Edition of Pater's Gaston

Book Reviews Edition of Pater's Gaston Walter Pater. Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text. Gerald Monsman, ed. Greensboro: ELT Press, 1995. xlvi + 336 pp. $40.00 IN 1894, THE YEAR in which Joseph Conrad completed his first novel, Walter Pater left the world his last, unfinished. Set in France after the Reformation, the novel was apparently to consist of four (or perhaps three) parts each containing approximately six chapters. The first five chapters appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in 1888, while Chapter 7 was published as an essay in the Fortnightly Review the next year. A further seven chapters (6 and 8-13) survived unpublished in manuscript. In 1896, Charles L. Shadwell, Pater's longtime friend, produced the posthumous Gaston de Latour: An Unfinished Romance, an edition that included Chapter 6 (drawn from a manuscript since lost) as well as the magazine chapters. Now Gerald Monsman, working assiduously and with great insight into Pater's work, has brought the entire body of material together under the title Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text in a sumptuous edition published by ELT Press. The text is "revised" only in the special sense that, in the six unpublished chapters, the "Edition Text" contains Pater's final wording where he made alterations in the manuscripts and that, in the published chapters, it contains the wording produced by Pater when copying the manuscript (now at the Berg) from the Macmillan's and Fortnightly issues. In a larger sense, it is principally a restored text, especially as compared with the even more incomplete edition of Shadwell, who judged most of the unpublished manuscript chapters insufficiently "finished" for publication. Although aimed, like Shadwell's, at more general readers, this edition will be used chiefly by Pater specialists interested in studying a work of his in progress, and his last. In addition to an introduction and the usual preliminaries, it contains 135 pages of main text, comprising both the published and unpublished chapters, and 190 pages of three kinds of back matter: "Explanatory Annotation to the Edition Text," an "Apparatus Criticus to the Edition Text"—a "Diplomatic Transcription" of the holographs of the unpublished chapters and a section of "Emendations & Variants"—and an Appendix on "Pater's Paper." Elegant illustrations grace the volume. 345 ELT 39 : 3 1996 The back matter suggests the two audiences served by this edition. The section of explanatory annotations contains principally historical notes, translations, cross-references, and other glosses, some of them rather elaborate, a few of them found in most dictionaries (e.g., scriptorium ), but there is also the occasional note on the several inscriptions in a given manuscript (e.g., 102:6, 102:26). The apparatus, on the other hand, begins with a lengthy genetic text of the extant manuscript chapters, deftly presented but nonetheless full of the arrows, rules, bracketed editorial comments, and other "barbed wire" familiar to hardy souls determined to pursue the details of inscription, and thus of the writing process, through this sort of transcription entangled in code. Next comes "Textual Emendations & Variants" (the actual title, not that listed in the Contents), which reports the "principal" variation in wording among the early texts (the manuscripts, the magazines, the Shadwell edition) as well as editorial emendations of the wording, spelling, and paragraphing of the copy-texts, though not their punctuation; here, too, is further and more detailed editorial commentary on some of the more problematic states of the texts. The volume thus has dual aims, both laudable though perhaps ultimately incompatible. In this it is not unlike many scholarly editions, but the bifurcation of aims and audiences is especially acute for a work that is in fact not yet a novel and in almost every important way is unfinished. The volume seeks at once to make Pater's last work accessible to readers interested in "the novel as, for example, a milepost in cultural studies" and to the scholar interested in Pater's processes of composition and revision and his search for the mot juste. In the "Edition Text" we find mostly a clear text, but this reading text contains square brackets surrounding language "supplied by the editor" or, if around blank space, "missing material." In what...