“LOST” OPPORTUNITY: The University of South Carolina Press has enjoyed its day in the media sun, thanks to the recent publication of O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life, the unabridged version of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. After all, how many university presses get mentioned in a New York Times editorial, even critically? In October, the Times questioned whether the press and the book’s editors, Arlyn Bruccoli and Matthew J. Bruccoli, should have published the original version at all, restoring 66,000 words cut in 1929 by Wolfe’s editor, Maxwell Perkins.
Michael S. Mills is among those who agree that the original O Lost deserves a wide reading. But he doesn’t plan to buy the South Carolina volume edited by the Bruccolis. That’s because he had the idea to restore O Lost first, yet, as a junior scholar, was stymied in the search for a publisher. “I was years ahead of Mr. Bruccoli,” he says. “I simply could not get enough interest in it.”
“As a matter of quiet protest on my part,” he adds, “I’m not going to purchase another man’s scholarly edition of the work I did.”
Now an instructor of English at Fayetteville Technical Community College, in North Carolina, Mr. Mills generated a scholarly edition of O Lost as part of his Ph.D. dissertation, which he received from Temple University in 1991. For nearly a decade, he looked in vain for a publisher who would put out O Lost, which, with scholarly material, is a hefty 695 pages in the South Carolina edition. Given Wolfe’s ties to the state, the University of North Carolina Press was a likely home. The press expressed interest, but bowed out when Mr. Mills couldn’t guarantee he’d be able to raise enough money to subsidize the publication. While praising his “excellent and painstaking editorial work,” Louisiana State University Press also turned down Mr. Mills, calling the decision “quite frankly an economic one.”
Finally, in 1998, the University of Missouri Press agreed to consider the manuscript, stressing twice in a letter to Mr. Mills that the review would be handled “promptly.” Just as his fortunes seemed to have turned, Mr. Mills got some stinging news: The Wolfe estate had agreed to entrust the publication to Mr. Bruccoli, a professor of English at the University of South Carolina. A prominent scholarly editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works, Mr. Bruccoli enjoys close ties to his home university’s press and to Charles Scribner’s Sons, the house that first published Look Homeward, Angel.
Timed to celebrate the centenary of Wolfe’s birth, South Carolina put out O Lost as well as To Loot My Life Clean: The Thomas Wolfe-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, which Mr. Bruccoli edited with Park Bucker, a former graduate student of his. Catherine Fry, the press’s director, says the 5,000-copy first printing of the novel is selling well enough that a second printing is likely.
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“NOTHING WAS STOLEN": South Carolina is able to sell the book for a reasonable $29.95 because it’s printed on lighter-weight paper. Just as important, the Bruccolis agreed to waive all royalties when they signed their contracts. Still, Ms. Fry says she understands why other presses shied away. “The negotiations were more protracted than any prior dealings in my career,” she says.
Mr. Bruccoli says he didn’t know of Mr. Mills’s efforts until after he had signed his agreement. “Nothing was stolen from him,” he says. He asked the instructor to comment on a hefty section of the O Lost manuscript. Had Mr. Mills contributed to the editing, he would have gotten substantial credit, though not on the title page, according to an agreement between them. Ultimately, Mr. Mills had little to add, says Mr. Bruccoli. “He was given an opportunity to participate, and he did nothing.”
In fact, Mr. Mills has no complaints about Mr. Bruccoli’s involvement, nor about the published volume. But he thinks Wolfe’s representatives could have shown him more courtesy. For now, he’s through with scholarship on the novelist. “I don’t want to put another dime in the coffers of the Wolfe estate,” he says.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A21