Greg W. Zacharias

The Complexion of Ever so Long Ago

One of James’s best known and perhaps most important ghost stories, his “dream of the Louvre,” comes not from a published tale or novel but first from his most private writing (his notebooks) and then from the private-gone-public autobiographical volume A Small Boy and Others. The migration of the story from James’s private conversation with himself in the notebook entry to the publication of his memoir is significant because it serves as an emblem of how the ghostly functions in James as a conversion from the very private to the very public. In addition, there seems to be something fundamentally therapeutic for James in the conversion process that signals James’s conversation with his past and provides him with a way to understand that experience.

Editing the Complete Letters of Henry James

In the late 1980s and early 1990s scholars began to enjoy more access than ever before to Henry James’s letters.1 As a result, two significant principles about Henry James’s letters became clear: 1) that about 75 percent of James’s nearly 10,500 extant letters had not been published; and 2) that the editors of the published letters, as a result of their editing methods, routinely omitted two classes of information from the original letters. In fact, the first principle was a consequence of the second. The first class of omitted information consists of whole letters and thus the information about James’s life contained within them.2 The second class includes meaningful details of James’s style and language that were present as James drafted his own letters but were omitted from the edited letter texts as a result of the editorial method itself. Among these details are the material or graphic features of the letter artifacts that reveal some of James’s habits as a writer and thinker as he wrote his letters. Thus we have designed The Complete Letters of Henry James to overcome these omissions. Two concepts were most important in our design. First, we included the complete sweep of James’s extant letters. Second, we used plain-text editing to refocus attention on the elements of the original documents themselves, not what we imagined James had wanted to write but did not.