Took a long long walk 40 feet south but missed the flock of turkeys. Instead, a dry field.

No rain, and here it is November tomorrow. This field is where Scalini used to spend hour in her successful hunt for gophers, back when she was a young outdoor cat.

What I just posted on Don Hagist's JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION review of SCARS OF INDEPENDENCE

So the Amazon Identity Thief wins a round--"Your review already exists." No, that was not me.

So I wrote a note as a review of SCARS OF INDEPENDENCE and posted it and was promptly told that my review already exists. No, that was the thief of my identity. So Amazon declined to post my informative note saying the thief was not me.
Oh boy.

Now the theft of my identity as an Amazon reviewer. I have not had a great month.

Last year I bought HOLGER HOOCK'S SCARS OF INDEPENDENCE. Today I pulled it down and decided to use Amazon to help me locate some pages by using LOOK INSIDE. Well, I saw a review signed Parker and clicked on it and found that it was posted by Hershel Parker. Oh no it was not! Then I find that "Parker" has written dozens of short reviews all of which are identified as having been posted by "Hershel Parker." I have called Amazon and talked to someone about this identity theft. Is nothing sacred? Well, I know the answer to that.

I take the opportunity to review in Amazon seriously and some of my reviews there could have been published in scholarly journals if I had not preferred the immediacy and potential audience of Amazon. I have written about the value of Amazon reviews in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE. I want my identity back!

A posting from CNN, belatedly

We're sorry for all the typos today Clearly, we weren't on top of our game this morning. We meant Red Sox and not Red Sex. Embarrassing! More importantly, the package bombing suspect could get up to 48 years in prison if convicted, not 48 hours -- like our typo said. Once again, please accept our apologies. We try to do our best, but sometimes we fall short.  - Saeed

CNN--If 48 hours is a typo, fix it! Please!

Package bombs
 

Cesar Sayoc goes to court today. Sayoc, the Florida man accused of sending 14 pipe bombs to prominent Democrats as well as CNN, will be formally charged this afternoon. He's expected to stand trial on five federal crimes and could get up to 48 hours in prison if convicted.

But maybe CNN expects a swift Presidential Pardon.

After 2 weeks--what's left of a Costner ear. Or was it a Bell ear? Maybe a Hard-Knox ear.

CNN today: 48 hours is a very long time if you spend them alone in a cell. Good!

Package bombs
 

Cesar Sayoc goes to court today. Sayoc, the Florida man accused of sending 14 pipe bombs to prominent Democrats as well as CNN, will be formally charged this afternoon. He's expected to stand trial on five federal crimes and could get up to 48 hours in prison if convicted.

People I admire but whose names I do not remember

The young professor in Dentistry at USC in the early 1970s who in Viet Nam had been the master of one-stop does-all root canal work in the jungle. Was his name Girard?

Picking up a Topic Started 2 years ago--Hanging Tories

Here, with interpolations, is what I posted 2 years ago, 3 days after I stopped watching MSNBC and all other news stations. I have survived by being almost steadily in denial, even today, when we see that incendiary words from the President just possibly might have something to do with acts of violence. It has become clear to me, being so old that I remember when Evangelicals were Christian, that Evangelicals who support Trump now constitute a Hate Group. I am too old to do anything but look at the hatred of long-dead people. I am going to look at what aged survivors of the Revolution said in 1832 or thereafter about the times they whipped or hanged Tories and the circumstances under which they did so. I am using hundreds of pension applications in the great Will Graves and C Leon Harris SOUTHERN CAMPAIGNS database, perhaps the most ambitious, painstaking, and valuable database for study of the American Revolution.

Friday, November 11, 2016

Why go into denial when you can go deep into the past? WHAT WAS WRONG WITH HANGING TORIES?

The skeleton crew of surviving students of Hayford is finishing the 15th of 15 volumes of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE. So that's about over, and should be out in 2017. [IT IS OUT, LATE IN 2017.] I am working on the copy-edited manuscript of the 3rd Norton Critical Edition of MOBY-DICK. So that will be out in 2017. [IT WAS ALSO OUT LATE IN 2017. I did a little thing on Melville's reputation for a Cambridge U P book that should be out in 2017. [IT WAS OUT IN FEBRUARY 2018.] I have a piece on "North Carolina Women Who Talked Back to the Tories" which should come out this month, maybe before I turn 81, in the webzine JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. [IT CAME OUT LTE IN 2016, AND WAS REPRINTED IN THE 2018 HARDBACK VOLUME OF THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.] Yesterday I submitted another piece to the JAR on the Tory troops as sexual predators. [THIS ONE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE WEBZINE LATE IN 2016.] I have other pieces in mind including one with a title "What Was Wrong With Hanging Tories?"--because Benjamin Cleveland got in trouble for that, as did others over in Virginia. Do you begin to see how deeply in denial I intend to be for an indefinite period? It feels like home back here in the 1770s. Sometimes searching a given topic (not chosen to give this result) I get 25 hits which include 5 or 6 cousins or uncles. We belong in this country and maybe I understand why 85% of the descendants of these men voted the way they did. But why could you shoot a Tory and not hang his brother? That will take some more research.

   IN 2018, OTHER THINGS HAPPENED, UNPLANNED, THAT INTERFERED WITH MY WORK ON HANGING TORIES.  

On 7 April 2018, news that the French Ministry of Education has put the Second Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man, eds. Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer, on the official program for the highly competitive external agrégation examination for 2019 and 2020. On 15 April 2018, more good news, the announcement that our edition of The Confidence-Man will also be on the program for the internal examination.

Moby-Dick ou le Cachalot, ed. Philippe Jaworski (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), with my "Herman Melville: Vie et Oeuvre, 1819-1891," 35-92. Published on 19 April 2018; my copy arrived 20 April 2018. So my chronology is in the standard French edition of Moby-Dick.

Participation in a section of Leviathan on the NN Edition. Sent in on 31 May 2018, “A Mandate Fulfilled (1965-2017): The Writings of Herman Melville.”

Starting in April 2018, I took on a big new job, probably my last job, writing notes for the Library of America volume on Herman Melville: The Collected  Poetry. I finished that in July and it is in the production line to be out in Melville's bi-centennial, 2019.

Current project: Ornery People: Who the Depression Okies Were. This will be a unique genealogical book because I bring to it all I have learned about historical research in a scholarly career spanning more than half a century. The idea behind it is that almost anyone whose family had been in eastern Oklahoma since the mid-19^th century can now, starting with the Internet, retrieve lost family stories and establish new historical memories in the context of successive episodes of American history. 

What I have done since July 2018, when I finished the Library of America volume, is research what became an article on my McGehee cousins and Cook cousins and the reckless lies and outright murder by a Freedmen's Bureau man--a shockingly example of my being forced by evidence to tell a politically incorrect bit of history. Then I have done the research, discovering unused documents (as usual) about the Great Hangings of Gainesville, Texas, in 1862, when my cousin Aaron Hill was one of the jurors. Now I am turning back to what was right and wrong about hanging Tories during the Revolution.

Many of my cousins will be in this article, as  by-standers or active rope-pullers. I hope to see it published in the webzine JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, perhaps even in 2018.

Brothers

Fuzzy moon before dawn

That terrifying beast that chased me in the dunes a couple of months ago: Identified

It was a "decorator crab." I heard the term on a Scottish islands show and realized at once what had chased me in the dunes.

Not quite healed

Henry Truman Hill is a cousin on the Parker side, named for a Maryland ancestor

After a Hellish Night Spent Sampling Videos and removing them from Watchlists

Shakespeare said it: MILDEWED EAR--Warning: Not for the Faint of Heart

Complications

After ear surgery, keep your head upright.

Do not empty trash cans.

After a trip to the dermatologist

Lottie Cain Honea, as she was

More pictures of Jay Leyda for Jack O'Connell

First picture in attic, where some of the boys probably slept. Third in the basement of the Troy Public Library. September 1986.

Hawk on Demilune Balcony a Decade ago

Henry Binder, Brian Higgins, and Hershel Parker

BRIAN HIGGINS IN BRENTWOOD

The Brutality of "LOCK HER UP" applied to Hillary Clinton and Diane Feinstein--and Trumpism come to Morro Bay

When you realize that a large percentage of the crowds shouting LOCK HER UP are self-defined Evangelicals, you--well, you come close to despair.
And in Morro Bay you see it in the attack on Runner Frank by a big young man with four dogs on the beach, one of which was threatening Frank, who got off with a shove to the sand and a broken arm.
Last week Los Osos Tom rescued me from a dog leaping at me.
Today a particularly aggressive scofflaw finally put a leash on her dog but was determined to charge on into the No Dogs area (the State Park area), and verbally abusive.

See that mouth on her. And for the first time in my experience, a surfer pushed his way into the situation by yelling, THE LAW DOESN'T MATTER, THE LAW DOESN'T MATTER. Never, never before have I encountered anything but courtesy from a surfer here. Trumpism has spread to Morro Bay. I find myself thinking for the first time "I am a tax-payer!" Then on the way home an Airbnb customer started to pull into traffic as I went by in this former area of single family homes. It's a terrible thing to be driven farther and faster into whining old age. I just wish Los Osos Tom were around every day.

Oldest man on the shore

Can you see? A dozen or so surfers strung out here

Decided to post a comment on Amazon--The Washington POST "Civil War Stories"

.0 out of 5 starsFalse Accusation of Atrocities in 1865 and 1866 repeated here by the Washington Postin 2015!

ByHershel Parkeron October 12, 2018

Format: Kindle Edition

George Boutwell, the Massachusetts Radical, had read a set of reckless allegations the Freedmen's Bureau sub-commissioner J. H. Matthews had made in Mississippi and summoned the young Iowan to Washington D.C., where Matthews cunningly told Boutwell just what Boutwell wanted to hear during a long interview printed in the Congressional Globe. Very much of what Matthews testified to is false. I am horror stricken to see this in Robert B. Mitchell's article: "Capt. J.H. Matthews, assigned to the Freedmen’s Bureau, told lawmakers that vigilantes in Amite and Pike counties whipped and murdered former slaves. In a report to his superiors in the bureau, Matthews told of one ex-slave being hanged and skinned. Outrages occurred elsewhere." According to Matthews, one of my cousins, John H. McGehee, had murdered a slave and skinned him, but John H. McGehee had nothing to do with either killing or cutting up a body. In 1865, Matthews as a Captain in the 66th Regiment of the United States Colored Infantry Matthews had led a raid on another, more distant cousin of mine, a raid in which one of his men for no reason fired on my cousin as he approached his home, and killed him. This was murder under cover of USCI authority. Matthews later led a similar raid on the house of John H. McGehee, but a former slave warned McGehee and he fled, escaping middle-of-the-night capture (and I think death) at Matthews's hands. What Matthews says about the behavior of whites in Amite County in 1865 is not all totally false, but the worst accusations are. Does any Civil War webzine want a carefully documented 10 page or so article laying out the truth of these lamentably persistent lies? The paper is a telling piece about how a Freedmen's Bureau sub-commissioner could stir up post-war hatred while getting away with horrific acts of his own.

The Power of Lies--A False Accusation at the End of 1865 repeated in CIVIL WAR STORIES (2015)

For three weeks or so, a lot longer than I intended, I have been working on accusations that some of my cousins committed atrocities during the Civil War. One set of accusations was made late in 1865 by J. H. Matthews, a sub-commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau. His lies were so lurid that Senator George Boutwell, a Radical Senator from Massachusetts, summoned him from Mississippi to Washington, D. C., to testify. Matthews told Boutwell a hate-arousing mess of fiction which was just what the zealot Senator wanted to hear. The interview is in the Congressional Record. The foulest of Matthews's lies was that my cousin John H. McGehee had killed a black man and beheaded him and skinned him. Anyhow, I did my usual painstaking research and found (not expecting this!) that Matthews had in fact led a raid in which a different, more distant cousin of mine was murdered by one of Matthews's uncontrolled gang. No historian has mentioned that. Now I see that Matthew's lies, widely quoted early in 1866, are repeated in CIVIL WAR STORIES (2015), a Washington POST publication, in a piece by Robert B. Mitchell. Well, I have not liked lies in major newspapers, not since Richard Brodhead lied about me in the NY TIMES in 2002 (saying only I in my "black hole" had heard of Melville's 1860 POEMS). My poor cousin John H. McGehee! How many hundreds of years will Matthews' lies be quoted?

Looking NW at 8 in the morning

Baking Day--2 Trays of Rolls, 2 Loaves---2 photos of same batch

Exercises to the second half of a fine documentary, Aida's Secrets, and 2 miles run on a muddy beach, but mainly baking. 2 photos trying to give due to all parts.

Why I love Jonathan Lethem--quite aside from his wonderful page in the 2017 NCE of MOBY-DICK

My Disappointment CritMyM

NOVEMBER 7, 2011

MY DISAPPOINTMENT CRITIC    JONATHAN LETHEM

“The job of the regular daily, weekly, or even monthly critic resembles the work of the serious intermittent critic, who writes only when he is asked to or genuinely moved to, in limited ways and for only a limited period of time … What usually happens is that (the staff critic) writes for some time at his highest level: reporting and characterizing accurately … and producing insights, and allusions, which, if they are not downright brilliant, are apposite … What happens after a longer time is that he settles down. The simple truth — this is okay, this is not okay, this is vile, this resembles that, this is good indeed, this is unspeakable — is not a day’s work for a thinking adult. Some critics go shrill. Others go stale. A lot go simultaneously shrill and stale. A few critics, writing quietly and well, bring something extra into their work … Some staff critics quit and choose to work flat out again, on other interests and in intermittent pieces. By far the most common tendency, however, is to stay put and simply to inflate, to pretend that each day’s text is after all a crisis…”

— Renata Adler, “The Perils of Pauline”

“As [Harold] Bloom has settled into this second career, so his old virtues have gradually fallen from him. An extraordinary amount of the work of the last decade is luxurious with padding and superfluity; there is hardly a book of his that would not have been better off as an essay. He is not a critic anymore, but a populist appreciator … Above all, for Bloom, writers must be ranked, and the greatness of the very greatest asserted again and again. Moreover, all great writers are essentially alike.”

— James Wood, “The Misreader”

“The house of fiction, as Henry James once said, has ‘not one window, but a million,’ and hence no single aperture gives access to what James called ‘the need of the individual vision and the pressure of the individual will.’ Different novelists look to different models. Fielding, Sterne, and Stendhal set the pattern for the ironic or self-conscious novel, flaunting its own narrative devices. Balzac became the great exemplar of the social novel, as Scott and Manzoni did for the historical novel. Tolstoy’s deceptive simplicity transformed style into a transparent window on the real. Kafka’s metaphorical novels and stories turned fiction into fable or parable. Each of these writers depends on exact circumstantial detail, but the strength of their fiction comes not from the phrase, the sentence, the metaphor, as critics like Wood would have it, but from how they actualize larger units of scene and theme, plot and character. It can be misleading to approach fiction primarily through its language, a technique better suited to the study of poetry…”

— Morris Dickstein, letter to New York Times Book Review, May 7, 2006

“Everyone speaks of the ‘negative capability’ of the artist, of his ability to lose what self he has in the many selves, the great self of the world. Such a quality is, surely, the first that a critic should have; yet who speaks of the negative capability of the critic? How often are we able to observe it?”

— Randall Jarrell, “Poets, Critics, and Readers”

WHAT HAPPENED IS THIS: I wrote a book (The Fortress of Solitude) and James Wood reviewed it. What happened next: I wrote James Wood a long, intemperate letter. (Not an open letter.) And he wrote a curt postcard in reply. Eight years later, I haven’t quit thinking about it. Why? The review, though bearing a few darts (“Depthless Brooklyn,” “squandered,” “before our disappointed eyes”), wasn’t the worst I’d had. Wasn’t horrible. (As my uncle Fred would have said, “I know from horrible.”) Why, I hear you moan in your sheets, why in the thick of this Ecstasy Party you’ve thrown for yourself, violate every contract of dignity and decency, why embarrass us and yourself, sulking over an eight-year-old mixed review? Conversely, why not, if I’d wished to flog Wood’s shortcomings, pick a review of someone else, make respectable defense of a fallen comrade? The answer is simple: In no other instance could I grasp so completely what Wood was doing.

Also, I had expectations. (That fatal state.) I felt, despite any warnings I should have heeded, that to be reviewed at last by the most consequential and galvanizing critical voice, the most apparently gifted close reader of our time, would be a sort of graduation day, even if I’d be destined to take some licks. Taking some, I’d join a hallowed list. I mean this: I’d have taken a much worse evaluation from Wood than I got, if it had seemed precise and upstanding. I wanted to learn something about my work. Instead I learned about Wood. The letdown startled me. I hadn’t realized until Wood was off my pedestal that I’d built one. That I’d sunk stock in the myth of a great critic. Was this how Rushdie or DeLillo felt — not savaged, in fact, but harassed, by a knight only they could tell was armorless?

As it happened, I wandered into this encounter a self-appointed expert in the matter of expecting — a lot? too much? — and being disappointed. I’d written a cycle of personal essays called The Disappointment Artist, its subject, precisely, the crisis of being so fraught with preemptory feelings in approaching a thing-a book, a movie, another person-that the thing itself is hardly encountered. So was I too ready to see Wood in my own framework, a version of “the narcissism of minor difference”? Or did it make me specially qualified to demand of Wood what I’d demanded of myself: that in the critical mode I sort out self and subject, even if they always again intermixed, at least long enough to spare the pouring-on of inapt disappointment?

James Wood, in 4,200 painstaking words, couldn’t bring himself to mention that my characters found a magic ring that allowed them flight and invisibility. This, the sole distinguishing feature that put the book aside from those you’d otherwise compare it to (Henry Roth, say). The brute component of audacity, whether you felt it sank the book or exalted it or only made it odd. These fantastic events hinge the plot at several points, including the finale — you simply couldn’t not mention this and have read the book at all. Or rather, you couldn’t unless you were Wood. He seemed content to round up the usual suspects: italics, redundant clauses, and an American kind of “realism” he routinely deplores. Perhaps Wood’s agenda edged him into bad faith on the particulars of the pages before him. A critic ostensibly concerned with formal matters, Wood failed to register the formal discontinuity I’d presented him, that of a book which wrenches its own “realism” — mimeticism is the word I prefer — into crisis by insisting on uncanny events. The result, it seemed to me, was a review that was erudite, descriptively meticulous, jive. I doubt Wood’s ever glanced back at the piece. But I’d like to think that if he did, he’d be embarrassed.

Strangely enough, another misrepresentation, made passingly, stuck worse in my craw. Wood complained of the book’s protagonist: “We never see him thinking an abstract thought, or reading a book … or thinking about God and the meaning of life, or growing up in any of the conventional mental ways of the teenage Bildungsroman.” Now this, friends, is how you send an author scurrying back to his own pages, to be certain he isn’t going mad. I wasn’t. My huffy, bruised, two-page letter to Wood detailed the fifteen or twenty most obvious, most unmissable instances of my primary character’s reading: Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Mad magazine, as well as endless scenes of looking at comic books. Never mind the obsessive parsing of LP liner notes, or first-person narration which included moments like: “I read Peter Guralnick and Charlie Gillett and Greg Shaw…” That my novel took as one of its key subjects the seduction, and risk, of reading the lives around you as if they were an epic cartoon or frieze, not something in which you were yourself implicated, I couldn’t demand Wood observe. But not reading? This enraged me.

(As for “thinking about God,” was there ever a more naked instance of a critic yearning for a book other than that on his desk? Can Wood’s own negative capability not reach the possibility that in some life dramas “God” never made it to the audition, let alone failed to get onstage? Pity me if you like, but I can’t remember even considering believing in either God or Santa Claus. The debunking was accomplished preemptively, preconsciously. Hence, not a subject in my Bildungsroman. Sorry!)

“The conventional mental ways of the teenage Bildungsroman.” Here, fobbed off in one casual phrase, may be the crux: the conventional mental. Wood is too committed a reader not to have registered what he (apparently) can’t bear to credit: the growth of a sensibility through literacy in visual culture, in vernacular and commercial culture, in the culture of music writing and children’s lit, in graffiti and street lore. What’s at stake isn’t a matter of “alternate” or “parallel” literacies, since these others aren’t really separate. They interpenetrate and, ultimately, demand familiarity with the Bloomian sort of core-canonical literacy. (I couldn’t have written my character’s growth into snobbery without Portrait of a Lady and Great Expectations at my back, but James and Dickens were simply not where I boarded the bus.)

What’s at stake is the matter of unsanctioned journeys into the life of culture. And I don’t believe anyone sanctions any other person’s journey into the life of culture. This is the point where I need to confess that my attention to James Wood, in the years since sending my letter, has been as cursory as it was before that uncomfortable passage (uncomfortable for me; I doubt I ruffled his feathers). Earlier I’d been content to sustain a cloudy image of a persuasive new critic who made people excited and nervous by passionately attacking novels that people (including myself) passionately believed in; now I found myself content to revise that in favor of an impression of a unpersuasive critic whose air of erudite amplitude veiled — barely — a punitive parochialism. It didn’t make me want to read him, so I’m not qualified to make any great pronouncements. I’ve only glanced, over these years, and it may be that my confirmation bias is in play when I do. Here’s what I see in my glances. When Wood praises, he mentions a writer’s higher education, and their overt high-literary influences, a lot. He likes things with certain provenances; I suppose that liking, which makes some people uneasy, is exactly what made me enraged. When he pans, his tone is often passive-aggressive, couched in weariness, even woundedness. Just beneath lies a ferocity which seems to wish to restore order to a disordered world.

Not that any God had me in mind, but if you’d designed a critic to aggravate me you couldn’t have done better. About books I’m Quakerish, believing every creature eligible to commune face-to-face with the Light; he’s a high priest, handing down sacred mysteries. To one who pines for a borderless literary universe, he looks like a border cop, checking IDs. The irony of Wood’s criticisms of Bloom is that Wood’s own “narcissism of minor difference” looks unmistakable: Wood is a critic whose better angels are at the mercy of his essentialist impulses.

His postcard to me? I’ve lost it, but can give a reliable paraphrase, since after my outpouring, rather than address what I’d said, Wood spared me just one or two arched-eyebrow lines. It was as though my effort bore an odor of ingratitude. “I’m sorry you felt that way,” he wrote, more or less. “I liked the book so much more than any of your other work.” His tone, it seemed to me, that of an aristocrat who never really expected those below him to understand the function of the social order. He’s not angry, he’s disappointed. Well, that makes two of us.

Addendum: On Bad Faith

My original letter to Wood included the suggestion that he was “in bad faith.” This, the confidant who vetted the letter wanted to challenge. He knew Wood and didn’t believe that was “the explanation” (though he couldn’t propose an alternative). But maybe it was a bridge too far. Reading the above, written eight years after, I see I’ve reached for the same term. What does it mean to me?

I’m not actually trying to read James Wood’s mind, or to change it now. Whether Wood consciously or unconsciously betrayed a standard he consciously recognizes, or could be made to recognize, doesn’t interest me. His piece is in bad faith. The instant it was published, with its blanketing tone of ruminative mastery, and yet with all it elides or mischaracterizes, it was so — period. It was in bad faith with my novel, and, I’d say, with novels, an enterprise to which Wood believes himself devoted, a belief I’d have no basis for challenging. So let’s call this “resultant bad faith,” a term which spares us the tedium and rage of guessing at the interior lives of those with whom we more than disagree.

2010 Edmond Caldwell on James Wood & Hershel Parker--lovely thing to encounter on the Internet Early in the Morning

James Wood is how I made friends with Jonathan Lethem, who wrote a spectacular page for the 2017 Norton Critical Edition of MOBY-DICK. 

CONTRA JAMES WOOD

The Erudite Mr. Wood, Part Deux

Would you buy a used car from this critic?

Nigel Wood has done us the service of directing our attention to a continuation of Hershel Parker’s remarks at Amazon.com on James Wood and the Melville chapter of The Broken Estate, the first part of which I had cited in my previous post as a challenge to Wood’s reputation for deep and wide “learning” or "erudition." I repost the entirety of the continuation here, followed by my response.

Parker writes:

In what I posted earlier on James Wood I did not mention what he had said of me in the 17 March 1997 New Republic and, somewhat revised, in The Broken Estate. In the New Republic he had begun with a subtle insult: mine was a "semi-biography"--not because it was half fiction or half essay but because it was the first volume. And I was "not a critic" but merely "a connoisseur of facts."

According to Wood, I had confessed that in writing this "biography" (or "semi-biography"?) I had assembled documents chronologically in my computer then "simply moved chunks of the Log from one computer file to the other," not bothering to construct a single sentence of prose of my own. This is, let me say, false. I made no such confession. The only time I moved chunks of the Log into the biography was to avoid retyping something I was going to quote. I was saving effort and trying not to introduce new errors.

Then Wood charged that I quoted "from almost every published contemporary review of Melville's novels." Now, I take some pride in having searched for many months, all told, since 1962, for unknown reviews and having publishing most of the known reviews, with the help of Brian Higgins, in the Cambridge Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, but I had been selective in quoting in the biography. Wood complained that I had filled "twelve pages with reviews of Omoo" but had almost neglected to describe or interpret the book. My view is that the reviews of Omoo that came to the attention of Melville's publishers and his friends and family were important--indeed, they were crucial. If they had not been favorable, he and Elizabeth Shaw could not have announced their engagement and proceeded with plans for marriage, and Melville could not have confidently embarked on Mardi. Then, the reviews by Horace Greeley and G. W. Peck came just in time to sour the mood of the wedding. Finally, in 1849 Richard Bentley would not have taken a chance on Mardi if the English reviews of Omoo had not been favorable. I could not tell the story without the reviews.

As for not describing the book, in Ch. 12, "Beachcomber and Whaler, 1842-1843," I had told what was known of Melville on Tahiti and Eimeo, drawing on old sources and two previously unpublished sources, one passed on to me from Wilson Heflin's papers and one in the 1878 Shaker Manifesto, discovered by Rita Gollin but not yet used in a biography.

In Ch. 23, "Winning Elizabeth Shaw and Winning the Harpers," I had reviewed what scholars had shown about the sourcebooks for Omoo, focusing on the way he "used, misused, and downright abused his sources."

Now I see that, deluding myself that I was a critic, I had devoted a substantial paragraph to one "of the characteristics of his mature style," Melville's "powerful portrayal of images from different times and places which alternate rapidly in the mind, merge with each other, and (in later examples) disentangle again. In Pierre and in Clarel, he made profound use of this psychological phenomenon, but it appears in most of its essentials in Omoo."

I see that I had also devoted most of a page to describing "Melville's new command of language, particularly in the way his descriptions of events and actions were now saturated with the Scriptures." You would have thought that Wood would have liked that paragraph on Melville's use of the Bible, since in 2006 he wrote the passage I quoted in my earlier initial comment: "Melville's words muster their associations, their deep histories, on every page. There are scores of allusions to the King James Bible."

Indeed, there are scores of allusions to the King James Bible in Moby-Dick. Therefore I would have thought that Wood might have been intrigued by my concluding that Omoo was "saturated with the Scriptures." He ought to have liked my conclusion that some readers would enjoy the evidence that Melville's brain was "Bible-soaked," even while his use of the Bible would offend "many pious people who kept a wary eye out for the use of God's word in vain, and who would find such submerged allusions blasphemous." Melville was taking a risk, I said.

A decade and a half after writing the passage, I look at my concluding paragraph on the composition of Omoo with delight and pride. I had been delicately humorous about the sexuality in Omoo, demonstrating Melville's own adeptness at sexual innuendo in describing how a stranger in Tahiti should have his knife in readiness and his caster slung. In a parenthetical exclamation Melville had identified Mr. Bell, the husband of the infinitely desirable Mrs. Bell, as "happy dog!" That term was loaded. Melville had passed on to the publisher John Wiley the review in which the Times of London had said this about him: "Enviable Herman! A happier dog it is impossible to imagine than Herman in the Typee Valley." I laugh aloud now, in reading, after this space of time, my summation of the successful author and lover: "Meanwhile, his knife in readiness and his caster slung, there were hours when it was impossible to imagine a happier dog than Herman in the Hudson Valley." At the moment I wrote that, I must have been in my modest way a "happy dog." I did well by Omoo, take it all in all.

Caldwell continues:

Melville, Wood charged, was "tied down by Parker's Lilliputian facts." Nevertheless, it was "at least a fine family chronicle." Then Wood abandoned my "semi-biography" for rhapsodical excursions of his own. Midway, he recollected me long enough to slap me into the dirt before snatching me halfway up, his mighty fist clutching my shirt: "His [Melville's] reading, which had been eager but arbitrary, now took on a systematic wildness. Here, Parker, with his dribbling data, is useful." The slapping down is in the "dribbling," and the jerking up comes fast in the assertion that the data is "useful." Useful, if one paid a little attention, but my dates of Melville's reading, for instance, got mixed up in Wood's mind. Far, far into theological rhapsodies in the New Republic, Wood remembered me again: "Parker is right to call Moby-Dick "the most daring and prolonged aesthetic adventure that had ever been conducted in the hemisphere in the English language." Then Wood was swept up and away with his metaphysical effusions. Well, what was the New Republic paying him for? for reviewing a book fairly and conscientiously or writing a dazzling critical essay which he could collect in The Broken Estate?

*******

Wood’s criticism of Parker’s biography is not original – in fact it is the standard knock against it. Wood needn’t have so much as touched the cover of one of its volumes to write what he did about it (although the tone of jeering superiority is all Wood’s); he is most likely just passing on what he read elsewhere, all too happy if readers who don’t know any better take the insight as yet more evidence of his critical brilliance. Yet in spite of having too many notes too many Oomo reviews, Parker’s biography has succeeded in becoming a standard, crucial reference for anyone writing seriously (as opposed to journalistically) about Melville.

No, Wood’s criticism of the Melville biography tells us more about Wood himself than it does about Parker – and this is why we should be grateful to Nigel for bringing it to our attention. It fits into a pattern that surfaces whenever Wood writes about other critics, or at least those – George Steiner, Edmund Wilson, Harold Bloom, and even Parker – who might, whatever their flaws, limits, or excesses, genuinely merit the rhetorical bouquets of “erudite” and “learned” so regularly strewn in Wood’s path. In one way or another, Wood arraigns them all for the crime of knowing too much.

Take for instance Wood’s deeply nasty (yet ultimately trivial) hatchet-job on George Steiner. It opens with a number of substantial paragraphs ridiculing the occasionally pretentious ways that the older critic has of displaying his breadth of reference and allusion. To give just one example: Steiner’s “habitual tic,” Wood writes, “is a consumer’s definite article. Just as one asks for a coffee, a Coke, a scotch, Steiner asks for 'a Socrates, a Mozart, a Gauss or a Galileo…'” Wood sets him straight: “There is ‘a coffee,’ but there is no such thing as ‘a Mozart’. There is Mozart, singular and nontransferable—a concretion, not a vapor.”

(Amusingly, Wood has had recourse to this proscribed rhetorical device himself, as in his epistle to the wayward lads at n+1: “I like best to lose myself in the rich prose of a Bellow or a Melville or a Henry Green…” A Melville, Mr. Wood? Pardon me, but there is simply no such thing. There is Melville, singular and nontransferable—or nonredundant, if you prefer…)

It goes unsaid by Wood that it is possible to read pages and pages of Steiner without encountering such rhetorical excesses, and the pages themselves – for instance from Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast, from his useful introduction on Heidegger, from his book on translation, After Babel, and from essays on Homer, Shakespeare, Thomas Bernhard, Kafka, Lukacs, Brecht, Schoenberg, and on topics as disparate as literary pornography and the Holocaust (and this represents only a small portion of his work) – render the excesses, when they do appear, minor and forgivable. But like a true contemporary media pundit Wood relies more on his audience’s ignorance of his subject than their knowledge of it; from its first word to its last the essay is devoted to construing a whole ugly man out of a few warts.

Wood’s essay on Edmund Wilson – who wrote for the New Republic back when it was staffed by humans – is far more generous (Wilson was safely dead, after all, and Marty Peretz didn’t have a hit out on him). Yet when it comes to Wilson’s erudition the underlying message is strikingly similar. Speaking of Wilson’s “exhaustive and sometimes exhausting scholarship,” Wood writes:

Wilson's method was likewise to eschew the fragmentary, to strive for integration, and it is both a strength and a weakness in his work . . . He seems to rear panoptically above his subjects, like a statue overseeing a city square, sternly, anciently surveying the busy activity, compressing and elucidating vast amounts of mobile information. John Berryman joked that whenever one met Wilson he was always "working his way through the oeuvre" of some writer or other. His letters become rather wearisome to read because of his need to whale his correspondents with his learning; as someone in the Goncourt journals remarks about a minor French writer, "Yes, yes, he has talent, but he doesn't know how to make people forgive him for having it."

[ . . . ]

What [Wilson] wrote about Michelet, in To the Finland Station, can also be applied to himself: "The impression he makes on us is quite different from that of the ordinary modern scholar who has specialized in some narrowly delimited subject and gotten it up in a graduate school: we feel that Michelet has read all the books, been to look at all the monuments and pictures, interviewed personally all the authorities, and explored all the libraries and archives of Europe; and that he has it all under his hat." Occasionally one wishes that Wilson would keep his hat on.

Oddly, although Wood speaks of this pedantry as a weakness of Wilson’s “work” – clearly implying his publications – the only examples he musters are from the letters (see the review itself for the text I clipped). I personally can’t remember Axel’s Castle, To the Finland Station, Patriotic Gore, or The Wound and the Bow being marred by “too many notes,” but that’s just me.

Later in the essay – Wood just can’t let it go – he adds, “There is something very moving about Wilson’s independence, his erotic curiosity for knowledge – though the conquistador of knowledge, bedding one fact after another, becomes tiresome after a while.” This defty combines Wood's defensiveness about Wilson’s erudition with a bourgeois moralist’s sniff at the latter’s robust sexual appetite, suggesting that in the presence of such a figure Wood feels castrated.

It's one of Wood’s most unintentionally funny essays, not least because it is so transparent that when he points up Wilson’s ostensible flaws, the ideally "correct" critical model he has in mind is – himself: Wilson didn’t do enough close readings, wasn’t attentive enough to style (“it is hard to find any sustained analysis of deep literary beauty in his work”), and, needless to say, shouldn't have been a Marxist. Other than that and the stuff about knowing and fucking too much, though, he was a great critic.

And then there’s Harold Bloom, another figure who, in spite of having become a windbag in his dotage, might actually be considered “erudite.” Wood’s Bloom-envy comes in two alluring scents, Poisoned Kiss and Daggers Drawn, so you can take your pick. His review of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, included in The Broken Estate, opens: “Harold Bloom has been so abundant, so voracious with texts (more than twenty books, five hundred introductions), that it sometimes seems that he has kidnapped the whole of English literature and has been releasing his hostages, one by one, over a lifetime, on his own spirited terms.” As a toast it’s equivocal, the kind of praise that has you wondering the next day if you hadn’t also been slyly insulted. Wood indeed goes on to criticize Bloom for being overly rushed and repetitive in parts of the impressive oeuvre, but at this point in their relationship he is willing to be charitable: “[Bloom's] weaknesses, of which he is doubtless aware, are merely the gases emitted by an overwhelming and natural energy. That is the cost of combustion, and it is combustion that interests us…” By the time Wood comes to write his review of Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, however, the Bloom is off the rose, and the gaseous emissions have become uneuphemistic farts:

There have been twelve books since 1990, which means a book roughly every sixteen months . . . The only way to conduct this kind of permanent revolution of print is to have the word factories ablaze all day and night, and to relish the inevitable duplication and mass production . . . An extraordinary amount of the work of the last decade is luxurious with padding and superfluity; there is hardly a book of his that would not have been better off as an essay. He is not a critic anymore, but a populist appreciator; the close readings of poems, sometimes thrilling in their originality, that characterized books such as The Anxiety of Influence and Agon have been replaced by a peculiar combination of character-psychologizing and canonical divination, producing that familiar Bloomian sentence, which is always adding superfluous codas to itself, and in which three or four favored authors are tossed around in an approving oil and coated with the substance of their creations…

All true, of course, but it was also true five or six years earlier when Wood wrote the very positive review of the Shakespeare book, published well within that decade of “luxurious padding,” “superfluous codas,” and the rest of the late-Bloom afflatus. What Wood chides in the first review he castigates in the second, without ever explaining the inconsistency.

What is consistent, however, is Wood’s discomfort with a prodigiously well-read and productive precursor, consistent not only between the two Bloom reviews (in spite of the difference in tone), but across all of the essays in which Wood puts aside his usual novel-gazing to treat of well-known critics from previous generations. Steiner, Wilson, Bloom – by some astonishing coincidence these three quite different figures all suffer from variations of the same “too many notes” disorder. They know too much and are vulgar enough to show it. James Wood, on the other hand, knows better (or at least less) and has the good manners to be the right kind of critic: a miniaturist.

Posted by Edmond Caldwell at 7:01 PM 3 comments:

July 26, 2010

The Erudite Mr. Wood

Picador (a division of Macmillan, which in turn is a subsidiary of the Holtzbrinck Publishing mega-conglomerate) is bringing out a new edition of Jiminy Critic’s first collection of literary journalism, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Credulity. It’s got a new introduction by the author, a new cover design to bring it in line with the quaintly (and appropriately) old-fashioned look of How Fiction Works, and a new price: $17.00. For a trade paperback.

In honor of the event, I’ve taken the liberty of lifting this interesting reader’s review by Hershel Parker from the book’s Amazon.com page (it reviews the original edition, but it was posted only a year ago, in July 2009). Parker, if you don’t know, is the author of the definitive scholarly biography of Herman Melville (in 2 volumes), as well as co-editor of an edition of Melville’s complete works. His remarks on Wood generally and the Melville chapter of The Broken Estate in particular are valuable because they speak to the meme, repeated so many times that it has taken on a lifeness of its own, that Wood is a tremendously “erudite” and even “learned” individual (by which standard Malcolm Gladwell is a “man of science” and Thomas Friedman a “public intellectual”).

“The Redundant Smirking Mr. Wood”

by Hershel Parker

I've been working hard on Herman Melville and not paying attention to recent criticism, although I have been aware of James Wood when he popped up in one English or American paper or another taking pay for writing reviews on Melville which turned into bullying bloviations on theology. His information about Melville's life was sketchy, I knew, and I thought his notions of Calvinism vs. Unitarianism were shaky. Well, while I was dismissing Wood as a religious obsessive posing as a book reviewer everyone else was strewing palm branches along his way. Cynthia Ozick huffed at the idea that Wood was called "our best young literary critic." Untrue, cried she: "He is our best literary critic." Adam Begley in the Financial Times proclaimed Wood "the best literary critic of his generation." In Los Angeles Times Gideon Lewis-Kraus elaborated: "To call James Wood the finest literary critic writing in English today, as is commonplace, is to treat him like some sort of fancy terrier at Westminster. It both exaggerates and diminishes his importance. . . . It would be better to say simply that Wood is among the very few contemporary writers of great consequence. . . . He has earned a rare and awesome cultural authority." How wrong could I be?

Not very. Take the New Republic review of Delbanco's Melville: His World and Work which begins with some off-base theological bullying then frankly turns into an essay on Melville's language in Moby-Dick:

"Melville's words muster their associations, their deep histories, on every page. There are scores of allusions to the King James Bible. Adjectives and adverbs are placed in glorious, loaded convoy: 'The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbert, heaped up, flaked up, with rose water snow.' With a tiny smirk of irony, Melville saves the word 'redundant' for the last place in that gorgeous list: as if to say, 'I dare you to find any of these multiple adjectives . . . redundant!'"

Well, correct "sherbert" to "sherbet" and put a hyphen in "rose-water," to start with, assuming my online text is right. Then what?

The first thing you think of, if you know even a shallow history of Melville's words, is that he cannot be using "redundant" to mean "duplicative." He must be using it in a Latin sense, one easy enough to establish with a dictionary if you don't know Latin.

If you know Melville, whether or not you know Latin, you know that he takes many latinate words from John Milton. It takes only a moment on Google to locate a couple of likely analogues in Paradise Lost and in Samson Agonistes.

As it happens, the use of "redundant" in Paradise Lost is in a description of Satan as serpent which Melville was very familiar with: "his head / Crested aloft, and carbuncle his eyes; / With burnish'd neck of verdant gold, erect / Amidst his circling spires, that on the grass / Floated redundant: pleasing was his shape, /And lovely" . . . . Melville used the passage in The Confidence-Man, for example. Or look at this passage in Samson Agonistes where the fallen hero laments his condition: "to visitants a gaze, / Or pitied object, these redundant locks / Robustious to no purpose clust'/ring down, / Vain monument of strength" . . . . (lines 567-570).

When Melville's two-volume Milton first came into view in 1983 in the Phillips Gallery I got a glimpse of it, and when it came up for auction again at Sotheby's in 1989 I was equipped with a copy of the same set, onto which one cloudy Manhattan day I inscribed all Melville's marks and annotations I could see. Now I open my duplicate of Melville's Milton, marked as he marked his copy, and see that Melville did some underlining and marking of the page opposite "Floated redundant" and that in the Samson Agonistes he drew a line along all of 559-574, with another, shorter line along 567-569, three of the lines I just quoted, including "these redundant locks / Robustious."

It apparently did not occur to Wood that "redundant" did not mean something like "duplicative." If he had been sensitive to Melville's language enough to know the word had to be Miltonic (or most likely was Miltonic), he could have consulted Melville & Milton (2004), ed. Robin Grey, which reprints from Leviathan (March and October 2002) the transcription of Melville's marginalia in his Milton by Grey and Douglas Robillard, in consultation with me. But that would have meant being scholarly instead of a smirking, superior critic.

Nice people don't smirk. Dubya was a compulsive smirker, and look where he got the world. Wood may smirk, also compulsively, but he is wrong to bring Melville into his nasty little clique of smirkers. I could muster many other examples from Wood on Melville. He may be the greatest critic in the world, but he does not know anything worth knowing about Melville, and he certainly does not understand the nobility of Melville's literary ancestry and the towering grandeur of Melville's spirit.

Posted by Edmond Caldwell at 7:51 PM 19 comments: