Some items on "John Bryant" a.k.a. Chowderhead in my 1990 Diary and the scary (wrong) instruction on how to say Parthenope

John Bryant's review essay, "Editing Melville in Manuscript" reveals an astonishing lack of control, and I have not said a word  about his ideas on textual editing.

Some items from my1990 diary.

2 March 1990 [I] discovered a Melville letter at NYPL in Duyckinck Collection folder of undated letters from unidentified correspondents. [This is the letter refusing to review a book by D.D.]

3 March Called Harry [Hayford] about [new] letter

3 March Called [John] Bryant [because he is in charge of EXTRACTS, the place to put new discoveries]. ADE session on Editing Melville. Told him Melville Research is where the action is. S[ai]d I wdn’t be on [a panel] with crazies like mmmmmm mmmmm or xxx or xxxxxxx. Harry is furious at him [Bryant].

20 March [Harry] talked also of J Bryant, toward whom he is . . . contemptuous . . . .

28 March--Talked to Harry--errors in M’s Reading--He’s to call Young Bryant & say “hold horses”-- Warburton not source for Koran on wine/Arnaut

30 April--call from Bryant--idiotically pushing claim that Wm Dodd = DD [author of the book EAD asked HM to review --the letter I found at NYPL]--idiotic--wants to rewrite my introduction to letter. S[ai]d no

15 October--nasty letter from young Bryant about New Hist[oricism] program.

23 October-- Long call from Harry about Mrs B in the poem & other matters--told him about Young Bryant’s censoring me

[This in these square brackets is not diary but a letter from me a few years later, 2000] I tell someone: “I had always assumed xxxxx was going to do the book--but life is so short that if Leviathan will print you swiftly and if you are content with John Bryant’s handling, I would go with Leviathan. I always find that John is the sort of editor who “fiddles” and makes things worse--he made me and Brian say something we did not say--and [Robert] Milder slammed us in print for saying it, when we had not said it. So I am wary of him as editor.”] [He never once gave good advice but always wanted to fiddle, and did so every time if you did not make yourself very clear and get some power behind you, as when I got Gail Coffler to keep him from messing up my memorial for Walter Bezanson, one of the best things I ever wrote. Bryant had a compulsion to put himself into everything, to make himself somehow the center, the star or chief mourner, and always he would mess up anything he touched, as when he set Brian Higgins and me up for ridicule.]

30 December [Chicago] Into the Lions’ Den--Wai-chee & audience contemptuous of HH & me. Party line of Lauter about CEAA pristine texts--“Ethan Brand” still about HM [though NH wrote it long before HM was a writer]. HH: Bullshit: “not on same wave length.” Hostility to my Auguste Davezac plea. Seelye attacking me--“Discredit the Expansionist!” (without knowing him). Only Kenneth Dauber seeing that it was an ethical issue I raised. Why is he an asst prof still? Mediated Gretchko and Young Bryant. Lunch with Walt & Gail HH Lynn Mary K Gretchko Bryant, Sandberg. [THEN] Alone on Wall St. on Sunday. [Brian was sick.] In snow took 2 1/2 mile walk--Water Tower Place--. . . Old Town up Wells--far up Clark past Fullerton to Barry . . . 14 degrees--That was the time to take a cab bk--Afraid of frostbite on face

[This was the meeting where Bob Wallace described  the “petulant” red-bearded stranger who kept shouting from the doorway, THE FACTS DON’T MATTER! THE FACTS DON’T MATTER! and were I remember the prophet as the Satanic red-bearded stranger. This was the meeting after which I never went to the transformed Bryant-Wai-chee Melville Society in the United States. The facts really had stopped mattering.]

I am repeating this because it is so shocking.

I am stunned that the June 2019 LEVIATHAN would print Bryant saying this:  "Parthenope (pronounced PAR-thin-OH-pee) is now the newly sanctioned title for what we have in the past referred to as Melville’s Burgundy Club Sketches.” Did no one at LEVIATHAN have the power to help him control himself?

You can ask any dope
How to say Penelope,

But it takes a Johnny B.

To Mispronounce Parthenope.

This would be merely amusing if in what passes as the final review of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE John Bryant in LEVIATHAN had not gotten so very much wrong. At least we won't be around if Melvilleans centuries hence go about saying PAR-thin-OH pee! PAR-thin-OH pee! PAR-thin-OH pee! PAR-thin-OH pee!