Browning Versions

Letters

Vol. 5 No. 16 · 1 September 1983

From Park Honan

SIR: Because you allow excellent reviewers space to develop their ideas, your journal challenges and delights us: but the crucial thing is to have an idea, and to be hard-headed and detailed with it. I approve the space you gave to your amiable Browning reviewer (LRB, Vol. 5, No 14). But where were her ideas? And detailed comments? May I mention one example? To imply, with no demonstration, as your reviewer does, that Ian Jack and Margaret Smith’s Oxford edition is better than the Ohio-Baylor variorum edition of Robert Browning’s poetry is very odd. Browning cared about artistic minutiae: ‘I attach importance to the mere stops.’ B.W.A. Massey, E.K. Brown and others show that pointing, hyphenation, capitalisation and even spelling mattered to him as devices of art and portraiture. The Oxford edition (so far only of Pauline and Paracelsus) is wayward and incomplete in recording his alterations in these minutiae. Further, as notes in Jack and Smith are brief, and set at the bottom of pages of Browning’s texts, very little is discussed by the editors for its real complexity or ambiguity. The Ohio-Baylor variorum, in contrast, records all of Browning’s changes in these artistic minutiae from edition to edition in the texts published during his lifetime; and its notes do discuss ambiguities and complexities. Just how accurate the Oxford Browning editors have been, I do not know. But they have two errors in the entry for my own and William Irvine’s The Book, the Ring, and the Poet: a Biography of Robert Browning (part of the title is omitted, and the London edition is given as ‘1974’ for 1975), and other errors in their ‘References and Abbreviations’. One of the editors, Ian Jack, in the Oxford volume of Browning’s Poetical Works 1833-1864, rewrites line 334 of ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, by changing ‘pity’ to ‘piety’ (to make the line more ‘Victorian’? or simply redundant?) though one finds ‘pity’ in Robert Browning’s texts of 1855, 1863, 1865, 1868, 1888 and 1889 of this line. Is it not time to be severe on Oxford’s recent practices with Browning?

Park Honan
Department of English Language and Literature, University of Birmingham

Barbara Everett writes: Park Honan’s idea of an idea is not mine. I was writing on Browning, and I mentioned recent editions – not just of Browning but of other poets – only to call attention to them. Textual criticism has its place, and the merits of the new Oxford Browning will no doubt be assessed in the academic journals. Mr Honan is wrong to say that I implied that the new Oxford edition is superior to the Ohio (he may be swayed by the fact that he is on the Ohio Editorial Board). I did, however, say that, among recent biographies of Browning, the best seemed to me to be Donald Thomas’s: the implication here being (I suppose) that the best is therefore not that by William Irvine and Park Honan.

Vol. 5 No. 18 · 6 October 1983

From Ian Jack

SIR: When I came on Park Honan’s strange outburst (LRB, Vol. 5, No 16) my first impulse was to ignore it. But it is clearly intended to do harm, and requires a few sentences of correction. It is not only inaccurate, confused and blustering, but also disingenuous.

As Barbara Everett points out, Honan refrains from mentioning that he is a member of the editorial board of the Ohio (now Ohio/Baylor) edition of Browning, a fact which deprives his opinion of the relative merits of that edition and the new Oxford English Texts edition of any claim to impartiality. In the essay to which he takes such exception (LRB, Vol. 5, No 14) Barbara Everett confines herself to a reference to the statement in my General Introduction that if the Ohio edition had been a sound one ‘I should have turned to other undertakings with a mixture of regret and relief’ – regret because I had always hoped to do something to render this great and enigmatic poet more accessible to readers, relief because I would have been saved many years of work and would have been free to turn to other projects.

Although I have more than once refused to review volumes of the Ohio edition (if I had reviewed one, I need hardly say, I would have begun with a declaration of my own interest in the matter), I felt obliged to say something in our first volume to explain why one large-scale edition of Browning was being succeeded by another. The demerits of the Ohio edition are common knowledge: I was glad to be able to confine myself to a reference to the trenchant reviews by the late John Pettigrew (an excellent Browning scholar) and a quotation from the criticisms of a former member of the editorial board, Morse Peckham, who reported ‘hundreds and hundreds of errors’ in the first two volumes, ‘in text, emendations, variants, and explanatory notes’.

Honan confesses that he does not know how accurate the Oxford edition may be, but then astonishingly goes on to claim that our record of variant readings is ‘wayward and incomplete’. The absurdity of this will be evident to anyone who takes the trouble to read the Textual Introduction by my co-editor Margaret Smith, who is well-known for her textual work on Charlotte Brontë. If Honan had read so far as page xxii he would have discovered a clear statement on the matter, and would have found that our (relatively few, yet important) textual emendations are based on a very careful evaluation of the editions and MSS, and almost invariably take the form of restorations of Browning’s own preferred text. Our explanatory notes (also placed at the foot of the page, for ease of reference) are much fuller than those in the Ohio edition, and I hope more accurate. I refrain from quoting any of their erroneous notes in this place, and content myself with the remark that the text and apparatus of Sordello, which will be available in our Volume II later this year, will enable those who wish to make comparisons to do so with a poem which requires scholarly attention more than most.

Honan claims that our list of ‘References and Abbreviations’ contains errors, but his only attempt to substantiate this relates to the title and date of a biography by the late William Irvine and himself. He accuses me, without justification, of giving the title wrongly (has he never heard of short titles? Does he think I should have given the title of the Biographie Universelle in full?), and is indignant because I give the date of the American edition of the book (1974) rather than that of the English (1975). If this seems to smack of desperation, it is as nothing compared to his concluding objection to an emendation of mine in the Oxford Standard Authors edition of 1970. He did not have to hunt far for it, since it is one of the seven verbal emendations which I listed at the end of the Introduction. I soon decided that I did not like it, my friends did not like it, and it was removed from the corrected reprints of 1975 and 1980 (including the paperback edition). But of course the OSA edition, in which my principal aim was to replace the old double-column edition with something more adequate and more likely to attract readers, had no textual ambitions; and it has nothing whatever to do with the Oxford English Texts edition.

Ian Jack
Pembroke College, Cambridge

Vol. 5 No. 20 · 3 November 1983

From Park Honan

SIR: I never meant ‘to do harm’ to Oxford Press, but in asking your reviewer ‘to be severe on Oxford’s recent practices with Browning’ (LRB, Vol. 5, No 16) I had in mind not only the faults of its new edition, which are discussed in the summer issue of Browning Society Notes (pp. 43-9), but a major principle. We ought to be faithful to poet’s diction, spelling, capitalisation, hyphenation and pointing, even though editors list some pointing changes but not others, regularise spelling and alter words. One editor changed Browning’s ‘pity’ to ‘piety’ in an Oxford Standard Authors edition. When his friends ‘did not like’ the change, he says (LRB, Vol. 5, No 18), he restored the poet’s word five years later. It seems the principle was not respected in the first place.

Now we have Vol. I of the Clarendon Poetical Works edition, in which the principle is neglected. It is surely wrong to print a volume which claims to give ‘full details of revisions’ and which omits every change the poet made in ‘hyphenation unless it indicates a different meaning’, many ‘capitalisation and spelling variants’ and ‘alternation between colons and semi-colons, with a few exceptions’. The fault is in not understanding that these minutiae may affect tempo, rhythm or tone in poetry, and that Browning worked at this level. How do we know he did? 1. B.W.A. Massey, E.K. Brown and others show in detail that colons, apostrophes, hyphens may be artfully used in his monologues. 2. Browning wrote in 1855, ‘I attach importance to the mere stops,’ and a year later, ‘you know what I do in looking after commas,’ and elsewhere: ‘I see little or nothing to emend … except the punctuation.’ 3. His methods matured when both oratorical and grammatical systems were valued, so that points for ‘breath-pause’ affect tempo in his verses. We who love Oxford may believe its Press will reform. Meanwhile it may be well that we have in the Ohio-Baylor and Oxford projects two sets of editors who remind us that there may be several versions of Browning.

Park Honan
University of Birmingham

From John Maynard

SIR: Park Honan’s letter (LRB, Vol. 5, No 16) concerning the Oxford and Ohio editions of Robert Browning surprises by its omissions: not only of his interest in the Ohio edition but of the long and sad history of that edition. Although I cannot begin to rehearse the various editorial and textual problems that led to the virtual abandonment of the Ohio edition after four volumes, much criticism, and even disarray among the original editors themselves, your readers should be warned that the edition has many problems as well as some special advantages. The fifth volume, out recently after a hiatus of many years, is an improvement. But no Browning scholar in the United States or Canada is unaware of the problems with the first four volumes of the Ohio edition. I am surprised that Professor Honan should act as if they should remain unknown (if they are unknown) in England.

John Maynard
Department of English, New York University

Vol. 5 No. 22 · 1 December 1983

From Ian Jack

SIR: Park Honan has become a nuisance. When John Maynard, who writes with authority as the author of the most important biographical study of Browning for many years (Browning’s Youth), remarks that his letter ‘surprises by its omissions’, he draws attention to one of Honan’s most unattractive habits. In his second letter (LRB, Vol. 5, No 20) he states that ‘the faults’ of the Oxford English Texts edition ‘are discussed in the summer issue of Browning Society Notes’, without revealing that the piece in question is by none other than himself. It is no more than a réchauffé of his letter, spiced with further bluster and misrepresentation.

Another strange thing has to be pointed out. In his first letter Honan admitted that he did not know just how accurate the Oxford Browning editors have been’. The admission becomes even more remarkable when one realises that he seems to have written his ‘review’ by the day when Barbara Everett’s essay was published. That appeared in your issue for 4-17 August, and on 4 August one of the research students who edit BSN wrote to tell me that he had received an unfavourable notice of our book. It appears to follow (and certainly the ‘review’ bears it out) than Honan had an equally superficial acquaintance with the book when he wrote the piece in question. Since our first volume, recently described in the Times Higher Education Supplement as ‘an impressive beginning to what promises to be the definitive edition of Browning’, represents the labour of years on the part of Margaret Smith and myself, such behaviour can only be described as unaccountable.

We had hoped to say as little as possible of the Ohio edition, which Honan’s maladroit attempts to defend can only draw still further into disrepute: but I feel obliged to cite one instance of the ‘scholarship’ of the first volume of the edition which he commends for its ‘graphic, factual, pertinent information’. When he presented the MS of Paracelsus to John Forster, Browning wrote on it two lines of Latin verse. I do not blame the Ohio editors for failing to recognise them as the work of John Donne (see the Addenda to our second volume, to be published shortly), but I must comment on the remarkable translation of the couplet which they provide. Freely translated, Donne states that while printed books are acceptable, manuscripts are to be more highly regarded. The Ohio editors, who get the second line nearly right, offer the following strange translation of the first: ‘The offspring which issued forth out of intoxicated effort, has been accepted.’ Did it ever occur to them that the unknown author of the Latin must have meant something when he wrote it, and that Browning must have had some reason for quoting it, when he made his generous gift?

Since Margaret Smith and I have replied to Honan at some length in the forthcoming issue of Browning Society Notes, I limit myself here to a single example of the ‘review’ to which he seeks to refer your readers. Remarking that there are ‘tid-bits’ in our appendices, he makes the surprising statement that one of them gives ‘variants from the Yale/Penguin Paracelsus’. I remember with pleasure the hours I spent in the Beinecke Library, copying out the variants in question. I ordered a microfilm, and Margaret Smith wrote the appendix to which Honan seems to be referring. I have a bad memory, but so far as I recall I did not see a single Penguin all day.

Ian Jack
Pembroke College, Cambridge

Vol. 5 No. 24 · 22 December 1983

From Park Honan

SIR: Ian Jack says I am a ‘nuisance’ (LRB, Vol. 5, No 22/23), but fails to reply to this: Oxford University Press have printed an edition of Browning’s Pauline and Paracelsus that is not edited to the standards of modern literary scholarship. Its major faults are: 1. the volume claims to give ‘full details’ (p. ix) of revisions but omits so many of Browning’s changes in important minutiae that not one of Jack’s textual notes, for any verse, can be trusted as full; 2. Jack is careless in bibliographical references; 3. his naive notion of ‘accidentals’ takes no account of the poet’s attitude to revisions; and 4. the editorial statements are misleading on Sordello’s modern reception, the poet’s borrowings, the poet’s reception of Kean, and similar matters.

Since Fault No 1 is the most grave, I discussed it in my review in Browning Society Notes and twice in your correspondence columns. Ian Jack is not helpless; he is a professor at Cambridge; but instead of telling us why he fails to give ‘full details of revisions’, he twice blames me for reviewing or criticising him. Most of his evasions are comic. He now sends a reply to BSN to imply that he is a Childe Roland and that I live in ‘Honanland’, presumably because he thinks he has cited Maynard often enough in his editorial notes to suit anyone.

Park Honan
University of Birmingham

From Editor, ‘London Review of Books’

Professor Jack is welcome to reply: after his letter, should he write one, this correspondence will close.

Editor, ‘London Review of Books’

Vol. 6 No. 1 · 19 January 1984

From Ian Jack

SIR: Margaret Smith and I have replied to Park Honan’s allegations (LRB, Vol. 5, No 24) in an article in the forthcoming number of Browning Society Notes entitled ‘Browning in Honanland: Some Comments on a recent “Review” of Volume I of the Oxford English Texts Edition of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning’. We were surprised that he should have been shown the article before publication, and are astonished that he should wish to draw your readers’ attention to it. His strange comment that I ‘imply’ that I am a ‘Childe Roland’ presumably refers to the motto of the article, lines 109-115 of that poem. We do not understand his reference to John Maynard.

Since Honan causes fresh confusion whenever he uses his typewriter, I am obliged to make two points. First, Sordello (to our treatment of which he seems to take exception) is not in Volume I of our edition, but in Volume II, which will be published during the spring. Secondly, his reference to ‘Jack’s textual notes’ obscures the fact that the textual editor of these two volumes is Margaret Smith. To anyone who knows her work on Charlotte Brontë this makes the statement that the textual part of our edition ignores ‘the standards of modern literary scholarship’ little short of astonishing – until, indeed, one realises that these standards are epitomised, for Honan, by the curiously involved and frequently unacceptable observations on textual matters in the prefatory matter of the ill-fated Ohio edition. We have been told of forthcoming reviews of our edition in the Modern Language Review, the Review of English Studies and Victorian Poetry, and others will no doubt appear in the appropriate journals. While we hope that the high opinion of our work already expressed by J.W. Harper in the Times Higher Education Supplement will be shared by other writers, we do not claim that our edition is irreproachable or wholly free from error. We look forward to studying careful and rational assessments of Volume I which will no doubt be characterised by the scholarship, the fair-mindedness and the normal courtesy so sadly absent from the communications of Park Honan.

Ian Jack
Pembroke College, Cambridge