To the Editors:
As a member of the editorial team that oversaw the critical edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I feel it is my prerogative and duty to comment on the extraordinary article, “The Scandal of Ulysses,” by John Kidd that appeared in the June 30 issue of The New York Review of Books. In the first place, I should like to set the record straight on an important point: Kidd asserts that the edition was based on facsimiles; this is quite simply untrue. The first transcriptions were made from facsimiles (no other procedure would have been practicable) but these were later checked against the originals personally by Professor Gabler. He is equally wrong in saying that all of the transcriptions were made in Munich; those of the early drafts and of the Rosenbach Manuscript were in fact (perhaps appropriately!) made in Dublin.
Kidd has, admittedly, uncovered a small number of errors in the 1984 Ulysses (for which he should be thanked), but he has deliberately exaggerated the moment of these out of all sane proportion and has attached them to false (in some cases, knowingly false) allegations, misrepresentations, innuendoes and insults (for which he should be censured). Of the two most significant errors (the name-changes of Thrift and Buller), neither one has anything relevant to the relative merits of facsimiles/originals. Consulting my own notes, I find that the original transcription of Frank Budgen’s hand in the Rosenbach correctly rendered “Thrift.” The transcription in its entirety was then independently checked three times (twice from the facsimile and once from the original). How, then, did the error “Shrift” originate? I do not have access to the notes of the other members of the team, but I can hazard a guess: through a most unusual combination of events at the stage of investigating the typescript. Joyce’s typist had first read “Shrift” and had then overprinted the “S” with “T” (JJA13–30). A query, “S or T?” was possibly made, and this checked back against the Rosenbach. Budgen’s “T” in “Thrift” does look like an “S,” but then he used that particular form regularly. Unfortunately, right next to “Thrift” on the manuscript page is “T.M. Patey”; this capital “T” is a more run-of-the-mill “T” and, indeed, is unmistakably a “T”. A wrong choice was made, and for one reason or another, this was not referred back to the original readers of the Rosenbach, thus effectively cancelling the checkings. What does this prove?: that all procedures, no matter how carefully contrived, are susceptible to human error. The case of Buller/Culler is simpler. Contrary to Kidd’s assertion, it is quite clear from the facsimile that Joyce wrote “Buller” and that the printer’s marking is an “e”; anyone mistaking that “e” for a “C” would be equally likely to do so from the original as from the facsimile and, in fact, apparently did.
In preparing the critical edition of Ulysses, editor Gabler had approximately 1,000,000 (one million) words to “locate, collate and relate”; the other members of the team had smaller, but nonetheless substantial, problems. The final text was constructed, word by word, from the extant manuscripts and by inference from the lost manuscripts. Each individual word and punctuation mark had to be assessed, not merely to see that it corresponded “diplomatically” to the holograph (where it existed) but also to inquire whether there might be bibliographical or textual/critical reasons why it should be emended. Only after all this work was completed was the Historical Collation (the list of 5000 “corrections”) generated automatically by a computer program. In principle, therefore, the “corrections” are irrelevant to the edition. At no time was their number or nature a consideration in the editing. Yet Kidd outrageously, preposterously, and, frankly, quite slanderously suggests that the Society of Authors (representing the Estate of James Joyce) somehow conspired in ensuring that the Historical Collation would yield the kind of result that it did in order to support a new copyright.
It is easier to destroy (or, to try to destroy) than it is to create. Kidd’s wearisome, four-year-long campaign against the edition has concentrated upon the five thousand “corrections.” With regard to the case of Thrift/Shrift, Kidd inquires: Did it occur to anyone to check whether Thrift was a real person before changing him to Shrift? But, according to the procedures and philosophy of the editing, it was assumed (honestly, if mistakenly) that no change had taken place. Such extra-textual investigations were only carried out in those cases where emendations to the Joyce holograph were felt to be called for. If Shrift had been investigated, then logically so should Messrs. Green, Patey, Scaife, Jeffs, Morphy, Stevenson, Adderly, and Huggard, not to mention the thousands of other names in Ulysses. Did Kidd do this? I very much doubt it. If the editors had done so (if indeed it could have been done, bearing in mind the burning of the records during the Irish Civil War), what would have been the result of the mammoth historical research? Textual-critically, it would have amounted to inadmissable evidence according to the methodology of the edition.
The third and last of Kidd’s name changes, Conolly/Connolly, is instructive in illustrating his (lack of) scholarly integrity and the ethics of his presentation. When I read his analysis, I felt it mighty odd that he should have noted the spelling “Conolly” in seven places (most of them very obscure) in Thom’s Dublin Directory. Referring to my own copy, I discovered precisely why this was so. In the most obvious place where I, or Kidd, or Joyce, would look up Mr. Norman—the alphabetical list of the “Nobility, Gentry, Merchants and Traders” at the back of the book (the section that includes John Joyce and that, indeed, Kidd looked up for “Buller”)—his name is printed as “Connolly Norman”; i.e. the identical form that Joyce wrote down in the Rosenbach Manuscript. Further, the list includes only one cross-reference (to his home address on the North Circular Road convenient to the Richmond) and, notably, here also his name is spelled “Connolly.” Why did Kidd not see fit to include this relevant information in his article? I submit, because it is his unscholarly practice to suppress evidence not supportive of his claims.
Kidd cites his article “Gaelic in the New Ulysses” in the Irish Literary Supplement (Fall, 1985) and repeats his claim that in the critical edition the “Irish Gaelic is botched.” Apart from the oblique reference—the switch from “Gaelic” to “Irish Gaelic” (a definite improvement!)—he does not mention that his article was resoundingly refuted in detail by Danis Rose in the Spring, 1986, issue of the same journal in a paper entitled “Irish and/or Gaelic in the New Ulysses: a reply to John Kidd.” Rose uncovered more editorial blunders in Kidd’s short article than Kidd had published concerning the whole Ulysses edition. Furthermore, Rose acknowledged the minority of three or four instances where Kidd’s analysis of the Irish genuinely called for new footnotes or emendations to the presentation in the critical edition. No such return of acknowledgement and scholarly dialogue is forthcoming from Kidd.
On the subject of unexamined archives, Kidd writes:
I turned up a postcard from Joyce to the typist Claud Sykes with textual alterations; its existence was denied in The New York Times, April 29, 1985, page B2. Robert Bertholf, the curator of rare books at SUNY-Buffalo, produced the card.
The full story of this postcard is quite otherwise and suggests an entirely new meaning for the words “I turned up.” Not the card itself, but a garbled version of what it contained was sprung on Gabler while in New York. From textual/critical considerations, Gabler did not believe that such a card could exist. His initial inquiries to SUNY-Buffalo elicited a negative response. To continue in Gabler’s words I include here an open letter dated 21 May, 1985:
For the Information of Whom It May Concern
From a personal letter to Dr. John Kidd, Charlottesville (Va.):
The business, such as you have chosen to publicize it, about the postcard from Joyce to Sykes from Locarno dated 19.XII.17 is entirely a red herring. The postcard itself has now surfaced. It contains two instructions which Sykes carried out and which consequently are followed by all texts, including that of the critical edition. (Regardless of whether or not the card had in fact been preserved, its onetime existence was inferrable, and had of course been tacitly assumed by us, from the inscription of one of the changes in Sykes’ hand in the Rosenbach MS.)
The card does not instruct Sykes to change an “on” to an “over.” Jack Dalton considered the possibility of making this change editorially on the grounds that, in the context quoted on the postcard in order to place one of the explicit instructions, an “on” of the Rosenbach MS is given as “over.” Dalton collated all printed texts from the first edition onwards as well as the Rosenbach MS and found them all to agree in “on.” He reached the decision not to change partly on the basis of this agreement, but more importantly by evaluating all contextual links, both those in the ‘passage in question and those of potential parallel passages in the first two chapters of Ulysses.
The entire story of Dalton’s assembling and evaluating the evidence to reach his verdict: “no S1” (i.e., “do not change to ‘over,’ but follow the first edition reading”) is encoded on one of his index cards. This index card was the source of your information. You did not know and did not understand Dalton’s conventions of encoding information and decisions on his cards. Now did you seek out the Buffalo postcard to make sure you understood the issue.
The Dalton cards—his memoranda to himself about his research findings, featuring much private code—were seen by you in Munich last January, when I offered you the opportunity to take a look at them. Much of the time I sat in my office next door and would have been available at any time to discuss queries. (While you had merely a couple of hasty afternoons with the cards, my familiarity with them was formed over a long time of using them.) You preferred to appropriate clandestinely a fragmentary piece of information and, irresponsibly mistaking your understanding of it for the truth of the matter, never bothered to seek verification. Thus compounding professional ineptitude with an act of personal double-dealing you rushed before the public to disparage my scholarly integrity. This I deeply resent. I expect you to seek, and I hope you will find ways to redress the insult and injury.
H.W.G.
Far from seeking ways to redress, Kidd has repeated and compounded the insult and the injury. One can but marvel (and even perhaps perversely admire) the nerve of the man posing as a friendly colleague in Gabler’s office in Munich only a few weeks before he launched his vitriolic campaign. Present-day patrons of Kidd, take note: watch your files and your backs!
