"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."
Most critics are like Robert Milder, who in his 2006 Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine declared that my biography made available "more than any reasonable person would want to know about the outward particulars of Melville's life while leaving room for new imaginative uses of its material." But Milder did not keep his promise to make "new imaginative uses" of the material in my biography. Milder undermined his book because the material he chose to try to make imaginative use of only fragmentary material--the biggest fragments, but fragments nevertheless. He did not make "new imaginative uses" of what had been found about The Isle of the Cross and Poems, in particular. Therefore anything he said about the relation of Pierre to Melville's later works and about the Melville between The Confidence-Man and Battle-Pieces was not newly imagined. It was not imagined at all, not taken into imaginative and intellectual account.
Most critics are like Robert Milder, who in his 2006 Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine declared that my
ReplyDeletebiography made available "more than any reasonable person would want to know about the outward particulars of Melville's life while leaving room for new imaginative uses of its material." But Milder did not keep his promise to make "new imaginative uses" of the material in my biography. Milder undermined his book because the material he chose to try to make imaginative use of only fragmentary material--the biggest fragments, but fragments nevertheless. He did not make "new imaginative uses" of what had been found about The Isle of the Cross and Poems, in particular. Therefore anything he said about the relation of Pierre to Melville's later works and about the Melville between The Confidence-Man and Battle-Pieces was not newly imagined. It was not imagined at all, not taken into imaginative and intellectual account.