Today at 11

 

Cooler today, and a bit of white on the top of the Rock

 

The Glenn-Tuckers--Jarndyce vs Jarndyce in Indian Territory--progress on ONE OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS

 I started this October 4 and finished a good draft late today. It's long. This was one of the harder chapters because I knew the family beginning from my own memories then knew nothing except we were kept off the Choctaw tribal rolls. I had no idea how the Choctaw leaders had managed to exclude us and what I discovered, just doing basic research, was horrific each phase at a time, first one shocker, then the next, right through to the punishment of the 3 judges--one dying in late stages of alcoholism, one slitting his throat after a long alcoholic binge, another ignoring a sore on the toe that gangrene attacked to the point that the good doctors cut off his leg and the thigh and he died the next morning. 

Since a young fellow at Stanford last year had talked about enucleation (taking out my good right eye) and a young woman her had talked about amputation of part of my left leg last year, I was more sympathetic to the losers than you might think. What I concluded is that young doctors have a checklist of operations they have performed and if they have not done an amputation, like the young woman here, they are apt to do one without exhausting other options. It goes on their CVSs.

I have 2 more hard chapters to do. One of them is about two of my cousins, not kin to each other, who were falsely accused of atrocities, together then led remarkable lives, separately. Here I think I know all the episodes already--but, who knows? One is about my kinfolks killed at the Mountain Meadows Massacre and partly about the strange half-life one of the children who was not killed but returned to Arkansas in a couple of years. This will be controversial.

Ring the doorbell as much as you like, I will not open the door for an Unvaccinated Vagrant

 

We are at the divesting stage, not accumulating, but Mark brought us pillows from France many years ago and we felt we had to buy the footstool.

 

High tides. Today, a lagoon more than a mile long. This was 2 days ago--no beach.

 

I forgot all about the Mothers of Mayhem because I did not drive for a year and now rarely drive at school drop off or pick up time.

 But the Mothers of Mayhem are back. (You know the lyrics: "The Mothers of Mayhem have dropped off their Darlings at School" . . . .) This one was afraid of not being there at 3:30 to pick up the child.

So today I was almost knocked off the road by the Cut-off Queen. I think she allowed an inch as she pulled in front of me. Would not want to be late for the pickup.

Should I send her license number to the police?

Beach was perfect except for terrorist with bulldog and no leash in her possession--

She had it under voice command which means it was under no control at all. It charged at me and circled my feet but did not bite and (just as important) did not knock me down. When you don't have good balance, a little mean dog or a little friendly dog can do serious injury. No more falls! She really came to the beach with no leash. It was a NO DOG beach, but really under Covid you can't blame people who come out with dogs on a leash.

I was reading Parsons' THE HANGING CLUB today.

Depressing--Colin Powell, fully vaccinated, dead of Covid at 84. It's not good to get Covid when you are over 60.

 

He was fully vaccinated and was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, his family said.

In my extreme old age I am thinking about my years with TB, 1955-1957 (and part of 1954, before I knew).

 Washington Post News

Before the coronavirus, tuberculosis was the world’s leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, taking more lives each year than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined. But tuberculosis is also curable and preventable, caused by a bacillus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and spread when people who are sick expel bacteria into the air, usually by coughing.

BUT TB IS NOT "CURABLE"; IT IS JUST CONTROLLABLE.

Tourists have all gone away

 

So dry, you never know what comes to the kitchen window

 

More detail about Fredson Bowers

 

In the suppressed article on: Maggie, finally published in Australia in 1995:

However purely he began, Bowers became the Mad Scientist of Textual Editing - a Mad Scientist who ran what may have been the world's sloppiest textual lab and promulgated varying self-serving high-sounding textual theories to cover the slovenliness.

 

 

Amanda Gailey in Proofs of Genius (University of Michigan 2015):

         Some editors began to fear that the CEAA had become too fundamentalist in its adherence to the Greg-Bowers method and too dominated by Bowers himself, who was becoming increasingly intransigent. Even Bruccoli referred to Bowers as the CEAA’s “czar,” and Hershel Parker, who was involved with the Center for many years but has since become one of its most vocal critics, in one of his more measured moments described Bowers as a man who “attacked in public those who were in his way and in one of his less measured moments described him as “a peculiarly inattentive mad scientist of a 1930s B movie.” In 1974, Parker uncovered problems with Bowers’s editing of Maggie for the multivolume edition of Stephen Crane’s work, and petitioned the CEAA to rescind the seal of approval granted to the text.

 

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

FREDSON BOWERS'S ABUSE OF POWER IN THE 1970S

 

     Fredson Bowers and the Abuse of Power in the 1970s: 

    An Episode from an Abortive Academic Autobiography. 

But trouble had begun well before, in 1974. . . . That March I arranged to write an article on the Virginia Maggie: A Girl of the Streets for Katz's Proof 5 and by August 1974, during Nixon's last days, I had drawn Brian Higgins in.  I found the textual work not "scientific" but the work of a peculiarly inattentive egomaniacal mad scientist of a 1930s B movie.  Bowers had leaned over backwards in order to justify his preference for the expurgated 1896 edition over Crane's honest 1893 book.  The evidence would have supported only the most conservative Gregian text, but Bowers had talked himself into justifying the 1896 text so that the product was a titivated version of the 1896 expurgation: the mad scientist was reaching for 1893 and seizing on 1896.  Fantastic editorial decisions (such as the deletion of the fat man in Ch. 17) were justified by grotesque literary arguments.  The textual lists were a horror.  Even aside from the fact that they contained far too many unjustifiable emendations and were illogically and inhumanely designed, they were so weakened by omissions and errors as to be totally useless.  The CEAA had tied itself to the great bibliographer who had descended into fantasy, no more capable of riding herd on the expenditure of vast sums of money from the federal government than he was of rounding up and riding herd on a list of variant words.  Idealistic in those days, I wrote up my evidence with the help of Brian Higgins and submitted it to the CEAA in January 1975, asking that the seal given to Maggie be rescinded.  On 4 June 1975 the CEAA Advisory Committee refused to rescind the seal, and I was told in a letter dated 26 June that the Committee felt "that it would be inappropriate for the CEAA to explain for publications its reasons for refusing to withdraw a seal already awarded to a volume." The CEAA closed ranks around Fredson Bowers.  Worse, Katz abruptly dropped the Maggie article from the 1975 Proof then in September 1976 declined to publish it in the next Proof either.  By then, on 11 February 1975, Bowers had written to the director of the CEAA making an only slightly veiled threat: "I am not at all sure of the legal position in desealing a volume . . . .  It is a purely hypothetical situation, but a publisher of a desealed volume might question the legal basis as causing him financial harm and bring suit with punitive damages, which I suppose would be collected, if successful, from the individual members of the Committee, or possibly MLA."  He added: "It should be thoroughly understood that under the copyright laws, this communication is my private property, and that verbal dissemination as well as printed is covered by my rights--indeed any form of reference in anything that could be construed as public."  The foot of a page contained this warning, all in capitals: "CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION.  NO PART MAY BE PRINTED OR REFERRED TO IN PRINT WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE WRITER ON PENALTY OF A PROMPT LAWSUIT." On 3 April 1975, Bowers wrote to John Gerber, who was heading the committee that established the successor organization, the Center for Scholarly Editions:  "In my private and confidential view, the only person I think ought never to be considered for the committee or chairman is Hershel Parker."  The blackballing worked.  I lost opportunities to evaluate textual situations for the CSE as I had been doing for the CEAA. No one would touch the Maggie article.  I thought for months that it would be published in Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography.  The editors promised not to ask [ . . . .] to review it, but they did, before they rejected it.  Fredson had to be protected.

 A lot of federal money for projects all around the country was involved--not a lot in relation to one helicopter for Viet Nam, but a lot by academic standards.  Deprived of my chance to work through textual histories of CEAA volumes, I seized other opportunities to focus in great detail on a handful of American masterpieces.  It happened that one of them had been edited by Bowers.  On 10 November 1974 I took on the chore of reviewing Bowers's Virginia edition of The Red Badge of Courage for Nineteenth-Century Fiction along with his 1972 NCR / Microcard Editions The Red Badge of Courage: A Facsimile Edition of the Manuscript.  I had made one of my casual notes in 1972 that I should reconstruct the manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage (as far as possible) and read the book that way.  I had not gotten round to it.  Now, after a time, I focused on what was wrong with Bowers's facsimile edition of the manuscript.  This elaborate, enormously expensive book, I soon realized, was not a facsimile of "The Final Manuscript."  It contained in sequential pages a facsimile (some edges carelessly cut off in the photographing) of the pages of the manuscript which Crane had given to a friend and which had ended up at Charlottesville.  It was a facsimile of the portion of the manuscript which was at Virginia--the greater part of the whole manuscript, some of which survived elsewhere and some of which was lost.  Not in sequence at all but relegated to the back by Bowers were the surviving pages of Chapter 12, the longest and by all odds the most crucial chapter in the book.  These pages were mislabeled "Discarded Chapter XII," instead of something like "Surviving Portions of Chapter 12." When the book had been the manuscript Crane was trying to sell, Ch. 12 had followed Ch. 11 and preceded Ch. 13.  It had been an integral part of the manuscript.  It was typical of Bowers, who tended to fixate on later texts and work backward from them, not to realize that the value of a facsimile edition of the manuscript would lie in presenting all the known leaves of the final manuscript in sequence, whatever institutional or private library they happened to come to rest in.  In terms of textual theory, he was more or less systematically abandoning the wise council of W. W. Greg and reverting to the advice of Ronald S. McKerrow, taking any excuse to adopt readings from a late text.  What this showed, ultimately, was a predisposition to ignore the creative process.

 In November 1975, for one of the most ecstatic two hour stretches of my life, I read the first 11 chapters, then read the surviving parts of Ch. 12 and whenever possible fill out gaps with portions of the fortuitously surviving rough draft, so as to get an idea of the lost content, then read what had originally been numbered 13, and so on to the end reading the original words whenever they survived.  Fleming's self-delusion and vainglory was consistent throughout the book.  If what Crane wrote had been printed, there would have been no controversy over the young man's courage or cowardice: the text was so mangled as to be uninterpretable in any final way.  I said in the review: "This rather motley and slightly incomplete reconstruction, I wager, would be the best possible basis for New Critical demonstrations of the unity of the novel--the sort of essays which have been lavished upon mere reprints (or reprints of reprints) of the Appleton text, a text which reached its final form as the result of omissions so hasty and ill-conceived that several passages still depend for their meaning upon passages which were excised."  After I had read Red Badge almost as Crane wrote it I went back into an undergraduate class at USC and confessed that I had taught it wrong in the last class.  Sitting on the corner of the desk, a triangular tear in what a librarian called my Viet Cong pants, I passionately explained how Crane meant the title to be understood.  It was a remarkable fifty minutes, the first time anyone in the world had taught The Red Badge of Courage from the text Crane had tried so long and hard to get into print.  In the evaluations two students said I was incompetent because I had admitted not knowing how to teach a book and had taught it again.  Well, after Kent State all standards had been thrown out the window, but I would continue to teach passionately.

 When published in the March 1976 Nineteenth-Century Fiction, my article contained as a final zinger my new student Henry Binder's discovery that, on the most mundane level, Bowers had faked an essential CEAA requirement, a Hinman Machine collation of first and last texts of the Appleton edition.  On 8 April 1976 Bowers wrote "Dear Parker": "if I hear of any further innuendoes about my expenditure of NEH funds, and the ethics of my work, you will be hearing from my lawyer in the matter of libel, and so will any journal that prints such remarks.  I am in fact reserving action on some statements made in this review."  He sent a copy to the editor, who scoffed at the threat.  Fredson Bowers, the most famous American bibliography of the time and at his best a brilliant expositor of copy-text theory, had become a slovenly researcher willing to fake research, a pompous, idiosyncratic literary critic, and a vehement bully who silenced critics by threats of lawsuits and who intimidated colleagues into acquiescing while he silenced genuine literary criticism. 

 

 

In a pile of scraps part of a copy of a letter I wrote Hayford late in 1962 about my misgivings about Fredson Bowers

 Later, when I realized how astonishingly sloppy his textual work was and asked the Center for Editions of American Authors to rescind the seal awarded to MAGGIE, Fredson blackballed me from the Center for Scholarly Editions (he lied about this) and prevented by article on MAGGIE from being published for more than 20 years. I was very wary of his from our first meeting, in 1962, as I wrote Hayford, who was in Italy.  Here is the snippet:

Yesterday at noon--no beach at all

 

High tide, deep sand--had to go into Trees

 

The flag I had on me the last time I kissed any part of Mae West's living body

 

A Famous Rhetorician just sent 1995 photographs--Landenberg breakfast room. We all look just the same. We took the wallpaper down later.

 

This morning's Skillet Bread

 

 

Riders out of the fog

 

MAINTENANCE CREW ON STRIKE--2ND DAY IN A ROW