mail. Though the manuscripts were available, there was no way
to type from them in the wonderfully silent Rare Books Room of the British
Museum. The cost of photocopies was and remains exorbitant. I remembered
how many times my poor wife typed my hand-written versions and then retyped
them with my corrections, how much time was spent finding ways to approximate
the creative process. My rationale for doing all that was that publication
of the manuscripts was out of the question, but versions of the drafts
plus a draft catalogue would give scholars access and whet appetites. (It
did, and in ways I could not have predicted.) In 1975, the idea that all
of the Wake manuscripts would be available (for a price) was immense.
A facsimile edition could occasion an explosion of scholarship. Of course
I had no idea how much work it would be or how much I myself could learn
from the experience.
According
to Michael Groden, Gavin had been inspired by Harry Levin, a master teacher
if there ever was one. Apparently, Levin spoke of the Joyce manuscripts
in his undergraduate class in Joyce. This reminded me of my own experience.
When I was a student in Paris writing what became Joyce et Mallarmé,
Lucie Noel got me an appointment with Levin, then visiting professor at
the Sorbonne.I told him that I had
gone to Buffalo in the summer of 1952 to study the recently inaugurated
collection. He responded by telling me about Harriet Weaver’s donation
to the British Museum. That was enough to inspire my first visit (1954)
and indirectly spark all that followed, including this reminiscence.
According to Groden[1] , Walton Litz was the third person approached by Gavin (after Ellmann and Staley). Before I read Mike’s essay, I had a picture of the clubable Walt charming the upper crust Gavin on a golf course in Princeton. As Mike says, Gavin had no knowledge of Finnegans Wake and certainly knew nothing of the enormous quantity of Wake materials. In the event, despite its bulk, the Wake played second fiddle to the rest of the oeuvre and especially to Ulysses.This is understandable, given its position in the world of Joyce scholarship at the time. Besides, though he had been the first to study the British Museum manuscripts and the second after me to publish on them, Walt was never that interested in the minutiae of Wake manuscripts, and the other members of the original committee (Hans Walter Gabler and Mike) were focussed exclusively on the early work. Still, there was no getting around the fact that of all the books, only that monster text had the fullest genetic record, a record so full that it should have been seen as daunting. I suspect that, along with the others, Gavin didn’t know quite what he had rushed into. He was certainly, frequently, visibly, and audibly disturbed by what ensued.
Garland had made its name by publishing facsimiles of out of print source materials in limited editions and marketing them largely to educational institutions; so the business and production methods were already in place. But facsimiles of unpublished and largely unedited materials were not in its line and the risks were real. I credit Gavin and especially Litz, the elder statesman, and Groden, the facilitator, for the success of the project. I also credit Garland’s very capable staff. Did I say that Gavin could be abrasive? Fortunately, Litz and he had good chemistry.
Preparatory
to Anything
I myself began to take the Garland project seriously a few months after Litz’s telephone call when I was summoned to our first meeting as a committee in New York. Present were Gavin, Walt, Mike Groden and me. Hans Gabler had also been recruited, but he never met with us. Much had been accomplished before my first meeting. Walt had enlisted Groden, his prize student, to organize the materials, locate the manuscripts, and head the project. Gavin had taken care of the finances and gotten permission from the estate and agreements from most of the libraries. The presentation of the collection had been established. (It was to conform to Garland’s other collections.) There had been some question about the inclusion of the Wake notebooks, probably on Gavin’s part, but in consultation with Mike, by recommending a double-page quadruple-page format, I had assured their publication.
The
meeting was called partly for my benefit: to familiarize me with the details
of the project and introduce me to Gavin. But it was called mainly to firm
some things up and face some unresolved problems. Permissions were in,
but several universities were balking.We
discussed and fixed upon strategies, not all of which succeeded. (One library
never did agree.) Since the formats of the manuscripts varied widely as
did the conventions of the various libraries, we did not yet have a page
count. Nevertheless, as Mike has noted, Garland had to fix the number of
volumes for a variety of reasons, so, without knowing how large each would
be, we decided on 63. We had no sense of how long it would take to edit
each of them or even when we would have all of the permissions. (In the
end the Wake volumes, by far the most original were finished and
published before some of the earlier ones.) At Mike’s suggestion, we settled
on a sufficiently bland descriptive title, one that has served very well
indeed.
The
nature and extent of the introductory material would depend on the problems
raised by each volume, but even the overall principles had yet to be decided.
Nevertheless, for practical business reasons, a printing schedule had to
be approximated. Unlike a university press, which can afford to take its
time, a press like Garland needs to see product promptly and minimize uncertainty.
To that end and reluctantly, we agreed to publish volumes as they matured
rather than in logical order. That made it impossible to number them with
the result that consultation was bound to be cumbersome. After all these
years, I still find myself turning to the back of the JJQ for the Wake-related
numbers, though, however clumsily, Groden’s Index can serve the
same function.
Then
there was the matter of dividing the spoils. Litz and Gabler had already
decided to limit their contribution to the early work. Groden, fresh from
his dissertation and his book, could easily handle Ulysses alone,
though others had been considered. This on top of being general editor.
That left the Wake. We knew it would be big, especially if we included
the notebooks. I agreed to take it on, but after trying to reorient myself
in relation to my ‘Draft Catalogue’, I thought that someone else should
do the arrangement. I suggested Clive Hart with whom I liked working. Clive
initially agreed. Later, he bowed out in the face of his heavy administrative
duties at Essex. It was his suggestion that led to the inclusion of suggesting
an unknown private scholar, a Wake Newslitter veteran, named Danis
Rose. (Clive wrote me that he would not turn into a Dalton.) Rose turned
out to be a popular and convenient choice because he was already planning
his edition of Finnegans Wake. (By that time Gabler’s edition was
well advanced and it was assumed that, with such a function, the Archive
was assured a good scholarly reception.[2] )
None of us knew how young Danis was, or how ambitious. I
had no idea that he would opt for a system so complex that I still have
trouble navigating it. In the end, he made very few changes in the more
user-friendly account given in the First-Draft Version. More about
this later.
The
result of these developments, plus some later improvisations, was a revolutionary
edition produced in incredibly short order. But that success, and it was
one, was shadowed by collateral byproducts. The first was the aforementioned
absence of volume numbers. Another was the absence of coherent tables of
contents, which makes consultation of the Ulysses volumes particularly
difficult, though the Wake volumes also raise serious problems. In theory,
of course, Rose’s charts should serve that function. Instead, because they
were designed to serve his edition, they reach a level of bewildering complexity,
obliging readers in search of particular passages to depend on my introductions,
where they will find no page references.This
would probably not have been the case if we had had time to organize the
collection as a unit.
Ultimately, the most serious consequence was built into the project from the start. Garland’s operating principle was to publish single and very limited runs and to sell them to institutions at rather high prices. The assumption was that only libraries and the very dedicated scholar or enthusiast would be interested in what were frequently arcane materials. As for the Archive, how many bibliographers and critics could there be with a deep interest in Joycean sweepings? At the time there were very few, and it appeared that most of them were on our board. There was never any plan to print a second edition, which would have been fairly easy at the time. Unfortunately, when a market appeared, it was too late to rethink, or so it appears. By that time the remaining Wake volumes had been snapped up at bargain prices. Now, until some better choice comes along, future genetic scholars will have to go to institutional libraries to do their research.
By
now, the existence of the Archive, the invention
of the ‘web,’ and the expansion of Genetic Criticism have led to significant
usage and great advances. The Joyce section of ITEM in Paris, which has
over the years held a series of remarkable conferences devoted to manuscript
studies has been seconded by an equally active Antwerp group. Though originally
at cross purposes (Post-Structuralist vs ‘Radical Philology’), the two
groups have combined forces, participating in each other’s conferences
and publications. The latter, reinforced by journal and book publications,
have attracted growing attention at Joyce conferences. Most recently, we
have the quixotic-seeming edition of The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at
Buffalo, edited by the Paris, Antwerp, Buffalo troika consisting of
Ferrer, Lernout, and Deane. In a sense, the notebook volumes of the Archive
were and remain Garland’s most challenging and original contribution. Who
could have predicted that when the question of their inclusion was raised?
At that time they were terra incognita.
Process:
the Chapters
It
took a while for things to shake out, for the remaining permissions to
come, for Clive to decide, for Mike’s series introduction to be written
and revised, for the bibliography to be established, for Rose to get his
system in motion, and for galleys of the facsimiles to appear. It was only
then that I began work on my descriptions of the chapters’ genetics. We
did them in the order in which they cleared the system, that is, out of
sequence. To do each one I had to have Danis’ ‘Draft Analysis’ in front
of me.
Having
spent years reading, transcribing, rereading, etc. the early drafts, I
had plenty of experience with their contents. But I had never before meticulously
followed the revision process through all the drafts, typescripts, proofs,
page proofs and galleys. A tedious but necessary process, it was also enlightening.I
saw things that would not have been revealed by any other approach: creative
shifts, false starts, lost revisions, . . .. I even found first-drafts
(especially in Book II) I had not included in my book.But
then there are many things that escaped me even after the JJA reading.
Just recently, while preparing my genetic essay on II.3, I realized that
I had overlooked the way Joyce tardily constructed the brilliant transitional
passages including what turns out to have been the last passage written
and revised for the Wake.
The
masochistic intensity of my JJA reading process was motivated partly by
my curiosity, but mostly by my belief that the introductions to each volume
should justify Danis’s arrangement while rationalizing Joyce’s moves. The
latter gave me fewer problems than the former because Danis’s method required
my reorientation. Frequently, I had questions and Danis had to justify
his decisions. Generally, we managed to agree and the arrangement is probably
better for it. Only once was our disagreement so strong that I simply threw
up my hands and suggested that he write his own introduction. All of this
was done by mail, sometimes through Mike. Incidentally, despite our interaction,
I have never met Danis (or his brother).
My
approach obliged me to set up a temporary space lit by a naked bulb in
our basement. That was the only place where I could work steadily night
after night and all weekend for months on end. I actually enjoyed the process
perhaps because the challenge was more mechanical than intellectual. Even
though my method had to be elastic enough to accommodate the many different
approaches used in the chapters, I quickly found a pace that was both efficient
and satisfying, but hardly speedy.
The
whole editorial process was taking time, often more time than Gavin would
bear. Having announced the appearance of the series, he saw himself and
Garland as under the gun to produce. Since he did not understand (or value
much) the Wake
and since so much of the edition was given over to
that book, he put the most pressure on us. We resisted as best we could,
but I took most of the blame. I sometimes wonder if, given more time, we
wouldn’t have produced a marginally better product. On the other hand,
it could have taken years to do so.
During
this period, Mike and I spent weeks in New York overseeing the editorial
process. It was then that I got to know Elspeth Hart, the extremely competent
and discrete, and very smart daughter of Kenneth Burke. Together we made
some important decisions about formatting and other things. To cut expenses,
Gavin put us up in his club, the Knickerbocker, permitting me to live in
a style to which I was unaccustomed on the lower edge of Central Park.
What I remember about the place was the air of privilege and exclusivity,
the good breakfasts, and the claw-footed tub in my rather spartan and distinctly
unmodern room.
Process:
the Notebooks
Originally,
I had been assigned the whole run of notebooks, a monumental project, given
the fact that I had studied only a few of them. Originally, we planned
to give them no more than summary treatment. It was only later that I decided
we should give them fuller treatment, cutting through the apparent chaos
with a cross between a table of contents and a summary. The possibility
of doing this, the need to do it in the service of ease of access and eventually,
scholarship, only gradually dawned on me.
My
notebook experience dated of course from my first trip to Buffalo, but
at that time my focus was limited by thesis concerns, wrongheaded for the
most part. I wanted to find evidence of Joyce’s interest in Stephane Mallarmé.
That, and my curiosity about all things Joycean, led me to flip through
all of the documents.In the process
I discovered the Tristan notes in VI.A, which were to prove important for
my later work.
Editorial
work on the first-drafts led me back for a second, more thorough look,
an attempt to understand the notebooks’ contribution to the genetic process.
Still later, I began making transcriptions from microfilm copies in an
attempt to clarify my views. I believed then and I still believe that amidst
the jumble of source-based factoids there lurk some clues to the workings
of Joyce’s mind.Those probes continued
sporadically for years, yielding relatively little publication (beside
my study of the Tristan materials). In the process, though at one time
or another I reviewed all of the notebooks, I developed a thorough knowledge
of only a handful. In the meantime, Jack Dalton, inspired by my introduction,
began trumpeting his intention to publish an edition. (He called me one
evening to find out how serious my current notebook work was.) I don’t
know for certain, but it seems plausible that Rose’s work was a response
to Dalton’s as was Roland McHugh’s, and others in the Newslitter
group, including Vincent Deane. This was by no means a bad thing, but,
given my less than constant attention, it left me somewhat behind.
Then
came the Archive. Before we began editing, I went with Mike and
Garland’s photographer, Bill Ludwig, to the embattled Buffalo Poetry Collection
to reproduce and paginate the notebooks. The librarian, Karl Gay, who had
been more than decent to me in the 50s, decided that we were the enemy
or worse, thieves, bent on stealing the collections crown jewels. He gave
us the silent treatment assigning an assistant to us as a mute page-turner.
I felt and it has turned out that we were doing the collection a real service
by at once exhibiting the fragile notebook’s content, publicizing it, and
making overuse less likely.
We
spent at different times good chunks of time supervising the project and
numbering pages, itself an important contribution to scholarship.Since
Buffalo, which was recovering from the heaviest snow storm in its history,
offers few diversions despite its hospitable faculty, there was plenty
of time to cast a unprogrammed eye on the notebooks’ contents. While Bill
did the photographing, I did the numbering. In the process, I began jotting
down anomalies. What struck me most forcefully was Joyce’s continued interest
in the sort of moments enshrined earlier in his epiphanies. I had no idea
what he was hoping to do with these highly personal observations when preparing
to write a book that would be relatively unmoored from the everyday behavioral
detail. Nor did I know how many of them there were (about 500 by the latest
count). At the time it did not matter. These were of course only one class
of engrossing entry. But my survey was, given time constraints, cursory.
At that stage all I could do was familiarize myself with the range of content
and concentrations of interest. It was then that I began tentatively compiling
internal evidence for the dating of each notebook, using and reacting to
the work of Peter Spielberg and Roland McHugh.Evenings
in my motel room all of this was further refined and systematized.
During
the (xerox) photographing process we noticed that the reproductions could
be more readable than the originals and tried filtering out the coloured
strikeouts to add more clarity. Color was actually a big issue. Gay was
insisting on color reproductions, and we knew that the strikeouts could
be keyed to specific campaigns and hence specific passages. But our budget
ruled out such extravagance. To compensate, Mike had the idea of photographing
the big notebook (VI.A or “Scribbledehobble”) in color. One of my duties
was to record the colors of the crayons as we progressed, but I quickly
found that, though Joyce used a limited number, there was often a range
of tones which could refine our results. It was soon clear, however, that
recording them with precision was difficult if not impossible, and we decided
that not recording them precisely would be wrong. Time was also a factor.
Dilemma. Finally, Mike cut the knot by simply and rapidly scanning the
pages, limiting himself to the primary colors. The lists appear at the
end of each volume.They are no
less useful I should say than the colors listed in the notebook edition,
and since we can’t systematically compare at close range notebook and manuscript
entries, we will have to be content with the imperfect but adequate.[3]
Some
time between Buffalo and the arrival of the reproductions, Danis Rose convinced
Gavin that things would be sped up if he did half the notebooks. Though
I was surprised, I had no serious objections. We decided that I would do
the earlier notebooks (those numbered between 1 and 24) and he would take
the remainder including the C series.That
seemed fair since my interest was in the early stages of the creative process.
I wasn’t prepared, however, for the co-opting of VI.A, a notebook on which
I had lavished much attention and even contemplated including as an appendix
to my First-Draft Version. Perhaps under pressure to keep it short,
perhaps because he saw no reason to go into it in depth, perhaps because
he recognized how complicated the notebook history actually is, Danis provided
only a schematic overview of the notebook, paying next to no attention
to its contents. We must remember that the introduction was written before
we had settled on a descriptive format.This
had been another of Gavin’s decisions. Now I can say, never mind, because
in the long run it was a good thing. It left the field open for more detailed
work on that complex, intriguing, and still puzzling document.In
saying relatively little, Danis said nothing outrageous.
Anxious
and impatient, Gavin gave Danis the nod because he found our progress slow
and because Danis had assured him that the notebooks were less of a problem
than the chapters.I suspect that
that opinion was based partly on his knowledge of the work of other Newslitter
enthusiasts, partly on his own considerable expertise. He had already written
his study of the ‘Index Notebook.’
My
approach was dictated by curiosity and enthusiasm rather than an established
position . From the start, I tried to see what was there and describe what
emerged when I attentively parsed every page.Gradually,
my attention was caught by a handful of categories (some of them noticed
during the Buffalo stays): autobiographical detail (often with initials),
literary (names of writers), books (titles), personal observations (epiphanoids),
conceptuals (forecasts of later developments), and important clusters of
notes devoted to specific subject matter or topics. Add to this the occasional
peculiarity of format or image.This
made the introductions a bit fuller than the others expected, but after
an initial reluctance to let me have my head (resulting some radical editing)
the others acquiesced. As a result, the notebooks were given treatments
full enough to highlight aspects that might be useful or suggestive. This
approach influenced the ITEM group’s decision to begin its study of notebook
19.
In
a considered attempt to refine the dates posited by Steinberg (generally
loose approximations) and McHugh (more rigorous), I studied each notebook
for evidence. My opening paragraphs laid out what I saw as facts and drew
conclusions that often differed from those of my predecessors. Among other
things, I used the dates established in my ‘Draft Catalogue’ buttressing
them with information in Ellmann’s volumes of the Joyce letters and his
biography to date specific entries and establish patterns. Though I saw
my dates as approximations, I presented them with what assurance I could
muster and gave the evidence that I felt justified them.
After
a slow start, Danis followed my example, though he highlighted different
categories. He began by accepting McHugh’s dates, but gradually established
his own, many of which he altered in Textual Diaries where he presented
a remarkably fresh and on the whole convincing set of dates, though without
laying out his evidence. My experience using his introductions has on the
whole been positive. Indeed, our collaboration proved to be a good one
in the end. The important thing was to present the notebooks as coherently
as was possible at the time so that others could further advance their
study.
In
the ensuing years, great progress has been made. Vincent Deane, Geert Lernout
and his group, and Daniel Ferrer and the ITEM group have been persistent
and productive.Already an important
key to the creative process, the notebooks are now in the process of becoming
fully available to scholarship and criticism.
[3] I faced a similar dilemma when editing the first drafts.When in the British Museum Library I was struck by the differences in format, papers, watermarks, notebooks, and even writing materials used.Believing them to be important, I made a careful record that remains among my papers.It could not be included in the already complex and expensive edition.Doubtless, had it been included, it would have caused further controversy, butI still regret its absence since it too could be of bibliographic and even genetic interest, perhaps answering questions and settling disputes.To my knowledge, no one has pursued this avenue in the interim.
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