The early stages of a literary work are often of immense interest. It is perhaps a rather tawdry kind of interest, like paparazzi shots of a Hollywood starlet taking the bins out before she’s put her make-up on. Of course it’s extraordinary to think that some of the most famous characters, events and lines in literature weren’t as we now know them but had to be struggled towards. Sometimes these efforts have the anachronistic but unavoidable sense of somebody getting it wrong.

Textual bibliographers have carefully classified the different steps a work takes from manuscript to first edition and subsequent versions. Perhaps we could go further in search of a writer’s progress. There are the inchoate thoughts, remote from any conscious intention – perhaps a sound, a mood, a phrase, a voice, a movement. Then some words that might merit being written down, even though no coherence is discernible. (But writers work in such different ways that none of this is universal.) Soon we start to have more consecutive writing – a few lines, or even a scene. A draft follows, which could be modified in any number of ways. At some point, eyes other than the author’s fall on the manuscript. Suggestions are made, changes might even be enforced, and agreement is reached on a final manuscript, which is sent to the printer and out to an audience.

Some or none of these stages may be preserved for the curious investigator. Occasionally we have everything, from the first jottings to the last authorised text. In many cases, however, writers have destroyed all other versions apart from the one first published, either by conscious decision or just custom. Sometimes even in these instances we still have signs of the author’s thoughts and decisions, because the work appeared in a subsequent rethought form. The differences between the first and second versions of The Dunciad and Brideshead Revisited tell us an enormous amount about the way Alexander Pope and Evelyn Waugh thought and worked.

James Joyce made a momentous improvement when he instructed
his editor to remove a single comma

Whether all this often amounts to more than vulgar curiosity I’m not quite sure. Bleak House is a work about which we know an enormous amount, almost from the moment of its conception. But what do we really learn about the finished novel by discovering that Dickens had jotted down dozens of other ideas for the title? With a few exceptions (for example, the first published edition rather than the last revised version of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa or Henry James’s novels), we prefer the last text the author approved. That is really the proper subject for discussion. Still, there is a lot to be said for vulgar curiosity, and there is no doubt that sifting through preliminary drafts turns up a lot to pique that particular interest.

Write, Cut, Rewrite is an agreeable glimpse of some highlights from an important collection of literary manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. For some reason, the book also discusses Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts, housed at Reading University, but otherwise it sticks to the Bodleian’s collection. This has its disadvantages in approaching the subject. A study of the development of individual texts would certainly prefer to look at some more celebrated or dramatic progresses. These could include Dickens’s working notes. There might be the vexed question of whether the First Quarto of Hamlet might be Shakespeare’s first thoughts rather than a hopelessly corrupt text (‘To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,/To Die, to sleepe, is that all?’). And then there’s the extraordinarily fascinating case of the version of The Waste Land that T.S. Eliot let Ezra Pound cut to the bone.

On the other hand, the Bodleian collection is so rich that we might even quibble with the choices Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon have made from them. I suppose it’s quite interesting to a Barbara Pym obsessive like myself that Mildred Lathbury, the heroine of Excellent Women, was once going to be called Clarissa. But it would have been much more interesting to have discussed another Pym manuscript, the first version of her first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle. As revealed by Paula Byrne, Pym’s excellent recent biographer, the Bodleian manuscript, written in the 1930s, has its two cosy spinster heroines embedded in fond nostalgia for their adolescence as Nazis. (‘She was wondering whether to wear her little swastika brooch or not.’)

The neglect of such a jaw-dropping typescript probably only suggests what riches are to be found in the collection overall. Here we have some thought-provoking insights into works in progress, some meticulous and tiny. James Joyce makes a momentous improvement to the second edition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by instructing his editor, Harriet Weaver, to delete a single comma from the first page of the first edition – the smallest changes require detailed justification. Instead of ‘When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold’, he required: ‘When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.’ The comma is removed: it stops being a careful rendering of a child’s voice and becomes closer to that voice itself.

Of course, much of this is tinkering, which may exasperate readers who focus on the meaning and not the means of literature. It is like trying to create the perfect joke – and sometimes it is exactly that. The first line of Beckett’s novel Murphy is a celebrated joke with philosophical and biblical undertones: ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.’ It is fascinating to see how it started with the biblical, but instead of the philosophical, the amateur-novelist ‘The sun shone as only the sun can, on nothing new’, and not a joke at all. Version after version followed – ‘as only suns can’; ‘as suns alone can’; ‘only suns must’; ‘the sun shone, it had no alternative, on the nothing new’ – before finally we get to the famous line. There is, too, a wonderful and inspiring dogged narrative of how W.B. Yeats pursued the opening of ‘All Souls’ Night’ from ‘It is All Souls’ Night’ (typescript – flat and telling us what the title says) to ‘’Tis All Souls’ Night, and the great Christ Church bell…’ (first printing – still arguably redundant, with a flash of grand archaism) to the final great opening:

Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell

And many a lesser bell sound through the room;

And it is All Souls’ Night.

In short, Yeats worked as hard on those three lines, and as tirelessly, as the writers’ room on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

This book is full of similar dedications to craft, and reproduces some very unlikely manuscripts – poems written on the back of torn packets of wine gums or (Beckett again) a bit of a Johnnie Walker cardboard box. There is a glorious late Larkin poem, ‘Long Lion Days’. He sent it to his companion Monica Jones on a Bodleian postcard of a medieval illumination of a lion. People trusted the Royal Mail a lot more in the 1970s, but I bet he kept a careful copy all the same.

There is, too, a quite interesting section on censorship, which would have been improved with some racier examples from the age that decided that obscenities might be admitted – it was a very gradual, point-by-point process. As it is, it does show that nobody read literary works with more scrupulous analysis than puritan censors. Here, the Lord Chamberlain objected to the moment in Beckett’s Endgame when Hamm first suggests they all pray to God, then shouts: ‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’ When Beckett agreed to change ‘bastard’ to ‘swine’, it was passed. The authors of this book describe that point of agreement as ‘curious’, which just goes to show that the Lord Chamberlain’s office had a better grasp of Beckett’s theological jokes than contemporary scholars do.

There is plenty of fun here, with well-illustrated examples from John le Carré, Mary Shelley, Kenneth Grahame (awful handwriting), Franz Kafka and Ludwig Wittgenstein among many others. If the book has a flaw, rather than a limitation, it’s that it doesn’t acknowledge that though most changes are in the nature of severe cutting, or at least replacements, there are authors whose revisions are overwhelmingly expansions. Proust’s additions, done by gluing strips on to the original draft, are so celebrated they have their own word in French, paperoles. According to Diana Souhami, Joyce’s marginal insertions to Ulysses, made at proof stage, increased the length of the novel by a third. The immense additional production costs could only be borne because his publisher, Sylvia Beach, was extremely rich. Some consideration of these and other famously self-indulgent manuscripts would have been welcome. But as it is, this is an enjoyable, borderline smutty glimpse behind the curtain of what no respectable author would ever want anyone to see./>