Addressing the "Wyndham Problem": A Versioned Approach to Textual Variation in John Wyndham's Postwar Novels

Abstract

Matthew Moore begins his doctoral dissertation on John Wyndham with a provocative proposition: “‘John Wyndham’ does not exist.” This opening achieves its intended effect, and intrigued readers must continue on in order to understand that John Wyndham does not exist in the same way that Mark Twain does not exist; both are pen names which, due to the popularity of the fiction associated with them, have become synonymous with the actual identities of the authors. After Moore’s startling first line, he goes on to deftly examine not only what he calls the “Wyndham strategy” but also the motivations and literary influences that contributed to the creation of the author’s postwar novels, evaluating the composition history of each novel in order to understand John Wyndham as a man and artist. But Moore’s interpretation of the Wyndham strategy does not offer a solution to the textual variations found across Wyndham’s novels, variations which have yet to be fully grappled with in Wyndham criticism. For this study then, I will be taking a different approach, one that reworks Moore’s initial premise and that addresses what I call the “Wyndham problem”: John Wyndham does indeed exist, but he exists in multiple, incompatible textual forms.