How I caused David Farrell Krell to "walk away" from his plans to write "THREE ENCOUNTERS: HEIDEGGER, ARENDT, DERRIDA."

This is from a book due out from Indiana in 2023. I am quoting from Krell's Preface: Many of my students over the years have pressed me with questions about Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida, knowing that I had met them and worked with them on at least a few occasions. It seems that I was among the very few of my generation and nationality who had the chance to meet with Heidegger, altough many of my generation knew Arendt, and many of my younger colleagues met and worked with Derrida. In the first two cases, a "memoir" appeared to be justified. However, since I knew Derrida best of the three, I decided to write about all three encounters, but only after long hesitation. Two things, perhaps three, held me back. To start with the third obstacle, I felt that I should let such a project wait until I began to feel closer to my death. An absurd conceit! At least for the young. In any case, absurd or not, I feel that it is now time to write. The second obstacle will sound abstract and merely "bookish," but it did cause me to walk away from the project. Hershel Parker, in his extraordinarily detailed account of Herman Melville's life, raises a strange warning flag several times--indeed, he seems to be obsessed with the worry. He notes that when Melville was writing Redburn in 1849, he 'dipped into' his own biography for material without realizing how 'dangerous' a confrontation with one's own life story must be. Only years later, when writing Pierre, or, The Ambituities, did Melville come to recognize the perils of autobiography. What sorts of perils? In Melville's case, the dangers involved certain memories of his childhood, which was largely a childhood of deprivation resulting from a beloved yet inept father's inability to provide for his children. Te ghost of an incompetent yet loved father haunted Melville, especially when he was writing Pierre, and even more so as he realized that his life as a professional writer was damaging the lives of his own children, some of whom came to disastrous ends, and all of whom bore a certain resentment toward their illustrious--and impoverished--father. Parker's obsession struck me as odd, and I did not understand it well, but it did cause me to shy from anything that smacked of autobiography. Which brings me to the first obstacle, the most potent one. Derrida's work on the genre of autobiography, exposing all the traps that it sets for an author, "traps on all sides," as he liked to say, surely discouraged me the most. . . . [end of quotation from Krell's Preface.] This is from the first volume of my biography of Melville (1996): Already by the early 1990s I had focused on Melville’s fascination with the feelings evoked when disparate places are juxtaposed, as in what he said to Evert Duyckinck on July 3, 1846: “[T]his strange bringing together of two such places as Typee and Buffalo, is really curious.” In chapter 27 of Omoo (in a passage I take as autobiographical) Melville described his inspection of the wreck of “an American whaler, a very old craft,” on the beach in Tahiti: “What were my emotions, when I saw upon her stern the name of a small town on the river Hudson! She was from the noble stream on whose banks I was born; in whose waters I had a hundred times bathed. In an instant, palm- trees and elms—canoes and skiffs—church spires and bamboos—all mingled in one vision of the present and the past.” The first example is simple; the second, more complex, is already moving toward his recognizing incongru- ous similarities in which disparate people, objects, and times tended to blur and merge into other people, objects, and times, and merge back—a process we would call morphing. Melville repeatedly described powerful, even hal- lucinatory, experiences when memories clashed with the present, catching him off-guard, unready to confront the past. We have records of some power- ful experiences which involve Melville’s revisiting a place where something momentous happened to him years before. I am convinced that a downright hallucinatory experience occurred in late May 1849. Melville had planned to write a book still more ambitious than Mardi until the reviews began to make it plain that could not be so self-indulgent. Just then, as I set out in chapter 5, his youngest brother, Tom, signed on the Navigator, bound for China. Herman went aboard his ship and saw him off, reenacting the scene in Manhattan ten years earlier, when his now-dead brother Gansevoort had seen him off on his own first voyage. In those ten years Melville had gone to the Pacific and returned and become a published writer with the help of Gansevoort—-who had died launching Typee in England and in New York. Now Tom, ten years his junior, looked uncannily the way Herman himself had looked, and Herman, ten years later, was playing the role of the older brother. In Melville’s mind at the end of May 1849, I decided, two New York wharf scenes glided into one and fused, and the bewilderingly similar sets of brothers glided across each other and fused in his mind. Demonstrably, within days Melville was reliving his first voyage in Redburn (which he dedicated to Tom). Demonstrably, the decision to write this semi-autobiographical book was sudden. This practical, straight- forward book was also reckless, as far as the psychological consequences for Melville were concerned. He must naively have thought he could draw on his own memories to write a short book very fast and be done with it. He did not think of repercussions, of the dangers of dropping an angle into the well of childhood (Pierre, bk. 21.1). Writing the book, I decided, had unleashed memories that propelled him into sudden psychological growth that contin- ued through the next years.