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.