In today's San Luis Obispo TRIBUNE Leonard Pitts tells of a new episode of "breathtaking emotional cruelty." Pastor Frank Pomeroy, whose daughter Annabelle was killed in the massacre at the First Baptist Church in November, was accosted by Robert Ussery, who yelled at him: "Your daughter never even existed. Show me her birth certificate." It turns out that Ussery denies many other mass shootings. "Show me her birth certificate" instantly reminds us of the Birther who was elected to the Presidency. If the highest elected official in the country can be an unapologetic Birther for years, why can't Ussery? Pitts deplores "America's vanishing ability—and willingness—to reason." What Pitts calls "the stupidification of America," he says, has "crept upon us over the course of a generation."
It appeared in American universities even before it "crept" into public discourse. In December 1990 the Melville Society meeting was packed with New Historicists, second-generation New Leftists (who had fervor but less purpose than the first), and a large group of second- and third-generation New Critics who had never done archival research and had certainly not been taught to do responsible research. I misread the atmosphere in the room as one of free-floating political correctness, not sharply focused, but the mood of the audience was hostile from the start. When Wai-chee Dimock resurrected Lewis Mumford’s long-refuted claim that Hawthorne had based Ethan Brand on Melville (before he met him or read anything but Typee), Harrison Hayford mildly reproved her, saying that if she thought it was acceptable to bring forth the Ethan Brand claim as a serious possibility, she was using a different standard for evidence than he used. At that, there was a subterranean murmur of anger in the audience like the incipient rebellion in Billy Budd, the mood hardening into fury that anyone’s idea could be considered invalid on grounds of biographical evidence. My diary for the day described my having gone unknowingly into the Lions' Den.
In the new post-scholarly climate, to point out errors was to violate the playground rules: one should always enhance one’s playmate’s self-esteem. The audience at the 1990 MLA was further incited when an onlooker described by Robert K. Wallace in Melville and Turner as “the petulant stranger in the doorway” kept crying out, with regard to Melville and history, ‘the facts don’t matter.’” Accepting what the satanic red-bearded prophet meant, I never attended another Melville Society meeting in the United States, although I went in 1997 to Cancun so we could climb the pyramids at Chichen Itza. Partly because of the hostile takeover of the Melville Society, I decided, as I said from the platform of a program on F. Scott Fitzgerald in Toronto in 1993, that attending the annual Modern Language Association convention had become a moral issue. The issue was settled right after that meeting when a Melvillean some years my senior proposed that we adjourn to his hotel room where we could “strip" and go at each other "one to one” over differing interpretations.
The facts did not matter in 1990, and have not mattered since then. A dean at Yale and later President of Duke University, Richard Brodhead, in the June 23, 2002, New York Times announced that I had invented two lost Melville books, The Isle of the Cross (1853) and Poems (1860) out of thin air. Only I in my "black hole" had heard of Poems, Brodhead said, although everyone had known about Poems since 1922. As for The Isle of the Cross, everyone had known since 1960 that Melville had completed a book in 1853, but I did not announce my discovery of the title until 1990, in the lead article of American Literature. In the New Republic (September 30, 2002) the biographer-to-be Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco said I couldn’t be trusted at all on anything because I had merely surmised the existence of those lost books (34). He had, of course, not read all of the book he was reviewing, for the evidence about the books is on the pages. And the Kansas professor Elizabeth Schultz in Common Review Winter 2002) echoed those two critics, decrying the merely “putative” existence of those books I claimed Melville had written.
Even if they have admitted that these two lost books once existed, recent academic critics have continued to ignore the reality that months of Melville's working life went into The Isle of the Cross (December 1852-May or June 1853) and parts of three years (1857-1860) went into the composition of Poems. My point is that when you think of the trajectory of Melville's writing life, you need to take account of months or years spent on something that a writer remembers keenly even if no one else can perceive it. I know something from personal experience about this, having written in the early 1970s a thorough account of Fredson Bowers's astonishingly incompetent edition of Stephen Crane's Maggie, a temperate but relentless exposé which no textual journal would publish and which led Bowers to blackball me from the Center for Scholarly Editions (although he later falsely denied doing so). For two decades I lived with one of my most important studies unpublished, while many people in the textual community knew of it but no one would dare to mention it because of Bowers's threats to sue. At last it was published by a brave editor in the Antipodes, when it was too late to do any good to the editing of American classics. I could imagine how Melville remembered the months he labored on The Isle of the Cross and in the process grew or at least changed from Pierre to his first work on short stories. You do not forget a long important part of your writing life.
In 2016 Michael Shelden published Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of "Moby-Dick," described as a new account of Herman Melville and the writing of Moby-Dick. It was, the ads said, "based on fresh archival research, which reveals that the anarchic spirit animating Melville’s canonical work was inspired by his great love affair with a shockingly unconventional married woman." The book was in fact not based on new archival documents and in fact wilfully ignored many known documents which flatly contradicted the premise of the book. In fact, Sarah Morewood was an unstable woman who had notoriously pursued a dashing brother-in-law of President Tyler in 1849 and in 1851 and afterwards was pursuing the strikingly demure religious brother of Evert Duyckinck. She was not pursuing Melville in 1850. Melville did not need a living muse for Moby-Dick, for he had the Bible, Shakespeare, and other great writers down to De Quincey. Now we are promised for the Summer 2018 a Newton's Law Productions documentary on Shelden's documentary account of Melville's love affair with Sarah Morewood. What meaning does the word "documentary" have any more? The stupidification of America, Pitts says. Yet some of us try to establish the truth and tell the truth.
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