The Waves: The two holograph drafts by Virginia Woolf (review)

434 LEITERS IN CANADA 1976 photographic filters and bromide plates. Similarly, David Farmer convincingly demonstrates that no edition of Women in Love provides the text as Lawrence intended it, and in the process unravels some of the complex problems involving authorial motive and aesthetic judgment which an editor of that novel must face; and Michael Sidnell not only ably surveys the confused landscape of Yeatsian textual studies but also comments sensibly on the practical problems of editors facing the monumental disarray of Yeats's published and unpublished texts. But, like MacKenzie, Farmer and Sidnell avoid attempting to venture far into the realm of theory: neither Sidnell's suggestion for a 'grand comprehensive edition' of Yeats's work nor Fanner's decision to use Seltzer's edition of Women in Love as copy text ('the accidentals are least corrupt therein') seriously challenges conventional editorial wisdom. Not so the essays on problems in editing Henry james and Frank Norris by Maqbool Aziz and joseph Katz: both offer striking examples of I the special editorial difficulties posed by the james and Norris texts, but '. both also plunge headlong into one or another of those two black holes of modern editing - the confusions surrounding questions of authorial intention and choice of copy text. Unfortunately, although they develop striking (and often cogent) arguments, they were hampered by lack of space to deal adequately with the tangled theoretical questions their papers raise. Thus Katz's attempt to develop in less than ten pages a convincing analysis which poses challenging questions touching on the exceedingly complex topic of authorial intention inevitably leaves an impression that far less than full justice was done to the subject; and Aziz's argument that the magazine version of Roderick Hudson is 'the real novel- therefore that text is the new ed,ition's reading text' raises more problems than it answers or indeed than Aziz had space to take up. But of course such sharply put challenges to some current editorial assumptions were calculated to provoke discussion and dissent among members of the conference, and they did. In the last analysis perhaps the only really regrettable feature of this volume is that the format of the series does not allow it to include a record of that free give-and-take which followed the papers themselves. (ROBERT c. SCHWEIK) Virginia Woolf. The Waves: The two holograph drafts. Transcribed and edited by J.W. Graham. University of Toronto Press. Intro, 72 pp; original drafts, 769 pp. $29·5° When The Waves was first published in the United States a former teacher of mine felt compelled, in the absence of appreciative notices, to write the Saturday Review proclaiming its importance. How times have changed. In the past decade Virginia Woolf's experimental novel has HUMANITIES 435 joined Ulysses and The Waste Land as representative literary texts of modernism. Predictably, the history of its composition has drawn increasingly greater attention. The two early manuscript versions of The Waves, in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, have been available to scholars for some time. Now, thanks to John Graham and the University of Toronto Press, these two holograph drafts will reach the larger audience they deserve. Beyond a fascinating gloss on the final version, they constitute in their own right an important contribution to Woolf studies. The editor's task was not an easy one. Labouringto create a new form for the novel, Woolf filled over 7 00 handwritten pages with the raw material which was to become, in the space of two years, the familiar text of The Waves . She described her process of composition in a 1929 diary entry: 'I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic's dream. Then 1trust to some inspiration on re-reading; and pencil them into some sense. Still 1 am not satisified. 1think there is something lacking. I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. 1press to my centre. I don't care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there.' Readers who have confronted this mosaic of revised sentences, scrambled words, and hieroglyphic-like emendations can only marvel at the accuracy and clarity...