Interesting Emendations: Simon Schama's "The Patriot" and "Rembrandt's Ghost"

These days I’ve been rereading some of Simon Schama’s old New Yorker pieces. There are five included in his recently published essay collection Scribble, Scribble, Scribble. I enjoy them immensely, particularly the two reviews, “Rembrandt’s Ghost” (The New Yorker, March 26, 2007) and “The Patriot” (The New Yorker, September 24, 2007). Comparing the book versions of these wonderful pieces with their magazine antecedents, I find them almost exactly the same. The only differences are with respect to the placement of a few commas. Apparently, Schama, unlike (say) John Updike, doesn’t much tinker with his writings after they’ve appeared in The New Yorker. What you see in the magazine is what you get in the collection. But what about those commas? Schama is a master writer. Any change he makes, no matter how minute, is significant. Here, for example, is a sentence from his New Yorker piece, “The Patriot,” that now appears in the Scribble, Scribble, Scribble version (retitled “Turner and the Drama of History”) with an added comma:

The New Yorker: "Turner was interested not in the deeds of the heroes but, rather, in the ways in which their memory might be visually transmitted to posterity."

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: "Turner was interested not in the deeds of the heroes, but, rather, in the ways in which their memory might be visually transmitted to posterity."

Here are two more examples – both taken from “Rembrandt’s Ghost”:

The New Yorker: "The look is naïve and apparently artless, but the hand that draws it is heavy with memories, not just of a Barcelona boyhood but of the archive of painting."

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: "The look is naive and apparently artless, but the hand that draws it is heavy with memories, not just of a Barcelona boyhood, but of the archive of painting."

The New Yorker: "Compositions like 'The Night Watch,' he gambled, would come alive not through an accumulation of posed portraits but through their atmospheric integration into a regularly lit drama."

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: "Compositions like The Night Watch, he gambled, would come alive not through an accumulation of posed portraits, but through their atmospheric integration into a regularly lit drama."

I confess, in all three instances, I prefer the slightly smoother New Yorker version. Why did Schama insert the extra commas in the book versions? My guess is that they were present in the drafts submitted to The New Yorker, and that they were deleted by the magazine editor(s). Schama reverted to his original texts when he included the pieces in his collection.

But these punctuation changes are exceedingly minor and do not in the least affect the stunning impact of Schama’s glorious powerhouse prose. I conclude by quoting one of my favorite passages from “Turner and the Drama of History” (formerly known as “The Patriot”), a description of Turner’s spectacular The Battle of Trafalgar:

The entanglement of the ships of the line, like so many lumbering dinosaurs locked in belligerent slaughter, is described through an inchoate massing of sails, each impossible to connect to any vessel in particular. It’s a maritime traffic jam, a smoke-choked pile-up with nowhere to go, no visible stretch of sea!