Saturday, February 29, 2020

COPYING BITS so I can give the books away--Reiman shocked that I would challenge Norman Mailer

Donald H. Reiman, THE STUDY OF MODERN MANUSCRIPTS (Johns Hopkins, 1993).

I have to find the note Mailer wrote on a newspaper article by someone else who was horrified ("MAILER MATTLES ACADEMIC CHUTZPAH!") that I would say Mailer had damaged one of his books: "To Hershel--may his ideas prevail to the sticking point, Norman."
He had read MACBETH, that man.



Chicago ad for the book version of AGAINST THEORY


https://www.press.uchicago.edu/dam/ucp/images/layout/mobile-menu.png



Against Theory

Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism




152 pages | 6.00 x 9.00 | © 1985


Paper $20.00ISBN: 9780226532271 Published June 1985

"Against Theory," the title essay in this volume, challenges the notion that literary theory has any real work to do, or any results to show. This challenge—issued by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in Critical Inquiry (8:4)—strikes some critics as scandalous, others as provocative and… Read More


"Against Theory," the title essay in this volume, challenges the notion that literary theory has any real work to do, or any results to show. This challenge—issued by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in Critical Inquiry (8:4)—strikes some critics as scandalous, others as provocative and productive.

The argument is directed against both sides of the current debates in literary theory, criticizing theoretical "objectivists" like E. D. Hirsch, Jr., on the one hand, and proponents of indeterminacy like Paul de Man on the other. The attack is not just on a particular way of doing theory but on the entire project of literary theory. The challenge is not only to a way of thinking and writing but to a way of making a living.

The resulting controversy has drawn so much attention among literary critics that it has been collected in a single volume so that the debate can be followed from start to finish. This collection includes the essay "Against Theory," seven responses to it, and a rejoinder by Knapp and Michaels (originally published in Critical Inquiry 9:4); in addition, there are two new statements plus a final reply by Knapp and Michaels.

The debate chronicled in this volume raises the most fundamental issues in the theory of meaning and the practice of interpretation. Are Knapp and Michaels confronting literary theory with a new "pragmatic" form of theory? Or are they (as some of their respondents suggest) arguing for a new form of nihilism? "If it is a nihilism," writes editor W. J. T. Mitchell, "it is one that demands an answer, not easy polemical dismissal, one that calls for theory to clarify its claims, not to mystify them and the easy assurance of intellectual fashion and institutional authority." It is the intention of Against Theory to aid in that clarification.


Table of Contents


Contents

Introduction: Pragmatic Theory
Against Theory - Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels
Revisionary Madness: The Prospects of American Literary Theory at the Present Time - Daniel T. O’Hara
Against Theory? - E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
Toward Uncritical Practice - Jonathan Crewe
Truth or Consequences: On Being Against Theory - Steven Mailloux
Lost Authority: Non-sense, Skewed Meanings, and Intentionless Meanings - Hershel Parker
On the Theory of "Against Theory" - Adena Rosmarin
Intentionless Meaning - William C. Dowling
A Reply to Our Critics - Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels
Consequences - Stanley Fish
Philosophy without Principles - Richard Rorty
A Reply to Richard Rorty: What Is Pragmatism? - Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels

Biography and Textual Research Breaks Through into Literary Theory--1982

The editor of CRITICAL INQUIRY welcomed my fast-written response to something in that journal and thought of having my piece paired with the one I was responding to. In the next months others responded or were asked to respond and the result was a booklet, AGAINST THEORY (1983). Some of the critics including Knapp and Michaels mentioned my piece but did not engage it intelligently--misrepresented what I very clearly said. This is an example of people just not able to read because of what they thought they knew. This article was very important to me because it was a great breakthrough.  I was writing FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS, for which this piece formed part of the preface. At an MLA party in LA Gerald Graff asked for it at Northwestern. Hayford found from Graff that it was in hand in Evanston and told me that he had suggested that Don Cook of the Howells Edition be an official reader for the press. I sputtered! Cook would not have understood it at all. I said, "Jerry should ask Cleanth Brooks" and I named a couple more respected theorists, maybe including Mitchell from CRITICAL INQUIRY.  Hayford scoffed at me. "But it's textual," he said (not having read it). Well, yeah, but it was also more theoretical than Murray Krieger and it was using cognitive psychology, creativity research, and studies of memory. It was pretty much trashed by the New Critical residue of reviewers, but over the years people discovered it. I think I will print here a list of praise I made for the Quarter Century after it was published in 1984. But it was a failure--the textual crowd decided that whatever got printed was what we should read and the theory crowd Deconstructed themselves.

AD FOR THE BOOK VERSION.

Friday, February 28, 2020

"The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating"--accepted by Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1961--published 1963

In August 1959 I resigned as telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railroad in Port Arthur, Texas. After getting the MA at Northwestern in the Summer of 1960, I took the Melville class of Harrison Hayford. He did not accept term papers. He wanted the paper written for the most likely journal to take it (following all their suggestions for style) and put in an envelope addressed to the journal with the correct amount of stamps on the envelope. If he liked it enough he could simply mail it. He may never have liked one well enough to mail straight off, but he liked my paper. He was the chairman of the Melville Society which that year was in Chicago. He asked me to read the paper there. In due course Nineteenth-Century Fiction published it. Harold Bloom republished it, as I have done more than once. It is well known in France, my 2nd Norton Critical Edition of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN having been assigned for all advanced graduate students taking the internal and external agregation [one g and an acute accent on the e] exam a few years ago. Giving the talk in December 1960 was the start of my career as a Melville scholar. What I brought to Northwestern was a knowledge of the Bible. I knew all about Original Sin, as Melville's mother did. The Yale authority on the novel knew the Bible but felt it in a sweeter Episcopalian way.


A brave old Tory, GGGGGG Grandpa Solomon Sparks

I think I have been cruelly punished as a whistle-blower and thinker-from-evidence, but Grandpa Sparks is the model for all his descendants. Why would he want to revolt? He had been given land in the 1750s and was very happy there. Tea? He did not drink tea. They had brandy and whisky. So young philanderer George Parks (who did not support a child he fathered while single) and who later married into my decent Moore family, tricked the kind-hearted old man into walking out of the safety of his house. (In this pension application "celebrated" means "notorious.")

I wish he had kicked George Parks even harder. Imagine being bound hand and foot on your back in a canoe shouting over and over, "hurra for King George." Grandpa!

What you see while going through boxes--Family name I won't see on an envelope any more--COSTNER

Uncle Andrew Costner has been dead 2 decades.

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Found after many years--My welcoming Ken Kesey to USC in 1975

Now if I keep unpacking and packing boxes I may find a bundle of letters from Cleanth Brooks which I could not find when I was writing MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE.

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

My bathroom "art piece" is going to Massachusetts. Now, Charlotte, NC, please produce dozens of 6" square Revolutionary Scenes

They don't have to be about my folks only, though David Knox leaping on the woodpile at the news from King's Mt would be a reasonable candidate. Captain Jack on horseback, for sure. Come on, Charlotte artists. My bathroom will be bare.

Now distracted by NOISY NEIGHBORS


Scary--a crowd of people wanting to buy face masks and meanwhile infecting each other. Stay out of Elevators! Don't get in a line to buy face masks!


Ancestry's ThruLines--Does anyone know how to read this? Is that man a DNA relative, really?

IF this man is a known connection and a shared DNA match, is he only a Potential Ancestor because he could be an uncle or cousin? How do I find how much DNA we share?

Greg Lennes's site shows that Melville is all over, being read, being illustrated, being sung.

After scanning down Greg Lennes's site this morning (MOBY-DICK sung in Chicago--and on and on) I thought about how in the 21st century Melville has been absorbed into American life as never before.

I remember when the flagship journal of American Literature, the one named AMERICAN LITERATURE, devoted an issue to showing why Melville should not be taught in any classroom and incidentally why my biography should be blocked before it could be published  ("We already have full scale biographies of Melville").  You don't remember? Here is Paul Lauter at the start, writing with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities:


The article that set the tone for the March 1994 issue of AMERICAN LITERATURE was written by Paul Lauder under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Called "Melville Climbs the Canon," it was cleverly designed to throw Melville back out of that canon. Lauter recounted his polling some 100 students as to "the names of five or perhaps ten American books or writers" they thought "an educated person should have read—'educated' being defined as having completed a B. A. degree." He reported that Melville was never listed—"left off—with not a single vote among the one hundred or more registered in" the poll. Lauter selected some comments meant as representative: "You really feel belittled when you're reading Melville." Lauter continued sympathetically (no one wants to feel belittled): "My students seemed actively to dislike Melville, to feel humiliated by the prose and ignorant before the dense web of Melville's allusive, syntactically intricate style and his convoluted plotting."


Melville, concluded Lauter, "had become for them" (his students) "a representative of what they hated about their academic training." He knew when this had come about—in the Melville Revival of the 1920s: "I want to argue that, in the main, 'Melville' was constructed in the 1920s as part of an ideological conflict which linked advocates of modernism and of traditional high cultural values—often connected to the academy—against a social and cultural 'other," generally, if ambiguously, portrayed as feminine, genteel, exotic, dark, foreign, and numerous. In this contest a distinctively masculine, Anglo-Saxon image of Melville was deployed as a lone and powerful artistic beacon against the dangers presented by the masses; creating such an image entailed overlooking issues of race, eroticism, democracy, and the like."

Lauter suggested "that much of Melville's appeal, especially in the critical period during which he was being established as a 'classic' writer, has precisely to do with the validation of boys' tastes in mens' criticisms." Masculinity (as the enemy of feminism) "was precisely part of Melville's appeal to twenties critics." Melville, in fact, was an oppressor of young, poor, minority students (including numbers of children of recent immigrants). Lauter explained his students' "distaste for Melville": "For them, the modernist preference for difficult, indeed obscure, texts is no virtue; it may, in fact, reflect a process deeply inflected by class standards, whose effect is to marginalize them culturally." No wonder Paul 

Lauter's students hated Melville! So well had the National Endowment for the Humanities spent our money! Down with anyone who marginalizes all students culturally!


This was the opening piece in a deeply distressing campaign to drive Melville out of the classroom. It did not happen very often. Most students, and not only white upper-class students, love Melville, given the chance. If you want evidence, look now almost weekly in Greg Lennes's Melville site at classroom projects where students are involved in reading and responding joyously to Melville. It seems to me that giving the ADE March award to Lauder is one of the indications that the ADE, like the Modern Language Association itself, has marginalized the very people who formed it, people, even some from lower classes, even back then, who have gained enough education to love great stories greatly told.

Monday, February 24, 2020

Blindsided as I pack--Brian Higgins here



A Note Relayed by the Editor of THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION--ABOUT AN ARTICLE THAT HUNDREDS OF NORTH CAROLINA FOLKS ALREADY CHERISH


I came across your 2013 story on the 1775 patriots of Tryon Co., NC relating to my direct ancestor Christian (Zimmerman) Carpenter. I just wanted to say thank you for writing it. I can’t describe the pride I felt reading it. It is both empowering and inspiring, and just to be able to see his actual signature and his name preserved in the memorial gave me a sense of genuine connection. Just having the confirmation that he was part of something greater than himself that transcended 8 generations for me to come to discover and understand- - - I am ever so grateful, and incredibly honored. Thank you for your research, patriotism, and effort in keeping these things accessible.



 


Saturday, February 22, 2020

One of the strangest of coincidences--Jean-Luc Bannalec and Helen MacInnes

Someone yesterday and today has been reading THE MISSING CORPSE and looking in an up-to-date 1975-era atlas for maps then printing a couple on a Tablet, but not happy about the lack of detail. I worked packing Box 63 and got very far on Box 64 using miscellaneous letters from Sealts, Leyda, Hayford, and others. I threw out 100 or so pages of notes on conversations with Sendak over PIERRE and on other projects. He is dead like so many others. Threw out a lot. Took photographs of Box 64 in progress showing room for half a dozen books. (I will re-photograph when full.)  Later I walked by the low wall of books just outside the elevator in the garage and thought I might see a few Melville books there. I pulled out a red and blue book as I walked and looked at it. It was ASSIGNMENT IN BRITTANY which I had forgotten I owned. In it were two maps I had printed which were better than anything found yesterday or today.

I must have bought it after coming here because I had thought of early 1953 as I took over as Agent-Telegrapher in Singer, Louisiana. A young minister was there, beginning to pack to leave, and he loaned me that book and ABOVE SUSPICION. I can't even remember if he was the Baptist minister though I think he must have been since it was the only one right in the village. But at some point 15 years or so ago I wanted to read ASSIGNMENT IN BRITTANY again. I swear, I picked it up which I could have picked up any of a couple of dozen books that were not deeply buried under others. After working so hard packing and thinking about the past decades, this was very strange.

Packing Boxes 62 and 63--Throwing out dozens of yellow legal pages of notes on phone conversations with Maurice Sendak

He's dead.
Brian Higgins is dead.
Kind young Mr Fleury is dead in his 20s of an unimaginably cruel cancer
Noel is dead,
Hennig is dead,
Hayford is dead,
Phil Young is dead
Stan is dead
Don Y is dead
Ed Daunais is dead
Mr. Newman is dead
So many others are dead
And this is just a few from 2 old brown bankers boxes I am sorting through.

Friday, February 21, 2020

"the clouds that lowered"--you spell it lowered. That unstable sort of day--no rain



Pittsfield, MA after GE: Arrowhead (the Historical Society) and the Berkshire Athenaeum Are Thriving--Leading the Way

Pittsfield is in a list of cities losing population. We are betting on Pittsfield's energetic citizens, superb location, and rich history. We are very happy that my Melville archive is going to the Berkshire Athenaeum--61 boxes mailed after this morning's trip to the PO.

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Back to Work: Taped 5 Boxes up through 61 and opened boxes 62-66 for Packing

10 more? 15 more? 20 more? I know a taper who would like to finish at 75.
I hear that there is an exceptionally talented volunteer eager to start making a finding aid. I have to confess that letters from Jay Leyda and other great Melville scholars are scattered through the boxes. The maker of a finding aid will deserve the thanks of all pilgrims.

Yesterday--Someone to Envy


Fictitious Fratricide in the Revolution--The fantasy of Thomas Costner killing Peter Costner at Ramsour's Mill in 1780

Later note: Wikipedia has picked up this fantasy. Oh dear.

Austin William Smith's U of Arizona 2010 dissertation is enlivened by a Shakespearean story.
A son that has killed his father, a father that has killed his son--Henry VI Part 3 Act 2 Scene 5.

This is wholly fictional. If it were true it would make Thomas one of the meanest of all the Costners, for he collected a small debt from his late brother Peter's estate which was being administered by his sister-in-law Mary's brother, the shopkeeper and jailor Heinrich (Henry) Dellinger.

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Diary--Joe Biden 2 November 1994

Should I send 40 years or more of Letts Diaries to the archive?

2 Nov. 1994:
Biden kept other women from testifying about Clarence Thomas--suppressing truth. Danforth = a crazy man, & Arlin Specter too.

Medical absence but Rock was still there Monday and Tuesday



Tuesday, February 18, 2020

What Possessed John Bryant to INSTRUCT Readers of LEVIATHAN how to say Parthenope WRONG?

How long will John Bryant's astounding error mess up readers of Melville's poetry?




       Parthenope--All together now: “Accentuate the Antepenultimate”







       In his review of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE in the June 2019 LEVIATHAN on p. 110 John Bryant instructed his readers on basic pronunciation:




          "Parthenope (pronounced PAR-thin-OH-pee) is now the newly sanctioned title for what we have in the past referred to as Melville’s Burgundy Club Sketches.”




       Yes, Parthenope is Melville’s final title for the Gentian-Grandvin material, but Parthenope is NOT to be pronounced PAR-thin-OH-pee.”




          John Walker in A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler, 1848) has a section on Greek and Latin Proper Names, p. 51. There he specifies which words are to be pronounced with emphasis on the penultimate syllable and which are to be pronounced with the emphasis on the ante-penultimate syllable. Walker says that classic Greek and Roman APE and OPE endings are accented on the “Antepenultimate” syllable, and he gives Calliope, Penelope, and Parthenope among the examples. That linguistic phenomenon is exemplified in a good many poems in the 19th century that mention Parthenope and violated in none.

HERE IS A MNEMONIC: ONLY A DOPE / SAYS PENELOPE.





   


James Tracy and his DIRECT ACTION (1996)--what you can learn from the Internet after reading the book

I bought the paperback of DIRECT ACTION because I am a Dellinger, 5 great grandson of Johnnes Phillip Dellinger who was David Dellinger's 3 great grandfather. Uncle Henry Dellinger (brother of Mary Magdelene Dellinger Costner (1741-1839) was the executive of my 4 Great Grandfather Peter Costner's estate in the 1780s in Lincoln County, NC. He is about the only Tory in the family. I like to think he died on the wrong side at Ramsour's Mill in 1780 because he did not understand English enough to know which part of the ground to go to. His brother Jacob was certainly an early patriot, a signer of the Tryon Association in 1775.

I have commented before on my disgust that the 20th century David Dellinger was proud of his Revolutionary ancestry--but only from his Boston family. This radical had no idea that his NC family had been revolutionaries early, as early as 1775.

If I had known we were cousins in 1968 and thereafter, oh what prestige I could have gotten from the living room radicals of Brentwood! I still am interested, and found James Tracy's book absorbing, especially the 1940s-1960s sections.

What you can find online! Several pdfs of entire reviews and a good article "BU Bridge Feature Article--Boston University" on James Travis--"Teacher, historian named new BU Academy headmaster."

The self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing folly of John Bryant's Transcribing According to "Rhetorical Agenda"



          When John Bryant pestered me to be on the editorial board of LEVIATHAN I refused over and over because I knew that he wanted my name for decoration only and would not take my advice. Have you looked at the forms he devised for contributors to LEVIATHAN? They seem to have been borrowed from a Bondage and Discipline dungeon. You had to submit, and submit, and submit, and confirm SUBMISSION. Does any other magazine use such terms?  I saw it as covertly tyrannical, abusive and kept thinking of the peculiar pair in Phillip Harth's Swift course in the Fall of 1959, when I was not used to Northerners. She always had her little whip in class. Why did they disappear before the beginning of the 2nd Quarter? When Gail Coffler wanted me to write the memorial piece on Walter Bezanson I told her she had to keep Bryant from tinkering with what I wrote. When I sent it in I warned him again that Gail would be seeing it and would know what I had written and we required it not to be tampered with.  I had put my heart into that tribute and knew that with a few twists he could sabotage it. He is incorrigible at fiddling, messing up, once managing to have the writer in AMERICAN LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP slap down me and Brian Higgins for saying what Bryant had changed our text to say. We remain in ALS falsely reprimanded for something Bryant put into the text without our seeing it.



        Bryant over the years became a master at self-aggrandizement, never based on scholarly achievement. He claimed for years in his proposals that he was going to put my greatly enlarged Melville LOG among his projects. If he ever does, it will have been stolen. For years and years in books and articles he has said he was working on the Typee manuscript. He said this in successful NEH proposals, it is clear. Anyone looking at his claims would think that a full manuscript of Typee had been discovered in 1983 in the Augusta Papers. No. One leaf had long been known because it had been in the possession of Melville’s cousin Kate Gansevoort Lansing and was at the NYPL. Fifteen leaves were in the Augusta Papers. 15. I repeat myself because Bryant repeated his claims so very many times.



       I repeat because it needs to be clear. The wording Bryant uses implies (no, SAYS) that there is a full manuscript of TYPEE. There is no such thing as “the TYPEE manuscript.” That is an example of Bryant’s self-aggrandizing. Referring to the surviving pages as “the TYPEE manuscript” instead of “the surviving leaves from the first draft of TYPEE” deflects our attention from what Bryant is actually working with—one old (already transcribed in the first NN volume) and fifteen new leaves, not a full draft of a book.



          No one took the time to challenge him on some of his frantic attempts to prove himself the equal of G. Thomas Tanselle. In THE FLUID TEXT he promulgates a no-fault theory of manuscript transcription? This paragraph is Bryant’s:

In confronting the physicality of the working draft manuscript of TYPEE for the first time, I found myself as a critic having to look more deeply into textual scholarship and the principles of textuality. Wanting to quote from the manuscript, I needed to transcribe. Trying to transcribe, I had to decipher scribbles, cancellations, and insertions. Transcription is the seemingly simple conversion of handwriting into print, a presumably mechanical matter. But the manuscript text before me soon became an object that defied perception. Such a vexatious “not-me” challenges our self-satisfied assurances that text objects are definable, much less interpretable. I have gazed at Melville’s handwriting now for over ten years, and each time I return to a passage of his writing, it requires a period of retraining for me to make it readable. I read a crucial, illegible word in the TYPEE manuscript as “promotion”; whereas Hershel Parker sees it as “peroration.” The word Melville intended is one word only; the scribble we both “see” is the same; but the readings we give to it vary with our differing rhetorical agendas. I doubt that Parker and I, or anyone, will be able to resolve this issue; all we can do is engage in a discourse upon the intended text, and its intentionality is defined by that discourse.

In the paragraph I have just quoted, Bryant concludes that intentionality is defined by the discourse he and I and anyone else engage in.

No, I would say, intentionality is defined by what Melville wrote or thought he was writing. Of course we can write down the wrong letters while our attention is distracted. When I noticed that a word was wrong in a depiction of the topography of Pierre’s mind, I wrote “neather” in the margin. The word “nearer” in the text was wrong: my intention was to write “nether,” a word I already knew how to spell, but my mind was still grappling with the complex sentence and I was probably writing in the margin without peering at the action of my ball point pen. Probably my eyes were not in the margin but on the page, and obviously I was influenced by the “ea” in the wrong word, “nearer.” I intended to write “nether.” If Melville ever wrote down the wrong word because his mind had already pushed ahead, we would not penalize him forever for not pausing to complete one process at the expense of wrecking a bigger ongoing one.

Then there’s a category of outright blunders, as where you write “eastward” instead of “westward,” but there is no doubt that you wrote the wrong word without thinking which way a body of water was from the land you are talking about. That’s understandable. Prejudice or preconceptions can distort our transcriptions, certainly. I found an instance or two where the meticulous Jay Leyda put down the wrong word because he expected that something *as it happened, something unfavorable) would be revealed by the writer or revealed about someone else. I shudder at my blunder in the first volume of my biography, my giving Catherine Sedgwick a book called THE LINTONS when Helen Melville plainly had written, correctly, Linwoods. What had happened? WUTHERING HEIGHTS had overruled my perception for the moment.  I was transcribing Helen’s letter, and I transcribed wrongly, what was in my mind and not what I  should have seen. I could not see the right word because the Linton family was so strong in my mind. I certainly intended to write the right word, but Emily Bronte got in the way of my perceiving the right word.

Nevertheless, all sorts of blunders aside, intentionality is defined by what the writer wrote, and no word should be called “illegible,” contrary to Bryant. One of the best lessons Harrison Hayford taught me (early) was that no scholar should refer to a word as illegible. What I insist on saying even today, when I often work on Fold3 images, is that a word is not yet transcribed. If you say a word is “illegible” you just mean that you cannot read it or cannot yet read it. A word in a text dismissed as “illegible” has just not been focused on yet by the right reader. Sometimes, as in Hayford’s plucking “Timon” out of Melville’s manuscript fragment of “The River,” the result seems like divination, but divination is merely the total saturation of the alert and brilliant transcriber into the text being transcribed. Some of Robert Sandberg’s transcriptions of “The House of the Tragic Poet” are of the same order as Hayford’s best readings, and Sandberg’s comment to me when I expressed my awe at what he had achieved was what I should have expected: that for weeks he had submerged himself into the manuscript until he knew the direction of the thought in particular sentences and larger hunks of prose as well as the state in which the “whole” of the surviving parts of the piece were left. It was not a matter of glancing down at an unfamiliar page and saying “What that says is ‘after completing the transcribing and editing of the Pieces.’” However, however, there is the situation like that when four or five of your family are puzzling over the identity of a woman in a 1930s image and an older cousin glances at the photograph and says, “That’s Beulah.” That can happen when someone comes in and glances at the word you have been agonizing over. I confess to have spend hours trying to find a word Helen had written (I was looking at names of fabrics, I think) until I read the letter from the start again and understood it perfectly well in its context. You can too easily focus on the word and not the context.

The word I transcribe as “peroration” in the Typee fragment is NOT an illegible word. Bryant can challenge my transcription, and I can argue from context that my reading is right, but the word is, finally, not illegible. It is what Melville intended it to be, slips in inscribing aside.


But misreading because of our expectations is a different thing from transcribing according to “our differing rhetorical agendas.” In transcribing the Melville family letters my agenda was to put down what the family wrote in the order they intended it to be read. If the writer put the location down in a line (ARROWHEAD, say) and later wrote a sentence that started on that line and jumped over the location, I jumped over the location too and transcribed what the writer wanted to say and did say, despite the inadvertently self-imposed obstacle of the location that was in the way, later.

I had no rhetorical agenda. I wanted to transcribe what the author wrote.



When I worked with Bryant’s transcription a few years ago I found what I decided (in my old-school judgmental fashion) were 2 mis-transcriptions in the first 11 lines on the first side of the first surviving leaf.  Two errors in the first 11 lines of the first side of the first leaf! In both cases, Bryant’s “rhetorical agenda” seemed to be pushing neutral words into sexually charged words. This suggested to me that his “rhetorical agenda” was a sexual agenda. Later I got enough money together to purchase Bryant’s MELVILLE UNFOLDING: SEXUALITY, POLITICS, AND THE VERSIONS OF “TYPEE”: A FLUID-TEXT ANALYSIS, WITH AN EDITION OF THE “TYPEE” MANUSCRIPT.

Again, the title startles me, and not just the “SEXUALITY” part. No, this book cannot contain an edition of “the TYPEE Manuscript” because such a thing has never been seen by a living person and presumably has not existed since 1846, when it was discarded in London after compositors set from it. This is egregious self-aggrandizement. There are two “versions” of only a very limited number of passages of TYPEE, not “versions of TYPEE.” And if my sample from the first leaf is representative, then “Sexuality” really may reflect Bryant’s “rhetorical agenda” perhaps as much as the words Melville wrote in those surviving few leaves of the first draft. Has anyone checked all of Bryant’s transcription against that in Volume 13 in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Uncompleted Writings?

     What does the philosophy of transcribing by “rhetorical agenda” lead to? I posted about a book on mourning in which a well-meaning fellow mistranscribes family letters so as to present a grotesquely false history of the publication of Typee in the United States. Quoted over and over, his false conclusions have entered into the history of grieving in America.  Are those mis-transcriptions not misreadings at all, because there is no such thing as a misreading but only the product of a varying rhetorical agenda? Anything goes? Are we in a textual kindergarten where we make every child feel equally proud of himself or herself? What Jimmy transcribes is just as good as what Suzie transcribes? Do we say, “And Debbi, what a beautiful transcription!” “Johnny, what a transcription!”?


Let's be Honest.  Much of John Bryant’s career is a product of self-aggrandizement, not of genuine personal achievements. His following his rhetorical agenda throws me right back into that Melville Society meeting in Chicago in 1990 and the prophetic and satanic red-bearded stranger shouting from the doorway, to the approval of the audience, THE FACTS DON’T MATTER.

Is there a better writer on American History alive than Timothy Egan?

His newspaper editorial on reverse immigration, grandchildren of Okies leaving California, is a little masterpiece.

Monday, February 17, 2020

Four of John Bryant’s Fantasy Narratives of his Intimacy and Equality with Harrison Hayford


John Bryant’s Fantasy Narratives of his Intimacy and Eqality with Harrison Hayfor

In the 2002 FLUID TEXT  John Bryant makes much of his intimacy with his highly respected equals: "while researching Melville, I would drift uptown to the Newberry Library to confer with Harrison Hayford, who from time to time would drift down from Northwestern to conduct the making of his magisterial edition of The Writings of Herman Melville." 

Bryant’s SUGGESTION in that passage: There were two great men. One great man would drift down from Northwestern University in Evanston, the other great man drift up from the University of Chicago, providentially meeting at the Newberry Library. Hayford was working on the Melville Edition, but he merely drifted down, not taking the lurching El, and at the Newberry rendezvoused with Bryant.  It seemed preordained--Equals equally drifting to a rendezvous.


The March 2003 LEVIATHAN: “Harry was always available for long phone calls about anything from family, scholarship, modern critics, and politics to, of course, Melville.

Bryant’s SUGGESTION in this passage: Hayford always had time “for long phone calls” about whatever was on Bryant’s mind.

        In fact, Hayford dreaded Bryant's intrusive telephone calls because, he lamented to Brian Higgins, to me, and others, Bryant never got right to the point but held him for a long initial circular maundering before he got to the purpose of the call, and even then what he brought up was more or less incoherent. As early as 1990, certainly by 1991, Hayford began calling John Bryant “Chowderhead” for his inability to understand arguments and implement solutions.

        My diary 5 July 1991.  Sendak telephoned me: Told him Brian H[iggins] says Harry now labels him Chowderhead.”

        Bryant’s inability to focus on a topic and his inability to understand the application of evidence is what made Hayford wave his hands around his head and say, “CHOWDERHEAD". I can testify that every time Bryant called me for advice about evidence in some contribution to MELVILLE SOCIETY EXTRACTS I became exasperated because he could not follow my explanation of what a line of evidence suggested. He never understood  just what helpful suggestions he might convey to the contributor. He seemed never to understand any argument from evidence. As you went through the steps in an argument, it was as if his mind had taken off on another topic altogether. He did not simply go off on tangents, if tangents start from a recognizable simple point on a curve, or maybe a complex area of a line. Bryant would simply go off, untethered, leaving you with the suggestions you had made or were still making. Maybe he was already planning to call someone else about a new topic. This pattern drove Harrison Hayford to distraction.”

My diary 5 July 1991.  Sendak telephoned me: “Told him Brian H[iggins] says Harry now labels him Chowderhead. 


Bryant in the June 2006 LEVIATHAN: “When I first met him, we both happened to live in the same metropolitan area: I was a graduate student on Chicago’s South Side; he, a world renowned Melville scholar and editor up north in Evanston. We agreed to meet half way, in 1973 at The Newberry Library, where he showed me the Library’s famous (now dispersed) Melville Room with its remarkable collection of materials including an equally famous (among Melvilleans) file cabinet of articles on all things Melville. He asked me questions about my dissertation and made me feel real, and his presence and nod gave me a crucial boost during a period of academic depression that drove many away from the profession.”


Bryant’s  SUGGESTION in this passage: Here Bryant acknowledges how different their statures were. They were unequals but they learned of each other somehow (who made the first move?) and agreed to meet halfway. After a personal guided tour of the Melville holdings, Hayford bestowed a blessing on him with “his presence and nod,” making him feel real, an equal then or at least to become an equal. When the God nods to you benignly it gives you a Crucial Boost to scholarly immortality?

The March 2003 LEVIATHAN: “We met at his house and in hotel rooms to look at photos of the “Art manuscripts or my transcription of the Typee manuscript. Shoulder to shoulder we pored over these objects marveling at their impenetrability.”


Bryant’s SUGGESTION in this passage: First, the implication that there was a manuscript of Typee  in the 1983 Augusta Papers, not a dozen or so leaves. This is egregious self-aggrandizing. Second, the false implication of frequent working meetings at 1010 Elmwood Avenue and hotel rooms. Third, the implication that Hayford ever would have thought of any Melville manuscripts as being impenetrable. Hayford simply never saw any Melville manuscript as anything but something to be transcribed. By the late 1970s Hayford and Robert Ryan had done detailed study of “Art.” A scholar does not marvel at the impenetrability of even the most difficult documents. I remember quite well how gnarly Cousin Priscilla’s handwriting was, but she formed her letters regularly and I caught on so as to capture every word, and in the process learn the title of Melville’s 1853 book, THE ISLE OF THE CROSS. That’s what scholars do. Fourth, the implication that Bryant and Hayford  were Mighty Champions [who for prolonged periods struggled together] shoulder to shoulder.  They never worked over Melville manuscripts this way.

        Think how “shoulder to shoulder” is used. Think of accounts of Churchill and Roosevelt sitting shoulder to shoulder.  Just to remind everyone how that phrase is used by real champions I quote from the 90 year old Joseph McJunkin’s affidavit supporting the application of the widow of Joseph Ratchford for his Revolutionary War pension. McJunkin gives a good American usage of the phrase Bryant used so self-aggrandizingly. 






(The meticulous transcriber is Will Graves.) Ordinary soldiers can earn the right to say they “fought hand to hand & shoulder to shoulder together,” as much as Churchill could have said that, after Roosevelt’s death. Scholars can work together shoulder to shoulder as Churchill and Roosevelt did and as McJunkin and Ratchford did, but nothing like that happened when Hayford and Bryant looked at “Art” and at images of the dozen-plus leaves of the draft of Typee.

A NOD from God--The Religious Hints by which John Bryant conveys his Exaltation to Equality with a great Melvillean

Elsewhere Bryant depicts himself as toiling "shoulder to shoulder" with Harrison Hayford, equals in scholarly achievement. In what I quote in the next paragraph, I want to point out the significance of his describing a blessing from Hayford. "God's Nods" are a part of Christian lore, as the quotation at the end from Jill Duffield makes clear.

John Bryant in the June 2006 LEVIATHAN on Harrison Hayford: “When I first met him, we both happened to live in the same metropolitan area: I was a graduate student on Chicago’s South Side; he, a world renowned Melville scholar and editor up north in Evanston. We agreed to meet half way, in 1973 at The Newberry Library, where he showed me the Library’s famous (now dispersed) Melville Room with its remarkable collection of materials including an equally famous (among Melvilleans) file cabinet of articles on all things Melville. He asked me questions about my dissertation and made me feel real, and his presence and nod gave me a crucial boost during a period of academic depression that drove many away from the profession.”

I am looking at this passages and others in which Bryant claims not only intimacy with Hayford but actual equality, a "shoulder to shoulder" partnership. Here I just want to emphasize the mystical significance in the last sentence I quoted. Hayford's questions made Bryant feel real, and Hayford's mere presence and his "nod" gave Bryant a boost, exalted him, you might say. What is going on here is religious--a blessing. The "nod" is not integral to ongoing labor. It is bestowed freely.

Here in a publication of the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators is the opening of a 20 July 2017 article by Jill Duffield entitled "GOD NODS." This is not a "Homer nods" situation at all. It is the bestowal of blessing just as Bryant implies in what I quoted.

          Early into my tenure as the pastor of a small church in rural North Carolina, when I was anxious about preaching every week and unsure God would indeed supply the words through the Word from Sunday to Sunday, I received a gift. I received a divine gift, what a friend of mine calls a “God nod.” A God nod is a small, but unmistakable affirmation of God’s presence. As I drove to worship on this particular Sunday, my anxiety level rising as I turned on the final stretch of road to the church, I saw Queen Anne’s lace dotting the side of the highway. The wild flowers had not been there just days before when I’d been on this same stretch headed to Wednesday evening Bible study. Now the lovely, delicate, white weeds were everywhere.

I arrived at the church, parked my car, and walked into the sanctuary. In the two vases of flowers on the stands that flanked the pulpit Queen Anne’s Lace overflowed. Another God nod.

          A God nod, a clear, simple, ordinary and unmistakable assurance of God’s presence and power made known through the weeds of the field along the roadside and arranged in the house of the Lord. You see, the text for the day was one of those seedy parables from Matthew and the sermon was woven together with the image of Queen Anne’s Lace. Queen Anne’s Lace, like the word of God, beautiful, resilient, ubiquitous, not planted nor cultivated by human hands, but undeniably present, abundant, alive and spreading. On that summer morning they were a God nod, assurance that the Spirit was working independent of me, my abilities or my limitations. Each tuft of white blowing in the breeze said, “Trust.” They reminded me that God does provide the words through the Word, made flesh and made known through the lilies of the field, too.

          I have come to take God nods seriously. I used to brush them off as coincidence or self-fulfilling prophecy or just happenstance. But now, I pay attention. I say, “Thanks for the sign, God.” Instead of what I used to often plead, “God, give me a sign.” I am not as inclined to beg for burning bushes, or voices from the cloud, or talking donkeys, or detailed visions, or explicit instructions in my dreams. Not that such communications from God would be unwelcomed. (Well, actually, given what those communications convey – go to Pharaoh, speak a word of judgment to your own people, take Mary as your wife, I am sending you to Saul now Paul, go eat with Gentiles – maybe they would not be as welcomed as I imagine them to be.) Now I seek to hear and heed the words and Word of God spoken in nods and nudges, simple conversations and chance encounters. I try to remain awake to notes that come at just the right moment, words that keep coming up in various readings, butterflies that suddenly land in my path, and unexpected people who speak wisdom or grace or admonishment.

When Bryant says Hayford gave him a nod, he is conveying that the nod exalted him--to intellectual grandeur and perhaps scholarly immortality, later comments make clear. I will print some more in this series in which Bryant establishes his equality with Hayford. There is genuine subtlety in Bryant's way of ingratiating himself into high intimacy and even equality with a great man. A reader can overlook what a "nod" signifies even while responding to its mention.



Sunday, February 16, 2020

Self-Aggrandizement and Clarification about Bryant's Stance as Biographer (in Cody Marrs's 2019 collection of essays)



This is from Bryant's essay, “The Biographical Re-Turn:  Writing Melville Biography and the Example of Women” in the Cambridge U P book edited by Cody Marrs, The New Melville Studies (2019).




In looking at this I focus on Bryant's acknowledging the risk of making his biography a mirror of his own desire. That is precisely what he did with Melville's texts in FLUID TEXTS. I mean, he read at least some the less clearly written words of a manuscript not to see what they said, what Melville had intended the marks to mean, but what he (Bryant) wanted them to say, what he preferred them to say according to his "rhetorical agenda." Let me quote a passage from p. 19:



[This is Bryant:] I read a crucial, illegible word in the Typee manuscript as 'promotion'; whereas Hershel Parker sees it as 'peroration'. The word Melville intended is one word only; the scribble we both 'see' is the same; but the readings we give to it vary with our differing rhetorical agendas. I doubt that Parker and I, or anyone else, will be able to resolve this issue; all we can do is engage in a discourse upon the intended text, and its intentionality is defined by that discourse.



[This is HP again:] Several comments. There is no manuscript of Typee. We know only of 16 leaves from the first draft. In innumerable places Bryant self-aggrandizes himself as working with an entire manuscript. No, 15 leaves, one having been transcribed perfectly in the NN edition.



Another comment.  The word I transcribe as “peroration” is NOT an illegible word. Bryant can challenge my transcription, and I can argue from context that my reading is right, but the word is, finally, not illegible. It is what Melville intended it to be.
Prejudice can distort our transcriptions, certainly. I found an instance or two where the meticulous Jay Leyda put down the wrong word because he expected that something unfavorable would be revealed by the writer or revealed about someone else. We can see what we expect to see.

But misreading because of our expectations is a different thing from transcribing according to “our differing rhetorical agendas.” In transcribing the Melville family letters my agenda was to put down what the family members wrote in the order they intended it to be read. If the writer put the location down in a line (ARROWHEAD, say) and later wrote a sentence that started on that line and jumped over the location, I jumped over the location too and transcribed what the writer wanted to say and did say, despite the inadvertently self-imposed obstacle of the location that was in the way, later.

I had no rhetorical agenda. I wanted to transcribe what the author wrote. Remember,
Bryant is talking on the basis of his transcription of sixteen known leaves from the first draft of TYPEE—one leaf long known in the NYPL and fifteen that went to the NYPL as part of the “Augusta Papers” of 1983. It is unfortunate that the wording Bryant uses implies that there is a full manuscript of TYPEE. There is no such thing as “the TYPEE manuscript.” Referring to the surviving pages as “the TYPEE manuscript” instead of “the surviving leaves from the first draft of TYPEE” deflects our attention from what Bryant is actually working with—sixteen leaves, not a full draft of a book. This is sleight of hand, self-aggrandizing on a grand scale. I have reason to think that there were readers of applications at NEH who did not realize that only 16 leaves of the draft of Typee are known.

When I worked with Bryant’s transcription a few years ago I found what I decided (in my old-school scholarly  fashion) were 2 mis-transcriptions in the first 11 lines on the first side of the first surviving leaf. --Two errors in the first 11 lines!--In both cases, Bryant’s “rhetorical agenda” seemed to be pushing pretty obviously inscribed neutral words into sexually charged words. This suggested to me that his “rhetorical agenda” was a sexual agenda. I did not go on trying to verify his transcription of the draft leaves.



Much later I got enough money together to purchase Bryant’s MELVILLE UNFOLDING: SEXUALITY, POLITICS, AND THE VERSIONS OF “TYPEE”: A FLUID-TEXT ANALYSIS, WITH AN EDITION OF THE “TYPEE” MANUSCRIPT. Again, the title startles me, and not just the “SEXUALITY” part. No, this book cannot contain an edition of “the TYPEE Manuscript” because such a thing has never been seen by a living person and presumably has not existed since 1846, when it was discarded in London after compositors set from it. There are “versions” of only a very limited number of passages of TYPEE, not “versions of TYPEE.” And if my sample from the first leaf is representative, then “Sexuality” really may reflect Bryant’s “rhetorical agenda” perhaps as much as the words Melville wrote in those surviving few leaves of the first draft.

What does the philosophy of transcribing by “rhetorical agenda” lead to? Are there no such things as misreadings? Are there no misreadings but only products of  varying rhetorical agendas? Anything goes? Are we in a textual kindergarten where we make every child feel equally proud of himself or herself? What Jimmy transcribes is just as good as what Suzie transcribes? Do we say, “And Debbi, what a beautiful transcription!” “Johnny, what a transcription!”?  Well, I remember what Harrison Hayford said at the last MLA Melville Society meeting we attended, the one in Chicago in 1990, when the audience applauded the idea that Hawthorne had put Melville into an early story before he had heard of Melville, “Then we are operating under a different notion of evidence.” All the while the satanic red-bearded stranger at the door kept shouting, “THE FACTS DON’T MATTER!”