The death of the author, the life of the misprint

 

(Cartoon from Punch)

In the Summer Critical Quarterly, Chris Townsend has published an article that almost directly targets a person like myself – a person who loves to chase through old newspapers and current biographies and pop history books, looking for the errant factoid, the misspelled name, the comedian as, indeed, the added or subtracted letter, messing up names and causing vast comedies of misrecognition among the minor players of history. Forgive me for being obscure – I am writing a story, at the moment, about J., a woman whose head was supposedly shaved in the Liberation because she had collaborated with the Nazis. It is a story that is extremely minor, save for J.’s family relationship with Winston Churchill – a very stretched and tiny one – and her walkon role among the Anglo French glitterati of the thirties and forties.

As I have plumbed what plums there are in her story, I find her misrecognized in dozens of texts, and the story of what she did or didn’t do almost impossible to say for sure. In the breath of stories told at the high table and over cocktails, bits of history or fictionary leap out. It is as if the clinamen of fiction edges the direction of history one way or another.

I’m going on, here. But to return to Chris Townsend’s article: it is an examination of the way a line in Wordsworth’s poem “A slumber did my spirit seal” – precisely that line – has had a frolic of its own, as it gets perpetually misprinted as “a slumber did my spirit steal”. That “t”, like an imp, keeps climbing into that line.

“‘A slumber did my spirit steal, /I had no human fears.’ Given that Wordsworth’s celebrated lyric is suspended in its entirety above this essay, there is a decent chance that you, reader, will have noticed the typographical error in that opening quotation: a slumber did my spirit steal. Then again, perhaps not. Exactly that typo, or misquotation, or mishearing, or misremembering, has proven to be a surprisingly pervasive one, and the poem has been accidentally made into one about stealing by readers both relatively unfamiliar with Wordsworth and those very familiar indeed.”

Among those very familiar indeed is Richard Holmes, who inserted the “t”. So did E.M. Forster (whose name I have often reduced, when writing, to Foster, as though he were the descendent of the man who wrote “Way down upon the Suwannee River”, which I also often misspell). In fact, Forster wrote (with Derridian karma forcing his hand), ‘it does not matter who wrote “A slumber did my spirit steal”’ – surely daring fate as much as the ancient Mariner did when he shot the albatross.

In some essay or another, Gore Vidal made fun of the fact that F.Scott Fitzgerald’s manuscripts are full of spelling mistake, as if the second grade lesson that good writing is good spelling was the law and the prophets. I’ve always been sympathetic to Fitzgerald, being a bad speller myself – C on the report card when I was in fifth grade. In contrast to the A in reading – what happened there? Partly this is because I have always kept reading and music close together – the words sound off in my head – and the musical version of “salmon”, for instance, is not exactly replicated in that devilish “l”.

As Townsend points out, the Oxford Companion to English literature went with the “t” over four editions, from 1932 to 1967, reminding us that one of the “companions” of Jesus was no true friend and sold him out for a bag full of steal. And by a false kiss sealed the deal.

Even, even (sob) Rene Wellek misquoted the poem, in a polemic against all those deconstructors destroying literary studies. That is the thing about polemic – it falls under a charm that inevitably makes one commit the same error that one is decrying.

I don’t know whether that spelling C was the decisive event that decided my whole paraphiliac career of looking for errors in others’ texts, or being fascinated by the game of “Chinese whispers” – as it was once called – because to my mind it is the very model of information transfer. But I am so so glad when I meet fellow obsessives. We all sit in the back of the class and make fun of Miss X when she hands back our pop spelling quizzes.