Anthony Weiner & Richard H. Brodhead & Andrew Delbanco & Elizabeth Schultz: WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?
Early in the twenty-first century three prominent Melville critics, Richard Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz, warned that Parker's biography was unreliable by citing his treatment of The Isle of the Cross (1853) and Poems (1860). The second of these reviewers, Delbanco, did not cite the earliest, Brodhead, as his authority, and Schultz cited neither Brodhead nor Delbanco. Brodhead in the New York Times for 23 June 2002 disparaged “Parker's surmises about works Melville never published that did not survive”:
He makes the case that in 1852-53 Melville wrote a novel based on materials he shared with Hawthorne about a sailor who deserted his wife. If this is true, then the theory that Melville renounced writing after "Pierre" is just wrong, and the mysterious leap from "Pierre" to the work he published after a silence, the very different "Bartleby the Scrivener," can be explained in a new way. Parker is also convinced that Melville prepared a volume of poems in 1860 that failed to be published. If this is so, a stretch that had seemed empty of literary strivings was instead a time of new effort and new failure--a black hole Parker alone has the instruments to detect.
Similarly, Andrew Delbanco in the New Republic (September 2002) warned that Parker's second volume, like the first, “must be used with caution”:
For one thing, Parker is amazingly certain of his own conclusions. . . . He is sure that immediately after completing Pierre, Melville wrote an unpublished novel (Parker implies that after failing to find a publisher, Melville burned it) inspired by a story he had heard about a sailor who disappears for thirty years, then returns to the wife for whom he has become a distant memory. He is sure that when Melville traveled by slow boat to San Francisco in 1860, he expected to find waiting for him a finished copy of a book of poems that he had entrusted in manuscript to his brother for transmission to his publishers before leaving the East. (Such a book was never published--and it is a surmise that Melville ever wrote it.) . . . . In short, Parker trusts his own intuition completely, and, presenting inferences as facts, he expects his readers to trust it, too.
Brodhead and Delbanco refrained even from naming The Isle of the Cross, as if the title gave it too much actuality. Elizabeth Schultz in The Common Review (Winter 2002) mentioned the title skeptically in her complaint:
Parker also reads betrayal and despair into the disappearance of two manuscripts, which he contends Melville completed--a novel, putatively titled The Isle of the Cross, and his first collection of poems. Throughout his biography, Parker bemoans the loss of The Isle of the Cross's ghostly manuscript, imagining Melville's regret at never having found a publisher for it. Although there is only tentative evidence for the manuscript's existence and submission to a publisher, its ostensible rejection leads Parker to view his heroic author as victimized: "masterful as he could be, [Melville] had a way now, after the failure of Moby-Dick and Pierre, of seeing himself as passive victim to whom things were done."
In their accusations none of these three reviewers mentioned the existence of any documentary evidence that earlier scholars and Parker had brought forward concerning these two lost books. All three critics ignored a full half century of accumulating evidence about a book Melville completed in 1853. (I found the title, The Isle of the Cross, only in 1987.) All three critics ignored extensive evidence about Poems, most of which had been available for eight decades.
Weirdly, in his 2005 Melville: His World and Work Delbanco referred briefly to the existence of lost books, The Isle of the Cross and Poems.
What was Anthony Weiner thinking? What were Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz thinking? Do they think they can get away with just anything at all?
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