Hopes for THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE (1965-2017)

LOOKING BACK, 52 and a half years after this all started.

10 YEARS AGO, IN THE JUNE 2007 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE I PROTESTED ABOUT THE PRACTICE OF REFERRING TO MOST OF MELVILLE'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY AS "LATE." Maybe about the same time I realized that the first (1965) flyer from Northwestern-University Press gave the title of Volume 13 as "BILLY BUDD AND OTHER LATE MANUSCRIPTS (late unpublished prose and poetry, 1860-1891)." When was it? after 2007 for sure, I realized we were still using the old title or a variant of it and got us all to say UNCOMPLETED instead of LATE. Now it has become clear that much more is at stake than referring to BILLY BUDD as completed and ready for the press (which still happens) or referring to all the unpublished poems as "late." In 1965 we did not have a good sense of the history of Melville's working life. We had been warned in 1960 in the LETTERS that Melville had finished a book in 1853, but even after I found the title and published an article in AMERICAN LITERATURE (1990) about it some critics still denied the existence of THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS (which Weaver in 1921 had not known about). (I alone in my "black hole" had imagined POEMS, Richard Brodhead said in the N Y Times in 2002). A biographer-to-be, Andrew Delbanco, said I was unreliable throughout both volumes of the biography because I had said there was a book called THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and another called POEMS. Another critic, Elizabeth Schultz, called these "books" merely "putative." This was not the worst, in some ways. Others listed Melville's published works as if "Bartleby" and other stories came right next to Melville's work on PIERRE. Others referred to BATTLE-PIECES as Melville's first volume of poetry, his "inaugural" volume after his "turn" to poetry, not acknowledging that if two or more publishers had not rejected the manuscript in 1860 POEMS would have been Melville's first volume of poetry.
That is, critics have ignored the stretch from the fall of 1852 to May 1853, especially from December 1853 on, when Melville was writing (and absorbed in writing) THE ISLE OF THE CROSS. Such critics ignore the long stretch from late 1857 or early 1858 until May 1860, when Melville was writing 3 lectures and many poems. Now, it helps if you as an academic have written lengthy (and you think important) pieces that did not find a publisher. You then have a sense of your working life as including the months you labored on something that does not show on your vita as published in an academic journal or as a book. Most of us have not looked at Melville's working life in the same way. My great hope for my "Historical Note" in the new volume, the final NN volume, is that it will encourage everyone to rethink what they think they know about the trajectory of Melville's working life. Tanselle's notes to BILLY BUDD, SAILOR and Sandberg's notes to many of the poems he has so astonishingly transcribed (with help from Hayford's working transcriptions) will also enlighten anyone willing to rethink what he or she thinks she knows about Melville's sometimes "late" but undeniably "uncompleted" works. That would be a wondrous outcome, and a reward for all our labors, notably, also, Alma MacDougall's, for she held everything together for so very long. [Ah, Alma! The divine Alma and I worked out changes in the contents page of READING "BILLY BUDD" on the telephone, if you can imagine, not e-mail.] Well, enough of morning maunderings and hopes.