Text Messenger
Yoder, Edwin M. Jr.
Text Messenger James B. Meriwether, 1928-2007. by Edwin M. Yqder Jr. In every writer's secret heart, which is not without tincture of vanity, he covets the kind of letter I received out of the...
...His first move was to walk to the blackboard and place a small dot on it...
...But if you happened to be, say, Mark Twain or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville, rev-enant by time machine to see how your work was faring, it might matter a great deal...
...The great novelist's Nobel Prize in Edwin M. YoderJr.'s novel, Lions at Lamb House, about Freud's analysis of Henry James, will be published in September...
...As a doctoral candidate at Princeton, Meriwether had gathered a display of Faulkner materials later published as The Literary Career of William Faulkner, the definitive treatment of the subject...
...Hawthorne's prudish sister excised references to lady's ankles from his stories...
...It is painstaking labor...
...And that wasn't all, but immodesty has its limits...
...If you took Edmund Wilson's view, this was idle pedantry...
...Once in Columbia, when I was writing a magazine piece on the textual wars provoked by Edmund Wilson, Jim was collating an Edith Wharton novel or story collection, of which there had been two printings for a single edition—the signal of textual trouble...
...The Fruits of the MLA," it was captioned, double entendre intentional...
...In that sense he was a pioneer, since the heedless world was only a decade and a half into the Faulkner revival...
...I close with two characteristic Meriwether moments...
...And there were ancillary dividends...
...It is enough for one lifetime...
...In every writer's secret heart, which is not without tincture of vanity, he covets the kind of letter I received out of the blue from a total stranger one day in July 1963...
...No man so attuned to the devil in the details could be without amusing quirks...
...By collating the Faulkner texts with Faulkner's manuscripts and (rarer) typescripts and publishing the discrepancies ("variants") in little journals, Meriwether shamed Random House into resetting them...
...I mourn him as an enriching and faithful friend, but the world should remember him as one who made it his mission to remove treacherous barriers that create confusion between writers and their audience—faceless, thankless, invaluable work...
...Textual scholars feel a nearly sacred obligation to assure that when we read, say, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, or Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, we are reading what they wrote, with their own idiosyncrasies, and not some "correction" by an officious editor or careless printer...
...Along with that first letter he sent me was a collection he had compiled (without credit) of Joyce Gary's journalism advocating African independence...
...The obtuse attitude of the great critic Edmund Wilson is all too typical: When the Modern Language Association and others were contending for an NEH grant to update and preserve great American fiction, and the MLA applied for funds to clean up and authenticate the texts, Wilson took a waspish swipe at textual scholarship in the New York Review of Books...
...Even now his specialty, textual scholarship, remains a relatively esoteric and unsung branch of literary The homely but essential aim of Meriwether's specialty is to establish a reliable text that meets the gold standard of authenticity, 'authorial intention.} studies...
...Misprints have consequences...
...How many thousands, one wonders, had read right through it without noticing...
...Wharton had nodded, and opened a wedding ceremony with words from the burial service...
...Every detail, including punctuation, must be compared systematically with a so-called "copy text," that is, the best extant evidence of what the author intended...
...The significance was this: Faulkner usually did not punctuate honorifics—wrote them Mr, Mrs, Dr, and so forth—with one exception: He had written "Dr...
...It suddenly lavished upon me the compliments that every writer believes he deserves and seldom hears...
...At the time he was also an assistant professor of English at Chapel Hill...
...Meriwether, on a Guggenheim grant, was collating—that is, comparing and correcting—the major Faulkner texts...
...This was the kind of thing Jim Meriwether and few others would notice or know, for he had a jeweler's eye for the telling detail...
...I should add that Meriwether was not only a great hawk of detail but also an eagle of wide horizons...
...I never heard Jim Meriwether boast, but his command of Faulkner's work was so much more exact than Faulkner's own that when the great Mississippian commenced writing the two concluding volumes of the Snopes trilogy he turned to Meriwether to straighten out the confused chronologies and inconsistencies...
...Meri-wether was already a master of textual scholarship that first summer afternoon in Chapel Hill when we stunned ourselves on his back porch with the mint juleps that, like his scholarship, were lingering labors of love and meticulous precision...
...Ten years ago, at the time of the Faulkner centennial (when he organized several conferences), Jim came for a master class in a seminar I was teaching...
...1950 found almost all of his novels out of print...
...All hail, then, the man who liberated William Faulkner from careless printers and from his own imperfect memory...
...The writer, I soon learned, was James B. Meriwether, devoted South Carolinian, Faulkner scholar, former Army intelligence officer, fellow idola-tor of Winston Churchill, champion track man and badminton player, and—not least—maker of definitive mint juleps...
...That we have sound Faulkner texts we owe to him...
...we thought...
...A wedding scene had the parson intoning, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord . . . " Even meticulous Mrs...
...Einstein," a tribute to the great physicist...
...Wilson wondered why anyone but a silly pedant could possibly care about the quality of a text so long as a book was handsome and nice to hold in the hands and the print was legible...
...A body of New Critical speculation had grown up around an odd but colorful locution in Melville, before it was found that he had written "coiled fish of the sea," not "soiled fish...
...Twain was a fanatic about punctuation, driven to profane fury by editors and printers who tinkered with his commas...
...The homely but essential aim of Meriwether's specialty is to establish a reliable text that meets the gold standard of authenticity, "authorial intention...
...Imagine: It was like being adviser to the Almighty on the sixth day of creation...
...It is a blessing to encounter such thinking and such writing...
...That generous letter became the overture to a friendship of shared affinities and interests that ended, sadly, only with Meriwether's death in March in his native Columbia, S.C...
...and the few that were in print were notoriously corrupt—especially the Gothic and lugubrious Sanctuary, which Faulkner had almost entirely rewritten in galley proofs...
...If only it were that simple...
...It said that an editorial I had written in the regional paper for which I was then writing "has all the hallmarks your best pieces have—not only contemporary but historical knowledge, clarity of thinking, strong feeling disciplined by scholarship and perspective and independence of mind...
...Only those who once coped with the vanished hazards of "hot type" know how garbled a printed text can be...
Vol. 12 • April 2007 • No. 31
