"That truth should be silent I had almost forgot"--Enobarbus in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, back in Rome after having been too long in Egypt.---------
Melville's PIERRE, Book 4, chapter 5: "Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually curious for nothing."
At the foot of the previous page I had asked: "Was the new upbeat religiosity of the ending designed to appease the Appleton editor, Ripley Hitchcock, who was so soon to wipe the rouge off MAGGIE? Levenson and Bowers refer to other instances in which Crane proved remarkably impressionable to criticism, but they never focus on the degree to which the differences between the final manuscript as first inscribed and the first edition of the book may be due to various outside pressures."
This was the beginning of some years of the most exciting textual-aesthetic explorations of my life, particularly when Henry Binder agreed to take on the job I suggested--that of reconstructing THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE as Crane wrote it, as closely as that could be done.
At the foot of the previous page I had asked:
ReplyDelete"Was the new upbeat religiosity of the ending designed to appease the Appleton editor, Ripley Hitchcock, who was so soon to wipe the rouge off MAGGIE? Levenson and Bowers refer to other instances in which Crane proved remarkably impressionable to criticism, but they never focus on the degree to which the differences between the final manuscript as first inscribed and the first edition of the book may be due to various outside pressures."
This was the beginning of some years of the most exciting textual-aesthetic explorations of my life, particularly when Henry Binder agreed to take on the job I suggested--that of reconstructing THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE as Crane wrote it, as closely as that could be done.