Dickens Brushed Up

DAVID COPPERFIELD--Charles Dickens; condensed by Robert Graves; edited by Merrill P. Paine--Harcourt, Brace ($1.00). When Robert Graves's The Real David Copperfield appeared in England last year, critics shouted "Blasphemy!" Author Graves had laid impious hands on the sacred text of David Copperfield, had dared not only to abridge it but also to rewrite it. Calling David Copperfield an autobiographical novel in which Dickens "for once . . . felt personally committed to the truth,'' and which he managed to keep "honest, though diluted, for quite a third of the way," Author Graves pointed out the patent fact that the novel as Dickens left it is a first-rate book stuffed with second-rate padding. Graves offered "no apologies for tampering with a reputed classic." The late Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston, novelist and explorer, had written a continuation of Dombey & Son without stirring up a hornet's nest. But going on from where Dickens left off was not the same thing as doing Dickens' job over. Rewriter Graves further annoyed Dickensians by asserting that three out of four readers of Dickens' best-known books (David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist) know them only in abridged form. No mere abridgment but a complete condensed revision, Graves's David Copperfield may well be come the text posterity knows best. So loudly indignant were ruffled British criics, however, that Publishers Harcourt, Brace blew hot & cold about bringing out a U. S. edition. They scheduled one for last week, withdrew it, finally compromised on publishing a school textbook of Graves's version, further edited by one Merrill P. Paine, Elizabeth, N. J. school teacher. Readers who took the trouble to compare The Real David Copperfield with Dickens' original found Graves's version an actual improvement. Even after Schoolteacher Paine's anxious revision of the revision, David Copperfield is a better book than it was. Many a reader who thinks himself a Dickens-lover could read this version without noticing any changes. None of the famed scenes, characters, dialog is missing. In the English edition Graves shows the kind of thing that is missing by printing a chapter of the original at the end of the book. The contrast is all in his favor. Author Graves's reason for rewriting. David Copperfield was not only that Dickens had padded it but that he had falsified some of the implications of his story. Consequently Graves not only subtracted some 250,000 words, cutting the book down to about half its size, but he added some incidents and, in one case, a whole chapter. Principal interpolation was a meeting between David and Emily, just after Dora's death, in which they confess their love, spend the night together. Reviser Paine omitted this chapter, as well as Emily's subsequent suicide, changed the final paragraphs of Graves's telescoped ending to a feebler transcription of his own. But even with these changes and without Graves's explanatory, controversial foreword, this book is still an amazing performance, should keep bright for many a long year the names of both Charles Dickens and Robert Graves.

The Authors. (For a biographical sketch of Charles John Huffam Dickens, see TIME, Mar. 12.) Critics have cried blasphemy at Poet Robert von Ranke Graves before. His Goodbye To All That, considered one of the best books about the World War, drew volleys of outraged British criticism by its outspokenness. During the War, in which he served as captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Graves was several times wounded, once reported dead. He is big-boned, rangy, with a nose broken from playing rugby. For the last five years he has lived in Deya, a mountain village in Mallorca, with Poet Laura Riding, with whom he has collaborated on several books (A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, No Decency Left). A painstaking worker, he rewrites everything again & again. In his 38 years he has written some 30 books. Some of them: Collected Poems, Lawrence and the Arabs, But It Still Goes On (TIME, Feb. 16, 1931), I. Claudius.

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