The MAGGIE article that was Suppressed for 20 years in the USA because of Bowers's Power

Bravely and beautifully published at last in BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND BULLETIN, Vol. 19 no. 3, Third Quarter, 1995

Patricia Ward and Brian Higgins

Newberry Library researcher Patricia Ward and Professor Higgins at the Melville Conference in New Bedford June 1980.

Brian Higgins with the Sendak-Parker Kraken edition of PIERRE

Stephen Crane Scholars and Critics--Binder, Higgins, and Parker

The LSU copy for the Higgins-Parker PIERRE book.

Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker

Published: 2007


$35.00
Herman Melville's Pierre; or. The Ambiguities has a storied place in the history of American publishing. Melville began writing this follow-up to Moby-Dick in October 1851, thinking that it might prove even more significant than its predecessor. The 1852 publication of Pierre was catastrophic, however. Melville lost his English publisher, and American reviewers derided the book and called the author mad. In Reading Melville's "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities," noted Melville authorities Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker probe the daunting story behind a deeply flawed but revealing work, one that directly reflects the major crisis of Melville's authorial life.

Weighed down by huge debts, Melville took the manuscript of Pierre to his New York publisher, Harper and Brothers, desperately needing the new work to be a financial success. The Harpers balked at publishing such a dangerous psychological novel (incest was a theme) and offered him less than half the royalties they had paid for his previous books. The anguished Melville accepted the contract but subsequently added new passages to his manuscript—passages that disparage the publishing industry and reflect his agony at the looming loss of his career.

Higgins and Parker examine what can plausibly be reconstructed of Melville's original version of Pierre and explore the consequences of his belated decision to expand his work, showing in detail how his hastily written and awkwardly inserted additions marred much of what he had brilliantly achieved in the shorter version. They demonstrate that to understand Pierre, and Melville himself at this crisis, one must first understand the compositional history that resulted in the book as published.

Setting Pierre in the context of Melville's literary life, Higgins and Parker's study is an illuminating demonstration of biographical and textual scholarship by two of the field's finest practitioners.

Brian Higgins is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Herman Melville: An Annotated Bibliography, 1846–1930> and Herman Melville: A Reference Guide, 1930–1960. He is also coeditor, with Hershel Parker, of Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews.

Hershel Parker, H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus of American Romanticism at the University of Delaware, is Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melvilleand author of the two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography. His other books include Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons and Reading "Billy Budd," and he is coeditor, with Brian Higgins, of Critical Essays on Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick."

The “CENSORSHIP BY ANY OTHER NAME” SERIES, No. 3, Milton R. Stern

In his CRITICAL ESSAYS ON “TENDER IS THE NIGHT” (1986) Milton R. Stern did not reprint mine and Brian Higgins’s “Sober Second Thoughts: Fitzgerald’s ‘Final Version’ of TENDER IS THE NIGHT.” He knew he should have: “The Higgins-Parker essay (which would have been included here had there been space for a full section on ‘The Text Itself’) offers a long discussion of objections to the revised edition.” Instead of quoting us, he created his own personal list of our “objections” to the Cowley edition and printed that list, each item followed by his “bare statement in parentheses of at least one possible rebuttal that should be explored.”  His representation of our essay as a series of “objections” proves hopelessly deceitful: you can’t possibly gather what our arguments were from his browbeating, bullying rebuttals. The high point of his denunciation comes here: “In sum, it is totalitarian to declare as a matter of fact or as a matter of settled opinion that one or the other version is the only version that should be considered.” Of course, we never said the Cowley edition should never be considered: any historian of Fitzgerald’s reputation would have to deal with it. Scottie Fitzgerald, for one, did not want to see it, and used her power as heir to forbid Scribner’s to print the mess that Cowley cobbled together from some sad, wan notes Fitzgerald made.

By not quoting me and Higgins, Stern totally misrepresented the loving tone of our essay. How many of the critical pieces Stern did reprint are worth reading now? Of course, Higgins and I would improve the essay if we were to revise it now.  The proportion of the sections could stand improvement, and the order of the arguments. But it’s a good strong honest essay and should have been reprinted rather than deceptively summarized and battered down then denounced as TOTALITARIAN (what a word to use!)

Now, having been printed in PROOF, a long-defunct annual, the Higgins-Parker is anything but easily accessible and not apt to take over adjacent countries by force and tyrannize over them. So Milton R. Stern goes into the Censorship by Any Other Name series.

24 April 2011 addition.
The 1994 Toronto MLA was my last. On 27 December 1994 at arrival I had rushed to the book displays to see how my article on diversity looked in the new Minnesota collection. Found the book but didn't see my piece. Looked again. Sick in stomach. Looked again very carefully. Not there. Oh, they would not let a part Indian say he did not like to see poems by part Indians put into anthologies merely because they were by part Indians no matter how conventional they were. Oh, they would not let me complain about the anthologizing of writings as if they were by Indians when in fact they were all or almost all by whites.

Then on 29 December the TENDER IS THE NIGHT session. This is from my diary, very slightly censored:

Stern an ideologue--utter fanatic--at end asked me to go off with him [to his room] and strip to the waist & go at him one on one--i[----]e--but Hostility of Audience to organic view of literature, [hostility] to talk of creative process--Really, farewell--I gave it a good long try. As I said in the session, attending MLA had become a moral issue. After the session ended I decided I had to act on principle, and never attended a MLA again.

The Living and Even Posthumous Power of Fredson Bowers

              On 1 January 1994 my diary shows that I devoted some hours to “tcb” (after all, Elvis’s birthday was only a week away):  “ . . . Wrote A&EB letter after 5 years. . . .” Actually, it was after more than 4 years, since 21 November 1989. I also wrote to the President and to the Provost of Northern Illinois University, appealing to them on the basis of my years as an Illinois taxpayer. This letter resulted in the discovery at A&EB of the long-lost 1989 letter, but in the end the editors substituted a new letter which was printed in an issue in 1994 (although dated 1992); I received my copy 14 October 1994. Then an American textual publication asked to see the MAGGIE article but decided to pass on it: Bowers was still too hot to handle. On 15 December 1994 I received a letter from Brian McMullin of Monash University, a man universally known for formidably heroic honesty and profound scholarly insight and besides all that the powerful editor of the BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND BULLETIN. On 31 October 1995 I received the issue containing the MAGGIE article, Vol. 19 (Third Quarter, 1995), 131-166, and 300 offprints, since I wanted to mail out many of them in the United States. 

 

              The publication of the MAGGIE article in the mid-1970s might have inspired all the CEAA and then the CSE editors to rethink their workshop procedures and to rethink their application of Greg’s rationale of copy-text to their particular textual situations. It would have affected the course of textual theory, I am sure, although it would have come at the moment when the look-ma-no-sweat  forces were organizing to exalt the James Thorpe theory that whatever was published ought to be what we read. (The great appeal of this theory was that you did not have to look at a manuscript if you had a printed text.)  It might, coming that early, have influenced the direction of criticism on Stephen Crane. It certainly would have let two universities know that I and Brian Higgins had not invented our work on an article that went from being listed on our annual reports as “forthcoming” (since it was written for one particular annual) to being dropped from our CVs after a few more attempts to get it into print. It did not drop out of our consciousnesses: we had devoted months to it, all in all, and it was strange to watch the way people who had read it in typescript danced around mention of it in their reviews of Bowers and other CSE editors.  A shadow at the feast, Melville said.

              From the experience I learned a powerful literary lesson partly based on remembering what it felt like to be young, tubercular, and unsure how much of a future there was. I came to understand just how tragically frustrating it was for a young tubercular writer to finish and (sort of) publish a brilliant first book and to finish a genuinely great book and not be able to get them truly published and read. He wanted his out-bring to be brought out. You can’t go on to the next experiment (for each new work was an experiment) with great confidence when the previous experiments have never been noticed. I came to think of him as finishing little literary bombs which should have exploded gloriously as he was writing and finishing the next, so he would be lighted by the brilliance of the reception of the previous one. Instead, he was working in pitch dark, sick, and vulnerable to pressures, such as the powerful opinions of “The Talented Ripley Hitchcock.”