II
"The Old Things" appeared in seven installments in The
Atlantic
Monthly from April to October, 1896. About a year earlier James
had written to William Dean Howells that he was really not sorry he was
rarely able to sell his fiction to magazines anymore:
I have always hated the magazine form, magazine conditions and
manners, and much of the magazine company. . . . The money-difference
will be great—but not so great after a bit as at first. . . .
[7]
Excepting Sarah Orne Jewett's
The Country of the Pointed
Firs,
about all that can be said for the quality of the fiction that kept "The Old
Things" company is that it was not so bad as the magazine's poetry. But
what the fiction lacked in quality, it made up for in quantity. Including
James's and Sarah Orne Jewett's work, for example, the September, 1896,
issue of the
Atlantic contained the installments of
six
different fictional serials. Among the objectionable "magazine conditions"
that affected "The Old Things" was the absence, after the first installment,
of any indication that the serial would be continued; nor was there any
evidence that the seventh installment was the last. Given the characteristic
inconclusiveness of the last chapter, one wonders how many
Atlantic readers waited patiently for another
installment.
James was quite fortunate, however, in the "magazine form" imposed
upon "The Old Things" by its division into installments. James knew in
advance, of course, that his work was to be serialized, but what kept him
from planning any definite structure through the installments was his
inability to tell how long his fiction was going to be. He had contracted
with Horace Scudder, the editor of the Atlantic, for a
fifteen-thousand-word story and he delivered an eighty-thousand-word
novel.[8] Up until very nearly the end
of the novel James did not
know how many chapters or installments his novel would make. Yet with
or without James's help—it is impossible to tell now—the
Atlantic's seven installments of "The Old Things" preserve
the
scenic structure of the novel.
[9]
Nowhere do the installment divisions interrupt a scene that is continued for
more than one chapter, although there are some tempting opportunities,
such as Mrs. Brigstock's dramatic entrance at the end of Chapter XIV. As
printed in the
Atlantic, the installments emphasize not
suspense
but the rhythm of increasingly long scenes. Even the lengthy scene of three
chapters between Mrs. Gereth and Fleda near the end of the novel is not
interrupted, but presented as the entire penultimate installment.
If he could not complain about its division into installments, James
had good grounds for objecting to the systematic overpunctuation that the
"magazine form" seems to have imposed on "The Old Things." Almost all
dashes in James's text were preceded by commas; all pauses in a sentence,
all non-restrictive and quite a few restrictive modifiers, and numerous
adverbs and adverbial phrases were surrounded with punctuation. The
following sentence illustrates the result:
Owen, as if in quest of his umbrella, looked vaguely about the
hall,—looked even, wistfully, up the staircase,— . . . .
Since James's typescript of "The Old Things" was apparently destroyed by
the
Atlantic after the serial was set, it is impossible to tell
how
closely his copy was followed. Yet with the exception of "Glasses"—
which the
Atlantic published in February, 1896, and
punctuated
in the same way as "The Old Things"—none of James's printed or
holograph writings around the time of "The Old Things" shows the
proliferation of commas to be found in that novel.
[10] And when "Glasses" reappeared
in
Embarrassments in June, 1896, the superfluous commas had
been omitted. It is improbable that James would have been taking out
commas in one text at the same time that he was putting them into
another.
Apart from the Atlantic's overpunctuation, there is no
evidence
that the serial is not a reliable reproduction of James's typescript.
[11] Yet "The Old Things" is far from
being
the best text of
The Spoils of Poynton. In addition to the less
significant title, the serial has a number of grammatical errors, infelicitous
sentences, and unfortunate ambiguities. There is also one unnoticed miracle
in the story with the death and resurrection of Fleda's father. Such an error
is not particularly surprising, however, for James did not consider serial
publication a permanent form for his work. An unpublished letter to
Scudder shows that James did not even see proof for "The Old
Things."
[12] His main purpose in
serialization was simply money; a carefully revised text could wait until the
work appeared as a book. There is a less important, though for
bibliographers perhaps more interesting, reason for serialization to be found
in the description of the writer Dencombe in James's story "The
Middle Years." Dencombe was "a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style"
whose
ideal would have been to publish secretly, and then, on the published
text, treat himself to the terrified revise, sacrificing always a first edition
and beginning for posterity and even for the collectors, poor dears, with a
second.
[13]
Serializing a novel in
The Atlantic Monthly was hardly
publishing it secretly, yet the process did approach Dencombe's ideal in
providing an opportunity for a "revise"—terrified or
not—before
The Spoils of Poynton appeared in book form.