The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Philip Gaskell’s letter [Letters, NYR, January 19] endeavours to set right some misleading speculations in Charles Rossman’s “The New ‘Ulysses’: The Hidden Controversy” [NYR, December 8, 1988]. Yet it seems not to have helped Rossman with the questions that trouble him.

When the James Joyce Estate accepted my proposal to edit Ulysses, they also asked three Joyce scholars of their choice to advise them. Richard Ellmann’s, Philip Gaskell’s and Clive Hart’s advice to the Estate was extended as assistance to the editor. Naturally, the edition benefited materially from the scrutiny they gave the editorial work in draft stages. From the very outset, however, I assumed full scholarly responsibility for the edition and made it clear that, in the event of disagreements, I would not relinquish nor accept curtailments of it.

The cooperation with the Estate and their advisers was good. How and why it was that two of the advisers nevertheless, and only at a very late stage, were unprepared to respond to the full implications of the over-all editorial concept, is not for me to say. The concept itself had been there to grasp from the beginning, since it was demonstrated in the trial chapter on which my proposal was based. The advisers made two moves which both deserve respect. One was to try to sway me into altering my procedure in one important, though strictly circumscribed area of Joyce’s text for Ulysses. The other was to stand by their advisory obligation to the Estate and not dissociate themselves, in the end, from the edition which in their own words they regarded as “prepared with a quite exceptional degree of scholarly expertise.” On my part, I upheld my concept. The advisers’ final stance implies their acceptance of an edition which, though not in every detail the one they would have established had they been the editors, is nonetheless a possible and defensible representation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In no way is the edition a compromise.

The area of dispute is easily specified. The Estate’s advisers did and do not distinguish documents and text. Seeing that certain documents—the author’s fair copies, in particular, of some of the novel’s episodes—are outside the line of transmission, they consider unique readings from them inadmissible to the critical text. This is a possible attitude, and many textual critics would hold it. Yet it is a purely formal one, and I do not subscribe to it in my solution to the problem of editing Ulysses. The documents in question show revisions, demonstrable or critically ascertainable, which only by the accidents of Joyce’s writing habits did not descend to the published text. Even though the documents stand outside the line of transmission, I accept such revisions in direct line of the development of the text. For instance: of the seedcake which Molly passed into Leopold Bloom’s mouth, Joyce writes first that it was “sweet and sour with spittle.” In revision, he makes it “sweetsour of her spittle,” poetically condensing the adjectives into an oxymoronic compound, and adding the personal pronoun to intensify the recall in Bloom’s memory. The revised reading is admitted to the critical text although it happens to be unique to a document outside the line of transmission. Not to admit it were to suspend a critical insight in favour of a strictly formal procedure. Either decision is defensible, and each gives a Joycean reading. Whether an editor, on argued grounds, chooses the one Joycean alternative or the other, he does not corrupt the text. If the “New Ulysses” incurs no editorial compromise, it is also not corrupt.

On our joint objective to free Ulysses of corruptions, Philip Gaskell’s letter is quite clear. In two thirds (or some 320) of 484 readings he would not wish to go along with the edited Ulysses because in these, as he says, it adopts text from outside the line of transmission. This, by his count, leaves 160-odd readings where we would still differ. If Gaskell’s copytext, as I assume, is the first edition, whereas mine is what I have termed a “continuous manuscript text,” it is truly remarkable that we should come so close in the editorial result. For it amounts, on his part, to a very extensive emendation of the first edition—which indeed, as he states, requires editorial changes in close to 1700 “(predominantly) verbal alterations” alone.

Figures, however, are not the answer to the questions—spurious or legitimate—that have arisen around the “New Ulysses.” What I have said concerning the Gaskell-Rossman exchange in your issue of January 19 should suffice to indicate that a knowledgeable argument takes a completely different direction from the one for which Charles Rossman falls. My remarks should also emphasize that the debate around Ulysses must seek levels of distinction and understanding that have been lacking in The New York Review of Books.

Hans Walter Gabler
Institute for English Philology
University of Munich
Munich, West Germany

To the Editors:

John Kidd writes [Letters, NYR, December 8, 1988, p. 62] in his discussion of the Conolly/Connolly question that “the man’s real name was being rejected in favor of the spelling in the Rosenbach Manuscript.” This raises, in the mind of an interested observer, two issues. What was the man’s real name and what authority does the Rosenbach Manuscript have in the transmission of Ulysses?

In previous correspondence [NYR, June 30, 1988, p. 33, and Letters, September 29, 1988, p. 81] Dr. Kidd cited Thom’s Directory as the major source for the single “n” spelling and this has been discussed in their responses by John O’Hanlon and Michael Groden. In this latest stage of the argument, Dr. Kidd cites J.B. Lyons, author of James Joyce and Medicine (1974), as a further authority supporting the single “n,” stating that Lyons “went to considerable trouble to identify the doctors mentioned in Ulysses.” He quotes “for example” a passage from p. 145 of this work which in its one mention of “Conolly” spells it with the single “n.” But this is the only mention of the name in the course of the book, not merely a single example; in the index the name, as Dr. Kidd acknowledges, is spelt “Connolly.” 50/50 choice—hardly firm or definitive proof. Indeed, if Dr. Kidd had examined the latest work by Dr. Lyons, Thrust Syphilis Down to Hell and Other Rejoyceana (1988), he would have found “Connolly” spelt consistently with a double “n” on the four instances it appears in the book in addition to the index. Furthermore, one of those instances is as caption to a portrait of the “real man.” In addition, Lyons goes so far as to correct the spelling of the quotation taken from p. 12 of the 1968 Penguin edition of the novel from “Conolly” to “Connolly.” In other words, Dr. Kidd’s fresh authority makes the same amendment as Professor Gabler. One further source which might also be cited for the “real name” is Who’s He When He’s At Home compiled by Shari and Bernard Benstock (1980) where “Conolly” is acknowledged as the version appearing in Ulysses (Random House, 1961) but “Connolly” is given as the “real name.”

Some readers may by this point ask: does it matter? Yes, because the astringent debate about the status of the 1984 edition revolves round such details and each one when eventually revealed by Dr. Kidd must be dealt with in turn, either to accept or to reject, but in every case to be discussed fully. This may lead to an eclectic editorial method but the circumstances of the composition and publication of Ulysses demand it. (It may also be noted in passing that the Conolly/Connolly decision, and some others of Dr. Kidd’s “errors,” was first questioned by the late Charles Peake at the 1985 Monaco conference, in a paper reprinted in Assessing the 1984 Ulysses edited by George Sandelescu and Clive Hart [1986].)

However, the more substantial issue of editorial principle and textual authority which is raised implicitly by Charles Rossman’s discussion of the correspondence leading to both the 1984 and 1986 editions, “The New ‘Ulysses’: The Hidden Controversy” [NYR, December 8, 1988], demands equal debate. The further reply by Dr. Rossman to Philip Gaskell [Letters, NYR, January 19] underlines a certain naïveté about editorial method that was, I feel, present also in the earlier article. One gains the impression, rightly or wrongly, that Dr. Rossman believes that a perfect, “uncorrupted” text of Ulysses, somehow free of critical judgements, upon which the entire body of Joycean scholars would agree, is a possibility. It is not. All those interested in the text of Ulysses probably possess a copy of some edition covered with annotations and corrections which each regards as the best possible text. There will be, however, no absolute agreement upon either the corrections or the criteria by which they were made. Decisions have to be made; there are balances of probability; all back their own judgement. So Philip Gaskell and Clive Hart disagree with a number of Professor Gabler’s critical judgements and would propose their own changes to his edition but neither, I presume, would champion any pre-existing edition over Gabler’s.

In the case of the Conolly/Connolly decision, the single “n” spelling is attested to by the printing of this particular episode in the Little Review, by the galley proofs of its proposed but never executed printing in the Egoist, and by the French printer’s first placards (proofs) of the first edition of the novel. The double “n” exists in the Rosenbach manuscript, a holograph fair copy of the novel prepared by Joyce for sale to supplement his income. The Rosenbach manuscript predates any of the sources for “n.” The judgement has to be made whether the later material represents Joyce’s final thoughts on the matter, either by making a deliberate alteration or by approving by act of omission an alteration made by a third party—typist, printer, whatever—or whether the later material represents a corruption of Joyce’s words. In this particular instance, there seems no reason why Joyce would make or authorise the change from “Connolly” to “Conolly” and there is no extant evidence from letters or postcards to the typist, for instance, confirming his involvement in the change. So the balance of probability swings towards “Connolly” and so Professor Gabler made the emendation. The fact that the real Connolly was spelt thus does not in itself justify the change but it does confirm it.

It was Clive Hart himself who wrote, in his essay in the collection edited by George Sandelescu and himself, of “the perfect Ulysses, totally harmonious, entirely errorfree, the Ulysses that has never existed, can never exist.” The solution is not to abandon Professor Gabler’s work. The Critical and Synoptic Edition of 1984 represents both a work of some scholarship and a source of textual data. The Corrected Edition of 1986, the trade edition, should not, however, stand inviolate through successive printings but Professor Gabler should be given the opportunity by Random House and Penguin to make further changes if he is swayed in his critical judgement by present and future discussions. In the meantime, each of us can continue to annotate and “correct” our copy of Gabler as we did with editions of the past. Alistair McCleery
Edinburgh, Scotland