Malcolm: I was beginning to think it was pestering time. I wasn't quite sure, it's about a month isn't it?
Hardy: Is it a month? It's as long as that is it? (laughs) I know I said two or three weeks, so it was very restrained of you.
Malcolm: Yes, I was beginning to itch for the phone, I've just been so busy otherwise, that probably saved you from my pestering.
Hardy: Anyway, I have now finished reading the book.
Malcolm: Oh good.
Hardy: And like Alan Ryan who read it before, I feel much more warmly towards it having finished it. And we would like to do it. That is to say, I mean I know you want a commitment sufficient to take you through the last stage of revision and that is what I'm offering. I'm not offering a totally unconditional commitment because obviously if what you do seems to us to make it worse then we would write to say so.
Malcolm: Of course, yes.
Hardy: But we feel confident enough to say go ahead and do that.
Malcolm: Oh great!
Hardy: I was, I was quite gripped by the end, the last two chapters. I was reading with the kind of attention that one gives to a novel, which is not very usual with a philosophical work. line 20
Malcolm: Oh great, it's very nice of you to say that.
Hardy: I think the fact that we both reacted in the same way to the later parts of the book suggests to me that there is something about the book which causes that and I've had another look at it with that in mind, and the first chapter is indeed both very long, much longer than any of the others and somehow less lively. Maybe it's just that one needs to get to know the people and more used to the mode of the book, but there may be a sense in which - and this is something to bear in mind perhaps as you revise - it may be a bit stiffer and more stilted and less relaxed.
Malcolm: I think you're probably right, yes.
Hardy: If there is any way of cutting that first chapter into separate sections, possibly two or three, where the natural breaks occur, without substantially affecting the flow of the argument, I think that might be a good thing, because somehow it's the length of that first chapter that makes it difficult to get going on the book. We both found that once we got past that we went on much easier. line 40
Malcolm: Yes well that's certainly a valid point. There's a certain amount I can cut out in that first chapter, but also, as you say, there's the break. One obvious break is where they go to the zoo park, the evolution bit, which has to be in there. Perhaps as you've got to the end of it you see why, how the various strands all interweave together, hopefully.
Page 2 (38)
Hardy: Yes, yes, oh absolutely. Certainly the book has a very careful structure, there's no doubt about that. Have you got a pen? I've got various points written down here which I'd quite like to convey to you on the telephone rather than writing a long boring monologue about them.
Malcolm: Okidoke, right, I've got a pen, yes.
Hardy: Right... Starting right at the top we both feel that the title is very boring. I can see the point of it and I can see that you're very wedded to it and obviously there are a lot of pointings forward to the eventual choice of title, but it's not very seductive from the outside to somebody who doesn't know anything about the book.
Malcolm: Do you think so?
Hardy: We may be wrong about this, that's just how we feel. line 60
Malcolm: Uhuh? I was rather pleased with the title, but then...
Hardy: Maybe some kind of subtitle is what's needed as well as the main title.
Malcolm: Y-yes, The original version of it was called The Children of Electra, but that I would have thought was the title of the play rather than of the book.
Hardy: Well that is true, yes... I mean I'm not being adamant about this at all, I'm just asking you to think about it.
Malcolm: Yes... What might soften the pill is did you read in the small print the 'Metaphysics lives!'?
Hardy: I think we need to get a subtitle which helps rather than hinders. I was tempted at one stage to suggest calling the book Hmmm which was the reaction of one or other to the remark of the philosopher [a pun on 'Hume']. Anyway, I've talked to Alan this morning about it and we've talked about the question of the various implausibilities if you're trying to take the text as something that could be used as a straight film-script. Now obviously, you don't intend it to be taken entirely in that mood.
Malcolm: It has crossed my mind that it would translate to television in particular rather well. line 80
Hardy: Right. Well, to an extent obviously the dialogue is an established conventional form for exposition and one doesn't expect it to be entirely naturalistic and we certainly feel that if you really want to make every word of this work as a straight script there'd be an awful lot of changes to be made, particularly in some parts.
Malcolm: Oh yes, undoubtedly.
Page 3 (39)
Hardy: There are one or two kinds of things which stick out more than others as I've mentioned. One is to do with the structure which I guess may be beyond redemption, and the other is to do with the local texture of the language. Now take the first one first: I don't know how carefully you've worked through the structure with this in mind, I think you probably have. It's kind of like the exercise which I remember was done on Virgil's The Aeneid: every time he used to say they eat, every time they say the Sun sets, and every time the Sun rises, and work out a chronology which when you take it literally bears no relation to what can have happened, but it's a poem, not a kind of day-by-day account.
Malcolm: Yes, yes, I haven't worked it out very precisely, I have to admit, no. line 100
Hardy: You don't? I mean there are places where one feels more than at others that what's supposed to be happening in ten minutes would be bound to take a good hour-and-a-half... I don't know if you can soften the edges of that at all?
Malcolm: Yes, that's something I can try and do. The trouble is that the arguments have to come in a certain order and for example, the universals, the thing about tables, happens so nicely at the pub...
Hardy: Yes quite.
Malcolm: ...that one's got to get them there by lunchtime.
Hardy: And you are buying time in various places very obviously, like by having an extension of pub opening time and by having this guy at the end lie about how far his house is from the place where they can't get the car out of the car park.
Malcolm: Yes, one thing I could do is I could start it earlier in the morning. It starts rather too late in the morning to be right really, because I wanted it to start when the weather was very hot. But it could be a sort of early-morning encounter, which would stretch the morning out more realistically... and the morning is too long and the afternoon is too short if anything, I think that's probably right. line 120
Hardy: Yes that's perceptibly so. I mean just bear it in mind as you go along. It's connected to another kind of general implausibility, which is whether people would really have philosophical discussions of this sophistication when crossing busy streets or doing various other things, but that's the sort of generalised suspension of disbelief that's involved in the whole enterprise.
Malcolm: Well, yes... There is a sort of philosophical point in all that, whether one believes that life does happen like that or not.
Hardy: Yes, I realize that... the way you want to tie it all into real implications.
Malcolm: But there's also the point that all important things or important meetings or discoveries, or most of them, do happen completely out of unlikely circumstances, by accident and so on.
Hardy: That's true,
Page 4 (40)
Malcolm: And I mean I think that is true. For example you'd say that it's a very unlikely twist that the bloke should end up being a publisher, the scientist I mean. That's just a sort of device that's thrown in for impure plausibility, just to neaten it up. Life's not like that, but there was a most extraordinary story, true, that happened. When I first went around trying to get this book published I was in correspondence with a guy at Routledge, who was then the philosophy editor at Routledge and he... they were considering it - this is the early version years ago - for quite some long time and I was in correspondence with him before he revealed that he was at school with me and knew me personally and I hadn't twigged. This is not a coincidence in the sense that you could explain quite clearly that we came from the same sort of background and he's quite likely to have gone into publishing and so on, but it nevertheless struck me as an enormous coincidence and a sort of sign that this was meant to be. line 150
Hardy: Right, but he didn't publish it?
Malcolm: He didn't publish it because, because he backed off from that coincidence... He wanted to be quite clear in his own mind that this coincidence wasn't going to affect his judgment.
Hardy: Right, so he bent over backwards to be unfavourable.
Malcolm: Exactly, or that's one way of putting it. So the question of whether you believe in the coincidences is all tied up with the way in which you respond to them, in a sense. So he revealed his own kind of to me rather dull view of life by not responding in some way.
Hardy: Right... On that point I should perhaps say that although I'm very keen to, to make something of this, both Alan Ryan and I are aware, as you must be, that this is a very unconventional piece of publishing and we're aware that we are taking a risk, but I think, you know, you've got to... Life would be very boring if you didn't take the odd risk, and it is in that spirit that I'm staying here.
Malcolm: Mm, yes... I think interesting philosophy has always been risky hasn't it? line 170
Hardy: Yes... Well, have we finished on the implausibilities... No, I think those were the two main points on the structure of the book. If we move on now to the language. I mean, I don't know how much rewriting you have done, but it looks as if, at times, some of the chunks of dialogue might have been lifted more-or-less unchanged out of the previous non-dialogue version.
Malcolm: That's right, yes. Patches of it are very differently dated.
Hardy: Right. As I said, I don't know that we would want to ask you to pursue translating the whole thing in such a way that it could be used straight as a tele-script but I think there are certain literary modes of speech or habits which more obviously stick out when they are put in a dialogue context. Like when you're talking about a range of examples, and one of the examples comes with the other one or two in brackets after it.
Page 5 (41)
Malcolm: Yes, I see what you mean.
Hardy: When you're talking about Aphrodite, Venus and Mars, say, as opposed to Aphrodite (Venus, Mars), which works in print but doesn't work as a piece of dialogue. That kind of thing, there's a certain amount of that.
Malcolm: Oh yes, there's an awful lot of that, yes.
Hardy: A certain amount of use of the oblique/stroke in the dialogue. Now I know people do say, particularly intellectuals, do say 'stroke' when they mean 'oblique/stroke', and there's other things like brackets, i.e. something or other which again...
Malcolm: Yes, yes, yes.
Hardy: And references to quotations, which I think should be kept to a minimum anyway, but put aside to an end-page rather than actually clumsily saying 'Hume's dialogue, page 136' or something in the middle.
Malcolm: Yes, yes, yes, of course. Oh yes, all those points absolutely taken. That's what my six months is all about. line 200
Hardy: The next thing I'm going to do this end... I mean is this a unique copy of the book that I have?
Malcolm: No, I have another copy.
Hardy: Do you want this back to work on?
Malcolm: Ermmm, I don't think so.
Hardy: I can let you have it back, it's just that I would like to have it accurately cast off so I can let you know that your 180,000 [words] is right.
Malcolm: No, keep it and cast it off accurately.
Hardy: It won't take more than a week or two,
Malcolm: Yes, yes.
Hardy: Then we can do costings and I can talk to you again about length and then having got to that point let me revisit it and we'll talk about it some more. I mean the book has a natural length, obviously, and I don't want to ask for unnecessary cuts, but at the same time length equals cover price, and of course...
Malcolm: Ya, ya, ya.
Hardy: I see much more having finished the book the point of the detail in the scientific sections, but the book could nevertheless bear some cuts... line 220
Malcolm: Mm. Some of it can go, some bits I know can go.
Page 6 (42)
Hardy: ...but at the same time I think there could be some trimming without destruction of... I wouldn't want to discourage you into making every statement a kind of grey standard length. I will let you know what the actual length is and then we'll have some costings done on the basis of the actual length and we'll talk more precisely then about what kind of saving might yield what kind of price-reduction. That again depends on whether we do it in hardback only or in hardback and paperback. I'm still wavering on that one.
Malcolm: Mmm.
Hardy: One very obvious way of saving space is to economise on the names as they come at the beginning of each speech, a case where I should have thought one would probably use a pair of devices, or something which is shorter than 'Cause', 'Effect' or 'Andrew' and 'Malcolm' each time.
Malcolm: Er, y-yes.
Hardy: I take it you'd have no objections to that?
Malcolm: N-no... As long as you kept those points at which the names changed... At the beginning of course they are just 'Driver' and 'Pedestrian' and then they become 'Professor' and... line 240
Hardy: That's right. Well, you establish that for a page or two and then you go into the abbreviations.
Malcolm: Yes, yes.
Hardy: I was wondering if there might even be a way, in terms of design of the thing which would...
Malcolm: Yes, I mean maybe those could be, rather than abbreviations, just very small print or something, or condensed print?
Hardy: Yes, I mean the way you've got it laid out here of course you lose five or six characters per line.
Malcolm: Yup. I don't know, there is something very nice about this relentless following of Cause and Effect. If they could be printed just very small.
Hardy: They could be, they'd probably be, it varies. Normally it's a matter of convention. As you probably know from reading plays the names of speakers are in bold capitals. If you were to retype all or some I might mention to you one or two OUP conventions which would save time for the editor: for example you don't put a colon after the name preceding the speech; use single quotation marks, as you do sometimes, but on the whole you mark things with doubles. Your language - as far as editing goes, you write on the whole very well with odd slips occasionally, which I think I can deal with because I think they form the basis which hadn't there been I wouldn't have been able to be accepting the book, as the work would have been too great. One recurrent error you make which is only a slip because you get it right sometimes, is the spelling of 'discrete' which is different when meaning 'separate' and 'tactful'.
Page 7 (43)
Malcolm: Oh yes, there are probably lots of errors like that. The odd split infinitive I expect. line 270
Hardy: There are plenty of split infinitives, and when you unsplit them you don't unsplit them in the most, er, felicitous way.
Malcolm: Yes, yes.
Hardy: Those... are... most of the things I have noted. Now, to sum up: you are going to have a crack at shortening to some degree, making it more consistent in style and tone, in particular breaking up the first chapter.
Malcolm: Yes, that sounds a good idea, yup.
Hardy: Consider at least - I don't know how it would work in a dialogue, no reason why we shouldn't in a way - the use of sub-headings, which are a very useful way of breaking up portions of text.
Malcolm: Well what I thought on that... It's a convention that used to be used, it's not so popular now but I rather like it, is the thing where at the top of each page, in italics, there is a theme-of-the-page or something.
Hardy: Yes, running headlines, yes.
Malcolm: In that package of introductory stuff, there's a list of suggested headlines as the pages are laid out at the moment. I thought something like that would give the thing a bit of shape. line 290
Hardy: Right. That could be done. That adds a little bit of extra cost because at the stage when the book is being made up into pages what wording will be appropriate will be uncertain. You would have to write your headlines when the book is already in page-proofs, so there'd have to be a sub-reference at this stage. There is one way round that, which is more-or-less do what you're suggesting without sub-headings at that stage: if you mark in the margin of the typescript or on galley-proofs what the heading would be for that particular section, that would be a quicker way. When you break a page, put in the heading of the next page in the last margin or the wording that came in the typescript for the next margin or the wording that came in the typescript, or whatever it is. If we had a translation-rule of that kind, that probably means that some of the words you write in the margin may be wasted, in that though you may have two alternatives only one of them will be used.
Malcolm: Mm. As long as one's got a pretty exact idea of how much type is going to go onto each page, then one can do the relevant...
Hardy: Yes, well, that we can certainly work out in advance. You have got a fairly good analytical table of contents anyway. Erm, sub-headings: one of the functions of a sub-heading is to signpost the argument of course, another is intermittently to break up slabs of text. That isn't so acute a need in a dialogue because it becomes the change of speaker that variegates it.
Malcolm: Yes.
Page 8 (44)
Hardy: But I still think that you should think about whether you'd be happy to have sub-headings as well. It helps to make a pause... to put the book down and go and have a cup of coffee at that point knowing one's got to a reasonable break.
Malcolm: Well, apart from the breaks between each speaker, there are those points where there are gaps marked as dotted lines or asterisks. line 320
Hardy: Yes, one could mark those in the text by extra space. Anyway, I will not go on at any greater length. I mean if you want I will be getting in touch again when I have done the costs and cast-off and so forth and then we can, er, talk about some sort of contract.
Malcolm: Great! Fantastic news! Really good!
Hardy: It seems to me that because it is such a risky venture I am not going to be terribly generous financially, ermm.... I mean what I think we should agree is that you have a fair royalty so that if the book is a success you will do well out of it.
Malcolm: Yes.
Hardy: But I don't want to pay you in advance money that has been very riskily invested.
Malcolm: Sure, sure I wouldn't expect that, yup.
Hardy: Okay?
Malcolm: Great! That's very good. I'm just in the middle at the moment... I couldn't do anything immediately because we have got the Brighton Festival going on here and I'm involved in all sorts of things, but everything finishes in a week or two... and by then perhaps I can get down to it.
Hardy: Right. Good. line 340
Malcolm: Great!
Hardy: Okay, well if you have any further thoughts or questions do come back to me with them. In the meantime...
Malcolm: In the meantime I'm waiting for you, you'll do the cast-off and...
Hardy: ...I'll write to you. Okay?
Malcolm: Splendid! Well thanks very much, that's er, that's made my day, (Hardy laughs) not to say my life.
Hardy: Well let's hope it does well. Okay?
Malcolm: Okay. Thanks very much.
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