Vol. 2 No. 19 · 2 October 1980
pages 6-7 | 3002 words
Hallo Dad
Christopher Ricks
- Mr Nicholas Sir Henry and Sons Daymare by Thomas Hinde
Macmillan, 271 pp, £6.95, August 1980, ISBN 0 333 29539 0
The last word of the reissue of Mr Nicholas, Thomas Hinde’s exquisitely glum and fearingly funny novel of 1952, is probably a misprint. At least, it is minutely different from the last word in the Penguin book in 1962, the issue which brought Hinde’s consummate first novel to an even more widely appreciative public. One tribute to the novel’s exact art is that it matters whether the book ends, as it did then, with the exchange,
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Letters
Vol. 2 No. 21 · 6 November 1980
From Thomas Hinde
SIR: I write in no spirit of resentment at Professor Ricks’s generous review of my novel, Mr Nicholas (LRB, Vol. 2, No 19), rather the opposite, but only because the reactions of an author when exposed to criticism of this sort may be of interest. I am not even opposed to such minute examinations of a text, which seem a healthy improvement on unsubstantiated generalisations. And I fully realise that even if an author says, ‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ the fact that he wrote it that way is what matters. There are, however, moments when he, the author, believes he does know best, and must decide whether to bask in undeserved praise or to supply the facts. Ricks congratulates me on originally ending Mr Nicholas with the words, ‘Hallo Dad,’ which is the way the 1961 Penguin edition prints them. By contrast, he suspects a misprint in the new 1980 Macmillan edition which ends ‘Hallo dad.’ He bases several flattering paragraphs on my sensitivity in intending this distinction. Alas, the Macmillan edition was set photographically from the original 1952 MacGibbon edition. It is some meticulous Penguin editor who should have the credit for my sensitivity, since I never even saw the proofs.
Thomas Hinde
West Hoathly, Sussex
Christopher Ricks writes: Authors’ intentions are elaborately slighted these days; this is usually foolish, and when it comes to textual matters, it is absurd. So I unreluctantly accept both the principle and the facts of Thomas Hinde’s letter. There are two textual readings for the last word of Mr Nicholas: one of them has authorial authority, and there would indeed be no point in claiming that an interpretation of the other was an interpretation of Thomas Hinde’s Mr Nicholas. Still, I sketched the differences of implication without claiming that one reading was simply superior. What remains important to me is that it should matter whether a son who has hitherto said ‘Dad’ should say it once more or whether he should say ‘dad’ instead. For what I congratulated Mr Hinde on was not his having written ‘Hello Dad,’ but his writing so that a minute distinction might carry much feeling. It is not clear to me from his careful letter whether he is implying that, though at this point he did unusually write ‘dad’, he didn’t really intend it; or again, that he did intend it, but didn’t intend anything by it. Either of these would seem to me a pity.
Vol. 2 No. 23 · 4 December 1980
From Paula Neuss
SIR: Did Professor Ricks intend to write ‘Hello Dad’ in his reply to Thomas Hinde (LRB. Vol. 2. No 21) and did he intend anything by it? Are there now to be three textual readings for the last words of Mr Nicholas and if so may I respectfully suggest a fourth? If the difference between ‘Hallo Dad’ and ‘Hello dad’ is that the second word of the latter would ‘withhold the customary respect that would upper-case your father’ (LRB. Vol. 2. No 19), would not ‘Hello’, so much the cheekier, have to be followed by ‘dad’, not ‘Dad’?
Paula Neuss
Birkbeck College
