James & Revision

BOOK REVIEWS Departmental Ditties and Other Verses; it was printed first in Lahore in 1881. "An English School," published in 1893 in Youth's Companion, was offered as a tribute to the bracing introduction to manhood provided by the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, North Devon, and provides a useful supplementary text as well. It is helpful to be able to consult the jottings in Kipling's diary for the crucial year 1885. All these selections are reprinted here. Moreover, a glossary of Anglo-Indian word and phrases is provided. (These explanations and definitions of words that Kipling assumed an educated Englishman would understand in context seem to lengthen to the crack of doom as the passing years take us farther away from the heyday of Empire; see, for example, the annotations in the recent series of Penguin reprints of Kipling's short stories.) Pinney"s notes, explaining family relationships, duly and tactfully reminding us of what Kipling forgot to include, identifying obscure titles of literary works and names of statesman and minor bureaucrats long forgotten, and historical events that loomed large in Kipling's memory, represent countless hours of heroic effort (over 62 pages). Perhaps, as Pinney believes and has stated in other publications, the time# for a Kipling revival remains far off in the future. It may never come. Even so, the interest of scholars and critics, and of various kinds of specialists in the Transitional period, remains keen, and for them a careful reading of almost anything Kipling wrote will prove rewarding. Something of'Myself"is best appreciated by someone who already knows a good deal about Kipling, and this edition will tell him a great deal more. It is, in fact, definitive. Harold Orel _________________________ University of Kansas James & Revision Philip Home. Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition. New York: Clarendon Press, 1990. xii + 373 pp. $89.00 The Complete PL·ys of Henry James. Leon Edel, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.846 pp. $45.00 ONE OF THE MORE obvious points to be made about Henry James and Revision is that it issues from long devotion, hard work, fresh perception , and exceptionally strict attention to detail. The great speculative emperors of our "culture of criticism" are not much in evidence here, the industrious author having written, it would seem, from some great good place where criticism is faithful explication and critics are not yet 215 ELT : VOLUME 35:2 1992 maddened by our current boxful of plagues. The author shows no compulsion to talk about the thing everyone else is talking about, or to peer behind James's veils, screens, and ambiguities (let alone tear the doors from his jambs), and he even appears content to labor within his discipline (rather like Roderick Hudson's Sam Singleton), untroubled by the avalanche of corrosive crossdisciplinary work, relentlessly intervening work. Yet Philip Home's book, far from being easy reading, is to be absorbed slowly and reflectively. Home's basic concern, from which he explores in many directions, is James's revision of his earlier work for the New York Edition (hereafter NYE). He deals with James's massive published output with unusual thoroughness and discrimination and makes good use of the Scribner archive at Princeton and the correspondence (at Yale) between James and his agent. The thesis is that with rare exceptions the NYE revisions are an improvement over the original passages. The great virtue of the study is the acuteness with which it notes and expresses the varying nuances of James's diction, syntax, tone. I would guess that many readers who prefer the earlier versions of the fiction will find themselves challenged by Home's demonstrations. Certainly, his argument that a continuing quest for thoroughness of expression guided James's mature artistry seems unexceptionable. What is said of Dencombe in "The Middle Years" was true for his creator: "the last thing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself." (Home's typically perceptive comment: "it is an ironic idiom that redeems 'the last thing . . . was a form final.. .' from tautology.") James defended his revisions for the NYE by comparing them to the varnish that supposedly brought out...