December 13, 2012
Quite aside from the
personal qualities that made anyone richer for knowing them. Joyce and Fred
will be remembered together as the most imaginative and most industrious team
ever to search the archives for new light on Herman Melville. Joyce herself is the
heroine of the ending of the preface to my MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE
NARRATIVE, just out. How I looked forward to her reading what I said of her
there, and elsewhere of her and Fred! But she knew that her stature as a
Melville scholar, like that of Fred, was high and enduring. Now I have decided
to remember her as she was on two occasions, first in 1991 when, turning in her
chair in an auditorium, she told Maurice Sendak he should illustrate PIERRE and
second on 19 November 2002 when she and I watched the Leonid showers together
at 2 in the morning from the south balcony here in Morro Bay. She was always
game for an adventure.
~
Hershel Parker,
Morro Bay, California
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