REVIEW of DAYSWORK
Early in September 2023, when I was preparing to celebrate being alive a year after heart surgery, I saw my name in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Sun. These were not advance notices of An Okie’s Racial Reckonings, oh no. These were reviews of a book, “a novel” (it says on the cover), Dayswork, by a married couple. It was not a novel. It was not fiction. It was an account of the couple’s erratically but persistently acquiring information about Herman Melville through the Internet during and after the lockdown for Covid. Recurrent characters are recognizable as real people. Melville and some of his family are real. Many pages are devoted to three modern people, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and me, called not by name but “The Biographer” throughout while Hardwick and other biographers are lower-case. They portray me often enough to give a sense of my working life and (several times) a distorted sense of me as misogynist. On the last page the couple, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, recognize “the achievements of Hershel Parker, the Biographer, whose prodigious research and writing about Melville we found invaluable.” They had been invasive, indecently so a time or two, when I must, once, have spoken or written unguardedly, and revealed something I should not have told anyone. I began to regard the book as a fragmented shorthand tour of my career.
It was hard to read the pages of Dayswork without correcting or supplementing them. Helen Vendler read Clarel the first time in 1976 before coming to Pittsfield, where after my speech a Hawthorne worshipper exploded at me, purple faced and foaming at the mouth—a public paroxysm. Her companion told me what Helen said during the man’s frenzy. That would have been a story! The authors print my cool critique of the great Harvard would-be biographer Harry Murray. They started the story, and I am tempted but will never tell what Murray confided to the late Brian Higgins at New Bedford in 1980. It’s strange to know “the rest” of many stories the couple were telling--and many more stories they did not know. All this made for a very odd retrospection of my career during the weeks Alma and I were polishing up the last chapters of An Okie’s Racial Reckonings.
They put me in Daywork just turned twenty, a tubercular, released from a sanitorium but isolated by state’s decree and recumbent for another five months, during which I read Shakespeare’s plays over and over. The authors say, accurately, that I remember reading for these months as “a great adventure.” They jump over some years, but bit by bit they print mainly accurate scenes from my later decades. I wince at the worst invasions and the times when the novelists reflexively slide into misandry. Elizabeth Hardwick made me her partner in a false claim about Melville’s sexuality. I walked over to check Hardwick’s lower-case biography of Melville only to find it gone, in Pittsfield now. I wince at being reproached for changing “scared white doe” to “sacred white doe” in the Mosses essay. How could I know better than Mrs. Melville, the copyist? Well, partly because I knew the context was lofty, and Wordsworthian, and I knew Melville’s handwriting which his wife was copying. Scott Norsworthy even more tellingly shows that Melville was thinking of Dryden’s hind right then, too, in a correction he made in Mrs. Melville’s transcription. He also puts “sacred white doe” into a thick context of Berkshire stories. Melville wrote “sacred white doe.”
Everyone can say misogyny. Dayswork made me learn to say misandry. How easy it is to be flippant toward people who know what they are doing but don’t stop and take 25 pages to show how they know, the way I know what Melville did when he got to Boston in 1844. The two novelists could have read twenty-five tightly argued pages on the Melvilles’ courtship in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. There I use familiar documents along with many family documents no one else has ever transcribed, read, and dated, and used. I worked it out. I knew what Melville had to have done in Boston. No, he was not drinking himself blind.
Dayswork misfires slightly several times. No, I never said Clarel is the best thing Melville ever wrote, but it’s true that when I get to part four I feel “‘edgy, vaguely dodgy and sore’ because ‘pretty soon there won’t be any more.’” But Dayswork chooses some issues well. One page shows me demolishing the argument for transcribing by your rhetorical agenda rather than learning to read your writer’s handwriting. The bonus the novelists did not know is that the unnamed self-promoting theorist is the one who always made fun of my hailing from Oklahoma. In my Bronco II I kept the Forebitter tape of “Harbo and Samuelsen,” the two young Norwegians who rowed across the Atlantic in 1896. A half mile down to the Pacific in the Bronco for my three-mile run, a half mile back, a 5 or 6 minutes ride for an 8 minute song, so usually home, waiting for the song to end. I played the song on days I was all but overwhelmed by Leyda’s project and Hayford’s projects and the piles of manuscripts I was transcribing (not to mention teaching every class originally). They quote me as saying that I listened and blubbered. Perhaps I am excessively emotional, but, yes, I wept at “the colors of Norway floating behind” and, yes, wept more at “they were not only brave but by God they could row.” The task I was part way through seemed like rowing across the Atlantic alone. The writers themselves became enthralled and devoted several pages to the young Norwegian heroes.
You know my Melville Collection is already mainly at the Berkshire Athenaeum. A couple of pages in Dayswork review my “long history” with the Athenaeum, beginning in 1962 when I hitchhiked to Pittsfield from New York City. (Don’t try it yourself.) After I recover from An Okie’s Racial Reckonings I will get help in sending more boxes to Pittsfield.
They devote four pages to what they see as a “triumphant feat of archival research,” celebrating the success of my long hunt for a Windsor, Vermont paper in November 1851. I was hunting on the chance—I thought, a near certainty--that it would describe a meeting in at which Melville gave Hawthorne his presentation copy of Moby-Dick, shortly before Hawthorne left the Berkshires. Decades ago, Hayford had been sure such a meeting had happened, and the great bookman Bill Reese also just knew, people being people, that it happened. The novelists capture my exultation when I held with shaking hands what I had longed for. They print this alone on one line: “‘Jesus,” he wrote in his diary, ‘my mind is wild.’” Later they say: “‘Wanted a drink’ he wrote in his dairy,” but in lieu “of a celebratory drink he called Hayford, then Maurice Sendak, and then went back to work.’” (I last drank any alcohol in 1986 when I got home from taking Jay Leyda on his last research trip and let myself face up to how advanced his Parkinson’s was.)
I did not stop to read Dayswork but I kept dipping into it. The scattered episodes on me run from 1956 up into the 1990s. The passages on Lowell ought to have displayed his love of Melville, but they did not, so why is he here? The writers did not like my dissing Hardwick’s little book on Melville. For it she did no research at all and she lied about me in it, pulling me into a sexual fantasy of hers. It’s a trivial book which a reviewer in the New York Times called “brief but meaty”! Hardwick features in Dayswork as the modern Griselda, patient--but making sure readers know just how deeply she is suffering from Lowell’s mistreatment during his recurrent madness. Lowell’s reputation as a poet suffers the more she suffers.
In the February 2020 Harper’s Helen Vendler accepts Hardwick’s self-portrait as Griselda, but nevertheless thinks Lowell’s reputation as a great writer is secure: “The passing of time makes the personal irrelevant.” I wish that were true, but Lowell is already disappearing from lists of great American poets. Go to Google for “The Best 20th Century American Poets” and see. Despite Vendler’s optimism, I fear Hardwick may already have cost Lowell his high place in American literature. If only the writers had shown how much Lowell loved Melville!
The writers of Daysworth read my blog (they mention one title, not credited to me, on page two!) so they must know I work on my own genealogy. Perhaps oddly, they do not mention my work on An Okie’s Racial Reckonings. They did not check Lowell and me for kinship. The only intermittently mad great poet in my family is Robert Traill Spence Lowell, twice winner of the Pulitzer prize. “Cal,” Lowell was called. Both Cal and I are Traills (and Balfours and Spences). We share grandparents, “William Traill of Westness” in the Orkneys and his wife Barbara Balfour, she from yet more ancient Orkney families. We share notable older ancestors such as James Baikie of Tankerness House (now the Orkney Museum). I think of myself as a Scot, and realizing that a great poet and I share such Orkney kinship is empowering. Is any other part of Scotland as evocative as the Orkneys, where a farmer’s pickaxe can reveal a Pictish tomb and where one morning after a storm a Viking village stood, open to the air? No wonder in his madness Cousin Cal announced that he was the King of Scotland! While reading my cousin’s poetry and pondering his tortured yet 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.
With luck, Dayswork, misandry or not, may prove a publicity boon for An Okie’s Racial Reckonings. Their “novel” was still being talked about on November 13 when DeNeen L. Brown published a stunning article in the Washington Post: “Army Clears Buffalo Soldiers Century-Old Convictions, Blames Racism.” Alma and I had just put into final form my “One Bad Cop,” the chapter about my Cousin Lee Sparks whose racist pistol-whipping of black women and men caused the Houston riot. Other chapters are timely, and may become news again. Who knows?
Any Depression Okie like me is now kin not to hundreds or thousands of other Americans but to millions, many more millions than when I started looking. There is an audience. Cousin Kevin built the baseball field and thousands of cars came rolling into Iowa. I have built my Reckonings with hundreds of names and hundreds of stories never told before. Perhaps many people will care.
My disrespected Okies are Americans. None of us entered through Ellis Island. Why, few of us came to the United States. My own white folks were all here before there was a United States, and the Choctaws were already here many millennia before them. Neither of my parents, I remind you, was born in one of the American states. They were born in different Territories. That alienated heritage may go toward accounting for the trajectory of my career. In 1962, the two Columbia students were amused to think I had come to New York from the vague Northwest Territory. The truth is, I was from a Territory where facts mattered. They matter in this book. Yes, I hail from Oklahoma. Steinbeck said it. We are, after all, Goddamn Okies. Facts and families matter.
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