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 Boston Globe, the New York Sun, then one damn place after another. 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 acquiring information about Melville starting during the lockdown for Covid. There are recurrent characters recognizable as real people. Melville and his family are real. Many pages are devoted to three people, Elizabeth Hardwick, my cousin Robert Traill Spence Lowell, both dead, 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 an honest sense of my working life and (several times) a distorted sense of me as misogynist. On the last page the couple, Chris Bachelder and Jennnifer Habel, recognize “the achievements of Hershel Parker, the Biographer, whose prodigious research and writing about Melville we found invaluable.” Looking through this “novel” 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.
I enter Daywork just turned twenty, a tubercular, isolated by state’s decree and recumbent for five months, reading only Shakespeare’s plays over and over. The authors say, accurately, that I remember reading for these months as “a great adventure.” I appreciate their portraying me as taking risks. They jump over some years, but bit by bit they print mainly accurate scenes from my later decades. I wince most as the novelists slip into misandry. Why might I dis Cousin Cal’s second wife? Well, why did she lie about me, claiming I championed her in a sexual absurdity? I walked over to check Elizabeth 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. Scott Norsworthy even more tellingly shows that Dryden’s hind was on Melville’s mind right there, too, in a correction he made in Mrs. Melville’s transcription. How easy it is to make fun of people who know what they are talking about 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.
Dayswork hits several of my good moments. 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.’” One page shows me demolishing the argument for transcribing by your rhetorical agenda rather than learning to read your writer’s handwriting. The bonus here 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 version of “Harbo and Samuelsen,” the two young Norwegians who rowed across the Atlantic in 1896. In those days I was all but overwhelmed by Leyda’s project and Hayford’s projects and the piles of manuscripts I was transcribing. A mile down to the Pacific in the Bronco for my three-mile run, a mile back, 5 or 6 minutes for an 8 minute song, home, usually waiting for the song to end. They quote me as saying I listened and blubbered. Yes, I wept at “the colors of Norway floating behind” and, yes, wept at “they were not only brave but by God they could row.” The writers themselves became enthralled and devoted several pages to the young heroes. You already know my Melville Collection is 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. The authors printed my cool critique of the great Harvard would-be biographer Harry Murray.
They devote four pages to what they see as my most “triumphant feat of archival research.” They could have chosen other of my feats, some on other authors (I was, after all, the first person to read an almost complete The Red Badge of Courage in three quarters of a century). They celebrate my determination for several years to find a Vermont paper on the chance—I thought, a near certainty--that it would describe a meeting in November 1851 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 Reece also just knew, people being people, that it happened. The writers 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 faced up to what I would have to do.)
Now Leyda, Hayford, and Sendak are dead, like Hardwick and my Traill cousin Cal. I emphasize “Traill” because a grandfather of Robert Traill Spence Lowell was also my grandfather, William Traill of Westness in the Orkneys. I think of myself as a Scot, and knowing that Lowell and I are both Traills of Orkney is empowering. It is good, say, to know that my Glenns are from Renfrewshire, near Glasgow, but is any other place as evocative as Orkney, where life is hard and where Pictish and Viking graves have been excavated? In November, the month I turn 88, Dayswork is still being talked about. If the novel continues to sell and enough libraries have copies, some readers will remember “The Biographer” when they see a notice for An Okie’s Racial Reckonings. Even if not a novel, Dayswork may with luck prove a publicity boon for An Okie’s Racial Reckonings.
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