917, RE: Alert -- To the Far Blue Mounta Posted by blamour, Sat Oct-24-20 01:41 PM
I think that the only way to regain consistency is to cut the Barnabas/Tatton meeting in To the Far Blue Mountains.
It doesn't match with Fair Blows the Wind, which was written later. Tatton arrives in a different port and on a fishing boat. It doesn't match with early drafts of FBTW which seem to have been written around the same time or earlier. And they describe the arrival in England and who Tatton interacts with in more detail.
And it's an easier revision. Removing the "early Tatton" reference in Chapter 19 takes quite a bit of rewriting. Removing the Barnabas/Tatton connection in Chapter 21 is just a couple of cuts and adding a very few words. Luckily, the Lost Treasures PS is the perfect place to document it.
The drastic, "original edit" that Dad objected to removed the ENTIRE trip back to England and Ireland and, instead, cut to Barnabas moving inland from his first fort. A lot else was cut too and all the chapters were renumbered.
When Fair Blows the Wind was badly cut, the last of the books to get this treatment, Dad claimed/complained that 100 pages had been Removed from Rivers West. As far as I can tell that is not true. I reedited the whole book because I was concerned over that claim. But it WAS true with To the Far Blue Mountains. Clearly some editing was needed, but it's more like a few paragraphs rather than scores of pages.
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