Searching for the “Confederacy of Dunces” Manuscript
I had nearly given up on the question of the original manuscript until a year ago when I interviewed Lynda Martin, the sister of Toole’s best friend in high school. “The manuscript?” she said in a soft southern accent. “Yes, well I have it in my closet here at home.”
An excellent tale of literary sleuthing from Cory Maclauchlin in The Millions.
It’s hard out there for a monk penning illuminated manuscripts for hours on end. Hat tip to Lapham’s Quarterly.
Walt Whitman’s manuscript page for his poem “A Death Sonnet for Custer,” 1876.
Spotted this in the NYPL digital archives: Mary Shelley’s embellished draft of Queen of the Universe, a revision of Queen Mab.
When Shelley’s friend asked what she was up to the famous writer is reported to have said, “I’ve drawn…a monster!” (Couldn’t resist.)
From the New York Public Library:
Among Nabokov’s 1950s lecture notes for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is this diagram of the “ladies’ part” of a “very primitive” sleeping car, in which Anna would have ridden.
From the New York Public Library:
In his copy of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Nabokov retranslated virtually the entire work interlinearly; on this page, he has depicted the beetle into which Gregor Samsa metamorphoses.
There’s reading a book, and then there’s Nabokov reading a book. “Interlinearly” means he translated the book between each line. For the entire work.
Nabokov preaches the virtues of literary data visualization forty years before everyone else:
From the New York Public Library:
In 1969, Nabokov told an interviewer, “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” Nabokov drew just such a map as part of his lecture notes for Ulysses.
![mythologyofblue:
Corrected page proofs of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal
[from Treasures of the national library of France - The European Library - v1.5]
(ramage)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/12707130_500.jpg)
Corrected page proofs of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal
[from Treasures of the national library of France - The European Library - v1.5]
(ramage)
An early draft of Walt Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!” (from the Library of Congress). How many other documents so exemplify the nexus of poetry and American history?
Roland Barthes’ method of composition was a bit unique: he’d compose brief missives on standard note cards, amassing hundreds before they cohered into a full text. These original manuscript notes are from his posthumous work Mourning Diary, with translations by Richard Howard. (Here’s an interview with Howard on Barthes.)
Opening page of corrected proof of Wallace’s 1996 essay “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise” for Harper’s magazine. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.
Get thee to Austin: the Harry Ransom Center is hosting a David Foster Wallace Symposium.
Denis Johnson’s notes for Train Dreams and his essay “Why I Write,” from Work in Progress, courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.
