Generous Mistakes: Incidents of Error in Henry James by Michael Anesko (review)

For more than thirty years Michael Anesko has been writing revelatory books that mine the James archive in order to complicate and clarify our picture of Henry James's relationships to the literary marketplace, to influential friends and colleagues like William Dean Howells, and even to his own posterity. Anesko is currently co-editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James (U of Nebraska P) and a general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, and it's difficult to imagine that there's a scholar working today who possesses a more comprehensive knowledge of what one might call the extended family of James-related archives—not only the archived James manuscripts and his famously voluminous correspondence but also the letters of his friends to one another and the archived records of his agent and publishers.

Anesko's seemingly insatiable appetite for (and Job-ean patience with) archival study is on full display in Generous Mistakes, which examines the editing and publishing process by which errors and inconsistencies made their way into James's novels, as well as the way in which error figures as a theme in two of his masterpieces, The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors. Because he neither attempts nor imagines any particular connection between the chapters focused on the surprisingly significant textual errors and inconsistencies across editions of James's novels and those that analyze the errors in judgment of James's protagonists, the book is best understood as a collection of essays on a topic rather than as a monograph driven by a central argument. This becomes particularly evident in the book's last chapter—which seems merely an add-on, although an enormously intriguing and entertaining one—in which Anesko relates his discovery of a would-be Broadway producer's attempt to bring James's The Ambassadors to the stage as a musical that would surpass My Fair Lady. That such a project would seem from the outset a comically serious error in judgment is the only ostensible rationale for its inclusion.

Because the three chapters focusing on textual errors have little bearing on the two more expressly interpretive chapters, it is not unreasonable to consider them separately. All are clearly written, rigorously documented, and replete with extensive footnotes and tables illustrating representative variations across editions. Although they will be of interest to any James scholar curious about the details of how James's work got done, Anesko seemingly addresses them more particularly to future editors of James's work, reminding them that by "paying meticulous attention to [James's] texts, today's scholarship can make amends for conditions that sometimes prevented him from doing so" (16). The first of these chapters takes aim at the Master's legendary dedication to detail in revising and amending his manuscripts, especially as regards the New York Edition (NYE). Anesko suggests that in their loyalty to the NYE as [End Page E-4] copy-texts for classroom use, the academic community has generally "swallowed . . . the purported logic of Scribner's original advertising hype" and accepted James's own claims for the "absolutely supreme impeccability that such an Edition must have & that the author's eye alone can finally contribute to" (2). The reality, Anesko shows, is that Jamesian impeccability was sometimes less than supreme, even in that vaunted edition, where for example it was a Scribner's typesetter who finally caught a chronological inconsistency in The Portrait of a Lady that had gone unnoticed by James since the 1883 Collective Edition of the novel (3). In another instance, James himself introduced a mistaken pronoun to the NYE that had been printed correctly in all previous editions. Overall, however, Anesko's reconstruction of James's intense revision process for the NYE only raises our estimation of James's dogged attention to detail, especially in light of the numerous practical complications he confronted when it came to duplication and delivery. Not only was James still completing installments...