WHEN
YOU ARE OLD, SOME DEATHS WIPE OUT AREAS OF YOUR LIFE THAT NO ONE ELSE SHARES
When
you are young you know that deaths of other young people can destroy families. When
you get old, some deaths just leave gaps in crowds. Other deaths, as you get
older, can wipe out whole decades of your aspirations and struggles and
achievements. The death this year of a Tindall cousin, my first collaborator
(on a Zane Grey novel in 1948) wipes out any other early participant of the
ambition I had held at least since the spring of 1945, when Cousin Ishmael visited
us in Oregon (and thank goodness could not read what I had written on the base
of a plaster Superman). The death this year of another Oklahoma classmate
(though I did not get to go to the 12th grade with him and the collaborator)
finishes off shared school memories and also finishes off the 1952-1959 years
as a railroad telegrapher, for he was on the same railroad briefly, in 1954. The
loss of a wise genealogist and West Pointer in 2013 removed the only cousin I
could share all my work on ORNERY PEOPLE with. From USC there survives a daily
companion and also a movie
editor and great textual theorist just now sending great photographs from Peru. A rhetorician also survives. But the death of two University
of Southern California former students and a USC-East man have almost wiped out
shared memories of my long battles for honesty in the textual establishment.
(So in 2015 Amanda Gailey in Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American
Revolution to the Digital Age
acknowledges that I was right in the 1970s! No one who suffered then remembers
besides me.) My teacher’s death in 2001 removed the strongest connection to
Northwestern and the Newberry, although the connection to the Press remained
and a younger student of his emerged to do, perhaps better, what the teacher
wanted to do. But the completion of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE in 2017
puts an end to that phase, and my edition of the Library of America HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE
POEMS, now advertised as due out for Melville’s bicentennial in 2019, puts an end to all that. No
one thinks I will write or edit another book on Melville! My problem now is
getting rid of my Melville books and papers some way other than putting them on
the curb a box at a time. I thought I had that taken care of . . . . The death of one Delaware professor who kept
up research in the Romantics and in new tools in world libraries sent out an
email saying he had cancer and not to write him and then died fast—cutting off the connection to Delaware. For many years I had a strong connection to Norton,
but after the death of one editor it was never the same, and I had to take the
biography away from the editor who wanted to know if you knew when you crossed the Line, could you see it? I am grateful to have the 3rd
Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick
out in 2017, with superb cooperation and help, but I don’t expect to do the 4th
edition. That part of my career is over—except you never know: the Ministry of
Education in France this year and in 2019 is using the 2006 Norton Critical
Edition of The Confidence-Man as one
of five texts in its national agrégation exams. Something may rise up. Then there areas of life so wiped out that I
cannot remember them now or cannot talk about them. As long as the half dozen regular runners on
the beach at Morro Bay survive . . . .
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