What do I care if "e" is somewhere upside down?
I.
I was amused to see John Worthen's 'Corrections to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence' in the latest Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies [1] ...
No one can deny that it is a remarkable feat of editorial hard labour and Lawrence scholars owe Professor Worthen an enormous debt of gratitude for his tireless efforts to ensure that Bert's books are as close as they possibly can be to what he intended.
The fact that Worthen continues to feel such peculiar responsibility - his phrase - not just for the volumes he worked on, but for the entire Cambridge Edition published between 1980 and 2018, is admirable and also rather touching [2].
II.
However, whilst I agree entirely with Worthen's own assessment that the Cambridge Edition was a wonderful achievement, I don't share his sadness at the fact that the above contains minor errors (of spelling and punctuation, for example) and correcting typos is never going to be something that I'll have his unflagging enthusiasm for.
Ironically, that's in large part due to Lawrence, who expresses his unconcern for first or last (or most textually accurate and authoritative) editions of books; objects which, whilst often containing strange voices and beautiful visions, should never be allowed to 'disturb the haze of autumn' or 'blot out the sunflowers' and whose printed appearance didn't concern him in the least:
'What do I care if "e" is somewhere upside down, or "g" comes from the wrong fount? I really don't.' [3]
Notes
[1] Volume 7, Number 1 (2024), ed. Susan Reid (published by the D. H. Lawrence Society).
[2] Worthen edited three volumes in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence, co-edited five others, and was closely involved with the last three books. In total, there are forty volumes, published between 1980 and 2018. In addition, there are eight volumes of Lawrence's letters published by Cambridge University Press and a three-part biography, the first volume of which - D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 - was written by Worthen (CUP, 1991).
[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bad Side of Books': introduction to A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Edward D. McDonald, in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 75.
As both a writer and editor (though my degree of insouciance and/or zeal in either role is for others to decide - though why could one also not be a zealous writer and insouciant editor, one wonders?), I find Lawrence's and/or the blogger's now dated rendering of 'font' as 'fount' in this context (a process that had actually been underway during Lawrence's own lifetime - it would need a suitably pedantic scholar to verify whether DHL was already guilty of inaccuracy at the time) both eye-catching and instructive. Either way, in drawing our attention to the way in which even such an apparently technical/abstract matter as print (or more precisely its lexicon) is subject to industrial pressures and cross-cultural evolution, it offers fascinating granular food for thought.
ReplyDeleteIn the first place, since for me at least passion drives perfectionism in all aspects of one's craft, typos and other technical failings in the production of literature cannot be a matter of authorial indifference. Morever, dividing the materiality of a work against its vision and derogating the former, as Lawrence appears to, promotes a dubious dualism a more sophisticated (and modern) criticality is compelled to call into question.
Personally, and contra Lawrence, I feel much more stirred and shaped by the example of Stéphane Mallarmé, the French Symbolist poet whose pioneering relationship with typography and the visual presentation of his works, most famously in his 1897 work 'Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1897), expressed his quest to unify poetic form with the materiality of the printed page. His holistic vision of poetic works as 'spiritual instruments' that deliberately integrate white space, spacings, and variable fonts/font sizes as part of the living silence and music of the poem, thereby multiplying readings and interpretations in an artful configuration of chance and necessity, was also literally ahead of its time. (In fact, the first edition of 'Un Coup de Dés' was not published in the format Mallarmé envisioned due to printing limitations at the time and was only completed in 1914, 16 years after his death.) In this respect, Mallarmé's innovations anticipated and/or influenced modernist and avant-garde movements/authors, such as Apollinaire, Futurism, Dadaism, and concrete poetry, and can also be seen as a precursor to the flexibility of digital typography.
Leaving aside his puzzlingly lackadaiscal attitude to how his works were produced, and as a much less sophisticated (and certainly less than visionary) poet, Lawrence, in my view, almost certainly would not have understood or appreciated any of this French subtlety and refinement, which is probably why he is mainly remembered as a (fine) novelist (and the son of a miner).