Book reviews -- Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius by Jack Stillinger

Comparative Literature, Spring 1995 by Falconer, Graham

MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP AND THE MYTH OF SOLITARY GENIUS. By Jack Stillinger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ix, 259 p.

The focus of this series of essays. the wide range of topics covered and also, perhaps, some of the implications for editors and critics, may be gauged from the opening paragraph of the final chapter, where the author recapitulates the various examples of multiple authorship that form the basis of his argument:

The foregoing chapters have illustrated multiple authorship in a variety of forms: the young Keats being refined, polished and restrained by well-intentioned friends and publishers; the middle-aged Mill being spruced up by his wife for attractive autobiographical presentation; the old Wordsworth rewriting his younger self; Coleridge constructing his philosophy with lengthy extracts taken over verbatim without acknowledgment from the Germans; Eliot seizing on the revisions and excisions of his mentor; novelists routinely sharing their authorship with friends, spouses, ghostwriters, agents, editors, censors, publishers; playwrights and screenwriters disappearing in the ordinary processes of play and film production. (p.182)

The fundamental idea is that literary collaboration is a much more widespread phenomenon than we realize; and that if critics and scholars were to recognize that fact, instead of chasing the will-o'-the-wisp of authorial intention, their interpretations and editorial decisions would be placed on a sounder footing. The emphasis throughout the book is on the writing process and, more specifically, on the ways that various "other hands" were involved in producing the texts of such canonical works as The Eve of St Agnes, The Waste Land, and Sister Carrie. Despite his impressive eclecticism--literary sociologists will be glad to learn that Jacqueline Susann and Orson Welles, like the great writers of the past, "got by with a little help from their friends"--Stillinger's notion of literary production, derived no doubt from his considerable expertise as an editor, gives the book a relatively narrow focus, when compared to the work of, say, J.J. McGann or D.F. McKenzie. Wider issues such as the economics of the book trade, the social-political context in which the works discussed were produced, or the educational level and aesthetic expectations of intended readers receive short shrift; and while there are many excellent pages on unofficial censors such as Mill's wife and Keats's publishers, the role of official censorship--as crucial in Hollywood as in English literary history--is passed over in silence.

Disappointingly, in a book the professed aim of which is to expand our notion of authorship to include various sorts of collaboration, the introductory chapter ("What is an author!") is by far the least convincing. Briefly summarized, the argument goes roughly as follows:

(1) Authors, according to the new orthodoxy. are dead;

(2) Yet the idea of authorship refuses to go away. Critics who proclaim the death of the author continue to sign their books and claim their royalties, while booksellers, librarians, and ordinary readers cannot avoid referring to authors if they are to buy and sell, classify and discuss their work;

(3) Besides, knowing about authors helps us to read their books more intelligently.

At this point, younger readers raised on a diet of Barthes and Foucault may decide to look elsewhere for the theoretical implications of multiple authorship, which would be a pity, for there is much valuable material still to come. The basic confusion--and it seems very basic indeed--lies in the failure to distinguish between literary production, a sphere in which the role of authors has never been denied, not even by the purest of New Critics or the most rabid deconstructionist, and interpretation, a quite separate activity regarding which certain schools of thought may periodically decide that the author's "presence" or opinion does not constitute an infallible guide to understanding literary works. This conceptual muddle emerges most clearly in the latter part of Chapter 9 (pp. 184 ff.), where Stillinger, playing devil's advocate, contrasts Blake--writer, illustrator, and publisher of his own books, and therefore best-case example of single authorship--with the public phenomenon of himself lecturing on Blake to an audience of students (complete with projector and slides of anatomically peculiar tigers). I can find no trace of paradox or contradiction in this test case. How a literary work is made and how it is subsequently used are separate issues, and the necessarily collaborative nature of a public lecture cannot be advanced as proof of collaborative composition; Blake, whatever kinds of multivocity are involved in discussing him, may still, as producer of texts, be the most singular of "onlie begetters."

Not surprisingly, the most convincing parts of the book occur in the chapters devoted to authors with whom Stillinger has the easy familiarity that comes from having edited them. To expatiate upon stylistic niceties in Keats's poems or degrees of truth and fiction in Mill's Autobiography while neglecting the respective roles of Richard Woodhouse and Harriet Mill in the composition of those texts is a dubious business indeed; and if editors can distinguish between words and phrases for which the writer alone was responsible and other passages that were the result of various kinds of collaboration, it is hard to imagine a critical approach that would not benefit from such information. The spirited and cogently argued defense of late versions of The Prelude and Sister Carrie, versions based respectively on Wordsworth's second thoughts about earlier efforts, and on extensive stylistic advice given by Sara Dreiser and Arthur Henry and accepted by Dreiser himself, take us right to the heart of Stillinger's thesis. Textual "primitivists" working in the Greg-Bowers tradition (in the cases just referred to, the Cornell and Pennsylvania editors) regard any kind of help as interference; a wife who bowdlerizes or corrects grammatical mistakes is as pernicious as the most slapdash compositor of a Bad Quarto. The most extreme advocate of this position is, of course, Hershel Parker, with whom Stillinger tangles in a lengthy note (p. 227); it is the myth of solitary genius, he argues, that forces editors like Parker to opt for manuscripts, or even first drafts, over early or revised editions as a basis for their copy-texts. While there may be cases where first is indeed best--it is the position taken by most stendhaliens--this extreme "primitivism" clearly makes nonsense of certain careers largely devoted to second thoughts (James, Balzac, and many other novelists), and is by definition incapable of dealing with inveterate tinkerers such as Yeats. The simple fact of recognizing how many hands (or more exactly, minds) were involved in producing certain canonical texts ought to persuade editors to adopt a more sensible view, closer to the "multiple version" theory advocated by Thorpe and McLaverty and the socialized concept of literary production developed by McGann.