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| Write Cut Rewrite exhibition Photo: Ian Wallman |
So what ‘darlings’ do we see here? Opening the exhibition is
a twelfth century manuscript, The Ormulum,
commenting on the Bible in early English. This is a literal cut and paste – one
page trimmed to a third of its size, overlying another with almost every line
heavily scored through. ‘For a notebook which is almost a thousand years old it
looks surprisingly modern because it features so many crossed-out passages,’
says the label.
Yet why do crossed out passages look more modern than the
finished product? Because they show a common human impulse to revise, with its
hesitancy and changes of mind, in a way that the fixed final text does not?
Doodles in Shelley’s notebook, displayed here, also seem strangely modern.
Perhaps it is use of the pen rather than fixed type which makes them seem more
human?
Also included are three wonderful sheets of witty lines kept
in reserve by Raymond Chandler for his detective novels, ticked off in pencil
after being used. Unused was ‘I left her with her virtue intact, but it was a
struggle. She nearly won.’ I can imagine that in The Big Sleep. Another aide
memoire is Philip Pullman’s list of Oxford colleges and the names he called
them in his children’s books, e.g. All Souls becomes St Scholastica.
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| A list of witty lines kept by Raymond Chandler |
Editing materials are important. Unlined notebooks show poet’s Alice Oswald swirling coloured sketches which she then tries to translate into words. Le Carré‘s drafts are handwritten, then typed up, then the typescript is cut up again and stapled between further handwritten parts. Fans of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy can read a highly edited, handwritten opening in which Ricki Tarr tracks down fellow ex-spy Jim Prideaux to a school where he is teaching. But in the final book, they never meet. This is one ‘darling’ which was killed.
Sometimes little is edited – Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism has one A3 sized manuscript
page with just one correction. Were his robust rhyming couplets a confident guide,
so little revision was needed? One can also see him underlining words (which
would be italicised in a modern addition), bringing out the oral qualities,
like a musical score.
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Electronic editing
And what of today’s untraceable electronic editing? This is covered by a digital display with ‘Cuttings’, a poem by Fanny Choi, where one can track the electronic editing process – ‘every keystroke, every pause, every typo, every half-developed idea later abandoned’.
Before going to the exhibition I had wondered whether a
museum, which must preserve objects and halt time, could convey any of the
fluency or even urgency of the editing process. It turns out that it can.
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| Corrections to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein |