A Recollection of Helen Tartar

I see in the January 2015 PMLA that Helen Tartar died in an automobile accident in 2014. This issue of PMLA prints an amazing series of memoirs.  “To many,” we learn, “her death was a shock of historic proportions, the abrupt cutting off of a still-unfolding epoch of critical theory, an era of interdisciplinary renewal across the humanities and beyond, and the coming-of-age of multimedia comparative literary studies.” This is among the more mildly phrased tributes to Helen Tartar.

We learn that Helen Tartar suffered over losing her job at Stanford University Press: “Her exit from Stanford University Press was traumatic. Let us state that clearly. Something happened there that she could not believe could happen, and she would suffer from it for years. I am not sure what horrible euphemisms Stanford used when those in charge decided to eliminate her position and to restrict the humanities list.” The firing demonstrated  the power of “postindustrial forces,” apparently, and apparently the "snake" at Stanford went on to unspeakable connections with Bush II. The "trauma of Stanford stayed with her for a long time."

How wrong could I have been back in the early 90s?

In those years I was engaged on Herman Melville literally day and night, getting up at 1 or 1:30 to work two or three hours transcribing “the Augusta Papers” and enlarging THE MELVILLE LOG from 900 to 9000 pages before reading the LOG in its new expanded sequence, where reprinted but corrected pieces from the 1951 edition appeared cheek by jowl with new documents, so that when I said, STOP, here is my story, it was always a different story than anyone had known. All this was obsessive, and it did horrific damage to my health, but I persisted.  I persisted even while longing to write the big piece on Henry James that I was then old enough to write. The conflict was excruciating: did I dare to drop Melville for as long as the essay would take? Could I pick him up again?  At last I took a chance and stopped working on Melville long enough to write my piece, eventually, very eventually, published as "Deconstructing The Art of the Novel and Liberating James's Prefaces," Henry James Review, 14 (Fall, 1993), 284-307.

I wrote the piece for a collection to be published at Stanford University Press, but months passed, and years passed, and the book was not published. At some point (I have the documents in the garage somewhere) I learned that Helen Tartar was holding up the book because she had to have a piece in it by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. As I understood the situation, Tartar was not soliciting a piece from Sedgwick because Sedgwick was a lover of Henry James and a profound reader of his novels and criticism. As I perceived that matter, Tartar wanted the piece because the book would not have been trendy enough without Sedgwick on "homosexual panic" and homosociality and the modern homosexual closet. Is there a word for how Sedgwick could reduce and trivialize Henry James?

Unpleasantness followed. At one point Tartar was enraged when I (perhaps standing on an absurd principle) refused to give Stanford University Press copyright to the piece. It all ended with Tartar enraged and me outraged but determined to find the piece a more congenial home, even if it meant taking the risk that it would be, after all, homeless.

I have not checked lately, but the article has pretty much been neglected. I re-read it a couple of years ago and by the end was in tears for me and James. This is a serious, loving article. The film-editor, literary critic, literary theorist Paul Seydor loved it and remembers it. [See Amazon now for early reviews of Seydor's new NU Press book on Peckinpah’s PAT GARRET AND BILLY THE KID.]

Years ago I got a most astonishing fan letter from a famous and best-selling novelist. The article, he wrote on the flyleaf of one of his books, was “exactly what I think scholarship should be about—interesting, informative, ennobling . . . .” “Ennobling” I liked because I had tried so hard to celebrate James’s slow growth into immense power. [It so happened that what the best-selling novelist wrote about textual theory in his preface was so much like what I thought that when I read it aloud in class the students laughingly shouted me down together--I must have been making it up because it was just what I had been telling them. What an joking old professor!]

Oh, what the hell, it’s 2015. I will quote more from the novelist (not, in case you wondered because of what I have said in the past, Cormac McCarthy):

". . . exactly what scholarship should be about—interesting, informative, ennobling. I can’t tell you how delighted I was to be taught by you. An added bonus is that Henry James is one of my absolute favorite writers. I know a lot about him. Now, thanks to you, I know more. Equally delighting is your prose style—lucid, flowing, conversational America."

It was important to me to publish this article on James, no matter whether Jameseans talked about it or not. I had been, for decades then, prevented from saying my very long say on Stephen Crane by threats of lawsuits from Fredson Bowers, and needed to express myself. Like Crane, I wanted my output put out there. Having the article published in the Henry James Review was enough. It was out there. I could go back to the obsession about Melville but in a Jamesean mood that carried me through his all but unbearable pain.

Helen Tartar got Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I have said my say about Sedgwick in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE. This is all I intend to say about Helen Tartar. Back then, she got what she deserved.