The Folly of Keeping CEAA and CSE Vetting Reports Secret

For the previous post I uploaded all 14 pages of my 18 June 1975 vetting report on Hawthorne's unfinished romances. I am reminded by reviewing the earlier vetting report, already posted, then this and the final vetting report (perhaps too long to post here) just how much time and thought went into reports which were read by a few and buried. If the policy had been to publish them within a year or two of their being submitted, all editors could have learned by seeing solutions to their own problems or perhaps have recognized for the first time that they had problems that others had encountered and offered possible solutions for.

I see that little from my numerous vetting reports from the early years of the CEAA (before Fredson Bowers banned me from the CSE for exposing his shoddy editing on MAGGIE) is visible in the 1984 FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS but that my work on several editions of American writers in the early 1970s informs the whole book as much as the work on particular authors like Mark Twain and Mailer.

Now when I see on a blog a comment on "the textually-oriented scholar Hershel Parker" and "Live Oak, with Moss," I think, "No, no. I did what I did in putting that poetic sequence in THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE and defending it in NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE was not because I was a 'textually-oriented scholar' but because I was a 'biographically-oriented textual scholar.'" I was seeing "Live Oak, with Moss" in what could be established of the chronology of a dim period of Whitman's life in the late 1850s whereas Alan Helms saw the poems in their scattered and altered forms as they were published later in the CALAMUS sequence--saw them as disparate "texts" that could be reassembled in the orginal order as if the pieces would mean the same in their altered forms that they had been when they were one organic sequence. Alan Helms, my most unlikely opponent, was proceeding not as Whitman lover and respecter but as amateur textual scholar.

This long vetting report is informed by my sense of Hawthorne the man and the sequence of his efforts to push his stories forward. That's biographical, and as I reflect on how sharply I differ from James Thorpe, Donald Pizer, and Jerome McGann I see that I proceed from a biographical stance and they do not. It makes all the difference.

Brenda Wineapple's Defilement of the Lamb of God and Herman Melville, reposted for June

Brenda Wineapple's Defilement of the Agnus Dei and Melville

JOHN 1:29, SAID OF JOHN THE BAPTIST: "THE NEXT DAY JOHN SEETH JESUS COMING UNTO HIM, AND SAITH, BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD, WHICH TAKETH AWAY THE SIN OF THE WORLD."

On Amazon.com the editorial reviews of Brenda Wineapple’s 2003 HAWTHORNE: A LIFE are, as they say now, to die for. Sacvan Bercovitch was ecstatic: “Clearly the best biography of Hawthorne; the Hawthorne for our time. Beautifully conceived and written, it conveys the full poignancy and complexity of Hawthorne’s life; it makes vivid the times and people and places, and what a rich array of people and events! A delight to read from start to end.”

Benita Eisler, we know from Wineapple’s acknowledgments, is a buddy of Wineapple’s, but she overcame her familiarity in this objective comment: “Brenda Wineapple’s Hawthorne is, quite literally, an electrifying life. The power and sweep of the writing galvanizes a subject frozen, by earlier biographies, into a series of stills. We understand, finally, a man and artist torn by every conflict of his time, adding a few of his own, a man both strange and strangely familiar. The great achievement of this stunning biography lies in the feat of restoring Hawthorne to the rich and roiling America of his own period, while revealing him, for the first time, as our contemporary.”

Robert D. Richardson was awe-struck: “With the possible exception of Herman Melville, no one has ever understood the grand tragic Shakespearian nature of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and work as well as Brenda Wineapple. Her brilliant, powerful, nervy, unsettling and riveting book is authoritatively researched and beautifully written; it has itself the dark mesmeric power of a Hawthorne story.”

And so the quotations go, down to Jamie Spencer’s: “Wineapple is a splendid stylist and a master of concision. She can capture an entire personality and life in a brief paragraph. She can define a complex amatory relationship in a sentence. Her eloquent hands bring Hawthorne vividly alive for us.”

I hate it when I disagree with experts, as I frequently do with the idolators of James Wood, and I hate it when I think back to the 1840s when there was in the reviewing coteries of Manhattan something then known as the Mutual Admiration Society, and, having thought back, look askance at modern reviewing in such revered organs as the New York TIMES, the NATION, the NEW YORKER, the NEW REPUBLIC, and THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS.

I know something of Hawthorne and more of Melville, and I find only one reviewer who has been honest about Wineapple, Denis Donoghue, and only in an organ far distant from Manhattan, the Los Angeles TIMES. He found that Wineapple’s prose frequently lapsed into “the style of romantic fiction” and quoted examples of vulgarities of language.

I stayed away from Wineapple’s biography of Hawthorne for years because I was so shocked by her quite savage dismissal of my biography of Melville as a companion to Edmund Morris’s DUTCH, as dishonest as any review I have ever seen, but I mustered my declining forces and read it, starting with the passages on Herman Melville, where I feel most secure, even if I am secure only in my fantasy, as Wineapple declared. In HAWTHORNE: A LIFE Wineapple is nowhere near as contemptuous of me: it is as if after having knocked me out of contention for a Pulitzer in a popular magazine she had blocked the whole review from her mind and assumed no one would remember it.

[It strikes me that Wineapple's behavior is like Andrew Delbanco's saying in 2002 in the NEW REPUBLIC that I could not be trusted anywhere because I made up THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS then in his 2005 book casually mentioning the existence of THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS, but not bringing up his having so vehemently challenged their existence in 2002. To savagely review my biography in 2002 was to write for the eyes of the Pulitzer judges, of course. In 1997 the Pulitzer jury reported that the first volume of my biography of Herman Melville contained "great passages of exciting writing." My biography would "be the one that scholars and Melville fans will be reading and referring to for the next fifty years. . . . This biography is a stunning achievement." Wineapple, Richard H. Brodhead, and Delbanco knew that I had been a finalist in 1997 and could not risk the next jury feeling the same way the 1997 jury had felt. What if there were no misery memoir like ANGELA'S ASHES to captivate the jury by its brevity, as one of the judges later confessed?--A misery memoir marketed honestly in the UK and Ireland as fiction, by the way, as Trevor Butterworth reported.]

I am horrified, utterly appalled at the casualness of Wineapple's telling about Hawthorne and Melville, for casualness slides quickly into carelessness. One passage I have mentioned in another post and call attention to it here because I simply cannot understand how any of her admirers failed to alert her to a gaff so humiliating that it should send her out of the field of biography forever. I am talking about lambs.

Appallingly, all but unbelievably, Wineapple misquoted what Melville wrote Hawthorne three or four days or so after their farewell meeting in Lenox at the Wilson (later Curtis) Hotel in mid November 1851 This was in response to Hawthorne’s letter which, from the evidence, praised MOBY-DICK—praised it very highly, maybe even extravagantly. According to Wineapple, Melville professed in the aftermath of reading Hawthorne’s praise to "feel spotless as a lamb."

We are dependent upon Rose Hawthorne Lathrop's transcription, but this daughter of Hawthorne's knew a Biblical reference when she saw one. Melville felt then, after reading Hawthorne's letter, anyone who knows the Bible or falteringly consults a biblical concordance would have recognized, as spotless as Jesus, the Lamb of God. Wineapple apparently visualized Melville as the Pittsfield farmer who milked his own cow and had been around exceptionally clean sheep, if he was going to say that he felt "spotless as a lamb."

Well, Melville HAD been around the Melvill farm when there were sheep, and nearby when sheep went astray, as in November 1837, when there was a notice in the Pittsfield SUN, accompanied by a woodcut of a sheep: “STRAYED From the subscriber on or about the first inst. sixteen sheep, consisting of thirteen EWES and three WETHERS marked by a crop of the left ear. Whoever shall return said Sheep, or give information where they may be found, shall be liberally rewarded. / ROBERT MELVILL.”

But Melville felt as spotless as Jesus, not as bedraggled as these 13 ewes and three wethers or any other besoiled sheep he had seen in New York or Massachusetts.

Think what this means: think what Wineapple missed of Melville’s religious nature and his sometimes reckless application of religious terms to mundate affairs or to his own high theological skepticism and all but instinctive belief. Baa-baa, thinks Wineapple, spotless as a lamb. Can you trust anything she says about Melville, Hawthorne, and religion?

Wineapple misquoted the text of Melville’s letter so as to desecrate the Biblical meaning just as she trivialized the whole of the last encounter in the Berkshires of these two momentous men. In another post I will give some embarrassing examples of Wineapple’s casualness with fact sliding fast into carelessness and outright error. I say embarrassing. This sort of thing ought to be embarrassing to Wineapple, but I find that I am embarrassed myself, partly for Hawthorne and Melville, I suppose, and partly for the sake of the ideal of the responsible biographer, who first absorbs all that has previously been garnered reliably and then does no new harm.

Not one of Wineapple’s ecstatic friends saved her from her baa-baa blunder. Not one of Wineapple’s ecstatic reviewers mentioned it. You see why I keep thinking of Duyckinck and Mathews or Mathews and Duyckinck and the Mutual Admiration Society of 1840s Manhattan.

Hawthorne's unfinished romances 7 December 1975 vetting report, 1 of 21 pages

AC = American Claimant
EofL = Elixir of Life
Getting the Hawthorne edition to adopt descriptive titles took a lot of negotiating.

Hawthorne's unfinished romances, 18 June 1975 vetting report, p. 1 of 14!

25 August 74 start of vetting report on Nathaniel Hawthorne's unfinished romances

These "vetting reports" ought to have been shared with all CEAA editors and ought within a couple of years to have been made public. Some of the best textual work of the decade is buried in these reports, and some probably lost forever from the history of textual scholarship.

Brenda Wineapple's Defilement of the Agnus Dei and Melville

Brenda Wineapple's Defilement of the Agnus Dei and Melville
JOHN 1:29, SAID OF JOHN THE BAPTIST: "THE NEXT DAY JOHN SEETH JESUS COMING UNTO HIM, AND SAITH, BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD, WHICH TAKETH AWAY THE SIN OF THE WORLD."

On Amazon.com the editorial reviews of Brenda Wineapple’s 2003 HAWTHORNE: A LIFE are, as they say now, to die for. Sacvan Bercovitch was ecstatic: “Clearly the best biography of Hawthorne; the Hawthorne for our time. Beautifully conceived and written, it conveys the full poignancy and complexity of Hawthorne’s life; it makes vivid the times and people and places, and what a rich array of people and events! A delight to read from start to end.”

Benita Eisler, we know from Wineapple’s acknowledgments, is a buddy of Wineapple’s, but she overcame her familiarity in this objective comment: “Brenda Wineapple’s Hawthorne is, quite literally, an electrifying life. The power and sweep of the writing galvanizes a subject frozen, by earlier biographies, into a series of stills. We understand, finally, a man and artist torn by every conflict of his time, adding a few of his own, a man both strange and strangely familiar. The great achievement of this stunning biography lies in the feat of restoring Hawthorne to the rich and roiling America of his own period, while revealing him, for the first time, as our contemporary.”

Robert D. Richardson was awe-struck: “With the possible exception of Herman Melville, no one has ever understood the grand tragic Shakespearian nature of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and work as well as Brenda Wineapple. Her brilliant, powerful, nervy, unsettling and riveting book is authoritatively researched and beautifully written; it has itself the dark mesmeric power of a Hawthorne story.”

And so the quotations go, down to Jamie Spencer’s: “Wineapple is a splendid stylist and a master of concision. She can capture an entire personality and life in a brief paragraph. She can define a complex amatory relationship in a sentence. Her eloquent hands bring Hawthorne vividly alive for us.”

I hate it when I disagree with experts, as I frequently do with the idolators of James Wood, and I hate it when I think back to the 1840s when there was in the reviewing coteries of Manhattan something then known as the Mutual Admiration Society, and, having thought back, look askance at modern reviewing in such revered organs as the New York TIMES, the NATION, the NEW YORKER, the NEW REPUBLIC, and THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS.

I know something of Hawthorne and more of Melville, and I find only one reviewer who has been honest about Wineapple, Denis Donoghue, and only in an organ far distant from Manhattan, the Los Angeles TIMES. He found that Wineapple’s prose frequently lapsed into “the style of romantic fiction” and quoted examples of vulgarities of language.

I stayed away from Wineapple’s biography of Hawthorne for years because I was so shocked by her quite savage dismissal of my biography of Melville as a companion to Edmund Morris’s DUTCH, as dishonest as any review I have ever seen, but I mustered my declining forces and read it, starting with the passages on Herman Melville, where I feel most secure, even if I am secure only in my fantasy, as Wineapple declared. In HAWTHORNE: A LIFE Wineapple is nowhere near as contemptuous of me: it is as if after having knocked me out of contention for a Pulitzer in a popular magazine she had blocked the whole review from her mind and assumed no one would remember it.

[It strikes me that Wineapple's behavior is like Andrew Delbanco's saying in 2002 in the NEW REPUBLIC that I could not be trusted anywhere because I made up THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS then in his 2005 book casually mentioning the existence of THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS, but not bringing up his having so vehemently challenged their existence in 2002. To savagely review my biography in 2002 was to write for the eyes of the Pulitzer judges, of course. In 1997 the Pulitzer jury reported that the first volume of my biography of Herman Melville contained "great passages of exciting writing." My biography would "be the one that scholars and Melville fans will be reading and referring to for the next fifty years. . . . This biography is a stunning achievement." Wineapple, Richard H. Brodhead, and Delbanco knew that I had been a finalist in 1997 and could not risk the next jury feeling the same way the 1997 jury had felt. What if there were no misery memoir like ANGELA'S ASHES to captivate the jury by its brevity, as one of the judges later confessed?--A misery memoir marketed honestly in the UK and Ireland as fiction, by the way, as Trevor Butterworth reported.]

I am horrified, utterly appalled at the casualness of Wineapple's telling about Hawthorne and Melville, for casualness slides quickly into carelessness. One passage I have mentioned in another post and call attention to it here because I simply cannot understand how any of her admirers failed to alert her to a gaff so humiliating that it should send her out of the field of biography forever. I am talking about lambs.

Appallingly, all but unbelievably, Wineapple misquoted what Melville wrote Hawthorne three or four days or so after their farewell meeting in Lenox at the Wilson (later Curtis) Hotel in mid November 1851 This was in response to Hawthorne’s letter which, from the evidence, praised MOBY-DICK—praised it very highly, maybe even extravagantly. According to Wineapple, Melville professed in the aftermath of reading Hawthorne’s praise to "feel spotless as a lamb."

We are dependent upon Rose Hawthorne Lathrop's transcription, but this daughter of Hawthorne's knew a Biblical reference when she saw one. Melville felt then, after reading Hawthorne's letter, anyone who knows the Bible or falteringly consults a biblical concordance would have recognized, as spotless as Jesus, the Lamb of God. Wineapple apparently visualized Melville as the Pittsfield farmer who milked his own cow and had been around exceptionally clean sheep, if he was going to say that he felt "spotless as a lamb."

Well, Melville HAD been around the Melvill farm when there were sheep, and nearby when sheep went astray, as in November 1837, when there was a notice in the Pittsfield SUN, accompanied by a woodcut of a sheep: “STRAYED From the subscriber on or about the first inst. sixteen sheep, consisting of thirteen EWES and three WETHERS marked by a crop of the left ear. Whoever shall return said Sheep, or give information where they may be found, shall be liberally rewarded. / ROBERT MELVILL.”

But Melville felt as spotless as Jesus, not as bedraggled as these 13 ewes and three wethers or any other besoiled sheep he had seen in New York or Massachusetts.

Think what this means: think what Wineapple missed of Melville’s religious nature and his sometimes reckless application of religious terms to mundate affairs or to his own high theological skepticism and all but instinctive belief. Baa-baa, thinks Wineapple, spotless as a lamb. Can you trust anything she says about Melville, Hawthorne, and religion?

Wineapple misquoted the text of Melville’s letter so as to desecrate the Biblical meaning just as she trivialized the whole of the last encounter in the Berkshires of these two momentous men. In another post I will give some embarrassing examples of Wineapple’s casualness with fact sliding fast into carelessness and outright error. I say embarrassing. This sort of thing ought to be embarrassing to Wineapple, but I find that I am embarrassed myself, partly for Hawthorne and Melville, I suppose, and partly for the sake of the ideal of the responsible biographer, who first absorbs all that has previously been garnered reliably and then does no new harm.

Not one of Wineapple’s ecstatic friends saved her from her baa-baa blunder. Not one of Wineapple’s ecstatic reviewers mentioned it. You see why I keep thinking of Duyckinck and Mathews or Mathews and Duyckinck and the Mutual Admiration Society of 1840s Manhattan.

Irresponsible Reviewers Series--Brenda Wineapple

Irresponsible Reviewers Series--Brenda Wineapple
Brenda Wineapple and Ferocious Jealousy

This is one of several posts in which I work through Wineapple's pages on Hawthorne and Melville. The errors are thick--and sometimes appalling, as when Wineapple treats the Lamb of God as if were a local Berkshire baa-baa.

The most scathing review of my biography of Melville was the one Brenda Wineapple published in the NATION for 2 May 2002, nominally a review of the second volume but fueled by rage toward the first. I was like Edmund Morris in DUTCH, not a careful biographer but one driven by fantasy, doing documentary research which would have been commendable had I not constantly veered between documentary evidence and fantastic departure from it. I had hoped the reviewers would say, “Thank you.”


Most baffling to me was Wineapple’s depiction of my attitude toward Nathaniel Hawthorne.


Here is Wineapple on the second volume: “Parker focuses on Melville's relationship to Hawthorne. But it's one of his book's more contradictory themes, since Parker is irritated by the pairing. Neighbors only for eighteen months, the two authors afterward saw one another about [why “about”?] three more times but in the nineteenth-century eye were yoked forevermore, Melville in the background and remembered, ‘if remembered at all,’ snaps Parker ‘as a man who had known Hawthorne, the literary man who had known Hawthorne during the Lenox months.’"


[Well, not in the “nineteenth-century eye.” Yes, in the tourist articles on the Berkshires in the 1850s and after they began again, postwar, in the later 60s, then in the 1870s when Hawthorne’s family began relying on Melville’s letters to fill out their accounts of Hawthorne in the Berkshires. The linkage of the two men was anything but general: it was specific to the Lenox months, and it was not anywhere I can think of in criticism on Hawthorne.—]


[Whoa! It’s hard not to stop to clarify and correct Wineapple. I will do that in a separate post.]


Wineapple went on: “Of course, Parker isn't the first biographer implicitly to lay the blame for Melville's neglect at Hawthorne's feet.” This is simply wildly irresponsible. Hawthorne had nothing to do with the neglect of Melville and I never said he did.


Sure, if he had been a different sort of man at a less hectic stage of life Hawthorne might have helped Melville’s career by reviewing MOBY-DICK, but it is Wineapple, not me, who blames Hawthorne for taking “Melville literally when he said not to write about it.” For him to write about MOBY-DICK would have been embarrassing. What would newswpaper editors say if you praised a book dedicated to you? Then Wineapple went on with a wholly irrelevant comment on another biographer: “Laurie Robertson-Lorant, whose earnest Melville: A Biography appeared the same year as the first installment of Parker's biography, doesn't much like Hawthorne.”


Wineapple goes on: “Despite Melville's capaciousness, Parker is convinced that envy preoccupies Melville, though the evidence suggests Parker is the envious one, so riled is he by Hawthorne's posthumous reputation and Melville's sinking one. Parker closely identifies with Melville, at times too closely, and will cross swords with anyone who ignored, outsold, criticized or just plain didn't like Melville.”


Earlier I "snapped" and now I am “riled”? Lawsy me! No. Years ago the British-educated Brian Higgins explained to me why some critics seemed not to understand the points we were making so clearly. I think I can recapture his words: “They just don’t understand the level we operate at, Hershel.” We laughed then delightedly and repeated the saying thereafter, but I want to say it now with great seriousness. Wineapple, as Denis Donoghue said in the 28 September 2003 Los Angeles TIMES, often wrote vulgarly, “in the style of romantic fiction.” Her cheeky, flippant word choices show that she just did not understand the high earnestness, the gravitas of my biography.


Envious? Riled “by Hawthorne’s posthumous reputation”? This makes no sense to me at all. I do mention jealousy in a particular context, Melville’s returning in 1869 to the Curtis Hotel, where he had last seen Hawthorne before he left Lenox: Melville, I say, “began to reflect (jealously, skeptically, judiciously, and still lovingly) on the mental, aesthetic, and physical characteristics of the man who had so bewitched him and now so outshone him.” See how far those words are from what Wineapple accuses me of.


Wineapple: But alas, Melville was in fact forgotten in America until his own posthumous revival in the 1920s, especially in Britain, when, Parker declares more than once, Moby-Dick and sometimes Pierre take their place in a literary pantheon that does not include the establishment writer (according to Parker) Hawthorne. "Not one of all these British admirers ever asked Melville what it had been like to be a friend of Hawthorne," Parker writes near the end of his book. "They understood that Hawthorne, like Longfellow, was immensely popular but not of the same order of literary greatness as Melville and Whitman." Take that, you American fools.”


“Take that, you American fools”? This cheap, vulgar tone is not mine.
I gave Hawthorne the graceful respect Melville always showed toward him and toward Vine, the character in whom he recorded (and perhaps then worked out) his own feelings toward Hawthorne. I am sure I never wrote anything in either volume which could be considered a slight toward Hawthorne. It was simply a fact, and still is, that much as I admire his best work I cannot accord him the high status that I gladly give to Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. That is not a slap at Hawthorne, and it was not a slap at American readers. It is a simple fact that London had a cadre of brilliant reviewers all through the 19th century and New York and Boston did not.


Wineapple ascribed to my biography with a view of Hawthorne so unfamiliar to me that I have had to look through my own writing to see what could have led her toward her interpretation. I find nothing was there to push her toward words like “irritated” and “snaps.” One hesitates to psychoanalyze a living biographer, but I think I have an idea what happened. Wineapple had come to despise Hawthorne, and, driven by fear that I might get more than a mere “finalist” award from the Pulitzer judges, and thereby queer her chances the next year, she attributed to me much of her own antipathy toward Hawthorne.


Here I quote Denis Donoghue in four paragraphs of diminishing length:
“Hawthorne was, according to the image she [Wineapple] conveys, a miserable, whining man, aloof, self-obsessed, determined to be unhappy. Wherever he lived, he wanted to be somewhere else. On one page Wineapple calls him a prude and a boor, on another page a racist. Has she lived too long with him? I wonder. Biographers often grow to dislike their subjects. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost’s official biographer, came to detest him long before completing the second volume of the biography. Wineapple seems to have wearied of her subject and become exasperated with his debility.


“It’s hard to say what she especially dislikes in Hawthorne. With a wife and three children, he needed money and kept on grasping for it, but he can’t be blamed for that. . . . . Hawthorne kept his eye on the main chance.


“But I don’t think Wineapple is distressed by such acts of prudence. She is incensed by his passivity and the moral claim he made for it. . . . Wineapple wants to cuff Hawthorne about the ears . . . .


“Wineapple doesn’t bring forward the more agreeable side of Hawthorne’s character . . . .”


Yes, Donoghue laid it all out: something about her own feelings toward Hawthorne (all aside from hopes of the Pulitzer) had her so “riled” that she projected them onto me, all innocent as I was.


I never portrayed Melville as merely or mainly envious of Hawthorne, not even in my chapters on CLAREL, in which I assume, like Bezanson, that Vine is based on Hawthorne. Melville was not engaged in a vendetta against his own friend. He had, starting very early, in 1851, understood that Hawthorne had serious limitations, needed roast beef done rare, but nevertheless he valued him as a man and as a writer, grieved at his death, and reread him admiringly, although he had long since thought his way past some of Hawthorne’s best ideas. To compare “The Artist of the Beautiful” to “The Piazza” is to see how much farther into aesthetics Melville was consciously going past Hawthorne, early in 1856. In the late 1860s Melville would have been superhuman not to have felt moments of envy at the (no one dared say) absurd exaltation of Hawthorne’s reputation in the late 1860s. (I trace this phenomenon in detail in a chapter of the forthcoming MELVILLE AND BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE).


As he wrote CLAREL Melville was able to take an objective look at the man who had meant and still meant much to him. He saw all the alluring grace, still, and reflected his own excessive early admiration in Clarel’s attitude toward Vine. But at a telling moment Melville makes it clear that he knew that Hawthorne’s race of thought long since was run. At one point (2.733) I say: “In his thoughts of his friend and in his poem, these months, Melville was leading a steady, poised life.” Neither Melville nor I were out to disparage Hawthorne. To talk of the failure of his powers is not to attack him.


[An aside: Hawthorne people sometimes act weirdly on the subject of his intelligence. At the Pittsfield conference to celebrate the centennial of CLAREL I gave a long talk on Melville’s portrayal of Vine. At the end of it a man stood up in the middle of the hall and frothed and foamed at the mouth for several very long minutes in indignation at my talk and especially the conclusion, about Hawthorne’s race of though being long since run. I heard that Helen Vendler, who had just read the poem, kept whispering, “He’s right, he’s right,” meaning that I was right. I never learned who the man was, and he wiped out any possibility for rational discussion.]


In the 1860s Melville had no way of knowing the agonies Hawthorne endured in trying to write his unfinished romances—except the way any reader of excerpts in the Atlantic would have. Without such knowledge, he nevertheless understood Hawthorne’s decline, and pitied it. I gather from her wording that Wineapple has not read the manuscripts of the late romances but derives her information from books printed by the descendants, even more than from the new scholarly editions. She refers to “the crude claimant manuscripts” but she does not indicate that she knows the history of their composition. Understanding the sequence of their inscription, of course, is a task any biographer ought to undertake, at least to the point of verifying the work of Hawthorne’s fraudulently packaging heirs and his modern scholarly editors.


As it happens, I know a good deal about the unfinished romances. In 1974 and 1975 I spent many weeks on the manuscripts as I criticized two “Historical Notes” line by line (notes to volumes titled to reflect Julian’s packaging). I worked to clarify the textual policy, and after great effort got the editors to move pretty far away from a truly inhuman, unusable way of recording manuscript variants (a Bowersian mad-scientist system in which you worked 25 minutes to unravel textual instructions to get to information that could have been displayed in 8 seconds if simple chronology had been followed).



In my deferential Southern way, I pushed the editors very hard to abandon the titles attached to odd pieces of manuscript by the descendants. No one else in their lifetime would do a scholarly edition, so this was the time to make an absolutely fresh start. The editors at length agreed to call the volumes descriptively, THE ELIXIR OF LIFE MANUSCRIPTS and THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT MANUSCRIPTS.


In the ELIXIR volume I see a note dated 1 December 1982: “They don’t thank me anywhere? –I thought more about these volumes than they did! see 1974 & 1975 reports!” Well, Fredson Bowers is listed in both volumes as “General Textual Editor.” That explains that silence! I was content enough with helping to assure that the unfinished romances were published in a form accessible to readers.


In 1974 and 1975, I read those unfinished manuscript in absolute horror at what they revealed of the decay of Hawthorne’s mind.

Now, 75 years old myself, I shudder as I look at a few Xerox pages of Hawthorne’s manuscripts and at 504 in the CLAIMANT volume where some of Hawthorne’s laments are gathered: “All this amounts to just nothing. I don’t advance a step.” “I can’t possibly make this out, though it keeps glimmering before me.” “’Twont do, Oh, heavens!” William Manchester would have understood! I understand, being fearful of my health even in the early 1990s—so fearful than I drafted the second half of Melville’s life first, in case it was too sad for me to finish when the time came. Any earnest writer would pity Hawthorne for his facing the loss of his powers.


Yes, let’s be honest. It seems to me that a biographer of Hawthorne owes it to the reader to take on the appalling task of determining what relation Hawthorne’s vaunted early “ambiguity” has to the irresolution obvious in his lamentations in these late manuscripts. What happened between marvelous early stories and the, well, hapless parts of the late romances?


So, as I say, when I wrote the biography I knew a great deal about Hawthorne’s manuscripts, still, and in the early 1980s I had worked out for the first time that Fields definitely had nothing to do with the length of THE SCARLET LETTER though he had much to do with the way it was published, separately aside from the Custom House essay. Besides I had learned a lot about Hawthorne biography during the many years I had taught his stories and romances and edited some of them for collections, notably THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.


I knew a good deal about Hawthorne, and I treated him with respect throughout my biography. Wineapple knew astonishingly little about Melville, as I will make clear in another post.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: CONTEMPT FOR BIOGRAPHICAL FACT SERIES. Wineapple on Melville and MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: CONTEMPT FOR BIOGRAPHICAL FACT SERIES. Wineapple on Melville and MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

A continuation of a close reading of Wineapple on Melville and Hawthorne. DOES ACCURACY MATTER IN BIOGRAPHY? AM I BEING PEDANTIC TO CARE ABOUT ACCURACY?

From the conclusion:
Would you give these pages anything above a D+ if you were grading sophomore papers? Yet go to Amazon.com and look at the ecstatic reviews of HAWTHORNE: A LIFE. To explain such mysteries you have to appeal to that Academic sense of Scratch-My-Back-and-I’ll-Scratch-Yours, for in certain moods no man can weigh the writing and reviewing of New York academic biography without throwing in something somehow like “Mutual Admiration Society” to strike the uneven balance.



224: Wineapple: “When Duyckinck returned to New York City, he carried the first installment of Melville’s review of Mosses from an Old Manse.”

No, he carried the full thing, and delayed his departure so he could carry the full thing. Wineapple ignores the detailed (I won’t say meticulous) account in the first volume of my biography of Melville (1996) in which I used the long-known documents along with documents in the 1983 NYPL-GL trove known as the “Augusta Papers.” My account totally superseded the account in the 1987 NN Piazza Tales &c volume. There are further details in my new footnotes to the Mosses essay in the 2nd Norton Critical Edition of MOBY-DICK, out in September 2001, for the sesquicentennial, in plenty of time for Wineapple to use them.

Every responsible teacher of MOBY-DICK knew that new textual information was in the 1967 first Norton edition and every teacher in 2001 and thereafter ought to have known that the newest information would be incorporated in the new edition. Why, by the way, is Wineapple not using the textual information in The Piazza Tales about the MOSSES essay and not using the information and the slightly improved text of the MOSSES essay in the new Norton Critical Edition? She makes no comment on her choice of text.

224: Wineapple: “Though it’s not clear when Melville began the review, whether before or after meeting Hawthorne” . . . .

Well, it certainly is clear, and if Wineapple wants to disagree with the evidence in my biography then she ought to challenge it rather than taking a doubtful position that would have been respectable before the Augusta Papers had been incorporated into the story but not afterwards.

224: Wineapple: “Pretending to be a Virginian on vacation in New England, he says he’s just read Hawthorne’s book while lying on the new-mown clover near the barn.” Well, where to begin? When Melville wrote the words about lying on clover he had not yet disguised himself by sticking Virginian into the title of his essay. He wrote the words in his “own” voice as literary critic. Then (oh, Wineapple’s recurrent failures to visualize) Melville does not say he is lying on clover NEAR the barn. The clover is already inside the barn, and the hill-side breeze is blowing over him through the wide barn door.

224-225. I am going to quote the whole little paragraph.

224-225: Wineapple:
Melville will set the record straight. “For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in blackness, ten times black.” Melville understands despondency and vile doubt; they stalk him too, and he knows that what most reviewers term morbidness is the clear-eyed admission that all the tanks have been drained. It’s a perception that “derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin,” he continues, “from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world[,] without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.

224-225: In her commentary Wineapple identifies Hawthorne’s blackness as “despondency and vile doubt.” But between the passage about “Indian-summer sunlight” and the passage about “Innate Depravity and Original Sin” Melville does NOT deal with “despondency and vile doubt.” He is focussed, instead, on two possibilities. One is that as a prose artist Hawthorne consciously uses blackness for particular aesthetic effects (“the wondrous effects he makes it [the blackness] to produce in his lights and shades”). The other possibility is that there really lurks in Hawthorne (whether he is aware of it or not) “a touch of Puritanic gloom.”

“Puritanic gloom” is not the equivalent of “despondency and vile doubt,” which are merely obstacles on any pilgrim’s way to the celestial city. Puritanic gloom is the bleak outlook that comes from the conviction that all human beings are born damned to burn in Hell endlessly (unless they are somehow spared). This is not a light thought. Listen to T. Walter Herbert, Jr.: “the intellectual conflict between liberal and Calvinistic points of view was a potent ingredient in Melville’s psychic difficulties, not as a mask for ‘deeper’ problems merely, but as an authentic locus of psychic distress.” Herbert, I think accurately, distinguishes between Melville’s psychic suffering over a Calvinistic view of the world and Hawthorne’s melancholy ennui over such a tiring topic. In this passage this second possibility Melville attributes to Hawthorne is not one that Hawthorne went through life experiencing any great psychic agony about.

Back to Wineapple: She asserts that a particular perception “derives its force” from thoughts that one needs a concept like Original Sin to explain the world. The perception is merely this: “what most reviewers term morbidness is the clear-eyed admission that all the tanks have been drained.” I find this shift to empty tanks not only vulgar but nonsensical. There is nothing in the context about a writer’s writing himself out, exhausting his resources. One would like to survey the reviews of Hawthorne up through the reviews of The Scarlet Letter to see if “morbidness” is a recurrent them among reviewers. I can and have searched the word in Melville’s known reviews which I have in my computer and do not find “morbid” coming up before MOBY-DICK except in the Literary World assurance 17 November 1849 that REDBURN contained NO “morbid feeling” but rather a manly sense of actuality. Melville is not writing about tanks running dry, though you could argue that Hawthorne’s did run dry several years before he died. Wineapple's topic is an irrelevant intrusion here.

Yet the perception that the tanks have run dry derives its force from a Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, Wineapple says.

In her little sandwich of a paragraph Wineapple puts down one slice of richly textured Melville-bread (something like my strongest sourdough rye) then smears in a little layer of something she finds on a workbench in a garage, perhaps, a sentence about empty tanks, then asserts a connection between her smear and the next layer of Melville-bread. The little sandwich does not bond together. The Wineapple layer slides off onto the floor when you try to pick up the sandwich because it is totally irrelevant. The particular perception she mentions has nothing to do with what she has just quoted and nothing to do with what she goes on to quote.

225: A short paragraph from Wineapple: “Melville’s Man of Mosses (as he referred to Hawthorne in his review) is a man of brooding unbelief.”

Do not Melville’s queries about Hawthorne point to belief rather than unbelief? Take the paragraph that takes “Earth’s Holocaust” as portraying the sacrifice of all vanities until what remains is only “the all-engendering heart of man” from which new vanities will spring: that is Calvinistic, and it is belief, not unbelief.

Melville brooded about belief but he does not attribute such a brooding to Hawthorne.

225. Wineapple’s next paragraph is even stranger than the one I quoted above, the one beginning “Melville will set the record straight.” This one starts off by saying, infelicitously, that Melville was writing about Hawthorne and himself both. Then comes some of Wineapple’s romantic fiction: “For all his magniloquent prose, Melville pictures Hawthorne as a mate bobbing like him on the trouble seas of publishing, recognition, and posterity.” If there were not other still worse sentences in Wineapple, I would nominate that for one of the worst sentences in American literary criticism. Writing it seems to have upset Wineapple, for without anything intervening she lurches many months ahead: “’What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay,’ he would confide to his new friend. ‘Yet, altogether, write the other [other italicized] way I cannot.’” What? We were talking about Melville’s essay on Hawthorne’s MOSSES.

The next paragraph contains shocking vulgarities: “’Let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American,’ Melville boomed . . . .” Melville BOOMED?

“As for Hawthorne, he is the flesh and blood of the land.” No, he is “of” Americans’ own flesh and blood. He is not the American Christ, he’s just an authentic American.

Would you give these pages anything above a D+ if you were grading sophomore papers? Yet go to Amazon.com and look at the ecstatic reviews of HAWTHORNE: A LIFE. To explain such mysteries you have to appeal to that Academic sense of Scratch-My-Back-and-I’ll-Scratch-Yours, for in certain moods no man can weigh New York academic biography without throwing in something somehow like “Mutual Admiration Society” to strike the uneven balance.

John Bryant's Contempt for Biographical Accuracy series, p. 257 of MELVILLE'S EVERMOVING DAWN

This continues the   "one Aunt Mary is as good as another Aunt Mary" series.

I was personally humiliated by having erroneous footnotes attached to the transcription of what was said at the Biographers' Panel. Now, years later, I see John Bryant's errors as part of a general carelessness about factual accuracy in professors who were taught by New Critics or the children of the New Critics. I will write somewhere about the way practitioners of the New Historicism, in particular, seem to regard biographical names or places or events as decorative items that can be chosen among without doing basic checking. To say Gansevoort died while seeing Melville's first book through the press is to diminish his triumph: at great cost to himself, he succeeded--he held copies of the book. To say that the temperature in Moxon's office was low is to misunderstand the metaphor: Moxon's MANNER was icy, and Melville managed to thaw him a little. This sort of thing matters--to me. And to confuse one Aunt Mary with another is to show no VISUALIZING of the scene, the fault I have complained about as common in Brenda Wineapple's HAWTHORNE: A LIFE. What would the Dorchester aunt be doing in Pittsfield?


These were real living people. They deserve to be thought of that way, not as cardboard pop-ups you can safely shuffle at will. And when documents are available, they ought to be used. Maria Melville's letter and other documents account for hours and hours of 2-4 August 1850 so that the possibility that HM began reading the NH book then was very very slim. He was the host! VISUALIZE! It's strange how important visualizing comes to seem to me as I think on the common contempt for accuracy in biographical matters.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE AND THE FAILURE TO VISUALIZE

In writing my biography of Melville I tried to visualizing every scene, even to the point of making rough seating charts at big family dinners. This may sound silly, but it helped me with the interrelationships of the characters. Perhaps because I understood 19th century modes of transportation so well (better than anyone else of my academic time, I am sure!--see the "Footsteps" article) I always visualized ways in which characters got to a given place, the time it took, how dirty and exhausted they would have been, and so on. There were moments when this paid off, as in my understanding the triumphant journey of Cousin Priscilla to Illinois by rail in the early 1850s after she had made the journey the old ways [I do mean "ways"] in the late 30s, or when people who had crossed Massachusetts by stagecoach crossed it by rail.

Now that I have been looking at Wineapple on Melville for several days I am struck again, this morning, by her debilitating failure to visualize her characters in motion. Well, her Gothic Imagination kicks in so that she has Melville, bushy beard blowing in the wind, galloping, galloping up to Love Grove. I mean visualizing responsibly.

Take, for instance, this on 243:"Early in November, Hawthorne met Melville for dinner at the Lenox hotel, and that night Melville presumably gave Hawthorne his inscribed copy of Moby-Dick" . . .

Leave aside the outright errors (it was not early November,and it was not night but afternoon).

"Hawthorne met Melville." Visualize. Melville texted Hawthorne asking if he could start walking to the Hotel and he would leave after a while and meet him there. No, Melville TELEPHONED Hawthorne and asked him . . . No, Melville got his copies of MOBY-DICK and even though he knew from the real meeting he had had at the Sedgwicks' EARLY in November that the Hawthornes were leaving any day he was confident enough in the speed of the postal service and PATIENT enough to drop Hawthorne a note saying he would like to get together and PATIENT enough to wait for Hawthorne's reply and . . . . No, that's not like Melville.

No, Melville had to go to the Little Red Cottage AND GET HAWTHORNE AND GO WITH HIM TO THE HOTEL and maybe even accompany him home before making the long trek back to Arrowhead.

Think about it.

I am thinking about it before I start my new and dismayingly long series about Wineapple's errors of fact about Hawthorne.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: CONTEMPT FOR BIOGRAPHICAL FACT SERIES. Wineapple on Melville and MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

A continuation of a close reading of Wineapple on Melville and Hawthorne. DOES ACCURACY MATTER IN BIOGRAPHY? AM I BEING PEDANTIC TO CARE ABOUT ACCURACY?

From the conclusion:
Would you give these pages anything above a D+ if you were grading sophomore papers? Yet go to Amazon.com and look at the ecstatic reviews of HAWTHORNE: A LIFE. To explain such mysteries you have to appeal to that Academic sense of Scratch-My-Back-and-I’ll-Scratch-Yours, for in certain moods no man can weigh the writing and reviewing of New York academic biography without throwing in something somehow like “Mutual Admiration Society” to strike the uneven balance.



224: Wineapple: “When Duyckinck returned to New York City, he carried the first installment of Melville’s review of Mosses from an Old Manse.”

No, he carried the full thing, and delayed his departure so he could carry the full thing. Wineapple ignores the detailed (I won’t say meticulous) account in the first volume of my biography of Melville (1996) in which I used the long-known documents along with documents in the 1983 NYPL-GL trove known as the “Augusta Papers.” My account totally superseded the account in the 1987 NN Piazza Tales &c volume. There are further details in my new footnotes to the Mosses essay in the 2nd Norton Critical Edition of MOBY-DICK, out in September 2001, for the sesquicentennial, in plenty of time for Wineapple to use them.

Every responsible teacher of MOBY-DICK knew that new textual information was in the 1967 first Norton edition and every teacher in 2001 and thereafter ought to have known that the newest information would be incorporated in the new edition. Why, by the way, is Wineapple not using the textual information in The Piazza Tales about the MOSSES essay and not using the information and the slightly improved text of the MOSSES essay in the new Norton Critical Edition? She makes no comment on her choice of text.

224: Wineapple: “Though it’s not clear when Melville began the review, whether before or after meeting Hawthorne” . . . .

Well, it certainly is clear, and if Wineapple wants to disagree with the evidence in my biography then she ought to challenge it rather than taking a doubtful position that would have been respectable before the Augusta Papers had been incorporated into the story but not afterwards.

224: Wineapple: “Pretending to be a Virginian on vacation in New England, he says he’s just read Hawthorne’s book while lying on the new-mown clover near the barn.” Well, where to begin? When Melville wrote the words about lying on clover he had not yet disguised himself by sticking Virginian into the title of his essay. He wrote the words in his “own” voice as literary critic. Then (oh, Wineapple’s recurrent failures to visualize) Melville does not say he is lying on clover NEAR the barn. The clover is already inside the barn, and the hill-side breeze is blowing over him through the wide barn door.

224-225. I am going to quote the whole little paragraph.

224-225: Wineapple:
Melville will set the record straight. “For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in blackness, ten times black.” Melville understands despondency and vile doubt; they stalk him too, and he knows that what most reviewers term morbidness is the clear-eyed admission that all the tanks have been drained. It’s a perception that “derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin,” he continues, “from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world[,] without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.

224-225: In her commentary Wineapple identifies Hawthorne’s blackness as “despondency and vile doubt.” But between the passage about “Indian-summer sunlight” and the passage about “Innate Depravity and Original Sin” Melville does NOT deal with “despondency and vile doubt.” He is focussed, instead, on two possibilities. One is that as a prose artist Hawthorne consciously uses blackness for particular aesthetic effects (“the wondrous effects he makes it [the blackness] to produce in his lights and shades”). The other possibility is that there really lurks in Hawthorne (whether he is aware of it or not) “a touch of Puritanic gloom.”

“Puritanic gloom” is not the equivalent of “despondency and vile doubt,” which are merely obstacles on any pilgrim’s way to the celestial city. Puritanic gloom is the bleak outlook that comes from the conviction that all human beings are born damned to burn in Hell endlessly (unless they are somehow spared). This is not a light thought. Listen to T. Walter Herbert, Jr.: “the intellectual conflict between liberal and Calvinistic points of view was a potent ingredient in Melville’s psychic difficulties, not as a mask for ‘deeper’ problems merely, but as an authentic locus of psychic distress.” Herbert, I think accurately, distinguishes between Melville’s psychic suffering over a Calvinistic view of the world and Hawthorne’s melancholy ennui over such a tiring topic. In this passage this second possibility Melville attributes to Hawthorne is not one that Hawthorne went through life experiencing any great psychic agony about.

Back to Wineapple: She asserts that a particular perception “derives its force” from thoughts that one needs a concept like Original Sin to explain the world. The perception is merely this: “what most reviewers term morbidness is the clear-eyed admission that all the tanks have been drained.” I find this shift to empty tanks not only vulgar but nonsensical. There is nothing in the context about a writer’s writing himself out, exhausting his resources. One would like to survey the reviews of Hawthorne up through the reviews of The Scarlet Letter to see if “morbidness” is a recurrent them among reviewers. I can and have searched the word in Melville’s known reviews which I have in my computer and do not find “morbid” coming up before MOBY-DICK except in the Literary World assurance 17 November 1849 that REDBURN contained NO “morbid feeling” but rather a manly sense of actuality. Melville is not writing about tanks running dry, though you could argue that Hawthorne’s did run dry several years before he died. Wineapple's topic is an irrelevant intrusion here.

Yet the perception that the tanks have run dry derives its force from a Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, Wineapple says.

In her little sandwich of a paragraph Wineapple puts down one slice of richly textured Melville-bread (something like my strongest sourdough rye) then smears in a little layer of something she finds on a workbench in a garage, perhaps, a sentence about empty tanks, then asserts a connection between her smear and the next layer of Melville-bread. The little sandwich does not bond together. The Wineapple layer slides off onto the floor when you try to pick up the sandwich because it is totally irrelevant. The particular perception she mentions has nothing to do with what she has just quoted and nothing to do with what she goes on to quote.

225: A short paragraph from Wineapple: “Melville’s Man of Mosses (as he referred to Hawthorne in his review) is a man of brooding unbelief.”

Do not Melville’s queries about Hawthorne point to belief rather than unbelief? Take the paragraph that takes “Earth’s Holocaust” as portraying the sacrifice of all vanities until what remains is only “the all-engendering heart of man” from which new vanities will spring: that is Calvinistic, and it is belief, not unbelief.

Melville brooded about belief but he does not attribute such a brooding to Hawthorne.

225. Wineapple’s next paragraph is even stranger than the one I quoted above, the one beginning “Melville will set the record straight.” This one starts off by saying, infelicitously, that Melville was writing about Hawthorne and himself both. Then comes some of Wineapple’s romantic fiction: “For all his magniloquent prose, Melville pictures Hawthorne as a mate bobbing like him on the trouble seas of publishing, recognition, and posterity.” If there were not other still worse sentences in Wineapple, I would nominate that for one of the worst sentences in American literary criticism. Writing it seems to have upset Wineapple, for without anything intervening she lurches many months ahead: “’What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay,’ he would confide to his new friend. ‘Yet, altogether, write the other [other italicized] way I cannot.’” What? We were talking about Melville’s essay on Hawthorne’s MOSSES.

The next paragraph contains shocking vulgarities: “’Let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American,’ Melville boomed . . . .” Melville BOOMED?

“As for Hawthorne, he is the flesh and blood of the land.” No, he is “of” Americans’ own flesh and blood. He is not the American Christ, he’s just an authentic American.

Would you give these pages anything above a D+ if you were grading sophomore papers? Yet go to Amazon.com and look at the ecstatic reviews of HAWTHORNE: A LIFE. To explain such mysteries you have to appeal to that Academic sense of Scratch-My-Back-and-I’ll-Scratch-Yours, for in certain moods no man can weigh New York academic biography without throwing in something somehow like “Mutual Admiration Society” to strike the uneven balance.

Brenda Wineapple's Defilement of the Agnus Dei and Melville

JOHN 1:29, SAID OF JOHN THE BAPTIST: "THE NEXT DAY JOHN SEETH JESUS COMING UNTO HIM, AND SAITH, BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD, WHICH TAKETH AWAY THE SIN OF THE WORLD."

On Amazon.com the editorial reviews of Brenda Wineapple’s 2003 HAWTHORNE: A LIFE are, as they say now, to die for. Sacvan Bercovitch was ecstatic: “Clearly the best biography of Hawthorne; the Hawthorne for our time. Beautifully conceived and written, it conveys the full poignancy and complexity of Hawthorne’s life; it makes vivid the times and people and places, and what a rich array of people and events! A delight to read from start to end.”

Benita Eisler, we know from Wineapple’s acknowledgments, is a buddy of Wineapple’s, but she overcame her familiarity in this objective comment: “Brenda Wineapple’s Hawthorne is, quite literally, an electrifying life. The power and sweep of the writing galvanizes a subject frozen, by earlier biographies, into a series of stills. We understand, finally, a man and artist torn by every conflict of his time, adding a few of his own, a man both strange and strangely familiar. The great achievement of this stunning biography lies in the feat of restoring Hawthorne to the rich and roiling America of his own period, while revealing him, for the first time, as our contemporary.”

Robert D. Richardson was awe-struck: “With the possible exception of Herman Melville, no one has ever understood the grand tragic Shakespearian nature of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and work as well as Brenda Wineapple. Her brilliant, powerful, nervy, unsettling and riveting book is authoritatively researched and beautifully written; it has itself the dark mesmeric power of a Hawthorne story.”

And so the quotations go, down to Jamie Spencer’s: “Wineapple is a splendid stylist and a master of concision. She can capture an entire personality and life in a brief paragraph. She can define a complex amatory relationship in a sentence. Her eloquent hands bring Hawthorne vividly alive for us.”

I hate it when I disagree with experts, as I frequently do with the idolators of James Wood, and I hate it when I think back to the 1840s when there was in the reviewing coteries of Manhattan something then known as the Mutual Admiration Society, and, having thought back, look askance at modern reviewing in such revered organs as the New York TIMES, the NATION, the NEW YORKER, the NEW REPUBLIC, and THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS.

I know something of Hawthorne and more of Melville, and I find only one reviewer who has been honest about Wineapple, Denis Donoghue, and only in an organ far distant from Manhattan, the Los Angeles TIMES. He found that Wineapple’s prose frequently lapsed into “the style of romantic fiction” and quoted examples of vulgarities of language.

I stayed away from Wineapple’s biography of Hawthorne for years because I was so shocked by her quite savage dismissal of my biography of Melville as a companion to Edmund Morris’s DUTCH, as dishonest as any review I have ever seen, but I mustered my declining forces and read it, starting with the passages on Herman Melville, where I feel most secure, even if I am secure only in my fantasy, as Wineapple declared. In HAWTHORNE: A LIFE Wineapple is nowhere near as contemptuous of me: it is as if after having knocked me out of contention for a Pulitzer in a popular magazine she had blocked the whole review from her mind and assumed no one would remember it.

[It strikes me that Wineapple's behavior is like Andrew Delbanco's saying in 2002 in the NEW REPUBLIC that I could not be trusted anywhere because I made up THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS then in his 2005 book casually mentioning the existence of THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS, but not bringing up his having so vehemently challenged their existence in 2002. To savagely review my biography in 2002 was to write for the eyes of the Pulitzer judges, of course. In 1997 the Pulitzer jury reported that the first volume of my biography of Herman Melville contained "great passages of exciting writing." My biography would "be the one that scholars and Melville fans will be reading and referring to for the next fifty years. . . . This biography is a stunning achievement." Wineapple, Richard H. Brodhead, and Delbanco knew that I had been a finalist in 1997 and could not risk the next jury feeling the same way the 1997 jury had felt. What if there were no misery memoir like ANGELA'S ASHES to captivate the jury by its brevity, as one of the judges later confessed?--A misery memoir marketed honestly in the UK and Ireland as fiction, by the way, as Trevor Butterworth reported.]

I am horrified, utterly appalled at the casualness of Wineapple's telling about Hawthorne and Melville, for casualness slides quickly into carelessness. One passage I have mentioned in another post and call attention to it here because I simply cannot understand how any of her admirers failed to alert her to a gaff so humiliating that it should send her out of the field of biography forever. I am talking about lambs.

Appallingly, all but unbelievably, Wineapple misquoted what Melville wrote Hawthorne three or four days or so after their farewell meeting in Lenox at the Wilson (later Curtis) Hotel in mid November 1851 This was in response to Hawthorne’s letter which, from the evidence, praised MOBY-DICK—praised it very highly, maybe even extravagantly. According to Wineapple, Melville professed in the aftermath of reading Hawthorne’s praise to "feel spotless as a lamb."

We are dependent upon Rose Hawthorne Lathrop's transcription, but this daughter of Hawthorne's knew a Biblical reference when she saw one. Melville felt then, after reading Hawthorne's letter, anyone who knows the Bible or falteringly consults a biblical concordance would have recognized, as spotless as Jesus, the Lamb of God. Wineapple apparently visualized Melville as the Pittsfield farmer who milked his own cow and had been around exceptionally clean sheep, if he was going to say that he felt "spotless as a lamb."

Well, Melville HAD been around the Melvill farm when there were sheep, and nearby when sheep went astray, as in November 1837, when there was a notice in the Pittsfield SUN, accompanied by a woodcut of a sheep: “STRAYED From the subscriber on or about the first inst. sixteen sheep, consisting of thirteen EWES and three WETHERS marked by a crop of the left ear. Whoever shall return said Sheep, or give information where they may be found, shall be liberally rewarded. / ROBERT MELVILL.”

But Melville felt as spotless as Jesus, not as bedraggled as these 13 ewes and three wethers or any other besoiled sheep he had seen in New York or Massachusetts.

Think what this means: think what Wineapple missed of Melville’s religious nature and his sometimes reckless application of religious terms to mundate affairs or to his own high theological skepticism and all but instinctive belief. Baa-baa, thinks Wineapple, spotless as a lamb. Can you trust anything she says about Melville, Hawthorne, and religion?

Wineapple misquoted the text of Melville’s letter so as to desecrate the Biblical meaning just as she trivialized the whole of the last encounter in the Berkshires of these two momentous men. In another post I will give some embarrassing examples of Wineapple’s casualness with fact sliding fast into carelessness and outright error. I say embarrassing. This sort of thing ought to be embarrassing to Wineapple, but I find that I am embarrassed myself, partly for Hawthorne and Melville, I suppose, and partly for the sake of the ideal of the responsible biographer, who first absorbs all that has previously been garnered reliably and then does no new harm.

Not one of Wineapple’s ecstatic friends saved her from her baa-baa blunder. Not one of Wineapple’s ecstatic reviewers mentioned it. You see why I keep thinking of Duyckinck and Mathews or Mathews and Duyckinck and the Mutual Admiration Society of 1840s Manhattan.

Irresponsible Reviewers Series--Brenda Wineapple

Brenda Wineapple and Ferocious Jealousy

The most scathing review of my biography of Melville was the one Brenda Wineapple published in the NATION for 2 May 2002, nominally a review of the second volume but fueled by rage toward the first. I was like Edmund Morris in DUTCH, not a careful biographer but one driven by fantasy, doing documentary research which would have been commendable had I not constantly veered between documentary evidence and fantastic departure from it. I had hoped the reviewers would say, “Thank you.”


Most baffling to me was Wineapple’s depiction of my attitude toward Nathaniel Hawthorne.


Here is Wineapple on the second volume: “Parker focuses on Melville's relationship to Hawthorne. But it's one of his book's more contradictory themes, since Parker is irritated by the pairing. Neighbors only for eighteen months, the two authors afterward saw one another about [why “about”?] three more times but in the nineteenth-century eye were yoked forevermore, Melville in the background and remembered, ‘if remembered at all,’ snaps Parker ‘as a man who had known Hawthorne, the literary man who had known Hawthorne during the Lenox months.’"


[Well, not in the “nineteenth-century eye.” Yes, in the tourist articles on the Berkshires in the 1850s and after they began again, postwar, in the later 60s, then in the 1870s when Hawthorne’s family began relying on Melville’s letters to fill out their accounts of Hawthorne in the Berkshires. The linkage of the two men was anything but general: it was specific to the Lenox months, and it was not anywhere I can think of in criticism on Hawthorne.—]


[Whoa! It’s hard not to stop to clarify and correct Wineapple. I will do that in a separate post.]


Wineapple went on: “Of course, Parker isn't the first biographer implicitly to lay the blame for Melville's neglect at Hawthorne's feet.” This is simply wildly irresponsible. Hawthorne had nothing to do with the neglect of Melville and I never said he did.


Sure, if he had been a different sort of man at a less hectic stage of life Hawthorne might have helped Melville’s career by reviewing MOBY-DICK, but it is Wineapple, not me, who blames Hawthorne for taking “Melville literally when he said not to write about it.” For him to write about MOBY-DICK would have been embarrassing. What would newswpaper editors say if you praised a book dedicated to you? Then Wineapple went on with a wholly irrelevant comment on another biographer: “Laurie Robertson-Lorant, whose earnest Melville: A Biography appeared the same year as the first installment of Parker's biography, doesn't much like Hawthorne.”


Wineapple goes on: “Despite Melville's capaciousness, Parker is convinced that envy preoccupies Melville, though the evidence suggests Parker is the envious one, so riled is he by Hawthorne's posthumous reputation and Melville's sinking one. Parker closely identifies with Melville, at times too closely, and will cross swords with anyone who ignored, outsold, criticized or just plain didn't like Melville.”


Earlier I "snapped" and now I am “riled”? Lawsy me! No. Years ago the British-educated Brian Higgins explained to me why some critics seemed not to understand the points we were making so clearly. I think I can recapture his words: “They just don’t understand the level we operate at, Hershel.” We laughed then delightedly and repeated the saying thereafter, but I want to say it now with great seriousness. Wineapple, as Denis Donoghue said in the 28 September 2003 Los Angeles TIMES, often wrote vulgarly, “in the style of romantic fiction.” Her cheeky, flippant word choices show that she just did not understand the high earnestness, the gravitas of my biography.


Envious? Riled “by Hawthorne’s posthumous reputation”? This makes no sense to me at all. I do mention jealousy in a particular context, Melville’s returning in 1869 to the Curtis Hotel, where he had last seen Hawthorne before he left Lenox: Melville, I say, “began to reflect (jealously, skeptically, judiciously, and still lovingly) on the mental, aesthetic, and physical characteristics of the man who had so bewitched him and now so outshone him.” See how far those words are from what Wineapple accuses me of.


Wineapple: But alas, Melville was in fact forgotten in America until his own posthumous revival in the 1920s, especially in Britain, when, Parker declares more than once, Moby-Dick and sometimes Pierre take their place in a literary pantheon that does not include the establishment writer (according to Parker) Hawthorne. "Not one of all these British admirers ever asked Melville what it had been like to be a friend of Hawthorne," Parker writes near the end of his book. "They understood that Hawthorne, like Longfellow, was immensely popular but not of the same order of literary greatness as Melville and Whitman." Take that, you American fools.”


“Take that, you American fools”? This cheap, vulgar tone is not mine.
I gave Hawthorne the graceful respect Melville always showed toward him and toward Vine, the character in whom he recorded (and perhaps then worked out) his own feelings toward Hawthorne. I am sure I never wrote anything in either volume which could be considered a slight toward Hawthorne. It was simply a fact, and still is, that much as I admire his best work I cannot accord him the high status that I gladly give to Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. That is not a slap at Hawthorne, and it was not a slap at American readers. It is a simple fact that London had a cadre of brilliant reviewers all through the 19th century and New York and Boston did not.


Wineapple ascribed to my biography with a view of Hawthorne so unfamiliar to me that I have had to look through my own writing to see what could have led her toward her interpretation. I find nothing was there to push her toward words like “irritated” and “snaps.” One hesitates to psychoanalyze a living biographer, but I think I have an idea what happened. Wineapple had come to despise Hawthorne, and, driven by fear that I might get more than a mere “finalist” award from the Pulitzer judges, and thereby queer her chances the next year, she attributed to me much of her own antipathy toward Hawthorne.


Here I quote Denis Donoghue in four paragraphs of diminishing length:
“Hawthorne was, according to the image she [Wineapple] conveys, a miserable, whining man, aloof, self-obsessed, determined to be unhappy. Wherever he lived, he wanted to be somewhere else. On one page Wineapple calls him a prude and a boor, on another page a racist. Has she lived too long with him? I wonder. Biographers often grow to dislike their subjects. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost’s official biographer, came to detest him long before completing the second volume of the biography. Wineapple seems to have wearied of her subject and become exasperated with his debility.


“It’s hard to say what she especially dislikes in Hawthorne. With a wife and three children, he needed money and kept on grasping for it, but he can’t be blamed for that. . . . . Hawthorne kept his eye on the main chance.


“But I don’t think Wineapple is distressed by such acts of prudence. She is incensed by his passivity and the moral claim he made for it. . . . Wineapple wants to cuff Hawthorne about the ears . . . .


“Wineapple doesn’t bring forward the more agreeable side of Hawthorne’s character . . . .”


Yes, Donoghue laid it all out: something about her own feelings toward Hawthorne (all aside from hopes of the Pulitzer) had her so “riled” that she projected them onto me, all innocent as I was.


I never portrayed Melville as merely or mainly envious of Hawthorne, not even in my chapters on CLAREL, in which I assume, like Bezanson, that Vine is based on Hawthorne. Melville was not engaged in a vendetta against his own friend. He had, starting very early, in 1851, understood that Hawthorne had serious limitations, needed roast beef done rare, but nevertheless he valued him as a man and as a writer, grieved at his death, and reread him admiringly, although he had long since thought his way past some of Hawthorne’s best ideas. To compare “The Artist of the Beautiful” to “The Piazza” is to see how much farther into aesthetics Melville was consciously going past Hawthorne, early in 1856. In the late 1860s Melville would have been superhuman not to have felt moments of envy at the (no one dared say) absurd exaltation of Hawthorne’s reputation in the late 1860s. (I trace this phenomenon in detail in a chapter of the forthcoming MELVILLE AND BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE).


As he wrote CLAREL Melville was able to take an objective look at the man who had meant and still meant much to him. He saw all the alluring grace, still, and reflected his own excessive early admiration in Clarel’s attitude toward Vine. But at a telling moment Melville makes it clear that he knew that Hawthorne’s race of thought long since was run. At one point (2.733) I say: “In his thoughts of his friend and in his poem, these months, Melville was leading a steady, poised life.” Neither Melville nor I were out to disparage Hawthorne. To talk of the failure of his powers is not to attack him.


[An aside: Hawthorne people sometimes act weirdly on the subject of his intelligence. At the Pittsfield conference to celebrate the centennial of CLAREL I gave a long talk on Melville’s portrayal of Vine. At the end of it a man stood up in the middle of the hall and frothed and foamed at the mouth for several very long minutes in indignation at my talk and especially the conclusion, about Hawthorne’s race of though being long since run. I heard that Helen Vendler, who had just read the poem, kept whispering, “He’s right, he’s right,” meaning that I was right. I never learned who the man was, and he wiped out any possibility for rational discussion.]


In the 1860s Melville had no way of knowing the agonies Hawthorne endured in trying to write his unfinished romances—except the way any reader of excerpts in the Atlantic would have. Without such knowledge, he nevertheless understood Hawthorne’s decline, and pitied it. I gather from her wording that Wineapple has not read the manuscripts of the late romances but derives her information from books printed by the descendants, even more than from the new scholarly editions. She refers to “the crude claimant manuscripts” but she does not indicate that she knows the history of their composition. Understanding the sequence of their inscription, of course, is a task any biographer ought to undertake, at least to the point of verifying the work of Hawthorne’s fraudulently packaging heirs and his modern scholarly editors.


As it happens, I know a good deal about the unfinished romances. In 1974 and 1975 I spent many weeks on the manuscripts as I criticized two “Historical Notes” line by line (notes to volumes titled to reflect Julian’s packaging). I worked to clarify the textual policy, and after great effort got the editors to move pretty far away from a truly inhuman, unusable way of recording manuscript variants (a Bowersian mad-scientist system in which you worked 25 minutes to unravel textual instructions to get to information that could have been displayed in 8 seconds if simple chronology had been followed).



In my deferential Southern way, I pushed the editors very hard to abandon the titles attached to odd pieces of manuscript by the descendants. No one else in their lifetime would do a scholarly edition, so this was the time to make an absolutely fresh start. The editors at length agreed to call the volumes descriptively, THE ELIXIR OF LIFE MANUSCRIPTS and THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT MANUSCRIPTS.


In the ELIXIR volume I see a note dated 1 December 1982: “They don’t thank me anywhere? –I thought more about these volumes than they did! see 1974 & 1975 reports!” Well, Fredson Bowers is listed in both volumes as “General Textual Editor.” That explains that silence! I was content enough with helping to assure that the unfinished romances were published in a form accessible to readers.


In 1974 and 1975, I read those unfinished manuscript in absolute horror at what they revealed of the decay of Hawthorne’s mind.

Now, 75 years old myself, I shudder as I look at a few Xerox pages of Hawthorne’s manuscripts and at 504 in the CLAIMANT volume where some of Hawthorne’s laments are gathered: “All this amounts to just nothing. I don’t advance a step.” “I can’t possibly make this out, though it keeps glimmering before me.” “’Twont do, Oh, heavens!” William Manchester would have understood! I understand, being fearful of my health even in the early 1990s—so fearful than I drafted the second half of Melville’s life first, in case it was too sad for me to finish when the time came. Any earnest writer would pity Hawthorne for his facing the loss of his powers.


Yes, let’s be honest. It seems to me that a biographer of Hawthorne owes it to the reader to take on the appalling task of determining what relation Hawthorne’s vaunted early “ambiguity” has to the irresolution obvious in his lamentations in these late manuscripts. What happened between marvelous early stories and the, well, hapless parts of the late romances?


So, as I say, when I wrote the biography I knew a great deal about Hawthorne’s manuscripts, still, and in the early 1980s I had worked out for the first time that Fields definitely had nothing to do with the length of THE SCARLET LETTER though he had much to do with the way it was published, separately aside from the Custom House essay. Besides I had learned a lot about Hawthorne biography during the many years I had taught his stories and romances and edited some of them for collections, notably THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.


I knew a good deal about Hawthorne, and I treated him with respect throughout my biography. Wineapple knew astonishingly little about Melville, as I will make clear in another post.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: REVIEW AS SLAUGHTER-OP FOR MY BIOGRAPHY AND MY REPUTATION

Beyond a Mere Hatchet-Job.

Brenda Wineapple’s review in the Nation hit like axe-murder on my HERMAN MELVILLE: A BIOGRAPHY and my reputation. Why did she write such a review? See the previous post.

In 2002, as I learned, Brenda Wineapple made a special request for an early review copy of the second volume of my biography of Melville. The innocent director of Johns Hopkins University Press obliged. Upon publication of her review in the NATION for 2 May 2002 it was clear that Wineapple had ground her axe in advance and used it, and not only on the book she was supposed to be reviewing. The next three paragraphs are hers:

Parker's fine sleuthing turned up a newspaper article, printed in the 1852 Windsor, Vermont, Journal, that recounts Melville meeting Hawthorne for dinner at a hotel in Lenox, Massachusetts, conveniently situated between Pittsfield and the small house the Hawthornes were occupying on the border of what today is known as Tanglewood. And on the basis of this gossip column, Parker speculates that the dinner took place circa November 14 and that as the two friends lingered, alone in the dining room, Melville handed Moby-Dick to Hawthorne. ("In no other way could Hawthorne have had a copy so soon," Parker explains.)

As Hawthorne held Moby-Dick in his hand, "he could open the book in his nervous way (more nervous even than normally)," writes Parker, "and get from his friend a guided tour of the organization of the thing now in print, and even sample a few paragraphs that caught his eye or that the author eagerly pointed out to him." He could indeed. Whether he did is another matter, though not for Parker, as secure in his fantasy as Edmund Morris is in his imaginary Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. "Take it all in all," Parker concludes, "this was the happiest day of Melville's life."

This reconstructed dinner purports to have happened because Parker, a mighty researcher, has loaded his book with enough fact, detail and circumstantial inference to oblige assent from a weary reader. Yet despite the hulking material he's amassed from a mountain of newspapers, a fairly new cache of family papers and a host of collateral letters, to name just a few of his sources, Parker continually veers into unwonted speculation that then careens into certainty, moving back and forth between data and guesswork, seamlessly fusing the two and squandering his credibility as biographer along the way. The happy dinner is a jarring case in point--and surprising in the work of a scholar as seemingly scrupulous as Parker, the associate general editor of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of The Writings of Herman Melville.



This “happy dinner,” Wineapple explains, “ is essential to Herman Melville, A Biography,Volume 2, 1851-1891,” the book she is nominally reviewing, because at different parts of the second volume I write about Melville’s relationship with Hawthorne.

Apparently everything I said about Hawthorne and Melville was wrong. “Parker is irritated by the pairing”—apparently because I do not think Hawthorne was as great as Melville. Wineapple is not clear when, but “in the nineteenth-century eye [the two men] were yoked forevermore, Melville in the background and remembered, ‘if remembered at all,’ snaps Parker, ‘as a man who had known Hawthorne, the literary man who had known Hawthorne during the Lenox months.’" I certainly was not snapping in the late chapter where I discussed the way Melville experienced the exaltation of Hawthorne’s reputation during his own near-oblivion.

Interestingly enough, Tony Kushner in an interview with Frederic Tuten understood perfectly well what I was doing in this late chapter:

Kushner: I didn’t mean that it [The Confidence-Man] was the end of his life as a great writer. I just meant that, you feel like after Pierre, that he becomes more and more discouraged. The Confidence-Man, as dark as it is, it’s in a certain sense permission that he was given to Clarel, which is thirteen thousand lines of rhymed verse about pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. It’s incredibly great and almost completely unreadable. But he becomes more and more a writer for himself and gives up on the idea that he’s going to rival Hawthorne. There’s a terrifyingly sad moment in Hershel Parker’s biography of Melville where he’s been completely forgotten and he’s seen Hawthorne become the great American writer. And Hawthorne’s dead and his diary has just been published. Melville, whose life has changed by reading Hawthorne, and reviewing Hawthorne, and meeting him, rushes to a bookstore in downtown Manhattan to buy a copy of the diary . . . . And he opens it to the index to see if the day of their meeting and their friendship is in the diary. He’s mentioned, I think, once, as a kind of a strange bearded man whom Hawthorne knew vaguely.

Yes, I succeeded: “a terrifyingly sad moment.” What I hoped for, all the years of my research and writing, was for majestic readers to take up the book, as Kushner did, rising to the power of the darkest scenes I was depicting.

Wineapple continued to turn my second volume into an ongoing rant against Hawthorne.

In 1852, with the success of The Blithedale Romance, Melville [Wineapple says] "may have sensed what would become a recurrent phenomenon for the rest of his life, that he was being eclipsed by Hawthorne." This is Parker speaking, not Melville. Despite Melville's capaciousness, Parker is convinced that envy preoccupies Melville, though the evidence suggests Parker is the envious one, so riled is he by Hawthorne's posthumous reputation and Melville's sinking one. Parker closely identifies with Melville, at times too closely, and will cross swords with anyone who ignored, outsold, criticized or just plain didn't like Melville. But alas, Melville was in fact forgotten in America until his own posthumous revival in the 1920s, especially in Britain, when, Parker declares more than once, Moby-Dick and sometimes Pierre take their place in a literary pantheon that does not include the establishment writer (according to Parker) Hawthorne. "Not one of all these British admirers ever asked Melville what it had been like to be a friend of Hawthorne," Parker writes near the end of his book. "They understood that Hawthorne, like Longfellow, was immensely popular but not of the same order of literary greatness as Melville and Whitman." Take that, you American fools.

Wineapple’s tone totally misrepresents my tone. I do not “snap.” I do not speak in a “Take that, you American fools” tone. The problem is Wineapple’s. Here I can only assume that she is being reflexively defensive of her Hawthorne—a very peculiar thing to do, in the light of Denis Donoghue’s perception that she despised the man. The problem is hers, not mine. Now, I simply take it as a given that Hawthorne is not of the same order of literary greatness as Melville and Whitman, or for that matter as Emily Dickinson. I am so comfortable in this conviction that I don’t, anywhere in the biography, have any impulse to be invidious about Hawthorne. And I never treat Melville as merely or mainly envious of Hawthorne’s fame. I treat him as grand enough to take a long historical view of himself and Hawthorne, grand enough to understand and even sympathize with the exaltation of Hawthorne’s reputation. I would have thought my chapters on CLAREL had shown that Melville was anything but merely jealous or envious of Hawthorne.

I keep coming back to the cheapness of Wineapple’s tone throughout her review. This cheapness of her tone persisted into her biography of Hawthorne, so that Denis Donoghue worried about her living with him too long and coming to dislike him. Did she detest him as Lawrance Thompson came to detest Frost, Donoghue wonders, and concludes: “Wineapple seems to have wearied of her subject and become exasperated with his debility.” Then he says: “Wineapple wants to cuff Hawthorne about the ears”!

Perhaps Wineapple’s misrepresentation of MY tone is an early manifestation of HER dislike of her subject, HER jealousy that I was dealing with new documents (even using for the first time some previously unknown Hawthorne documents!), describing many previously unknown episodes, and taking a long historical view in which MY author, however obscure, WOULD be recognized as one of the Titanic writers of the world. I tried at all points to rise to the depiction of human grandeur.

I needed better reviewers than I got in New York. I needed someone of the stature of Tony Kushner. The ONLY person I have seen make mention of this sad section of my book is Tony, the only one. And there are other chapters of equal weight which were never once mentioned by a New York critic.

Surprisingly, Wineapple might think, I got some remarkably intelligent, sensitive, and objective reviewers from the hinterlands and overseas, reviewers who read the book with care and wrote about it temperately. Her review was far worse than a hatchet-job. It was an axe-murder of my book and my reputation.

I will probably post a series on documentary evidence and how a careful biographer makes responsible narrative of such evidence. I have in a previous post shown just how little I "fantasized" in my depiction of Hawthorne and Melville in the Lenox hotel, but I want to conduct some classes here in the wise use of archival evidence--avuncular tutorials if not quite master classes.

It was a terrible thing Wineapple did, saying I was like Edmund Morris in DUTCH. It was as far from truth as anyone could imagine. And it hurt, it hurts. Whatever she achieved by her review, she achieved her end of weakening my spirit, exhausted as I already was by the years of work on the biography. And soon after Wineapple came Brodhead and soon after Brodhead came Delbanco, then Schultz.

People are real, even biographers, and they should not be lied about, as (my posts show) Brodhead and Delbanco and Schultz and Milder lied about my biography. For it is a lie to say or imply that I invented THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS, and it is a lie to say that I neglected marginalia in the biography. Lies stay up indefinitely on the Internet. Let Truth stay on the Internet too in blogs. It's a new world.

SOME REFLECTIONS ON BRENDA WINEAPPLE, INTERNET SLANDERERS, AND WHAT REALLY WENT ON IN THAT HOTEL IN LENOX: A DEMONSTRATION OF BIOGRAPHICAL SLEUTHING AND PRESENTATION OF EVIDENCE

Harrison Hayford’s “Melville and Hawthorne: A Biographical and Critical Study” (1945) was one of the great Yale dissertations on Melville directed by Stanley T. Williams. For “Melville and Hawthorne” Hayford assembled all the known factual information about the two writers (including the most basic, a fresh list of their meetings), and in his investigations discovered unknown letters and other documents now so familiar that few people remember who found them. Hayford’s diffidence about being a non-combatant in World War II (because of tuberculosis) and Leon Howard’s bad advice kept him from publishing the dissertation in the elegant, unpretentious “Yale Studies in English” where Merrell R. Davis’s dissertation on Mardi found such an appropriate home. Few new documents emerged in the next decades besides some letters by Sophia Hawthorne published by Eleanor Thomas Metcalf in Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (1953), so that Hayford’s dissertation could have been published any year up through the 1970s with only minimal updating. Withholding distinguished work from publication became habitual with Hayford; only in 2003 did Northwestern University Press publish posthumously his Melville’s Prisoners, a collection of essays and speeches authorized by his son Charles Hayford and seen into print by Alma MacDougall Reising, with a foreword by me.

In 1945 the last meeting between Melville and Hawthorne which Hayford could document was on 8 August 1851, the expedition to see the Shakers at Hancock Village, but he speculated (p. 244) about a final meeting:

Very likely, however, in the three months before Hawthorne moved away from Lenox there were further visits. At least one meeting seems probable, on November 7, when Melville may have presented Hawthorne a copy of Moby Dick, fresh from the press, while Hawthorne gave young Malcolm Melville a copy of The Wonder Book, also just printed.

(Properly, the title is A Wonder Book.) Here Hayford placed this footnote:

This episode is purely conjectural, and may be substantiated or disproved by the inscription in the presentation copy of Moby Dick now in the possession of Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach (see his Books and Bidders, pp. 26-27). In M [Houghton Library] there is a copy of the Wonder Book inscribed by Hawthorne, "Malcolm Melville / from Mr Hawthorne / Nov. 7th 1851." The Wonder Book was not published until November 15 (see Literary World, IX, 390, 413); hence this was an advance copy. My conjecture is that Melville at the same time presented Hawthorne an advance copy of Moby Dick, which was published, apparently, about the same day as The Wonder Book.[end of HH's fn]

The Rosenbach Moby-Dick turned out to be a copy the Hawthornes acquired to replace the earlier one they had presumably lost in their mid-1850s peregrinations.

More than four decades passed before I discovered fresh evidence about early November 1851 in the "Augusta Papers" acquired by the NYPL in 1983, and another decade before I transcribed and published some of that evidence in the first volume of my biography. There I explained that a meeting took place on 4 November 1851 at the home in Lenox of Charles and Elizabeth Sedgwick, he the clerk of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, she the mistress of the notable school which Helen had attended in 1835. As the time neared for Hawthorne to leave the little red cottage, Sedgwick, who had tried to bring Hawthorne together with the English novelist G. P. R. James (internationally famous as the "solitary horseman" novelist, then oddly living at Stockbridge), decided that the only thing to do was to throw a party midweek (on 4 November, a Tuesday), with only a couple of days' notice, so he could at least gather James, Hawthorne, and Melville at his hearth one time. This gathering was a farewell party for the Hawthornes.

The next day after the party, 5 November 1851, Maria Melville wrote a full account to her daughter Augusta, then visiting Allan in New York City:

On monday morning [3 November] immediately after breakfast we drove to town. At the post office was a note directed to Mrs Melville of course I opened it, it contained an invitation for me to come to tea on tuesday Eveg. wishing me to extend the invitation to Mr & Mrs Herman Melville & my daughters, or any friend or friends we might have with us, from Mrs Sedgwick as an inducement to come so far we were to meet the James' from Stockbridge & a few friends. Herman said he would take us at once and seem'd pleased. As we were to be there at seven or lose our tea, we started from home at half past five. It was very cold--muffs were brought down & Buffaloes we wraped ourselves up warm Helen & Herman in front, Kate & my self in the back seat with glasses drawn up. The moon soon began to shine forth fitfully, by & by a few flakes of snow fell. However we had a pleasant drive to Lenox Herman being in excellent spirits.

When we descended, after arranging our dress, we saw Mr Hawthorne, and all the Sedgwicks who were delighted to see us, the weather was so cold they thought we would not come. Miss Catherine Sedgwick came in soon after with Mrs Orville Dewey, soon after came Mr James Colt, & Mr Mearson [?] two Pittsfield lawyers they were attending Court at Lenox. A ring at the bell, a little noise and in a few minutes enter'd Mrs James & daughter and a Mrs Bills . . . . ¶Mrs James is agreeable, does not dress well, is thin, but badly form'd, her rich silk dress was not well made. . . . Mr James has purchase'd a farm near Stockbridge, his son is to manage it. The author is going to build upon this farm & locate himself permanently on the expiration of their present lease--which was taken for two years.
Mr & Mrs Sedgwick on the entrance of Mrs James both ask'd for her husband, she slowly & very quietly said, Mr James beg'd me to say that he had "commenced a new book to day," & could not break out on any account. Bessie Sedgwick says he snuffs to such a degree that his bosom is cover'd with the dust, and you can't help inhaling some of the particles when you sit beside him. Our disappointment was very great at not seeing the great novelist. Mr Hawthorne was induce'd to come to meet Herman--On asking for his wife he said they went out alternate, he took charge of the children when his wife went out[.] They could not both be spared together."

The fact that Melville was in such good spirits may mean that he had not heard of Hawthorne's plans to leave Lenox. Whether he knew or not, he must have been playing out in his mind a scene he would enact any week now--an exultant ride or drive over to the little red cottage with a presentation copy of Moby-Dick. And Melville was the attraction for Hawthorne, not James.

Whatever else Melville and Hawthorne talked about on this occasion, they must have expressed frustration that their new books had not arrived. [Notice that I say “must have”: these were real human beings who had to act much the way normal men act.] Each man knew that the other was awaiting a new book, and each also had a long-cherished surprise for the other in his book. [Do I KNOW that each had a surprise, that they had not blabbed to each other? Well, I know the reticence of the men, and the pleasure of delayed gratification.] Hawthorne had dated his preface to The Snow-Image three days earlier, but a different work, A Wonder Book, was due to be published any day. Months earlier, he had written into a late chapter a tribute to his friend's struggle to shape out "the gigantic conception of his 'White Whale,' while the gigantic shape of Greylock looms upon him from his study-window." (This was the first time the title of the book, in any form (The White Whale, The Whale, Moby-Dick) had been mentioned in any other book.) Any day, also, Melville was expecting copies of his book, now retitled Moby-Dick. James's absence, as well as Sophia's, meant that it was easier for the two men to confer a little over Hawthorne's plans and Melville's responses to them. Melville had a seriously sick wife (left at home) and a new book on the brain and probably partly on the page, but before the evening was out he must have [another reasonable “must have”] conveyed his sense that they had to say goodbye properly, not in a moment's public chat at someone else's tea party. Hawthorne would have told him how much he wanted to get the new book--to Malcolm, he might have said (knowing that it could take a while before someone found the reference to the White Whale in it). Melville would have confessed to Hawthorne how frustrated he would feel if his book came out just too late for him to carry a presentation copy to Hawthorne. Both the men could talk openly about their eagerness to see their books without mentioning the compliment buried deep inside the one and blazoned on the dedication page of the other.

A day or two later Hawthorne received his first copies of A Wonder Book and inscribed one, on 7 November, to Malcolm, knowing that before long the father would see the pre-publication compliment. Hayford in 1945 had visualized a scene, not located in a town or house, in which Hawthorne presented the volume in person, but almost surely Hawthorne would not have made his way to Pittsfield. More likely, according to his frugal habit, he found someone to carry it to Pittsfield. (Hayford's own characteristic behavior may have been modeled on Hawthorne's, for he discovered that in the modern world a powerful man who does not drive a car will be picked up and driven places by others--even on trips of hundreds of miles.) According to Hayford's speculation, on the same day, 7 November, Hawthorne would have entrusted a copy of A Wonder Book to Melville and Melville would have given him in exchange a copy of Moby-Dick. When I focused on the timetable in the late 1980s that did not seem likely to me. My years of review hunting had shown that the Albany Evening Journal and the Boston Daily Evening Transcript each had a copy on 12 November and the Boston Courier and the Troy Daily Whig noticed the book on 13 November, the Troy Budget on 14 November. I knew when books were first available, and suspected also that the Harpers would not have been much concerned with getting advance copies of Moby-Dick to Melville, though they would willingly pass sheets to the Literary World at Allan's behest. If Allan and the Harpers were alert, Melville should have received copies on or a couple of days before the official publication date of 14 November (a Friday). The arrival of the whaling book a week or so after Hawthorne inscribed a copy of his book for Malcolm, was, after all, providential: if copies had been delayed a week longer Melville would not have been able to hand a presentation copy to the man to whom he had dedicated it in token of admiration of his genius.

Here the information might have stood, at least until selected newspaper databases became available in the 21st century, had I not spent 24 and 25 June 1987 in the Boston Public Library hunched over microfilm readers scanning Lowell and Lawrence newspapers for reviews of Moby-Dick and other Melville books and information about Melville's brother-in-law, John Hoadley. Something else struck me--in the Lowell Weekly Journal and Courier for 19 December 1851 an article on the Hawthorne cottage outside Lenox, reprinted from a longer article in the Windsor, Vermont, Journal. (By 2010 this Lowell paper was available on a database.) The author, no name or pen name given, newly moved from Vermont to Lenox, was acting as a special correspondent to his hometown newspaper, since the natural scenery and the local celebrities (dead like Jonathan Edwards as well as living) were of general interest, even in Vermont. As partially reprinted in the Lowell paper, the author seemed not to know that he was describing a cottage that not only looked deserted but was deserted:

A correspondent of the Windsor, Vt., Journal, at Lenox, writes that in a spot of unrivalled loveliness on the Northern shore of the Mountain Mirror stands a small, uninviting, insignificant, red house, with green window blinds, and one single pine tree before it. One might pass it at almost any time of the day, and think it vacant; the doors would all be shut, the blinds all closed, and the single pine tree would look as sullen as if it were conscious of its loneliness. There would be no path to the gate, and no knocker on the door, and one would immediately conclude that the red house of the two gables was shut against the resort of men--and he would not be far from right, for there lives Nathaniel Hawthorne.
According to Hawthorne's journal, his departure date was 21 November: "We left Lenox, Friday morning, November 21st (I think) 1851, in a storm of snow and sleet; took the cars at Pittsfield, and arrived at West Newton that evening." This meant, I assumed, that the letter-writer may have observed the cottage later in November or even in December, not knowing that the author was no longer in residence. Nevertheless, the cottage could not have changed much in a week or two, so the description was still applicable to what Hawthorne had known.


That was interesting enough, but the editor of the Weekly Journal and Courier tantalized me with what he acknowledged omitting: "The writer, after giving a brief description of Mr H's personal appearance, proceeds as follows . . . ." I needed that brief description of Hawthorne's personal appearance which (I knew) no Hawthorne scholar had ever seen. I could be the first to plunder it, for my biography, if I had the space. I determined to find the Windsor, Vermont, Journal, knowing that literary-minded people, like this writer, often took on the job of special correspondent, offering reports from the hinterlands to the metropolis or the metropolis to the hinterlands, or from one metropolis to another.

I had, in fact, an intense interest in special correspondents. If you had given me three years' pay in 1985, back after I finished Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons and before I clove to Jay Leyda, carrying on his Log, I would have devoted myself to a study of American special correspondents for American newspapers, including a few who wrote letters to or from European capitals. I knew that the greatest untouched or scarcely touched resource for politics, public construction works, economics, literary history, architectural history, theatrical history, musical history and much more of value lay in the disappearing files of American newspapers in the letters of special correspondents who distilled the day's or week's or month's news for people in other cities. In 1988, the next year after finding the quotation from the Windsor Journal, I found in the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin a big book's worth of weekly letters from the young lawyer Oakey Hall (later D.A. and mayor), an intimate of the Duyckinck circle, who casually sprinkled his pages with little gems about Melville. Who would have guessed that Melville wrote White-Jacket in "a score of sittings"? That was the gossip current among the New York literati at the time. Now, well into the new millennium, the digitizing of many American newspapers may make it easier for others to fulfill my dream of a library of books consisting of these contemporary letters, even if the great the majority of newspaper files already have been destroyed.

That dream now beckons me still, although impossible now, but in 1987 and the next years my time and travel funds already were not limitless. I was teaching full time, and I had hundreds of documents to transcribe into the ever expanding The Melville Log, starting with the "Augusta Papers." I added the Lowell item to the LOG on 11 August 1990. Every few months when I had to divide my files because the capacity of WordStar in my computer was so limited (27 pages, was it?), I conscientiously moved the note up to the top of a new file containing November and December 1851: "MUST FIND WINDSOR VT. JOURNAL."

I went to the Library of Congress where I was told that the Windsor, Vermont, Journal was not extant anywhere. Hoping still, I prevailed upon a student from New England to look in Vermont libraries, reimbursing him his expenses. My dairy for 24 April 1990: "Chris off to NH--called to leave message about that Windsor VT Journal paper on NH." Later, I asked Richard E. Winslow III, the Portsmouth librarian-naval historian, if he would put it on his hunting list, since he was beginning to specialize in hunting for Melville and Thoreau reviews in regional New England newspapers. In August 1992 Winslow found a file of the Journal. The Lowell paper had omitted a reference by the writer to his earlier description of the Mountain Mirror. Winslow knew to keep looking, and of course more was in the Windsor Journal than the article condensed in the Lowell paper. Comparatively few special correspondents, even the unpaid amateurs, contented themselves with one attempt to enlighten and amuse friends at home while establishing their own reputations as competent amateur writers.

The 12 December 1851 Windsor Journal article signed by "Maherbal" had indeed contained a physical description of Hawthorne omitted in the Lowell paper:

If, however, on a closer inspection you observed a wreath of smoke curling up from the chimney of the house of the two gables, and had curiosity enough to saunter around the precincts in hopes of seeing signs of life, until about four o'clock, you would finally hear the door creak, and there would stand before you a middling-sized, thick set man, with a large and vigorous, though not unpleasant face, and lying under a profusion of coarse black hair, a head of massive development. There would be nothing very striking in his countenance, except it were his dark and intelligent eye, arched by a very black eye-brow, yet you would gather from the tout ensemble of the expression that it betokened an intensely-working and thorough-going intellect.--Were it not that the countenance is relieved and heightened by the vigor and intensity of mental activity that beams through it, you would think there was something in it very heavy and sombre. If you ever had any hint that there was a vein of rancor and acrimony in his character, you would look in vain for any indications of it in his face, unless you commenced to imagine what expression that black eye, would take, and that heavy eye-brow, and that firmly drawn mouth, when he was belaboring the Custom House officials, or spurring his bitterness against some Puritan hypocrite. But while you were making these observations, your hero would raise his eyes from the ground long enough to give you one of those modest but expressive glances which mark the man of seclusion and reflection, and then with a kind of swinging gait which would assure you that he was not used to bustle among the crowds of business or fashion, would wend his way up to the village Post office.

This was valuable, but in the end I found I just could not work it into the space I was allotting the chapter of the biography.

There was a bigger surprise, for the Vermont paper had concluded with a paragraph on the Hawthornes' removal from the cottage: "Within a few days past Mr. Hawthorne has left our goodly village, to spend the winter in Newton. Strange that he should encamp so near Salem! Lenox was a great way off, but not far enough to dispel the lurid gleams that were reflected from 'Gallows Hill,' upon the House of the Seven Gables!" I would guess that this is a postscript, perhaps added to the letter when the writer learned belatedly that the cottage was now quite unoccupied.

All this was valuable and interesting, but Maherbal had tardily written another report which was dated 10 January 1852 and printed in the Windsor Journal on 16 January 1852: "G. P. R. JAMES--HERMAN MELVILLE." Here was news indeed:

HERMAN MELVILLE, another distingué [like James] in the literature of fiction, is a resident of Pittsfield. Although he has been for some time favorably known to a certain class of readers as a novelist, he is yet comparatively a young man--not above thirty-five years of age. The Melville family have long been known in Pittsfield as ranking among the upright and respectable members of society, though by no means of the so-called highest class. Herman Melville himself is a son-in-law of the celebrated Chief Justice Shaw of Boston. As may be gathered from the fact that Melville dedicated his book lately published to Nathaniel Hawthorne, "in admiration of his genius," the two distinguished writers of fiction are personal friends--not however familiar, intimate friends by any means--for if the complaints on the part of the Pittsfield people with regard to the exclusiveness of the one, and the representations of Maherbal in the Journal concerning the social character of the other, are to be taken as conclusive in the matter, they seem to be alike strangers to any thing like familiarity of social intercourse. Not very long ago, the author of the "Scarlet Letter" and the author of "Typee," having, in some unaccountable way, gotten a mutual desire to see one another, as if neither had a home to which he could invite the other, made arrangements in a very formal manner to dine together at a hotel in this village. What a solemn time they must have had, those mighty conjurors in the domain of the imagination, all alone in the dining-room of a hotel! In the small talk of the flippant beaux and light-headed belles of Berkshire, the solemn attempt of two of the greatest characters of which the county could boast, towards an acquaintance, was made a subject of infinite merriment.

Winslow's packet containing Maherbal's letters was in my mail on 29 August 1992.

My hands still shaking as I held the photocopies, I went to the computer and deleted the note I had copied and recopied from one expanding file to the next several times a year: "MUST FIND WINDSOR VT. JOURNAL." Jay Leyda was four and a half years dead but I told him--the only dead scholar I talked to. On 7 July 1988, five months after his death, I had hallucinated him in New Orleans, a city of ghosts for me from the early 1950s. As I stood before the slanted newspaper rack pulling out plum after plum of Oakey Hall's intimate revelations about Melville, there on my right Jay had been standing in his faded blue raincoat, but he did not stay long. Yards of brittle Scotch tape (the destructive kind) had been slathered, years earlier, to the pages of the Commercial Bulletin and no matter how cautiously I turned the pages the dried tape fell off onto the floor, not taking the high-rag-content paper with it. Members of the Tulane staff were intent on their holiday, wheeling carts of alcohol by to fete the throng of visiting rare book and manuscript librarians, so they ignored me as I shifted my feet for two days in what sounded more and more like a fast breeding nest of rattlesnakes. That was 1988, the only time I hallucinated.

On that 29 August 1992 I telephoned Hayford. We had been on the phone already, my diary shows, talking about Cornelius Mathews's audacious toast about "bloomers":

At 2 pm mail & all hell broke loose. Winslow had found not only the Windsor VT NH article I wanted but also one on HM--abt his dining with Hawthorne at a Hotel--the day he gave him a copy of ¬MD--Jesus my mind is wild. Harry had called. Called him bk—

Hayford, who in 1945 had listed Melville's known meetings with Hawthorne, now listened to me read to him Maherbal's account. It was obvious to him, as to me, what the occasion was, although he had not yet read my account of the previous (4 November) meeting. The discovery was the good goddess's bonus, above and beyond anything any of us could have imagined. It was time for celebration. "Wanted a drink," I jotted down honestly, six years after dropping Jay Leyda off after his last research trip: then, weighing the odds of my having the strength to finish both the LOG and a biography, I had decided anything that took away from my alertness had to go, at least until three volumes of The New Melville Log were published, so I had stopped drinking anything alcoholic, although I did not for a moment envision keeping that resolve for a quarter century or more, awaiting the publication of the LOG.) Now, in 1992, I celebrated by talking to Hayford. Then I telephoned Maurice Sendak and read the whole account of the meeting to him, relying on him as a man with a well-documented visual imagination, and went back to work.

The discovery sent our minds in several directions, one toward self-reproach. At least Harry had imagined a meeting in which Melville handed Hawthorne Moby-Dick, and sensible people like the bookdealer and collector William Reese had mused about the high monetary and emotional value of the copy inscribed to Hawthorne. As Reese said to the Grolier Club (published in its Gazette in 1993), "one can always contemplate something really big--the actual dedication copy to Hawthorne of Moby-Dick." Unquestioning inmates of the Ivory Towers, the great lot of us academics never once thought that what you do when you dedicate a book to a friend who lives nearby is take him a copy and watch his face when he reads the dedication and your inscription.

What is wrong with academics in general? Well, we are good at erecting ramparts against thought. If we acknowledge the value of documents at all, we fixate on documents we are familiar with and think we understand. The long-known letter Melville wrote to Hawthorne on 17 November (that date seems certain enough) has proved such a rampart. It is so passionately confessional, so ecstatic, that we fixated on it almost to the exclusion of what we can infer about Hawthorne's letter that prompted it. We know from Melville's reply that, unwontedly reckless in his emotional and intellectual response to the power of the book that gave the dedication its true significance, Hawthorne had offered in his letter to review Moby-Dick, repayment in kind for Melville's momentous essay on Mosses from an Old Manse.

We can also make other reasonable inferences about the content of Hawthorne's letter, especially if you know that a dramatic meeting with Melville preceded Hawthorne's reading the book. We fixated on that letter apart from its place in all that is known of the nature of the conversations Melville and Hawthorne had enjoyed since August 1850 and their surviving comments about each other, and the surviving material evidence in journals, books, and letters. We should have recognized that Hawthorne had been eagerly awaiting the appearance of his friend's book, the book he had hailed in his own Wonder Book.

We fixated on Melville's letter to the near-total exclusion of any questioning of how Hawthorne got his copy of Moby-Dick so soon. Except for Hayford's vague depiction, did anyone ever wonder in print how Hawthorne got his copy so soon, when there was no other copy in Lenox that we know of and the book was not in the Pittsfield bookstore until mid-December? We slap our heads the way I slapped mine when I realized that Melville himself had written the note announcing that he could be expected home from the Pacific at any moment. Every Melville scholar must feel chagrined at not having realized that, in order for Hawthorne to have had the copy of Moby-Dick so soon, Melville must have carried a copy to him. What fools we academics be! Melville liked to surprise people, the way he surprised his mother and sisters in 1844. He wanted to see Hawthorne's face as he first saw the dedication page. We ought to have known this sort of thing happened, even before we had the documentation of the meeting in the Lenox hotel. Shame on us for not thinking of writers as real people with normal needs. (With the aid of databases in 2010 I learned I should have used the 1851 name, the Wilson Hotel, earlier the Berkshire Coffee-House or the Red Inn, renamed the Curtis Hotel a few years later. Curtis in his later years talked as if he had been the owner of the hotel from the late 1840s, and in fact he was much on the scene because of his and his brother's livery stable and a stage route as well as a boarding house nearby.)

In August 1992 I had other things to do besides trying to do justice to the scene. I had just pushed into 1856 in my draft of the latter portion of my biography. I had started at the publication of Moby-Dick rather than Melville's birth because what I was adding to the Log made me question whether I would have the strength to write about the last four decades of Melville's life after exhausting myself on the first decades. Would I succumb to the heartache of the later decades, I worried, and leave the second half of the book unwritten (I was still thinking of it as one volume), as William Manchester would later leave his biography of Churchill uncompleted? Better to draft the second half first, so I did. When it became clear that the biography would have to be broken in two, and that (because I had found so many new episodes) each volume would be longer than the whole was originally envisioned, the question of where to break it became urgent. Volume One had to end on a high dramatic note. I don't remember all the talk back and forth, but I think it was John Wenke who said simply, "You don't have any choice. You have to end it in the hotel."

What I wrote about that meeting of Hawthorne and Melville proved as controversial as anything in the whole first volume. Philip Weiss in the New York Times Magazine for 15 December 1996 recalled my lecture at the 92nd Street Y: "The high point of the lecture would also be the high point of Parker's book: a largely imagined description of a sacred moment, a meeting that Parker discovered took place between Melville and Hawthorne in 1851."

The scene, as I will show, was not really “largely imagined,” but the words "largely imagined" had grim consequences such as this item from the Internet:

"Parker says that Hawthorne and Melville agreed to meet as soon as Melville published Moby-Dick. He says that Melville drove to Hawthorne's to invite him to a formal farewell dinner and/or publishing celebration at Curtis's hotel in Lenox. I don't know where he got this from since he quotes no sources nor have any other sources referred to this meeting. He also says that Lenoxites were curious about the two local recluses in the hotel. This seems to me to be pure fabrication on the part of Parker in order to present a more dramatic story. (Okay, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for credibility.) He concludes this volume of his biography with a description of their meeting. Where is he getting this from? He's clearly just making up details and is not at all reliable." This was 1999.
On the Internet since 1999 this slander: “I also think Hershel Parker sacrifices his biographical integrity by ending his book with a charming and fabricated story.”
“This is just one example of Parker speculating without offering any evidence to back up his opinions.”
Then came this annihilating early review, nominally of my second volume. In the Nation (20 May 2002) Brenda Wineapple ignored my second volume in order to characterize that final scene from the first volume as fantasized, even worse than "largely imagined":

"Parker's fine sleuthing turned up a newspaper article, printed in the 1852 Windsor, Vermont, Journal, that recounts Melville meeting Hawthorne for dinner at a hotel in Lenox, Massachusetts, conveniently situated between Pittsfield and the small house the Hawthornes were occupying on the border of what today is known as Tanglewood." Wineapple continued: "And on the basis of this gossip column" (but it was not a gossip column), "Parker speculates that the dinner took place circa November 14 and that as the two friends lingered, alone in the dining room, Melville handed Moby-Dick to Hawthorne. ('In no other way could Hawthorne have had a copy so soon,' Parker explains.)" She was building toward this demolition of my integrity as a biographer:

“As Hawthorne held Moby-Dick in his hand, ‘he could open the book in his nervous way (more nervous even than normally),’ writes Parker, ‘and get from his friend a guided tour of the organization of the thing now in print, and even sample a few paragraphs that caught his eye or that the author eagerly pointed out to him.’ He could indeed. Whether he did is another matter, though not for Parker, as secure in his fantasy as Edmund Morris is in his imaginary Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. ‘Take it all in all,’ Parker concludes, ‘this was the happiest day of Melville's life.’”

Biographers talk about “rivals.” In Mark Bostridge’s LIVES FOR SALE, Frances Wilson describes the horror of discovering that she had not one but two rivals working on Harriette Wilson: “Our books would appear together, be reviewed together, be stocked on the shelves together.” At some point I learned that the woman sitting in the front row as I gave talks about my discoveries was writing a biography of her own, and I knew in the late 1990s that the ferocious reviewer of my first volume, Andrew Delbanco, was planning his own biography of Melville, but I had not heard anything about Wineapple except that she was planning a biography of Hawthorne. On reading this scathing comparison of me to Edmund Morris it was apparent to me that she regarded herself as a rival.

If I got a Pulitzer for the second volume instead of just being one of two finalists, as in 1997 (when the award went to a short easy-to-read misery memoir honestly marketed in Ireland and the UK and the rest of Ireland as fiction), would the Pulitzer committee be willing to consider her for a Pulitzer in only another year or two, when her biography was published? Two Pulitzers on the American friends Melville and Hawthorne in close proximity? Knocking me out of competition would clear the field for her biography of Hawthorne? This smart strategy is the one Andrew Delbanco seems also had been employing for years and employed devastatingly in 2002, when he said I could not be trusted because I had made up THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS (although both of them had weirdly become real in time for his 2005 book).

Here is Wineapple's own version of this scene, in her 2003 biography of Hawthorne:

“In the fall, they [the Hawthornes] sold much of their furniture at auction, including Hawthorne's mahogany writing desk, and gathered the remaining household goods, leaving behind their five cats and a sorrowful Melville. There was nothing to be done about Melville, of course; he had a family of his own. Early in November, Hawthorne met Melville for dinner at the Lenox hotel, and that night Melville presumably gave Hawthorne his inscribed copy of Moby-Dick, cooked, Melville hinted, partly at Hawthorne's fire. ‘I have written a wicked book,’ Melville was to tell him, ‘and feel spotless as a lamb.’ The letter (lost) that Hawthorne wrote in praise of Moby-Dick drove the younger author to rapture: ‘Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's,’ Melville surged with hopeful intimacy, demanding in the next breath, ‘Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right you do drink from my flagon of life?’"

The cats had indeed been abandoned, according to Julian, and Melville could have been sorrowing, despite the exultant tone of his letter to Hawthorne. Whether he was sorrowful is another matter, though not for Wineapple, who (this is a terrible thing to say, but true) is as secure in her fantasy as Edmund Morris is in his imaginary Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

This is cheeky, vulgar writing about sacred days in the lives of two momentous men who deserve a full measure of respect.

Wineapple, said Dennis Donoghue in the Los Angeles Time Book Review, 28 September 2003, depicted Hawthorne as “a miserable, whining man, aloof, self-obsessed, determined to be unhappy. . . . Wineapple seems to have wearied of her subject and become exasperated with his debility.” Donoghue saves for the ending his unhappiness about Wineapple’s vulgarities of style:

Donoghue: I don’t think Wineapple is secure in her interpretation of Hawthorne. This may account for the strange mixture of styles in her writing. Much of the book is ordinary, decent standard English, as in the passages I’ve quoted. But a lot of it is in the style of romantic fiction. “The Eternal City huddled in January’s icy glare,” meaning that it was cold in Rome that January: “Head bent, the Reverend Bentley wears his broad-brimmed hat, he usually does, and raises his skirts as if to dodge temptation, passing whorehouses and warehouses hunkered near the water’s edge.” Nonsense: no evidence for any of this, except maybe the hat. “Perhaps he took her hand then, warm and small in her wintry glove.” Perhaps, perhaps not. “Age clasped his throat.” It what? “Liverpool loomed on the shore, warehouses standing like upended coffins in an overcast dawn.” Maybe: I doubt it. Hawthorne wrote romances, but that doesn’t justify his biographer in writing romantic sentences. And then, presumably to enrich the mixture, Wineapple uses demotic American, pretending that the past tense of “tread” is “tread,” not “trod,” and that “like” has wiped out “as” just as “that” has displaced “who” and “whom”: “like Hawthorne does,” “like Dickens or Balzac do,” and “the man that he kills.”

So much for Donoghue on Wineapple.

What Wineapple purveyed about me in the Nation was romantic fiction, indeed, and inaccurate as biography. In her review she describes the hotel as
"conveniently situated between Pittsfield and the small house the
Hawthornes were occupying on the border of what today is known as
Tanglewood." Had she walked the Berkshire terrain without realizing that the Wilson/Curtis Hotel is not equidistant or nearly equidistant from the little red cottage and from Arrowhead? The meeting I described was not in early November, and she errs in the footnotes when she cites me as authority for "Early in November." In my biography, I did reveal an early November meeting--the 4 November meeting at Charles and Elizabeth Sedgwick's in Lenox, but Wineapple ignores this new information.

Then, Wineapple mis-imagines the new meeting I discovered, taking it as nocturnal. In the Melvilles' usage, family dinner ended by 1:30 or so and the afternoon could be taken up with work for several hours. Gansevoort could haul skins to Schenectady after dinner and get back after dark. Redburn could have dinner ashore in Liverpool and resume work at 1:30. Under extreme pressure young Allan could be forced to work through the day and take dinner as late as 4 or even 5, although later in New York City the large household dined at 4. Dinner at a western Massachusetts hotel, as in North Adams, was noon or shortly afterwards. That was the case in the summer of 1851 is clear from the drivers' attempt to deliver the Morewood-Melville party to the North Adams hotel at dinner hour--for after the showdown with the cunning driver and the local constabulary and the trip back to Pittsfield, Mrs. Morewood proposed a fishing party for the afternoon, and planned a midnight supper. Midnight suppers at gala parties was not uncommon. Yes, on occasion Melville could go to Lenox at night, even in November, but he took Hawthorne to the hotel for dinner, presumably after the guests had dined, for he booked the dining room for himself. This would have been after any guests at the hotel had finished dinner, the midday meal, perhaps two in the afternoon.

Appallingly, all but unbelievably, Wineapple misquoted what Melville wrote Hawthorne three days or so later, his claiming to "feel spotless as the lamb." We are dependent upon Rose Hawthorne Lathrop's transcription, but this daughter of Hawthorne's knew a biblical reference when she saw one. Melville felt then, after reading Hawthorne's letter, anyone who knows the Bible or falteringly consults a biblical concordance would have recognized, as spotless as Jesus, the Lamb of God. Wineapple apparently visualized Melville as the Pittsfield farmer who milked his own cow and had been around exceptionally clean sheep, one who could say that he felt "spotless as a lamb."

Well, Melville HAD been around the Melvill farm when there were sheep, and nearby when sheep went astray, as in 1837:

PITTSFIELD November 16, 1837: A notice in the Sun, accompanied by a woodcut of a sheep, and dated November 8:
STRAYED From the subscriber on or about the first inst. sixteen sheep, consisting of thirteen EWES and three WETHERS marked by a crop of the left ear. Whoever shall return said Sheep, or give information where they may be found, shall be liberally rewarded.
ROBERT MELVILL

But Melville felt as spotless as Jesus, not as bedraggled as these 13 ewes and three wethers or other besoiled sheep he had seen in New York or Massachusetts. Wineapple misquoted the text so as to desecrate the biblical meaning just as she trivialized the whole of the last encounter in the Berkshires of these two momentous men.


Was what I wrote so irresponsible in its misguided loftiness that she had to compare it to the notoriously fictionalized DUTCH by Edmund Morris?

Let's see how secure I was in my “fantasy.” What, factually, could I glean from the letter from Maherbal, what could I work into my last paragarphs? Well, a very great deal indeed!

1. The writer knew that Melville had dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne and could accurately quote from the dedication.
2. Melville and Hawthorne met each other "not very long" before 10 January 1852, and therefore fairly soon before 21 November 1851, when Hawthorne left Lenox, as Maherbal knew.
3. The two men met in a Lenox hotel, for dinner.
4. Observers, possibly a good many, looked into the dining room where the men sat at a table alone together? At the least, some Lenoxites looked in and many Lenoxites learned of the meeting. In the biography I read Maherbal as indicating that some of the Lenoxites peeked in at the two writers. That, I see now, was pushing the evidence.
5. Any observers, like the rest of Berkshire County, had confirmed Maherbal in the belief that the writers were acquainted already but had not become intimate friends.
6. Pittsfield people had complained about Melville's exclusiveness.
7. Lenox people had complained about Hawthorne's exclusiveness.
8. Melville and Hawthorne both seemed to be "strangers to any thing like familiarity of social intercourse" with each other and presumably with other people.
9. Maherbal thought of Melville as the author of Typee and Hawthorne as the writer of The Scarlet Letter, which implies that he was thinking of the sensualist vs. the Puritan moralist--a comical pairing. Maherbal testified that Melville's name "often lingers now in terms of adulation upon many rosy lips," a fair indication of how he and many others saw Melville--what I long ago described as the nation's first sex symbol.
10. "Not very long ago," the two writers had "in some unaccountable way, gotten a mutual desire to see one another."
11. They should have met in either Melville's house or Hawthorne's house, he thought (not thinking of Hawthorne's lack of mobility and not knowing that the Little Red House was in disarray).
12. Instead, they violated local custom by making "arrangements in a very formal manner to dine together at a hotel in this village," thereby baffling if not outraging the conventional standards of those who learned what they had done.
13. Maherbal reflected in something like awe or disbelief at what had occurred in the local hotel: "What a solemn time they must have had, those mighty conjurors in the domain of the imagination, all alone in the dining-room of a hotel!"
14. Flippant young men and lightheaded young women of Lenox and indeed in all of Berkshire may have witnessed and certainly heard stories of this "solemn attempt of two of the greatest characters of which the county could boast, towards an acquaintance."
15. These Berkshire County beaux and belles made this meeting "a subject of infinite merriment."
16. The meeting was in a very public place. (There was in 1851 another hotel, the Ives Hotel, but the Berkshire Coffee-Shop, in 1851 the Wilson Hotel, later to be the Curtis Hotel, was the only famous hotel in Lenox; both Melville and Hawthorne had prior connections with the Wilson Hotel.
17. The meeting lasted a good long time, time enough for the men to get to know each other, time enough to justify making the formal arrangement for the use of the dining room. Two hours? Three hours?

In the light of all this factual detail, what had I invented or fantasized?

I made a conscious decision to treat the golden gift of this unknown meeting in a style appropriately heightened to describe Melville's giving an inscribed copy of Moby-Dick to Hawthorne and watching his face as he read the dedication. Can I prove the meeting did not take place at another time in the Fall? I can't prove it, but given what we know of their meeting on 4 November and Hawthorne's signing a book for Malcolm on the 7th and Melville's having to give Moby-Dick to Hawthorne in order for him to read it and write to him about it, I take it as pretty well proven. (You can imagine Harpers sending Hawthorne an advance copy of the book, but that is fantasy. Fields sent copies out to Hawthorne's friends, to be sure.) Melville had an urgent need to meet Hawthorne, did in fact meet him, and thereafter Hawthorne possessed a copy of Moby-Dick, and wrote Melville about it very soon thereafter, and from Maherbal we know of a private meeting in a public place which the Lenoxites found very strange.

In the final pages of the first volume of my biography I attempted to show how Lenox and Pittsfield felt about the two authors who had lived in their county but had not made themselves familiar guests in their churches and dinner tables. I needed to remind the reader that the jail where Uncle Thomas had been confined was cheek-by-jowl with the courthouse where Shaw presided--in a row with the Wilson Hotel. I needed to remind the reader of how resentful many in the Berkshires were that Hawthorne had proved so maddeningly reclusive and that Melville had almost never attended church with his sisters and mother and had rebuffed the ministerial advances. I wanted to recall Melville's youthful impression of the awe in which the Pittsfield men regarded the courtesies of Uncle Thomas and the rich man of the village, Edward Newton: "To the ensuing conversation, also, they listened with the look of steers astonished in the pasture at the camel of the menagerie passing by on the road." I wanted to play up, throughout the ending, the mingled admiration, irritation, frustration, and envy of the local inhabitants, playing that off against the easy intimacy and conspicuous distinction of the two men in the dining room, however they were dressed. These two men, I did not venture to say, were striking looking, Melville very handsome and Hawthorne grizzled now but displaying much of the facial gorgeousness that had marked the decades of his early maturity. They were, however people responded to their looks, genuine national and international celebrities, and well worth staring at or hearing about. I was happy to use a bit of Melville's markings, a decade later, of Hazlitt's railing about the narrowness and viciousness of country people and his enthusiastic seconding of Hazlitt's opinions.

To flesh out the scene I conscientiously looked at reliable accounts of Hawthorne's characteristic mannerisms, which I knew less well than Melville's. His legs (longer than Melville's) would have been under the table, but what about his hands? Witnesses testified to his nervous gestures. Would Hawthorne then put the book down and not look at it again and proceed to talk about his plans for life in West Newton. That would not have been polite. The only polite thing to do is to look through the book a little, not neglecting your host, but getting a sense of what goes on in the book. What does Melville do when you are holding the book? Could he resist pointing out the compliment to Salem women? In ordinary human behavior they would have picked the book up many times and passed it back and forth. And they talked of their achievements and their plans, Melville, perhaps, of what he had already done on Pierre. Is this wild fantasy in the manner of Edmund Morris’s DUTCH?

This is my final paragraph in the 14 July 1995 printout Hayford read and marked:

There were onlookers aplenty, but no eavesdroppers to record their conversation. Decades later Melville wrote into the manuscript a closeted interview between Captain Vere and Billy Budd--an interview the secrets of which the narrator does not reveal. At some well chosen moment Melville took out the book they had been awaiting and handed his friend an autographed copy of Moby-Dick, the first presentation copy. How else would Hawthorne have had a copy so soon, one that he had read by the 15th or 16th? Here, in the dining room, Hawthorne for the first time saw the extraordinary dedication--the first time a book had ever been dedicated to him. Never demonstrative, he was profoundly moved. Alone with the author, he could open the book, get a guided tour of the organization of the thing in print, and even sample a few paragraphs that caught his eye or that the author particularly wanted him to see, perhaps some passages he had seen in March in Melville's study. Hawthorne could see enough, in that period of sampling, to be profoundly impressed by the genius of the author of this book queerly named for an enormous sperm whale, Moby-Dick. The flippant beaux and the light-headed belles were witnessing a sacred occasion in American literary life as the men lingered at the table, drinking, soothed into ineffable socialities, obscured at times from view by their tobacco smoke. They lingered long after the dining-room had emptied, each reverential toward the other's genius, each aware that when they met again, in West Newton, in Boston, or wherever their Fates might bring them together, they would not fall at once into these present terms of intimacy. Inevitably, Hawthorne, the one who was leaving, was looking forward, and Melville at moments was looking back at his decision to finish his book near this older writer, but at other moments he was living intensely in the present, a moment he might have been robbed of if the book had been delayed, the time when his friend held in his hand his farewell gift, the printed and bound book, a tangible token of Melville's admiration for his genius. Take it all in all, it was the happiest day of Melville's life.

In the book as printed in 1996 this paragraph became, by Hayford's direction, two long paragraphs and a very short final one, the two longer ones incorporating Hayford's suggestions for strengthening the prose. My last line was changed a little, not by Hayford's advice, to "Take it all in all, this was the happiest day of Melville's life." I indignantly rejected someone else's correction of "Take" to "Taken": I was an Okie who had worked to acquire a prose voice, and I was challenging and alluring the reader into complicity with me. Besides, "take him all in all" had been good enough for Hamlet.

“A real DIAMOND of a find,” Hayford wrote in his minute criticism on the printout of that scene, as he pushed for clearer visualizing of Hawthorne and Melville at the table. Hayford then filled the back of the last page of the printout, starting a third of the way down the left and raying out east, north, and south, here transcribed in order of inscription:

1:15 a.m. 17 July 95 Reader (HH) at end of book after the past 10 days’ day & night sessions. Surpassingly GOOD!—this whole last Chapter (A WOWZER—even & esp. to us old Shipmate Melvilleans)—THAR SHE BREACHES (to high heaven) etc etc
But do labor, up to the moment when you surrender the last page proofs, to polish the whole passage and this [final] ¶ to its full shining climactic peak.
Every word counts--as in a lyric poem, which this ¶ is (it breaks into SONG—a Song of jubilation & Praise)---(I’m carried away—as I’ve been all week in this HOUSE and the presence of the author of this stunningly magnificent biography.)

I print this here as a memorable record of the lifelong response to new details about Melville and Hawthorne by the man who had pioneered the recovery of documentary records of their acquaintance and had striven to capture the essential qualities of their relationship. I print it, also, as an illustration of how great lifelong scholarship, like Hayford’s work on Hawthorne and Melville, can become part of an ongoing collaboration of scholars, as when Hawthorne surprised both Hayford and me by coming back onstage so often in the first draft of the second volume of my biography, which Hayford read before reading the first volume. Herman Melville: A Biography, Hayford knew very well, would not have been written without his own “Melville and Hawthorne.”

The New York attacks on my integrity as a biography in 2002 were devastating to my health and peace of mind. I felt helpless against the onslaughts from Wineapple, Brodhead, and Delbanco. Together, and joined later by Elizabeth Schultz, the New York reviewers formed a united front for the Pulitzer committee to see. The 1997 committee had given the prize to an early fictional “misery memoir” and named me as one of the two finalists. The 2003 committee need not consider me at all, since after all my claims of doing fresh archival research the best New York reviewers had declared that I had written a fantasy biography.

I did not speak out about Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz until 2007. I am 75 now, carrying on with "severely damaged lung capacity" from long-arrested tuberculosis, shoring up these fragments from a writing desk. It is time that I speak out about Brenda Wineapple. How much, I challenge her or you, how much about the final scene in my first volume is fantasized? Did I deserve to have my biography compared to Edmund Morris’s DUTCH?