The Talented Ripley Hitchcock

It is sad to admit that several of my very best modest proposals for the period of American literary realism fell flat. I am most disappointed that no one rushed to follow up my suggestion that definitions of American naturalism current in my time were all invalid insofar as they were derived from study of American novels published between around 1890 and 1920. Such a definition could be valid for defining editorial tastes but would say nothing of what the novelists were trying to say, since all or almost all the greatest works published during that time were known to the mid-twentieth century critics constructing the definitions only in more or less seriously maimed texts heavily altered by editors with a sharp eye to what could be published and what would be popular. That made me saddest, but I have to confess that I am more than a little dashed to see that in American Literary Realism Donald Pizer, having defended all these years what Ripley Hitchcock did to The Red Badge of Courage, in the joint-article with Robert M. Dowling is still looking for aesthetic grounds for what Crane did to poor Maggie Johnson and the fat man when all the time it was Hitchcock who did it.¹

I hope that neither I nor my student Henry Binder (now dead, all too unfairly) ever said that Hitchcock was a bad editor, although I may have hinted at doubts about his character. What I argued first, and then what Binder demonstrated in the classic article "The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows," was that Hitchcock made the book saleable and popular by removing what Crane called, in another case of expurgating editors, the anarchy—the originality of it, and also the coherence of it.² Brian Higgins and I argued much the same thing about Maggie: just as Hitchcock was concerned not to let Red Badge mean what it had meant in the manuscript, he was concerned not to let Maggie mean what it had meant in the first edition.³ Hitchcock had almost no concern at all with making either book coherent in a new way, just a concern not to let either one mean what they had very clearly meant as Crane wrote them. Hitchcock was not a monster out to destroy masterpieces. He was a practical working editor who was betting that he could make Red Badge not only publishable but popular, especially if he pitched it hard to the veterans of the war, as he did on the "order blank."⁴ The next year he was a practical working editor who was frustrated at just how hard it would be to make Maggie anywhere near as popular as the previous Appleton book by Crane, the subject being distasteful and there being no streetwalkers' guild with purchasing power and eccentric taste to rival the power and taste of Civil War veterans.

In his reprinting of "The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows" in the Norton hardback and the Avon paperback edition of Red Badge, Binder added a section on Hitchcock as "a skillful entrepreneur, more ready than other editors of his time to accept stories that were troublesome or that other houses had rejected and then make them publishable by calling for alterations."⁵ Binder observed that "it is clear that the editor had suggested the excision of some thirty thousand words" from Edward Noyes Westcott's David Harum "in addition to a reordering of sections of the story." The changes Hitchcock "engineered" resulted in the book's becoming "an astonishing success for decades." Binder also cited Hitchcock's insisting on extensive cuts and revisions in Theodore Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt. He concluded that "there is consistency in Hitchcock's calling for cuts in Crane's Maggie, in Westcott's David Harum, and in Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt" as well as in Red Badge and (still later) The Third Violet.⁶

I am sorry to see that in their exchange in ALR on Maggie Dowling and Pizer do not mention my "Getting Used to the 'Original Form' of The Red Badge of Courage."⁷ There...