Looking through papers stuck in books before sending them to Massachusetts

 Sometimes what you see is consoling. This morning, LIVING WITH A WRITER, the 2004 collection of essays.

        Every reviewer was happy with my depressing (downright tragic) article on how Melville was "Damned by Dollars." Melanie McGrath in the London Evening Standard said, "There is a fine essay on the awful existence of Herman Melville." The Year's Work in English Studies said, "The most substantial contribution is Hershel Parker on Melville's marriage." In Book Heaven Andy Jaysnovitch began this way: "On the back cover of Living With a Writer edited by Dale Salwak (Palgrave, 2004), the following question is posed: "what is the cost of as masterpiece or a caring relationship?' The first essay that I chose to read in this book answers that question all too well. In "Damned by Dollars: Moby-Dick and the Price of Genius," Herman Melville biographer Hershel Parker tallies the huge cost that Melville paid in plying his craft in the face of a public and a publishing industry that was blind to his talent. The opening of this wonderful essay sets the stage for this question . . . ."  Andrew Motion in the Guardian says, “Admittedly the problems get examined more fairly and squarely in their own section. There's a (too) long piece on Somerset Maugham and his wife Syrie, for instance, in which Jeffrey Meyers shows how the sexual difficulties of their marriage were compounded by the fact that "she constantly interfered with, or even prevented, his writing". And a detailed account by Hershel Parker of how Melville's struggles as a writer shattered his family: he had a daughter whose arthritis was brought on by a bad diet, a son who committed suicide, another son who died young.. . . . Catherine Aird says: ‘The only writer with whom I live is me, myself, alone’; Nadine Gordimer talks about 'the secret intimacy’ of ‘living with myself’; and Parker talks about Melville's desperate need for what he called ‘the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose’, (matching Keats's equally brilliant words about his hunger for ‘delicious diligent indolence’).”

         But going fast toward 87 years old, full of pills for blood clots and Valley Fever, what do I want with the book or the reviews stuck in it?

        Instead, as long as I have a memory I will remember what the Companion (not yet Caregiver) said on 26 June 1997 after I had given the talk in the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Joyce and Fred Kennedy, great researchers, arrived late and made a small bustle as they found seats. I was very happy they made it. Aside from that, the Companion said, “You could have heard a pin drop.” I gave the talk again at Stanford on 1 November 2001. Tobias Wolff stood up in the back, greatly moved by it, and said words I wish I could hear again. There may be a recording still at Stanford. Well, that essay made me cry a little more than once when I read it after a long interval.

        Go, little book, go off to the Berkshire Athenaeum as soon as we can get the strength to tape and mail five more bankers boxes.