INTERVIEW: Wicklow resident Prof J.C.C. Mays has spent his entire adult life on a 'mind-boggling' project, editing the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As the last six volumes are published, he tells Arminta Wallace that his work originated in 'a series of accidents'
'THE left-hand page might have, say, Hebrew on it and the right-hand page might be a diagram. Some of it is written in gout medicine; some is written in laudanum. And then you find pages where he scratched himself and finished a couple of words in blood, just because - well, just because he had to." Quite. Settled in the garden of his Wicklow farmhouse, his lanky frame folded into a wooden deckchair, Prof J.C.C. Mays is talking about editing the manuscripts of one Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man who clearly never allowed the lack of a biro to cripple his creative impulses.
It is a suitably sylvan location in which to discuss the poet whose work is packed with lofty crags, sacred rivers and "gardens bright with sinuous rills . . . enfolding sunny spots of greenery". Clouds scud across a wind-scoured sky, allowing bursts of sunlight to bathe us in liquid gold - and encouraging fistfuls of flying insects to nuzzle into ears, hair and the surrounding shrubs. The house is sufficiently far from the beaten track for Mays to declare that when he retires, he'll spend his days standing on the roadside counting passing cars, which are relative rarities. But like Coleridge's manuscripts, the apparently idyllic scene of rural domesticity - complete with resident long-haired German Shepherd, who sidles up to the tape recorder every time she thinks we aren't looking, and breathes solemnly into it - isn't short on surprises.
Behind us, what looks like an ordinary hayshed turns out to be an expertly-equipped all-mod-cons workspace, with row upon row of books marching along immaculate columns of floor-to-ceiling shelves. On a shelf within easy reach of his desk is the set of books on which Mays has lavished over a quarter of a century of meticulous research: The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge, Princeton University Press, six volumes, 4,816 pages, 29 centimetres of shelf space, €647.25. It is a mind-boggling achievement within an even more mind-boggling project; for the Collected Coleridge, of which Poetical Works is the final part, runs to 34 volumes in total - and as Mays is the first to point out, that's not counting 10 volumes of notebooks and six of letters, all edited by a combined team of scholars.
So how did Mays get involved? "A series of accidents, really" is how he sums up his life with Coleridge. "I suppose I got into university life by accident - in those days you didn't have to try very hard to get sucked in. But I pretty soon realised that I liked Coleridge. I had my doubts about English literature as an area of study - and Coleridge kind of erupts over the edge of it, into science, philosophy, German, theology. He's the kind of writer who's into everything, and isn't looking for easy answers, and that suits me."
While researching a doctorate on Coleridge at Oxford he met Canadian academic Kathleen Coburn, the general editor of the Coleridge series, who brought him to Toronto to continue his investigations on a year-long fellowship. He was then, with disarming promptness, offered a permanent job at the university. "I found myself in my 20s with the appalling prospect of becoming an American academic buried in a very deep groove with a specialist tab over me, teaching one course for the rest of my days, so I just got out," he says.
Mays moved to Ireland instead, took a position in the English department at University College Dublin and forgot about Coleridge - until Coburn invited him to edit the poems and plays for her mammoth complete works. By 1976, he had settled down to some serious Coleridge collecting. "If you looked at the people who had written books about Coleridge in the early 1970s, and who might be qualified to do this job, I wasn't one of them," he says, laughing. "It was a very quirky choice. Either she was odd to choose me - and it shows in the the result - or she chose me because she thought I was the youngest and fittest of the people she knew. Because, God knows, I hadn't a clue what I was taking on."
The Collected Coleridge was partly sponsored by the Bollingen Foundation, set up by Paul Mellon, whose father emigrated to the US from Omagh and made a fortune on the railroads. Thanks to the Mellon millions, Mays became the proud possessor of the first IBM personal computer to arrive in Ireland. "I went out to the airport to collect it in 1982," he says. "It cost an absolute fortune. It's an incredible thing with an enormous dot matrix printer. I still have it in UCD, though I don't know what to do with it now - I'm trying to find out whether there might be a museum somewhere to take it. But it certainly rescued me, because by that stage I had become enmeshed in bits of paper and Tippex."
By the end of the summer of 1989 the printer had churned out six Xerox cartons-ful of typed pages, each containing up to 2,500 sheets. It turned out that Coleridge was an obsessive reviser. There are at least 18 separate versions of 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel' in existence. For the editor, the problem becomes one of judgment. When is a new version of a poem a truly new version - is the addition of, say, a comma enough to tip the balance? And which, then, is the definitive version - the earliest? The latest? The "best"? Such are the questions which convulse the secret world of academic text editing.
"English language textual editing is based on the idea of Shakespeare as the national Bible," explains Mays. "It really emerged in the 19th century.
"Before that, someone like Dr Johnson would take an educated guess at a bit of Shakespearean nonsense and come up with some pretty good suggestions. But in the 19th century, while trying to work out a definitive text, they began to think about things like how 16th-century printing shops were arranged, and how a compositor who was in a hurry might choose the wrong bit of type from a tray, and how handwriting could have been misread and so on. By the 1920s it was incredibly sophisticated. They were working out the number of compositors at work in the shop and when they might have changed shifts and how mistakes might have occurred between different shifts."
By Coleridge's time, printing had developed into a less hit-and-miss process. Hand copyists could, however, still wreak havoc with manuscripts. Many of Coleridge's poems were copied by the Wordsworth women - his wife, sister and sister-in-law. "They all tended to copy each other's handwriting, but they all make very different kinds of mistake, so you have to know where one person stops and another picks up," Mays says.
Then there are the poet's own changes. "He wrote some poems and finished with them. He wrote other poems that he fiddled with all through his life, that are basically the same poem with a lot of fine-tuning. And he wrote poems that he radically revised at various stages; and then fine-tuned each of them," says Mays, adding - with commendable understatement - "It's an incredibly fluid situation".
To decipher the various layers of scratching-out and rewriting, Mays used a "collating machine" which was originally developed for spying on the Germans during the second World War. "It's like a pair of binoculars - you put a page in on each side, and if there's a difference between the two, it starts to vibrate." Ultraviolet light also proved useful - and one poem emerged, miraculously, when a mirror was held up to a page in a discarded book. "The sort of knowledge you need is contained in a book on police detection methods. It's really on fraud, and it's the best guide to the use of ultraviolet and reading erased pencil and so on," says Mays, with a chuckle. "The Metropolitan Police have a website -I was on it the other day - where you can ask them for an updated bibliography on typewritten materials."
Mays devised his own rules regarding definitive versions of Coleridge's poetry - briefly, early versions of political pieces and later versions of more purely literary poems - and says people are free to agree or disagree. "My choice is questionable, and if I were to do this again next week I might choose another one - but you do have to choose," he says.
He is visibly shocked by the suggestion that he might be "Mr Coleridge" or that this project, exhaustive as it is, might present a definitive view of Coleridge's work. "I'm not a Coleridge freak. There are many other writers whom I have an equal interest in and have spent almost as much spare time on. Possibly," he adds with a smile, "in order to stay sane."
A little light reading, Mays-style? He grins broadly. "The writers I like are kind of odd. Not the kind you find in Waterstone's or Hodges Figgis; you have to go looking for them. Some American, some Irish poets - what might be called underground, alternative, whatever the phrase is. Things that get published in pamphlets, or get circulated quietly. That's where I think it's actually at, and has been at for a long time."
Inside the door of his office he reaches up, takes a small, leather-bound book from a shelf and leafs affectionately through it. It is, it turns out, a book by Coleridge's da. "Coleridge's father was a clergyman in Devon who wrote books about all sort of bizarre things. This one is ostensibly about church furniture - but actually it's a sort of dissertation on Methodism." It's a fair bet that for Prof J.C.C. Mays, counting cars is a long way off yet.