Customer Review
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.
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.
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