About Rewriting One’s Books

Approaching age forty, appraising his previously published work, poet W. H. Auden saw rubbish; good ideas poorly realized; poems he had “nothing against except their lack of importance” (most of his work, he thought); and the few “for which he [was] honestly grateful.”

Subsequently, in his fifties, Auden rejected some published poems “because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring.” He also revised other published poems, not “former thoughts or feelings” but “the language in which they were first expressed when, on further consideration, it seemed to me inaccurate, lifeless, prolix, or painful to the ear.” And, he wrote, “On revisions as a matter of principle, I agree with Valery: ‘A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.’ ”

Like Auden or Robert Lowell, W. B. Yeats was an editor and reviser of his own published work: “Whenever I remake a song,” Yeats famously wrote, “it is myself that I remake.”

Of contemporary troubadours, Bob Dylan, still touring as he approaches eighty, has for years continued to revise / deconstruct / alter his songs in performance. “He not busy being born is busy dying,” Dylan wrote when young.

Prose authors seldom return to published work with the intention of improving it. However, John Fowles, author of The Magus (1965), felt that, despite the fame the book brought him, it “remained essentially where a tyro taught himself to write novels.” This despite the “endless flux” of the many drafts from which it first emerged. Thirteen years later, Fowles published a revised version. In 1977, Fowles said, “It was the first book I wrote and technically it never satisfied me. I’ve learned more about the tricks of the trade since then. I wanted to put in one or two new scenes and I wanted to clarify one or two things a little bit.”

What Fowles did. What would it compare to? Remarrying a former wife? Exhuming a body?

Not my thing, though in terms of line editing alone I might be merciless. Still, after the years achieving a book, it no longer engaged me except to see it into print. Other projects might then compel; sometimes to my surprise, did. But much as I reappraised the past as writer, I had no impulse to rework published work.

Now, at seventy-five, something else strikes me. Many of the people I knew when young are either gone or much changed, in jeopardy if not diminished. But my books? They have not aged. Not, “Did they age well?” one way or the other, but they have not aged. Stuck in time, yet also—oddly, amazingly— immune from aging. Unless, that is, I choose to—how to say it—bring my books down to Earth. To, by revising, make them... mortal.