Sunday, March 11, 2018
Robert Ussery, Richard Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, Donald Trump, and
Michael Shelden: "The Stupidification of America."
In
today's San Luis Obispo TRIBUNE Leonard Pitts tells of a new episode of
"breathtaking emotional cruelty." Pastor Frank Pomeroy, whose
daughter Annabelle was killed in the massacre at the First Baptist Church in
November 2017 was accosted by Robert Ussery, who yelled at him: "Your
daughter never even existed. Show me her birth certificate." It turns out
that Ussery denies many other mass shootings. "Show me her birth
certificate" instantly reminds us of the Birther who was elected to the
Presidency. If the highest elected official in the country can be an
unapologetic Birther for years, why can't Ussery? Pitts deplores
"America's vanishing ability—and willingness—to reason." What Pitts
calls "the stupidification of America," he says, has "crept upon
us over the course of a generation."
It appeared in American
universities even before it "crept" into public discourse. In
December 1990 the Melville Society meeting was packed with New Historicists,
second-generation New Leftists (who had fervor but less purpose than the
first), and a large group of second- and third-generation New Critics who had
never done archival research and had certainly not been taught to do
responsible research. I misread the atmosphere in the room as one of
free-floating political correctness, not sharply focused, but the mood of the
audience was hostile from the start. When Wai-chee Dimock resurrected Lewis
Mumford’s long-refuted claim that Hawthorne had based Ethan Brand on Melville
(before he met him or read anything but Typee), Harrison Hayford mildly
reproved her, saying that if she thought it was acceptable to bring forth the
Ethan Brand claim as a serious possibility, she was using a different standard
for evidence than he used. At that, there was a subterranean murmur of anger in
the audience like the incipient rebellion in Billy Budd, the mood hardening
into fury that anyone’s idea could be considered invalid on grounds of
biographical evidence. My diary for the day described my having gone unknowingly
into the Lions' Den.
In the new post-scholarly
climate, to point out errors was to violate the playground rules: one should
always enhance one’s playmate’s self-esteem. The audience at the 1990 MLA was
further incited when an onlooker described by Robert K. Wallace in Melville and
Turner as “the petulant stranger in the doorway” kept crying out, with regard
to Melville and history, ‘the facts don’t matter.’” Accepting what the satanic
red-bearded prophet meant, I never attended another Melville Society meeting in
the United States, although I went in 1997 to Cancun so we could climb the
pyramids at Chichen Itza. Partly because of the hostile takeover of the
Melville Society, I decided, as I said from the platform of a program on F.
Scott Fitzgerald in Toronto in 1993, that attending the annual Modern Language
Association convention had become a moral issue. The issue was settled right
after that meeting when a Melvillean some years my senior proposed that we
adjourn to his hotel room where we could “strip" and go at each other
"one to one” over differing interpretations. I declined.
The facts did not matter in
1990, and have not mattered since then. A dean at Yale and later President of
Duke University, Richard Brodhead, in the June 23, 2002, New York Times announced
that I had invented two lost Melville books, The Isle of the Cross (1853) and Poems (1860) out of thin air. Only I in my "black hole"
had heard of Poems, Brodhead said, although everyone had known about Poems
since 1922. As for The Isle of the Cross,
everyone had known since 1960 that Melville had completed a book in 1853, but I
did not announce my discovery of the title until 1990, in the lead article of
American Literature. In the New Republic (September 30, 2002) the
biographer-to-be Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco said I couldn’t be trusted
at all on anything because I had merely surmised the existence of those lost
books (34). He had, of course, not read all of the book he was reviewing, for
the evidence about the books is on the pages. And the Kansas professor
Elizabeth Schultz in Common Review Winter 2002) echoed those two critics,
decrying the merely “putative” existence of those books I claimed Melville had
written.
Even if they have admitted
that these two lost books once existed, recent academic critics have continued
to ignore the reality that months of Melville's working life went into The Isle
of the Cross (December 1852-May or June 1853) and parts of three years
(1857-1860) went into the composition of Poems. My point is that when you think
of the trajectory of Melville's writing life, you need to take account of
months or years spent on something that a writer remembers keenly even if no
one else can perceive it. I know something from personal experience about this,
having written in the early 1970s a thorough account of Fredson Bowers's
astonishingly incompetent edition of Stephen Crane's Maggie, a temperate but
relentless exposé which no textual journal would publish and which led Bowers
to blackball me from the Center for Scholarly Editions (although he later
falsely denied doing so). For two decades I lived with one of my most important
studies unpublished, while many people in the textual community knew of it but
no one would dare to mention it because of Bowers's threats to sue. At last it
was published by a brave editor in the Antipodes, when it was too late to do
any good to the editing of American classics. I could imagine how Melville
remembered the months he labored on The Isle of the Cross and in the process
grew or at least changed from Pierre to his first work on short stories. If you
are a writer you do not forget a long important part of your writing life.
In 2016 Michael Shelden
published Melville in Love: The Secret
Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of "Moby-Dick," described as
a new account of Herman Melville and the writing of Moby-Dick. It was, the ads
said, "based on fresh archival research, which reveals that the anarchic
spirit animating Melville’s canonical work was inspired by his great love
affair with a shockingly unconventional married woman." The book was in
fact not based on new archival documents and in fact wilfully ignored many
known documents which flatly contradicted the premise of the book. In fact,
Sarah Morewood was an unstable woman who had notoriously pursued a dashing
brother-in-law of President Tyler in 1849 and in 1851 and afterwards was
pursuing the strikingly demure religious brother of Evert Duyckinck. She was
not pursuing Melville in 1850. Melville did not need a living muse for
Moby-Dick, for he had the Bible, Shakespeare, and other great writers down to
De Quincey. Now we are promised for the Summer 2018 a Newton's Law Productions
documentary on Shelden's documentary account of Melville's love affair with
Sarah Morewood. What meaning does the word "documentary" have any
more? The stupidification of America, Pitts says. Yet some of us try to
establish the truth and tell the truth.
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