In 2002, I suffered
profound trauma from reviewers who lied about me, Richard Brodhead in the New
York Times, Andrew Delbanco in the New Republic, and Elizabeth Schultz in
the Common Review. They all said I
had invented two books Melville had finished, one of which had been known in
detail since 1922, the other known about since the 1950s although it was not
until 1987 that I found the title, The
Isle of the Cross. For my biography of Melville (1996 and 2002) I had
studied hundreds of unknown documents and discovered dozens of new episodes in
Melville’s life. All real scholars recognized how accurate I was. For the back
of the first volume Harrison Hayford had proclaimed “Hershel Parker has become,
quite simply, the most important
Melville scholar of all time." Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz knew nothing, or
claimed to know nothing, of Melville biography, but their lies left my
reputation in tatters. Certainly it took away my chances for a Pulitzer
(although I am still on the Pulitzer list as a finalist for the first volume).
The Association of American Publishers, where the judges are scholars, unlike
the Pulitzer, in which journalists serve, gave me the R. R. Hawkins Award
(the PROSE) award for both volumes. This was high recognition, but the prize
that everyone knows is the Pulitzer. I did not respond to Brodhead because I
thought surely other reviewers would point out his errors, but after Delbanco
echoed him it was too late to protest. I was cruelly branded as an incompetent
biographer.
Shamed by the Dean of Yale College in the New York Times, made to realize that I had not been writing all those years for either an academic or a public audience, I acknowledged that while I had raised myself up by my own efforts (I can't say bootstraps because I did not have boots) I had not raised myself high enough. An alien, an Okie, I had aspired to play with the white kids ever since 1940, when a white boy in Hebbronville, Texas, brought me into his kitchen (clean, dazzlingly white) and his mother angrily ordered me out. The great scholar Harrison Hayford could offer astonishing praise in 1996, but Brodhead and Delbanco had made it clear that no matter how hard I worked I was not going to get to play with the white kids. How alien was I from real Americans? In 2002, at 67, I admitted how profoundly ignorant of my ancestry I was, and turned away from Melville for a while, as I did intermittently for two decades.
I always knew my living Glenn kinfolks (including my Grandmother Parker) were, not far back, part Choctaw. My grandmother’s sister Essie said that their father, John Rogers, was a full-blooded Irishman. Now, thanks to the research by Internet cousins, I know he was not Irish, and not full-blooded anything but from a Scottish father and a German mother. I also knew two tiny anecdotes about other whites. What was told about the Parker great grandfather’s running deadfalls barefoot in snow in Northern Mississippi at 5 or so years old. That was a generalized you-think-you-have-it-bad story not attached to any date. I know now that he was born in 1858. What does that tell you? My ornery Bell great grandfather, a lifelong Mississippian, late in life liked to say provocatively that he was “Scotch-Irish and Damn Yankee.” Maybe, I suspect now, he was jealous of his older brother who had been captured at Lookout Mountain and survived the Yankee hell-hole of Rock Island, Illinois.
On my mother’s side of
the family the more settled Costner and Bell kinfolks who stayed in Mississippi
remembered much more about family history than she did. We were transient,
unable to make or maintain close connections. My mother was born in 1906 in the
middle of what had been “No Man’s Land,” a strip of public land north of the Texas Panhandle.
In 1890 it became part of Oklahoma Territory, Beaver County, which ran the
width of the two Panhandles. The town Guymon, near where she was born, down
near Texas, was redefined at statehood in November 1907 as the middle county,
named Guymon. Around 1910 a negro man came all the way from Mississippi to visit
my grandfather Gene Costner and his brother Moses (Kevin Costner’s
great-grandfather). I never learned his means of transportation or his purpose.
What Mother knew was that the younger cousins were agog: they had never seen a
black man.
A few months before
statehood my father was born at the edge of Wister, LeFlore County, Indian
Territory, next to Arkansas. I was born in 1935 near Comanche, Oklahoma (in the
middle of the state) and carried right away to the Rio Grande for four years
where my father worked on a private oilfield, the best work he had ever had.
Jobless in 1940, the six of us huddled and fought rats in the back room of a
tiny bodega in Hebbronville. In the street (being white skinned and
white-haired) I was beaten by a gang of local Texas boys we called Mexicans and
once saved only by my older brother. I still see him approaching down a dip in
the dirt street leading the cow from the common.
Temporary refuge (and
hard work for the older members of the family) came in a dark house in a Costner
diary farm near Heavener, Oklahoma, across the Kansas City Southern Railroad
tracks from my Parker grandparents. Town boys mocked me (why call me a “rooster
shit”?) for (they claimed) looking enviously at their white bread sandwiches.
On Pearl Harbor Day I was handed a single-scoop strawberry ice cream cone which
I thought I would not like but did. My
father got war work to the north, near Pryor, where we lived through the winter
of 1942 in a big tent directly across from the entrance to the DuPont Black
Powder Plant, the Delaware chemist H. Fletcher Brown having pioneered that
powder. Water came from a hydrant sticking three feet up on a pipe, outside.
There was no bathroom. I slept in a tiny annex; snow fell a few times through
the stitches connecting it to the main tent. In 1992 in the tiny H. Fletcher
Brown Park in Wilmington I held Bill Clinton’s hands as he promised me he would
behave himself. The park was soon “repurposed,” Brown’s name removed. After two
decades at the University of Delaware, the 1980s and 1990s, I retired to Morro
Bay as “H. Fletcher Brown Professor, Emeritus.” That’s my title now.
On 27 April 1942 I
remember the sky turning turgid green. The cyclone hit a little later, to the
west, in Pryor, demolishing much of the town and killing an indeterminate
number of people, the wartime influx making any head count dubious. After the
war, when Colliers said the storm
killed “seventy-odd Oklahomans” I did not know the idiom. Already
hyper-sensitive about “Okie,” I thought it was an insult. I saw the wrecked
school. Did they let some people in to try to rescue books? Bigger Okie boys
leaned against the bricks dropping what looked like real turds through their
pants, from their waist to the ground.
Ever the opportunist, Henry
Kaiser stepped in with transportation to Los Angeles and on north to Richmond
and Portland. My father left Pryor at once. The rest of us went down to Wister,
renting half a telephone operator’s tiny station. In 1981 I recognized it
instantly in Sissy Specek’s Raggedy Man,
so stations all around may have been built from one blueprint. My grandmother’s
incredibly tall dark uncle Johnny Glenn, black clothing, black top-hat, son of
a part Choctaw Mexican War soldier and his part Choctaw second wife, I know
now, carried a basket down a little hill with fresh Spring vegetables, watching
out for his niece’s daughter-in-law and her children, whom he had just met.
Military records show his father was six five and an uncle six four. Could this
dark son have been taller? Soon we took a Kaiser mixed train west, workers and
their families and some soldiers; later, blacks took those mixed trains, not
all from the South, either. Much of the way, we ate fried chicken without
getting sick. Once Mother had two soldiers take me off the stalled train to pee
and then lifted me safely back. Los Angeles was chaotic and traumatic but we
got headed north.
In the instant wartime
towns of Vanport and then East Vanport, Oregon of 1942-1945. For the third
grade I walked south to a big pre-war school in Vanport. I was mentioned in the
Portland Oregonian for the closest
guess at the number of beans in a fishbowl. Later, on the farm north of Wister,
I could count a hundred sheep better than anyone, waving off arcs of them. An Okie would have the best sense of how to
count beans, or sheep, or pennies. In 1942 I did not know who John Steinbeck
was, but in Grapes of Wrath he had
already defined who I was. I was an “Okie”--not Scottish or French or English
or Italian or some other European nationality, but a person with no fixed abode
and no helpful connections. Some teachers showed their contempt. In the third
grade a teacher shamed the lanky Audrey for dirt behind her ears and for wearing
long pigtails with the same bow all week, evidence presumptive that her hair
was not brushed out and replaited daily. (Her mother may have been working the
graveyard shift, as mine did for a time.) I absorbed Audrey’s shame and feel it
still.
Having lived to become, for
now, “the” surviving authority on
East Vanport, I am quoted in The Voices
of Vanport. Radio and the Flood of ’48 (20 June 2022). I am the only
survivor that local historians can find who knows there was a school in East Vanport (was it just for fourth grade?) and
exactly where it was in relation to the bridge over the Columbia River. Early in 1945 I walked part way there with
Billy Shoemaker, a Kiowa, after the point our paths met. We were not living
near enough to play together, so the short walk was the extent of our meetings.
Just after war’s end, my father bought a car (that is, a pre-war car) for a
trip to Oklahoma. In it we visited part-Choctaw cousins across the Columbia in
Vancouver. In their house was a silent Plains Indian cousin of theirs who
terrified me. He was not emaciated but puffy, doughy, after torture by the
Germans who had seized on him with delight as a rare prize, a Red Indian. In
the next weeks, at nine years old, I was trucked out daily as a farm worker
with an crew of grown ups, mainly Okies, who talked all day in obscenities I
had never heard and could not visualize sanely. Their words traumatized me for
years, and some still baffle me.
In school back in Wister
from 1945 to 1952 several of us in the class were cousins. Two were whites on
my mother’s side, descended from Tindalls. In 1948 Lottie and I collaborated on
a novel, a Zane Grey western, Yonder the
Whirlwind. Many people start novels and do not finish them. We finished
ours. I have the original copy, and Lottie still had Betty Hamner’s full
amanuensis copy when she died in 2018. The other cousins were Glenns. My
father’s first cousin Bobby King (just younger than me) was darkest because
Great-Aunt Alice’s husband was at least half Choctaw. As Bobby aged he looked
perturbingly like a shorter, darker version of my father. Around 1950 a
neat young white man came into the café
my mother was running on the highway in Wister and whispered furtively to her.
He was a coach with a team which included one black player: could they all come
in? Of course, said my mother, and they ate calmly and politely in two booths.
That day I learned that a motto in many towns in early statehood was “Nigger,
don’t let the sun go down on your head.” I never forgot that, and it affected
my writing of one of the saddest chapters in this book, the one on Dovey
Costner.
My older sister and
brothers soon left. As the only remaining farmhand, I went to school by bus but
not to any after-hours events: I was working. I wanted to write poetry inspired
by a book I acquired, who knows how, Louis Untermeyer’s A Treasury of Great Poems. I still have it. I stopped trying to
write poetry but I still love it. In 2008 I published Melville: The Making of the Poet and as late as 2019 I edited
Herman Melville’s Complete Poems for
the Library of America. After the eleventh grade, at 16, in the summer of 1952,
I took a train from Howe, a town that does not exist anymore, stayed the night
with a brother in Oklahoma City who was killed in 1958, and went on to Red
Rock, Oklahoma to become an apprentice telegrapher on the AT&SF Railroad in
an enormous depot that does not exist any more. The job of railroad telegrapher
does not exist any more either. In the station unsold tickets to Indian
Territory and Oklahoma Territory destinations were hanging on big brass hooks,
still valid. Territorial history was that recent. In 1952 I was 45 years from
statehood and now I’m two and a half times farther removed from the territories
than then. Once that summer the depot
agent went back to the depot at night and surprised a well-known local white
woman in the embrace of a black man. Was he local? The agent left, not
acknowledging that he recognizing her, and never named her.
From late 1952 until
September 1957 I was a telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railroad in
towns along the Sabine River in Louisiana, starting at Many (say “manny”),
where I revered my teacher Bob Sibley, the first black man I knew. (Last time I
checked, Sibleys still live in nearby Florian.) He had a foible, one Fatima
(accent the TEE) after another wet far up the cigarette, but he did all the
work at the station. Together we loaded adding machine and ledgers into the
agent’s car the end of every day and unloaded them every morning, untouched.
Bob (I may have used his first name) and I understood the agent’s fantasy of
pretending to work. This prepared me for understanding the way most English
professors conduct their careers. I was up in Noble, sixty miles south of
Shreveport, when Hank Williams died. For
weeks you could have walked across any half-populated area and not been away
from the sound of his voice. There was a historic relic in Noble, a dark 1910
store with an ancient cracker-barrel. Eudora Welty should have photographed it
when she was photographing Uncle Tom Costner’s store in Banner, Mississippi.
I worked longest as
agent-telegrapher in Singer, Louisiana, population 90 or so, where there were
distinct local racial divisions, whites, blacks, and what everyone, including
themselves, called “redbones.” Everyone in Singer knew everyone, and any two
people waiting for a train wanted to catch up with each other, even though they
had talked earlier that day. I locked the door to the colored waiting room and
barred the little ticket window on the office side with shelves for a hot plate
and coffee supplies, for I slept on a cot in the station. I earned nine college
units there by correspondence from the University of Oklahoma, exams supervised
by the Baptist minister. Then in DeRitter I swept the vast station at night,
all four toilets, all littered with little empty bottles of Dr. Tichenor’s
Antiseptic, the New Orleans product invented by a wounded Confederate soldier,
who had healed his leg with alcohol and knew its power.
In DeQuincy I first met
someone obsessed with family history, my landlady who was vainglorious about
being from the “first families of Virginia,” ancestors there in the 1600s. That
talk left me deflated, not belonging anywhere, and I put any curiosity about
family history back out of my mind. Now, I understand that however you got to
Virginia in the 1660s (free or indentured or enslaved), in three or four
generations you were kin or connected to pretty much everyone. I was getting
very weak in DeQuincy. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, I went on leave for two
years but kept my seniority. For weeks I was in a sanitorium west of
Shreveport, near Texas, a warehouse where sick men were sent to die. At Singer
I had supported my parents for two years and bought my father a $1000 truck for
him to drive to California. In 1955 they were settled in a house in Point
Richmond when I finally called my mother to say I was sick. Obeying her, I
drove out and she got me into a sanitorium where doctors had heard of
streptomycin, which saved my life.
On
New Year’s Day 1956, released from the sanitorium with orders to say in bed
(away from outsiders I might infect), I took up the complete Shakespeare I had
bought in New Orleans in 1953. I could deadhead there from Singer by going
north to Shreveport then southeast on the Louisiana & Arkansas--a long trip
for a short stay. I can date one trip. On or about 18 May 1954 at Baton Rouge
white passengers in the dining car had fresh papers brought on announcing the
overturn of Plessy v. Ferguson, the
case which Albion Tourgee had lost on 18 May 1896. Everyone in the car, while it
was being served by blacks, spoke calmly and acceptingly. Staying in bed for
five full months starting 1 January 1956, I read the plays every day, some a
dozen times. I also played all the Shakespeare LPs my mother could bring me
from the local library, including, over and over, the incomparable Paul
Robeson’s Othello.
After that I took a correspondence course in philosophy from
Berkeley. I needed it: John Dewey freed me of my lingering Southern religion. I
was hoping that someday I could have enough education to teach junior high
school like an attractive young black couple I had met on my one trip to Sabine
Pass, in 1954. I envied them their
marriage, their education, their jobs, and their neat clothing. During the Suez
Crisis, puffy like the tortured Indian I saw in Vancouver in 1945, I was tested
at the junior college’s Plunge annex in Richmond and told that by Dr. Cole that
I could aim at teaching higher than secondary school if I kept on. I picked up more units in Contra Costa Junior
College in San Pablo while being treated for TB, now with pneumo-peritoneum, air
pumped into my belly with a horse needle every Monday to rest the lungs. Early
in 1957, remembering Alexander Scourby’s incomparable voice in the Robeson LP,
I played Cassio in the Richmond Community Theatre (on weekends, when some air
had leaked out) and got to speak and hear words of the play over and over,
again.
That Spring, now moved to a cot on the back porch, for
eleven afternoons I rested my pocket of air as I read Moby-Dick in prolonged astonishment that a young American could
have absorbed Shakespeare so profoundly. I was an impoverished tubercular
high-school dropout with a professor’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays, but
every month I was sick I was amassing seniority as a telegrapher on the Kansas
City Southern.
For the next two years,
from September 1957 to September 1959, I was in Port Arthur, having just missed Audrey, which outdid the 1942
Pryor cyclone. I made one trip up to Singer where I heard about snakes and animals
in trees; James Lee Burke, who would know, says human bodies could fall on you. I
worked alone upstairs in the vast dark Freight House of the Kansas City
Southern Railroad in Port Arthur from 8 at night till 4 in the morning. Anyone
could walk up the wide steep stairs and enter but only a few tramps and no
thugs ever surprised me. No one bumped me from that job. Who would have wanted
it? Days, I drove, past Nederland and past Spindletop, for classes at Lamar
State College of Technology in Beaumont. I worked that way, 8 at night till 4 in the morning, and saw only white
trainmen and white Texas Rangers drinking above a bar but no blacks except
those waiting or cooking in cafes. I saw no blacks in the classes I was taking
in Beaumont. The brakemen I sometimes rounded up from whorehouses were all
white, as were the prostitutes. My formidable old landlady was a Cajun, from
across the Sabine. (In 1962 from Illinois I went back to see her before
hitchhiking from Port Arthur to New York to work in the Melville archives.)
While I was there the service station in Port Arthur had three toilets, Men,
Women, and Colored. All the gasoline stations were that way, and two drinking
fountains (if any), White and Colored.
On
30 August 1959 the Beaumont Journal
printed a photograph of me and a squib saying I would “graduate with highest
honors” and that Lamar Tech would award me “a BA degree in English.” (Where did
I get the tie and jacket? Were they the director’s gift when I played Tommy
Turner in The Male Animal late in 1956?)
The Lamar registrar Celeste Kitchen had allowed me to take for credit one more
correspondence course, Medieval French Poetry, from the University of Texas.
What was I thinking? Well, for two years at Port Arthur I went to sleep at 4:30
in the morning to tapes of Brecht-Weill (Dreigroschen
Oper, Aufsteig und Fall der Stadt
Mahagonny) and I wanted to know more about François Villon. On Houston
radio KTRH young Dan Rather read my name from a list of regional students who
graduated with honors. Think of it: I am so old Dan Rather read my name on the radio.
I never knew
anyone else who had to leave school after the eleventh grade, at 16, and who
took correspondence courses from three state universities (Oklahoma,
California, and Texas) while working his way through college. I never knew
anyone who had earned a BA in so higgledy-piggledy a fashion. But after I
graduated I gave up seven years’ seniority on the railroad, a
secure lifetime job, and drove north to Northwestern University on a Woodrow
Wilson Fellowship. The first quarter in Evanston, the Fall of 1959, I wrote
papers on Swift and Wordsworth by reading everything available in the library
on Swift’s campaign against the Marlboroughs and on Wordsworth’s early
humanitarianism. That was research of a sort. In Port Arthur, I had read for my
own enlightenment the de Selincourt-Darbishire edition of The Prelude, underlining and commenting on every page of the
1805-1806 text and frequently commenting on the facing page, the 1850 text, so at
Northwestern I knew to avoid the later, revised texts. I had never read Swift,
but learned from a great teacher, Phillip Harth, who died in 2020 at 94. Because
I did not know Latin and Greek I was not allowed to major in the Renaissance or
the Romantics.
The next year, 1960, I learned that Harrison Hayford
required students to turn in a term paper prepared for the requirements of a particular
journal and handed to him in an envelope with the right postage, so he could
mail it if it was good. He may never have mailed a paper. I had lost too much
time already, so I signed up. For his Melville class I read The Confidence-Man and explained the
allegory of the Indian-hater. That was not research: that came from long
saturation in the Bible, which I knew better than the few others who had
written on the book. That year Hayford was chairman of the Melville meeting at
the Modern Language Association to be held in Chicago. I would give my paper
there, he said. I did, and I dealt brusquely with the query from the professor
from the university of Oklahoma: what if I had an Indian in class? I would
explain that I was part Choctaw and that Melville was using Indians in an
allegory.
First rejected by American
Literature, the paper was published in a California journal, Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Later I gave
Harold Bloom permission to reprint it. Reading Romeo and Juliet in early 1956,
not for the first time, I had realized that a line was vulgar. I decided, that
moment, never to read beyond any passage until I thought I understood it. I
became a slower reader but one who kept whole passages in mind. I had
demonstrated my textual alertness to Hayford by casually correcting “murder” in
the text of The Confidence-Man to
“number” (“party,” meaning group, was the word in Melville’s source).
So, a few years late, I had a Bachelor’s degree from Lamar
(now Lamar University). I had
gained a Master’s at Northwestern in 1960 on the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship
($1800 dollars--riches running wild) and a PhD in 1963 there on one of the new
Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowships ($3990, having held out for $4000 but
capitulating under pressure from the chairman). In the summer of 1962, blessed
with that new Fellowship, I at last worked in the great Melville archives, in
New York City, in Pittsfield, and in Boston and Cambridge.
In Manhattan I took off one afternoon to see the
incomparable Desdemona, Uta Hagen, in Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? then stood, dazed, on the sidewalk surrounded by a
few dozen equally dazed blue-haired women. I also took off to meet two PhD
students of the Columbia professor Richard Chase who were surprised to hear
there was a university west of the Hudson River and dumbstruck when I told them
I was going to the New York Public Library or the New-York Historical Society
every day to copy out nineteenth-century letters and diary entries about
Melville and to look for Melville in old newspapers. They had a great story to
regale Chase and their fellow students with at Columbia--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 looking at each other showed they thought this
was the quaintest damned thing they had ever heard. It probably was. The
research required by my dissertation topic had pushed me out of step with my
sprightly contemporaries. I just didn't know how far out of step I was. I keep
coming back to this story because it predicted the resistance to historical
scholarship, biographical scholarship, and textual scholarship which would
manifest itself in each succeeding decade. It was a defining moment of my
academic career.
As an Okie I was, in fact, a little fanatic. I did not know
how to stop working. Really, not everyone had read only Shakespeare for five
months. Not everyone in 1962 was annotating Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log with corrections and additions. (In 1969 I supervised
the 2nd edition while Leyda was in East Germany).
Knowing I could not only write well enough but also could read the
way I did, Hayford asked me to be his co-editor in the Norton Critical
Edition of Moby-Dick, and I was on my
way to a career as a Melville scholar. I
was hired back at Northwestern in 1965 to be Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville,
Harrison Hayford the General Editor and G. Thomas Tanselle the Bibliographical
Editor.
We all
three assumed that those professors who had been publishing essays on
Melville’s writings in the 1950s and early 1960s would contribute the
“Historical Notes.” This was a way of
letting us focus on editing while sharing whatever prestige would accrue to the
volumes. The contributors were to write fresh accounts of the composition,
publication, critical reception, and later history. These younger people,
midway in age between Hayford and his two students who were now his collaborators,
had not been trained to research and write such accounts. They were early New
Critics, perfectly competent to write essays on “The Unity of Melville’s Mardi” or “Fraternal Images in Omoo.” They did not know how to do
research. What was required took skills they simply did not have. I ended up
feeding them information for all parts of the essays then writing some Notes
myself. In the 1960s I recognized a widening gap between what I was doing and
what others published.
At Northwestern in the mid 1960s I supervised collators of variant Melville editions and scrutinized the texts myself. As I studied texts and especially author’s revisions I came to see that W. W. Greg’s rationale of copy-text was perfect for incorporating corrections but never adequate for dealing with revisions Tanselle was the great up and coming bibliographer and Hayford assumed that that meant he was the great textual scholar and theorist. In fact, I was doing the grubby textual work from which I was slowly impelled to challenge the dominant theory of copy-text. I had no one to talk to about what I was learning. When he had satisfied himself in his mind Hayford did not want to listen.
Then one evening in the Fall of 1967 at a party given by the director of the Newberry Library I talked to someone about Melville's texts, James B. Meriwether, who from his study of Faulkner manuscripts, typescripts, and published texts had arrived at conclusions astonishingly like those I was making about Melville. We adjourned to a quiet bar and talked passionately for hours about author's revisions, about the all too soberness of sober second thoughts, about the sacredness of the creative process. If we had been overheard we could have been shot on the spot for heresy by two different thought-killing squads: first, the bibliographical adherents of Greg we had just left at the party, whose theory held that an author retained control (legal control and aesthetic control) over all parts of a literary work as long as he lived; second, by the hoard of surviving older and younger New Critics, who ruled out of consideration all information about the author, biographical information being irrelevant to interpretation. That night changed my life. The next day I began looking for another job. Maybe I would find other people to talk to and certainly I could begin writing about what I was discovering.
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