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The Work of Revision. By Hannah Sullivan. Harvard University Press 360pp, Pounds 25.95. ISBN 9780674073128. Published 28 June 2013
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader," Robert Frost declared. Is he right? Do texts reveal a writer's real emotions and experience? In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom proposes, "first kiss does the trick ... First thoughts are best"; meanwhile, James Joyce was hectically revising his manuscript. After the dark night of composition, revisions show our morning-after regrets: we wake up hugging a manuscript, then cry: "What! are you here?" (T.S. Eliot).
In Hannah Sullivan's impressively researched first book, revisions become a "figure for modernism" - particularly for London-y High Moderns: from Henry James' embroidered sentences to Ezra Pound's minimalist poetics and surgery to The Waste Land; from Ulysses' volcanic additions to Virginia Woolf's traumatised self-portraits. Hardly is a mark unremarked-upon; even Pound's colon from In a Station of the Metro is probed.
The Work of Revision places the author's intention at centre stage, brought back from the shadows of non-being, a mere "functional principle" whose texts "write themselves". Still, an author's scrawled corrections or pentimenti can, like a second Last Will, excite...