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.