An oddity in DAYSWORK--the writers forget that Lowell ought to be here because he loved Melville and wrote about him.

 I'm saying they have no function for him except to denounce him for mistreating Elizabeth Hardwick. Now, Lowell had long bouts of madness, real howling madness, in between writing great poetry. What is he doing in this book if he never read Melville?

        Now Leyda, Hayford, and Sendak are dead. I loved all three and think of them differently but poignantly. 

    Hardwick, who died in 2007 at 95, had a successful later life. In Dayswork she is the modern Patient Griselda all the while making sure a host of impressionable woman know just how deeply she is suffering. The authors seem to have brought her and Lowell into Dayswork only to portray what they see as my slight mistreatment of her (I was polite but I despised her sloppy book) and Lowell’s monstrous abuse of her. What else is Lowell doing here? He is not a great poet, here. You would think, in a book so much about Melville, that they would mention the poetry, at least the early “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and the prose adaptation of Benito Cereno for the stage. Melville has vanished from their passages on Lowell. Here, Lowell is a madman who at the end can write poetry only by plagiarizing Hardwick’s noble letters to him. She said this to everyone and probably believed it herself. We all believed it, but see William Logan’s word-count in the New Criterion (February 2020). I reeled back several times from the force of reflexive misandry in the treatment of me, but mainly of Lowell. Maybe it’s best in Dayswork that Lowell is not identified as a reader of Melville (even in this book supposedly about Melville) and that he and I are never identified as kinsmen in this book about genealogy.

        Lowell was, I still believe, one of the greatest American poets of his century, worth mourning, but he does not appear on most modern lists of mid twentieth-century poets. Look at Google. Lowell is being erased or cancelled while I still cherish his memory. We have in common a love of Melville and we have in common, also, a grandfather, not a Boston Brahmin but William Traill of Westness in the Orkneys, and we descend from still more ancient Orkney families, the Spences and Balfours. As I have said, I think of myself as a Scot, and knowing that a great poet and I both have those Orkney heritages is empowering. Is any other part of Scotland as evocative as the harsh Orkneys, where a Viking village stands washed open to the air and a farmer’s pickaxe can open Pictish tombs? No wonder in his madness Lowell announced in a restaurant that he was the King of Scotland! While pondering my cousin’s tortured and triumphant life, I rejoice in knowing he made a pilgrimage to the Orkneys to visit to the poet Charles Mackay Brown, who knew more about our Traill and Balfour ancestors than we ever did, or ever will.