"SOWING CONFUSION," I WROTE ABOUT JOHN BRYANT IN 1994

“Sowing confusion,” I wrote about John Bryant in 1994, my words in my diary imperfectly recalling the King James Version:

Proverbs 6:14 - Frowardness [is] in his heart, he deviseth mischief continually; he soweth discord.

18 April John Bryant wants title of “Poems 1860” changed.

19 April Call from John Bryant just after Mert [Sealts] went ballistic over his [JB’s] editorial criticisms & hung up on him [hung up on Bryant] after withdrawing his piece. . . . Atwater . . . --Bob Milder fell in March in NYC & hit head on curb & “can’t talk.” Now talks as if someone is pulling on his tongue. . . . So I suggested he [Bryant] call Mert with abject apology

22 April Hard to wind down. Mail. Young Bryant’s comments on “Poems, 1860”--wants to avoid the word “great.”

Debate with myself whether to withdraw it.

A bad night over Young Bryant & [his] fear of “great.”

24 April Talked to Ed Shneidman about his new bklet--he had withdrawn his Companion piece once b/c of “pipsqueak” John Bryant--so he understood [when I] told him the story of AL [the March 1994 issue of American Literature designed to take Melville out of the canon and prevent my biography from being published--“we already have full scale biographies of Melville”]

25 April  Bad night b/c of Young Bryant . . . . Called Bryant at 750 am. OK--will keep greatness in and make other corrections & revisions. . . . To Smith [Hall] to print after inputting changes for Poems ch[apter] for Bryant. . . . Long call from Bryant about panel disc[ussion]

4 May  Chronicle wi letters defending me--OK except Bryant’s assy one--& the fact that no one says that the 1867 letters were published twice.

25 July --Off to Arrowhead to say goodbye to Caroline [B.]--and to see the Gansevoort Melville letter Ruth said Hennig and Young Bryant just saw last week--couldn’t find it [even] with Barbara Allen’s help. [see 30 July]

30 July later Young Bryant sowing confusion--[what he and Hennig thought was a Gansevoort Melville letter caused waste of time from several of us] Not Gansevoort’s at all but the HSG letter to PG that I [read and] sent to Stan [Garner] years ago. . . . Stupid John picking up documents & mouthing on while HC was trying to work with [cyanotype] album--utterly incompetent. [He just saw the name Lizzie]-- thought it was Lizzie Shaw [Melville]--Jesus what an xxxxxxx--Told me all about his great textual work on Typee all alone--Well, no, I had [already written] 12 pages [for my biograpny] on the ms pages [the dozen plus pages of the Typee Draft]--[He] caused me a lot of worry just by his incompetence.

***********************************************************************

End of 1994 diary excerpts.

***********************************************************************

“Perhaps I appear to be playing ‘gotcha’” John Bryant says in his review of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition in the June 2019 LEVIATHAN. The problem is that he is still sowing confusion, sowing discord. Perhaps no one has ever lied about him in a way calculated to damage him personally and professionally. Lucky fellow! Well, Richard Brodhead and Andrew Delbanco did lie that way about me, and Elizabeth Schultz followed them part way into the depths. Personally and professionally their lies were very damaging to me. No, I have not gotten over the damage.

        Did anyone notice that in his book on Melville Andrew Delbanco mentioned The Isle of the Cross and Poems without any hint of his having said in 2002 that I had made them up? The LEVIATHAN contributors all this time, since 2002, have left these lies standing. Have I missed some refutation of Brodhead and Delbanco?

        Worse, now, in the long run, is that covering up for Brodhead and Delbanco has meant that people who write on Melville have not yet begun taking account of the half a year of actual writing Melville devoted to The Isle of the Cross and the two and a half years or so he lectured but devoted the rest of the time to writing poems--to reshaping himself into a poet. So to praise a critic for writing on Melville’s inaugural volume of poetry, meaning the 1866 Battle-Pieces is to praise a refusal to think of Melville in human terms, as devoting many months to making himself into a poet. That’s an example.

        I have been trying for many years now to get people to think afresh about Melville in his working life. I did that in the recent Historical Note that John Bryant is reviewing. Weirdly, he sows confusion on what I said about Merton Sealts and me--absolutely missing the point, and missing the fact that I used Evert Duyckinck’s list of callers as a way of suggesting that the men Melville saw there were charming, powerful, insightful men whom he lost touch with on Duyckinck’s death. I offered the possibility, using what evidence we had, that Melville needed to invent boon companions when he lost some of his living ones. That was an attempt, a minor one, to try to look at the contexts of Melville’s working life when there is not a great deal of evidence, when even some of Duyckinck’s callers are not identified.

        So it’s not helpful for Bryant to misunderstand or misrepresent what I had clearly said, to distort a passage in the Historical Note in order to what, smear me?, and certainly muddy the facts of my relation to Sealts. This is pushing people away from trying to visualize the trajectory of Melville’s career. In his equally weird decision that “surmise” was all I did about the lost volumes, Bryant is humiliating himself, not me, except among the readers of LEVIATHAN who do not know the documentary evidence. Remember that among much other documentary evidence is Charles Scribner’s letter rejecting HM’s POEMS. I did not surmise that letter. How can Bryant bring himself to justify Brodhead and Delbanco at the cost of denying such documentary evidence? I did NOT surmise POEMS! nor The Isle of the Cross.

        I keep thinking of my shame when I saw the mass of biographical errors Bryant made in his notes to the 1991 panel discussion. I should not have been ashamed: he should have. I was humiliated by the errors attached to my words. The GOTCHA in the “surmises” part of Bryant’s review should humiliate him, but I have never seen him embarrassed at anything he said or did, whether it was complaining that his photograph was not in the December 1996 New York TIMES Magazine or barging in to maunder on at the end of my talk in Lenox in 2007, unable not to be center of attention, or--well, enough. I could go on. Now Bryant has given readings from his forthcoming two volume biography of Melville. Well, we will see.

        I see his inability to refrain from saying it was “fair-enough” for a reviewer to say I had only "surmises" about one or two lost books and his inability to read what I was saying in the Historical Note about me and Sealts as part of the same mentality as his theory of transcribing manuscripts by his “rhetorical agenda.” What counts is not what is there but what you wish it would be. Is that unfair? Look at his review carefully. Will he apologize?