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I am Tom Freeland,
a lawyer in Oxford, Mississippi. The picture in the header is my law office.
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Noel Polk, Faulkner scholar, has diedNoel Polk, most prominently, the editor of “corrected texts” of William Faulkner’s work, and editor of Faulkner’s work for the Library of America, has died at 69. He taught for decades at University of Southern Mississippi, and most recently at Mississippi State. In addition to editing Faulkner (and Robert Penn Warren’s All The Kings Men), he was a published poet, memoirist, and literary scholar. More details here. A major loss to Mississippi’s literary community.  August 21, 2012, 11:50 pm | Tags: Noel Polk, William Faulkner | Category: Books, Southern History & Culture |
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Joyce Carol Oats on Polk’s rewrite of All the King’s Men in the NYT:
Since I had not read All the King’s Men for perhaps twenty years, Robert Penn Warren’s original text was no more familiar to me than the “restored” text provided by Noel Polk. My reading of the two editions was in tandem, which was the only way to note Mr. Polk’s “corrections” of the original text. As I indicated in my review, the 1946 text, for all its flaws, is superior to the “restored” text, which primarily restores distracting stylistic tics and the self-consciously mythic name “Willie Talos,” which Warren had dropped in favor of the more plausible “Willie Stark.” That Robert Penn Warren, novelist, poet, essayist, and shrewd literary critic, not only approved the original 1946 edition of his most famous novel but oversaw numerous reprintings through the decades, including a special 1963 edition published by Time Inc. with a preface by the author, and did not “restore” any of the original manuscript, and did not resuscitate “Willie Talos,” is the irrefutable argument that the 1946 edition is the one Warren would wish us to read. That Noel Polk should make a project of “restoring” a text in this way, and that this text should be published to compete with the author-approved text, is unconscionable, unethical, and indefensible.
Thanks for that, Lee (issues of timing aside!). But it’s the NYRB, not the NYT. The Polk letter to which Lee’s quotation was a response is here.
The question of how to treat an editorial emendation to which the author agreed is a thorny issue of lit crit, probably moreso than either Polk or Oates appeared to admit in this instance. Few would insist that the true text of The Waste Land is the one Eliot wrote before Pound got hold of it. But each case has to be judged on its own facts.
I didnt state my views of Polk’s rewrites. But I think there is great danger in corrected texts. Faulkner rewrote in galleys– famously, he cost himself some money doing so with Sanctuary. He accepted some suggestions from editors and rejected others, vehemently (writing on a galley about a change he’d rejected, first, with “stet”, then “stet god damn it” and then “stet god damn it son of a bitch”). Somewhere, I’ve read him explain why he would not take the opportunity to go back and clean up inconsistencies between books, even books in the same series (The Snopes Trilogy).
I’m far more inclined to trust the final editions. As Lee knows, I’m particularly suspicious of his reworking of Sanctuary.
As a lawyer whose done some copyright work, I’ve always wondered how much of the appeal of these corrected texts was to set a new copyright term running…….
Apologies for the timing, Anderson–yes, rather crass of me. Tom’s link contained another link to the Oats’ letter. The link claimed the letter was printed from the NYT. I read the article with great interest (not the masthead).
My instincts tend toward JCO’s opinion, very strongly, but perhaps I don’t know enough about it. To my understanding Polk rewrote AKM after RPW died. If so, that would seem incredibly immoral. There’s a difference between the influence of editors working with living writers (such as the American edition of Clockwork Orange) and cases where a editor rewrites somebody’s life work after the writer is dead. I find the later scenario unforgivable.
It says in in the 2002 re-issue, “Additional text Copyright by Noel Polk.”
Warren being long dead by 2002, I think JKO’s outrage is correct. And, as as NMC knows, I’m usually the one guy defending USM.
Boo-yeah on the copyright issue, NMC.
It all depends. A Farewell to Arms was published with em-dashes in place of the curse words that Scribners made Hemingway cut. I wouldn’t mind seeing those restored. And sometimes the process of publishing can mangle punctuation, etc. To say nothing of the Henry James novel where the publisher switched chapters around, and NO ONE notices for, what, 50 years?…
But one can overblow the romantic myth of the inspired-genius writer. Suppose Warren’s wife had said, “You gotta be kidding, ‘Talos’? Change it to something real.” And he had done that, after some griping. Would it be proper to “correct” that back? If not, why is is proper when it’s his editor making the suggestion? [N.b. I am actually sadly ignorant of the particular textual issue involved; this is a hypothetical example.]
A perfect text, like a perfect trial, is a Platonic ideal with no correspondence in reality. The best an editor can do is apply his principles consistently and explain those principles clearly, so that the reader knows what’s been done and why.
Lee, I don’t know how much you get into this stuff, but sometimes there’s a good argument that the published text doesn’t represent the author’s true intentions, so that even when the author is dead, there’s a good argument for going back and editing the text.
The classic example must be Joyce’s Ulysses. There’s no agreement on what text is preferable. Hell, it’s nearly impossible to print a corrected text without introducing *new* errors.
Oates can shoot from the hip — I recall demolishing her essay on Sylvia Plath back in grad school — but she may have a point about ATKM. I just hope both versions are available so that readers can decide for themselves.
I’m with Lee on Penn Warren’s book. I could not believe the change. Talos? What basis did Polk have to believe that was not Penn Warren’s final intent?
Why isn’t it possible that, late in the game, the author saw a flaw he’d not seen earlier, or listened to a legitimate criticism and made a change?
Polk should have tackled the corrected text of Look Homeward Angel. By all reports, that may have cured him.
Most readers don’t think twice when they buy a copy of a novel that says “corrected” or “restored,”–they just assume that’s sales hype, whatever, and that the changes are minor to meaningless. In other words, they still think they are reading the original author’s decisions.
Along those lines I made the mistake of reading an edition of Faulkner’s Sanctuary without realizing it had been rewritten by Polk. I couldn’t believe how terrible some of the sentences were. They stopped me cold, and I thought: Faulkner published those sentences? Until I realized my mistake, it honestly made me rethink Faulkner.
To me the arrogance of such a rewrite seems obvious. Some academic is basically saying, I, Joe Academic, having never published a novel of my any renowned, am proclaiming myself such a genius that i can correct Faulkner or Warren and restore the integrity they sold down the river.
Such rewrites are also implying these great authors were either lazy or sold out, right? Or am I missing something.
I wonder who gave Polk the rights to rewrite RPW’s novel? And then he copyrights it for himself? Okay, timing-wise I’ll keep my mouth shut. Anyway, Anderson, suffice to say I think Joyce Carol Oats hit the ball out of the park.
I love Noel Polk, and am sorry he is gone. I have not read All the King’s Men, so I don’t have a dog in the fight, but I am with Anderson concerning timing, and against Anderson concerning The Waste Land.
Eliot dedicated the book to Pound because of what he did with the original text. That said, if a text came out of Eliot’s original, I’d probably buy it, and I bet it’d be pretty good.
Phil, the original Eliot is available in facsimile, and well worth a look to anyone who loves the poem. But Eliot clearly appreciated Pound’s editing.
Pound was much better editing, translating, or discussing poetry than he was at writing it. As someone lacking in creativity myself, I sympathize.
The Eliot-Pound analogy is meaningless and distracting. Eliot was alive to approve or disapprove, right? RPW wasn’t. See a difference?
Ah, but it’s not meaningless, Lee. For Noel Polk has instead of a sympathy page, a page about ideas, which I am sure he’d prefer.
But yes, thanks for the help, the Pound-Eliot analogy does not work for this.
Anderson, thanks for the link and I will check it out. As for Pound writing unbeautifully:
Charity I have had sometimes,
I cannot make it flow thru.
A little light, like a rushlight
to lead back to splendour
and
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.
Wasn’t meant to be an exact analogy. Examples with dead authors abound. Who’s to say the First Folio was printed as the Bard wanted it? If Dostoevsky had to write around the censors, would he want his texts restored? If Austen spelled “choose” “chuse,” is that her deliberate choice or can it be modernized?
The notion that a printed text presumptively reflects its author’s intent seems less than plausible.
The printed text the author signed off on stands a much better chance than one reworked long after his death, Anderson. I think that is Lee’s point. He’s not asking for a perfect fit, I suspect, because he surely knows there can be no such thing. But how about the best we can have?
I liked Polk’s memoir Outside the Southern Myth. He explained the particular history of Picayune (his hometown) and how it didn’t fit into the stereotypical view of the small southern town.
I just went and read the Polk letter to which Oates is responding. It closes with this barbed shot at Oates (who has published, what, 20 novels? And presumably seen the work of an editor here and there?): “Ms. Oates is correct that good editors sometimes improve books. But it is she who is “naive” about relations between authors and editors, not I, since I know how often well-intentioned commercial editors have altered novels for the worse and obviously she does not.”
No wonder she fired back with such force.
Well, I don’t know about the textual history of ATKM. You could have a letter or a diary entry post-publication where Warren griped about the changes, and use that as an excuse to revert the text. Without any such evidence, I would be skeptical of simply assuming that Warren wasn’t reconciled to the editorial changes.
There have been similar issues about Raymond Carver, whose editor apparently made Carver’s stories better … over much griping from Carver.
How about a living author? Jack Vance published The Dying Earth in 1950. After his fans start the Vance Integral Edition in 1999, he decides that book was really supposed to be called Mazirian the Magician. Do we honor 1999 Vance’s correction of what 1950 Vance titled the book?
Marianne Moore’s most-anthologized poem, “Poetry,” was ruthlessly cut by her in her collected poems (to the 1st 3 lines only). (Epigraph to that volume: “Omissions are not accidents. — M.M.”) Is it wrong for anthologists to reprint the longer version?
Etc., etc.
In each of those examples, Anderson, there is evidence that the author did not like the changes. There is none for Penn Warren.
With Sanctuary, Faulkner stated that he made the changes so that the book would not embarrass the ones he had published after writing Sanctuary– specifically The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. And no evidence that he did not wish the books to stand as printed, with one minor exception noted later. The books changed publishers. They came out in new editions. They were not changed until after Faulkner’s death.
What was done with Sartoris is a better solution: They printed the original manuscript text along with Faulkner’s original title, Flags in the Dust.
I had a problem with the republication of the Old Man section of The Wild Palms as a free-standing short novel (combined with the Spotted Horses section of The Hamlet and something else I forget) which caused the novel Faulkner published– the Wild Palms, which alternated sections of two stories– to slip out of print for a bit. I think both are available now.
The one exception is that he did say he wished printing could be done in color for the Benjy section of TSATF. The Franklin Mint project of doing so is an interesting one. I’m assuming since Polk was involved, they did not use the text Faulkner approved. I’d be interested to compare Polk’s interpretation of the time breaks in that section to my own, but not $450 interested (the price of the Franklin Mint publication).
I believe it’s the Folio Society, NMC, that is publishing the colored inks edition of The Sound and the Fury, and I understand the run is sold out already.
Polk’s collaborator on this was Steve Ross, former English professor at the Naval Academy, and now a program director at the NEH.
Like I said, I don’t know anything about Warren. Publishing the typescript of ATKM is useful as a resource, but substituting it for the published novel (as a little googling suggests Polk did) sounds egregious to me.
I suppose Polk defended his procedure somewhere or other — it’s not like the guy was an imbecile.
In the end, I suspect NMC’s earlier point is the best explanation: copyright! Not to mention getting those used paperbacks of ATKM out of the college market (surely that’s 90% of the book’s sales these days).
I want to thank all of you for this open discussion. Even though I was a lowly PE major, I’ve read (and in some cases frequently re-read) the works y’all are discussing and others by the authors mentioned. I feel terribly dumb to discover today that those works were, in some instances, “fiddled with” by their authors, or others, after publication. Thank you for partially enlightening me.
“Willie Talos”? Sounds like the screen name for a porn actor.
Ben -agree wholeheartedly. As a long-time ago engineering major, I never realized that this ‘process’ existed, and appreciate the enlightenment. Would say – while on the subject – found the same enlightenment on the Zach Scruggs postings several days ago. Was going to say so then, but you and others ‘beat me to it’ so I passed then.
Appreciate NMC’s insight on both – and will have to admit to appreciating Anderson’s as well! Thanks.
As the Wikipedia article notes, textual criticism got its big start with the Bible, and then came to be applied to literature (skip down to “copy text” section), roughly around the time when literary texts began to be “secular scriptures.”
Those finding the subject new to them might be interested in the article, which even quotes the prof who introduced the subject to me back in the day (Peter Shillingsburg).
Re: copyright, see this from the article:
Scientific and critical editions can be protected by copyright as works of authorship if enough creativity/originality is provided. The mere addition of a word or substitution of a term with another one that results to be more correct, usually does not achieve such level of originality/creativity.
So if Polk hadn’t changed up ATKM *enough*, no new work. Hm.
Gordon Lish was Carver’s editor, and his letters to and from Carver are pretty heartwrenching. Carver at one point begs and begs Lish not to publish the collection What We Talk About When We Talk about Love in its present forms (truncated by Lish’s editing). But in the end Carver conceded and, because of Lish’s edits, a new and very influential style was born, MFA minimalism. Lish also edited Barry Hannah’s best books.
As to the First Folio that was published six years after Shakespeare died and many of the plays in it had been vasty rewritten. It has been suggested they were rewritten in order be read instead of acted. Some plays remained the same, and a great number of plays, including The Tempest and Macbeth, were published for the first time in that 1623 Folio. Did Shakespeare do the rewriting? It’s hard to say. There are a few other candidates. Ben Jonson is usually mentioned and he was intimately involved in the First Folio. Mary Sidney is another. We know she greatly revised all of her brother Philip’s famous sonnets before they were ever published, and the First Folio was dedicated to her two sons; interestingly her heraldic beast was the swan and she was known as the Swan of the Avon because her home Wilton was on the Avon River. Also Fulke Greville’s name has been mentioned as one of Shakespeare revisers for the folio. Greville once bragged about having been Shakespeare’s “master,” and although scholars have taken this to mean his school master, it’s also true that in the caste system of writing, usually handled like an assembly line for the Elizabethans, the “master” was the person in charge of the final draft. Greville was once selected by a computer program comparing literary styles and vocabulary as the Elizabethan most likely to have contributed to Shakespeare’s work. His poem do seem uncannily similar. Aside from Shakespeare Greville was the only Elizabethan to write homosexual love sonnets.
And, yes, Willy Talus does sound like a porn star name.
I have another Talos tangent for you … absolutely nothing to do with literature or anything else good in life.
“Talos” was the name of the Navy’s longest-range surface-to-air missile (technical nomenclature: RIM-8) during the era of the Vietnam unpleasantness.
One fine Spring day in 1968, the bad guys put up two sections of Mig 21 aircraft … four aircraft total. A ship I was working with … the USS Long Beach, the first nuclear-powered heavy cruiser … was armed with Talos missiles.
Long Beach tracked the Migs on radar as they came up from Phuc Yen (hey … that’s the name of the North Vietnamese airbase … I’m not making this stuff up) and achieved a radar fire-control lock-on at about 75 miles. Think about that a minute: 4 objects, each not much larger than a Toyota Land Cruiser, 75 miles distant and moving very fast … those are amazingly tiny specks in the sky. And this preceded most of the solid-state radar electronics … ours were old tube-powered gadgets. It amazes me even today.
Long Beach fired a Talos missile at the unsuspecting Migs. A few moments later … kablooie. Talos blasted one Mig from the sky; the victim’s wingman flew into the debris and his Mig was destroyed also. The other two turned tail and beat feet back to Phuc Yen.
That probably couldn’t have happened if our missiles had been named Willie Starks.
Hah that makes it an even better porn name. All the Queen’s Minions. Starring Slick Willy Talos.
No Stark missiles, Ben, but there was the unfortunate USS Stark, a guided-missile frigate hit by an Iraqi anti-ship missile back in the late 80s.
Great story about the Talos shoot-down, and well told.
NMC, I don’t think it was a “barbed shot” Polk was throwing at Oates–it was likely a compliment, given what I know of Noel Polk. He seems to be suggesting that the quality of her work is so good that it obviously hasn’t been marred by “well-intentioned commercial editors.”
That’s an interesting alternate reading that sent me to take another look at the sentence. Still reads barbed to me, and Oates came back with all guns blazing in reply.
Based on RPM’s suggestion, I think Polk’s intent is sufficiently clear that his letter should be edited to reflect same ….
The point that seems to be missed in all these exchanges is that no one is “rewriting” these great authors, but as with the facsimile of “The Waste Land” or the very recent edition of A Farewell to Arms that contains in an appendix the 47 different endings Hemingway wrote for it, scholars are making available a look at a writer’s work room, so to speak–that is, making working papers or important drafts available. Noel, the Faulkner biographer Joe Blotner, the great Hardy (and Faulkner) scholar Michael Millgate, and I were given the job of organizing and introducing the 25-volumes of Faulkner’s manuscripts and typescripts in the collections of The New York Public Library and The University of Virginia. These editions of drafts of great writers’ works are in the same vein, and equally useful to students of writing, etc. And, as we know, it would be almost impossible to reconstruct what Thomas Wolfe did while Max Perkins was trying to rein in Look Homeward, Angel; but I know a marvelous contemporary writer who nearly lost his novel because his publisher wanted him to get something out and made him give close to what was, in the writer’s mind, just the first third of the book. Theater, of course, is a more agreed-upon cooperative operation; the lonely fiction writer may not always be the best editor of his own work, but is likely not to want to admit it.
I understand the objections to Noel Polk’s editing that various people have made. But it is necessary to remember that Polk was rigorously trained in the methods of textual/bibliographical scholarship and that he applied these methods to his editing of various authors’ works. In other words, Tom McHaney’s remarks are correct.
Copied below is information from The Library of America about Noel Polk’s editorial procedure.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA PAGE FROM THE MISSQ. 11/25/12/UPDATED 12/1/12.
Remembering Faulkner scholar Noel Polk (1943–2012)
On August 21, Noel Polk, professor, literary scholar, critic, and poet, died at his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Emeritus Professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of the Mississippi Quarterly, Polk was best known for his editorial and critical work on William Faulkner and his critical work on Eudora Welty. The five volumes of Faulkner’s novels he co-edited with Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner for The Library of America involved painstaking research to reconstruct the most authoritative text for each novel, a process he described in the Notes on the Texts for each volume:
The Polk texts attempt to reproduce Faulkner’s typescripts as he presented them to his publishers before editorial intervention. They accept only those revisions on typescript or proof that Faulkner seems to have initiated himself as a response to his own text, not those he made in response to a revision or a correction suggested by an editor; this is a very conservative policy which rejects many of Faulkner’s proof revisions in favor of his original typescript.
They accept only those revisions on typescript or proof that Faulkner seems to have initiated himself as a response to his own text, not those he made in response to a revision or a correction suggested by an editor
Right. That’s a Romantic ideology of the author that eliminates a commonsense procedure used by many writers: “hey, take a look at this and give me some feedback … hey, that’s not the right word? Hm, you’re right about that, thanks!”
Instead, we get a text that treats Faulkner’s writing as a divine inspiration that must be unsullied by mortal tampering.
It’s certainly *one* way to edit a novel.
Faulkner was provably able to say no to editorial suggestions. In galleys one of his idiosyncratic spellings got corrected. He wrote “stet.” The correction stood. He wrote “stet god damn it.”. It remained. He wrote “stet god damn it son of a bitch” and won the point.
The point I am making about Dr Polk’s editorial procedure is that it is a time-honored method of establishing a type of scholarly text in which, as Tom McHaney has observed, a reader is able to see, as it were, into the writer’s workshop.
Certainly it is true that many readers do not care what edition of an author they decide to peruse. it is equally true that, within the well-established conventions of textual/bibiliographical editing, a “corrected” text is of primary value to scholars working in the field. It was to that field that Dr Polk made his extraordinarily significant contributions.
Here, again, is The Library of America, in an extended excerpt:
On August 21, Noel Polk, professor, literary scholar, critic, and poet, died at his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Emeritus Professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of the Mississippi Quarterly, Polk was best known for his editorial and critical work on William Faulkner and his critical work on Eudora Welty. The five volumes of Faulkner’s novels he co-edited with Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner for The Library of America involved painstaking research to reconstruct the most authoritative text for each novel, a process he described in the Notes on the Texts for each volume:
The Polk texts attempt to reproduce Faulkner’s typescripts as he presented them to his publishers before editorial intervention. They accept only those revisions on typescript or proof that Faulkner seems to have initiated himself as a response to his own text, not those he made in response to a revision or a correction suggested by an editor; this is a very conservative policy which rejects many of Faulkner’s proof revisions in favor of his original typescript.
Reconstructing Faulkner’s novels as he originally intended posed numerous problems for Polk as he recounted in his introduction to his collection of essays, Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner:
[Faulkner] took almost no interest in the printed forms of his books: he occasionally fought losing battles with editors over their alterations, but he never restored his original intentions back to what had been editorially altered. And he never revised a novel after it was published; for all we know, he never even re-read his novels (except, of course, those passages he read in public). For all intents and purposes, when he gave a typescript to his publishers he lost interest in it and proceeded immediately to the next blank page; what proofing he did he did with some obeisance to his professional duty, but he took no pleasure or interest in these more mechanical stages of literary production.
Polk’s opens his essay “Where the Comma Goes: Editing William Faulkner,” with an eloquent brief for the role of the scholarly editor:
Scholarly editing is the ultimate act of criticism, because it involves a wider range of issues than interpretation alone does, from macrocosmic ones like the author’s meaning, to more mundane and microcosmic ones like where does the comma go? Dealing with all these issues responsibly requires extensive knowledge of publishing history and of publishing techniques and procedures, of standard usage in the author’s period, of the author’s preferences at any period of his or her career, of the author’s relationship to commercial editors, to financial considerations, and to the political and cultural times, and of the author’s practices in composing, revising, and proofreading. The editor must be sensitive to an author’s most subtle nuances of style, punctuation, and spelling, as well as to larger issues in the work, but also constantly aware of the complex interaction between his or her own aesthetic sense and the author’s, because in order to determine where the comma goes the editor must constantly differentiate between authorial error and authorial intention. Finally, the editorial act is central to the critical enterprise because editorial decisions impinge directly upon questions of canon and literary history.
Polk’s essays detail the seriousness and care with which he tackled his research—“untold hours trying to parse out fine Faulknerian distinctions between ‘diningroom,’ ‘dining room,’ and ‘dining-room.’ It’s not all fun.”—but they also include transporting passages about his delight in discovery:
Few things in my scholarly life have given me the kind of personal pleasure that I got from showing the manuscripts of The Sound and the Fury to a friend late one cluttered Friday afternoon at the Alderman Library. You who have held it know that it is, simply, gorgeous. It and the manuscripts of Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!, are almost objets d’arts, each individual page a canvas sensual to the fingers and pleasing to the eye: rule-straight lines of highly stylized handwriting forming a visual counterpoint to the scope and power, the psychological chaos, of the world the handwriting is creating. The pages thus speak eloquently of a shoring up against that chaos, of compression, of control.
Polk had long wished to realize Faulkner’s dream of publishing a version of The Sound and the Fury which used colored ink to represent the time shifts in the sometimes bewildering opening Benjy section. Last month the Folio Society published a limited edition of The Sound and the Fury that Polk co-edited with Stephen Ross that uses fourteen different inks to mark each time period.
I don’t doubt Polk’s seriousness or hard work.
What I doubt is the presumption that changes Faulkner made– or even allowed– in response to editorial comment were somehow not valid. Every fiction writer with whom I’ve discussed this doubts what Polk has done.
When I am writing, at a late stage of the process, I show what I have written to reader(s) I trust. I will frequently make changes based on the suggestions I get. After the fact, no one– even me– could tell anything about my intent when I accepted those suggestions. Sometimes, I make them because I’m sure the reader had a great point. Sometimes, I make them because I’m not certain. Sometimes, I make them because I’m facing a deadline, trust the reader, and don’t have the time to fully think through an alternative way. Sometimes, I change nothing. But the idea that someone could come in later, and devine my true intent from an earlier stage of the process seems to me literally absurd.
The first Polk project that I was aware of was the edition of Sanctuary. This was a book that I thought (as Faulkner did after reworking it) stood with the others, more than many thought. I did not line-by-line compare what Polk had done, but, from memory, I was bothered. I’ve recently re-read the pre-Polk Sanctuary and should probably look at the post-Polk to confirm my impression. But either way, the underlying assumption that editorial comment pulled Faulkner away from his “true” intentions seems very wrong-headed to me.