University of Virginia Library

V

Volume X of the New York Edition appeared in 1908, and it contained, in addition to "A London Life" and "The Chaperon," the third, final, and most extensive revision of the Spoils. The nearly fifteen hundred new readings in this revision—most of which replaced words and passages unaltered in the earlier editions—are not the kinds of changes James had made during the first two revisions of the novel. Although he continued to remove commas whenever there was a chance, his changes in syntax went beyond those in the earlier revisions.

James achieved in his third revision a more highly compressed style by deleting a large number of relative and personal pronouns and by transforming subordinate clauses into phrases. The extensive use of contractions and the frequent inversion of the normal word order of a sentence are additional characteristics of James's late style that are noticeable in the New York Edition revisions of the Spoils.

The most frequent type of change that James made in the diction of his novel was the continued addition of specific descriptive details. Sometimes this was done merely by adding descriptive nouns: "a tussle, dishevelment, shrieks" becomes "a tussle, dishevelment, pushes, scratches, shrieks." Occasionally these changes in wording have a greater significance, as when the end of the "business" of Fleda's relations with Owen becomes the end of "dreams and realities," or when the description of Mrs. Gereth's behavior towards Fleda changes from "a sort of brutality of good intentions" to "a high brutality of good intentions."[23] As these revisions show, James's changes in diction for the New York Edition are often changes in imagery. James did not introduce new patterns of imagery into the Spoils, as he seems to have done in revising some of his earlier works for the New York Edition,[24] but he did add important images to the novel. The battle imagery is added to when Mrs. Gereth blanches as if she had heard "of the landing, there on her coast, of a foreign army" instead of the sound of an autumn wind. James also utilized opportunities—neglected for some reason in his first two revisions—to change the phrase "the old things" to "the spoils" three times. Once he significantly altered "gone" to "spoiled" in describing Fleda's realization of what happened to her secret of Owen's love. Such a change emphasizes again how the spoils of Poynton ruin the relationships in the novel. In another revealing change James stressed Fleda's position in the social worlds of Poynton and Waterbath—a position not often noted by critics. To the description that the only thing in the world that Fleda had was a feeling of suspense, James added the sentence, "It was, morally speaking, like figuring in society with the wardrobe of one garment." Practicing speaking, Fleda was, of course, figuring in the society of the novel with a one-garment wardrobe.

The significance of some of the changes made in the third revision of the Spoils extends beyond the particular novel that James was revising, and through them "the logic of the particular case" illuminates the New York Edition revisions of other works. In his general explanation of his revisions for his collected works, James mentioned two particular kinds of improvements he thought he had made: the improvement of the "vicâ-voce" quality of his prose, and the addition of an "immense array of terms, perceptional and expressional, that . . . simply looked over the heads of the standing terms. . . ."[25] The sound of James's prose was improved in the third revision of the Spoils and in the other works of the New York Edition through the use of contractions, alliteration, and balanced phrases. The improvements that resulted from the change in "perceptional and expressional" terms is perhaps more questionable. In looking over the heads of the more ordinary terms, they tend to stand out rather conspicuously. The following words and phrases, for example, were all substituted in the last revision of the Spoils for the "perceptional" term hesitated which James used so frequently to describe the reactions of his characters: gasped, wondered, debated, dropped, faltered, cast about, hung fire, hung back, took it so, rather floundered, thought again, waited for thought, had a pause, failed of presence of mind for a moment, seemed for an instant to have to walk around it. Not all of these changes are elegant variations, however; in its context the last circumlocution is a neat description of Owen Gereth's reaction to a "fairly simple" statement by Fleda. How revisions such as these can throw light on James's revisions of other works can be seen, for example, in the assertion that James's changes of the word "perceived" to "felt" in his revisions of "The Turn of the Screw" show that he was trying "to alter the governess's testimony from that of things observed and perceived to things felt."[26] But this same kind of change is one of the more frequent ones made in the New York Edition of the Spoils, and it is improbable that James was also trying to stress the delusions of the characters in that novel.

Other types of revision that extend beyond "the logic of the particular case" are revisions of anti-Semitic remarks[27] and authorial intrusions

in the novel. James changed one authorial "I" to "we" and modified another so as to leave in the author but take out his self-consciously deprecating remark.[28] These changes together with a half dozen or so unrevised intrusions that survived all three revisions of the novel indicate that James's technique of point of view in the Spoils did not preclude his direct use of the first-person author behind that point of view, a point of view which — except when it belongs to a narrator in the fiction — is almost always set forth by an omniscient, reserved, but present author.

Sooner or later in any study of James's—and perhaps anyone else's— revisions, it must be frankly admitted that many of the changes are inexplicable.[29] Who can say with plausibility why James changed "a motive magnificent" to "a motive superb" and then again to "a motive splendid"? These inexplicable changes should not be ignored, however. When a writer makes nearly 3,400 changes in revising a novel three times, it is not difficult to find evidence among them for almost any critical thesis; with an admitted ballast of inexplicable changes, it is possible to go farther with the explicable ones. But before a critic uses or an editor accepts or rejects an author's revisions, he ought if possible to ascertain why the author undertook them. In his prefaces to the New York Edition James was quite explicit about his motives for revising. In the preface to Roderick Hudson he briefly justified his revisions on the grounds that "the only detachment" of an author from his work is "the detachment of aversion"; but if the work is going to be republished, then,

Many of James's commentators have felt able to say, if not where his revisions should have started, at least where they should have stopped, and usually their dicta are based on conclusions about the unfortunateness of his development as a writer. James, of course, was convinced that his development and his revisions were for the best. Thus his ultimate justification of his revisions, as set forth involutedly at the end of his last preface to the New York Edition, was a moral one.

This explanation of what was a moral necessity for James does not answer the question of whether or not his final revisions ultimately resulted in the best text of The Spoils of Poynton. The logic of the particular case that is the Spoils shows, however, that they did. The only responsible alternative to the New York Edition of the novel is the first English edition. "The Old Things" is the most inaccurate and badly written of the four texts, and the first American edition is not a completely consistent revision of these faults.[32] There is, in short, no good bibliographical reason—though there may still be financial ones because of copyright—for ignoring James's final intentions concerning the Spoils.

There are, on the contrary, good reasons, apart from the revised text itself, why the New York Edition is better than any other version of the Spoils. James's famous preface to the Spoils (including his explanation of why he grouped the novel with "A London Life" and "The Chaperon") should certainly accompany any edition of the novel, though the most logical text it should preface is the one it was written for. This is also true of the photographic frontispiece to Volume X of the New York Edition. The most consistently neglected feature of that edition are its frontispieces; even the recent expensive reprinting of the edition by Scribners omits them. James himself presided over the making of these frontispieces, giving instructions to the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn about where the subjects of the pictures might be found, and selecting the ones that were used in

the New York Edition. Consequently, these photographs are significant, if oblique, comments by the author on his work. The frontispiece to Volume X is entitled "Some of the Spoils," and it was photographed at the famous Wallace Collection in London.[33] It shows a setting of furniture which includes a firescreen with a panel of Gobelin tapestry, a bronze musical clock on the mantlepiece along with two candelabra, and two Louis XVI chairs flanking the fireplace.[34] The effect of this frontispiece is similar to the others whose function James himself described in the preface to The Golden Bowl. Rather than compete with the fiction, each frontispiece was to The optical echoes of the frontispiece to the Spoils remind the reader again of how the spoils themselves at the center of the novel are, in the words of the preface, "full of suggestion, clearly, as to their possible influence on other passions and other relations."[36] A definitive edition of The Spoils of Poynton that did not present to the reader their optical suggestions along with James's preface and final revisions would not live up to its author's ideals of exemplary art, active care, and consistent finish.