"That truth should be silent I had almost
forgot"--Enobarbus in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, back in Rome after having been
too long in Egypt.--------- Melville's PIERRE, Book 4, chapter 5:
"Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually
curious for nothing."
Monday, May 16, 2011
TLS takes on UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS's
AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead
NOT ONE WORD MORE Revisited.
J.C. in the NB page of the TLS for 6 May 2011 makes witty, wry, sardonic,
merciless fun of “Past profiles” in Dale Salwak’s University of Iowa Press
collection, AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead, in which
modern critics interview dead writers, engaging them in sprightly imaginary
conversations. J.C. chooses to embarrass Cynthia Ozick: “When playing this
parlour game, the trick is to conjure plausibly, without seeming arch. We find
it hard to believe that Henry James would respond to questions about his
homosexuality by saying (to Cynthia Ozick), ‘Let us pass over this unseemly
subject’.” “Or,” continues J. C., “Or that Edith Wharton would launch into a
discussion of the same topic—chucking in James’s constipation—before even
offering John Halperin a cup of tea. Not content with his scoop on the
‘repressed’ James, Halperin asks Wharton about her ‘first sexual relationship’.
She tells all. We’d tell him to get out.” J. C. is still more appalled by Paul
Delany’s calling in the doctor over Gissing’s syphilitic lesions and
tuberculosis, but he cannot resist turning back to the egregious effrontery of
Cynthia Ozick: “Like many of the would-be-journalists here” in AfterWord, “Ozick
assumes that the purpose of a literary interview is to throw down banana-skin
questions, leading to a slip-up, a ‘revelation’. Any decent interviewer could
have told her that a hostile line of questioning is more likely to produce a
forced smile, folded arms, and a glance at the fobwatch.”
Perhaps the TLS will, after these tough words, pass the Iowa book out to a
sympathetic reviewer, but for now AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary
Dead, is a collection one would not want to be, as it were, caught
dead in.
There but for the grace of my own high sense of delicacy and the mean spirits
of two reviewers might I have gone!
For the earlier version of this book, then called ONE WORD MORE, I
wrote the essay NOT ONE WORD MORE. Why the “NOT”? Because I would not have
dreamed of putting words in the mouth of Herman Melville. I responded to
Salwak’s request for an article only on that condition, that I would not have
to invent words which I would then attribute to Melville. As I wrote James Hime
on 4 July 2008: “The premiss (or premise) of the collection, ONE WORD MORE, is
that the biographers get one more chance to quiz their living or dead subjects.
Of course I could not put words into HM's mouth so my article is called ‘Not
One Word More’ and I get to talk about myself. The editor really likes it, and
even H----y, who values privacy, likes it too.”
Last year two reviewers for Iowa recommended dropping my essay, as Joe Parsons,
the head of the Press, blithely told me. One of these sagacious reviewers said,
“Not only does Walker not write so much about Melville as about himself, but
the tone is disrespectful and laden with Walker's usual opprobrium for his
critics, real or imagined.” You have to watch that Walker. I remember when a
reviewer back in the 80s started off wondering “what possessed Herschel Walker
to write Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons.” I can only assume
that the same, now aged, churl, an academic who writes reviews and reader’s
reports but not scholarly articles and books, leapt at the chance to knock me
again, a quarter century later.
The other reviewer was indeed too disrespectful to me, if not Walker, for
anyone to tell me what she said.
In the old days when you were thrown out of a collection you sulked. These
days, you do what I did when my review of Sally Bushell’s new book was
rejected: you post most of it on Amazon.com half an hour later, and start a
blog and post the rest of it. And on that blog you post “Not One Word More”
with a disingenuous reference to AfterWord. That’s just what I did
back in January.
Now, with J.C. aghast at Cynthia Ozick and other contributors, I congratulate
myself on having refused from the start to play that particular game—and for
getting “Not One Word More” out where more people will read it than will read
the Iowa book. Here the long-suffering Walker’s controversial essay is, again.
16 May 2011
Now, what follows below was my way of handling rejection, back in January. I
regret only that I was still too traumatized by Brenda Wineapple's slaughter of
my biography in THE NATION to ask Melville what he thought of her transforming
his reference to the Lamb of God into a reference to a baaing Berkshire ewe,
wether, or ram. He might, at that, have broken silence.
Herman Melville: Not One Word More
Hershel Parker
Early in 2011 the University of Iowa Press is announcing AfterWord:
Conjuring the Literary Dead, edited by Dale Salwak, in which
biographers conduct interviews with their dead subjects so as to elicit more
words, if not last words, from the grave. What a terrifying and attractive
notion! But I know just how many words Herman Melville would say to me.
Any biographer wants all he or she can get. If I were looking at newly
discovered marginalia of Melville’s in an auction house and the clerk said I
could copy half of a 24 line note, I would conscientiously copy twelve lines.
I'm docile and deferential. Then I would copy the other 12. How am I supposed
to know which words will turn out to be the most revealing? I need all the
words much more than any collector who will buy a book Melville marked up so he
can take it apart and sell it a leaf at a time, framed, with a window on the
back if there’s marking on both sides. I'm saying "need" and not
"needed" because I still have a biography to write, not a 500-page
condensation of the terse 2000 page two-volume Johns Hopkins study but a wholly
different shorter book for Northwestern called Melville and Biography:
An Inside Narrative (with an ambiguous nod to the subtitle of Billy
Budd, Sailor). (It’s about biography as theorized and practiced in the last 3
decades as well as problems in Melville biography.) Anything I could learn
directly from Melville would go into that book. I have the questions ready but
no confidence at all that I could conjure new words from him, although I have,
now that I think about it, discovered more than a few of his words recorded by
others or written down by the man himself.
The fact is that I have been talking to Melville for over half a century, under
my breath or, very often, out loud. Mainly I've asked him questions. Far too
often I've moaned, "Ah, why did you do that? Didn't you know what the
consequences would be?" I asked myself why he did not protest in the
newspapers once he realized that Americans were learning from the London
Athenaeum that he had not accounted for Ishmael's survival--from the Athenaeum
as quoted twice, at devastating length, in his wife's home town. He could have
asked editors to print a formal "card" if not just a news item. He
could have asked Richard Bentley to print the "Epilogue" in his
magazine and publicize it in the London newspapers. The loss of the
"Epilogue" to The Whale could have been a publicity bonanza, like the
discovery of Toby was for Typee. If the Literary World review of Moby-Dick had
not been so sanctimonious, would he have asked Evert Duyckinck to put an
article about the lost "Epilogue" in the Literary World?
Not expecting to conjure up answers, I've challenged myself with simple
questions. I would ask, "What did you have on or about your person when
you arrived in New York City in October 1844?" I talked things out at (if
not with) Melville for years, as in bringing him up to date by saying, “Well,
one thing you had was Allan's long letter to you which you received in Boston,
a letter we did not know about until after the covetous and secretive
psychiatrist Henry Murray died.” (Murray had the interest, the money, and the
access in the 1920s so I was convinced that he had bought some of the letters
to Hawthorne from that former jailbird, his son Julian. Before Nina sold the
Francis Street house in Cambridge I diplomatically suggested that she might
look for a wall safe in the study behind the boards that Murray had torn off
the barn at Arrowhead, but she thought I was a mad Jamesean biographer and
refused to mess up a perfectly good wall. If I had twenty minutes with a metal
detector . . . .)
"What were you thinking about on that ferry or that ship or that
train?" I would ask. “When you had just seen Toby in Rochester (really
Rochester, as Thurlow Weed said, you could tell me, and not Buffalo?) I knew
that you were thinking about how to get control of his story so you could add
it as an appendix to your book. He was running off with your Typee! Whatever
mix of emotions you were reflecting on after seeing your old shipmate, you had
work to do on the way home, now that his own vivid narrative was being
reprinted all over the country.” I asked hundreds of such simple questions
before I was finished, and got surprising answers, a few times, from documents
but not from Melville. Sometimes I was just curious and had to remain so: “Did
you really break off your first stint of work on the whaling book to make an
excursion to West Point?” He could tell me now that other writing are speaking
“AfterWords” to their biographers.
Let me try the address you directly in public, in a blog, which is sort of like
what the Home Journal was to Nathaniel Parker Willis. “If other dead writers
are talking to biographers, why not you, Melville?” Still silent? I know that
side of you--"the most silent man" Maunsell Field ever knew, before
you and Dr. Holmes gave him the best talk he ever heard. Am I going to get to
hear you in full tide of racy talk as in the early years, or in full rant in
the last years about "Damn fools" of politicians? No? I'll never hear
your voice? Never know if you really did talk, all your life, with something of
your father's Bostonian-Scottish accent? I'm still on my own?
Just because I squatted over your bones to take a rubbing of your tombstone on
rice paper on a sticky July day in 1962, you think I've been crowding you for
half a century? Now you are irritated enough not to talk but curious enough to
give me a tour of likely sites for an interview? It’s my version of the Iowa
group’s fantasy but instead of chatting you are offering and rejecting one site
after another?
Is this Westport? One harbor looks like another to me.
I've played along. At every new scene I'm telling you where we are or else I've
made my best guess. You're the world traveler, after all. Next are you going to
sit cross-legged in Paradise waiting for Hawthorne, and expect me to follow?
Don't even suggest a cozy chat on a ferry boat, you who will change your seat
eight times before we steam along past with the new Statue of Liberty! Julian
Hawthorne told the truth for once about your fiddling with the long stick with
a hook as you adjusted the high transom window. I thought I was the fidgety old
man. Please, stop a few minutes at the next Scene of High Significance in the
Life of Herman Melville. I'm much older than you ever lived to be, and you are
giving me vertigo.
Thanks for pausing. Oh, it's a crow's nest, and it's rocking, and I don't like
heights. I'll close my eyes--that concentrates the snugness and lets me feel my
own identity aright, you say. Maybe it will combat the vertigo. Now, your not
talking is nothing new. We do have some things in common. Philip Weiss, the
writer of the stealth attack on your reputation in the New York Times Magazine
in December 1996, had his Eureka moment when he was quizzing me: "Oh,
you're an autodidact, like Melville!" Yes, you could say that. I had to
quit school at sixteen to become a railroad telegrapher and had seven years'
seniority when I quit that job—the first of what turned out to be dead end
jobs. But I sputtered when I saw that Weiss had referred to you as my "hero."
Another autodidact, yes, but never my hero. Maybe my hero from your time was
Andrew Jackson, who as a boy fought at Cowpens, very near King's Mountain,
where my Scots and German grandparents and uncles and cousins fought alongside
the Over-mountain Men.
I'm glad to be with you now, although these ropes are slimy. You were not my
hero, but I never thought of us as friends or allies. I never thought much
about whether or not you would like me at all, you with your knowledge of
poverty always infused with a profound sense of entitlement, although I did
derive some wry amusement at wishing you knew someone with Choctaw and Cherokee
blood was writing about the metaphysics of Indian-hating. Always when I
fantasized imaginary conversations for you it was never between you and me. I
fantasized about your being deep in talk with people I knew you would have
relished, wishing that you could have sat down with the great guerrilla John
Mosby in cozy confabulation about Sir Walter Scott and that arrogant young
murderer of Mosby's men, George Armstrong Custer.
Now that I think of it, I wish I could have overheard you telling stories to a
group of men at sea, trying out tall tales about Fayaway on the Charles and
Henry and on the United States, before you had come up with the spelling of
that name—maybe a greater stroke of genius than adapting “Mocha Dick” for your
whale. Before you got home were you already telling about your naked son--the
story that turned on the tailor's practice of dressing the male genitals to the
left or right pants leg? You hinted, you teased, you bragged, but you undercut
the sexual boasting, turning the stories comically against yourself, to judge
from the story that the boy Ferris Gleenslet heard in 1886 in the barbershop in
Glen's Falls. When I started working on you I was young and a prude. Now I'd
like to hear what your contemporaries said was "racy."
Just before he died, as you knew, your brother Gansevoort met Nathaniel Parker
Willis in London ("We had a long, friendly & I may almost say intimate
conversation"), and acted as Willis's brother-in-law's groomsman. Willis
had been something of a Lothario, at least before and between marriages, as he
asserted in the Tribune on 18 October 1849 in a curious denial that he was a
profligate: "That, in my first residence abroad, and when a single man, I
saw freely every manner of life which, by general usage, a gentleman may see, I
will not deny." The fragments of your letter to Willis that survive, your
letter from London, are among the glories of your still youthful exuberance.
What if we had a dozen such letters, and his to you, instead of comments on you
by Evert A. Duyckinck? We have some of his reviews of your books, but that's
not the same thing. I still don't know you as a man among men.
Where are we off to? Oh, I see. Ho, ho, it's a joke worthy of your brother
Allan. From the crow's nest, a natural progression (as you said about going
from the baths of Caracalla to the Protestant Cemetery) . . . .
Scene: Owl's Nest, Claymont, Delaware.
I recognize Felix Darley's house. I've been inside this place when the plaster
was down and some of the lath torn off and there were holes in the floor you
could drop an easel through, if you folded it up. I thought about buying it, to
save it, but it was cynically overpriced. The whole area was run down, what
you'd expect from the south edge of Chester, Pennsylvania, that industrial dump
where Wilmingtonians went to shoot up, in my time. You could not see the
Delaware River at all for the trees. Dickens came to Owl's Nest, but you never
visited here, did you? Yet, as I found in the 1980s, Darley made his arduous
way to Arrowhead, asking directions (stuttering nervously as he did?), finally
directed through bog and through bush by locals who thought they were Puckish. You
keep your secrets: did you meet through Henry Tuckerman? Or at Dr. John
Francis's? You aren't going to tell me, I know. You must have seen his
illustrations of Irving after your ungrateful declaration of independence in
the essay on Hawthorne. Did they affect your repentant homage to the old man in
the "Paradise" and "Tartarus" stories? Darley must have
talked to you about his friend Poe. He was good to be around, genuinely sweet,
quietly humorous, almost as gorgeous as Hawthorne had been, and the age of your
younger brother Allan.
And how many other painters did you know very well? You gave the painter E. S.
Doolittle the whale's tooth Captain Worth had given you. Long ago I saw it at
the New-York Historical Society I told Jay Leyda about it, stewing all the time
about “Doolittle” until Scott Norsworthy identified him recently. Then on
fultonhistory.com while looking for something else I found an astonishing 1880s
newspaper article about it, after someone else had inherited it. Doolittle is
not famous now, but you knew Bierstadt, Church, and many others, didn't you? Or
did you avoid every invitation to meet them? This is tantalizing. Your Uncle
Peter owned Bierstadts. He and his circle of Albany friends seemed to own half
the best Hudson River paintings in existence, buying them as they were painted.
You collected prints because you saw superb American oil paintings you could
not afford and saw Richard Lather's very expensive mediocre European oil
paintings you certainly could not afford. But what about Darley? He cared about
you, yet he never illustrated anything of yours, just for fun? No luscious
drawings of scenes from your South Sea stories? How I wish I had a dozen
letters from him to you and you to him! Not a word in any Darley papers left in
libraries or attics in Delaware, either, not that I could find. You know what I
mean when I say I wish I "had" these letters: I wish I could see them
in a library.
Scene: Broadway and Eighth Street in empty Manhattan, a ghost town, you with
Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, and nobody else in sight until you
encounter a solitary man, someone you all recognize.
Are you challenging and reproaching me, since this is not in my biography? I
know about it because Scott Norsworthy found it recently. (Harrison Hayford
said it: "What Hershel needs is a Hershel.") On a July Sunday in 1849
this man met the three of you, and all four then strolled down a Broadway that
was a "scene of utter desolation." The man remembered long
afterwards: "We looked up toward Union Square--we were standing near
Eighth Street--not a living being was visible. We looked down toward the
Battery. The same solitude prevailed. As we advanced a few blocks, a solitary
pedestrian emerged out of Howard Street and crossed Broadway. The spell was broken.
Humanity once more came on the scene."
The cholera was raging, and sensible people were indoors. Did you remember this
vacant Manhattan when you wrote in "Bartleby" that Wall Street on
Sunday is as deserted as Petra? And now that you bring me here I realize that
in 1857 in Florence when you saw the wax carvings depicting "Naples in the
Time of the Plague" you must have remembered Albany and Manhattan in
plague years. You aren't going to tell me this man's name, I know, but he gave
some clues. In 1855 he was "actively engaged in mercantile business"
with both store and office on Broad Street. He lived near Union Square and took
the Broadway stage to and from his office. He was a personal friend of General
William Worth, who died that year. Perhaps, like Worth, he was a Mason and an
Episcopalian (but went to hear Methodist ministers). He was familiar with many
journalists (including Thomas Powell) and theatrical people (including Allan's
friend James Hackett), especially opera singers and their managers. He was a
Columbia graduate. Stephen Hoy thinks he was a Schermerhorn, probably John. You
could just tell me his name, you know. It might not do me any good, but I want
to know. No, it would do me good--all my experience says that it would lead to
more connections and maybe even some new stories. He probably left a diary.
Scene: The Battery, as it was in 1866.
You want to show me the homeless Southern veterans hovering there. You
identified with these ghostlike men, somehow, having survived your life as a famous
writer. These quiet men haunted the Battery for you the rest of your life. You
jerked your head when I reminded you how much alike you and your obsessed
cousin Kate Gansevoort Lansing were in moving among ghosts in a haunted world.
But we all do that, as we age, don't we? If you want to know, some of my
captured kinsmen died from mistreatment by the Yankees and some who survived
the prisons walked all the way back south from places like Alton, Illinois,
into black poverty for as long as they lived.
Scene: The William Worth monument, since 1857 a traffic island at the
junction of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 24th and 25th Streets.
You liked to sit on this monument late in life. Did you ever see Worth in
Albany or Manhattan? Did you read, in your last years, what Grant said about
him in his Personal Memoirs--that he was nervous or even frenetic and wore his
men out with needlessly long marches when they were just heading for an
encampment, not a battle? When you sat and smoked here did you change your spot
every few minutes? I know it meant something special to you, probably
associated with the outbreak of the war with Mexico and Gansevoort's death, the
time you witnessed all that violent war paroxysm in Albany. Anyone can see the
monument on the Internet now, or the great book called New York 1880, but
nobody could imagine how bad the automobile and truck pollution is. Only a
smoker like you could stand it here. Can we go somewhere else?
Scene: 49 Mount Vernon Street, Boston. Charles Bulfinch, but enlarged! The
great house on the greatest street in America! Your great-grandson Mel
could have bought it back into the family, in the late Truman or early
Eisenhower years. The owner let me in when I held out a copy of the bound
advance proof of the first volume. The lower floor was off limits, rented,
except the foyer, but I could see that there down the hallway was a succession
of two arched doorways. And of course I had the photographs made about the time
Sam Shaw died and the house was sold.
You know critics think you were never engaged to Elizabeth Shaw. You just
suddenly married! I worked out that you spent time in Boston in October 1844
before you went to New York City. You would not have been welcomed by your
aunts, who had cut your mother off, but if you did call on one of them or if
you had found your cousin Guert in the Navy Yard you would have been told that
someone in Boston had up-to-date news from Lansingburgh: Lizzie, who had spent
weeks there with your mother and sisters and Tom (when he was home), and was in
regular correspondence with Helen. In October 1844 Lizzie had known the
contents of every letter the family had received from you and she knew the
contents of letters from Helen and the others that probably never reached you.
You had been a romantic figure even before you told your stories to Lemuel
Shaw, who had a cousin in the Hawaiian Islands you might have met, and who knew
all about what his friend Captain Percival had done with the missionary-school
girls there. Your plan to surprise your mother was easy to effect: your aunts
never wrote her, and Guert and Lizzie could be told not to write. And you swore
the New Yorker Allan to secrecy when you wrote him that you were coming there
next.
You dedicated Typee to Judge Shaw for a reason, and I dated the courtship
better by finding a letter in which your mother specified the month you became
engaged. I knew how many times you had seen Lizzie before then. Critics gave me
a hard time for thinking you had an actual courtship, but I knew Othello; I did
enact Michael Cassio in a Bay Area theatre in, after all. "She loved me
for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them."
Your fate was sealed before you left here for the last time in October, 1844,
and when you walked out into the Common on your wedding day in 1847 you were
the true grandson of the Hero of the Tea Party, the immensely wealthy old man,
the "Last Leaf," who took you for your first walks there. After Shaw
died you were never welcome here, so it's bittersweet now. I know what this
house meant to you.
And that's not even talking about this as the place where you read Shakespeare.
After Malcolm was born you had nothing to do for days but sit on a sofa and
read Shakespeare. You had known some of the plays, but you had never read most
of them. Shakespeare is the main reason I wrote your biography, you know? You
don't know? While I was a telegraph operator I contracted tuberculosis. During
one five month period of my confinement, in 1956, I was in a tiny room with one
book, a one-volume Shakespeare I had bought in New Orleans in 1953. I had
pencils and a pocket knife to sharpen them with and for those months I read the
plays every day, over and over, some more than 20 times. The next year I read
Moby-Dick in eleven afternoons (still flattened by that barbaric treatment,
pneumo-peritoneum), savoring it, hardly believing that a young American had
absorbed Shakespeare as you had done. I gained access to that room in 2005. It
was as small as I remembered, but sacred to me, as sacred as a room in the
Mount Vernon house was to you--the room where you read Shakespeare.
Scene: No. 1 Bond Street, the great house on what Maria Melville in the
1820s envied as a street of marble-faced dwellings.
I saw the outside as we came, and I see Benjamin Franklin's china, so I know
it's Dr. Francis's mansion, near the Thurston house of Allan's in-laws, but you
are frustrating and reproaching me again. Here in his salon are thirty men,
forty men, the most famous New Yorkers of their time, and a couple of European
lions. You are a fixture here, dropping in even when you are living in
Pittsfield and only in town on business--and yet the only record we have is the
account I suspect Henry Tuckerman wrote, naming you and him and Duyckinck and
Rufus Griswold as regulars. Scott Norsworthy (again) finally nailed down the
date of the newspaper article Perry Miller said was from 1850: 1854, reprinted
in 1855. I spent months all told, looking for it, and in early July 1988 I
found a treasure when Tulane would not let me see the Picayune, where I thought
the article might be. The treasure was several years’ worth of Oakey Hall's
weekly letters in the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, written from inside the
Duyckinck circle.
Have you forgotten how many days you took to write White-Jacket? Oakey told all
of New Orleans you wrote it in "a score of sittings"! I would have
said about 60, July and August, but if you lined up your next source one day,
took a sharp scrutiny of it the next day, and wrote like hell the third day,
there you were! By uncanny coincidence, a month earlier, 28 June 1988, on the
back of a 9 x 12 envelope on a train from Strasbourg to Luxembourg I had
outlined Reading "Billy Budd," concluding: "I want to do it at a
stretch. I want to do it in 21 days. That's six pages a day average. There's
your goal." I wanted to know how it felt for you to write a book that fast
(then in the next two months write a longer one), and the only way to have any
idea of it was to do it myself--to write one that fast (but spare myself from
following it with another written that fast)!
Back in this country, we went at once to New Orleans. When I discovered what
Oakey Hall said about White-Jacket, then I altered my goal. Home in Wilmington,
I decided my book would be "written in 'a score of sittings'" between
13 July 1988 and 31 August 1988. In fact, I wrote it between 13 July and 24
August in a third floor room where the temperature was in the 90s nineteen days
in a row, so muggy that that the keyboard of the computer often gummed up. I
printed and mailed it on 24 August. The publisher said it would be fine if I
cut it by a quarter. Then my wife read it and said don't touch it--it's too
good for that series anyhow. So I sent it to Northwestern. If at Tulane I had
lain on the floor and kicked my heels and protested that I was almost a Cajun
or a Redbone, having been a depot agent and telegrapher on the Kansas City
Southern in Calcasieu Parish and a telegrapher up and down the Sabine towns,
the librarian might have let me see the Picayune, and then I would never have
discovered the Commercial Bulletin. I might have written the Billy Budd book
fast, but Hall’s "a score of sittings" gave me an extra impetus. The
benefits of docility! What did I find out? That now I remember almost nothing
about the composition except that the first weekend Mark Niemeyer hovered
around as I tried to pile up what we were calling "gross byteage."
Did you have any memory, years later, of writing White-Jacket?
When I was in the East I should have assembled a list of known guests who
frequented Dr. Francis's and should have read dozens of New York City papers
(and of course there were dozens) and two or three dozen out-of-town papers
that printed regular letters from their New York City correspondents, looking
for mentions of the men who came here. I could have maximized my efforts by
starting when a foreign celebrity was in town, and then I should have looked at
their letters and diaries. I didn't do. There have to be records still--diaries
or letters of men who attended and described how you talked, once you were
warmed up with the wine. A biographer should be omnivorous, omnipresent,
immortal, and strong as a horse. I couldn't do everything. I'm apologizing.
Now, do you want to point me toward where records survive? How about that for
the next scene, a pile of letters and diaries?
Scene: Monument Mountain by the Devil's Pulpit, summer, black flies swarming.
Ah, this time you are grateful to me, as you should be! Twentieth-century
Melville criticism harped on how excited you were about meeting Hawthorne, who
ignored you and looked "mildly" about for the Great Carbuncle of his
story. Finally, after my first volume was out, I went to the manuscript and saw
that Duyckinck's letter had been mistranscribed in the 1930s. All agitated,
Hawthorne was hamming it up, looking wildly about for his Great Carbuncle. We
should have known he was enthralled by you: how many men did he meet and
immediately invite for a sleepover? Hawthorne was as excited about encountering
you as you were about encountering him. So I vindicated you belatedly in the
“Documentation” of Vol. 2! Maybe after another century criticism will catch up
with "wildly," but meanwhile I've put it on record that you aren't
any longer to be seen as the young man who fell into unrequited love with a
once-gorgeous old storywriter. The powerful attraction was mutual. If you were
talking you'd say "Thank you." Well, you're welcome. Finding
"wildly" was my pleasure, really.
Scene: The Manhattan Church of the Ascension, high Episcopalian, an infant
baptism.
The Thurstons' church, and therefore your brother Allan's, June of 1849, the
christening of little Maria Gansevoort Melville, named for your mother. The
woman in motion is one of your Van Rensselaer cousins, Dutch Church like your
mother, fleeing, aghast at the minister's making the sign of the cross. Jesuits
are prowling the country and here in broad daylight a putatively Protestant
minister makes a pagan gesture!
While at Northwestern I spent the 1959 Christmas holiday in California reading
Pierre, then the Fall of 1960 I took a Melville course from Harrison Hayford
because other students said he would not accept a term paper. He wanted an
article styled for a particular journal, presented to him in an envelope
addressed to that journal, the proper number of stamps affixed. Then if it was
good he could put it in the mail. Mine was "The Metaphysics of
Indian-hating," an explication of the allegory in The Confidence-Man in
which you portray diluted Indian-haters as nominal Christians.
Nineteenth-Century Fiction took it. Harold Bloom reprinted it, and I still
reprint it as often as I can. Hayford and his Yale colleagues, even Elizabeth
Foster, had been too high toned to understand total depravity and Original Sin
the way a person exposed to your mother's Dutch Church or mid-twentieth century
Southern Baptist doctrine could, back when Baptists believed not only in sin
but in separation of church and state. Foster was a Texan, but Episcopalian.
They were great scholars and good diluted Indian-haters, the Yale Melville
students. William Shakespeare and John Calvin--they let me become a Melvillean.
Now you know.
Scene: The edge of the fountain of the Nelson memorial in Liverpool, Victory
crowning the hero as Death stabs him.
I came here before there was an Internet and I wanted pictures. Liverpool
didn't have a single postcard of the memorial for sale, and my hotel room was
so dark that I lost my roll of film in it. The library had signs up: "If
you leave it, it will be pinched." Someone had "pinched" the
handle for the microfilm reader. Look: I wore the first joint of my right index
finger down to a nub reading the Mercury. The Adelphi up on the ridge where
Duyckinck stayed was shabby. The whole town had turned into Launcelott's-Hey.
The only tourists were two Japanese teenage girls searching for Strawberry
Fields. You broke my heart when you came back here after seventeen years and
stood thinking how your life had changed triumphantly, and changed again
miserably. Take me somewhere else. Take me to tacky Southport, even, where I
walked on the same grains of sand you did and then decided I had located what
was left of the pub you and Hawthorne went to, the Fox & Geese, now a
fast-food take-out place called "The Steamboat."
Scene: Lenox: a corner of the old dining room at Wilson’s Hotel, formerly
the Little Red Inn.
You owe me big for this one. This is where you spent the happiest hours of your
life, that dark afternoon in mid November 1851 when you and Hawthorne sat here,
with the local belles and beaux peeking in and giggling because they thought
that you two reclusive authors had chosen such a peculiar way of getting
acquainted. Local men did not dine in a hotel! You sat there showing Hawthorne
the dedication to Moby-Dick and letting him hold the book as you talked.
Critics who ignore documents are hopeless, but even scholars are stupid because
we become dependent on documents. We can't imagine any human action that isn't
documented. All babies are mysteries to us unless we have a notebook record of
successful impregnation. We never once asked how Hawthorne got a copy of the
book so fast, as if you wouldn't have walked barefoot to Lenox in the snow to
get it to him before he left for the east.
You know how this episode was discovered? In Boston while reading Lawrence,
Massachusetts, papers (to find out what I could about your brother-in-law
Hoadley) I found an unknown letter signed "Maherbal," a description
of the Hawthorne cottage near Lenox about the time the Hawthornes left, in
November 1851, written from Lenox and reprinted from the Windsor (Vermont)
Journal. Where there is one letter to a hometown newspaper, there may be more,
so for five years I hunted for the Journal and even sent a graduate student up
to ransack New Hampshire libraries. Back then, there were limits on how many
pages anyone could get into a computer file, and I kept subdividing 1851,
always transferring to the top of the new file the note "FIND WINDSOR
VERMONT JOURNAL."
At last, five years later, Richard E. Winslow found a file of the Journal for
me, and in it of course were more letters, one describing your meeting with
Hawthorne alone together in the dining room in a hotel in Lenox, surely the
Little Red Inn that in 1851 was known as Wilson’s and a few years later became
Curtis's Hotel, where your father-in-law Judge Shaw stayed every September,
when he held court. Moral: you determine to invest one precious hour of a
research trip trying to find out how grand, really, was John and Kate Hoadley's
house, where your mother visited, and in that hour you stumble over something
that leads you, in good time, to a buried treasure, if you live long enough and
keep on the alert. This meeting in the hotel was a great discovery for me as
biographer, a bonus bestowed by the Goddess of the Archives. Just in terms of
practicality it was a godsend because it provided a seemingly inevitable
conclusion for the first volume. Why, I didn't need a newspaper document. I was
allowing for this scene all along, even though I would have set it in the
chaotic Little Red Cottage, where Sophia was doing all the packing for the move
to Newton by herself. Sure I was. No, I’ll confess: scholars are document
dependent, when we don't ignore documents altogether. You know what happened
later.
Scene: Same dining room, 1869, before the hotel (by now Curtis’s) became the
Victorian Behemoth, you and a most elite gathering where you are outranked in
wealth but not in ancestry or achievement.
That was fast. I was about to say that this document in the Windsor (Vermont)
Journal set off an explosion far away, once I paid attention again to an item
in the 20 September 1869 Springfield Republican which Jay Leyda had quoted in
the 1969 "Supplement" to The Melville Log: "Among the notabilities
who have been summering at Curtis's hotel in Lenox . . . Herman Melville of New
York." Overshadowed by post-war plutocrats, your own old fame recalled
only as an adjunct to Hawthorne's fame (no longer the "man who lived among
the cannibals" but beginning to be almost famous as the "man who had
known Hawthorne in the Berkshires"), you sat again in the dining room
which had witnessed the highest triumph in your life, when Moby-Dick was
published and your friend read the dedication. Could anyone doubt that you
remembered that afternoon in November 1851?
No--not when I could show that you tended to experience a peculiar mental state
when disparate times, places, and people collided. Typically, an image of one
object, place, or person superimposes itself upon another, the images
dissolving back and forth, exactly what we could call "morphing."
This psychological tendency may have been abnormally strong in you, judging
from the way you described it in your books, in Omoo, or Pierre, or others. Did
you use it in the lost The Isle of the Cross? Did the heroine perceive the
husband blurringly as youth and as mature man, morphing back and forth? Did the
bigamous husband confuse which female head was wrapped in one of those
expensive shawls? You remember you used it in Israel Potter, and let it suffuse
"The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids." Having learned
of the memorable meeting in the hotel in 1851 and your return visit in 1869,
and knowing your habit of playing off one time against another, I had to allow
for the power of your memory.
Evidence came from such disparate places! The New York Public Library dated a
fragmentary diary of your youngest brother Tom as "[1860?]." From my
perpetual calendar, from knowledge of Tom's various promotions, and finally
(after I had zeroed in) from NYC shipping notices, I dated it to late May 1849.
Bill Gilman, who had done the work on your early life and Redburn, was dead,
long dead, but how I wanted to tell him! Don't feel too sorry for me: I had a
few dozen moments like that over the years, times when some document I was
reading lit up months of your life. Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts were
alive when I discovered the title of the Agatha story and the date of
completion: The Isle of the Cross, on or around 22 May 1853. I had the thrill
of telephoning them. Telling you which one I called first would be like
admitting which child I staggered toward and lay on top of during the Sylmar
earthquake! Think about it: only a biographer has these ecstatic insights--or sometimes
heart-rending realizations. No critic has any idea of this kind of intellectual
and emotional adventure.
So I knew you began the wholly unplanned Redburn just after an emotional, and
perhaps all but hallucinatory, re-enactment of a momentous life-event on the
docks of Manhattan. You saw off Tom (who looked just like you) on a voyage to
China--ten years after your elder brother Gansevoort, dead now more than three
years, had seen you off to Liverpool. You were reckless: you thought you could
write a fast and easy book, and you did, pretty much, but you were so naive you
didn't think about what reliving your youth would do to you. You realized later
that you never know what monsters you may catch when you drop your fishing hook
into the well of childhood. Writing the "beggarly" Redburn made you
able to write Moby-Dick.
Whether or not you "saw" Hawthorne in the dining room at the Curtis
Hotel in 1869, his grand aging head morphing, for instance, into the head of
Uncle Peter's friend General Dix, to whom you had inscribed a copy of
Battle-Pieces, or Colonel Crosby (from same family as the Van Rensselaer in-law
of that name?), or whoever sat where Hawthorne had sat, you remembered. You
know I'm right. For years, probably, you had been planning to put your
experiences in the Holy Land into a modern poetic pilgrimage where man-made
structures and demonic terrain would be the backdrops to hours and hours of
some of the best talk anyone had ever heard on all the great topics of the
century. Steven Olsen-Smith has found that you ensconced yourself in the
"Eastern Travels" alcove of the Astor Library on 1 February 1869--a
fair indication that you were thinking about the big project that was to follow
Battle-Pieces. An "alcove" was just right for absorbing and reflecting:
you always loved snug places, even those where you kept your eyes open.
You had a project, inchoate, maybe, sketched out in some detail, maybe. But
after your vacation, you were haunted by something not connected to Jerusalem
and the desert. You brooded through September, October, November, and December
1869 over how you could come to terms with the utter failure of your own career
while Hawthorne, dead five years, was exalted to the highest American literary
empyrean. Jay Leyda had plundered the late-published Hawthorne notebooks and
memoirs for their information about you in 1850 and the next few years. He had
not taken account of the way they affected you as they came out, beginning a
few years after Hawthorne's death. I looked at them in context and saw the
exquisite agony you suffered at being remembered only because Hawthorne's
family used your letters to document his stay in the Berkshires. The only one
to understand the poignancy of my recovering your fate as "the man who had
known" Hawthorne was Tony Kushner, who talked to Frederic Tuten about this
"terrifyingly sad moment" in the biography. I could show you on the
Internet. (Having Kushner understand the poignancy of that part of the
biography is as close as I come to your having Hawthorne understand Moby-Dick.)
At some point in the Fall of 1869, it all made sense: you could work your new
obsession into your old plans if you took Hawthorne along with you on the
pilgrimage. In January 1870, sure that you could work out your self-analysis at
a bearable pace, whatever new was published about Hawthorne (and your minor
role in his life), you started buying source books for Clarel. The idea of
taking Hawthorne with you was the catalyst that allowed you to start writing
Clarel, just as the power of the memory of Gansevoort's seeing you aboard your
first ship propelled you into the composition of Redburn. The difference is the
amount of thought you might already have given to a poem about travelers in the
Holy Land; with Redburn, you just started writing, without planning.
Scene: Flyover, below us an "exceeding high mountain" from the top
of which all the kingdoms of the world are visible.
You must have seen all the kingdoms of the world on many different mornings in
the Fourth Avenue house and at Arrowhead and in Allan's attic in his new house.
When you finished drafting "The Town-Ho's Story" or "The Grand
Armada" you must have been whirled up to an exceeding high mountain,
higher than Greylock, and trembled to see Dante and Shakespeare beside you and
Milton huffing and puffing a little below, Spenser hoisting him by the arm. You
were exalted, but how were you tempted? To go even deeper into debt? secretly
borrowing $2050 so you could finish The Whale (as you were still calling it)
and make it as good as you could? Tempted to be exalted as a great artist and a
lousy provider? To follow Jesus, according to Mark 10:29-30, you would have to
leave house, brethren, sisters, mother, wife, child, land for his sake and the
gospel's. To be a great artist would you have to gamble everything, including
the house and land, on the success of your whaling book? You were never a Dr.
Faustus, despite reading all about him in Thomas Roscoe's The German Novelists,
as Scott Norsworthy has found. But after the reviews of Moby-Dick and The Whale
came were you ever a loving father to Malcolm again? Did you ever "fairly
devour him" with kisses after January of 1851?
Scene: The Gansevoort house in Gansevoort.
This one I know from the outside, but from Cousin Kate's letters and other
evidence I made a detailed floor plan showing almost every room and including
Augusta's earth closet. Then just recently John Gretchko came up with Cousin
Augustus Peebles’ inventory of the contents, room by room!
It's hard to feel calm here when you remember that the grownups said Aunt
Catherine had refused to let you visit when you were a boy. And you were wrong,
just hopelessly blind to the consequences, when you sent Stanwix to stay there
with Augusta and your mother before Uncle Herman died. Fanny was all right, but
Augusta had a Dutch Reform duty to fill Stanwix's little head with total
depravity and Original Sin. You thought, some days, that you had partly
escaped, but you put Stanwix right into that soul-killing theology. How could
Lizzie have allowed that? Do you really think impressionable little Stanwix
ever recovered from that theological indoctrination? Poor little boy: you never
played with him the way you had played with Malcolm the first two and a half
years. No one ever was afraid you would devour him with kisses after being
separated. You decided that fathers who fail as providers don't deserve to love
their children.
The outside has not changed much. I imagined the hammock and croquet, and the
trees as they were. My wife and I walked out along Snook Kill to get a sense of
the terrain, and counted goldfinches. Jay Leyda didn't get here in the 1940s.
If he had, he would have climbed into the attic and found all of your sister
Augusta's papers, every year's batch neatly tied up in ribbons, and the
complete first draft of Typee! Everything went to the dump in the 1950s!
Risking wrath, Virginia Barden reached into the truck and pulled out one volume
labeled "Novels" on the thin leather binding (done at the local
tanner's), but including poetry as well as novels--Gansevoort's farewell gift
to Fanny of Longfellow's Voices of the Night. The isolated year 1863, complete
in the Augusta Papers acquired by the NYPL in 1983, is massive and detailed,
detailed enough (joined to the old Gansevoort-Lansing Collection and other
documents) to let someone, someday, do a superb social history of a tiny
American village. The documents were a revelation: a family haven in the north
to balance the family haven at Staten Island, the Governor's House. The fresh
fruit and vegetables were incomparable, and for endless years, it began to
seem, your mother at last had a household she could proudly dominate and enough
money to allow her to feel unthreatened. It was good while it lasted, wasn't
it?
Scene: The Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla.
I wanted to know what it felt like to make my own torturous way down from the
Baths of Caracalla to the Protestant Cemetery. Shelley and Keats!--not, as far
as I could tell, poets of your Albany and Lansingburgh adolescence but important
to you in 1857. I walked the Rows at Chester. I ran my fingers over the green
marble drapery of the Church of the Jesuits in Venice--the carving that we
admired and that young William Dean Howells sneered at. I climbed up Dumbarton.
How many other confluences did my wife and I see because of you? We went to
Cairo, Illinois, whether you ever did or not. Coblenz, of course. How many
"superb" views did we see from the world's Ehrenbreitsteins because
of you, even if we missed so much that you saw? However much I wanted to start
with the physical, I could not have cramped myself into even a spiffed up,
tourist-ready whaler forecastle.
I could pursue you as far as Italy and San Francisco, but I knew I could never
follow your more intricate thought processes, though I did figure out how you
were likely to respond to certain situations. I did not set out to experience
the worst things that you had experienced. I did not want to follow you into
misery. I knew more about poverty as a Depression Okie than you did. But in
order to get a quiet place to work on your life I ended up paying two
mortgages, having imitated you in being foolish or desperate enough to buy a
new house before selling the old one. That part about early 1851 in the first
volume may have been more suffused with emotion than most people could
understand. Autobiography intrudes into the most disciplined, disinterested
studies.
Scene: A Reading Room in Lower Manhattan, tables stacked with files of
newspapers, three-legged stools available, and brass spittoons.
The Congregationalists and Presbyterians and Methodists crucified you for Typee
and Omoo because you were traducing the missionaries. Worse, you were mocking
Christianity and insidiously luring people into thinking lascivious thoughts.
What did you really think would happen when you let Ishmael kneel down and
worship Yojo with Queequeg? It's joyous to read now but you were suicidal to
write it, knowing your friend Duyckinck.
While I was writing I couldn't worry much about how the biography would be
reviewed, but I assumed I would see "we are grateful to Parker,"
"there is much here to be grateful for," "we extend our thanks
to Parker." Almost never, and mainly from people in the
hinterlands--Columbia, South Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia, and even Sydney, in
the Antipodes. I had violated all the rules when I behaved like the 1940s Yale
scholars and acted as if there were still facts about you to be learned. When
the reviewers savaged me I identified with you much more than I ever wanted to.
Why did they crucify me? I could give you a three-hour lecture on the New
Criticism as it morphed into Reader-Response Criticism, Deconstructionism, the
New Historicism, and (have I ever lied to you?) Neuron-firing (I'll show you
Raymond Tallis in the 11 April 2008 TLS).
As I was starting research on my dissertation in 1962 I met two candidates for
the PhD at Columbia who were amused that Northwestern was offering doctorates,
so I explained that the Northwest Territory needed some sort of regional
school. They were curious about what kind of dissertation I was writing that
would involve going to New York City. When I told them I was going to the New
York Public Library or the New-York Historical Society every day to read
nineteenth-century newspapers and copy out nineteenth century letters about you
and politics they were dumbstruck. They saw they had a great story to regale
their fellow students and their teacher Richard Chase with at Columbia, this
skinny guy from the Midwest in a wash-and-wear dark gray glen plaid Baskin suit
and a subdued narrow rep tie going to the libraries every day and looking at
old newspapers and manuscripts! In 1962, a graduate student going to the
archives as if the New Criticism had never triumphed! Coming all the way to New
York to do it! They were too polite to laugh outright, but the way they kept
rolling their eyes at each other showed they thought this was the quaintest
damned thing they had ever heard. It probably was. No, you've never heard of
them.
Despite this episode, for many years I did not admit how far out of step I was
as a researcher. For many years, I would find that the last person to have
called for some box of papers was one of Hayford's colleagues in the 1940s.
That shows you how out of step I was. Most of the time I did not care. My sin
was to put out my hand for many years, searching newspaper files in the 1960s
and 1970s and later for reviews of your books and stories and articles about
you and your acquaintances. You think it was all fun? Think of my bursting into
tears around degenerating genealogists and ragged bookies (or whoever those
people were who were reading about horse-race results in the 1940s papers),
hiding my head in the microfilm reader to weep after I saw "HERMAN
MELVILLE CRAZY." My sin was going to the old archives and turning through
box after box of family papers that had been in the Shaw papers at the
Massachusetts Historical Society for many decades and the Gansevoort-Lansing
papers that had been in the New York Public Library for three quarters of a century
and the Melville-Morewood papers that had been in the Berkshire Athenaeum for
half a century and any other papers I could find along the Atlantic seaboard
and the Hudson River. My sin was to transcribe the so-called Augusta Papers,
the remnant of the files of your sister which were found in a barn in upstate
New York in 1983 and (mainly) acquired by the NYPL. I dated them and identified
the correspondents and people mentioned in them. I compounded that sin by
laying out old and new evidence in chronological order as I transcribed them
into a computer file of the 1951 The Melville Log. First I had entered the
items in the 90-page 1969 supplement (half of which I had supplied), then
hundreds and hundreds of other documents, including the Augusta Papers. I replaced
excerpts in the Log with full transcriptions of documents, all in sequence.
Looking at entire documents meant seeing a different story, discovering dozens
of new episodes in your life. Some of them were heartbreaking. Some of them
were comical: a grocery shopping list led me to understand that your
long-impoverished mother had thrown a lavish party for you and your bride on
your arrival in Lansingburgh from Canada.
After the reviewer in the New York Times slaughtered volume
one (he knew nothing about Melville but ferociously wanted to be another Lionel
Trilling or Edmund Wilson) I ought to have known what to expect. The only way I
could work was to go into deep denial as I finished the second volume. Of
course, the second volume was savaged much more cruelly than the first. Richard
Brodhead in the New York Times let it be known that I had invented The Isle of
the Cross (1853) and Poems (1860) out of thin air, the insane products of me as
"demon-researcher." In the New Republic a look-ma-no-hands would-be
"biographer" Andrew Delbanco, who later bragged about fleeing the
Houghton lest he intrude on your privacy by handling your mail, said I couldn't
be trusted at all on anything because I had merely surmised the existence of
those lost books. And Elizabeth Schultz echoed those two critics about the
merely "putative" existence of those book. We've talked about the
book you finished in May 1853, and how my discovery of the title merely
confirmed what Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman had said in Letters and
Mert Sealts had said in the Northwestern-Newberry Piazza Tales volume. Well, in
1921 Raymond Weaver had not known about Poems. Were reviewers in 2002 expected
to read documents that Meade Minnigerode published the next year,1922,
documents that later had been reprinted many times, in the Log, in Letters
(1960), in the NN Correspondence (1993), in my volume two? Apparently not. Of
course I identified with you as the victim of monstrously undeserved attacks.
And it nearly broke me, after the second volume was reviewed. I was exhausted,
I was having long-postponed surgeries, and I wanted to be thanked.
Scene: I get to choose this one, since I've never been to Ireland, although
many of my Scots ancestors lived there from Shakespeare's heyday for another
century and a quarter: "the dingy little dining room of the hotel in
Galway town on the west coast of Ireland."
I buy copies of Raymond Weaver's biography when I can. After all, he never
returned your drawing of Arrowhead to your grand-daughter Eleanor, so the
nearest thing to it is the reproduction in Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic.
I bought a copy on eBay around 2002, one Weaver had inscribed to Thomas Monro,
who stashed clippings in it. One was a newspaper article entitled "Passing
on the Torch," a partial reprint from the "Gossip Shop" in The
Bookman of February 1922, presumably by John Farrar. I traced your underground
reputation in England for years, and Joyce and Fred Kennedy discovered more
links, but if true, this is big news, so I want it in this book which has many
British contributors. Some contributor or reader of the collection may want to
verify it. It's news to you? I'll read it slowly and let it fall as a
benediction on you. Here is the full text:
The history of "Moby Dick", Melville's titanic dramatization of human
fortitude and implacable resolve, has been the history of a book's laudation by
literary artists who recognized in Melville an artist who transcended all that
they themselves could do in words. The most interesting genealogy of "book
recommending," the passing on of a torch from one hand to another, was
supplied one day recently by James Stephens, the wizard who wrote "The
Crock of Gold," "Mary, Mary," and "The Demi-Gods."
Reveling over "Moby-Dick" with Samuel McCoy, who has just returned
from Ireland, Stephens said:
"Did I ever tell you how I first heard of the book? George Meredith, who
was about twenty years old when 'Moby Dick' was first published, read it,
recognized a master in Melville, and passed the book on to Watts-Dunton.
Watts-Dunton, equally enthralled, urged Dante Gabriel Rossetti to read it.
Rossetti ran with it to Swinburne, crying out that Swinburne must read it.
Swinburne, finding in it the roar of the sea described as he himself could not,
with all his music, silently passed it on to Oscar Wilde, then the most
glittering star among the literary lights of London. Wilde, a Dubliner, handed
the book on to another Irishman, young William Butler Yeats, making, as he did
so, an epigram on Melville's greatness that would be worth repeating--if I
could remember it. Yeats, coming back from London to Dublin, brought a copy of
the book with him and presented it to George Russell, 'A.E.,' essayist, poet,
painter, and seer, commanding him by all the ancient gods of Eire to read it at
once. And 'A.E.,' chanting solemn rhapsodies through his beard, handed it on to
us, his disciples. I pass it on to all I know, as the greatest prose work in
the English tongue.
"Melville," added Stephens thoughtfully, "was the last of the
bards. He was wider than Shakespeare."
Pronounced on the afternoon of August 7, 1921, in the dingy little dining room
of the hotel in Galway town on the west coast of Ireland, where bearded sailors
from all the ports of the world once drank Spanish wine in the Galway inns.
Scene: My narrow study in Morro Bay, but with views of the Pacific 12 miles
up to Estero Point and 12 miles down to Point Buchon. You lifting an eyebrow as
you point to something Ishmael says in Chapter 91 of "Moby-Dick":
"It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale;
worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to
bury the departed"? And later you point to Stubb's decision: "It's
worth trying. Yes, I'm in for it."
You mean was it worth it, climbing onto a blasted whale with my bare hands?
Yes, of course the unsavory odor is from what critics have written about you
for 160 years now, and the scholarship is the ambergris, almost all of it, even
when it was obviously incomplete.
The older people who were still alive, the people who had done dissertations at
Yale in the 1940s with Stanley T. Williams, cheered me on, as Leon Howard did
and the greatest of all the researchers, Jay Leyda. After a while they all saw
that I was the main one carrying on their work year after year, although
several other people my age or younger made wonderful spot discoveries. I
worked the way I did because my phrenological organ of filial piety is
abnormally large. Jay Leyda was going to expand the Log and needed me to
shepherd him around as his Parkinson's advanced. I ended up having to do the
Log as well. Now, you know, my Log is not the 1951 edition with 900 pages or
the 1969 reprint with a new 90-page supplement. It's 9,000 pages,
unpublishable, but I am now working on the first of three volumes for print,
having condensed 3,000 pages to 600. One of Hayford’s last students, Robert
Sandberg, is doing the layout and coding, work beyond my capacities.
No one assembles that many documents while living a sociable life. A scholar
works alone, works every day, gets up in the middle of the night and works, for
years. I worked absolutely alone for year after year just transcribing the
"Augusta Papers" (that fragment of her archive) and plundering the
eastern libraries. Day after day I worked, and often 1 to 4 in the night,
lighted magnifier to the right of me, transcribing items into my burgeoning The
New Melville Log, dating them as I went so I could place them right, but not
reading them in full context. The day and night line, as your lawyer says in
"Bartleby," proved too much, and my body collapsed, everything going
at once. After a week in the hospital I resigned from five editorial boards on
one day and cut out everything extraneous and forged on.
I didn't make discoveries and rush into print, usually. I had been the supplier
of documents to the critics, rushing new discoveries into print. I reached the
point that I could not put out bulletins for fear of losing my focus and
momentum. After a while I knew all about living indefinitely with stories no
one else knew, except those I told to Jay, until he died, and to Hayford and
Sealts, until they died. It affects anyone's mental state, when he puts things
together that no one had ever known, especially sad things, and lives with the
new stories untold. I came to exist in a prolonged wrought-up state from
different causes, since I worked all over your life, jumping from decade to
decade depending on the evidence I was copying. Years might go by before I read
all the items in the electronic file for 1847, for instance, and longer before
I read 1847-1848. Sometimes I discovered the significance of documents only
when I started to write the biography--that is, when I started reading long
stretches of documents, seeing documents in context as I looked for a
"natural" chapter break. Obviously since I was writing about you I
had to have the biblical number of chapters, 40, but where they broke was
always a surprise to me, and the only way to find the break was to read a
period of months or a year or two, listening.
Was it worth it? On 1 October 2000 I copied Gutzun Borglum's ungraceful but
powerful declaration into the back end-pages of the first volume of my
biography: "The reason for building any work of art can only be for the
purpose of fixing in some durable form a great emotion, or a great idea, of the
individual, or the people." I wasn't thinking about you, although it could
have applied to you in the composition of Moby-Dick or Clarel. I was thinking
of myself, isolated from professional Melville critics and defamed by New York
literary critics of volume one while I struggled to achieve a state of grace
and remain in that state for as many months as it took to finish the second
volume of the biography. I understood then what you experienced when Moby-Dick
was trashed--too many too powerful commentators had trashed my first volume
without reading it. You fought to stay in a state of grace, and succeeded,
almost all the way through your work on Pierre. But then you were caught off
guard by the contract the Harpers offered you, 20 cents on the dollar instead
of 50, and you exploded in what you inserted into the completed Pierre! If I
had not stayed in that state of grace, that "zone" they talk about
now, I could not have finished the second volume.
Was it heroic? Well, writing the biography was the great adventure of my life,
outdoing my five months of doing nothing but reading Shakespeare. Put it this
way: at my lowest moments, when I felt that no one could carry on Jay Leyda's
work while writing his own narrative biography, I played a tape of the group
Forebitter in my Bronco II, the "Harbo and Samuelson" song about the
hearty young Norwegian oystermen who set out to row across the Atlantic, west
to east. "They were not only brave, but by God they could row!" I
blubbered in the Bronco then went back to work. And of course if I had not been
my own Leyda I could not have written a biography filled with new episodes and
new understanding of my vastly larger cast of characters. At the simplest
level, I found episodes when I dated documents. How many of my cherished
stories started with transcribing and dating?
After it was over, I came close to dying in 2002 when the reviewers in the New
York Times and the New Republic and the Common
Reader all said that I had made up The Isle of the Cross and Poems.
[Even in January 2011 I was still too traumatized by Brenda Wineapple's attack
in THE NATION to talk about it. See several recent posts on this blog.] I had
always blamed you for not going public about the "Epilogue," even if
only to say you couldn't quite make sense of what the American papers were
reporting about what the Brits were saying. Well, I had postponed some
surgeries until the book was finished, and I didn't have the strength to fight
back. Besides, I was sure the next review in another paper after Brodhead's in
the Times would correct him, since everyone had known all
about Poems since 1922 and had known since 1960 that Melville had finished a
book in 1853! I have already told you what happened. As it was, I didn't sleep
well again until mid-2007, when I began setting the record straight. In the
June 2007 Nineteenth-Century Literature I published "The
Isle of the Cross and Poems: Lost Melville Books and the Indefinite Afterlife
of Error." Later in the Introduction to Melville: The Making of the Poet
(Northwestern, 2008) I commented on how Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz and
other critics had distorted the trajectory of your career. (You haven't even
heard of that book?) And I have become a "blog hooligan" and
occasional Internet columnist, flogging myself into the new century.
I'm older than you ever lived to be, as I admonished you at the start. The
surviving members of the old editorial team (with the help of some newcomers)
got out the next-to-last Northwestern-Newberry volume, Published Poems, in
2009, and are working on the last, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other
Uncompleted Writings. Very few academics are doing research, but I'm
not alone, now. The librarian Dennis Marnon is a font (a polite word for what
Jay Leyda called me in a note I found: "Hershel is a faucet"). Marnon
found an account of your secret guardian angel at the Custom House, an admirer
of Moby-Dick, being the Collector of the Port, Chester Allen Arthur. Scott
Norsworthy, who works with disabled people in a nursing home, had found an
earlier account of Arthur’s watching out for you, and is finding books we never
knew you read, as I told you. John Gretchko sells ice cream, I think. Richard
Winslow is a semi-retired librarian and canoe-voyager. My former student Steven
Olsen-Smith, a professor, took to heart my research command ("First, put
out your hand") and is finding more about your reading than we ever knew.
He's the one who found that you secluded yourself a while in the "Eastern
Travel" alcove of the Astor Library early in 1869. It's still high times
for a handful of us!
You'll like my 2011, The Powell Papers, about the English
crook who fooled you, apparently. After that I'm doing Melville and
Biography: An Inside Narrative, whether you say a word to me or not. I
did not really have much hope that you would talk to me like the other famous
writers did to the Iowa biographers in AfterWord, and I would
never dare to put my words into your mouth. So I’ll turn back soon to Melville
and Biography: An Inside Narrative. It’s “complete”—left resting since
May 2010 when I started working on the first volume of The New Melville
Log. After I do MB:AIN I am determined to live to write a book
called Ornery People, stories from the astonishingly thick
paper trail left by the humblest people you could imagine, my American
ancestors. Like you in the last years, I am getting books out while I can. I
don’t want to leave gigabytes behind in a matchbox full of flash drives.
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