University of Virginia Library

III

After the editor has separated authorial from nonauthorial alterations and has decided how to treat the nonauthorial ones, he still faces the question of how to define "final" with respect to the authorial variants. Normally, of course, when there are two authorial readings at a given point and their sequence can be determined, the later one is taken to represent the author's "final intention." However, there are in general two kinds of situations in which this view of "final

intention" will prove unsatisfactory: (1) when the nature or extent of the revisions is such that the result seems, in effect, a new work, rather than a "final version" of an old work;[45] and (2) when the author allows several alternative readings to stand in his manuscript or vacillates among them in successive editions. In the first case, one may say that there is more than one "final" intention; in the second, that there is no final intention at all.

The editorial problem in both cases usually reduces itself to quantitative terms: when the authorial variants are few in number, it makes little practical difference if an editor selects one group of readings as "final" and incorporates them into his text, since the reader will be able without much difficulty to analyze the variants for himself and come to his own conclusions about the way in which these variants alter the total effect of the work; but when the number of variants is great, the system of presenting one final text with variant readings in notes is less satisfactory, and the only practical solution is to produce more than one text (perhaps arranged in parallel columns), each representing a different "intention."[46] That the recognition of more than one valid text of a given work is often forced on an editor by the practical exigencies of recording variant readings should not obscure the fact that the theoretical problem of determining "final" authorial intention has no necessary connection with the quantity of variants.

Turning to the first of the two categories—in which an author's revisions produce, in a manner of speaking, a new work—one can identify several patterns. The most clear-cut involves those situations in which the author's revisions reflect motives which make it impossible for an editor to accept the later version of a work as truly representing the author's intention, even though, in temporal terms, this version is "final." If, for instance, an author deletes passages for the purpose of producing a condensation or simplifies the language to make the work appropriate for younger readers, the special motives in each case prevent the resulting revisions from being definitive. The revised version, in such cases, does not represent a refinement of the work as previously "completed" but a new work conceived for different purposes;

if the new version has merit, it is as an independent work to be edited separately. This is not to deny that the author might make in the process some revisions which an editor would adopt as emendations in his copy-text, but in order to qualify for adoption they would have to be revisions unconnected with the aim of condensation or simplification.[47] In other words, two types of revision must be distinguished: that which aims at altering the purpose, direction, or character of a work, thus attempting to make a different sort of work out of it; and that which aims at intensifying, refining, or improving the work as then conceived (whether or not it succeeds in doing so), thus altering the work in degree but not in kind. If one may think of a work in terms of a spatial metaphor, the first might be labeled "vertical revision," because it moves the work to a different plane, and the second "horizontal revision," because it involves alterations within the same plane. Both produce local changes in active intention; but revisions of the first type appear to be in fulfillment of an altered programmatic intention or to reflect an altered active intention in the work as a whole, whereas those of the second do not.

A similar situation occurs when an author makes revisions, not because he wishes to, but because he is asked or compelled to. Herman Melville, after the publication of Typee (1846), was asked by his American publisher, Wiley & Putnam, to soften his criticism of the missionaries in the South Seas for a revised edition, and in July 1846 he complied by deleting about thirty-six pages of material and revising other passages. These changes alter the tone of the book and are not in keeping with the spirit of the original version. There is no question that Melville is responsible for the changes, and in this sense they are "final"; but they represent not so much his intention as his acquiescence. Under these circumstances, an editor is justified in rejecting the revisions and adopting the original readings as best reflecting the author's "final intention"; in fact, to accept the readings which are final in chronological terms would distort that intention. But again the two types of revision must be separated, for Melville made some revisions in July 1846 which had no connection with the expurgation of political, religious, and sexual references—and these an editor would

adopt.[48] In other words, the "vertical" revisions are rejected, and the "horizontal" revisions are accepted.[49] Just as accidental and substantive variants are, in Greg's rationale, to be treated separately, so, too, known authorial revisions must be divided into categories for editorial decision according to the motives or conceptions they reflect.

A further related problem—the weight to be attached to an author's statement about his revisions—can also be illustrated by the Typee case. After removing the passages on the missionaries from the American edition, Melville wrote to John Murray, his English publisher, "Such passages are altogether foreign to the adventure, & altho' they may possess a temporary interest now, to some, yet so far as the wide & permanent popularity of the work is conserned [sic], their exclusion will certainly be beneficial." One could argue that Melville is simply making the best of the situation, that he is rationalizing the changes and trying to convince himself that they are for the better; on the other side, one could say that here is a strong statement from the author about his "intention" and that the author's wishes, so stated, must be respected. However, in the same way that an author may make revisions which do not reflect his ultimate wishes about his work, he may also make statements which, for various reasons, are less than completely candid. In the end, one cannot automatically accept such statements at face value; as in any historical research, statements can only be interpreted by placing them in their context, by reconstructing as fully as possible the course of events which led up to them. The publisher, in the case of Typee, and not the author, initiated the revisions, and there is no evidence, internal or external, to suggest that they are the kinds of changes Melville would have made without pressure from someone else; even his statement implies that the revised work is in a sense a different work, stemming from a different set of programmatic intentions—aimed at producing a permanently popular work, not dated by discussions of current issues. After these considerations, an editor need not feel that Melville's statement makes the case for rejecting the expurgations any less strong.[50] Such statements

by authors should always be carefully evaluated, like any other evidence, but they cannot be binding on an editor. Only the circumstances of each case can dictate the weight to be accorded to these statements, just as the author's actual revisions cannot be indiscriminately adopted without reference to the entire historical situation surrounding them.

This treatment of author's statements has certain further implications. The essential issue, stated baldly, is whether an editor can presume to reverse an author's decision. Even if Melville did not want to revise Typee, the fact remains that he did so and even asserted decisively that the result was an improvement. Is it not the author's prerogative to determine the ultimate form of his work? Suppose that Melville meant what he said and that, even though he would not have made the revisions without external influence, he was sincerely convinced that he had done the right thing. Most editors would disagree with him, but they would also say that it is not an editor's place to determine what the author should have done. If the author has a lapse in taste, the argument goes, that lapse is a historical fact which scholarly research cannot undertake to repair. There is no answer to this argument, of course, so long as the revision was definitely an attempt to improve the work in terms of its original conception (horizontal revision). But when the revision shifts that conception and thereby produces a different work (vertical revision), the editor may only confuse matters by presenting the revised version as the basic text: if he finds the original version a more faithful representation of the author's vision, he is not abdicating his scholarly responsibility in favor of an undisciplined subjectivity if he edits that version on its own terms as a separate work (and goes on to include the variant readings of the revised edition in notes). It is one thing for an editor to impose his taste upon an author's work by choosing among variant readings solely on the basis of their appeal to him; it is quite another for him to put that taste to the service of historical understanding by allowing it to guide him in distinguishing among the levels of authorial revision and discriminating among the various artistic conceptions they represent.

The most familiar situation in which more than one "final" intention can be said to exist occurs when an author, at a later stage in his career, extensively revises a work completed years before—not because

he is compelled to, nor because he wants to condense it, expand it, or adjust it to a different audience, but because he feels he can improve it artistically. The classic case of such revision is the New York Edition (1907-09) of Henry James. It seems to be generally agreed that an attempt to record in textual notes the variant readings between the original and revised versions of the novels and stories included in that edition would be of questionable utility, since the revisions are so pervasive that they create substantially new works. Both versions of a given work deserve to be read in their own right, and an essay generalizing upon and categorizing the differences between them may be more useful than a list of variants appended to one of the texts. Many essays of this kind have appeared, and a fairly recent one, on "Pandora," sums up the situation: "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."[51] The revised version, because it is essentially "different," manifests a "final intention" which does not supersede the "final intention" of the earlier version. Merely because the revision came at the end of a long career, when James's artistry and insight were presumably more mature, it cannot invalidate the intrinsic merits of the original version. The two are discrete works.

If this point of view has been readily accepted in extreme cases of revision, it has scarcely been considered at all in instances of slight revision. But why should the quantity of alterations affect one's theoretical position? If one treats a heavily revised text as an independent work simply because the difficulties of handling the variants in any other way are overwhelming and then edits a less heavily revised work as a single text with notes because it is possible to do so, the theoretical basis of the whole operation is questionable. The idea that a revised version can be considered a separate work is sometimes said to rest on the concept of organic form—the view that form and content in a work of art are so integrated that any alteration produces a new entity. Of course, it is not necessary to adduce this concept in order to make the point: changing a word in any utterance results technically in a different utterance. Although the change of one word in a novel

makes less practical difference than the change of one word in a brief lyric poem, strictly speaking each version (both of the novel and of the poem) is a "separate work." Maintaining this position would not quite put an end to all scholarly editing, because editors would still have the task of detecting nonauthorial readings (emendations of publishers' readers, compositors' errors, and the like) and purifying the text of them;[52] but they could not choose among authorial variants, for they would have to consider each group of them, for each successive impression or edition, as resulting in a new work to be edited separately.[53] Clearly such a situation would be intolerable from a practical point of view; in the majority of instances editorial choice among authorial variants does not deprive readers of the opportunity for reconstructing other forms of the text on the basis of the material presented in the apparatus, and a list of variants has the positive advantage of drawing together the evidence from various versions into a form where it is conveniently comparable.

If, in practice, editors are not going to regard each version as necessarily a separate work, then some rationale is required for distinguishing those instances of revision which are to be edited as separate works from those which are not. A quantitative dividing line is not logical: it would be impossible to set up a particular number of revisions, or words involved in revisions, as the test for defining a separate work in this sense.[54] What is more meaningful than the extent of the revisions is their nature. One author might make 3000 changes in his selection of adjectives and adverbs, for instance—and perhaps improve his book stylistically—without altering his original conception of the work at all; another might make only ten revisions in key passages and change the whole direction of the book. Whether or not two versions of a book are treated by an editor as independent works should depend on a qualitative, not quantitative, distinction. If revisions do not spring from the same conception of an organic whole as the original version manifested (what I have called vertical revisions), then they produce a new work, even though the actual number of new readings is small; if revisions are attempts to develop and improve the original conception (what I have called horizontal revisions), then they do not produce a separate work for practical purposes, regardless of the number of changes involved.[55] Generally, large numbers of alterations do follow from a changed conception or programmatic intention, but the point is that there is no necessary connection between the two.

In making decisions about authorial intention, an editor may be inclined to take into account a related factor, the timing of the changes. When an author, late in his life, makes revisions in an early work, one could argue that the result will almost surely constitute an effectively different work, since it is unlikely that the author will have the same conception of his work in mind as he had during the process of its original composition. James's revisions are a case in point, but the argument can be applied to other instances in which neither the extent of the changes nor the shift in intent is so pronounced. When

Arthur Stedman edited Typee in 1892, he claimed to have made alterations "by written direction of the author" (who died in 1891). The only presently known evidence of any authorial direction is a note in Mrs. Melville's hand listing four changes which her husband requested.[56] Even assuming that this note accurately represents Melville's final wishes, how much weight is to be given to a few isolated changes suggested nearly fifty years after the original composition of the work? Two of the changes represent the same kind of expurgation which Melville was required to make for the earlier revised edition and are not consistent with the spirit of the work. These revisions are different from James's not merely in quantity but in the fact that they are not part of a sustained and coherent reshaping of an early work. Instead, they are simply instances of sporadic tinkering; such tinkering, when performed during or soon after the composition of a work, can be expected to fit the general tone and spirit of the whole, but when it occurs much later the results may well seem out of place. A systematic job of revision, even if it does not result in many changes, may have a coherence of its own, but isolated changes frequently clash with the larger context. Nevertheless, it is obviously possible for authors to make consistent sporadic revisions late in life, and the timing of revisions is therefore not in itself the key. Just as a quantitative measure of revision will not serve to distinguish what versions are to be edited as separate works, so a time limit is similarly unrealistic: one cannot say that all revisions made within a week, or a month, or a year of the original composition are to be accepted as part of the same conception, while those made after that time either result in different works or represent random thoughts not consistent with any coherent plan. What is important, once again, is the nature of the changes, and no mechanical rule—about their extent or their timing—can produce meaningful distinctions among them with respect to underlying conceptions or motives.

The role which these considerations play in editing and the critical nature of the decisions they imply are well illustrated in Bowers's edition of Stephen Crane's Maggie.[57] Crane's book was first printed privately in 1893; three years later, in order to secure publication by D. Appleton & Co., he agreed to make revisions, particularly the elimination of profanity. But, as Bowers points out, Crane's alterations were not limited to bowdlerizing: "It is clear from many examples

that he took the opportunity to make stylistic revisions as well as literary improvements" (p. lxviii). As in the case of Typee, an editor will reject the enforced expurgations and will accept the stylistic revisions made at the same time. But Maggie offers in addition a difficult intermediate category: the removal of various sordid details, culminating in the cancellation of a 96-word paragraph describing a "huge fat man," which had appeared in the 1893 edition at a strategic point, just before Maggie's death at the end of Chapter 17. The first critical question is obviously to decide whether these alterations were among those which Crane made under duress or whether he made them independently, judging them to be artistic improvements. Answering that question, as Bowers recognizes, involves literary judgment, and he provides a long interpretive discussion (pp. lxxvii-xci) of the implications of the removal of that paragraph, concluding with the view that Crane did delete it for artistic reasons. Once that decision is made, there is a second critical question to be faced: does this revision (and the scattered lesser ones similar to it) produce an essentially different work? Bowers clearly states the possibility: He then concludes that "Maggie does not bear comparison with these examples," arguing that Crane "was operating from a strong literary conviction about the integrity of a text once written and published" (p. xcv). It is possible, then, by incorporating the 1896 revisions which Crane "made for his own purposes and satisfaction" (p. xcvii), to produce a single "'ideal' text of Maggie as a literary fact, not a limited 'ideal' text either of the 1893 or of the 1896 edition" (p. xcv). Obviously this conclusion is reached through critical analysis, and another editor might analyze the situation differently and come to the opposing view—that there are two distinct Maggies which it would be improper to merge.[58] No incontrovertible answer is to be expected to a question like this, dependent on judgment; but every editor in his own work must recognize that the question exists and reach an answer to it.[59]

With some authors the possibility of multiple "final" intentions is further intensified. Instead of making one systematic revision of a work at some point later in life, they revise their work continually throughout their careers. An extreme example of this method, referred to by Bowers in the passage quoted above, is Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which was extensively revised eight times between 1855 and 1892. When an author works in this way, successive editions constitute a printed record of a developing mind. The fact that Whitman said of his final "deathbed" edition (1891-92) that any future edition should be "a copy and facsimile, indeed, of the text of these . . . pages" does not mean that critics and scholars must reject all earlier editions as works in their own right.[60] Even if Whitman came to think of the earlier editions as preliminary drafts for his final version, each of those editions was published and at the time of its publication represented a final version that he was willing to present to the public and thus his final intention as of that moment.[61] If one decides that the revisions at each stage are the kind which spring from an altered conception of the whole, one can argue that each edition of Leaves is a separate work with its own final intention. (The situation would differ from that of Henry James only in the greater number of separate works, resulting from the greater number of stages of revision.) In that case, Whitman's last text is not—as an intended work—any more "final" than his earlier texts; it merely comes later. To one taking this position, Whitman's own judgment should of course be no embarrassment; it is only a critical pronouncement about his work, not an element within the work.

These issues are raised in an acute form in connection with the poetry of W. H. Auden. Joseph Warren Beach, in The Making of the Auden Canon (1957), describes in great detail the way in which Auden continually omitted or revised passages to bring his poems into conformity with his current ideological preoccupations. In 1945, for example, he gave the poems from "In Time of War," in Beach's words, "a more distinctively religious cast than they had when first written in 1938 and published in 1939" (p. 10). Throughout his career, according to Beach, Auden displayed a faculty for "domesticating, within the frame of mind that at any moment possesses him, work conceived in some quite different frame of mind" (p. 15). In preparing a collected edition, he not only revised poems to make them "reasonably acceptable to him at a time when he was concerned that his work should be as edifying spiritually as it was imaginatively arresting" (p. 242); he also arranged the poems in alphabetical order so that their connections with previous volumes or particular stages in his career would be obscured. The situation is reminiscent of Whitman's preparation of an authorized final edition, but in Auden's case the emphasis is more clearly on ideological content than on artistic form. As with Whitman, Auden's final text can be regarded as only another text, reflecting a different conception of his work.

Beach's analysis presents, in effect, the apparatus for a critical edition in essay form—a method which, for this kind of author, is perhaps more useful than a list of variant readings, since such a list tends to suggest that the versions compared are essentially the same work. At the end of his book Beach takes up—in one of the few discussions of the subject in print—some of the editorial implications of multiple authorial intention. One can concur with his feeling of dissatisfaction about Auden's collected text and yet find a curious logic in his conclusion:

In these comments Beach is explaining what he wishes Auden had done but in the process confuses the roles of author and scholarly editor. The particular revision and arrangement which Auden decided upon for his collected poems represent, in themselves, one of the "successive periods" in the "course of an interesting mind." The fact that he did not arrange his poems in chronological order or leave them unaltered does not prevent the editor from making the earlier texts available. Many of Auden's decisions may not please an editor, but, whatever they are, they constitute the only material the editor has to work with. One can criticize an author's lapses, but one cannot expect him to treat his own work as if he were a scholarly editor.

Pursuing the nature of Auden's "identity," Beach sensibly asks, "And how . . . can we question the right of an author to be his own judge as to the intent of a piece of writing, or to make it over so as to give it a new direction?" (p. 251). This, after all, is the central issue. But the answer again proves troublesome: "What I have suggested is that such a making over of a work of literary art is not to be accomplished by cutting out a few offensive passages, or by merely hanging the work in a different gallery in different company; and that it is vain to suppose that now it means something essentially different from what it did." In other words, as he goes on to say, a work of art should have "a wholeness, or integrality, that underlies all the diverse and even conflicting elements" (p. 253). It is precisely because of its "integrality," however, that any adjustments made in a work of art may turn it into a different, if no less integral, work. To say that an author's last version of a work means the same thing as his earliest is to abandon all criticism; but to find that a late version fails to supersede an early one is not to deny the author's right to do with his work as he pleases. In the end, whenever there are authorial revisions, an editor is not fulfilling his responsibility to the work of literature if he does not assess the nature of those revisions, in order to determine whether he is really dealing with only a single work.

Before glancing at the argument that this approach to editing gives the editor too much freedom to be eclectic, let us turn to the second major category in which "final intention" is problematical—those instances in which there is literally no final intention, either because the author never prepared his manuscript for publication or because he wavered in his revisions for successive printings.[62] Perhaps the most

common instances of this situation occur in the editing of letters. Although letters, generally full of abbreviations and elliptical remarks, can be described as manuscripts not prepared for publication, they have one peculiar feature: they were not (in most cases) intended for publication. Whatever form the manuscript is in, therefore, if the letter was sent, represents "final intention"; the posting of a letter is equivalent to the publication of a literary work, for each activity serves as the means by which a particular kind of communication is directed to its audience. When letters are published, do they automatically become a different genre, subject to different conventions, or is their intention distorted if they are not reproduced exactly as they arrived in the recipient's hands? If the author prepares his own letters for publication, he will almost certainly alter them (at least with respect to accidentals, but possibly also to substantives), and he will probably expect them to be subjected to the same processes of copy-editing and house-styling as any other work. But when letters are published posthumously, does the fact that the author would have expected them to be adjusted to conform with the conventions of published writing justify an editor's attempt to perform those adjustments? Clearly it does not, because, as we have seen, what an author expects is different from what he actively intends. In any case, an editor cannot possibly put himself in the frame of mind of a publisher's house-stylist of some previous period, and the changes he would introduce, however knowledgeable he may be, could carry no authority. Additionally, the abbreviations and other unconventional features of a letter may be its most revealing characteristics; if they are removed or normalized, the substance of the letter and the nuances conveyed to the recipient may be obscured, if not substantially altered. Naturally, some adjustments are inevitable, since complete fidelity to the original would mean photographic reproduction on the same quality of paper. But alterations—even in such matters as the misspelling of words—should be made with extreme caution if the effect of a letter as a private document is to be retained. This procedure comes closer to the author's intention, as revealed in the finished text of each letter, than following any directions the author may have pronounced when he was thinking of his letters more as literary property than as private expression.[63]

A similar situation exists in connection with journals, notebooks, and other personal papers, except that for these classes of material

there is not even that degree of finality accorded to letters by the act of posting. If the writer made no final selection among alternative words or phrases, an editor has no basis—nor justification—for doing so; to prepare a "clear text" which reads smoothly is to change the essential nature of the document. Such works, though they may turn out to be literature, form a special genre in which the necessity for final choice (forced upon an author in the case of published works by the act of publication) does not apply. From a practical point of view, some of these works gain little from the preservation of their formal texture, and it may be that the group of readers who will be turning to a particular document may find the loss of such fidelity a price worth paying for a conveniently readable text. The nature of the document and the uses to which it may be put will in each instance determine the degree of compromise which can be tolerated. In some cases a full transcription may be accompanied by a separate "reading text."[64] But the theoretical point remains: altering private papers to conform to conventional standards of publication makes different works of them and thus is bound to distort their meaning.

When writers leave unfinished, or unprepared for publication, literary works of other genres—those which are normally circulated in published form—the problem is somewhat different. In these cases the rejected readings, false starts, and uncanceled variants are of interest in showing the writer's manner of working and stylistic development, just as they are when found in the surviving manuscripts of a published work; but they do not reflect the essential nature of the work itself, as they do in a letter or a journal. An editor who completes the author's job by preparing such works for conventional publication (correcting errors, choosing among uncanceled variants, and the like) is not obscuring the final effect or meaning of the work but rather clarifying it. When a poem, left in manuscript, is posthumously published in the form of an exact transcript, it is being treated like a historical

document; when it is published in a clear reading text, it is being treated like a work of literary art. Both forms may have their uses, but only the second can represent (or attempt to represent) the author's intention.[65]

The poems of Emily Dickinson present a special situation: they are clearly poems (not journal entries or letters), but they were not intended for publication. They contain both eccentric punctuation (often impossible to reproduce in type) and uncanceled alternative readings. If an editor decides to publish as exact transcriptions as possible of these poems (or even photographs of the manuscripts), he is doing what normally is most sensible for works not intended for publication. But in this case he would be doing less than full justice to the material, which belongs to a genre conventionally circulated in some kind of published form and with decisions among alternative readings already made. The fact that Emily Dickinson did not "intend" publication does not alter the basic nature of the material and automatically convert into notebook jottings what would have been called poetry if published. Her distrust of publication does not obligate an editor to leave her poems unpublished (or to edit them as if they were private papers) any more than an author's "deathbed" edition obligates an editor to regard previous editions as superseded. In either case the work has an existence distinct from the wishes (expressed or implied) of its creator, and "intention" regarding publication is different from the active intention embodied in the work. Whether or not Emily Dickinson's manuscripts were specifically "intended" for publication is really beside the point; the important matter is that they are manuscripts of poems not prepared for publication. Although an editor will rightly feel an obligation to present as fully as possible the evidence available in those manuscripts (as documents in the history of American literature), he should feel equally obliged to make decisions among the author's alternative readings and produce a clear text of the poems (as literature).[66] An editor who

thus "completes" unfinished poems is not being presumptuous but is simply facing his responsibility. One editor's choice among alternatives may of course differ from another's, but the excellence of any critical edition—whether based on unprepared manuscripts or not—is directly related to the critical powers of its editor.