Jane Austen editions
Sir, – In the correspondence between your reviewer Jocelyn Harris and the
editors of the Later Manuscripts volume in the Cambridge Jane Austen, Janet
Todd and Linda Bree (most recently, June 12), a major issue has been the
Cambridge treatment of the most important works, the two uncompleted novels,
“The Watsons” and “Sanditon”. The Cambridge primary texts are described as
“reading” texts and Harris has called the decision to present the
manuscripts in this way as “bizarre”, a judgement resisted by the editors.
R. W. Chapman, the founding father of Austen studies, faced a similar decision
in preparing his collected edition of the Austen manuscript works for the
Oxford Jane Austen, entitled Minor Works (1954). Throughout the Oxford
edition of the novels (1923), Chapman had viewed his prime responsibility as
editor to lie in carrying out his duty to the author in preserving the
fidelity of the text, a resolve “To restore, and maintain in its integrity
the text of our great writers”. Accordingly, Chapman left his individual
editions of the manuscripts, 1925–50, unmediated, for readers to engage with
as manuscripts, making no attempt to turn these texts into trouble-free
reading versions. Jane Austen’s idiosyncrasies of spelling, capitalization,
paragraphing and so on he intended to leave unchanged. Regarding
punctuation, he had declared his view bluntly back in 1923: that “to
modernize is – in however small a degree – to falsify”. He respected the
status of “The Watsons” and “Sanditon” as work-in-progress, unfinished and
unfinalized. Taking in Jane Austen’s corrections and revisions to these
manuscripts, Chapman explained in Minor Works that he was providing texts
that were faithful to “what seems to have been” Jane Austen’s “final
intention”.
The Cambridge editors have followed a different policy. While line-by-line
transcriptions of the manuscripts are provided in the Appendices, they
explain that the reading texts of “The Watsons” and “Sanditon” are
“discreetly edited to reflect basic publishing conventions of the early
nineteenth century”, “conventions” based on the evidence of “Austen’s own
published works”. Thus the Cambridge texts are editorial constructs, what we
might describe as hypothetical texts projected for a notional existence. The
problem thus created is clear: as-for-publication editing is wholly
incompatible with the essential nature of these fragments as manuscript
works-in-progress. These are manuscripts in a transitional state, en route
to completion but still far from finished. Jane Austen’s future changes
might have been as radical and widespread as those she made to the ending of
Persuasion. So an editorial treatment that confers an impress of finality is
seriously misjudged. For a “scholarly” edition, as this is described by
Cambridge, the editors would have been better advised to take a conservative
line, as Chapman did, only giving what could be construed as Jane Austen’s
“final intention” at that point in time. In the event, through some gremlin
in the Oxford processes, Chapman was frustrated in this, since between the
manuscripts and the texts as printed several hundred discrepancies were
introduced in such matters as paragraphing, hyphenation, punctuation, the
use of ampersands, upper and lower case, and so on.
The alternative for the Cambridge editors would have been to provide a
substantial note on the text, sifting these issues thoroughly, referring to
what previous editors had done, and weighing the pros and cons involved in
their own decision. Such a discussion, which passes unmentioned in Later
Manuscripts, was conducted thirty years ago by John Davie in the Oxford
World’s Classics Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon (1980).
Davie considers the very treatment favoured by Cambridge – “normalizing the
text along lines which the editor presumes would have been followed in
publication” – only to reject it: “to normalize the ‘Minor Works’ to this
extent involves guesswork and runs the risk of departing from Jane Austen’s
intentions in some points of substance”.
In the General Editor’s Preface to the entire Cambridge edition, Professor
Todd refers to “the author’s own chosen style” – and it is precisely Jane
Austen’s “chosen style” that lies buried beneath the Cambridge reading texts
of these two important works. Chapman’s decision was in the opposite
direction, with the consequence that Minor Works, for all its errors,
presents these texts for what they are, unmistakably works-in-progress.
To explain my own concern with these matters, I should mention that following
Chapman’s death in 1960 I prepared the revised version of Minor Works
(1969). In July 2006, my contract with Cambridge for the Later Manuscripts
volume was terminated on the grounds of late delivery. My material, omitting
the texts, was subsequently published as Jane Austen: A student’s guide to
the later manuscript works (2007).
BRIAN SOUTHAM
3 West Heath Drive, London NW11.
Isaiah Berlin
Sir, – Am I being obtuse, or is Gabriel Josipovici (Letters, June 12) seeing
an ambiguity where none exists? He quotes a remark made by David Aberbach
about Isaiah Berlin’s comparison of Jews to hunchbacks in “Jewish Slavery
and Emancipation” – “he also echoed Kafka’s allegory of Jewish deformity, ‘A
Report to an Academy’” – and says it is hard to know whether this
characterization of Kafka’s story is Berlin’s or Aberbach’s. On any unforced
reading it is surely Aberbach’s; in any event, I know of no evidence that
Berlin held such a view of Kafka’s work, or, a fortiori, that he was
influenced by it in writing his essay on the Jewish condition.
Michael Goldman (also June 12) says there is no firm evidence as to whether
Berlin had a bar mitzvah. But there is, which is why Berlin’s biographer
Michael Ignatieff says he did. Here is what Berlin said to Ignatieff:
I did my bar mitzvah in the new West End Synagogue, which was very smart, a
kind of real West End affair, and I wasn’t allowed to sing the portion of
the Bible which boys in that position do, because I was adjudged to have no
musical sense whatever, and I wouldn’t do it right; and I received a prayer
book at the hands of a man called Sir Meyer Spielman, who was the chief
warden. All this I remember.
He adds that he followed the local custom of wearing a top hat. Aberbach says
that Berlin told him he never had a bar mitzvah. It seems there has been a
misunderstanding.
HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.
Middle East envoys
Sir, – Commenting on my review of Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble, Edward
N. Luttwak upbraids me for identifying a number of American and British
officials who have been involved in the recent history of the Middle East as
Jewish, and employs a flurry of epithets – crass, foolish, racist (Letters,
June 19).
The truth is that anyone who reads the Israeli or Arab press is well aware of
the facts. It is only in the British and American media that it is taboo to
mention that the emperor has no clothes, and even there only in the
mainstream media – the facts are readily available, for example, in the
Jewish Chronicle. And why not? They are relevant to the story. An
interesting example has cropped up in the last few days concerning Dennis
Ross, who is discussed in Tyler’s book and in my review. According to an
Israeli newspaper, he is to be “abruptly relieved of his duties” as Hillary
Clinton’s special envoy to Iran, and one of the reasons is “Iran’s
persistent refusal to accept Ross as a US emissary given the diplomat’s
Jewish background” and support of Israel. The Wall Street Journal, on the
contrary, reports that President Obama is increasingly relying on Ross as an
adviser on Iran, and that he is about to move from the State Department to
the White House; the report mentions Ross’s hawkish views, but not the fact
that he is Jewish. Neither report is yet confirmed. The matter is of great
interest to those who follow US/Iranian relations.
Most Jews are, for understandable reasons, sympathetic to Israel. Any Jew is
therefore handicapped in Arab eyes when trying to act as a negotiator on the
Palestine question – just as I was occasionally handicapped working on
political problems in Northern Ireland because I am a Roman Catholic, or
Senator Mitchell’s Arab connection may handicap him in Israeli eyes. I do
not “attack” Senator Mitchell just as I do not attack Dennis Ross, Rahm
Emanuel or Lord Levy, although I describe the appointment of Levy by Tony
Blair as his Middle East representative as foolish.
OLIVER MILES
2 Belbroughton Road, Oxford.
To read Oliver Miles's review, click here,
and to read Edward N. Luttwak's letter, click here.
Age of eloquence
Sir, – Margreta de Grazia takes issue with my criticism of Carla Mazzio, in
The Inarticulate Renaissance (Letter, June 19), for assuming that the
characters taking part in Hieronimo’s play-within-the-play actually speak in
four different languages, citing Lukas Erne’s recent book on Thomas Kyd as
an authority on this issue. But Professor de Grazia failed to read the
relevant footnote, where Erne scrupulously records the views of two
distinguished scholars of Elizabethan drama. Muriel Bradbrook (1935) found
it “unlikely”, while David Bevington (1996) referred to “[Hieronimo’s]
fiction that the actors perform in different languages”, adding that
“presumably the original performances were in English throughout. Audiences
readily accepted the convention that they are ‘hearing’ other languages”.
If de Grazia has difficulty with this convention, I invite her to consider the
alternative, Kyd having to write for Hieronimo nine lines of Greek
hexameter, say (very few Englishmen in the 1580s could write Greek verse),
fifteen lines of Latin elegiacs for Balthasar, three lines of versi sciolti
for Lorenzo, and nine lines of French alexandrines for Bel-Imperia, all four
then engaging in dialogue with each other. As Kyd made Balthasar object,
“this will be a mere confusion. / And hardly shall we all be understood”. Is
this the purpose of playing?
David Hillman finds it “fair enough to disagree with this book and its
premisses” (Letters, June 19), but rebukes me for expressing such
disagreement “with a young academic’s early work”, for, “as Vickers must
surely know, the book is Mazzio’s first monograph”. I’m afraid that Dr
Hillman attributes to me more knowledge than I possessed. But since Mazzio
co-edited a volume of essays with him as long ago as 1997, and adds a
four-page afterword to her book in which she acknowledges the help and
support of over ninety colleagues (including Hillman and de Grazia), I
hardly felt that she needed special protection.
In any case, a reviewer’s job is to evaluate the book before him, which Mazzio
herself claims to be based upon a “vast and enormously rich field of
scholarship”. In my view, the use that she made of this scholarship was
deeply misguided, and I would be happy to substantiate this judgement in
more detail.
BRIAN VICKERS
7 Abbot’s Place, London NW6.
‘Certain lines’
Sir, – In his review (June 5) of Ian Hamilton’s Collected Poems, Christopher
Reid draws attention to an enigmatic, unpublished four-line poem called
“Untranslatable”: “‘There are certain lines – whole poems even: / I have no
idea what they mean; / It’s what I can’t grasp that draws me back to them.’
/ Yours used to be like that, and so did his”. The first three lines,
lightly amended, come from “Necessary Explanation”, the introductory poem to
a pamphlet of versions from Yannis Ritsos which Hamilton published in 1969
as part of the Review.
ALAN PAGE
B.L.1, 36 rue Emeriau, Paris 75015.
