This needs to be posted again.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
HOW FAR WILL THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER
EDUCATION GO TO PROTECT LYING IVY LEAGUE REVIEWERS?
HOW FAR WILL THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
GO TO PROTECT LYING IVY LEAGUE REVIEWERS?
This is a topic worth pursuing until the CHRONICLE
apologizes for what it did on February 11, 2013 in “A Leviathan Task of
Biography.”
It looks to me as if the CHRONICLE will go to
great lengths to protect eminent Ivy League professors from the consequences of
their own actions—outright lying about the state of scholarship in order to
discredit a scholar.
Let’s review. I am talking about actual lies,
not comments about my weak prose or flimsy logic in my biography of Melville,
and not gaffs by the reviewers, not simple misconstruings of my presentation of
events. There are such things as
outright lies in reviews, and lies can have devastating consequences on the
reputation of the one lied about. I did not sleep peacefully one night between
the reviews of Richard Brodhead in the New York TIMES and Andrew Delbanco in
the NEW REPUBLIC in 2002 and the time I began speaking out in 2007. The lies
did horrible damage to my health. By the time Elizabeth Schultz copy-catted the
big boys much of the damage had been done, although she drove new twisted nails
into what closed upon me as if it were the coffin of my reputation.
Let’s look at the lies, remembering that
evidence was laid out right there on the pages of the biography for any casual
reader to see. If a casual reader can see something, paid reviewers have an
obligation to see it and to avoid wrongly defaming the author of the book they
are reviewing,
Let me review the situation. In 2002 three prominent Melville critics, Richard
Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz, warned that my biography was
unreliable by citing my treatment of THE ISLE OF THE CROSS (1853) and POEMS
(1860). The second of these reviewers, Delbanco, did not cite the earliest,
Brodhead, as his authority, and Schultz cited neither Brodhead nor Delbanco.
Brodhead in the New York Times for 23 June 2002 disparaged “Parker's
surmises about works Melville never published that did not survive,” the first
“a novel based on materials he shared with Hawthorne about a sailor who
deserted his wife. . . . Parker is also
convinced that Melville prepared a volume of poems in 1860 that failed to be
published. If this is so, a stretch that had seemed empty of literary strivings
was instead a time of new effort and new failure--a black hole Parker alone has
the instruments to detect.” The prose book was not surmised: we had known since
1960, for sure, that Melville completed a book in mid 1853. To say that I alone
in my “black hole” had detected POEMS was an outright lie. As was clear in my
biography, every scholar and critic had known about POEMS since 1922. If I was
in a black hole, I was far from alone there! Willard Thorp, move over—make room
for Jay Leyda and Leon Howard and all the rest!
Similarly, Andrew Delbanco in the NEW REPUBLIC (September 2002) warned
that my second volume, like the first, “must be used with caution.” [Here I do
not note his errors in describing what I said.] Delbanco: “For one thing,
Parker is amazingly certain of his own conclusions. . . . He is sure that
immediately after completing ‘Pierre,’ Melville wrote an unpublished novel
(Parker implies that after failing to find a publisher, Melville burned it)
inspired by a story he had heard about a sailor who disappears for thirty
years, then returns to the wife for whom he has become a distant memory. He is
sure that when Melville traveled by slow boat to San Francisco in 1860, he
expected to find waiting for him a finished copy of a book of poems that he had
entrusted in manuscript to his brother for transmission to his publishers
before leaving the East. (Such a book was never
published--and it is a surmise that Melville ever wrote it.) . . . . In short, Parker trusts his own intuition completely, and,
presenting inferences as facts, he expects his readers to trust it, too.” My
talking about the completion of POEMS was not a surmise, the word used by
Brodhead and Delbanco: we not only know he completed it, we even know of two
publishers who looked at POEMS and rejected it.
Brodhead and Delbanco refrained even from naming THE ISLE OF THE CROSS,
as if the title gave it too much actuality. Elizabeth Schultz in THE COMMON
REVIEW (Winter 2002) mentioned the title skeptically in her complaint: “Parker
also reads betrayal and despair into the disappearance of two manuscripts,
which he contends Melville completed--a novel, putatively titled The Isle of
the Cross, and his first collection of poems. Throughout his biography, Parker
bemoans the loss of The Isle of the Cross's ghostly manuscript, imagining
Melville's regret at never having found a publisher for it. Although there is
only tentative evidence for the manuscript's existence and submission to a
publisher, its ostensible rejection leads Parker to view his heroic author as
victimized: ‘masterful as he could be, [Melville] had a way now, after the
failure of Moby-Dick and Pierre, of seeing himself as passive victim to whom
things were done.’" Tentative evidence? Did Schultz assume that the
editors of the LETTERS lied about an 1853 book years before I lied about one
entitled THE ISLE OF THE CROSS? “Throughout” my biography? Where, after the
initial discussion? What does she mean by “putative”? Hers seems to be an
ignorant, disdainful elaboration on what she picked up from Brodhead and
Delbanco.
In their accusations none of these three reviewers mentioned the
existence of any documentary evidence that earlier scholars and I had brought
forward concerning these two lost books. All three critics ignored a full half
century of accumulating evidence about a book Melville completed in 1853. The
publication of LETTERS (1960) proved the existence of the novel finished in
1853, although it was 1987 before I discovered the title, THE ISLE OF THE
CROSS, and 1990 before I published the evidence in AMERICAN LITERATURE. All
three ignored extensive evidence about POEMS, most of which had been available
for eight decades. In my biography, of course, I quoted Melville’s well-known
12-point memo to his brother Allan on the publication of his POEMS! The evidence for both lost books
was laid out right there on the pages of the biography.
Some lies don’t matter. If a reviewer says I
mistook a letter by Helen Melvill for one by Helen Melville, that would not
matter much, even if I had been right. The reader of the review would just say,
hey, Parker’s not so careful after all. (I confess to being so in thrall to
Emily Bronte that I looked at “Linwoods” in a manuscript and miscopied it as
“Lintons”!) But false accusations can be deeply damaging.
Paula Backscheider says this in the Introduction
to her REFLECTIONS ON BIOGRAPHY: “For an academic to be accused of ‘making
things up’ or ‘conflating’ quotations and evidence is the most serious charge
that can be levelled against him or her and may discredit that person forever.”
In the March 30, 2013 WALL STREET JOURNAL Carl
Rollyson confirmed Backscheider: to suggest that I “invented details” to suit
my ‘all-consuming quest’ to tell Melville’s story was “a nearly mortal blow to
a biographer who has spent his entire career documenting every aspect of his
subject’s life.”
I felt from June 2002 to March 30, 2013 that I
might indeed have been discredited forever by Brodhead and Delbanco’s lies,
which flourish still on the Internet, brazen as ever. Liberation came when
Rollyson discussed some of my charges against one slandering reviewer, Delbanco.
Say it bluntly: Rollyson was the first reviewer in an NYC paper who ever dealt
honestly with a book of mine, without overt or hidden personal-political
agenda. The only bias I can see in his review is against ignorant, flippant, or
malicious reviewing of worthy biographies, for he has not only written many
biographies but has written books on the genre of biography.
As it happens, Rollyson in the WALL STREET
JOURNAL did not specifically look at the lies Brodhead and Delbanco told about
my inventing lost books of Melville’s.
Earlier in 2013, I had hoped that the CHRONICLE
OF HIGHER EDUCATION might be the paper which first set out my grievances
against Brodhead and Delbanco. That did not happen. Indeed, the CHRONICLE set
me up for scorn instead of vindicating me.
Here is the sequence as I reconstruct it. The
NEW YORKER blog for January 2013 listed MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE
among the “Books to Watch Out For” that month. Reading that “Parker writes with
a rare combination of humor and passion,” someone at the CHRONICLE decided that
reviewing the book would be a good idea. Northwestern University Press promptly
provided a review copy and on January 18 a reporter emailed Northwestern
wanting to have some kind of interview with me because the book “would be a
great fit” for their “Books & Arts” section and they wanted to hurry
because they wanted to print the article as close as they could to the official
publication date, January 15.
In the next days the reporter and I settled on
January 28 for a telephone interview. We talked for over an hour. I told the
reporter how damaged I had been about the accusations that I had merely
“surmised” or actually made up THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS and went into
some detail about the psychology of being slandered. I told him how the victim
internalizes shame and does not sound convincing when trying to defend himself.
In fact, there was in 2002 a new director of the Johns Hopkins University Press
and I never felt I had convincingly conveyed to her that I had been horribly
abused. When you complain about reviews in the New York TIMES and the NEW
REPUBLIC—reviews written by chaired professors at Yale and Columbia—you
inevitably sound as if you are being overly sensitive and defensive about what
must have been justified criticisms.
Reader, try it the next time someone says some horrific lie about
you—try explaining that you really don’t often beat your husband with a harpoon
handle. Anyhow, I went into some detail with the reporter about the lies about
my inventing POEMS, in particular, and the damage that had done to my
reputation and my health. I mentioned that Delbanco’s slanders had been picked
up by others and elaborated. Alan Helms was guilty of this in Nineteenth-Century Literature—using
Delbanco’s words to slander me all over again as a “slippery fish” with
evidence--after all, Delbanco had said so, although not in those words.
So, I had said my say to the reporter from the
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, and put my grievances on record, I thought. On
February 1 Rose Engelland emailed from the CHRONICLE to ask permission to put a
photograph of me in the CHRONICLE—the picture she had taken from my 2008
MELVILLE: THE MAKING OF THE POET. I said yes, at once, without comment on the
fact that the beard in that picture had been shaved off and without offering
one of the trial photos we had taken in the fall of 2012 for MELVILLE
BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE. Don’t rock the boat was my motto. Harold Bloom
wants to reprint my 1963 article, I don’t ask to make any changes. Don’t rock
the boat.
Then on Friday February 8 the reporter thanked
me for working with the art department on the photo and asked me to confirm a
few details about my age, residence, and so on. Fine.
On Sunday 10 February the CHRONICLE posted a teaser:
“More than a decade after the publication of his career-defining Melville
volumes, Hershel Parker strikes back at his critics in a genre-bending new
work.” I loved “genre-bending,” for the book in fact was in part autobiography
of me as biographer, in part a history of Melville biography, in part a history
of criticism of Melville biography, in part a set of demonstrations of a
biographer at work, and finally extensive endnotes which (while starting with
problems I recognized in Melville) constituted a seminar of British and some
American biographers on biography as a genre, not just on Melville.
What happened between
Friday and Monday? It looks to me as if someone intervened. The
complimentary-sounding title remained—“A Leviathan Task of Biography.” My photo
was dropped and a picture of Melville was run in—my face being no great loss in
itself but a strong indication that someone had made from up high an executive
decision: Parker was not to be honored by this impulsively commissioned
article. The second paragraph is shamelessly falsified and to my textual
scholar’s eye it looks like nothing so much as an editorial intrusion:
Instead of moving from the first
paragraph (“to Parker’s mind, unwarranted condemnation from many within the
academy”), the CHRONICLE report proceeded to this second paragraph:
Critical
reviews appeared in newspapers, magazines, and journals, and Parker, a
professor emeritus of English at the University of Delaware, found himself at
odds with such Melville scholars as Richard Brodhead (who raised questions
about Parker's "editorial principles" in The New
York Times) and Andrew Delbanco (who, while criticizing Parker's misreading
of sex and sin, did declare, in The New York Review of Books, that
"Parker's biography is written with love and devotion"). Critics'
skepticism centered on two issues: the name of a lost Melville story ("The
Isle of the Cross") and the importance of an 1860 manuscript called
"Poems." A falling-out followed, and Parker, who felt he had been
victimized, drifted away from groups like the Melville Society.
What happened?
This is a totally fabricated paragraph.
I can’t find
“editorial principles” in Brodhead’s review and can’t find it in MELVILLE
BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE. Of course, my quarrel with Brodhead had nothing
to do with editorial principles but only with his saying I merely surmised the
existence of two lost books, and in particular that only I in my “black hole”
had identified POEMS. Why did the CHRONICLE reach back to a review by Delbanco
in the NYRofB in 1997 to find a
complimentary phrase instead of looking at his accusation in 2002 that I had
made up two books which I claimed Melville wrote but which are now lost? And of
course the “name” of THE ISLE OF THE CROSS is not in dispute but the existence
of the book, and of course it’s not “the importance of an 1860 manuscript
called ‘Poems’” but the existence of that book. The last paragraph says a
“falling-out” followed—a falling out with Brodhead over “editorial principles”?
and a “falling-out” with Delbanco over what—his criticizing my “misreading of
sex and sin”? Anyhow, who was misreading? Feeling victimized, after 2002 I
“drifted away” from the Melville Society. No, after the new-leftist takeover in
1990 I stopped going to Melville Society meetings, except when I got to climb
pyramids in Central America one year. My standards are flexible!
Now, the damage
does not stop with the one phony paragraph. Any good critic, and not just a New
Critic, will read every following paragraph with this fabricated second
paragraph in mind. What made the New Criticism so easy to apply that much of it
is based on how real people read all the time. You put that second paragraph
in, the one about “editorial principles” and “misreading of sex and sin,” and
every harsh thing you quote me as saying after that is transformed into the
rantings of an old codger who believes without warrant that he has been
criticized too much by reviewers, who really had merely disagreed on editorial
principles (principles, after all)
and who really recognized that he had written with “love and devotion.” You would have to be loony to complain about
such reviewers. So with this setup, was it any surprise that the first comment
in the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION starts “Hershel Parker Crazy”?
By the strategic
fabrication of the content and by the strategic placement of the 2nd
paragraph, the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION defended the President of Duke
University and a chaired professor at Columbia while injuring me all over
again. Rather than laying out the genuine grievance, the CHRONICLE damaged me
all over again.
If Tesla can shame the New York
TIMES into an apology over its review of Tesla's Model S sedan, can I shame the
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION into printing an honest paragraph in place of the
fabricated 2nd paragraph?
