University of Virginia Library

The Spoils of Poynton: Revisions and Editions
by
S. P. Rosenbaum [*]

A half century ago there appeared, appropriately enough in PMLA, the first academic study of the celebrated—or deplored—revisions made by Henry James for the New York Edition of his collected works. The study frankly criticized the eccentricities of "the later manner of Mr. Henry James," as found in The Awkward Age, and questioned "whether a mode of writing which so constantly distracts attention from the substance to the form of expression is still to be called a style."[1] As newer critics we may perhaps be amused at the assumed dichotomy between form and content in this criticism, and at the rigid subordination of the former to the latter; yet the objections to James's revisions are still very much with us, even if the arguments pro and con have become more sophisticated.[2] The controversy between revisionists and anti-revisionists has grown in complexity and intensity since the New York Edition began to appear in 1907, with the disagreements often being based on differing assumptions about James's development. Anti-revisionists frequently maintain that he reached the apex of his art with The Portrait of a Lady or perhaps The Bostonians, while revisionists find his greatest achievements in the last three major novels. What complicates this controversy over the revisions is the number of stopping places between the original editions and the final revisions of his works. Forty years ago PMLA could print an article on

James's revisions that assumed there were only two relevant editions of Roderick Hudson instead of the seven editions and three sets of revisions that are now known.[3] Yet the discovery of a number of intermediate texts and revisions has not really dissipated the disagreements between revisionists and anti-revisionists because they mainly concern the revisions made for the New York Edition. What has not been clearly enough recognized in the controversy, however, is that the significance of these late revisions depends rather heavily on the nature of the unrevised or preceding text. If it is clear, as a contemporary of the New York Edition maintained in 1908, that "Mr. James wrote better English thirty years ago than he writes to-day,"[4] is it also clear that his English of 1888 is better? And what about the prose of 1898?

I

The answer to the question which is the best text of a given novel of Henry James — the unrevised, first revised, second revised, third or even fourth revised — depends above all on what the given novel is. The answer, to borrow James's own words from a slightly different context in the preface to The Spoils of Poynton, is to be found in "the logic of the particular case," a logic to be found in the circumstances of composition, publication, revision, and republication. The purpose of this paper is to examine the logic of that particular case The Spoils of Poynton in order to determine the best text and to see what light a study of James's revisions of the novel throws on an understanding of the Spoils in particular and on James's habits and patterns of revision in general.

Four different texts of The Spoils of Poynton were published during James's lifetime. The original serialization of the novel under the title "The Old Things" appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1896. The first American and first English editions appeared, a week apart, in February, 1897,[5] and in 1908 the novel was published again in the New York Edition. The differences between the serial and the three editions of the novel are not merely the result of being set by

different printers. James himself carefully revised each of the first three texts as he prepared it for republication. Nearly 3,400 changes are to be found between the four texts, and they range in importance from the deletion of a comma to the change of the novel's title.[6]

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:

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:

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 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.

III

James's customary practice was to have the first editions of his novels appear about the same time as their final serialized installments. Nevertheless, the first American and English editions of the Spoils were not published until February, 1897, nearly four months after the serial had ended. They were delayed because James's English publisher, William Heinemann, was scheduled to bring out in the fall

of 1896 the first edition of The Other House—the novel James converted from a play after writing the Spoils—as it ended its serial in The Illustrated London News.[14] The Spoils was put off until 1897 so as not to compete with The Other House which, because of its serialization, could not be published earlier.[15] This delay in the publication of Heinemann's edition of the Spoils probably accounts for the most striking fact about the two first editions of the novel: the differences between the two texts. The Boston and London first editions have in common more than twelve hundred revisions from "The Old Things." Yet apart from national differences in spelling and punctuation, there are nearly six hundred variant readings between the two first editions that appeared within a week of each other. These variants reveal that James obviously did not revise his serial once for both editions. The even greater number of identical readings to be found in both first editions but not in the serial reveals that James did not revise his serial independently for each edition. Since the American edition follows the serial in most of the variants between the two editions, it appears that the first American edition was the intermediate text in a sequence of revisions from the serial to the first English edition. An unpublished letter to the editor of the Atlantic reveals that James did not originally intend to revise the same novel twice within four months.[16] James hoped to send Houghton, Mifflin, the American publishers of both the Atlantic and the Spoils, revised proofsheets of the first English edition that Heinemann had already contracted to publish. What appears to have happened instead is that Heinemann set up the English first edition, after it had been delayed by The Other House, from the revised sheets of the first American edition which in turn had been set up from revised sheets of the Atlantic installments.

When he revised the serial for the first American edition, James made more than fourteen hundred changes. Most of these were merely fingerings of style—minor changes in punctuation, diction, and syntax. He removed many of the Atlantic's superfluous commas, and he tightened and clarified his sentence structure by bringing subjects and

verbs closer together and by changing parenthetical or relative clauses to nouns or participial phrases. Some revisions corrected solecisms or awkwardnesses in "The Old Things," as, for example, the changing of a misplaced phrase that had described Fleda's and Owen's eyes catching sounds through a door. In general the diction of the first American edition is more exact than that of the serial. Certain non-Jamesean ambiguities were dropped—as in the plumbing image that James suppressed by changing a "flushed and overflowing Sunday" to a "flushed and huddled Sunday." In revisions that involved more than stylistic changes, James altered the ages of Mrs. Gereth (she becomes "young in the fifties" instead of "young at fifty" and she has been married twenty-six instead of twenty-four years) and Fleda's father (he becomes fifty-seven instead of fifty-five). These changes imply that Fleda and Owen are perhaps a little older in the first American edition than in "The Old Things." In the first American edition only Fleda's mother is dead and Fleda is meagerly supported by her father who collects his own kinds of old things; there is no mention of a grandfather. Fleda's impressions of Owen Gereth were subjected to an interesting series of alterations that de-emphasize Owen as a stupid boy and thus increase the plausibility of his attractiveness to Fleda. In the first chapter of the serial Fleda is described as feeling that Owen was "singularly handsome and admirably stupid" but after the first revision Owen is "absolutely beautiful and delightfully dense." Again in the first chapter, the description of Owen as a "bouncing boy" is dropped, and further on in the novel his "stupidity" is changed twice to "heaviness."[17]

The most important single change from the serial to the first American edition was the title. In changing it from "The Old Things" to The Spoils of Poynton James continued to identify the house and furnishings as the center of his novel—a center also stressed in the earlier working title, the "House Beautiful" and "The Great House."[18] The final title adds something more, however; through irony it implies that the old things of Poynton are spoils not only because

they are fruits of battle,[19] but also because they spoil all the human relationships in the novel by occupying such a central place in them. The title also suggests that ultimately the characters themselves—including Fleda Vetch—become the spoils of Poynton as they are morally affected by the old things.

Other changes in imagery made during the first revision developed images implicit in the serial.[20] An effective example of this is seen in the way James revised his description of Poynton so as to make it more specific without getting into the difficulties of making it more detailed. In "The Old Things" Poynton is described as follows:

This fine example of the Jamesean Vague was revised as follows for the first American edition:

IV

Even if his resemblance to the "passionate corrector" Dencombe is accepted, it is difficult to see why, within four months of revising it for the first American edition, James again revised The Spoils of Poynton for the first English edition. It is unlikely that he had forgotten his recent revision, and there is no evidence, as with The Ambassadors,[21] that the circumstances of publication led him to revise even part of his serial independently for the London edition. Whatever the reason, James kept almost all the changes he had made for the first American edition, and in addition he made some five hundred more revisions. Less that a fifth of these affected changes James had

already made in his first revision. Only occasionally in these revisions of revisions did James return to readings found in the serial—as when he omitted a passage, added only in the first American edition, comparing Owen's behavior at Maggie's to his "cheerful slowness" at Ricks. Most of the alterations made in the second revision of the Spoils closely resemble the kinds of changes James made in the first. He continued, for instance, to remove extra commas and tighten his syntax. Changes in diction tend, as in the first revision, towards greater accuracy and specificity. Mrs. Gereth tries to "rub up" a glimmer in Owen's mind instead of attempting to "invoke" it, and Fleda feels not simply Owen's "lips" on her face, but his "warm lips." The most extensive addition to the first English edition is only a sentence spoken by Mrs. Gereth to Fleda on the latter's ignorance of the brutes that men are; the interpolated remark adds another detail to the treatment that Fleda receives from Mrs. Gereth after revealing her love for Owen.

The greater consistency of its punctuation and the increased precision of its diction make the first English edition of the Spoils something of an improvement over the first American edition. Beyond this, the second revision corrected a number of typographical errors in the first American edition, while introducing only a very few new ones of its own. There is, in short, no sound bibliographical reason why it should not be preferred over the Boston edition, and it is not surprising that James used the London edition as the basis for his third set of revisions of The Spoils of Poynton that he made for the New York Edition of his works.[22]

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.

Notes