Modes of Composition in Three Authors

Modes of Composition in Three Authors
Hoover, David L., New York University, david.hoover@nyu.edu
I have already argued against the widely held belief that Henry James's switch from handwriting to dictation caused a radical change in his style (Hoover 2009). However, the wider question of how mode of composition affects literary style remains open, and James might be the exception rather than the rule. I report here on some preliminary studies for a more comprehensive examination of writers who changed their mode of composition either temporarily or permanently. The three authors examined here, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Walter Scott, present clear cases of changes from handwriting to dictation (and back), ones in which the details of composition are well known, and in which the changes in mode of composition take place within a single text.

The case of Thomas Hardy is slightly problematic because he was not always truthful about his wife's role in the production of his books, and in some cases burned some MS pages in her hand. For A Laodicean, one of his less important novels, however, the facts seem fairly clear. After sending the first three (of thirteen) installments of the serial version to the printer, Hardy fell ill, suffering from some kind of bladder inflamation. He struggled through the fourth installment, but his doctor then gave him the choice of lying with his feet higher than his head or an operation. Choosing the former required him to dictate much of the novel, though he was able to correct proofs. He eventually became “less and less dependent on dictation, writing the final sections of the manuscript in his own hand.” He mentions writing parts of installment twelve in a letter (Milgate 2006: 204), and this suggests he also wrote part thirteen.

To test for any dramatic effect of the switch to dictation, I divided the novel into four parts, the handwritten installmens1-4, the dictated 5-11, and the partially or wholly handwritten 12 and 13, and further divided these installments into sections of about 9,000 words. As can be seen in Fig. 1, the sections of the novel strongly tend to group together chronologically, though the beginning, 1-4 HW (1), is somewhat unusual, as often happens with the beginnings of novels, and 5-11 D (5) is also an outlier. At first, Fig. 1 seems to support a distinction between handwritten and dictated parts, but the presence of the largely handwritten installments 12 and 13 among the dictated parts suggests that narrative structure is a more potent force than mode of composition. Further work will be necessary to test other characteristics of the text, but the analysis shown in Fig. 1, along with many others based on shorter sections, does not suggest that Hardy's mode of composition radically affected his style.

Fig. 1–Handwriting and Dictation in A Laodicean

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Joseph Conrad presents a more complex problem. Several of his texts were partly dictated, including three I will examine here, the novellas The End of the Tether and The Shadow-Line, and novel The Rescue. Conrad dictated the second serial installment of “The End of the Tether” to Ford Maddox Ford under time pressure after part of the manuscript was accidentally burnt. I have separated the beginning and the burnt installment from the rest of the story, and have analyzed the parts in sections of about 2,600 words. As Fig. 2 shows, the first two sections of the dictated (burnt) installment cluster with the handwritten beginning of the story, while the last section clusters with the handwritten rest of the story. The narrative structure is again quite clear here, but there is nothing to suggest that dictation altered Conrad's style.

Fig. 2–Handwriting and Dictation in “The End of the Tether”

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About one-fourth of The Shadow Line, beginning a little more than half-way through the novella, were dictated. Conrad himself ponders the possible effect of mode of composition, suggesting that “it will be curious for critics to compare my dictated to my written manner of expressing myself” (Conrad 1983: 543) . As with The End of the Tether, however, there is little evidence of any affect of dictation on the style of the novel, as Fig. 3 shows. Analyses based on different numbers of words vary somewhat, but the separate cluster containing the first four sections of the novel is very stable, and all analyses group the fifth handwritten section of the beginning of the novel with the dictated sections that immediately follow it. Again, narrative structure trumps any effect of the change in mode of composition.

Fig. 3–Handwriting and Dictation in The Shadow-Line

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The composition of The Rescue is unusual in that Conrad first worked on this novel from 1896 to 1898, but did not finish it until 1918-1919. The early part was handwritten, while the end was dictated. Although Conrad suggests that the novel might prove interesting as a case of style evolution, readers have found the style “homogeneous” (Karl 1979: 816). Here I divided the novel into dictated and handwritten parts, and cut them into sections of about 5,000 words for analysis. As Fig. 4 shows, the first two dictated parts cluster with the handwritten parts, and the 7th handwritten section clusters with the dictated parts. This pattern is extremely stable in analyses based on the 990-600 MFW, and all analyses show a mixing of sections produced by the two modes. Further tests based on other textual features will be needed to make the case more strongly, but, for Conrad, as for James and Hardy, the mode of composition has no obvious effect on style.

Fig. 4–Handwriting and Dictation in The Rescue

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Turning to Walter Scott, we find a different scenario. About a third of the way through his career, Scott was writing very rapidly in an attempt to pay off an enormous debt. While writing The Bride of Lammermoor in 1818-19, he suffered from increasingly severe stomach pains (probably from gall-stone disease) that prevented him from writing, and finished the novel by dictation, though it is not entirely clear exactly where the dictation begins. The final extant MS leaf corresponds to Chapter 26 (of 33), but it ends with a catch word and has corrections for later leaves on the reverse (Milgate 1987: 170). We can be sure, however, that much, and probably most, of the last seven chapters were dictated. I have divided the novel into the part corresponding to the MS and the rest, and have divided both parts into sections of about 5,000 words. The important peculiarities of the pattern shown in Fig. 5 remain constant over many analyses. The first part of the novel for which no MS exists clusters (loosely) with the final two chapters of MS (though also with handwritten sections 6-12), but the handwritten sections 13-17 cluster with the handwritten beginning of the novel and the other three sections for which no MS exists. This peculiar pattern needs further study, but it does not support a difference between Scott's dictated and handwritten styles.

Fig. 5–Dictation and Handwriting in The Bride of Lammermoor

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Because of continuing stomach pain, Scott also dictated about half of Ivanhoe, but finished the novel by hand after he began to recover. I have divided the novel into handwritten and dictated sections of about 9,000 words. The analysis in Fig. 6 shows that here, as before, there is no evidence of a significant shift in style when Scott's mode of composition changed. The last dictated section clusters with the following MS sections, while the next to last MS section, MS (9), clusters with the dictated sections. When fewer words are analyzed MS (9) shifts to the MS cluster, but Dict. (9) then also moves into the MS cluster. The most reasonable interpretation of this behavior is that the last dictated sections are similar to the adjacent MS sections, and that the important factor is again narrative structure rather than mode of composition.

Fig. 6–Handwriting and Dictation in Ivanhoe

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More analysis of other cases, especially those involving typewriting and word-processing, where some evidence for significant effects exists from composition studies, will be needed before any strong generalizations are possible. Yet the evidence from James and the three authors examined here strongly suggests that mode of composition has remarkably little effect on authorial style.The tempting conclusion that the authors' revisions may have erased any effects of the changes in mode of composition has some support from the heavy revisions of James and Conrad, but Hardy was apparently not a heavy reviser, and Scott famously revised very little.

References:
Conrad, J. 1983 The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 5 F. Karl L. Davies Cambridge Univ. Press Cambridge

Hoover, D. 2009 “Modes of Composition in Henry James: Dictation, Style, and What Maisie Knew, ” Digital Humanities 2009, University of Maryland, June 22-25, 2009

Karl, F. 1979 Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives, a Biography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York

Millgate, Jane 1987 Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist, Univ. of Toronto Press Toronto