Rereading The American: A Century Since

Rereading The American: A Century Since by James W. Tuttleton, New York University Very late In life, in 1913, Henry James gave Stark Young two lists of his "advanced" novels; they constituted the "beef and potatoes" of his art, while the tales were the delectable "little tarts." At the head of the more advanced second list was The American, followed by The Tragic Muse, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. James of course intended Young to read The Amer i can in the much-revised New York edition; otherwise, he remarked, Young would forfeit "half, or much more than half, my confidence." Clearly James thought highly of his novel of the American in Paris. Yet Robert Herrick, the novelist who visited James in 1907, while the New York Edition was in preparation, remonstrated with the Master about his "re-touching" of The American. His ground for the protest was "the respect one owed to one's past, living or buried, and the impossibility of this sort of resurrection by breathing the breath of one's present life into what for good or ill had been done and finished under another inspiration, as a different if inferior person."! James, however, was absolutely adamant about the Importance of his revisions. He told Herrlck: "I shouldn't have planned the edition at all unless I had felt close rev lslon--wherever seeming called foi—to be an indispensable part of it. I do every justice to your contention, but don't think me reckless or purblind If I say that I hold myself really right and you really wrong." His "duty to his older creations," according to Herrick, called for "nothing less than a complete 're-writlng' of these earlier and primitively simple efforts in the later mannei—the manner of the amanuensis and the 'overtreatment'!"2 The point of this contention between the two novelists has the highest significance for literary criticism. Which is the preferable form of the novel, The American as James wrote it In 1875-76, or as he revised it in 1907? (There has been little discussion, in a century of criticism, over whether it is necessary to choose between them.) Unquestionably some of James's critics have preferred the later version of the book, or at least deferred to James's rigorous insistence. Royal A. Gettmann has argued that "It is wrong ... to assume that James the Reviser mercilessly manhandled the works of James the First."3 Commending the revisions as "a moral act of the highest kind," lsadore Traschen has praised the extent to which the retouching "enlarged on character and theme through the use of recurrent images; Images In the original were transformed Into emphatic symbols." And he has praised the extent to which the revisions introduced into the novel the "poetic mode" of the major phase.4 Such defenses of the Master's revisions have not always been widely accepted. In my judgment, the doubtful retouchings constitute a distinctive irritant to readers who are familiar with both texts. While James, as he put it in the Preface to Roderick Hudson, "'nowhere scrupled to re-write a sentence or a passage on judging It susceptible of a better turn,'" a number of the "better turns" in The American seem worthy of calling into question. The alteration of Newman's "clean shaved" cheek to "he spoke, as to cheek and chin, of the matutinal steel" is, in my view, a dubious felicity. The bluntly 1. Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956), p. 137; Robert Herrick, "A Visit to Henry James," The Yale Review, 12 (1923), 734. 2. Selected Letters of Henry James, p. 190; Herrick, p. 732. 3. Royal A. Gettmann, "Henry James's Revision of The American," American Literature, 16 (1945), 279-95. This essay, as well as several other essays to be mentioned, is reprinted in Henry James's The American, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). Cf. p. 476. Hereafter, citations from such reprinted essays wiI I be indicated by the abbreviation HJTA. 4. lsadore Traschen, "Henry James and the Art of Revision," Philological Quarterly, 35 (1956...