John Bryant's failures to read evidence and read texts and his failure to package truthfully

John Bryant and "Truth in Packaging"

I have protested to Bryant over the years against the use of misleading terms in applications for federal funding.  For some time he ignored my protests that he was claiming to print my 9000 page electronic THE MELVILLE LOG as part of a grant project he was master of. I think it likely that he had my many years of work listed in NEH proposals as under his control. If he has my LOG and intends to publish it, then it has been stolen from me. Can he post his applications now?

It is a little late now for NEH and all other charitable funding organizations to take notice, but here is a warning: Not only have I never told Bryant that he can have control of my THE MELVILLE LOG but (let’s be clear) there is no known manuscript of TYPEE.

This is the full title of John Bryant's MELVILLE UNFOLDING: SEXUALITY, POLITICS, AND THE VERSIONS OF TYPEE: A FLUID-TEXT ANALYSIS, WITH AN EDITION OF THE TYPEE MANUSCRIPT.

What can the University of Michigan editors have thought they were doing when they allowed such a title?

There are no "Versions of Typee." There are versions of a handful of passages in Typee.

There exists no "Typee Manuscript" as far as anyone knows. There is NO SUCH THING.

There exist sixteen leaves from the first draft of Typee. As far as we know, this is all--one that had long been in the NYPL-GL, fifteen added as part of the 1983 "Augusta Papers."

16 Leaves and What Do You Get? Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself.

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Can we not define our projects in ways that look less self-aggrandizing or self-magnifying? The work of transcribing and analyzing 16 manuscript leaves should be honorable enough to be described simply and accurately.  G. Thomas Tanselle and Robert Sandberg did it for the 2017 BILLY BUDD &c volume of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition without vaunting their achievement! They simply list their names as the ones who did the work.

Indeed, making a careful transcription and analysis of the surviving leaves from Melville's first draft of TYPEE would have been an honorable enough enterprise for anyone. I thought my chapter on "The Sailor at the Writing Desk" in the 1996 volume of my biography of Melville was well worth doing, as an early attempt to make a narrative about young Melville as a working writer.  I know very well how happy I would be to see a more minute analysis of the order in which Melville worked and a conscientious transcription of the words he put down on the paper on those 16 leaves, along with a full depiction of his arsenal of symbols for re-arranging bits of prose. Does anyone want a transcription guided by what Bryant calls  his "rhetorical agenda" instead of a determination to find what the author intended by each word?

I note that Bryant's informative "Melville, 'Little Henry,' and the Process of Composition: A Peep at the TYPEE Fragment" is more accurately titled. A title with "Draft Fragment" or some other wording would have been better, but "TYPEE Fragment" gives adequate warning that Bryant is dealing not with a TYPEE Manuscript but just a fragment (a fragment of the first draft, in fact). Honesty in packaging takes thought, and Bryant’s September 1986 title in Extracts 67 is not perfect but certainly better than the outright misrepresentations in Bryant's later wording.

Bryant’s review of the NN Edition in the June 2019 LEVIATHAN suffers from lack of truth in packaging. In attacking me for not liking being lied about, Bryant says that to say that I merely surmise the existence of one of Melville lost books is a “fair-enough” charge. But he also implies that he thinks “surmises” might be unfair if he had something documentary (he dismisses Melville’s 12 point memo on the publication of his POEMS--not documentary), something like “rejection slips.” But, Heaven help us, we DO have Charles Scribner’s letter rejecting POEMS. Does Bryant not know that Charles Scribner's letter is better evidence than a tiny rejection slip? Richard Brodhead and Andrew Delbanco were not “fair-enough” in saying I merely "surmised" these lost volumes. They were out to discredit me, and they have to a great extent succeeded as Bryant's 2019 review shows.

To do what Bryant did in attacking me in the review of the final NN volume is dishonest. He sort of, kind of,  has some familiarity with biographical documents but he does not understand how to analyze them and relate them to each other. I have noted elsewhere that in this review he totally misrepresents what I said about Sealts and the prose sketches about Grandvin and Gentian. Can he not have understood the passage? He is not a sharp reader because no one who reads by “rhetorical agenda” can respect the text he is looking at. But is there something darker at work? Like jealousy? I think of his misery that no photograph of him appeared in that December 1996 New York TIMES Magazine.  Why would a photograph of Bryant appeared  in that issue? It was not about him. The NN Edition was not about him, either.