The Editing of American Literature, 1890–1930: Essays and Reviews by Donald Pizer (review)

The reader of this collection is apt to find it more akin to a book than a gathering of related essays. Much like Pizer’s earlier The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (1993), this is a meditation, conducted over decades, and written from the self-confessed position of an “outsider” who believes too strict an adherence to a certain editorial theory can do “damage” to a literary text. The organization of these previously published essays and reviews is straightforward: After two essays on general questions of textual editing and their appropriateness to American, as opposed to Renaissance, texts for which the theory of the eclectic edition and the notion of the copy-text were fashioned, Pizer offers case studies. There is a section on Theodore Dreiser, one on Stephen Crane, and another on focused, practical examples of the textual and literary criticism.

In the first chapter Pizer discerns five ways in which copy-text theory is ill-adapted to the distinctive features of modern American literary texts. Briefly, those ways involve the kinds of manuscript evidence that survive and the writing habits of individual modern writers; the desire for a “pure” literary edition, he adds, is impractical and does not serve the interests of literary criticism very well. Pizer argues for a “textual organicism” in lieu of the scientism that directs much textual criticism, one that devises its own editorial principles for the individual text at hand. In the second chapter, Pizer addresses the problem of self-censorship and posits four tests for believing such censorship did, in fact, occur: How reliable is the external evidence in answering such questions? What can be reasonably inferred about the authorial motives for making revision? Is one version aesthetically “better” than another? Finally, ought the textual editor automatically dismiss a text that has, through generations, acquired a canonical status in favor of a text uncontaminated by self-censorship? Pizer examines the textual and critical history of McTeague, Sister Carrie, and The Red Badge of Courage as case studies in point and concludes with the advice that if there is some doubt about “questions of self-censorship, leave the text alone.”

In the section on Dreiser, in separate essays Pizer describes the textual difficulties in editing any of his novels, partly due to the complicated compositional and prepublication histories of the texts. Then Pizer turns his attention to the Pennsylvania edition of Sister Carrie and finds the textual procedures unsound and, as a result, he argues that the resulting edition should not replace the 1900 edition either as the object of criticism or as part of the American canon. Jennie Gerhardt is described as a “pastiche” text—a mix of changes made by the original publisher (Harper’s), Dreiser himself, and the editor of the Pennsylvania editions. Pizer also takes issue with the Virginia editions of Stephen Crane and argues that those editions are not especially useful to the literary critic, one of the chief objectives of a scholarly edition. Likewise, in his response to Henry Binder’s argument in “The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows” that Crane’s cuts were forced upon him by his editor, Pizer expresses strong skepticism, and in any event the cuts made improved the novel as a whole. The final section is devoted to examples of practical criticism and the text. He takes issue with Hershel Parker’s insistence that Crane was unsympathetic toward Henry Fleming by inspecting the first paragraph of the novel to show the inherent ambivalence toward this character Crane displays from the very beginning. An essay on a passage in Dos Passos’ The Big Money and an essay that tries to answer conclusively whether Maggie in the end committed suicide in Maggie: a Girl of the Streets complete the collection. These essays and reviews are of a piece with Pizer’s other published work: they are informed and informative, rigorously researched, and clearly, even elegantly, expressed.