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Notes
A brief version of this paper was read before the Bibliographical Evidence Group of the Modern Language Association, December, 1964.
For some advocates of the revisions, see F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (1944), pp. 152-186, and Isadore Traschen, "Henry James and the Art of Revision," PQ, XXXV (1956), 39-47. For more recent critics of the revisions, see Simon Nowell-Smith, "Introductory Note," The Reverberator (n. d), pp. vii-x, and Roy Harvey Pearce, "Introduction," The American (1962), pp. xvii-xxi.
See Hélène Harvitt, "How Henry James Revised Roderick Hudson: A Study in Style," PMLA, XXXIX (1924), 203-227, and the correction by Raymond D. Havens, "The Revision of Roderick Hudson," PMLA, XL (1925), 433-434. See also Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence, A Bibliography of Henry James, Revised Edition (1961), pp. 29-31.
For a complete collation of the four texts see my unpublished thesis "Studies for a Definitive Edition of Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton (Cornell, 1960), II, 186-359. All page references for revisions discussed in this paper can also be found there.
James's correspondence with Scudder has been partly published in The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (1947), pp. 206, 251, and 256. Important unpublished letters, including all those referred to in this paper, are now at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; these letters may not be quoted until Professor Leon Edel's edition of James's correspondence appears.
See, for example, the frontispiece of James's Notebooks, the printed entries of 1896, "The Altar of the Dead" first published in Terminations (1895), and "The Other House" serialized in The Illustrated London News from July 4th to September 26th, 1896.
An error in Percy Lubbock's edition of James's letters (I, 246) has led to the confusing of The Other House with The Spoils of Poynton in the matter of dictation. The crisis of serialization that James refers to in his letter happened with The Other House not the Spoils. Writer's cramp prevented James from turning out installments of The Other House in time for The Illustrated London News, and this forced him to begin dictating the novel. That the Spoils was handwritten seems clear from unpublished letters to Scudder where James refers to sending his manuscript off to the typist before mailing it the Atlantic.
In an unpublished letter from De Vere Gardens, London, to his brother, dated October 30, 1896, James mentioned that the Spoils was being held back so it would not interfere with the sales of The Other House.
Clement Shorter, the editor of The Illustrated London News, was worried that the premature appearance of The Other House would cut down the sales of the serial; James reassured him that the first edition would be delayed. See Letters to an Editor, privately printed by Clement Shorter (London, 1916), p. 11.
James also made some small additions to the first American edition. In Chapter XVI, towards the end of the final scene between Fleda and Owen, he added, for example, a description of the uneasy Owen as he appeared to Fleda just before she asks her ominous question about when Mrs. Brigstock was to have returned home to her daughter. The effect of the interpolation is to prepare for and thus emphasize the question.
See James's Notebooks, p. 207, and unpublished letters to Scudder, one written from De Vere Gardens, London, on December 18, 1895 and another dated only "Wednesday."
The change to war imagery in the revised title is reinforced by at least three other additional images of battle in the first American edition.
Alexander Holder-Barell's The Development of Imagery and its Functional Significance in Henry James's Novels (1959) uses the serial and the New York Edition revisions of the Spoils, among other novels, to study the development of James's imagery. By not considering the revisions in imagery made for the first editions, the author attributes to James's developing use of imagery in his final revisions some changes that were, in fact, made within a year of the original writing of "The Old Things." And two of the three "added" images cited in the discussion of "The Old Things" (pp. 27-28 and notes 18-21, pp. 161-162) are actually to be found in the original text—including the one described by the author as "the most significant added image in the novel."
See "Editions and Revisions," The Ambassadors: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (1964), pp. 353-362.
Evidence that the New York Edition revisions were based on the first English edition is to be seen in the nearly five hundred readings in which the New York Edition follows the first English edition but differs from the earlier texts. If the New York Edition were based on the serial or on the first American edition, one would expect to find more than the some fifty readings in which the New York Edition ignores a change in the first English edition and reverts to a reading in one of the earlier texts.
Another noteworthy change of a word, which may have been only the correction of a misprint unnoticed in the previous two revisions, is the change of a noun used by Mrs. Gereth in denouncing the consequences of Fleda's passion for Owen. In the first three texts it is the "insanity" of the passion she criticizes, but in the New York Edition it is more aptly the "inanity" of Fleda's passion that she attacks.
See, for example, Isadore Traschen's studies of the revisions of The American in AL, XXVI (1954), 67-77, and New England Quarterly, XXIX (1956), 43-62.
The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, ed. R. P. Blackmur (1934), pp. 339, 346-7.
In the first three texts of the Spoils, for instance, Mrs. Gereth implicitly describes herself as "the greatest Jew, who had ever tracked a victim" in her hunt for spoils. In the New York Edition she is "the craftiest stalker, who had ever tracked big game." The Dreyfus Case, which occurred between the second and third revisions of the novel, may have been behind these changes. (See James's praise of Zola's J'accuse! in "Fourteen Letters," ed. Henry Brewster, Botteghe Oscure, XIX (1957), 194.) Some anti-Semitic remarks in James's other works were not revised, however.
James dropped the last seven words of the following: "Save on one other occasion, at which we shall in time arrive, little as the reader may believe it. . . ."
On rare occasions changes become explicable in conjunction with biographical details. James's mention of someone's "works" that Owen considers giving Fleda for her services is qualified in the New York Edition to works of the kind usually sold by subscription. The New York Edition itself was sold only by subscription.
Ironically, until the recent reprinting of the New York Edition, the first American was the only edition in circulation in the United States. It was even the basis for a French translation of the Spoils incorrectly entitled Le Sort de Poynton, which appeared in La Revue de Paris in 1928. (In 1954 the same translation was reissued under the more accurate title, Les Dépouilles de Poynton.)
I am grateful to Mr. Coburn for this information. The interesting story of Mr. Coburn's photographs for the New York Edition was told by him in a talk entitled "Illustrating Henry James by Photography" for the British Broadcasting Corporation Third Programme, July 17, 1953.
The furniture in the photograph is identifiable from F. J. B. Watson's Furniture: Wallace Collection Catalogues (1956), pp. 63-64, 90, 141, and 186-187.
Art of the Novel, p. 333. The "set" for the Spoils as pictured in the frontispiece nevertheless manages to contradict the text in two minor ways. The wallpaper, or perhaps wall-brocade, in the photograph, and the two pictures, one on top of the other, do not fit in with the descriptions of Poynton as having "not many pictures" and "not an inch of pasted paper anywhere," (The Spoils of Poynton, (1908), X, 22).
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