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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
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
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
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
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 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
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:
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:
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.
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:
Subsequently, James turns "the abnormal homogeneity of American society" into "the abnormal homogeneity of the American mass" (151).
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
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:
"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
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
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
(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
Notes
This paper is a byproduct of research made possible by a grant from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society. I am indebted to Mr. James Kraft for scrutiny of this paper and for several suggestions which I have incorporated.
"Early and Late Revisions in Henry James's 'A Passionate Pilgrim,'" American Literature, XXIII (May, 1951), 234.
Page references in this and the next paragraph are to Leon Edel's reprinting of the London text in The Complete Tales of Henry James (1963), V, 357-412.
See Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Middle Years (1957), pp. 168-169, for the connection with "Pandora," and pp. 274-275 for the insults of two Washington and New York papers.
To avoid cluttering the text I hereafter cite page references only to the New York Edition (XVIII). Parallel passages in the London 1885 text (which varies only slightly from the Boston 1885 text, as described) can easily be compared in Leon Edel, ed., Complete Tales.
There is evidently a misprint in the original New York Sun version of 1884. Instead of "comical," the adjective is "critical," which ruins the rhetorical contrast between comic and serious that James has set up.
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