Well, this is my report on being "The Biographer" in DAYSWORK

 

             First I saw the Washington POST review on line, then went down to a neighbor to ask for his discarded Wall Street Journal, then others went online, the Boston Globe, Sewanee Review, Kirkus. Almost all of them indicated that I had been roughed up by the authors, I was "crusty and dogged," I was "dour and insisten," I was "an obsessive and possessive crank," the WSJ said I came "under frequent ribbing" for my "exhaustive, overly flattering two-volume biography of Melville." I was not named in the text except maybe once, but was regularly (sardonically?) referred to as The Biographer. So I was prepared for a savage attack. Question: why did the reviewers not recognize what the writers were doing with me?

    Well, it is a very strange book. I would not call it a novel. It really is not fiction. I am not going to write a description of it because many are already trying and I am worrying about my chapter on Reconstruction in AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS. And I have not "read" it but I had looked all through for "The Biographer" and have marked a lot of passages.

    It could have been so much worse for me. Here I am with a new book coming out, and slanders like those from Brodhead and Delbanco in 2002 might not have hurt the new book but would have hurt me.

    Let me list some ways I am extremely grateful:

 . . . at the way they handled my reply to a critic's idiotic claim (69) that when a word is hard to transcribe he should read it according to his rhetoric agenda. They quote my explanation that we should transcribe the word, recover the word Melville wrote, not a word that will serve our interpretations.

. . .  at the way they treated my account of 5 months of 1956 in bed with TB reading only Shakespeare. They say, perceptively, that I "remember these five months of bed rest as a great adventure." They understand that I see some episodes of my life as heroic.

. . . for the way they treat my Melville Collection's going  (mostly gone) to the Berkshire Athenaeum.

. . . for the way they deal with my plans for a biography (152-153) and the diplomatic way I dealt with Harry Murray (159) and my dead serious recommendation to his widow.

. . . for acknowledging my discovery of The Isle of the Cross, the "missing book" between Pierre and the magazine work.

. . . for their story of my long search for a newspaper account of the meeting between HM and NH in Lenox in November 1851, a meeting which Hayford knew had to have happened: you don't dedicate a book to your friend and not try to present it to him. The authors put me in the summer of 1987 in the Boston Public Library where (looking for something else) I found in the Lowell Weekly Journal and Courier an unknown article on Hawthorne in Lenox reprinted from the Windsor Vermont Journal. They convey my quest for it. The Library of Congress assured me it did not exist. I paid a student to go up to Vermont and search the libraries. I asked a compulsive newspaper hunter on Thoreau, a Portsmouth historian, to watch for a file of the Journal. Years passed, in which I put MUST FIND WINDSOR VERMONT JOURNAL (in very big letters) at the top of 1851 on my computer. I did that every time I had to divide files. Now I could delete the warning.

    For describing this great discovery of the last meal of NH and HM in Lenox so as to retain all the excitement of the first hours (194-197). 

I am grateful that they understood the glory of such a new discovery. They convey the sense of triumph, even glory.

     "At 2 pm mail & all hell broke loose," the Biographer noted in his diary." . . . . "'Jesus,' he wrote in his diary, 'my mind is wild.'" 

    "Wanted a drink," I wrote in my diary, but I did not drink, and still have not. Instead of having a drink, I called Hayford and Maurice Sendak. 

    I put this out there for any non-drinker who in a moment of intense excitement wants to reward himself or herself with a single drink. Don't. At that moment I wanted a drink but I did not take one. The writers know that when I realized the magnitude of my tasks I gave up alcohol altogether. If I live 3 more years from now it will be 40 years. I could not have achieved what I did without being as alert as I could. One of my Costner ancestors told her sons that they should not drink merely for moral reasons but because their supply of mother-wit was limited. Right.

            On p. 54 they introduce my turning to Harbo and Samuelsen for encouragement but they don't know that I listened only between leaving my workroom and reaching the beach to run (for I was running then, not walking). I did not go out to a stationary Bronco II and listen and blubber, not quite. I listened in a controlled situation, going to the Pacific and returning, and then went back to work. It was a short drive. My replacement beach car, the 2007 Honda, has 36,000 or so miles on it. This is my account:

If I had not held myself in that state of grace, that “zone” athletes talk about, I could not have finished the second volume. Was it heroic? Well, writing the biography was the great adventure of my life, outdoing my five months of doing nothing but reading Shakespeare. Put it this humble way: at my lowest moments, when I felt that no one could carry on Jay Leyda's work while writing his own narrative biography, I played a tape of the group Forebitter in my Bronco II, the ‘Harbo and Samuelsen’ song about the hearty young Norwegian oystermen who set out to row across the Atlantic, west to east. ‘They were not only brave, but by God they could row!’ I listened and blubbered in the Bronco then went back to work. And of course if I had not been my own Leyda I could not have written a biography filled with new episodes and new understanding of my vastly larger cast of characters. At the simplest level, I found episodes when I dated documents. How many of my cherished stories started with transcribing and dating?

               Curiously, Harbo and Samuelsen caught the writers' imagination for the next several pages. Readers may not realize that this "interpolation" is their tribute to heroic achievement. At the very end of the book (in a page by itself) they "acknowledge the achievements of Hershel Parker, the Biographer, whose prodigious research and writing about Melville we found invaluable." Thank you, Bachelder & Habel. This is a strange sort of book, but if I was to be in it I am glad you treated me as you did.