Whose Text Is It Anyway? Of Editions and Remixes
Haven’t been able to write much this week due to a combination of out of town company (fun!) and car trouble (not at all fun). But last night I had a moment to scan through the NY Times just to catch up on what was going on. I always check out the Op-Ed page and the Letters to the Editor, one of my favorite parts of any newspaper. Yesterday, there was a letter in response to an article that the Times recently published that just got under my skin. I’ve been dwelling on it since last night, so it’s time to try to make these random thoughts a bit more coherent. Intrigued? Curious? Dying to know what got me so riled up?
Well, here’s the link to the actual letter. As you can see, it’s in response to the Times article from June 28 about the forthcoming new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. As you can see, Mr. Scribner is displeased with this new version of the text (interestingly subtitled “The Restored Edition” and trumpeted on Amazon.com as being published “as Ernest Hemingway intended” ), prepared by Sean Hemingway, a grandson of Papa H. Amazon blurb aside, Scribner decries this text as actually contrary to the author’s intentions and, essentially, an illegitimate text that will fade or pale in comparison with the original, edited largely by Mary Hemingway after her husband’s death and first published in 1964.
I love Hemingway. I love A Moveable Feast. I am thrilled that there is now this version of the text that includes material not originally included in the 1964 edition, despite the fact that Scribner claims such inclusion is “revisionist” history. As the scion of a great publishing family, Scribner should know that textual editing, especially in a case such as this one in which the author died before publishing what Scribner acknowledges is a “holograph” text and was pieced together by others in the first place (and some scholars have questioned Mary’s revisions to the “final” draft Hemingway had prepared), is a tricky business and the notion of a “definitive” edition of anything is an idea we would all do well to be wary of. [Sorry I'm using so many quotation marks, but I just need to emphasize that words such as final, original, definitive, etc. are all very problematic to me].
So I can’t decide if Scribner is being self-serving and disingenuous here in this letter, or just plain naive. As I said, I think he should know better, so I’m falling down on the self-serving and disingenuous side, which explains why the letter has been bothering me so much. The issue of authorial intent is problematic, as any good postmodernist knows. Yes, authors do have intentions, I’m not disputing that. But do any of us really ever fully know our own minds, even when we create? And even if we do create a text with a specific goal or intention, is it true that that text actually accurately and fully enacts that intent?
I don’t want to go into a whole treatise on the death of the author here, but I just want to raise that notion that authorial intentions are slippery things and that readers bring things to the table as well, things that often subvert or undermine the author’s purpose and aim.
I also want to think more about this in relation to the issues of copyright and intellectual property that I raised in my post on Brett Gaylor’s movie, RiP: A Remix Manifesto, that I wrote about in this post from June 30. I think that the remixing and reworking of texts that we’re seeing in digital culture has some similarities to the process that textual scholars have long been going through as they prepare new editions of literary texts. Those learned editors are often comparing different manuscripts and making decisions about the “correct” wording or spelling, or about what sections and passages are in keeping with the spirit of the text. Sometimes, as in this case with A Moveable Feast, they add previously excluded material, sometimes they delete passages based on a later revision that has been unearthed. No matter what the actual revision consists of, I think it is fair to say that they are remixing. Certainly they are trying to capture (in a rigorous and scholarly way) the spirit, if not the letter, of the author’s intent as they perceive it, but that necessarily entails some creativity as well as a good dose of their own perspectives.
I’m not going to get to any real point here, this late at night, but I this is something I want to think about further, especially as I’ve just posted about Gaylor’s film and remixing is on my mind. Sure would love to hear what others think on this. Weigh in, please!
Speaking of revisionist history, A.E. Hotchner in today’s NYTimes, is the latest to revise the publication/editorial history of Hemingway’s text. He claims that A Moveable Feast, far from being “pieced together” (my words in the above post) by Mary Hemingway and Ernest Hemingway’s editor(s? - again there are conflicting reports) at Scribner, was finished and final (something Charles Scribner III also claims) and ready for publication when it was delivered to Scribner in manuscript form. Hotchner claims that Mary made virtually no changes to the manuscript after Hemingway’s death, but some scholars have made a contradictory argument, noting the extensive revisions and amendments to that final manuscript that Hotchner presented to Charles Scribner, Jr.
I find it amusing that Hotchner is attacking Scribner on the grounds that the publishing company has failed to protect the author’s work, while Scribner III had, just a few weeks before, faulted Hemingway’s grandson for this illegitimate new edition. Both men seem to believe that the original text is sacred, which means both should be on board with the current iteration of U.S. copyright law, but it’s that copyright law that is causing a lot of the trouble, I’d say. As one of Hemingway’s heirs, Sean Hemingway is a lawful owner of his grandfather’s estate. So why can’t he do with this text what he will? And, as Charles Scribner III clearly knows, the new “restored” edition is being published by the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster (and everyone knows that a little controversy is good for business!).
Here’s a novel idea that might solve the problem and maybe even make Hotchner, Scribner and Sean Hemingway happy (well, probably not!): what if Hemingway’s novel were allowed to enter the public domain in 2020 according to the copyright law that existed in the U.S. prior to the passage of the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (aka the Sonny Bono/Mickey Mouse law)? Sean Hemingway could have simply waited a mere 11 more years and then created his own version of AMF, a derivative work based on his grandfather’s text that offered a new vision of the text without presenting itself as somehow more authentic and original than the 1964 version. Hotchner and Scribner could still claim that the original was definitive and authoritative, published as Papa intended. Sean could still present his vision of the text and make money from it (provided anyone wanted to publish it, but I suspect Scribner would jump at the chance to continue to make money off the Hemingway name). Everyone’s happy, right? I wouldn’t hold my breath. I have a feeling all three of these fine gentlemen would balk at my suggestion that copyrighted work fall back into the public domain after a mere 56 years (though I’d love to be proven wrong on that).
Finally, I also have to say that I think Hotchner’s claim in this op-ed that Hemingway’s manuscript was final to be problematic. He notes that in the months prior to his death, Ernest Hemingway was still thinking about his “Paris book” and notes that he was,
Well, Hotchner, which is it? Was Hemingway satisfied with the finished manuscript or not? Who is to say what might have happened to the text had Hemingway been alive to shepherd it through the editorial process prior to its publication. While Hotchner suggests that Hemingway’s concern over the final sentence of the book was related to his mental instability at the time, I think it is not out of the realm of possibility that Hemingway might have made more revisions to the manuscript had he lived. But he didn’t live to see this text published. And therein lies my one of my problems with both Hotchner and Scribner’s claims that the original was published in the form its author intended. I’ve got two words for you both: Maxwell Perkins. Remember him? The legendary editor at Scribner who worked extensively with Hemingway on two of his most beloved texts, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms? Perkins’s work with Hemingway and others (Fitzgerald, Wolfe) should remind us that a text is very often the product of a creative and complicated collaborative process between writer and editor.
This comment is really rambling on, so I’ll just sum this up: writing is a collaborative endeavor, and I don’t believe it is accurate to say that any text is truly the “original” work of a lone genius author, nor should any text be declared off-limits for creative reinterpretation or rewriting (at least not forever - copyright terms should be “limited” as per our Constitution).