Charles Feidelson, the man who killed scholarship at Yale--see his power over Richard Brodhead and Wai-chee Dimock still

 

          Over the long term, the most virulent and influential enemy of the Jay Leyda's 1951 The Melville Log was Charles Feidelson, ironically the man promoted by Yale to "replace" Stanley T. Williams, the director of that extraordinary series of factually-based Melville dissertations in the 1940s by Walter E. Bezanson, Merton M. Sealts, Harrison Hayford, William H. Gilman, Merrell R. Davis and others, studies which prepared Leyda's way. Paul Lauter has recorded the shock to students in 1953 when previous bibliographical, biographical, and historical class notes from Stanley T. Williams proved to be useless in the new order at Yale embodied by the new authority at the podium, Feidelson. An early convert to the New Criticism and a lifelong proselytizer for it, Feidelson dismissed the Log in the December 1951 Yale Review as wayward, a "mere accumulation of data," much of it "rather dreary stuff," and as a "welter of disconnected and often trivial data" irrelevant to literary criticism. Feidelson depicted Leyda, Leon Howard, and Gilman (author of the 1951 Melville's Early Life and REDBURN) as representing the "earth-bound" historical school of Melvilleans in contrast to "intuitional, or high-flying, school of Melville studies." Leyda was earth-bound when he included "even such items as the fact that on July 21, 1836, Melville's sisters received awards at the Albany Female Academy." This was the only "sort of truth" the Log offered. Unless "our interests are merely anecdotal," the welter of trivial data "would seem to demand an even greater exercise of imagination than any for which earlier biographers can be reproached." Feidelson knew for sure that in the new Yale and the new American university system any "exercise of imagination" upon such dreary data would be misplaced: "While earlier biographers made the error of treating their images as objective facts of Melville's life, the new school" (of Leyda and Howard, and of course of the pedestrian students of his predecessor at Yale) was "in danger of reducing Melville to the simplistic terms of an external chronicle." The hapless Leyda and Howard had tried to resolve "the Melville problem" by "an appeal to fact when what is needed is enriched speculative interpretation." How often during the more than third of a century until 1988 did Feidelson inveigh or rant against that compendium of dreary facts, The Melville Log? Year after year, when he came to Melville in his courses? It seemed so, to judge from the publications of his more notable students who continue to reveal their disdain for mere facts even into the new century.