James's "Pandora": The Mixed Consequences of
Revision
by
Charles Vandersee
[*]
One of the fascinating aspects of Jamesian revisions is the fact that
any generalization about them is suspect. When Hélène
Harvitt
compared the 1883 Roderick Hudson with the New York
Edition she found that the revisions tended to make the text "heavy,
ambiguous, and sometimes almost impenetrable."[1] On the other hand, Albert F.
Gegenheimer looked at "A Passionate Pilgrim" and found in three revisions
over the years quite the opposite happening. The changes were "distinct
improvements," as passages became shorter and ornate language became
plainer and more precise. Ambiguities disappeared.[2] One of the most recent writers on
Jamesian revisions is S. P. Rosenbaum, who clarifies the "controversy
between revisionists and anti-revisionists" by reiterating an important
caveat: To study the revisions soundly one must collate all
texts
of a James work rather than merely check the first edition (or magazine
printing) against the New York Edition.[3] For as F. O. Matthiessen had
earlier
cautioned, James was in the habit of "touching up his texts" whenever a
new printing gave him the chance.[4]
Most often, however, one's concern is with James's late revisions.
For as Matthiessen also points out, the changes "that instruct us in the
evolution of his technique" are those that he introduced into a text
twenty or twenty-five years after having last printed it.
[5] Here the problem is simply to
compare
the New York text of a work (1907-09) with the text of the most recent
prior revision. This, in fact, should be done with all of James's works if we
are ever to have a full and definitive understanding of James as conscious
artist.
Among these works is a relatively minor story of the 1880's,
"Pandora," which first appeared in the New York Sun in two
installments in June, 1884. Before James revised it for his New York
Edition (1909) it had made only two other appearances, in The
Author
of Beltraffio (Boston, 1885) and in Stories Revived
(London, 1885). The three early versions of this story are virtually
identical. When James revised the 1884 newspaper text for book
publication, he apparently made two separate and unrelated revisions, one
for the Boston printing of 1885 and one for the London printing of a few
months later. Evidence for independent revisions derives from an analysis
of minor verbal differences among the three versions. As an example,
Pandora, the "self-made girl," is an "invader" of Count Vogelstein's
shipboard reverie in the Sun text. In the Boston text she
becomes his "aggressor," while the London text retains "invader"
(363).[6]
Vogelstein later describes her, in both the Sun text and the
Boston text, as "a great beauty and a great belle," but in the London text
he calls her "a great beauty and a great success" (385). Similarly, her
parents' "extraordinary pilgrimage" to Europe is satisfactory for both New
York and Boston, but becomes an "extraordinary odyssey" for London
readers (373). Thus James made certain alterations of the New York text
for the Boston printing but not for the London printing, and vice versa. The
London edition has some forty of these verbal changes from the New York
text, twice as many as the Boston text has. As Leon Edel observes, the
Boston text had "less supervision by the author."[7]
These minor changes typify James fastidiously "touching up his
texts," but they have little significance beyond this. Too close a scrutiny,
in fact, reveals what one is tempted to call the hand of a whimsical meddler
rather than that of a careful craftsman. Seven times, for example, James
changed one phrase of the New York Sun text in two
different
ways for his respective Boston and London texts. In the Sun
text, to give an illustration, the New York customs official remarks to
alighting passengers that the voyage had apparently "been 'kind of dull'".
This happy colloquial touch weakens in the Boston text ("had
been 'rather glassy'") and dies completely on reaching London ("had had
a good deal of sameness") (376). In a whimsical maneuver of a different
kind, James at one point unwittingly wrecked the consistency of details in
his text. Vogelstein, at a Washington party, pretends (in all three texts) "to
be looking for a cup of tea." In the New York and Boston texts he does
indeed find "some tea," and a few lines later (again, in all three versions)
"he drank his tea." In the London text, however, it is not tea that
Vogelstein picks up, but rather "two ices" — a capricious revision
that
later places Vogelstein in the position of putting down a cup of tea that he
had never picked up (389).
Curious and revealing as these small touches may be, they are only
the prelude to the subsequent metamorphosis of the tale. In 1909,
twenty-four years after the Boston and London printings, James published
a volume in the New York Edition which contained a freshly-revised
"Pandora." He was now reading the story (in the Boston version) with a
generation behind him of perspective and of stylistic development in his art.
And he was now revising thoroughly and meticulously, with care rather
than with hurried caprice.
There are a number of special reasons for wishing to see what James
now did with this obscure tale, this "anecdote," as James called it in his
Preface. In the first place, and least important, certain of its characters are
based on real people. Not the protagonist, to be sure — no one has
found
a real-life original for Count Otto Vogelstein, the earnest but obtuse
German diplomat. Nor is there a known model for Pandora Day, the
"self-made girl" from Utica, New York, who is the object of Vogelstein's
somewhat restrained attentions. But the Washington host and hostess at the
party which throws the two together do come from life. James rejoiced in
his notebook that he might "do Henry Adams and his wife,"
and
the urbane Alfred Bonnycastles are the outcome of this notion. Mrs.
Adams, however, committed suicide eighteen months after the story's first
appearance, and tasteless newspaper accounts at the time reported that she
had possessed "a sharp tongue."[8] Would James, therefore, in
preparing the New York Edition, somehow play down Mrs.
Bonnycastle-Adams? Or perhaps remove her delightfully wicked quips so
as to spare the abnormally sensitive Adams any recollection of the savage
reports about his wife's wit?
A further reason for inquiry into this particular story is given by
Matthiessen. "Pandora," he reminds us, is one of only two early stories
with American settings that appear in the New York Edition.
[9] If only "Pandora" and "The Point
of
View" fit the congruence of James's grand design, what changes were
necessary? What shifts of emphasis, what alteration of detail would the
expatriate make as he reread his description of American life? There are,
for example, some pages on New York in "Pandora," and James in his visit
to America in 1904 had found that city "appalling, fantastically charmless
and elaborately dire." And though America in general was "very
interesting" and "uncannily delightful," it also left him "transcendently" and
"whiningly" homesick for Lamb House.
[10] Would these 1904 observations and
judgments affect his revisions of "Pandora"?
Finally, the story has already had its revisions hastily scanned by
Matthiessen, who states his conclusions so tersely as make the serious
student curious. Matthiessen observes that James "made no changes in
outline or structure, but he enlivened several sentences with brighter
details."[11] He then gives four
examples. Can this, the reader asks, be all that James did? Do the "brighter
details" have any effect on characterization, tone, or mood? Have duller
details been excised to make room for the brighter ones? How many
sentences are "several"?
These various matters deserve careful attention, and we take up the
case of Mrs. Bonnycastle first. "Pandora" is the humorous story of a
German diplomat who cannot make up his mind to court an American girl
until he fully understands what her social position is. James focuses his
attention on Vogelstein rather than on Pandora, and he has formally marked
off Vogelstein's experience into two parts, which correspond to the two
installments in the Sun. The reader first follows him across
the
Atlantic, and then, after Vogelstein has spent two years in Washington, we
rejoin him during a few days there in April. Mrs. Bonnycastle appears only
in this second part. She is introduced in both versions of the story as the
lady "whose receptions were the pleasantest in Washington" (128).[12] Like Marian Adams, she made her
society
exclusive; there was "the complaint sometimes made of it that it was too
limited, that it left out, on the whole, more people than
it took in." Mrs. Bonnycastle is a sarcastic, biting individual who
mercilessly chides Vogelstein for failing, after two years, to comprehend
the self-made girl: "You Germans may be thorough, but you certainly are
not
quick!" (148). Conversation with her is a sparring match rather than a
leisurely give-and-take. James, in short, conceived her as a foil for the
"serious, civil, ceremonious" diplomat. Her role, an exceedingly important
one in the story, is that of candid informant. Vogelstein desperately needs
someone to teach him the ABC's of America's mysterious social alphabet,
and the forthright Mrs. Bonnycastle appoints herself his tutor.
Clearly, James, in revising the text, found himself committed to
retaining Mrs. Bonnycastle in all her splendid bluntness, all her sprightly
arrogance. To have altered her would have been to redesign all the
character relationships in the story. For, like most James characters, she is
an essential element of his total ensemble — a skewer cannot be
replaced
by a soup ladle. If the idea ever struck James that Mrs. Bonnycastle was
too vivid a portrait (or caricature) of the tragic Mrs. Adams, the New York
Edition makes it clear that structural and artistic demands of the story
triumphed over personal considerations. If anything, the alterations in Mrs.
Bonnycastle make her even more sharptongued and more acidulous than she
had been originally. Consider the verbal changes that James made: When
spring came (in the 1885 text), she "relaxed her vigilance a little, became
humorously inconsistent, vernally reckless" in her social invitations. The
New York Edition replaces "humorously
inconsistent" by putting a touch of malice in her character: "whimsically
wilful" (129). As for her principle of excluding people from her home: In
the 1885 text "she perceived differences [in people] where [Vogelstein] only
saw resemblances." The revision shows her as elaborately obsessed with her
exclusions: "This lady would discourse to him à perte de
vue
on differences. . . ." (129). On one of the many occasions that Mrs.
Bonnycastle laughs in his face at Vogelstein's obtuseness, the revision
heightens the mockery in her attitude. Instead of saying that she "stared at
him a moment, with her laughter in her face," James tells us that she
"launched at him all her laughter" (142). On a similar occasion the revision
is from "the explosion of Mrs. Bonnycastle's mirth" to "a renewed
explosion of Mrs. Bonnycastle's sense of the ridiculous" (148). Here two
things are stressed: the fact that her unkind laughs are recurrent and the fact
that Vogelstein himself is specifically the
"ridiculous" object of her mirth. Again to stress Mrs. Bonnycastle's
perpetual laugh, James in another change adds a significant phrase: "said
the lady of infinite mirth" (162) instead of "Mrs. Bonnycastle said." In one
of her malicious shafts at German temperament she remarks: "I don't mean
anything German and transcendental." The revision changes the relatively
neutral "transcendental" into the insulting "moonstruck" (162).
The revelation of Pandora's betrothal, which shocks the unsuspecting
Count, undergoes certain revisions; the first version reads:
He [Vogelstein] did Mrs. Bonnycastle, moreover, the justice to
believe that she would not have taken up the subject so
casually
if she had suspected that she should make him wince. The whole thing was
one of her jokes, and the notification, moreover, was really
friendly. (Italics mine)
In the New York Edition, amplification unmistakably emphasizes the
selfishness and even cruelty in Mrs. Bonnycastle's humor:
He did Mrs. Bonnycastle moreover the justice to believe that she
would n't have approached the question with such levity if
she
had supposed she should make him wince. The whole thing was, like
everything else, but for her to laugh at, and the betrayal moreover
of
a good intention (162). (Italics mine)
And in the final sentence of the story James was unable to resist another
Dickensian reiteration of her perpetual laugh. He added in the New York
revision the words here italicized.
He communicated this news [of Pandora's marriage] to Mrs.
Bonnycastle, who had not heard it, but who, shrieking at the queer
face he showed her, met it with the remark that there
was
now ground for a new induction as to the self-made girl (168).
One takes the shriek as a laugh; it would be a violation of her character to
shriek in sincere sympathy, surprise, or any other feminine emotion.
The mocking laughter of Mrs. Bonnycastle is thus one piece of
characterization to which James clearly paid deliberate attention. On only
one occasion did he weaken the force of her mirth: "Mrs. Bonnycastle
stared a moment, in return; then laughed very hard" becomes: "Mrs.
Bonnycastle broke on her side into free amusement" (133). In no instances
do James's revisions remove or tone down any of Mrs. Bonnycastle's
pungent remarks themselves.
In moving away from Mrs. Bonnycastle into the various American
aspects of the story, we find much the same kind of revisions. Leon Edel
has observed that "Pandora" was a tale "as critical of American families
and American institutions as James's other international stories."[13] A number of James's revisions
help to
sharpen and strengthen his criticism. His subject in the story is America
seen through the eyes of a foreigner, an inversion of his more frequent
international theme, but one which he had already tried out in The
Europeans. To make his setting Washington and his protagonist a
political
figure (secretary of the German legation) was to allow James room
throughout the tale for all manner of observations about America. The
conscientious Count, like James's grim Teuton of "A Bundle of Letters"
(1879), sets about earnestly to penetrate American mores, and James uses
details of conversation and experience to construct an image of
America.
Part one of the story takes Vogelstein, aboard a North German Lloyd
steamer, from Southampton to a Jersey City dock. The first mention of
America is by way of comparison, in the chauvinistic Count's mind, to his
own venerated Germany: Vogelstein "was quite aware, however, of the
claims of the United States and that this portion of the globe presented an
enormous field for study." In his revision James inserted one word in
particular which neatly clarified and focused Vogelstein's image of the
United States: it had claims to "economic and other
consideration" (98). The image of America in the story is thus initially
framed in dollar signs, and the perceptive reader of a later generation is
delicately reminded by the author that he has set his tale in the Gilded Age.
Published in 1884, the story took place "a few years ago," we read in the
first paragraph.
A further fact about America, of which Vogelstein has been informed
in advance, is that its denizens are "a highly humorous people." And he
worries about this, because his own sense of humor is deficient. Here too
a subtle alteration provides a different and more disparaging view of
America. Removing the warmth that the word "humorous" provides, James
tells us in the New York Edition that America was "a society abounding in
comic aspects" (98). Thus America is here represented as itself an object
of laughter, while the earlier version is ambiguous, suggesting that
Americans are both laughing and laughable. This revised emphasis is
clearly indicated also in the sentences previous to the one quoted in part.
The early text says of Vogelstein:
He was an excellent young man, and his only fault was that he had
not a high sense of humour.
The revised text reads:
He was a highly upright young man, whose only fault was that his
sense of comedy, or of the humour of things, had never been
specifically disengaged from his several other senses (98). (Italics
mine)
Shortly thereafter the author, deliberately intruding into the story as first
person narrator, takes a half paragraph to paint an ugly picture of German
emigrants on the ship bound for America. The italicized
words, added in the 1909 revision, show how two decades of immigration
apparently disturbed James as he looked at America: "They [the
immigrants] were destined to swell
still further the
huge current of
the Western democracy" (100).
(The
women's shawls of 1885 became the "remarkably ugly shawls" of
1909.)
One other verbal revision by which James subtly diminished America
comes in connection with the Tauchnitz novel which the Count uses to pass
the shipboard hours. The book — one can see James smiling
— was
his own Daisy Miller, and the America-bound Vogelstein had
been assured it "would help to prepare him." To this sentence James in
1909 added five words: ". . . for some of the oddities" (102). Among these
oddities, in James's mind no less than in his Count's, was the subject of
American humor. America's boisterous humor is occasionally alluded to in
the story, in ways that make James seem almost like a puzzled
anthropologist describing the exotic trait of an aboriginal people. When, for
example, Pandora Day's brother utters witticisms in the smoking room, we
are told that:
Vogelstein, well as he knew English, could rarely catch the joke; but
he could see, at least, that these were the most transcendent flights of
American humour.
In the elaborate revision:
. . .he could see at least that these must be choice specimens of that
American humour admired and practised by a whole continent and yet to
be rendered accessible to a trained diplomatist, clearly, but [i.e., only] by
some special and incalculable revelation (113).
With much of America's native humor depending on regional dialects and
indigenous character types, on comic exaggeration as well as on laconic
understatement, it is no wonder that the insular and serious Count felt
perplexed.
Two minor revisions dealing with Vogelstein's arrival in New York
are worth noting for the altered view of America they give. The genial and
well-wishing customs officer puzzles the German, but Vogelstein concludes
finally that "it was simply the American manner, and it was very amicable,
after all." The revision drops the "amicable" and has Vogelstein decide
instead that the American manner "had a finish of its own after all" (124).
Here, of course, one complimentary idea is traded for another, but there is
also a note of surprise added to the Count's reaction: one infers that he had
expected to find nothing really "finished" in America. As Vogelstein then
strolls out on the dock, James plants a negative idea about America in the
Count's mind.
Pandora puts him through a hand-shaking ceremony with her parents, and
the Count reflects, in the original, "that evidently the Americans, whom he
had always heard described as silent and practical, were not unversed in
certain social arts." In the revised text his pleasure is replaced by quiet
amusement at already observing one of America's comic aspects: the silent
and practical Americans "rejoiced to extravagance in the social graces"
(125). Vogelstein thus begins to observe at first hand the United States
—
which in the revised text, with a touch of irony, is three times referred to
as "the great Republic" (100, 129, 150).
Part two of the story contains fewer of these damning details. When
Mrs. Bonnycastle explains to Vogelstein her principles of social exclusion
("her discrimination"), the 1885 edition provides him with no rumination
on the matter. But the 1909 text adds:
American promiscuity, goodness knew, had been strange to him, but
it was nothing to the queerness of American criticism (129).
The other minor alterations pertaining to America are as follows: At the
Bonnycastle party "the President" of the 1885 text becomes in 1909 "the
great man," an ironic touch occurring at the end of a scene which portrays
him as a perfectly common, neighborly chap who might have just stepped
in casually through the back door (140). In the 1885 text, Pandora, the
self-made girl, "was possible only in America — only in a country
where
certain competitions [i.e., women of sophistication and culture] were
absent." The 1909 revision sharpens this rather oblique passage by
expanding the scope of America's differences: "— only in a country
where
whole ranges of competition
and
comparison
were absent" (150). A minor revision in the succeeding sentence adds the
italicized words; Vogelstein, as he converses with the Bonnycastles after
their party,
in the animated stillness, with the fragrant breath of the western
world in his nostrils, was convinced of what he had already suspected, that
conversation in the great Republic was [1885: United States is much] more
yearningly, not to say gropingly, psychological than
elsewhere
(150).
The reflection is more on Vogelstein than on America; he finds Americans
harder to understand (and the process of understanding far more capricious)
than he had expected. James is adding emphasis to Vogelstein's most
characteristic trait, his slowness of perception, which provides much comic
irony in the story.
Subsequently, James turns "the abnormal homogeneity of American
society" into "the abnormal homogeneity of the American mass" (151).
The "white, bare passages" of the Capitol become its "bleak bare
development." And a few small touches reduce the House chamber to a
comic set; the 1885 text:
In the lower House there were certain bedaubed walls, in the basest
style of imitation, which made him feel faintly sick; there was a lobby
adorned with artless prints and photographs of eminent congressmen, which
was too serious for a joke and too comical for anything else.
[14]
The 1909 revision:
. . . faintly sick, not to speak of a lobby adorned with artless prints
and photographs of eminent defunct Congressmen that was
all too serious for a joke and too comic for a
Valhalla (153).
Likewise the official guide at Mount Vernon takes on a slightly different
cast, a more repulsive one: Instead of being a man "with a large beard," he
is a "vulgar heavily-bearded man." He has a "whimsical" manner, and "he
made a cheerful thing,
an echo of the platform before the booth of
a
county fair [words added 1909], even of a visit to the tomb of the
pater patriae." James's revisions here stress the vulgarity in
America's ostentatious veneration of the past (158).
But it is a mistake to assert that in 1909 a peevish James came back
to his American story and set about deliberately to disparage his native
country. What these small changes add up to is something else. True, in
some altered passages where James the author speaks, the judgments and
descriptions are his own. And they thus may reflect an increase in his
disenchantment, a heightened sense of the comic in America. On his visit
to America in 1904 he had described Washington as "amusing."[15] But the revisions have as their
main
purpose a widening of the gulf between the German, Vogelstein, and the
inscrutable "great Republic" that he confronts. Vogelstein simply cannot
cope with America — with the "self-made girl" or with its other
complex
phenomena. He has become more emphatically the Vogel, the
poor bird pecking in the hard ground of the New World for insignificant
worms while the large panorama is lost on him. And his German head is
a dense,
round Stein; as both versions of the story tell us, "his mind
contained several millions of facts, packed too closely together for the light
breeze of the imagination to draw through the mass" (99). To understand
the New World required this breeze of the imagination, which Vogelstein
could
not stir up. And not to understand something is often to dislike it —
this
is a truism of behavior that applies to Vogelstein. James, in revising,
consciously makes Vogelstein more puzzled and consequently less
charitable. Vogelstein becomes even more of a type character — the
supercilious European — than he had been.
It is interesting that this deliberate revision of character seems clearly
to be part of a pattern. When we turn to the final aspect of our concern,
James's "brighter details," we see at once that Vogelstein is not the only
character to become less of an individual and more of a type. We have
already pointed to Mrs. Bonnycastle, whose persistent laughter becomes
more prominent, a Dickensian trait, in 1909. She becomes less of a real
person and more of a Bergsonian comic machine — let the Count
stutter
an inane query and Mrs. Bonnycastle breaks forth in another spasm of her
"infinite mirth." We can also point to another character, almost a pure type
to begin with, who is even further caricatured in the 1909 revision. This is
Mrs. Steuben, Pandora's chaperone at the Bonnycastle party. In both
editions she speaks with a Savannah accent, she has "written verses which
were admired in the South," and she wears her dead commodore husband
in a "full-length portrait" on her bosom (145).
Thus already in 1885 James puts her in the story as a comic figure. When
she ungrammatically remarks, "I'm very fond of the old; you know that's
a weakness of we Southerners," James sniggers: "The poor lady, it will be
observed, had another weakness as well" (146). She is an amalgam of two
type characters, the obsolete ante-bellum Southern lady and the
self-deceiving poetaster. When James took her up in 1909 he revelled
without restraint in making her even more absurd. Her voice in 1885 "had
a little flute-like way of sounding the adjective" in the phrase "true, true
love." Once in the story was certainly enough for this vigorous Dickensian
simile, especially since she occupies little space in the story. But in 1909
James put it in once more: "'Do you think anything's really new?' she then
began to flute" (146). Another of her Savannah habits is to pronounce South
as "Sooth," to which James elaborately calls our attention:
Vogelstein had been struck before this with Mrs. Steuben's
pronunciation of the word by which her native latitudes were designated;
transcribing it from her lips you would have written it (as the nearest
approach) the Sooth (146).
In 1909 he expanded this quirk far out of proportion, into the realm of
caricature, by additional references:
"It's no trouble for a Southerner [1909: "we of the Sooth"] to be
quiet" (147).
He [Vogelstein] sat there half an hour, and the warm dead stillness
of the Washington night — nowhere are the nights so silent —
came
in at the open window, mingled with a soft sweet earthy smell, the smell
of growing things. [1909: . . . things and in particular, as he thought, of
Mrs. Steuben's Sooth.] (149)
"Why, what do people get engaged for? I presume they will marry
before long." [1909: "Why what do people fall in love with each other
for? I presume they'll marry when she gets round to it. Ah
if
she had only been from the Sooth—!"] (164)
The revised Mrs. Steuben also has become more the Southern archromantic:
"get engaged" becoming "fall in love with each other."
If one goes beyond a mere cataloguing of "brighter details" to draw
come conclusions, one cannot help noticing James's deliberate and subtle
change in overall tone. The laughter of Mrs. Bonnycastle is emphasized, the
rigid thickheadedness of Vogelstein is underscored, the caricature of Mrs.
Steuben balloons into the ridiculous. The tone is more overtly comic
—
a shift from discreet satire into broad burlesque. James is clearly enjoying
himself, and is not making the mistake of trying to rescue a trivial piece by
elaborating it to literary or thematic significance.
Here, however, the question of judgment comes in. Is he going too
far in the other direction? Are the new and "brighter" details and the new
and farcical tone more successful — given the same characters and
situations — than the more gently satiric tone of the old? The answer
is
likely to be no. One is inclined to fault James for overstatement in the
revisions — for trying to turn his gentle comedy of 1885 into overt
burlesque, a mode in which his touch is less sure and his manner a bit
strained. Nor, by and large, do the revisions in "Pandora" help much to
clarify or "brighten" the story. It cannot be said of "Pandora," for example
(as Gegenheimer can say of "A Passionate Pilgrim"), that the "substitution
of strongly graphic and visual images for other methods of comparison is
striking."[16] Nor, in contrast to
The Reverberator, do we see James adding dashes of wit and
colorful imagery, or "new metaphors, strikingly apt."[17]
We have seen how the story as a whole is affected in tone and
characterization by certain minor changes. Let us now look briefly at some
of the other small verbal changes, which can be arranged in six groups:
(1) Revision of single words, often with little or no observable
reason or effect. Vogelstein as "curious" instead of "inquisitive" (98). An
"aspect" of America to study instead of a "question" (101). A suspicious
facial expression "noted" rather than "perceived" (102).
"Gathered"/"perceived" (104). "Sought occasion"/"sought an opportunity"
(113). National "annals" instead of "history" (153). "Splendid" terrace
instead of "magnificent" (154).
The diligent student will consult the context and decide for himself
whether there is a nuance of difference, but I would argue that he will find
one word as good as the other, and the precision of the narration neither
improved nor damaged. Hélène Harvitt's query of 1924 is
still valid:
one wonders in some cases "why he should have preferred one word to
another."[18]
(2) Revision of single words with minor but noticeable effect. Perhaps
most important is the replacing of the straightforward "Vogelstein" with
various descriptive epithets: "our observer" (122), "this diplomatic aspirant"
(155), "the young man" (157), "her old shipmate" (139), "our special
traveller" (155), "her critic" (158), "our young friend" (158), "poor Count
Otto" (167). Or — as we leave Vogelstein sadder but wiser at the
end
— "our silent sufferer" (167). Here, of course, is a Jamesian
mannerism,
and one can no more beg him to mute the chummy "our" than to ask him
to write about Mannlicher rifles and African buffalo. But nonetheless the
effect is to make us (uncomfortably, I would assert) aware of the author.
It divides our attention between author and characters, and this division has
been fatal to lesser writers. No greater precision is achieved; there is only
the strained affectation of a false rapport between writer and
audience.
This increased informality is worth further attention, as it corresponds
with the same trait noted by Matthiessen and others as a constant element
in James's revisions. Matthiessen calls it a "pervasive
colloquialization,"[19] and we see it
also, in this 72-page story, in the more than 140 contractions that James
substitutes: I've, they're, he's, they'll, they've, he'd, I'd. Most occur in
characters' speeches, but the revision is wholesale and in some cases
ill-advised. James's habitual circumlocutions and his inflated diction simply
do not harmonize with some of the folksy contractions in his own narrative
voice.
(3) "Brighter details" — usually involving an expansion of the
thought. "In Washington" becomes "by the waters of the Potomac" (128).
A society founded on "necessary lapses"/"fundamental fallacies and
triumphant blunders" (129). "Persons of leisure"/"that body which
Vogelstein was to hear invoked, again and again, with the mixture
of desire and of deprecation that might have attended the mention of a
secret vice, under the name of a leisure-class" (130). "All this passed
through Vogelstein's mind"/"These images and these questions coursed
through Count Otto's mind" (140). "Pandora remarked
sympathetically"/"there was a high mature competence in the way the girl
sounded the note of approval" (140). Vogelstein remembered that a Dresden
lady had called America "a country of girls"/"the country of the
Mädchen" (101). Dresden girls "came straight towards one, like
that"/"were apt to advance, like this one, straight upon their victim" (104).
She looked "like the Queen in
Hamlet"/"like the
vieux
jeu idea of the queen in 'Hamlet'" (145). He asked her if she
desired
"his seat"/"of him the surrender of his seat" (106). One might give one's
self away to people "who afterwards prove a great encumbrance"/ "who
would afterwards be as a millstone round one's neck" (114).
This millstone is one of the few images that James added to the story
— and a rather trite one at that. The most famous expansion through
"brighter detail" adds the italicized words to a remark by Alfred
Bonnycastle (Henry Adams): "Let us be vulgar and have
some
fun — let us invite the President" (131). In the examples from this
category of revisions it is easy to see that most are extremely felicitous and
clarifying. Some also are of questionable value. The wisest of James's
revisions fall into this category.
(4) Duller details — usually involving an expansion of thought.
The
lady beside him "was making him laugh"/"ministered freely and without
scruple, it was clear, to this effect of his comfortably unbending" (138).
Vogelstein had "often, in Washington, been discoursed to at the same
moment by several virginal voices"/"so repeatedly heard himself addressed
in even more than triple simultaneity" (133). ". . . the girl returned"/". .
. the ex-heroine of the Donau returned" (143). "If he spoke
to
her at all he wished to speak to her alone"/"If he should speak to her at all
he would somehow wish it to be in more privacy" (141). The inhabitants
of the commercial cities came so far southward "to escape that boisterous
interlude" (i.e., spring)/"to escape, after the long winter, that final affront"
(136). "She hesitated again"/ "Again she just hung fire" (161).
These are items, in short, to add to the arsenal of those who argue
that the later James is the hippopotamus painfully trying to retrieve a pea.
In fact, however, the revisions that fit this category are rather fewer than
those in the category of "brighter details." Thus, generally speaking, in
"Pandora" the shade of meaning is attended to by the reviser with
considerable care and with success more often than failure. The "hung fire"
revision above is, as Matthiessen observes, a "Jamesian
favorite,"
[20] and as such it suggests
that precision and felicity were not the only reasons for James's revisions.
Instead, a clever colloquialism sometimes became for James an obsession
to be used over and over again.
(5) Excision of significant detail in a full phrase or clause or
sentence. "Vogelstein's servant, an Englishman (he had taken him for
practice in the language), had gone in pursuit of an examiner"/"Vogelstein's
servant was off in search of an examiner" (123).
This is the only instance in the story of James deleting lengthy detail
without substituting the same idea or a subtly altered idea in different
phrasing.
(6) Addition of significant detail in a full phrase or clause or
sentence. In addition to the several examples already cited above in other
contexts, there are the following: American ladies "in striped shawls,
though in prettier ones than the nursing mothers of the
steerage"
(100). "Differences, however, were notoriously half the
charm
of travel[.], and perhaps even most when they could n't be expressed
in figures, numbers, diagrams or the other
merely
useful symbols" (101f.). "'Our name is Day'"/"'Our name's
just Day — you might n't think it was
[was in italics] a name, might you? if we did n't make
the
most of it," (106).
Numerous other instances are available, showing that James tended
to add rather than delete, which is quite to be expected in a quest for
nuance and clarification.
We may finally sum up the nature of the revisions by reiterating that
tone and detail are the two main aspects of the story affected. In tone the
achievement is dubious — a warped veneer of the colloquial that
does not
bond well to the basic formality of syntax and diction. There is also a
debatable shift from one region of the comic to another: from subtle satire
to broad farce, a shift which the individual reader can contemplate
according to his own standards of comedy and of Jamesian art. In the
matter of details, we find extensive minor alteration, usually expansion for
the sake of clarification and addition of meaning. Most of these revisions
work nicely, but some few stand out as evidence for the prosecution.
So in this particular story the net result is neither striking
improvement nor fatal tampering. The story is better in some ways, worse
in others. But it is different — one cannot assert that the changes
really
add up to nothing. The care with which James went through his "anecdote"
word by word and thought by thought is convincingly
demonstrated by one particular revision in the second half of the story.
Seven pages from the end Mrs. Bonnycastle has occasion to warn
Vogelstein not to fix his affections on Pandora, the "self-made girl,"
because, as she puts it (in both versions), "she's always engaged to some
young man who belongs to her earlier phase." Vogelstein inquiries what an
"earlier phase" might mean, and in the 1885 version Mrs. Bonnycastle
answers simply: "The time before she had made herself — when she
lived at home." When James in 1909 revised her response he could look
back at his whole gallery of self-made girls, whether self-made in the social
or the ethical sense: Isabel Archer, Milly Theale, Maggie Verver. He could
also look at the achievements of modern women in real life, as his friend
Henry Adams had stood in awe of Mme Curie and her ominous radium. All
opened odd Pandora's boxes, finding not evils but their own latent powers
and perceptions, just as Pandora Day, whose last name evokes her
brightness and candor, had opened the lavish box of American opportunity.
Whatever went through James's mind, there is no faulting the wisdom in
his revision of Mrs. Bonnycastle's response. Fraught with meaning for the
story and for the age, her response to the Count's query, "Her earlier
phase?" now reads: "The time before she had made herself — when
she
lived unconscious of her powers" (162).
Notes
