Olson and the Format of Maximus
by Gerald Burns
Published in Exquisite Corpse #15 (1986) and reprinted in Minutes of the Charles Olson Society #20 (April
1997).
I've designed and typeset
over a dozen books for James Haining's Salt Lick Press. The best of these, to
my mind, were texts presenting postmodern difficulties — poems floated
all over the page with bloc and individual indention, sudden drops (as if with
the Index key on an electric typewriter) to the next line, eccentric spacing
between words, and breaks between stanzas which can fall anywhere. The trick,
for a modern typesetter or photocompositor, is to duplicate the effect of the typed manuscript in what is practically
another medium. A first printing of an eccentric text can be horribly
important, if only because it tends to become the copy-text for later editions. I ask for white or
near-white paper to make crisper reproductions. If a space in the text (a
specially good rule for verse) coincides with the foot of the page I install
three asterisks in the footline, and say so in a note at the front.
Olson was fortunate
twice with In Cold Hell, In Thicket.
The Divers Press issue (Origin 8,
overseen by Creeley in Mallorca) is as determinedly handsome a book as
Creeley's own A Form of Women,
type dark enough for the solidity of the lines, in blocs disposed with great
dignity on the squarish page. If you hold the Four Seasons edition in the other
hand you can see the later printing take up the first as a challenge, find
other ways (larger type, a bit more leading) to be equivalently lovely. In
spite of Creeley's taste for titles in extra-bold sans serif (kept up in Black Mountain Review — I've
wondered did he take a hint from New Directions) I'd rather (just barely) be
reading the Divers Press edition.
The Maximus Poems got wonderful settings out of Stuttgart, reissued reduced with the first reset to its original shape by Jargon/Corinth, indentions so elegant and expressive it's a pleasure that issue stays available in stores. The placement of multiply indented blocs, seeing them over that jump from the manuscript when the line-lengths shrink (which alters the proportion of verse sections, in themselves and to each other) is delicate. Beginners measure the indention on the typed page and specify that. Even in a type size sort of "like" the typewriter face it isn't going to work. The Divers, Jargon/Corinth and Four Seasons books are models of how it should be done.
Olson's problem came
with Maximus IV, V, VI, the
Cape Goliard edition in the large size (which, I'm told, follows a smaller
Jargon/Corinth attempt, typeset but never issued). The letters, written to
Barry Hall from Gloucester in 1968, are in the Simon Fraser Library. They show
Olson, ill and at long distance, choosing (from a limited selection) the font.
He does not specify type size and leading, and seems to know very little,
technically, about what leading (the vertical distance between lines) can be
made to do.
His choice is between
Bembo and Garamond, and he seems fairly good at imagining how a line will look in either. But apparently he is
sent fairly short-line samples (in which the collapsing effect of set type will
be less apparent), and the problem, as he finds out nearly at once, is in the
leading.
Garamond sets small — 12-point Garamond on a leading of 12, which is to say squashed together vertically, still has space between the descenders of the line above (the tails of a lower-case y or g) and the next line's ascenders (the top of a W or l). Olson's MS included both long and short lines double-spaced on his typewriter. These any printer (unless told otherwise) will, as it were, double-space in set type, which is to say insert an invisible line of type's worth of depth, so an 11 on 12 setting will drop 24 points to the next line. Sometimes, especially if these double-spaced lines are very short (think of double-spaced Zukofsky lyrics in All), this is too
spacy and you go to 1 1/2 spaces instead. I find, for verse giving this kind of
problem, that an odd-number leading is best, say 11 on 13 rather than 11 on 12.
It gives you a point more space, for one thing, but (at least as important) is
not divisible neatly by two. Even multiples lose energy for typeset verse;
given an odd number of points the 1 1/2 spacing especially must go a point over
or one short, and this is more interesting (especially in photocomposed type,
always a little boring because all the proportions are a bit too neatly
divisible). The Stuttgart Maximuses,
on a leading of 15, go to 30 when they double-space and look just fine. Barry
Hall provides a leading of 12. Further, all the angled type and so on I assumed
was cut in seems from the galleys to have started life as hotset type —
real lead pushed around — which even at the time was not perhaps the best
way to do it. And the verse blocs were seldom disposed to Olson's liking
— much of his energy went into indicating further indention and the
repositioning of the floating short pieces on the index stock (numbered front
and back) which functioned, visually, as the pages to him. The rest (and all
this would have been better spent proofing) went into a series of . . . it's
hard to know what to call them . . . almost frighteningly desperate remarks on
many many galley pages, on the horrible effect of the Bembo's double-spacing.
Note that just this correspondence, and then the book resulting from these
galleys, becomes the design for the Goliard/Grossman Maximus and this dictates, decides, the format of The Maximus Poems as issued by the
University of California. That edition incorporates (for instance) three
em-dash conventions. The one that gives most trouble (as uncaught en-dashes for
hyphens) is the en-dash with the space on each side, established here by Barry
Hall. I've looked only sketchily at the IV, V, VI typescript MS at Simon Fraser, but carefully at
both sides of every galley page, scribbled and scribbled on by Olson, and it's
obvious (especially if, as I say, you've set a lot of postmodern type) that
Olson is fighting to get something that looks like his poems at all, and has no
energy left for fine points. When he proposes a Havana seegar to Hall it's for
a tiny section that almost happens (to my eye by luck) to set something like
what he wants. His hope that this might happen for the rest of it is, by the
time he gets galley pages, impractical.
SELECTIONS, CHARLES OLSON CORRESPONDENCE with BARRY HALL of Cape Goliard, London (originals in Simon Fraser University Library. Square brackets are Olson's.)
My Dear Barry:
Definitely either the
Bembo or the Garamond, & curiously am I cock-eyed but the Bembo seems to keep an energy going which the
Garamond seems to sit back from (it [the Bembo's energy] shows, it seems to my
eye, in less of a disunion in the spaces between the lines(?)
At the same time, on the face of it the Garamond is the more conservative & dependable possibly over a whole book? —Cld you therefore give me one more sample [& take a chunk of lines from something difficult . . .] & where the lines are long and give me the same passage set in the two types,
to make further decision by?
I hope that will not hang
you up — & will make altogether, in the end, a better book between
us.
Love,
O
(February
7th)
Thursday — February 22nd
Dear Barry — Having a hell of a time trying to make up my mind between those two —
and I honestly want the conservatism of the Garamond [at the same time
as every fresh time I look at
the Bembo I am arrested by some
activity there which, in truth, the Garamond then seems to lack]
But at that time I think the verse itself should do its own
work anyway, & the lighter the cover the more the verse should show!
It
would be only if I were in the shop, & lifted by the new act of setting that I cld tell.
_______________
I'm going to post this off to you, so that there is
no further delay [48 hrs]
[it
caught me when I was
not
in good condition,
and
still am off]
— and yet it is no decision.
It is an agony and either
only if I saw more — or we cld thrash it out by test-runs. . . .
I'll simply dispatch this,
Yours
Charles
Friday July 21
Barry — Simply so you know where we are [by
July 15th, as you requested] on the proofs:
actually the typos are very few, and the main job
has turned out to be to re-paste most every page for the reason you also
yourself have stated: that the Bembo type chosen so shortens my lines that that 'flat' literal effect those poems require, has had to be achieved (so far as it is possible,
given the shortening of the line (plus reason 2, below)] by re-organizing [as
against both my original & your fair attempt to duplicate it] the position
of each poem, (1) on each page, & (2) compared, on the left & the right
page, in each pair, facing each other, to each other.
The
real agony — what I mean
above by Reason 2, is the bloody Bembo double-space [actually also the leading
of single-space] is too open for my harder taste either in this font — or
in some necessity of modern type-setting I don't understand.
That is, that same flatness (& strung-out quality I want, & require, to make my staves show any reader what is the
exact condition of these letters, syllables words, & how they sound to the
silent ear) is be-devilled throughout by too wide a space between single-space
lines, in the first place —— & horror & hell itself where
my double-space has been duplicated by your Bembo d.s.
I
have adjusted, as best I could —crying, in some cases, as page after page
(in notes to yourself) out to you if there isn't some 1 1/2 space or some way
to shrink or sweat the leading. [In most cases I have just had to abandon
double-spaces.]
.
. . I average at best 33 pages a day — & as you know, I was somewhat
held up by that hospital spell. . . .
The
problem then is mainly this leading — & anything you can possibly do to improve it — to dry
out the over-distance between lines, will give us both a better press and, for
me, a longer life of my poems.
Yours, to be on to vou,
Charles
Addenda
I'm now wondering about Olson's constant changes in page proof to italic in IV, V, VI. His standard marginal note
for this reads "not Italic — underlined [cf. Mss.]" You see it
apposed to padma (proof page
17), again on p. 18, and even for titles, as "Maximus further on (December
28th 1959)". It's everywhere, and I wonder if it's less an idiosyncrasy
than a reaction to the space-eating (and light-bodied) nature of Bembo italic.
What's odd is the self-righteous tone of his "[cf. Mss.]", as if
printers wouldn't automatically set underlined typescript in italic.
MS page 15 (page
proof 21) shows Olson double-spacing a short-line poem, and indicating stanza
breaks only by one additional notch (a half-space) on the typewriter. The printer
catches the second but ignores the first. Olson's note reads, "reset as
single space between lines — & only double as parts of stanzas
[marked" — his interstanza marks are large checks. But there is a
fuller note: "[in other words re-set as single space — or if at all possible 1 1/2 [and then, if 1 1/2 possible, do the same to last two
couplets page before]" (MS p. 14, proof p. 20).
On the tiny poem on page proof 24 Olson's pleases are underlined four times: "Very important to see if spaces can be impeccably right here — please follow Mss, please . . . less space please!!! . . . reduce leading to something like 1 1/2 space if at all possible!!! [It looks too — juicy!]"
Just as a sample,
proof page 12 is an instance of multiple indention carried from typescript page
to page (MS 5-6); the printer treated p. 6 as a new problem. Olson's notes for
the two floating sections are. "Move to Left [shd be in line with last passage on previous page"
and "ditto".
Lastly, and again to my
eye, it seems Hall is giving Olson everywhere the minimal interword spacing, the opposite of what he wants.
This is one reason the single-space Bembo is such a thicket, and it contributes
everywhere to the shortening of Olson's lines.
7.27.84
Gerald
Burns
Note: This was the paper I wrote up from my notes in
1984 in Vancouver. In 1986 it appeared in Exquisite Corpse #15, a bit cavalierly typeset, as often happens to
pieces about typesetting. If there are mis-strikes in this I'm sorry: the furnace is off and my fingers are cold. —GB 5.19.96