ONE OF THE REASONS THAT we value art is that it endures time. Whereas its creators and audiences decay and die, art functions as a stable repository of humanity’s most valuable insights and perceptions. Two-hundred-year-old poems or musical scores are as faithful to their creators’ intent as they were at their moments of genesis.
However, such endurance sets up a particular problem for artists, for while they may, in many cases, welcome the faithful preservation of their ideas, they may, on other occasions, grow deeply to regret it. They may wish to move away from a particular stance, only to find that they remain permanently identified with it in the public mind. Whereas most of us can hide old photos and destroy our jottings, artists are fated to have to live alongside the work they have placed in the public realm — even when this work creates an awkward clash with their present aspirations. Art can act like a cloying parent who, in a gathering of adult friends, cannot resist tugging a child back to an earlier incarnation of itself.
Yet there is one little-discussed, and almost taboo, way out of this bind: revision. Artists (particularly if they are writers) have the option to pull a creation back into the workshop, amend and update it, and return it to the public realm, rather as one might remodel a piece of technology. It is a particularly romantic myth that leads us to suppose that artists could never improve what they previously delivered to the world. If computer companies are allowed to amend their products every few years, is it not plausible that artists too should, through time, grow more lucid about their work and should hence infuse it with their latest, and most mature insights? The results of revision can be spectacularly good. Take Montaigne’s Essays. When it was first published in 1580, it came in two volumes, whose quality would not have assured it a place in literary history. It was devoid of much of the charm and digression for which Montaigne is now revered. So it was fortunate that Montaigne published a second, much-expanded, personal, wise and funny edition in 1588. He then left the book alone, went on a long journey around Europe, became the mayor of Bordeaux for two terms — and in the course of this break from his desk, discovered that he could improve his book yet further. So he produced a new set of emendations and insertions, published in a third edition after his death in 1592. He admitted candidly that he would continue to make revisions “without ceasing as long as the world has ink and paper”.
But the results are not always so happy. Henry James revised all his works for a collected New York Edition of 1908, published by Scribner in America and Macmillan in England. The changes were extensive. The Spoils of Poynton alone went through 1,500 changes. The New York Edition is generally regarded by scholars to have introduced a more elaborate, layered, elegant style, that could also be faulted for obscurity and tedium. What we think of as quintessentially Jamesian sentences are really the product of the later James. Some editors, notably those behind the Oxford Classics edition of The Awkward Age, now stick to earlier versions.
There are signs that even James regretted his changes. The writer Compton Mackenzie recalled that James telling him: “I wasted months of labour upon the thankless, the sterile, the preposterous, the monstrous task of revision. There is not an hour of such labour that I have not regretted since.” A contemporary reviewer of the New York Edition delivered the most withering verdict of all: “Let Mr James respect the classics, even from his own pen.”
The pleasures and pitfalls of revision were much on my mind a few months ago, when the publisher of my first book, Essays in Love, offered to put a new cover on it — and then casually wondered whether there was anything I might want to change on the inside. I had written the book at the age of 22, at the height of romantic agony and confusion. I was now 35, somewhat more stable, with a wife and a child. Was there anything that the older self might teach the younger? It would been miraculous if there hadn’t been. Rereading my book, I was struck by certain grammatical faults as well as inelegant turns of phrase. I could see sentences crying out to be emended and others to be added. I felt the wisdom of the remark: “A work is never finished, it is only ever abandoned.” My abandoned book deserved a small helping hand. I therefore spent a month reworking the novel, a task even more arduous than writing it, for I was aware of a dual need: that of improving the book, but also of not ruining what was already there. I sensed a danger of making the work too slick — when it was precisely the inexperience and youthfulness of the writer that had lent it some of its interest.
As I completed my revisions, I was surprised to find that it was shorter than the original, like the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, which — in the directors’ cut — ends up ten minutes shorter than the cinema version.
Though very few writers revise their work directly, it is perhaps true that all writers are involved in revising themselves, for they do so whenever they publish new work. A new book is always an attempt to atone for the faults of a previous one; despite the merits of the occasional rewrite, the best way to revise any work of art may just be to move on and create something new.
I might add, that though happy with the changes I made inside, perhaps the greatest alteration has been to the cover of the book. As an unknown first-time writer, I’d had no say in the appearance of my cover. Now my publisher was keen to solicit my ideas and so I suggested taking a photograph of a woman reading a book in a library, lost in thought. He agreed and set about looking for a suitable model. But when none materialised, I suggested that we use my wife — and he agreed. It feels peculiar, but eminently right, that a book about love produced when I was 22 should have ended up sporting on the cover a woman whom I came to know only many years later, and yet who fulfils many of the unformed romantic aspirations that were present when I wrote it.
