Reposted after a message from Sid Scharwz, who remembered us both. Updated only about the slightly shabby California house, recently in the news.
Saturday,
May 30, 2015
I wrote memorial tributes to the great
Melvilleans Harrison Hayford and Walter E. Bezanson but I never thought I would
write about Brian Higgins, younger than me, not older, my student at the
University of Southern California in 1968 then my collaborator on many projects
for four decades. Can I compose a third in the conventional memorial genre? No.
No. I protect myself in this piece by starting with Henry James, whose late
works were beloved by both Brian and me. Perhaps the best thing I ever wrote
alone was an article on James’s prefaces to the New York edition. It did not
make much of an impact, although a very famous novelist said it “ennobled” him.
No one guessed that a particular section was autobiographical, based on my
collaborations with Brian. In talking about it and Brian, I will sound more
than a little vainglorious. But, then, one of the things Brian explained to me
was, “They just don’t comprehend the level we are operating on, Hershel.” That, of course, became one of the many
catch-phrases we laughed about every time an occasion arose, year by year, for
one of us to recall it.
In that article on the prefaces the
submerged autobiography is the paragraph about James’s memories of the places
where he wrote his novels and stories, places where he had performed acts of
heroism: “In writing the prefaces James remembered the details of what he had
written years before far less clearly than he remembered the rooms in which he
had labored over his fiction and the sounds outside those rooms and (less
often?) the sights from the windows in those rooms. For monument to his high
achievement James might have been content with his randomly sized books in
their range of colors and their diverse stamping and lettering, the hodgepodge
figuring for him what the slab of marble in the suburban cemetery figured for
John Marcher. Instead, in his sixties he saw his writing rooms as his monument.
The remembered rooms, the scenes of his labors and of his triumphs, he
enumerated lovingly.” I listed a dozen or so of the rooms, starting with “‘the
high, charming, shabby old room’ that looked out at the Piazza Santa Maria
Novella” and ending with, in Bad-Hamburg, “‘a dampish, dusky, unsunned room,’
so dark that he could see his way to and from his inkstand ‘but by keeping the
door to the court open.’” In writing the prefaces, I said, James “rejoiced in
his sense of his own bravery in these rooms, where he had encountered more
dangers than in the nocturnal marches down the London streets during which he
conducted his investigative researches for The
Princess Casamassima. Nostalgia is a secondary emotion in these memories:
these rooms, for the duration of James’s own courageous occupancy, had been
inhabited by the Muse herself, and now in his memory they were sacred places.”
When I wrote the paragraph in the early 1990s I was thinking, already, of the
rooms in which Brian and I had worked, where we had struggled with an array of
aesthetic challenges.
When I taught summer school at
Northwestern in 1973 Brian came up from Chicago to work with me at night in the
English department, where we could use typewriters to lay out about what was
wrong with the Cowley reordering of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. (Later Hayford loved hearing that the piece
“was aborning in old University Hall.”) Two years earlier, I had extemporized
for 50 minutes when I arrived at a USC class to find the students holding paperbacks
of the nonsensical Cowley edition. More recently, Brian had proved his worth by
meticulously locating in it small accidental losses along with big inadvertent
ludicrousnesses. The article, published in August 1975, was in due course
treated briskly in American Literary
Scholarship as a “bibliographical” piece, not a critical article, when of
course it was a worthy piece of criticism (however much we could have improved
it in later years) and, more than that, a piece that in a rudimentary way engaged
basic seldom-explored problems in literary aesthetics. Then an eminent purblind
Eastern professor, now dead, denounced it at length in a collection of essays
on the novel without reprinting it there. (Pursuing his monomaniacal feud
across international borders, decades later he challenged me to come to his
hotel room, strip at least to the waist, and settle the issues once for all.
This invitation gave Brian and me cause for two decades’ worth of laughter.) It
was the response to our Tender
article that elicited from Brian the comment about the level on which we were
working. We published a bit of our mid-1970s work on Stephen Crane’s Maggie in a Norton Critical Edition, but
our long essay proved unpublishable in the United States because it exposed the
editorial and aesthetic incompetence of the all-powerful bibliographer Fredson
Bowers. Honest reviewing of the grand national editorial project simply ceased
after every editor of a textual journal had seen our paper and bowed before
Bowers’s threats of legal proceedings against anyone who published it. Starting
then in the mid-1970s timid textual journals stifled any inquiry into the
necessary relationship between editorial principles and what cognitive
psychologists were learning about the creative process. Our inability to
publish this study damaged our careers and our psyches and taught us bitter
lessons about doing original work and challenging authority. Brian and I wrote
other articles and edited significant collections, never giving up hope of
triumphing over the censorship of the monograph-length study of Maggie. How did we survive and flourish,
until that article was published--not in the United States but in the
Antipodes, in the 1990s? Might as well ask how we survived so many “Higgins
breakfasts” as long as we did! Or how we survived the century’s coldest day yet
in Chicago then later worked through the century’s real coldest day, again,
toting a dead car battery and a living bundle of typescripts inch by icy inch
past the Moody Bible Institute. Decade by decade we got better together as
readers, teaching ourselves, and had more private fun, as when we satirizing
ourselves with pretentious terms like “Flawed Grandeur” and “Fair Augury” in
titles. And we laughed. Now I will never have anyone to laugh with the way I
laughed with Brian.
One workroom followed another. Perhaps
the most heroic site of all was a kitchen in Ladera Heights where for two weeks
in July 1975 (a month before the Tender
article was published) we read Pierre,
talking through the functions of passages and recording our conclusions in
typed notes, many of which ultimately informed the 2006 book. In those sessions
Brian and I pushed ourselves day by day into the most rigorous literary
analysis either of us had ever done, the result better than either of us could
have done alone, for Brian’s great strength, nourished by John Plumb and other
British tutors, was as a reader, and I had been transformed as a reader by five
months in bed with a one-volume Shakespeare as I recovered from tuberculosis.
There were many other work spaces, thought spaces, for the later articles, the
collections we edited, and the much-interrupted, Pierre book which lured us like a Spirit-Spout. We wrote together
in a slightly shabby 1930s Spanish house in Brentwood (late in 2015 sold for
$4,800,000, flipped for $5,100,000, and then still more recently razed, trees,
house, study, and all, a teardown); the marble Newberry Library Melville Room
(the Melville books now dispersed and the room repurposed); Brian’s rental
apartment in Chicago; a dark narrow unsunned row house in Wilmington, Delaware,
on a cliff above the Brandywine; a motel room in New Bedford where Brian kept
silent about the poisonous, insidiously flattering invitation he had just heard
from a great Harvard psychologist; the third floor of a Victorian on the flats
in Wilmington where we worked with both lapboards and, for the first time, a
computer; the very last house in southeast Pennsylvania, where a few steps into
the woods the man from Leicester got to stand in three American states at once;
the Public Library in Troy, New York; the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts; and finally another Spanish house, in Morro Bay, California. For
some of the sessions, photographs of Brian or me holding galleys (a textual
stage now unknown to writers) or page proofs or posing with books convey
something of the pleasures of working together, but nothing except our printed
words, especially in the Pierre book,
comes close to capturing the sense of exhilaration and joy that suffused us as
we did our best thinking and writing. Taken all in all, our collaborations
record for me a huge, powerfully moving part of both our working lives, and our
work rooms are as sacred to me as James’s were to him. Now talking about the
rooms in which Brian Higgins and I taught each other for almost half a century
keeps me from acknowledging what his silence is going to mean and what I am
going to do without the laughter.
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