A Turn in the Formation of James's New York Edition: Criticism, the Historical Record, and the Siting of The Awkward Age

In the monumental and controversial array that is James’s New York Edition, the position of The Awkward Age commands scrutiny, for it falls at a point at once prominent and problematic. The location of the novel within this series aligning selected fictions across twenty-four volumes has struck some as itself an awkward anomaly, even perversity, and as a token of the hazards that obstruct every attempt to account for the arrangement of the collection.

My essay studies a slice of the historical record on the forming of The Novels and Tales of Henry James and will focus on one stretch of the series that the writer unquestionably ordered in his original copy. In calling notice to certain of James’s choices not ordinarily visible (documented largely in unpublished sources), I aim primarily to ensure considerations of the timing and of the full import of these decisions positioning The Awkward Age. Its location resulted from his unforced decision to diverge from an initial outline of how he would deploy fictions in a selective gathering. At a specific time he shifted the 1899 novel to its present place. Yet this notable departure incorporated, from his previous sketch, other basic concepts for the limited collection he first proposed to Scribner’s. The change amounted, I claim, to a decisive turn in James’s ordering of the “collective-selective” “array” (as he persistently termed the New York Edition). ¹ The altered deployment entailed his creation of sequences effecting new and more meaningful juxtapositions. James’s new siting of the one novel together with his subsequent, exactly dated, and closely related decisions signify, I propose, an outstanding turn with which he instituted a transformed conception for the overall shape of his array.

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Like other productions of James’s “Fourth Phase,” the New York Edition always has provoked sharp interrogations of the writer’s revisionary “re-seeing” stance, and current questions engage the central “debates about canonicity, intentionality, authority, intertextuality, and literary value” (McWhirter 137). A foremost concern, too, is to situate the edition in its full complement of biographical, historical, and social contexts. Moreover, the past decade has seen a marked expansion of our information on the process by which the edition formed, and more of this factual data has been brought into wider discussion, usually in connection with contending views of the organization and significance of the collection. While such appraisals have long been at odds, lately criticism has concentrated on assessing The Novels and Tales of Henry James as a project that was simultaneously a commercial venture and James’s “literary self-representation.” Our critical dialogue has been inquiring (as McWhirter’s 1991 essay exemplifies) whether this edition displays James’s assertion of artistic “mastery” exclusively or his skepticism about such claims as well; if both attitudes are manifest, how equally and how consciously or deliberately?

The expansion of evidence in the past decade on how the edition took shape has come partly through tapping a greater range of the information already on record and now shown to be pertinent in new ways, e.g. the circumstances of the publishing industries for American and English markets, details of James’s daily personal life and working routines, and aspects of his various social and professional commitments. Recognized as especially relevant are facts that help to pinpoint the temporal relations between stages of his labor on The Novels and Tales of Henry James and on other writing projects, as Hershel Parker has very recently reemphasized. ² In addition, facts concerning the genesis of particular specifications for the edition have become somewhat better known as scholars have quoted more specifics from unpublished archival documents, particularly from the correspondence of the Scribner firm and of James’s agent, J. B. Pinker. Their studies have provided more ample demonstration of the complicated negotiations leading to the joint decisions by writer and publisher (in contract and less formally) that specified a 23-volume selective gathering in luxury format. ³ In addition, crucial new and previously unknown information about...