Donald Trump, John Bryant, and Wa-Chee Dimock and the Death of Truth

Today of course University Professors and College Teachers  should agree that Trump is correct in saying our Revolutionary soldiers “manned the airports” and (perhaps in the War of 1812) “took over the airports.” Facts have not mattered in United States colleges for a long time. “FACTS DON’T MATTER” has been ringing in my ears since 1990/

       Remember Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth?

      The TLS for 27 July 2018 devoted a full page to “Deconstruction industry: Issues with truth in modern America,” an excerpt from Michiko Kakutani’s book THE DEATH OF TRUTH,”--available from Amazon Prime  for $14.12

        Kakutani  points to the way the 2016 Trump campaign echoed the “postmodernist arguments” of the academic elite in the preceding decades:

       It’s safe to say that Trump has never pllouhed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard, and postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land. But some dumbed-down corollaries of their thinking have seeped into popular culture and been hijacked by the President’s defenders, who want to use its relativistic arguments to excuse his lies, and by right-wingers who want to question evolution or deny the reality of climate change or promote alternative facts.

       Kakutani goes on to discuss Jacques Derrida and his academic followers: Derrida, she says, “used the word ‘deconstruction’ to posit that all texts are unstable and irreducibly complex and that ever variable meanings are imputed by readers and observers. In focusing on the possible contradictions and ambiguities of a text (and articulating such arguments in deliberately tangled and pretentious prose), it promulgated an extreme relativism that was ultimately nihilistic in its implications; anything could mean anything; an author’s intent did not matter, could not in fact be discerned; there was no such thing as an obvious or common-sense reading, because everything had an infinitude of meanings. In short, there was no such thing as truth.”

      I turn now to John Bryant’s review of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville in LEVIATHAN for June, 2019. Bryant says that I am personally affronted by “academic reviewers” who in 2002 “seemed skeptical of the existence of Melville’s projected volume of poetry.” Bryant excuses the reviewers by his choice of words--“scholars”: “scholars can only deduce from the indirect evidence of the letters that Melville composed this volume of poems.” What would it take to establish the FACT that Melville wrote a book he called POEMS? What you would need, Bryant offers, would be “rejection slips, a bundle of manuscripts, or the actual publication of a book.” But we DO have a rejection letter from a New York City publisher and we know there was at least one more! And some people might be satisfied by Melville’s letter to his brother Allan on 22 May 1860: “Memoranda for Allan concerning the publication of my verses.” This covers 12 points, including #6, “Let the title-page be simply, Poems / by / Herman Melville.” In this list Melville is about as specific as a scholar would want: “In the M. S. S. each piece is on a page by itself, however small the piece.” Bryant is not so easily persuaded: “In discussing  Parker’s treatment of Poems 1860, one reviewer stated that Parker ‘surmises’ the existence of the volume--a fair-enough verb given the indirect though conclusive evidence at hand--but the perceived derogation angered Parker, and for two decades he has not relented in licking the wound, to the detriment of the opening of his Historical Note.”

      There was no derogation, according to Bryant--only my perception of derogation. Bryant portrays me as being angry merely because of being said merely to have surmised the existence of The Isle of the Cross (1853) and Poems: “when at the turn of the present century, knowledgeable Melvilleans seemed not so much to ignore or dismiss the fact of Poems 1860 as to relegate it from fact to deduction, or surmisal, Parker launched his hot heart’s shell upon the backs of criticism, and he has been riding that whale ever since.” That is extravagant language, Mr. Bryant, and not very sympathetic to someone who was lied  about in major reviewing organs.

      But what did these reviewers of my second  volume actually say? Richard Brodhead in the New York Times for 23 June 2002 disparaged my “surmises about works Melville never published that did not survive,” deeming one particular surmise dubious and another an outright fabrication. This is Brodhead:

[Parker] make the case that in 1852-53 Melville wrote a novel based on materials he shared with Hawthorne about a sailor who deserted his wife. If this is true, then the theory that Melville renounced writing after “Pierre” is just wrong, and the mysterious leap from “Pierre” to the work he published after a silence, the very different “Bartleby the Scrivener,” can be explained in a new way. 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 striving was instead a time of new effort and new failure--a black hole Parker alone has the instruments to detect.

       What? “a black hole Parker alone has the instruments to detect”? Well, Meade Minnegerode in 1922 and every scholar since then, including Jay Leyda, who had in the 1951 The Melville Log, pp. 619-620, Charles Scribner’s rejection of “Melville’s Poems.” From that 1951 Log  we also knew that Evert Duyckinck had sent POEMS to Rudd & Carleton, who had possession of it on 23 June. I was not alone in a black hole, as the pages of the book Brodhead was reviewing made very clear. Yes, I was distressed to read lies in the New York TIMES, but I had some hope that other reviewers would quickly correct Brodhead. Instead, two others piled on me.

      What the biographer-to-be Andrew Delbanco said in The New Republic for 30 September 2002 was even more sweeping. My entire second volume, like the first, “must be used with caution.” “For one thing,” Delbanco warns, “Parker is amazingly certain of his own conclusions.” I was sure that “immediately after completing Pierre Melville wrote an unpublished novel.” Well, not immediately, nearly a year passed before he began it. I was also sure that Melville had left a book of poems to be published in his absence.  Delbanco continued: “Such a book was never published--and it is a surmise that Melville ever wrote it.” He continued with this denunciation: “In short, Parker trusts his own intuition completely, and, presenting inferences as facts, he expects his readers to trust it, too.”

John Bryant’s sweet savoring of the word “surmise” begins to sound stranger and stranger.

      [Notice: neither Brodhead nor Delbanco named The Isle of the Cross, as if the title gave it too much actuality.]

      Elizabeth Schultz in The Common Review for Winter 2002 took up the criticism. Parker “contends Melville completed” two lost manuscripts, “a novel, putatively titled The Isle of the Cross, and his first collection of poems.”  I only contended that he finished a book of poems. Her next comment is very strange indeed: “Throughout his biography, Parker bemoans the loss of The Isle of the Cross’s ghostly manuscript.” My index shows a non-bemoaning reference on 2.686 but the other dozen and a half references seem concentrated in the time Melville was working on the book or trying to sell it to Harper’s. (He refers to it in a letter to the Harpers in November 1853.)  Can anyone else find that I bemoaned the loss of The Isle of the Cross “throughout” the biography?

      Now, could these 3 reviews, particularly the first two, have been calculated to knock me out of running for a Pulitzer? My first volume had lost out to a book marketed in the UK as fiction, but at least I was on the Pulitzer site as a finalist. After Brodhead and Delbanco (a professor at the home of the Pulitzers) there was no hope. Interestingly enough, each of the volumes was given the highest prize from the Association of American Publishers, the R. R. Hawkins Award.  Apparently the jurors at the Association of American Publishers valued the scholarship in both volumes.

      Bryant says that Brodhead and Delbanco’s word “surmises” is “a fair-enough verb given the indirect though conclusive evidence at hand.” No. The evidence is indeed conclusive, but it is NOT indirect. What of Melville’s 12 point memo to Allan? What of Charles Scribner’s rejection of Poems? What of all the documentation in Elizabeth Shaw Melville’s letter to Duyckinck about the poems? I don’t surmise the existence of Poems. Brodhead and Delbanco were not choosing a “fair-enough verb” but a very unfair one. By not mentioning the names of Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz, Bryant covers up their falsifications. He protects those who did great damage to my reputation. For, remember, they were all charged with reading a book before condemning it. They may even have been paid. The evidence was all right there in Volume Two of my biography. Of course I remain angry, and am irritated again at Bryant denouncing me and “my hot heart’s shell” rather than taking on those who lied about me. (Notice that in his book on Melville three years later Delbanco blithely mentions the existence of both lost books with nary a word about his lofty skepticism in 2002.)

       In July 1990 in American Literary Scholarship (55) Brian Higgins printed my warning that Neal Tolchin’s transcriptions from family letters in Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville were not to be trusted, specifying a particularly disastrous misreading of a letter Melville’s mother wrote in February 1846. In December 1990 the Melville Society meeting was packed with new New Historicists, second-generation New Leftists (who had fervor but less purpose than the first), and a large group of second- and third-generation New Critics who had never done archival research and had certainly not been taught to do responsible research. Sitting up front with Harrison Hayford, John Bryant, and Wai-Chee Dimock, I misread the atmosphere in the room as one of free-floating political correctness, not sharply focused, but the mood of the audience was hostile from the start. When Wai-chee Dimock resurrected Lewis Mumford’s long-refuted claim that Hawthorne had based Ethan Brand on Melville (before he met him or  read anything but Typee), Hayford mildly reproved her, saying that if she thought it was acceptable to bring forth the Ethan Brand claim as a serious possibility, she was using a different standard for evidence than he used. At that, there was a subterranean murmur of anger in the audience like the incipient rebellion in Billy Budd, the mood hardening into fury that anyone’s idea could be considered invalid on grounds of biographical evidence. In the new post-scholarly climate to point out errors was to violate the playground rules: one should always enhance one’s playmate’s self-esteem. The audience was further incited by a man standing at the open door,  a satanic red-bearded stranger (more mildly described by Robert K. Wallace in Melville and Turner (611) as “the petulant stranger in the doorway”). The satanic onlooker  kept crying out, with regard to Melville and history, ‘THE FACTS DON’T MATTER.’”  ‘THE FACTS DON’T MATTER.’” ‘THE FACTS DON’T MATTER.’”  ‘THE FACTS DON’T MATTER.’” Accepting reality, I never attended another Melville Society meeting in the United States.     

       Already, Wai-chee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty (1989), an early contribution to the New Historicism, had been blurbed by Sacvan Bercovitch as giving “a model of a new kind of historical scholarship that has absorbed (as distinct from imitated) ‘European theory’ and whose historicism is a form of sophisticated multidisciplinary analysis.” This is from her second paragraph (3–4):

Far from being a liability, territorial expansion had come to be seen, by the 1830s, as a basic requirement for the nation’s well-being, so basic that it became practically an alimentary need. Major Davezac, a speaker at the 1844 New Jersey Democratic State Convention, proceeded from just that premise when he alluded to America’s “pasture grounds”—invoking, in his zeal, if not the “mighty bulk” of the whale, then something almost as bulky: “Make way, I say, for the young American Buffalo—he has not yet got land enough; he wants more land as his cool shelter in summer—he wants more land for his beautiful pasture grounds. I tell you, we will give him Oregon for his summer shade, and the region of Texas as his winter pasture. (Applause.) Like all of his race, he wants salt, too. Well, he shall have the use of two oceans—the mighty Pacific and the turbulent Atlantic shall be his.”

Melville, Dimock declared, “could not have known about a speech at the New Jersey convention,” but he and Davezac, “the enshrined writer and the forgotten speaker,” together inhabited “a historical moment” (4). Davezac was worth recalling, “obscure as he once was and discredited as he has since become” (5).

       In Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (2012) I looked at Dimock’s assertation that  Davezac had become discredited—discredited by her personally stringent standards of political correctness in which anyone is evil who advocated expansion in the 1840s. Her “historicism” had not driven her to find even the first name of this man who was anything but obscure. The great adventure of Auguste Davezac’s life was being aide-de-camp to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and every American in the 1840s knew that whatever credit some precisionists gave to the Treaty of Ghent the war was really won at New Orleans on January 8, 1815 Davezac was also a prominent literary man, capable of writing learnedly on Froissart’s Chronicles in the November 1843 United States Magazine and Democratic Review, one of his favorite places to publish. His contemporaries would have hooted at the idea that he was obscure. Melville, Dimock was sure, “could not have known” about a particular 1844 speech of Davezac’s. But how far-fetched is it to think that Melville may have known a good deal about Major Davezac, and perhaps might even have read some of his speeches, perhaps even that particular one?

       Melville’s older brother Gansevoort in his instant-retrieval Index Rerum (now in the Berkshire Athenaeum) which he used in 1840 and 1842 noted a speech by Major Davezac “of New Orleans” and just where to find it (“the whole speech is contained in Bell’s New Era for February 29, 1840”). In the 1840 election, while Herman was in the United States, Gansevoort had campaigned with Davezac, according to what Davezac wrote to Robert J. Walker, the secretary of the treasury, on April 11, 1845: “Soon after my arrival in the State of New-York, I became acquainted with Mr. G. Melville, by being fellow labourers in the cause of Democracy, in the canvass of 1840. Young as he then was, he gave indications of talents, as a popular orator, which his mature exertions, in the last memorable contest, have proved not to have been fallacious” (letter in the National Archives). As reported in the New York Tribune of June 15, 1843, on the previous day Davezac and Gansevoort both championed the dissolution of the union between Ireland and Great Britain at a great Repeal meeting, Davezac speaking at length as one of the stars and young Gansevoort speaking more briefly. During the final days of the 1844 campaign Herman was in New York with Gansevoort and Allan, the next younger Melville brother, and would have been aware of his older brother’s association with a hero of the Battle of New Orleans. During that campaign Allan had saved in a “bushell” basket dozens of thin newspapers containing Gansevoort’s speeches, and might well have saved some of Davezac’s along with his brother’s, since the two were political allies.

       When Davezac rode in the great Democratic torchlight procession in Manhattan on November 1, 1844, in which Gansevoort and Allan Melville also took part, and which the newly returned from whaling Herman witnessed (having missed Gansevoort in Lansingburgh and hurried down to see him), he carried a banner and a flag, the banner proclaiming “this flag was at the battle of new orleans 8th january, 1815: major a. davezac.” For all Democrats he was a national hero. Early in 1845, while Melville was writing Typee in Manhattan, Davezac was everywhere in the press. The Democratic Review in February, out in late January, carried an article on him accompanied by “a Portrait on Steel,” and the article was reprinted in the Broadway Journal and the New World and perhaps elsewhere. Davezac in the April 11, 1845, letter to Walker championed Gansevoort Melville for an appointment from President Polk on the basis of his great services in 1844. For a time Gansevoort had possession of the strong letter of support which Davezac wrote for him, and typically would have shown it to Allan. Herman might have been in Lansingburgh by then, but he might have heard of the letter from Gansevoort or Allan if he did not actually hold it in his hands and read it. Certainly to Melville there was nothing obscure and nothing discredited about Auguste Davezac. Dimock, however, seems arbitrarily to have declared Davezac discredited because he believed, half a decade before the admission of California to the Union, that the United States should expand to the Pacific. Harboring in Morro Bay, California, as I do, I feel more than a little distressed at Dimock’s implicit condemnation of California’s having been brought into the Union. Can Californians ever redeem themselves to her level of politically correct purity?

       What Dimock practiced in Empire for Liberty, and what many of her New Critical and New Historicist peers practiced, was historicism without historical research. Names of historical figures? pieces to be used as decorations. Yet she traveled to libraries: “I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Melville Collection at the Newberry Library, which has compiled the nineteenth-century reviews” (228 n. 16). “Which” is revealing: the impersonal “Collection” had compiled “the” reviews. She had the thrill of discovery by opening a drawer and finding reviews compiled by the “Collection”! She could not visualize my compiling the files during repeated trips to the New York Public Library Annex, the New-York Historical Society, and many other repositories. The “Collection” had compiled “the” reviews—meaning all the reviews that existed? I was engaged in an ongoing compilation of reviews but it plainly never occurred to her that she could have joined in the hunt, perhaps in papers especially apt to take a political slant congenial to her. “Which has compiled” reveals her failure to visualize real scholars doing productive work in her own time. Similarly, she is thrilled by dipping into books written by people who have gone to libraries more remote even than faraway Chicago and have handled expensive books with their own hands. She cites a book by R. W. Van Alstyne for the source of her quotation from a 1776 book, not just any old book but “a rare book in the Huntington Library”—’way out in California, near the City of Angels (217)! Dimock breathlessly flirts with the trappings of scholarship.

       Dimock had absorbed without question her New Critical and New Historicist training. For her there were no living researchers engaged in ongoing archival scholarship, and there never had been living writers engaged in ongoing creative projects. For her (223), the “standard critique of the notion of ‘creativity’ is Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production” (which she cites in a late translation). She cites approvingly Jerome McGann, a follower of James Thorpe’s theory of the socialized text (which denigrates the creative process), and cites Paul Feyerabend’s 1987 “Creativity—A Dangerous Myth” (223). In that article Feyerabend declares that “the view that culture needs individual creativity” is “not only absurd but also dangerous” (701).

       The creative author is a myth (the reader, trendy academics had known since the 1970s, creates meaning, not the writer) and the idea of individual creativity is dangerous, at least to current critical theory. As Joel Myerson said in Text (1993), McGann suggested “an almost Marxist, collective ownership of the text among the authors and other participants in its creation: the ‘workers’ of the text have indeed united” (115). Dimock does not cite the great 1979 book by Albert Rothenberg, The Emerging Goddess, which she ought to have known as the “standard” book on the creative process, and does not cite exciting new work done on creativity and in the cognitive sciences in the 1980s, particularly on perception and memory.7 She apparently had no practical information about the creative process and no idea at all about what real scholars do, no idea that real scholars compile evidence exhaustively before daring to try to interpret it. No wonder she typically takes her quotations at second hand, from people who have quoted passages from other books: picking her quotations from other books distances her from real scholars working with real documents. As Robert D. Hume says in Reconstructing Contexts, among New Historicists literary criticism becomes “an elaborate game played for the self-glorification of the participants” (190).

       Remember Sacvan Bercovitch’s praise of Wai-chee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty (1989), as an early contribution to the New Historicism, “a model of a new kind of historical scholarship that has absorbed (as distinct from imitated) ‘European theory’ and whose historicism is a form of sophisticated multidisciplinary analysis.” A Historicism in which no one does any historical research.

       In 2016 Donald Trump was elected President of the United States and Wai-chee Dimock was elected Editor of PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION. In 2018 Michiko Katutani published THE DEATH OF TRUTH.

       In the 1990 Chicago meeting I described earlier I do not recall that John Bryant made a public comment on Hayford’s wry defense of interpretation based upon facts. My contact with him at that time was edgy. Bryant had asked me to write a letter in support of his application for a grant from a Pennsylvania institution. I read the proposal and told him I could not in good conscience support it. He seemed baffled at my behavior and explained to me that in this business I scratched his back so he would scratch mine. I could only hope that I would not need a back-scratching. Somewhat later, at the 1991 Pittsfield Conference on Melville, I was on the panel “Biographers on Biography.”  Years passed, and on 27 September 1997, a year after the first volume of my biography of Melville appeared, Bryand and Robert Milder published Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. A transcription of the panel discussion was published there followed by “Notes (prepared by John Bryant).” It was good to relive the 1991 exchanges, but it was humiliating to read the error-filled notes making a mush of what I had said. Here is one page.

I was shamed. The errors were not mine, but the shame seemed mine. When I howled in grief,  Bryant was unperturbed. One Aunt Mary was as good as another Aunt Mary. They were not real people. They were decorations.

       Now, years later, I see John Bryant's errors in footnotes to my essay in Evermoving Dawn as part of a general carelessness about factual accuracy in professors who were taught by New Critics or the children of the New Critics. I have written in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative about the way practitioners of the New Historicism, in particular, seem to regard biographical names or places or events as decorative items that can be chosen among without doing basic checking. To say Gansevoort died while seeing Melville's first book through the press is to diminish his triumph: at great cost to himself, he succeeded--he held copies of the book. To say that the temperature in Moxon's office was low is to misunderstand the metaphor: Moxon's MANNER was icy, and Melville managed to thaw him a little. This sort of thing matters--to me. And to confuse one Aunt Mary with another is to show no VISUALIZING of the scene, the fault I have complained about as common in Brenda Wineapple's HAWTHORNE: A LIFE, where she puts Melville near the barn rather than inside. Bryant in his annotations failed to ask, for instance, what would the Dorchester aunt be doing in Pittsfield and how would she have gotten there?

These members of the Melville family were real living people. They deserve to be thought of that way, not as cardboard pop-ups you can safely shuffle at will. And when documents are available, they ought to be used. Maria Melville's letter and other documents account for hours and hours of 2-4 August 1850 so that the possibility that HM began reading the NH book then was very very slim. He was the host! VISUALIZE! It's strange how important visualizing comes to seem to me as I think on the common contempt for accuracy in biographical matters.

      The 1990 Chicago meeting of the Melville Society went from hostile to toxic. My diary heading is "Into the Lions' Den" but in my memory (I am compelled to review it now) it became a vision of Hell, one later objectively recorded by Robert Wallace in Melville and Ruskin, even to the man he called the "red-bearded stranger." This satanic Confidence Man fresh from the Infernal Regions stood at the Doorway to the Pit laughing like Mephistopheles and crying out over and over, "FACTS DON'T MATTER!" Afterwards, despairing of the death of scholarship on Melville, I walked so far north along Lake Michigan in the blizzard that I got frostbite. That was my last Melville Society meeting, except the one held in Cancun, where I went so I could climb a pyramid at Chichen Itza.