COSTNERS and a couple of in-laws

 

Surges today

 

High Surf

 

Torn part of August 1959 article in a Beaumont paper, saved by my mother. I have been telling everyone that I got $1,800. Could I be wrong?

S

 

Everett--- a niece sent me this picture I never had. 1951?

 

DAYSWORK again, having reflected on how misandry can poison reputations.

 

Hershel Parker

Dayswork—not a novel but a couple’s look on the Internet for Herman Melville

             In the Fall of 2023 Alma MacDougall and I were in putting the chapters of An Okie’s Racial Reckonings in final form, one by one. I was preparing to celebrate being alive a year after heart surgery. Early in September I saw my name in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Sun, one paper after another, at first. 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, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick (his second wife), and me, called not by name but “The Biographer” (with a capital B) throughout. They plunder from me with no scruples at all, but they often identify me (or B) often enough to give a sense of my career and only a dozen or so times unfairly (and ignorantly) slam me as a misogynist. That swift, reflexive misandry poisons some passages on me but, still worse, on Robert Lowell whom they never talk of as a poet who loved Melville. 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, most indecently so a time or two, when I must, once or twice, have spoken or written unguardedly, and revealed something I should never have told anyone.
            I did not stop to read Dayswork but I kept dipping into it. The scattered episodes on me started in 1956, just after I turned twenty, and went on 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 dismissing 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. Hardwick features in Dayswork as the modern Griselda, patient--but making sure readers (beginning with all her women friends) knew just how deeply and how frequently she suffered from Lowell’s mistreatment during his recurrent madness. Lowell’s reputation as a poet 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 think Hardwick may already have cost Lowell his high place in American literature. If only the writers of Dayswork had shown how much Lowell loved Melville!
            The writers of Dayswork read years of my blog (plundered it, sometimes without identifying “the Biographer” as their source) so they must know I have learned much about my own genealogy. They do not mention An Okie’s Racial Reckonings and do not mention the kinship between Lowell and me. The only intermittently mad great poet in my family is Robert Traill Spence Lowell, twice winner of the Pulitzer prize. “Cal,” Lowell was called by his intimates. Cal and I are both 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 knowing that a great poet and I share such Orkney kinship has been 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, washed 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.

 

A working draft for the back cover of AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS--

 

              Hershel Parker is called “The Dean of Melville Studies” for his two-volume biography of Melville (1996 and 2002). The first volume was a Pulitzer finalist and winner of the top Association of American Publishers Award (the Hawkins Award), and the second also won the top AAP Hawkins Award. Earlier, he won a Woodrow Wilson  Fellowship and the first  Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship, then a Guggenheim Fellowship. After his retirement in 1998 his books include in 2002 the second volume of the biography; the 2^nd Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (2002); Melville: The Making of the Poet (2008); Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (2013; the 1917 third NCE of Moby-Dick; and the 2019 Library of America Melville: Complete Poems. At intervals, from the 1970s on, he wrenched himself from Melville to write urgent original studies of American fiction and poetry--Tender is the Night, The Red Badge of Courage, Pudd’nhead Wilson, “The Germ Theory of The Scarlet Letter,” “Live Oak, with Moss,” The Art of Fiction, Absalom, Absalom!, An American Dream, and “Textual Criticism and Hemingway.” His 1984 Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons, a book of textual scholarship and theory, continues to be influential. 

               In 2002 Parker began assembling family documents, learning odd episodes of American history as he went. In the mid-2010s he wrote articles on North Carolina for the Journal of the American Revolution and an essay on the hate term “Okie,” thinking it might go into a book called Ornery People. When George Floyd was murdered on 25 May 2020, Parker knew what he could do. From more than 10,000 files, now too intimidating for Ornery People, he pulled several thousand documents on whites, Indians, and blacks, (to start with) determined to find stories. He became fascinated by hundreds of kinfolks (new to him) who played crucial roles in historical events, and began drafting their stories. After the Introduction come seventeen chapters, from the Revolution to the first World War. Here are four samples. In northwest North Carolina a Sparks cousin in 1843 performed the marriages of the Siamese Twins and in 1863 a first cousin of his risked his life to give a pro-Union speech in public. In 1873 an aristocratic McGehee cousin gained amnesty for all crimes of the KKK in North Carolina, defeating Albion Tourgee, who much later defended Homer Plessy only to have the racist Supreme Court rule to keep Jim Crow the law. Freed from a North Carolina owner, black Moses Costner failed at sharecropping in South Carolina, took his family (including Dovey, the baby) to Grimes County, Texas, where slaves had been needed. Now blacks were not needed and were driven out. The Costners went just over the Red River into Indian Territory where soon racism imperiled them again. In 1911 terrified blacks fled by train loads while newspapers around the country reported on Dovey Costner’s campaign to be sent to a safer place, Nigeria. One bad cop, another Sparks cousin, caused the Houston riot of 1917 by pistol-whipping black women and black men as usual, thoughtless of the Buffalo Soldiers newly stationed there. (How timely are all these chapters? In mid-November 2023 the Army decided to excuse itself and the 110 Buffalo Soldiers it had hanged or imprisoned.) In the appendix are family stories and documents from the 1600s to the present. Four years in the making, here is An Okie’s Racial Reckonings.

 

 

My review of DAYSWORK as published in Amazon

             

Customer Review

Hershel Parker

3.0 out of 5 stars Not a "novel" but a couple's look on the Internet for Herman Melville

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2023

        In the Fall of 2023 Alma MacDougall and I were in putting the chapters in final form, one by one. I was preparing to celebrate being alive a year after heart surgery. Early in September I saw my name in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Sun, one paper after another, at first. 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, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hard-wick (his second wife), and me, called not by name but “The Biographer” (with a capital B) throughout. They portray me often enough to give a sense of my career and only a few times unfairly slam me as a misogynist. That swift, reflexive misandry takes over not only some passages on me but, still worse, on Robert Lowell whom they never talk of as a poet who loved Melville. 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 un-guardedly, and revealed something I should not have told anyone.
        I did not stop to read Dayswork but I kept dipping into it. The scattered episodes on me started in 1956, just after I turned twenty, and went on 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 dismissing Hardwick’s little book on Melville. For it she did no re-search at all and she lied about me in it, pulling me into a sexual fantasy of hers. 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. 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 think 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 Dayswork read my blog so they must know I have learned much about my own genealogy but they do not mention An Okie’s Racial Reckonings and do not mention the kinship between Lowell and me. The only intermittently mad great poet to shelter with me, Robert Traill Spence Lowell, twice winner of the Pulitzer prize, is family. “Cal,” Lowell was called by his intimates. Cal and I are both 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’ve said that 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, washed 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.

   

having more fun