Long-running literary clash thrown into spotlight

By MARGIE THOMSON

On the surface, it looked so good. Librarian Margaret Scott and academic Vincent O'Sullivan collaborating in bringing to publication four volumes of the letters of Katherine Mansfield, with a fifth on the way. All the works are of considerable scholarship and a resource for anyone with a substantial interest in our most famous literary export.

So much is true. It's also true to say that Scott had the original contract with Oxford University Press, through Dan Davin, to hunt down and edit letters written by Mansfield, and that some years later O'Sullivan became involved (although the circumstances surrounding his recruitment are disputed), eventually becoming a joint editor.

But for an observer to say anything else about this relationship is to march into a minefield of disagreement, dislike and disappointment where the lines between literal, historical and emotional truth have become blurred.

Scott brought the conflict to public notice in her recent memoir, Recollecting Mansfield. She says she had begun to feel weighed down by the hundreds of letters waiting to be transcribed. Working fulltime as manuscripts librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library, the widowed mother-of-three was editing the Mansfield letters in her spare time. Crystallising 20 years of hurt and anger into just two paragraphs, she writes:

"Then one day I was approached by Vincent O'Sullivan with an offer of help ... He said he had some spare time and would be prepared to give me a hand if I would like it. This seemed like a gift from the gods and I felt greatly relieved. At first all seemed well, and after a while I approached OUP and told them we needed a new contract in which Vincent and I would be co-editors, he having, as he explained, alphabetical priority.

"Failing to soldier on alone was a piece of cowardice for which I paid dearly in the long run. For it soon became clear that no kind of collaboration would be possible. The arrangement just simply didn't work, and the next few years were desperately unhappy. The experience left me vulnerable to an insidious depression."

She chose these words carefully and is, she says, prepared to stand by what she wrote. But she has been surprised, naively perhaps, by the way reviewers have homed in on this evidence of antipathy. And now O'Sullivan has waded in with a letter to the Herald (following our review of Recollecting Mansfield) which ups the ante considerably.

O'Sullivan contests Scott's version of how he came to be involved and doesn't mince his words:

" 1. I became co-editor at the invitation of Dan Davin, who, from his desk at Oxford, saw that the edition would not exist if left to Scott.

"2. Each of the four volumes that have so far appeared makes it clear in a prefatory note quite what was done by whom ...

"3. No one doubts Scott's admirable secretarial skill in reading what, at times, is very difficult handwriting. But it is a far cry from straight transcription to scholarly edition, a cry Scott has been deaf to for decades.

"4. When she attempted an edition by herself with the Mansfield Notebooks, neither Oxford, nor any other scholarly press, was interested enough to publish. Is there such a thing as a fact speaking for itself?

"Margaret Scott is quite correct, though, to note how difficult co-editing the letters has been. I have found working with her professionally repellent."

Scott's response to the assertion that O'Sullivan's involvement was at Davin's behest: "It's the first I've heard of it."

The Herald spoke to academics (none of whom would be quoted) about the working relationship and, while no-one knew all the details, two were of the opinion that Scott could not have successfully completed the letters alone; and that, while O'Sullivan can be difficult to work with, his expertise on Mansfield was essential to the correct ordering and annotation of the letters.

What seems likely is that, despite falling out, they each had a need for the skills of the other. Collaborations are often difficult, with the finished product being no real indicator of the tensions beneath the polished surface.

O'Sullivan buys into this.

"The way I'd put it is that the edition needed both the skills Margaret brought to it, and my skills," he told the Herald. The generous and seemingly mollifying tone is rather spoiled when he denigrates Scott's skills as "secretarial."

Scott initially contests this mutual-need scenario but concedes she was a beginner. "What I needed was someone to give me a little bit of backing and support. After all, I did it with the two large volumes of the Mansfield Notebooks."

It seems that most of her bad feeling comes not from the involvement of someone else as such, but the way she perceives she was treated during the collaboration.

There is an impression in O'Sullivan's letter that Scott completed her transcription and editing of Mansfield's notebooks and then, the quality being not up to scratch, was unable to find a scholarly press willing to publish the two volumes.

The OUP and the New Zealand university presses weren't interested, but whether it was because of Scott's non-academic standing, her unorthodox scholarly practice, or simply the non-commercial nature of the work itself, we shall never know.

The Indiana University Press, on the other hand, liked the idea and agreed to publish Scott's edition of the notebooks, although this arrangement fell over when Scott would not agree to make a selection of the best bits and squeeze them into one volume.

In the end, the two-volume edition of the Notebooks was published by Wellington publisher Daphne Brasell.

The Notebooks were reviewed favourably and at length in both the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, admittedly neither of which are scholarly publications. While O'Sullivan strongly disapproves of Scott's approach to editing Mansfield's punctuation in the interests of readability, she used her judgment to change the many hurried dashes to commas and full-stops. The London Review of Books approved of the clarity. But, while history is littered with heavily edited and freely interpreted transcriptions, the modern approach is to transcribe exactly as written by the author.

It is, as O'Sullivan says, the scholarly view of editing versus a readerly view.

O'Sullivan's letter speaks volumes about how difficult this particular collaboration must have been - in fact, still is, as the fifth and final volume of the letters has not yet reached publication.

Both O'Sullivan and Scott, while civil on the phone, are capable of great prickliness. Whether their conflict began as a result of territoriality - she a rather insecure person wanting to protect what she thought was hers; he a more assured personality wanting to occupy that same ground - or scholarly difference, it has become deeply, darkly personal.

Says Scott, who has become increasingly reluctant to be quoted on this matter: "This is his modus operandi, not mine.

"My work will stand or fall without his say-so."

Says O'Sullivan, defending his letter: " If one's professional integrity is challenged, you have the right to come back and say, that's not right."

The relationship looks doomed, although their joint work will stand as an important contribution to understanding Mansfield, herself a turbulent, acerbic personality.

No doubt the dislike between Scott and O'Sullivan will itself become, like those much argued over annotations, a footnote in the annals of Mansfield scholarship.