BRENDA WINEAPPLE: CAN SHE WRITE A SINGLE ACCURATE SENTENCE ABOUT MELVILLE?
In April I finally looked at Brenda Wineapple’s review of my biography in the NATION and am stunned by the reckless writing.I repost this in May to keep the Wineapple pieces together:
In 1841 Melville signed on to the whaler Acushnet . . . .
HE WAS ON THE CREW LIST ON 31 DECEMBER 1840. Picky of me?
. . . the autobiographical Redburn (1849), followed by a story of seamen, White-Jacket (1850) . . .
REDBURN WAS NOT SIMPLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND WHITE-JACKET IS FAR MORE THAN A STORY OF SEAMEN.
. . . . And on the basis of this gossip column . . . .
MAHERBAL WAS NOT WRITING A GOSSIP COLUMN FOR THE WINDSOR, VERMONT, JOURNAL. WINEAPPLE DOES NOT KNOW ABOUT SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS.
According to Parker, who expertly excavated information about the lost manuscript, including its title ("The Isle of the Cross"), Melville finished this book, which his publisher, Harper's, was prevented from printing for some unknown reason. (Parker thinks the Harper brothers feared a suit from survivors . . .)
I NEVER SAID I THOUGHT THAT. I SAID THAT WAS THE MOST OBVIOUS GUESS THEN WENT ON TO EXPLAIN THAT THE MOST OBVIOUS GUESS WAS NOT NECESSARILY THE RIGHT ONE.
. . . "The Encantadas," sketches that Melville may have purloined from a longer unpublished manuscript of his about tortoises . . . .
NOTHING INDICATES THAT WHATEVER MELVILLE WROTE OF HIS TORTOISE HUNTING BOOK WAS LONGER THAN THE ENCANTADAS; “PURLOINED” IS VULGAR AND INEXACT, BUT MELVILLE MAY HAVE PUSHED SOME OF THE TORTOISE BOOK INTO THE ENCANTADAS.
Judge Shaw dispatched the ailing Melville to Rome, Egypt and the Levant . . .
WHAT IS WRONG WITH GIVING THE SEQUENCE CORRECTLY, EGYPT, THE LEVANT, AND ROME?
[Egypt] . . . hoping to find among the hieroglyphics tidings to quiet his uneasy soul.
IS THERE ANY EVIDENCE THAT MELVILLE THOUGHT HE WOULD BE QUIETED BY THE HIEROGLYPHICS? IS THIS JUST HIGH-SOUNDING BLATHER?
His works falling out of print,he solaced himself in long walks around New York City after he and his family moved there in 1863, and eventually landed
a dry-dock job as a Custom House inspector.
HIS BOOKS FELL OUT OF PRINT? No. THE PIAZZA TALES AND THE CONFIDENCE-MAN WERE NOT AVAILABLE, BUT ISRAEL POTTER WAS REPRINTED IN 1865 AND THE HARPER BOOKS REMAINED IN PRINT.
WHAT CAN SHE THINK A DRY-DOCK IS?
A DEFINITION FROM FLICKR.COM: “Dry docks are great chambers below water level used for the repair and construction of ships. A ship can be brought in from the adjoining body of water once the chamber has been filled with water. The chamber is then drained, allowing the ship to rest on wooden blocks so that work may proceed. After work is completed, the chamber is flooded to outside water level, the gate is opened, and the ship can depart.” JUST THE PLACE FOR A CUSTOMS INSPECTOR TO WORK!
. . . allegations about Melville's abuse of his wife, which so upset her brothers they wanted to kidnap her and the children and hustle them back to Boston.
THERE IS NO MENTION OF THE CHILDREN IN SAMUEL SHAW’S LETTER TO H. W. BELLOWS, AND LIZZIE’S HALF BROTHERS (HER FULL BROTHER WAS NOT INVOLVED?) NEVER SUGGESTED KIDNAPPING HER OR HER AND THE CHILDREN. IT WAS H. W. BELLOWS WHO SUGGESTED SOMETHIG LIKE A KIDNAPPING, A SCHEME SAM REJECTED.
The beleaguered Melville frequently did abandon his wife, whom he seemed to love, though he was clearly drawn to the company of men . . . .
MELVILLE FREQUENTLY ABANDONED HIS WIFE?
What can you say about this level of sloppiness?
Labels: biographical errors, Brenda Wineapple, Errors of fact, Melville
Showing posts with label Melville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Melville. Show all posts
Monday, May 2, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
BRENDA WINEAPPLE: CAN SHE WRITE A SINGLE ACCURATE SENTENCE ABOUT MELVILLE?
I finally looked at Brenda Wineapple’s review of my biography in the NATION and am stunned by the reckless writing. Here are examples:
In 1841 Melville signed on to the whaler Acushnet . . . .
HE WAS ON THE CREW LIST ON 31 DECEMBER 1840. Picky of me?
. . . the autobiographical Redburn (1849), followed by a story of seamen, White-Jacket (1850) . . .
REDBURN WAS NOT SIMPLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND WHITE-JACKET IS FAR MORE THAN A STORY OF SEAMEN.
. . . . And on the basis of this gossip column . . . .
MAHERBAL WAS NOT WRITING A GOSSIP COLUMN FOR THE WINDSOR, VERMONT, JOURNAL. WINEAPPLE DOES NOT KNOW ABOUT SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS.
According to Parker, who expertly excavated information about the lost manuscript, including its title ("The Isle of the Cross"), Melville finished this book, which his publisher, Harper's, was prevented from printing for some unknown reason. (Parker thinks the Harper brothers feared a suit from survivors . . .)
I NEVER SAID I THOUGHT THAT. I SAID THAT WAS THE MOST OBVIOUS GUESS THEN WENT ON TO EXPLAIN THAT THE MOST OBVIOUS GUESS WAS NOT NECESSARILY THE RIGHT ONE.
. . . "The Encantadas," sketches that Melville may have purloined from a longer unpublished manuscript of his about tortoises . . . .
NOTHING INDICATES THAT WHATEVER MELVILLE WROTE OF HIS TORTOISE HUNTING BOOK WAS LONGER THAN THE ENCANTADAS; “PURLOINED” IS VULGAR AND INEXACT, BUT MELVILLE MAY HAVE PUSHED SOME OF THE TORTOISE BOOK INTO THE ENCANTADAS.
Judge Shaw dispatched the ailing Melville to Rome, Egypt and the Levant . . .
WHAT IS WRONG WITH GIVING THE SEQUENCE CORRECTLY, EGYPT, THE LEVANT, AND ROME?
[Egypt] . . . hoping to find among the hieroglyphics tidings to quiet his uneasy soul.
IS THERE ANY EVIDENCE THAT MELVILLE THOUGHT HE WOULD BE QUIETED BY THE HIEROGLYPHICS? IS THIS JUST HIGH-SOUNDING BLATHER?
His works falling out of print,he solaced himself in long walks around New York City after he and his family moved there in 1863, and eventually landed
a dry-dock job as a Custom House inspector.
HIS BOOKS FELL OUT OF PRINT? No. THE PIAZZA TALES AND THE CONFIDENCE-MAN WERE NOT AVAILABLE, BUT ISRAEL POTTER WAS REPRINTED IN 1865 AND THE HARPER BOOKS REMAINED IN PRINT.
WHAT CAN SHE THINK A DRY-DOCK IS?
A DEFINITION FROM FLICKR.COM: “Dry docks are great chambers below water level used for the repair and construction of ships. A ship can be brought in from the adjoining body of water once the chamber has been filled with water. The chamber is then drained, allowing the ship to rest on wooden blocks so that work may proceed. After work is completed, the chamber is flooded to outside water level, the gate is opened, and the ship can depart.” JUST THE PLACE FOR A CUSTOMS INSPECTOR TO WORK!
. . . allegations about Melville's abuse of his wife, which so upset her brothers they wanted to kidnap her and the children and hustle them back to Boston.
THERE IS NO MENTION OF THE CHILDREN IN SAMUEL SHAW’S LETTER TO H. W. BELLOWS, AND LIZZIE’S HALF BROTHERS (HER FULL BROTHER WAS NOT INVOLVED?) NEVER SUGGESTED KIDNAPPING HER OR HER AND THE CHILDREN. IT WAS H. W. BELLOWS WHO SUGGESTED SOMETHIG LIKE A KIDNAPPING, A SCHEME SAM REJECTED.
The beleaguered Melville frequently did abandon his wife, whom he seemed to love, though he was clearly drawn to the company of men . . . .
MELVILLE FREQUENTLY ABANDONED HIS WIFE?
What can you say about this level of sloppiness?
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Roger Payne and Hershel Parker 1997
The man who first learned that whales sing.
And whose own life is a brave song.
The halo is providential.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Hershel Parker talking to Maurice Sendak Pittsfield 1991
This is the Melville meeting at which Sendak promised to do a cover picture for my biography which was then supposed to be a single volume. When it became two volumes, he did a second picture.
Joyce Deveau Kennedy and Frederick Kennedy
The only great male-female research team in Melville scholarship.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Series,The Lost Skill of Accurate Manuscript Transcription, No. 1, Neal L. Tolchin
A Little Learning about Manuscript Transition
By the late 1980s a few up and coming young academics saw that, after all, there was some strategic self-promotional value in acknowledging things historical and even things biographical. A very few of these younger academics began going to the archives, the most persistent of whom was Neal L. Tolchin, who worked his findings into his 1988 Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville. Tolchin was a rarity, a New Historicist who had actually set out to perform archival research. In 1992 Andrew Delbanco offered this praise of Tolchin’s arguments and conclusions without mentioning Tolchin’s use of manuscript material:
Another substantial book, Neal L. Tolchin's Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville, uses psychoanalytic categories to propose a different way in which antebellum American culture was constricting and oppressive. Here we learn that Americans, especially women, were subject to a pathology of chronic grieving that placed them in 'a double bind . . . which at once prolonged the process of mourning and blocked the expression of feeling in bereavement."
While employing his "psychoanalytic categories," Tolchin [xv] had essayed "a radical revision of the biographical text" which located "Maria Melville's hitherto marginalized influence at the center of the tensions in Melville's art."
In achieving this revolutionary view, Tolchin had ventured into the New York Public Library to look at some of the letters in the Augusta Papers and had traveled to Pittsfield to look at family letters in the Berkshire Athenaeum. Tolchin did not recognize that he was having trouble, particularly with Melville's mother's letters. Maria Gansevoort Melville's handwriting is perfectly clear, after you transcribe several dozen of her letters (a comment that almost guarantees that I will blunder the next time I quote her). Tolchin printed some very strange transcriptions, and some of his biographical conclusions on the basis of mistaken transcriptions are breathtaking.
Tolchin's difficulties with transcribing and understanding are most prominently displayed in the first paragraph of his second chapter, "The Liminality of Grief: Mourning Ritual in Typee." Here Tolchin's misreadings are so serious as to undermine not just a single chapter (built upon misreadings) but his entire book:
In a letter of February 7, 1846, a puzzled Maria Melville comments on her son's recently published first novel, Typee, "his book which none of us understand, so contradictory in its information." One wonders if Mrs. Melville associated her son Gansevoort's leg ailment with the mysterious leg injury that the narrative persona, Tommo, suffers and which causes him to be carried about on a native's back. Writing on March 5, 1839, Melville's mother describes how "Gansevoort has still to be carried to the fire and is unable to bear his weight." One further wonders whether the cause of Tommo's disability, his exposure to "death-like coldness" during a rainy night spent in a ravine, triggered for Mrs. Melville a memory of her husband's fatal exposure. To explore the social text of Tommo's leg wound and how it relates to Maria Melville's sense of Typee's contradictions, I examine the novel's conflicting types and peeps, as it links the pain inscribed in Tommo's body to Melville's frozen grief for his father.
This is remarkable as "a radical revision of the biographical text," but it rests upon a transcription of a document in the Augusta Papers by a New Historicist not trained in working with manuscripts.
To begin with, the letter Tolchin purports to quote is not dated 7 February 1846 but 28 February 1846. In it Maria explains a complex situation to her daughter Augusta, then visiting the Van Rensselaers in Albany:
Herman left us last monday Eveg for Troy on his way to New York by the early Cars--he receiv'd a letter from Allan in the morning regarding his book which none of us understood, so contradictory in its information. Herman was very desirous of having it come out in Wiley & Putnams "Library of Choice Reading," and from Allans letter, the thing was not determined, and indeed the arrival of the Book itself by the Cambria by the reading of Allans letter was more than uncertain. If the book was not got out by the first of March he would lose the Copy right in America, so Gansevoort wrote. Herman had no Idea of that you may suppose, to have the copy right was all to Herman--so he concluded to go to New York, altho Gansevoort particularly requested him to remain here--but too much was at stake and he went down--to assure himself that all was safe.
Maria, of course, does not say that the whole family was puzzled by Typee. They were puzzled not by Typee but by Allan's letter about it. In actual biographical fact Maria Melville nowhere manifested any "sense of Typee's contradictions," if such contradictions existed. On the contrary, good mother that she was, she perfectly understood how important preserving the American copyright for his book was to Herman. Tolchin had constructed his chapter on an absolutely false basis.
Punning on the subtitle of Typee ("A Peep at Polynesian Life"), Tolchin declared he would explore "the novel's conflicting types and peeps, as it links the pain inscribed in Tommo's body to Melville's frozen grief for his father." After misquoting the letter, Tolchin explained that he would build an elaborate theory on the basis of "the social text of Tommo's leg wound and how it relates to Maria Melville's sense of Typee's contradictions"--how the social text relates to a sense of contradictions that Maria Melville never experienced. For any New Critic, of course, the opening of a chapter or a larger work carries in it the plan of the whole. Well-trained critic that he is, Tolchin recurred to his powerful opening as he constructed the rest of the chapter. He began a new section of the chapter with a reminder that some of Tommo's actions and "the contradictory peeps at Marquesan life" must "have been in large part responsible for the bafflement with which Melville's family read Typee." No, Herman and Maria, at least, were puzzled by Allan's muddy letter, but not about the meaning of Typee. And of course, good critic that he is, Tolchin in the last sentence of the chapter tied the whole back to the first paragraph: "Tommo mirrors back to Maria Melville the 'contradictory . . . information' of her own unresolved grief as it has been transmuted into and energized her son's fictive mourning rite."
The first readers, you think, would have done a little spot verifying of Tolchin's transcriptions and then would have hooted the book out of libraries? That did not happen. No one at Yale University Press, no reader for the press, no reviewer or critic checked any of Tolchin's transcriptions from manuscripts. It did not matter at all that Tolchin had built a whole chapter on a fantastic misreading of Maria Melville's handwriting, and that, of course, according to the theory of organic unity the falsely-conceived chapter is built into and effects the entire book.
I called the mis-transcription in Maria’s 28 February 1846 letter to the attention of Brian Higgins so he could mention it in the annual American Literary Scholarship, but apparently no one has referred to that warning in print. Tolchin's book has been cited favorably dozens of times. In the American Historical Review (April 1990) Karen Halttunen declared that "Tolchin convincingly demonstrates that Melville's work abounds with images of blocked bereavement and with thinly veiled references to the death of his father." Tolchin "offers a compelling synthesis of the body of Melville's work." Bryan Collier Short in Cast By Means of Figures: Herman Melville's Rhetorical Development (1992) lists it among "biographically oriented studies" and Karen Elizabeth Smythe in Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (1992) cites it as "a biographical study." Julia A. Stern, in The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997), offers this praise:
Much of my thinking about the relationship between the feeling that characterizes sentimentality and the pathological disturbance of mourning that takes shape in melancholia is inspired by Mitchell R. Breitwieser's remark that, in a recent work on Melville and mourning in antebellum America, Neal L. Tolchin has identified the centrality of a blocking and channeling of mourning in genteel culture, and the consequent production of an underground melancholia. Tolchin's extensive and perspicacious investigation of Melville's America suggests to me that sentimentalism is a reappearance of the Puritan sublimation of mourning . . . ." 241
It is "an important study," says Peter Balaam in Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Composition, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature (2009). As dozens of favorable citations show, Tolchin's book has entered into common knowledge among writers interested in histories of emotion, in grief, misery, gender, death, and even the making of the middle-class family. Not one of the critics who have praised its insights and have incorporated its findings has seen that the second chapter is built upon a grotesque error which taints many other passages in the book. A critic who takes this flawed book as "a compelling synthesis of the body of Melville's work" is deluded, and insofar as the critic incorporates Tolchin's findings into his or her own work, that work is tainted.
By the late 1980s a few up and coming young academics saw that, after all, there was some strategic self-promotional value in acknowledging things historical and even things biographical. A very few of these younger academics began going to the archives, the most persistent of whom was Neal L. Tolchin, who worked his findings into his 1988 Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville. Tolchin was a rarity, a New Historicist who had actually set out to perform archival research. In 1992 Andrew Delbanco offered this praise of Tolchin’s arguments and conclusions without mentioning Tolchin’s use of manuscript material:
Another substantial book, Neal L. Tolchin's Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville, uses psychoanalytic categories to propose a different way in which antebellum American culture was constricting and oppressive. Here we learn that Americans, especially women, were subject to a pathology of chronic grieving that placed them in 'a double bind . . . which at once prolonged the process of mourning and blocked the expression of feeling in bereavement."
While employing his "psychoanalytic categories," Tolchin [xv] had essayed "a radical revision of the biographical text" which located "Maria Melville's hitherto marginalized influence at the center of the tensions in Melville's art."
In achieving this revolutionary view, Tolchin had ventured into the New York Public Library to look at some of the letters in the Augusta Papers and had traveled to Pittsfield to look at family letters in the Berkshire Athenaeum. Tolchin did not recognize that he was having trouble, particularly with Melville's mother's letters. Maria Gansevoort Melville's handwriting is perfectly clear, after you transcribe several dozen of her letters (a comment that almost guarantees that I will blunder the next time I quote her). Tolchin printed some very strange transcriptions, and some of his biographical conclusions on the basis of mistaken transcriptions are breathtaking.
Tolchin's difficulties with transcribing and understanding are most prominently displayed in the first paragraph of his second chapter, "The Liminality of Grief: Mourning Ritual in Typee." Here Tolchin's misreadings are so serious as to undermine not just a single chapter (built upon misreadings) but his entire book:
In a letter of February 7, 1846, a puzzled Maria Melville comments on her son's recently published first novel, Typee, "his book which none of us understand, so contradictory in its information." One wonders if Mrs. Melville associated her son Gansevoort's leg ailment with the mysterious leg injury that the narrative persona, Tommo, suffers and which causes him to be carried about on a native's back. Writing on March 5, 1839, Melville's mother describes how "Gansevoort has still to be carried to the fire and is unable to bear his weight." One further wonders whether the cause of Tommo's disability, his exposure to "death-like coldness" during a rainy night spent in a ravine, triggered for Mrs. Melville a memory of her husband's fatal exposure. To explore the social text of Tommo's leg wound and how it relates to Maria Melville's sense of Typee's contradictions, I examine the novel's conflicting types and peeps, as it links the pain inscribed in Tommo's body to Melville's frozen grief for his father.
This is remarkable as "a radical revision of the biographical text," but it rests upon a transcription of a document in the Augusta Papers by a New Historicist not trained in working with manuscripts.
To begin with, the letter Tolchin purports to quote is not dated 7 February 1846 but 28 February 1846. In it Maria explains a complex situation to her daughter Augusta, then visiting the Van Rensselaers in Albany:
Herman left us last monday Eveg for Troy on his way to New York by the early Cars--he receiv'd a letter from Allan in the morning regarding his book which none of us understood, so contradictory in its information. Herman was very desirous of having it come out in Wiley & Putnams "Library of Choice Reading," and from Allans letter, the thing was not determined, and indeed the arrival of the Book itself by the Cambria by the reading of Allans letter was more than uncertain. If the book was not got out by the first of March he would lose the Copy right in America, so Gansevoort wrote. Herman had no Idea of that you may suppose, to have the copy right was all to Herman--so he concluded to go to New York, altho Gansevoort particularly requested him to remain here--but too much was at stake and he went down--to assure himself that all was safe.
Maria, of course, does not say that the whole family was puzzled by Typee. They were puzzled not by Typee but by Allan's letter about it. In actual biographical fact Maria Melville nowhere manifested any "sense of Typee's contradictions," if such contradictions existed. On the contrary, good mother that she was, she perfectly understood how important preserving the American copyright for his book was to Herman. Tolchin had constructed his chapter on an absolutely false basis.
Punning on the subtitle of Typee ("A Peep at Polynesian Life"), Tolchin declared he would explore "the novel's conflicting types and peeps, as it links the pain inscribed in Tommo's body to Melville's frozen grief for his father." After misquoting the letter, Tolchin explained that he would build an elaborate theory on the basis of "the social text of Tommo's leg wound and how it relates to Maria Melville's sense of Typee's contradictions"--how the social text relates to a sense of contradictions that Maria Melville never experienced. For any New Critic, of course, the opening of a chapter or a larger work carries in it the plan of the whole. Well-trained critic that he is, Tolchin recurred to his powerful opening as he constructed the rest of the chapter. He began a new section of the chapter with a reminder that some of Tommo's actions and "the contradictory peeps at Marquesan life" must "have been in large part responsible for the bafflement with which Melville's family read Typee." No, Herman and Maria, at least, were puzzled by Allan's muddy letter, but not about the meaning of Typee. And of course, good critic that he is, Tolchin in the last sentence of the chapter tied the whole back to the first paragraph: "Tommo mirrors back to Maria Melville the 'contradictory . . . information' of her own unresolved grief as it has been transmuted into and energized her son's fictive mourning rite."
The first readers, you think, would have done a little spot verifying of Tolchin's transcriptions and then would have hooted the book out of libraries? That did not happen. No one at Yale University Press, no reader for the press, no reviewer or critic checked any of Tolchin's transcriptions from manuscripts. It did not matter at all that Tolchin had built a whole chapter on a fantastic misreading of Maria Melville's handwriting, and that, of course, according to the theory of organic unity the falsely-conceived chapter is built into and effects the entire book.
I called the mis-transcription in Maria’s 28 February 1846 letter to the attention of Brian Higgins so he could mention it in the annual American Literary Scholarship, but apparently no one has referred to that warning in print. Tolchin's book has been cited favorably dozens of times. In the American Historical Review (April 1990) Karen Halttunen declared that "Tolchin convincingly demonstrates that Melville's work abounds with images of blocked bereavement and with thinly veiled references to the death of his father." Tolchin "offers a compelling synthesis of the body of Melville's work." Bryan Collier Short in Cast By Means of Figures: Herman Melville's Rhetorical Development (1992) lists it among "biographically oriented studies" and Karen Elizabeth Smythe in Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (1992) cites it as "a biographical study." Julia A. Stern, in The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997), offers this praise:
Much of my thinking about the relationship between the feeling that characterizes sentimentality and the pathological disturbance of mourning that takes shape in melancholia is inspired by Mitchell R. Breitwieser's remark that, in a recent work on Melville and mourning in antebellum America, Neal L. Tolchin has identified the centrality of a blocking and channeling of mourning in genteel culture, and the consequent production of an underground melancholia. Tolchin's extensive and perspicacious investigation of Melville's America suggests to me that sentimentalism is a reappearance of the Puritan sublimation of mourning . . . ." 241
It is "an important study," says Peter Balaam in Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Composition, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature (2009). As dozens of favorable citations show, Tolchin's book has entered into common knowledge among writers interested in histories of emotion, in grief, misery, gender, death, and even the making of the middle-class family. Not one of the critics who have praised its insights and have incorporated its findings has seen that the second chapter is built upon a grotesque error which taints many other passages in the book. A critic who takes this flawed book as "a compelling synthesis of the body of Melville's work" is deluded, and insofar as the critic incorporates Tolchin's findings into his or her own work, that work is tainted.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Irresponsible Reviewers Series--Brodhead, Delbanco, & Schultz
In the old days if someone printed an error about a historical event, say, in a newspaper or magazine you could try to get a correction printed in the same paper or magazine. Now, errors put into print in (say in a review of a book) frequently live for years, fresh as ever every day, on the Internet. Is there any way of scotching this snake? Hopeless to think of killing it?
Early in the twenty-first century three prominent Melville critics, Richard Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz, warned that my biography of Melville was unreliable by citing my treatment of the lost The Isle of the Cross (1853) and the lost Poems (1860). The second of these reviewers, Delbanco, did not cite the earliest, Brodhead, as his authority, and Schultz cited neither Brodhead nor Delbanco.
Brodhead in the New York Times for 23 June 2002 disparaged “Parker's surmises about works Melville never published that did not survive”:
“He makes the case that in 1852-53 Melville wrote a novel based on materials he shared with Hawthorne about a sailor who deserted his wife. If this is true, then the theory that Melville renounced writing after ‘Pierre’ is just wrong, and the mysterious leap from ‘Pierre’ to the work he published after a silence, the very different ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’ can be explained in a new way. [This “insight” is not Brodhead’s but mine; “as Parker says” would have made that clear.] Parker is also convinced that Melville prepared a volume of poems in 1860 that failed to be published. If this is so, a stretch that had seemed empty of literary strivings was instead a time of new effort and new failure--a black hole Parker alone has the instruments to detect.”
Similarly, Andrew Delbanco in the New Republic (September 2002) warned that my second volume, like the first, “must be used with caution”:
“For one thing, Parker is amazingly certain of his own conclusions. . . . He is sure that immediately after completing Pierre, Melville wrote an unpublished novel (Parker implies that after failing to find a publisher, Melville burned it) inspired by a story he had heard about a sailor who disappears for thirty years, then returns to the wife for whom he has become a distant memory. He is sure that when Melville traveled by slow boat [“slow boat is a romantic intrusion] to San Francisco in 1860, he expected to find waiting for him a finished copy of a book of poems that he had entrusted in manuscript to his brother for transmission to his publishers before leaving the East. (Such a book was never published--and it is a surmise that Melville ever wrote it.) . . . . In short, Parker trusts his own intuition completely, and, presenting inferences as facts, he expects his readers to trust it, too.”
Brodhead and Delbanco refrained even from naming The Isle of the Cross, as if the title gave it too much actuality. Elizabeth Schultz in The Common Review (Winter 2002) mentioned the title skeptically in her complaint:
“Parker also reads betrayal and despair into the disappearance of two manuscripts, which he contends Melville completed--a novel, putatively titled The Isle of the Cross, and his first collection of poems. Throughout his biography, Parker bemoans the loss of The Isle of the Cross's ghostly manuscript, imagining Melville's regret at never having found a publisher for it. [But where throughout the biography are these ghostly references?] Although there is only tentative evidence for the manuscript's existence and submission to a publisher, its ostensible rejection leads Parker to view his heroic author as victimized: ‘masterful as he could be, [Melville] had a way now, after the failure of Moby-Dick and Pierre, of seeing himself as passive victim to whom things were done.’"
In their implication that I had invented these lost books none of these three reviewers mentioned the existence of any documentary evidence that earlier scholars and I had brought forward concerning these same two lost books.
All three critics, Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz, ignored a full half century of accumulating evidence about the book Melville completed in 1853, the book he had tried to get Hawthorne to write but had decided in December 1852 to write himself. (It was 1987 when I found the title The Isle of the Cross.) All three ignored extensive evidence about Poems, most of which had been available for eight decades. To ignore the work of generations of dedicated scholars comes close to being a mortal sin, it seems to me. To ignore their work is to erase their lives.
In their 1960 LETTERS, Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman showed that Melville had taken a book to the Harpers in the spring of 1853 but had been prevented from publishing it and still had the manuscript when he wrote the Harpers on 24 November 1853. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., building upon work by Harrison Hayford in 1946, concluded in his 1987 "Historical Note" to the Northwestern-Newberry "The Piazza Tales" and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 that Melville had completed the “Agatha” story. Sealts managed to narrow the completion date to around May 1853, demonstrating, on the basis of available evidence, that Melville had offered to the Harpers in June 1853 a new book which he still had in his possession that November in manuscript. Sealts quoted the forthright assertion at the start of Melville’s letter to the Harpers on 24 November 1853: “In addition to the work which I took to New York last Spring, but which I was prevented from printing at that time; I have now in hand, and pretty well on towards completion, another book—300 pages, say—partly of nautical adventure, and partly—or, rather, chiefly, of Tortoise Hunting Adventure.” Then Sealts commented: “The opening sentence of this letter would seem to indicate that Melville still had ‘in hand’ the unpublished work of the previous spring; if so, he had not at this point destroyed the manuscript.”
In 1987, just after Sealts’s “Historical Note” went to press, in the course of transcribing Melville’s cousin Priscilla’s letters to his sister Augusta, I found that Augusta Melville’s letter to Priscilla on 6 April 1853 had mentioned Herman’s new manuscript as near completion. Consequently Priscilla for weeks afterwards had “constantly” looked in “the journals & magazines” that reached her in isolated Canandaigua, New York, hoping to see notices. On 22 May she asked eagerly: “When will the ‘Isle of the Cross’ make its appearance?” Her letter reached Arrowhead on 26 May, and Augusta replied four days later, telling her that Bessie, the third Melville child, had been born on the 22nd and that Herman had completed his book. In her reply on 12 June Priscilla commented: “the ‘Isle of the Cross’ is almost a twin sister of the little one & I think she should be nam’d for the heroine—if there is such a personage—the advent of the two are singularly near together.” Some time passed before the manuscript was in good order and Melville felt he could be away from his family and the farm. It was around 6 or 7 June when he left with the manuscript for New York, very much as Sealts had said. In the same 1990 issue of American Literature where Parker published the new evidence for the title and date of completion, Gary Scharnhorst announced his discovery that on 11 June the Springfield Daily Republican had reported regional news: “Herman Melville has gone to New York to superintend the issue of a new work.” On 14 June (as Scott Norsworthy discovered in 2001) the Daily Evening Transcript repeated the news for Bostonians : “Herman Melville has gone to New York to superintend the issue of a new work.” The newspaper items in themselves are not conclusive, but in conjunction with Priscilla’s letters and with Melville’s own comments in November, where he implies the unpublished manuscript he was prevented from publishing was a book (in the same class as “another book” he was engaged on in November), the matter should have been settled. For Sealts and Hayford the matter was settled after Parker’s discoveries, before the news reports were found, although the fate of The Isle of the Cross was left as mysterious as ever. In his February 1990 “A Supplementary Note to Melville’s Reading (1988)” Sealts added a note to his earlier assertion that in June 1853 Melville took to New York “for submission to Harper and Brothers a book-length manuscript”: “Hershel Parker, working with Augusta Melville’s correspondence as recently added to the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection, New York Public Library, has established that this work was in fact ‘completed under the title of The Isle of the Cross.’”
Sealts’s use of the words “in fact” revealed his bias: he believed that sometimes archival evidence could reveal historical and biographical truth. Sealts knew that he was writing at a time when many academicians professed not to believe that any historical or biographical truth could ever be established. The repudiation of biographical information by the New Critics in the 1940s and 1950s and their successors through the New Historicists in the 1980s and 1990s had, after half a century and more, resulted in a professoriat which far too often not only did not know how to conduct archival research but was skeptical that any new information could be gained from archival research.
When he wrote his 1921 biography of Melville, Raymond Weaver had not known about POEMS (1860); his primary source of family information, Melville's granddaughter Eleanor Thomas Metcalf, treated Poems at length in her 1953 book, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, but she apparently had not learned about it in time to tell Weaver. The evidence had rested, unread, in the Duyckinck Collection in the New York Public Library until 1922, the year after Weaver’s biography appeared, when Meade Minnigerode published Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Bibliography (New York: Brick Row). There he printed documents that showed that Melville had completed a volume of poetry early in 1860 and left it to be published when he sailed with his brother Thomas around Cape Horn. The documents included Melville’s two letters to Evert A. Duyckinck asking if he would “lend something of an overseeing eye” to the launching of his new manuscript and telling him to expect to hear from Mrs. Melville. Minnigerode also printed three detailed letters from Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Duyckinck and, very tellingly, her copy of a letter Melville wrote to his brother Allan: “Memoranda for Allan Concerning the publication of my verses,” twelve specific directions. (In one of her letters Mrs. Melville later conveyed a thirteenth directive directly to Duyckinck.) The documents printed in 1922 show that Duyckinck submitted the manuscript to at least two New York publishers. In what became a standard anthology, often used as a textbook, Melville: Representative Selections (1938), Willard Thorp reprinted or summarized this evidence. Thereafter, the fact that Melville had completed a volume of poems in 1860 was familiar to Jay Leyda (who in The Melville Log published additional evidence, the letter from Charles Scribner rejecting Melville's Poems), to Leon Howard, Eleanor Metcalf, Walter E. Bezanson, Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (the joint editors of Melville's Letters), Harrison Hayford, Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and Hershel Parker—that is, to all Melville scholars after Thorp, and even to many critics who had not worked with Melville documents themselves or would not have seen Minnigerode’s book. It seemed that no one could deny the existence of Poems except by demonstrating that the documents Minnigerode discovered (and the later-discovered letter from Scribner) were forgeries, part of a gigantic hoax on Melville scholars.
The claims made in 2002 and 2003 that THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and the 1860 POEMS had only a hypothetical existence were published in the New York Times and in influential magazines, just where they could most seriously mislead the general literary community and Melville critics, including the reviewers who read at least the early review in the Times. But the existence of Poems in 1860 is simple fact, inarguable to anyone who believes there is such a thing as verifiable biographical fact. A few decades ago scholars could hope at least that a printed correction would ultimately scotch the snake of error, if not kill it. In the twenty-first century errors in reviews are almost uncorrectable, for false statements may continue to mislead incalculable numbers of readers during an extended afterlife on the Internet, where an eager new Melvillean of the indefinite future may encounter even the most inaccurate review without the advantage of a warning label.
Weirdly, Andrew Delbanco in his 2005 MELVILLE: HIS WORLD AND WORK (208) refers to “a novel-length manuscript, now lost, submitted . . . to Harper’s under the title The Isle of the Cross.” Eerily, on 266-267 he refers to “a small manuscript” of poems Melville asked his brother Allan to place with a publisher when he sailed for San Francisco in 1860, although he does not give Melville’s title, POEMS.
Nowhere does Andrew Delbanco explain his sudden rich knowledge of Melville’s world and work between 2002 and 2005, or apologize for his trashing of my reputation for careful scholarship. Is it odd that in the advance proofs of his MELVILLE: HIS WORLD AND WORK there was no mention of my contribution to Melville scholarship at all?
Richard Brodhead and Elizabeth Schultz have not recanted their reviews, as far as I know, and no one of the three has explained whether or not any two or all three consulted about their decision to base their discrediting of my biography on my discussion of the very real but lost THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS.
On 17 February 2011 the President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced that this same Richard Brodhead has been named as Chairman of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, charged “to bolster teaching and research.” Does no one at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences have a sense of irony or a sense of humor?
Early in the twenty-first century three prominent Melville critics, Richard Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz, warned that my biography of Melville was unreliable by citing my treatment of the lost The Isle of the Cross (1853) and the lost Poems (1860). The second of these reviewers, Delbanco, did not cite the earliest, Brodhead, as his authority, and Schultz cited neither Brodhead nor Delbanco.
Brodhead in the New York Times for 23 June 2002 disparaged “Parker's surmises about works Melville never published that did not survive”:
“He makes the case that in 1852-53 Melville wrote a novel based on materials he shared with Hawthorne about a sailor who deserted his wife. If this is true, then the theory that Melville renounced writing after ‘Pierre’ is just wrong, and the mysterious leap from ‘Pierre’ to the work he published after a silence, the very different ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’ can be explained in a new way. [This “insight” is not Brodhead’s but mine; “as Parker says” would have made that clear.] Parker is also convinced that Melville prepared a volume of poems in 1860 that failed to be published. If this is so, a stretch that had seemed empty of literary strivings was instead a time of new effort and new failure--a black hole Parker alone has the instruments to detect.”
Similarly, Andrew Delbanco in the New Republic (September 2002) warned that my second volume, like the first, “must be used with caution”:
“For one thing, Parker is amazingly certain of his own conclusions. . . . He is sure that immediately after completing Pierre, Melville wrote an unpublished novel (Parker implies that after failing to find a publisher, Melville burned it) inspired by a story he had heard about a sailor who disappears for thirty years, then returns to the wife for whom he has become a distant memory. He is sure that when Melville traveled by slow boat [“slow boat is a romantic intrusion] to San Francisco in 1860, he expected to find waiting for him a finished copy of a book of poems that he had entrusted in manuscript to his brother for transmission to his publishers before leaving the East. (Such a book was never published--and it is a surmise that Melville ever wrote it.) . . . . In short, Parker trusts his own intuition completely, and, presenting inferences as facts, he expects his readers to trust it, too.”
Brodhead and Delbanco refrained even from naming The Isle of the Cross, as if the title gave it too much actuality. Elizabeth Schultz in The Common Review (Winter 2002) mentioned the title skeptically in her complaint:
“Parker also reads betrayal and despair into the disappearance of two manuscripts, which he contends Melville completed--a novel, putatively titled The Isle of the Cross, and his first collection of poems. Throughout his biography, Parker bemoans the loss of The Isle of the Cross's ghostly manuscript, imagining Melville's regret at never having found a publisher for it. [But where throughout the biography are these ghostly references?] Although there is only tentative evidence for the manuscript's existence and submission to a publisher, its ostensible rejection leads Parker to view his heroic author as victimized: ‘masterful as he could be, [Melville] had a way now, after the failure of Moby-Dick and Pierre, of seeing himself as passive victim to whom things were done.’"
In their implication that I had invented these lost books none of these three reviewers mentioned the existence of any documentary evidence that earlier scholars and I had brought forward concerning these same two lost books.
All three critics, Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz, ignored a full half century of accumulating evidence about the book Melville completed in 1853, the book he had tried to get Hawthorne to write but had decided in December 1852 to write himself. (It was 1987 when I found the title The Isle of the Cross.) All three ignored extensive evidence about Poems, most of which had been available for eight decades. To ignore the work of generations of dedicated scholars comes close to being a mortal sin, it seems to me. To ignore their work is to erase their lives.
In their 1960 LETTERS, Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman showed that Melville had taken a book to the Harpers in the spring of 1853 but had been prevented from publishing it and still had the manuscript when he wrote the Harpers on 24 November 1853. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., building upon work by Harrison Hayford in 1946, concluded in his 1987 "Historical Note" to the Northwestern-Newberry "The Piazza Tales" and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 that Melville had completed the “Agatha” story. Sealts managed to narrow the completion date to around May 1853, demonstrating, on the basis of available evidence, that Melville had offered to the Harpers in June 1853 a new book which he still had in his possession that November in manuscript. Sealts quoted the forthright assertion at the start of Melville’s letter to the Harpers on 24 November 1853: “In addition to the work which I took to New York last Spring, but which I was prevented from printing at that time; I have now in hand, and pretty well on towards completion, another book—300 pages, say—partly of nautical adventure, and partly—or, rather, chiefly, of Tortoise Hunting Adventure.” Then Sealts commented: “The opening sentence of this letter would seem to indicate that Melville still had ‘in hand’ the unpublished work of the previous spring; if so, he had not at this point destroyed the manuscript.”
In 1987, just after Sealts’s “Historical Note” went to press, in the course of transcribing Melville’s cousin Priscilla’s letters to his sister Augusta, I found that Augusta Melville’s letter to Priscilla on 6 April 1853 had mentioned Herman’s new manuscript as near completion. Consequently Priscilla for weeks afterwards had “constantly” looked in “the journals & magazines” that reached her in isolated Canandaigua, New York, hoping to see notices. On 22 May she asked eagerly: “When will the ‘Isle of the Cross’ make its appearance?” Her letter reached Arrowhead on 26 May, and Augusta replied four days later, telling her that Bessie, the third Melville child, had been born on the 22nd and that Herman had completed his book. In her reply on 12 June Priscilla commented: “the ‘Isle of the Cross’ is almost a twin sister of the little one & I think she should be nam’d for the heroine—if there is such a personage—the advent of the two are singularly near together.” Some time passed before the manuscript was in good order and Melville felt he could be away from his family and the farm. It was around 6 or 7 June when he left with the manuscript for New York, very much as Sealts had said. In the same 1990 issue of American Literature where Parker published the new evidence for the title and date of completion, Gary Scharnhorst announced his discovery that on 11 June the Springfield Daily Republican had reported regional news: “Herman Melville has gone to New York to superintend the issue of a new work.” On 14 June (as Scott Norsworthy discovered in 2001) the Daily Evening Transcript repeated the news for Bostonians : “Herman Melville has gone to New York to superintend the issue of a new work.” The newspaper items in themselves are not conclusive, but in conjunction with Priscilla’s letters and with Melville’s own comments in November, where he implies the unpublished manuscript he was prevented from publishing was a book (in the same class as “another book” he was engaged on in November), the matter should have been settled. For Sealts and Hayford the matter was settled after Parker’s discoveries, before the news reports were found, although the fate of The Isle of the Cross was left as mysterious as ever. In his February 1990 “A Supplementary Note to Melville’s Reading (1988)” Sealts added a note to his earlier assertion that in June 1853 Melville took to New York “for submission to Harper and Brothers a book-length manuscript”: “Hershel Parker, working with Augusta Melville’s correspondence as recently added to the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection, New York Public Library, has established that this work was in fact ‘completed under the title of The Isle of the Cross.’”
Sealts’s use of the words “in fact” revealed his bias: he believed that sometimes archival evidence could reveal historical and biographical truth. Sealts knew that he was writing at a time when many academicians professed not to believe that any historical or biographical truth could ever be established. The repudiation of biographical information by the New Critics in the 1940s and 1950s and their successors through the New Historicists in the 1980s and 1990s had, after half a century and more, resulted in a professoriat which far too often not only did not know how to conduct archival research but was skeptical that any new information could be gained from archival research.
When he wrote his 1921 biography of Melville, Raymond Weaver had not known about POEMS (1860); his primary source of family information, Melville's granddaughter Eleanor Thomas Metcalf, treated Poems at length in her 1953 book, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, but she apparently had not learned about it in time to tell Weaver. The evidence had rested, unread, in the Duyckinck Collection in the New York Public Library until 1922, the year after Weaver’s biography appeared, when Meade Minnigerode published Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Bibliography (New York: Brick Row). There he printed documents that showed that Melville had completed a volume of poetry early in 1860 and left it to be published when he sailed with his brother Thomas around Cape Horn. The documents included Melville’s two letters to Evert A. Duyckinck asking if he would “lend something of an overseeing eye” to the launching of his new manuscript and telling him to expect to hear from Mrs. Melville. Minnigerode also printed three detailed letters from Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Duyckinck and, very tellingly, her copy of a letter Melville wrote to his brother Allan: “Memoranda for Allan Concerning the publication of my verses,” twelve specific directions. (In one of her letters Mrs. Melville later conveyed a thirteenth directive directly to Duyckinck.) The documents printed in 1922 show that Duyckinck submitted the manuscript to at least two New York publishers. In what became a standard anthology, often used as a textbook, Melville: Representative Selections (1938), Willard Thorp reprinted or summarized this evidence. Thereafter, the fact that Melville had completed a volume of poems in 1860 was familiar to Jay Leyda (who in The Melville Log published additional evidence, the letter from Charles Scribner rejecting Melville's Poems), to Leon Howard, Eleanor Metcalf, Walter E. Bezanson, Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (the joint editors of Melville's Letters), Harrison Hayford, Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and Hershel Parker—that is, to all Melville scholars after Thorp, and even to many critics who had not worked with Melville documents themselves or would not have seen Minnigerode’s book. It seemed that no one could deny the existence of Poems except by demonstrating that the documents Minnigerode discovered (and the later-discovered letter from Scribner) were forgeries, part of a gigantic hoax on Melville scholars.
The claims made in 2002 and 2003 that THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and the 1860 POEMS had only a hypothetical existence were published in the New York Times and in influential magazines, just where they could most seriously mislead the general literary community and Melville critics, including the reviewers who read at least the early review in the Times. But the existence of Poems in 1860 is simple fact, inarguable to anyone who believes there is such a thing as verifiable biographical fact. A few decades ago scholars could hope at least that a printed correction would ultimately scotch the snake of error, if not kill it. In the twenty-first century errors in reviews are almost uncorrectable, for false statements may continue to mislead incalculable numbers of readers during an extended afterlife on the Internet, where an eager new Melvillean of the indefinite future may encounter even the most inaccurate review without the advantage of a warning label.
Weirdly, Andrew Delbanco in his 2005 MELVILLE: HIS WORLD AND WORK (208) refers to “a novel-length manuscript, now lost, submitted . . . to Harper’s under the title The Isle of the Cross.” Eerily, on 266-267 he refers to “a small manuscript” of poems Melville asked his brother Allan to place with a publisher when he sailed for San Francisco in 1860, although he does not give Melville’s title, POEMS.
Nowhere does Andrew Delbanco explain his sudden rich knowledge of Melville’s world and work between 2002 and 2005, or apologize for his trashing of my reputation for careful scholarship. Is it odd that in the advance proofs of his MELVILLE: HIS WORLD AND WORK there was no mention of my contribution to Melville scholarship at all?
Richard Brodhead and Elizabeth Schultz have not recanted their reviews, as far as I know, and no one of the three has explained whether or not any two or all three consulted about their decision to base their discrediting of my biography on my discussion of the very real but lost THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS.
On 17 February 2011 the President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced that this same Richard Brodhead has been named as Chairman of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, charged “to bolster teaching and research.” Does no one at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences have a sense of irony or a sense of humor?
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