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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
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
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:
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
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:
Apart from the Atlantic's overpunctuation, there is no evidence
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
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
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
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:
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
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.
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
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,
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
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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