"THE GAY PURSUIT OF
A PERILOUS QUEST"
Erskine Childers’s THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS continues to enthrall
me. Here Carruthers has finally learned why Davies has lured him into what
so-far has seemed a ridiculously unaccountable enterprise:
Close in the train of Humour came Romance, veiling her face, but
I knew it was the rustle of her robes that I heard in the foam beneath me; I
knew that it was she who handed me the cup of sparkling wine and bade me drink
and be merry. Strange to me though it was, I knew the taste when it touched my
lips. It was not that bastard concoction I had tasted in the pseudo-Bohemias of
Soho; it was not the showy but insipid beverage I should have drunk my fill of
at Movern Lodge; it was the purest of her pure vintages, instilling the ancient
inspiration which, under many guises, quickens thousands of better brains than
mine, but whose essence is always the same: The gay pursuit of a perilous
quest.
“THE GAY PURSUIT OF A PERILOUS QUEST.”
In my extreme old age I define my scholarly life, perhaps
vaingloriously, as one in which I was for prolonged periods engaged in the
pursuit of a perilous quest. It’s hard to use the term “gay pursuit” when you
are damaging your health by transcribing old letters in the middle of the
night, or trying to write prose between 2 and 5 morning after morning, while
working fulltime. But then I remember 1957-1959 when, still recovering from
tuberculosis, I worked 8 at night till 4 in the morning in the KCS Freight
House in Port Arthur while going to school at Lamar State College of Technology
in the day. In that enormous vacant space of the Freight House I read THE
PRELUDE and THE FAERIE QUEENE not for a class but for myself. That was “gay
pursuit of a perilous quest” to learn about British poetry. Perilous? Sure, for who knew whether I could move from
railroad to Texas high school? What jobs would there be? Would the state
prevent me from being around children and young people, “arrested” TB or not?
For pure joy I
remember 1962, when the New-York Public Library and other NYC and Massachusetts
libraries opened their treasures to me. At the Berkshire Athenaeum that summer
I sat for hours at a long table, all alone, then when school turned out I
shared the tables with fifteen or twenty small children, so that I experienced
the fabulous joy of reading century and century and a half old letters in the
presence of bustling descendants of some of the Melville neighbors I was
reading about. I remember the day at the
NYPL when I said, for ten minutes, to hell with trying to get through what I
came up to see, I want to see what’s in the folder of undated letters from
unidentified correspondents, and in minutes found an unknown Melville letter.
Then there is another sort of rare joys, as when I became the first person in
almost a century to read something very closely approximating what Stephen
Crane meant THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE to be. Gay pursuit of a perilous quest for
knowledge of what American writers really wrote! Just how perilous it was
FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS demonstrates!
In MELVILLE
BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE, I see that I talk more than once about the joy
that a biographical researcher in the archives (paper or virtual) can
experience and that no one who writes a biography from other books can ever
experience. Here is that final paragraph of the Preface:
These Malay
pirates of literary biography, springing up, weapons drawn, from the bottom of
the ship in the treacherous fashion Melville describes in Mardi, will not succeed. As long as libraries preserve archives
such as the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection of the New York Public Library or the
Melville and Morewood papers at the Berkshire Athenaeum or the Melvill-Melville
papers at Houghton Library, or the Shaw papers at the Massachusetts Historical
Society, pilgrim researchers will come, even if only a dedicated few. There
will always be a few literary detectives who devote months or years to the
pursuit of documents in the confidence that at last they will sit at midnight
in a little bare motel room in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and turn through a
big shoebox full of what looks like only bills of lading until you spy a blue
folded paper, clearly a letter, a letter with the signature “Really Thine, H.
Melville”--a letter reassuring Melville’s wife’s young step-cousin Sam Savage:
“Concerning the foot-ball part of the
business, why, we are all foot-balls, more or less--& it is lucky that we
are, on some accounts. It is important, however, that our balls be covered with
a leather, good & tough, that will stand banging & all ‘the slings&
arrows of outrageous fortune.” [The heroine of this Spartanburg episode is
Joyce Deveau Kennedy. In Spartanburg, Professor John B. Edmunds, Jr., acting
for his mother, Helen Edmunds, entrusted her with a big shoebox full of papers.
She was alone in a motel room late at night when she found Melville’s letter to
Sam Savage. She immediately called her husband, Frederick Kennedy then,
sleeping very little, she read and reread the letter many times, waiting for
morning so she could spring her find on the owner. Scholars live for such
moments. [Email from JDK, 26 August 2011.] Joyce had the supreme joy of calling
her husband, Frederick J. Kennedy, around midnight, to say “Freddie! Guess what
I’ve just found!” “What a happy memory,” FJK says.]
Literary
detectives will sit in dark rooms peering at their computer screens, doing
their ultimately-advanced searches. They will imaginatively misspell (Mellvill,
Mellville, Hermann, and more) when accurate spellings turn up nothing. They
will try their equivalent of “froward” and “godless” on Google every few weeks
for most of a decade, as Scott Norsworthy did until he discovered a source for
some of Melville’s once-baffling notes in the back of his Shakespeare. They
will boggle at a passage in a Melville text and find riches, as I did when I
Googled “Napoleon” and “outline” and “tree” and discovered that Melville in The Confidence-Man was referring to a
then-famous example of hidden art.
There will always
be a few frequenters of known archives, a few imaginative trackers of missing
archives, a few librarians who recognize gaps in their institution’s papers and
reach out their hands for lost treasures, and a few “divine amateurs” who
believe that the facts matter and that they can identify some of them from
their computers or in raids on distant libraries. And for literary biography,
there will always be readers who want to know about the living man or woman
whose deepest being infuses the books they love.
Lewis Mumford, Newton
Arvin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Andrew Delbanco, and many others never experienced
the joy that comes of discovery. Delbanco, picking through my quotations from
Melville family letters, knew nothing of the joy of discovery, and of course
knew nothing of the larger contexts from which I had made small selections to
further particular arguments I was making in particular paragraphs. Biographers
like Delbanco know nothing of the joy of reading many pages of documents in
chronological order, many of which you have transcribed into the chronology and
some of which you have dated or re-dated, for whenever an archival biographer
reads through long known and new documents he will experience astonishing
insights, often the insights which lead him to say, “I have to stop here and write
it down—this is the new chapter in the story.” There’s another side: the
archival biographer will sometimes make discovery after discovery that he all
but wishes he had never known. One more twist to my knowledge of how cruelly
the Harpers treated Melville! One more twist to what I knew about Melville’s
indebtedness! One more twist to what I knew of his in-laws’ contempt for him!
Or even one more newspaper juxtaposing an inquest to the death of Malcolm
Melville with an account of the number of overflowing privies in the
neighborhood. Yes, some things you wish Melville never had to experience or to
see and that you never had to know about, particularly when you have to write
an account of them. But the joy overwhelms the pain. You know these people because
you have read their mail and listened to their plans and grief and their own
joys, and you love them, even the unlovable ones such as covetous greedy
kick-his-bed-partner Allan!
I’ll think more about this topic and revise this post.
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