John Bryant and the Old Notion of "Truth in Packaging"

John Bryant and the Old Notion of "Truth in Packaging"
This deserves a separate little note, reposted in May for convenience of readers.

This is the full title a book by John Bryant: MELVILLE UNFOLDING: SEXUALITY, POLITICS, AND THE VERSIONS OF TYPEE: A FLUID-TEXT ANALYSIS, WITH AN EDITION OF THE TYPEE MANUSCRIPT.

What can the University of Michigan editors have thought they were doing when they allowed such a title?

There are no "Versions of Typee." There are versions of a handful of passages in Typee.

There exists no "Typee Manuscript" as far as anyone knows. There is NO SUCH THING.

There exist sixteen leaves from the first draft of Typee. As far as we know, this is all--one that had long been in the NYPL-GL, fifteen added as part of the 1983 "Augusta Papers."

16 Leaves and What Do You Get?
---- -- ---- -- ------- ---- . . . .

I have protested to Bryant over the years against the use of misleading terms in applications for federal funding. It is a little late now for NEH and all other charitable funding organizations to take notice, but here is a warning: There is no known manuscript of TYPEE.

Can we not define our projects in ways that look less self-aggrandizing or self-magnifying? The work of transcribing and analyzing 16 manuscript leaves should be honorable enough to be described simply and accurately.

Indeed, making a careful transcription and analysis of the surviving leaves from Melville's first draft of TYPEE would have been an honorable enough enterprise for anyone. I thought my chapter on "The Sailor at the Writing Desk" was well worth doing, as an early attempt to make a narrative about young Melville as a working writer. I know very well how happy I would be to see a more minute analysis of the order in which Melville worked and a conscientious transcription of the words he put down on the paper on those 16 leaves, along with a full depiction of his arsenal of symbols for re-arranging bits of prose. Does anyone want a transcription guided by one person's "rhetorical agenda" instead of a determination to find what the author intended by each word?

I note now (16 April 2011) that Bryant's informative "Melville, 'Little Henry,' and the Process of Composition: A Peep at the TYPEE Fragment" is more accurately titled. A title with "Draft Fragment" or some other wording would have been better, but "TYPEE Fragment" gives adequate warning that Bryant is dealing not with a TYPEE Manuscript but just a fragment (a fragment of the first draft, in fact). Honesty in packaging takes thought, and this September 1986 title in Extracts 67 is not perfect but certainly better than the outright misrepresentations in Bryant's later wording.

John Bryant's Contempt for Biographical Accuracy series, p. 257 of MELVILLE'S EVERMOVING DAWN

This continues the   "one Aunt Mary is as good as another Aunt Mary" series.

I was personally humiliated by having erroneous footnotes attached to the transcription of what was said at the Biographers' Panel. Now, years later, I see John Bryant's errors as part of a general carelessness about factual accuracy in professors who were taught by New Critics or the children of the New Critics. I will write somewhere about the way practitioners of the New Historicism, in particular, seem to regard biographical names or places or events as decorative items that can be chosen among without doing basic checking. To say Gansevoort died while seeing Melville's first book through the press is to diminish his triumph: at great cost to himself, he succeeded--he held copies of the book. To say that the temperature in Moxon's office was low is to misunderstand the metaphor: Moxon's MANNER was icy, and Melville managed to thaw him a little. This sort of thing matters--to me. And to confuse one Aunt Mary with another is to show no VISUALIZING of the scene, the fault I have complained about as common in Brenda Wineapple's HAWTHORNE: A LIFE. What would the Dorchester aunt be doing in Pittsfield?


These were real living people. They deserve to be thought of that way, not as cardboard pop-ups you can safely shuffle at will. And when documents are available, they ought to be used. Maria Melville's letter and other documents account for hours and hours of 2-4 August 1850 so that the possibility that HM began reading the NH book then was very very slim. He was the host! VISUALIZE! It's strange how important visualizing comes to seem to me as I think on the common contempt for accuracy in biographical matters.

CONTEMPT FOR BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS SERIES--More of John Bryant's Embarrassing Errors in his notes on the 1991 Pittsfield Biography Panel

MELVILLE'S EVERMOVING DAWN was published late in 1997, six and a half years after the panel discussion Bryant provided the fns for, a year after the publication of the first volume of my biography of Melville.

I was humiliated by the errors associated with my comments on the panel and was irritated by Bryant's casual dismissal of my complaint!

To me it mattered that someone was a cousin or a step-cousin. It mattered that Melville said he had started TYPEE in NYC and not in Lansingburgh. Surely Bryant ought to have known about the label Melville affixed to the draft manuscript of TYPEE which he gave to Augusta, since he had published his "Little Henry" article as early as the September 1986 issue of EXTRACTS. The years of Malcolm's and Milie's birth mattered to me. Casually saying Uncle Peter was "invariably helpful in supporting his widowed sister and her family" was simply erroneous, as had been the earlier description by writers on Melville of Peter as Melville's favorite uncle. Peter's selfishness (or perceived selfishness) fills many of the early letters in the Augusta Papers. He could have educated Maria's children and Leonard's children. Timely expenditure of small sums could have altered the lives of those orphaned children. To call Catherine Lansing Elizabeth Shaw Melville's sister-in-law is very strange.

Accuracy mattered to me in 1997, and matters still. I simply don't understand the New Historical habit of treating biographical data as decorative--one Aunt Mary as good as another Aunt Mary, since what's aimed for is the historicist appearance of concern with context rather than the product of actual historical research into contexts.

CONTEMPT FOR BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS SERIES--Sample page 2 of Humiliating Errors in Notes by John Bryant in MELVILLE'S EVERMOVING DAWN (1997)

I loved Leon Howard but in the 1990s I would not have cited any page of his biography without correcting it. Leon's temperament required him to try to make Melville normal whenever he could, and any time the facts were not clear and there were two or more possible actions Leon would choose wrong, every time, every time, because he so wanted Melville to be reasonable. After the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of MOBY-DICK was published in 1988 and until the first volume of my biography was published in 1996 any responsible scholar would have used my account of the meeting of Melville and Hawthorne there, in the Historical Note. Possibly MELVILLE'S EVERMOVING DAWN was in press when my first volume came out, but if so the Historical Note ought to have been used. I had the great advantage of Maria Melville's detailed account of the comings and goings of the magical week as well as much other previously unknown information. To have Bryant citing Leon was humiliating indeed.


so

CONTEMPT FOR BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS SERIES--Sample page 1 of Humiliating Errors in Notes by John Bryant in MELVILLE'S EVERMOVING DAWN (1997)

As a participant in "Biographers on Biography" I was given a chance to correct a transcript of the forum, but not a chance to look over John Bryant's notes on the panel discussion. Here is a sample page of Bryant's notes and my comments. I felt humiliated by the errors, but the impression I got when I protested was that one Aunt Mary was as good as another. The impression I got, in fact, was that biographical details were decorations. I had by then devoted many years to a pursuit of accuracy and knew that every Melville story absolutely depended upon accuracy in transcriptions, in dating, in identification of the most minor associates. No, I was not happy when the book came on 27 September 1997, once I saw the notes on "Biographers on Biography."

John Bryant and the Old Notion of "Truth in Packaging"

This deserves a separate little note.

This is the full title of John Bryant's MELVILLE UNFOLDING: SEXUALITY, POLITICS, AND THE VERSIONS OF TYPEE: A FLUID-TEXT ANALYSIS, WITH AN EDITION OF THE TYPEE MANUSCRIPT.

What can the University of Michigan editors have thought they were doing when they allowed such a title?

There are no "Versions of Typee." There are versions of a handful of passages in Typee.

There exists no "Typee Manuscript" as far as anyone knows. There is NO SUCH THING.

There exist sixteen leaves from the first draft of Typee. As far as we know, this is all--one that had long been in the NYPL-GL, fifteen added as part of the 1983 "Augusta Papers."

16 Leaves and What Do You Get?
---- -- ---- -- ------- ---- . . . .

I have protested to Bryant over the years against the use of misleading terms in applications for federal funding. It is a little late now for NEH and all other charitable funding organizations to take notice, but here is a warning: There is no known manuscript of TYPEE.

Can we not define our projects in ways that look less self-aggrandizing or self-magnifying? The work of transcribing and analyzing 16 manuscript leaves should be honorable enough to be described simply and accurately.

Indeed, making a careful transcription and analysis of the surviving leaves from Melville's first draft of TYPEE would have been an honorable enough enterprise for anyone. I thought my chapter on "The Sailor at the Writing Desk" was well worth doing, as an early attempt to make a narrative about young Melville as a working writer. I know very well how happy I would be to see a more minute analysis of the order in which Melville worked and a conscientious transcription of the words he put down on the paper on those 16 leaves, along with a full depiction of his arsenal of symbols for re-arranging bits of prose. Does anyone want a transcription guided by one person's "rhetorical agenda" instead of a determination to find what the author intended by each word?

I note now (16 April 2011) that Bryant's informative "Melville, 'Little Henry,' and the Process of Composition: A Peep at the TYPEE Fragment" is more accurately titled. A title with "Draft Fragment" or some other wording would have been better, but "TYPEE Fragment" gives adequate warning that Bryant is dealing not with a TYPEE Manuscript but just a fragment (a fragment of the first draft, in fact). Honesty in packaging takes thought, and this September 1986 title in Extracts 67 is not perfect but certainly better than the outright misrepresentations in Bryant's later wording.