The Folly of Keeping CEAA and CSE Vetting Reports Secret

For the previous post I uploaded all 14 pages of my 18 June 1975 vetting report on Hawthorne's unfinished romances. I am reminded by reviewing the earlier vetting report, already posted, then this and the final vetting report (perhaps too long to post here) just how much time and thought went into reports which were read by a few and buried. If the policy had been to publish them within a year or two of their being submitted, all editors could have learned by seeing solutions to their own problems or perhaps have recognized for the first time that they had problems that others had encountered and offered possible solutions for.

I see that little from my numerous vetting reports from the early years of the CEAA (before Fredson Bowers banned me from the CSE for exposing his shoddy editing on MAGGIE) is visible in the 1984 FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS but that my work on several editions of American writers in the early 1970s informs the whole book as much as the work on particular authors like Mark Twain and Mailer.

Now when I see on a blog a comment on "the textually-oriented scholar Hershel Parker" and "Live Oak, with Moss," I think, "No, no. I did what I did in putting that poetic sequence in THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE and defending it in NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE was not because I was a 'textually-oriented scholar' but because I was a 'biographically-oriented textual scholar.'" I was seeing "Live Oak, with Moss" in what could be established of the chronology of a dim period of Whitman's life in the late 1850s whereas Alan Helms saw the poems in their scattered and altered forms as they were published later in the CALAMUS sequence--saw them as disparate "texts" that could be reassembled in the orginal order as if the pieces would mean the same in their altered forms that they had been when they were one organic sequence. Alan Helms, my most unlikely opponent, was proceeding not as Whitman lover and respecter but as amateur textual scholar.

This long vetting report is informed by my sense of Hawthorne the man and the sequence of his efforts to push his stories forward. That's biographical, and as I reflect on how sharply I differ from James Thorpe, Donald Pizer, and Jerome McGann I see that I proceed from a biographical stance and they do not. It makes all the difference.