In last August, while waiting for the Library of America HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE POEMS to be printed, I realized that 60 years had passed since I graduated from Lamar State College of Technology, quit my job as a night telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railroad in Port Arthur, and left for Northwestern University. I thought I might find the date of the graduation in a data base but was stunned to find not only the date but also a photograph and the information that I had graduated with "highest honor." I had remembered it as "highest honors." Graduation took place--it
turned out--on August 22, 1959. Two years earlier I drove across country to the railroad offices at Oil City, Louisiana, only to find that the doctor had not mailed a statement saying my tuberculosis was not any longer a public threat. Most of the last air from the final pumping of pneumo-peritoneum leaked out of my body there while I waited for a letter from the doctor, the only time I ever saw women walking on dirt roads carrying their loads on their heads. From August 1957 till the end of
August 1959 I worked alone at the Kansas City Southern Freight House in Port Arthur
as the night telegrapher, 8 pm till 4 am, and went to school at Lamar in
Beaumont. Trepidatious about my health, I signed up for only 10 units for Fall 1957, but
later one semester Celeste Kitchen let me take 22 units.
Then for the Fall Quarter 1959 I was at Northwestern University on a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship studying Swift with the great Phillip Harth and Wordsworth with Zera Fink. In Evanston I locked up Scott Hall at night to earn my food, but I never once had to go out to whorehouses looking for a brakeman at 2 or 3 in the morning, as I had routinely done in Port Arthur.
Since August 2019 I have kept the newspaper photograph pinned up and look at it in total bewilderment. When did I get a necktie and where was the jacket from? 60 years! 67 years and a few months since I left high school after the junior year to help support the family. And here we are at the end of 2019 packing dozens of bankers boxes of books and papers and taping them and dollying and then carrying them to the Post Office five at a time, now and into the new year, sending my Melville Collection to the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 57 years after I hitchhiked there from NYC to work in the Melville papers in the old Athenaeum with third graders at 3 pm the only other users of the library. And after all this time the reviews in the TLS and New York Review of Books, the latter by the great critic Helen Vendler who read the 18,000 lines before coming to the Pittsfield meeting for the centennial of CLAREL in 1976 where (to one man's hysterical denunciation) I "performed," as she said then ("Your students must love you."). And memories of working at the Athenaeum year after year, decade after decade, and what I learned there and kept on learning there. Taping five boxes a day is enough. Mailing the boxes the next day is enough. 84 is old. Older than any of my grandparents ever were except Alice Bell Costner. With any luck, by the time the last boxes are shipped I will have outlived her, and can focus on writing ORNERY PEOPLE.
Then for the Fall Quarter 1959 I was at Northwestern University on a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship studying Swift with the great Phillip Harth and Wordsworth with Zera Fink. In Evanston I locked up Scott Hall at night to earn my food, but I never once had to go out to whorehouses looking for a brakeman at 2 or 3 in the morning, as I had routinely done in Port Arthur.
Since August 2019 I have kept the newspaper photograph pinned up and look at it in total bewilderment. When did I get a necktie and where was the jacket from? 60 years! 67 years and a few months since I left high school after the junior year to help support the family. And here we are at the end of 2019 packing dozens of bankers boxes of books and papers and taping them and dollying and then carrying them to the Post Office five at a time, now and into the new year, sending my Melville Collection to the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 57 years after I hitchhiked there from NYC to work in the Melville papers in the old Athenaeum with third graders at 3 pm the only other users of the library. And after all this time the reviews in the TLS and New York Review of Books, the latter by the great critic Helen Vendler who read the 18,000 lines before coming to the Pittsfield meeting for the centennial of CLAREL in 1976 where (to one man's hysterical denunciation) I "performed," as she said then ("Your students must love you."). And memories of working at the Athenaeum year after year, decade after decade, and what I learned there and kept on learning there. Taping five boxes a day is enough. Mailing the boxes the next day is enough. 84 is old. Older than any of my grandparents ever were except Alice Bell Costner. With any luck, by the time the last boxes are shipped I will have outlived her, and can focus on writing ORNERY PEOPLE.
What an incredible journey, Dr. Parker. It's interesting to think how many of our personal voyages are bound up with Melville's, through his writing, across the centuries. I still remember the steps I was sitting on, my junior year of college, when I finished Moby-Dick for the first time. So many thanks to you for getting all these poems into print in one place. The effort is worthy of much more than a sub-sub-Librarian.
ReplyDeleteI'm a teacher at nearby SLO Classical Academy High School, and we'll be reading Moby-Dick (the Arion Press facsimile edition) this spring. If you have any interest in dropping by for a day to riff on Melville's work or biography, I'm sure the kids would love that. They are very curious and courteous classical students. Let me know if you have the time and desire to drop by, between walks at Morro Rock! mrmccullough@sloclassical.org