Cousin Meriwether McGehee and
Me.
In 1876 my cousin Colonel
Valentine Meriwether McGehee, a lawyer in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, died suddenly,
only 35.
He was interred in a metallic
case after the usual time. His funeral was about to take place on the second
night of his supposed death. After near thirty hours the watchers over his
remains were surprised and horrified by seeing the glass casing of the coffin
broken open and the appearance of the corpse's head thrust through the
aperture. The colonel spoke to ask, "What the Devil are you trying to do to me?" It is unnecessary to state that he was soon relieved from his
uncomfortable situation, and at last accounts he was in a fair way of recovery,
and is no doubt worth many dead men yet.
Final Death 14 November 1876.
I don't know about genes but
I do believe in family traits being passed down. Many is the time I have asked,
"WHAT THE DEVIL ARE YOU TRYING TO DO TO ME?"
One time, in 1994, cost me a
broken wrist when I tried to run off the pain in the last snow and ice of the
year. The “flagship” journal AMERICAN LITERATURE arrived with a whole issue (March)
devoted to demolishing Melville as a writer to be studied.
Paul Lauter laid the groundwork by a selection of
quotations supposedly from students:
“You really feel belittled when you are
reading Melville.” “I know this is art, and I can’t understand it.” “You feel
something’s wrong with you; that you’re missing something.”
My students seemed actively to dislike
Melville, to feel humiliated by the prose and ignorant before the dense web of
Melville’s allusive, syntactically intricte style and his convoluted plotting.
That was the preface to the issue. But it was known
that I was writing a new biography of Melville, and in the 1988
Northwestern-Newberry MOBY-DICK I had written a wholly new account of
Melville’s meeting of Hawthorne in 1850 while the great book was in progress.
It was clear from that account that my biography would be based on hundreds of
new letters and many other new documents. It was clear, in particular, that I
was re-dating previous poorly understood or misunderstood accounts, such as the
assumption that Melville wrote the essay on Hawthorne before meeting him.
So what did Julian Markels say? Page 115: “We can easily suppose
that Melville’s entire life to that point went into writing Moby-Dick and that everything known
about his life is relevant background. But we already have full-scale
biographies of Melville, and Hayford tells us here that Parker is writing a new
biography.”
Perhaps the cruelest and most
ignorant thing ever said about me, although there are many other candidates,
was the truly idiotic comment “BUT
WE ALREADY HAVE FULL-SCALE BIOGRAPHIES OF MELVILLE.”
What the Devil were they trying to do to me? The intention of the powers at AMERICAN LITERATURE was clear: I was to be
shut down, and Melville was to be removed from the canon of American
Literature. Cousin Valentine Meriwether McGehee said it for me.
I was hurt but not shut down. And if you look around you see that in the 21st century Melville has become a genuinely popular writer, as I describe in the 2017 3rd NORTON CRITICAL EDITION of Moby-Dick. And Goodness Gracious, the French for the last 2 years have had the Norton THE CONFIDENCE-MAN on their nation-wide agregation [one g but acute accent on the e] exam. Those involved are mostly still alive, doing other damage.
