Robert Milder and Anthony Weiner: What Were They Thinking?

What goes on in the mind of Anthony Weiner when he posts lewd pictures then claims that his Twitter account had been hacked?

What goes on in the mind of Robert Milder when he ignores the fact that I used far more of Melville's marginalia than anyone had ever done--that I used his Spenser marginalia before anyone else saw it, that I had early access at an auction gallery to his Milton marginalia, that I had early access at an auction gallery to his Vasari marginalia, that the owner kindly let me have access to the extremely important marginalia in Hazlitt's LECTURES long before anyone else used those volumes, that I built an entire dramatic chapter on marginalia?

Here is what Milder said: "Still less has Parker given himself to addressing Melville's intellectual life, amply recorded not only in his writing but in the reading marginalia through which . . . he conducted his ongoing self education. When so few primary materials exist for knowing the man, it is odd that Parker should neglect this richly provocative resource, which others have explored with important results."

Was Milder thinking that he was so mighty that he could get away with anything? Was Weiner thinking that he was so mighty that he could get away with anything?

Some Notes on Laurie Robertson-Lorant's Book

“I had a Rival”—the Heart-Wrenching Lament of Frances Wilson

When Laurie Robertson-Lorant's 1996 Melville: A Biography was published ahead of my first volume I was forced to make a quick addition to my preface, then being pushed into final form:
Casting a wider net than [Edwin H.] Miller, Robertson-Lorant made good use of recent publications, including the Historical Notes and other editorial information in volumes of The Writings of Herman Melville. She made vigorous forays into much the same archival material I have used, but she was sporadic rather than exhaustive in her study of the family letters, and not always alert to the narrative potential of other kinds of evidence, such as records of Melville's reading and his marginalia.
In an earlier draft of the passage, for the eyes of the publisher, I had gone on:

"Robertson-Lorant's transcriptions of manuscript material are erratic: a bedstead can be transmogrified into a "bird-cage stand.” On the level of detail, her book is pervasively unreliable: letters are frequently misdated and mistranscribed, events are misdated, events and behavior are misconstrued."

The 15 December 1996 New York Times Magazine article on Melville by Philip Weiss quoted my exasperation over some of her transcriptions, but no reviewer noticed anything amiss. Later a prominent reviewer scolded me for suggesting that her readers might be cautious about her work. So it goes.

I itemized to the publisher some of what I had found in that several-hour scan of her book: what I had to do was finish my revisions to my preface so as to take account of her book in it. The eager but inexperienced Robertson-Lorant, I found, had related incidents reminiscent of Weaver's and Miller's contrivances. In her book (but not mine) a fourteen-year-old Herman had been caught boozing in a Schenectady barroom (60). Hun or Hunn Gansevoort was Herman's first cousin, son of Peter and Mary Gansevoort, she revealed (89). It mattered to me when Robertson-Lorant wrote about a nonexistent cousin, "Millie Van Rensselaer Thayer" instead of Cornelia (Nilly!) Van Rensselaer who married Nathaniel Thayer in 1846, not 1845 (137), and whom Melville visited in 1846, after he had finished Omoo, not before Typee was published.

Ruthlessly she had killed off Cousin Stanwix Gansevoort decades early. She had assigned Maria Gansevoort Melvill (as the name was still spelled) a nephew, "Henry Gansevoort," in the 1820s. Robertson-Lorant informed the reader that "boys--and perhaps even a few rebellious girls--shed their clothes" and swam together in the "Hudson's many streams or tributaries" (45). A biographer who thinks Helen Maria Melville might have skinny-dipped in the Hudson simply does not comprehend American class distinctions. Decades later gentlemen and ladies taking the ferry boat to Staten Ireland were sometimes aghast at the state of undress of Irishwomen on the beaches, but gentlewomen like the daughters of Maria Gansevoort Melville did not "skinny dip."

I cringed when Robertson-Lorant luridly asserted that the intensely religious Augusta Melville liked "being escorted around Albany and Lansingburgh by Stephen Van Rensselaer, until it dawned on her that his reckless driving hinted at qualities undesirable in a marriage prospect"-- Stephen Van Rensselaer, the mature and securely married pillar of the Albany Dutch Church, Augusta's spiritual mentor, far more akin to her in religious matters than, say, Helen and Herman--Stephen Van Rensselaer, the father of Cornelia (Nilly, not Milly!) Van Rensselaer Thayer! In my account the brothers Herman and Allan do not pool their resources and buy a brownstone (166). Sister Fanny does not visit Black Rock, New Jersey (182); instead, she accompanies Allan and Sophia Melville to the scenic Black Rock near Niagara Falls. Herman Melville buys his father's own copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy at a famous Manhattan bookstore in my biography, not in Pittsfield (625). I had thought I was aware of things sexual (indeed, Andrew Delbanco thought I was obsessed with the topic), but Robertson-Lorant's outdid me not only with Augusta's thoughts about Stephen Van Rensselaer but with her teasing description of a Herman who in 1847, safely out of sight in Washington City, made moves on a girl from Bond Street (155) at a time when he was engaged to Elizabeth Shaw. He had not been flirting "a bit with 'one of the sweetest of our Bond Street girls.'" The flirting was wholly Robertson-Lorant's invention and the girl referred to was Sophia Thurston, whom Allan Melville married later in the year.

Herman at the end of July 1850 did not go "to New York to bring his mothers and sisters to Pittsfield"; Maria Melville went there first to Pittsfield in June and others followed. In Robertson-Lorant's book, but not mine, Melville and Sophia Hawthorne sat cramped together "on the verandah of the red cottage overlooking Stockbridge Bowl" (253). In fact, the cottage lacked that architectural feature and in my book the two sit more grandly on the verandah of the higher situated Tappan house--painted brown (hence, "Chateau Brun"). It was Helen who had the special friendship with Mrs. Ives and Augusta who had the special friendship with Cornelia (Nilly) Van Rensselaer Thayer. In my biography Augusta has poignant reason for being at Arrowhead in June 1851, Helen for being in Manhattan and Brooklyn; in Robertson-Lorant's account they change places (272), with no reason given. Melville, we are told by Robertson-Lorant, "burned his love letters to Lizzie" (618), those which his daughter Bessie possessed in the early twentieth century. All this I told the publisher and then went on with the revisions to the preface.

I have not revisited Laurie Robertson-Lorant’s book except when someone has queried me about a particular point. I do assert now that I was polite in what I said in the preface to the first volume of my biography.

I think it’s time to admit how I thought of her in the early 90s when I would see her in the front row as I gave a talk about my discoveries. Her name was so complicated that I irresistibly thought of an analogy with Melville’s Marquesan fellow, Kory-Kory. Wouldn’t you have shortened Laurie Robertson-Lorant to Lory-Lory, honestly?

I had seen fast enough that Laurie Robertson-Lorant's biography was very much a 1990s document. The fullest analysis of her book in that light is in the December 1996 New Criterion review by James W. Tuttleton, who, though critical, was seemingly compelled to defend her as a product of his own New York University. "Ms. Robertson-Lorant," he said, "took her doctorate from New York University and acknowledges the inspiration of the eminent Americanists Gay Wilson Allen and William Gibson." This is the Allen who decade after decade hoped against hope that Walt Whitman was not a degenerate, a homosexual--who hoped, oh hoped (p. 424 of The Solitary Singer) that "actual perversion" (homosexual love-making) was, oh heavenly powers, not likely! This is the Gibson, a lovely, sweet man, who as the inspector for Fredson Bowers's now notoriously misconceived and error-ridden Virginia Edition of Crane's Maggie gave this endorsement: "As always, Professor Bowers' texts and apparatus are impeccable." Tuttleton observed that the Melville biographer Edwin H. Miller "might very well have been another of her teachers at NYU, although she scants his work." This is the Miller who fantasized for Melville "a Spanish cavalier's costume" 250 for his "wild caper" of making sexual advances to Hawthorne.

In most regards the NYU loyalist Tuttleton sees Robertson-Lorant's performance not in the light of what she actually did in her biography of Melville but in the light of the superb training which by definition she had received at NYU: "she was taught to plumb the archives and secure the facts."

Focused as he was on defending an NYU PhD as the product of rigorous training in scholarly methods, Tuttleton nevertheless acknowledged that "inundating detail that is marginal to Melville's life" obscured "the historical context" in Robertson-Lorant's treatment:

Long paragraphs or even pages are given to discussion of extra-literary events. We learn more than we need to know about how sex was repressed in Melville's day (though he and Lizzie managed to produce four children, and six or eight were not uncommon at the time). We also hear about how blacks were enslaved and American Indians were discriminated against. The domestic situation of women and the laws that governed property loom large in the Robertson-Lorant account. In case anybody is interested (and we aren't), she repeatedly flourishes her radical bona fides by constantly faulting the market economy, and we hear a great deal about the despoliation [sic] of nature by westering America. She is so hopelessly PC that she makes me want to go out and get the bumper sticker "NUKE THE WHALES." ¶Robertson-Lorant's life is an instance of the abysmal New Historicism, which authorizes anyone to jerry-rig her own political prejudices into a so-called context for a historical biography. She is thin, thin, thin, on Melville's political views and so comes very close to seriously misrepresenting his fundamental social conservatism. . . . .¶In short, for Robertson-Lorant a biography is an occasion for didactic homily, and she never misses a chance to demonstrate her superior morality, often in the most risible ways. An instance: "Having recently learned that ACLS supported teachers and artists who were blacklisted during the McCarthy reign of terror in the 1950s, I was doubly proud to have been a recipient of an ACLS fellowship." Imagine being proud of a link with Communist teachers and artists who wanted nothing less than the overthrow of our constitutional liberties and the violent wreckage of our elective government! Poor woman, she hasn't the faintest clue about what a "reign of terror" is. . . Evidently Dr. Robertson-Lorant is one of those parlor Marxists in the educational world for whom "the new market capitalism and industrialization" can be blamed for Melville's and even America's ills. Adolescents should be protected from her.

From this diatribe Tuttleton moved on to a long treatment of Robertson-Lorant on homosexuality and her conclusion that Melville "'undoubtedly' experienced some form of homosexual activity." For this claim, he said, "there is zero evidence and every reason to doubt it."

In the March 1998 Nineteenth-Century Literature Robert Milder supplemented this analysis. Robertson-Lorant’s biography was “not a book for professional Americanists, much less for knowledgeable Melvilleans”:

Robertson-Lorant evidently aims to give us a Melville for the 1990s. In practice this means a Melville meritoriously liberal in his writing on the touchstone issues of the time (more our time, perhaps, than his own) but not above tyrannizing over his household with the combined force of the Victorian paterfamilias and the frustrated man of genius. Her main themes—“Melville’s sexuality, his relationship with his wife and children, and the degree of responsibility he bears for his older son’s suicide” (Robertson-Lorant, p. xv)—are important additions to the emphases of older biographies, but rather than complement established concerns they have been allowed to displace them.

The man who had reproached me for the modest hint in my preface has not yet taken on Tuttleton and Milder.

The Inhumane Aloofness of Critics: Milder and Brodhead as Examples

Back in the mid 1970s the New Criticism still held such sway that a bright young academic could package a reading of even Melville's broken-backed Pierre; or, The Ambiguities as a unified work, as Robert Milder did late in 1974 in "Melville's 'Intentions' in Pierre." Milder showed satisfaction as he elaborated his theory that Pierre (as published) was "an intensely deliberate book," this despite the internal evidence that the book started out one way and went wildly awry when Melville suddenly decided to announce that young Pierre had been a juvenile author, and then was led into sections of new writing on Pierre's present attempts to become a great writer. Milder could mention "self-lacerating humor" in Pierre but, partly because he took the whole of the book as carefully deliberated, he showed no sense that Melville suffered during the latter time he devoted to the composition of the book. In 1962 and 1963 I had spent months in the Melville archives for my dissertation and later had become an authority on Melville's texts, but in the mid-1970s I was making myself over for an essentially biographical role as a textual theorist focused on American fiction, not just Melville. What ultimately propelled me away from studies of other writers' compositional processes into Melville biography was reading Milder's article, for I was convinced he had been altogether too complacent about what he was describing. The loss of the literary unity of Pierre was collateral damage from the spectre of the loss of Melville's career: "self-lacerating humor" masked almost unbearable anguish.

Two years later Richard H. Brodhead in Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (1976) was even cooler than Milder as he explained "why Melville tells his story as he does." Willing to admit some lack of formal unity, he was unperturbed that "the second half of the book has little to do" with the "literary endeavor" he had identified in the first half. He also was unperturbed that "the structure" of Melville's "narrative becomes looser," as when in "Young America in Literature" Melville "shifts to topical satire." He patted the author on the head: "Melville was wise not to let a foolish consistency keep him from exploring the subjects and methods he does in these chapters; they are among the most interesting in Pierre." In this reading Melville's failures were aesthetic, but the laudable result of the failures was that they provided Brodhead with "interesting" chapters to explicate, however much looser they were than the earlier chapters.

I reacted to Brodhead's coolness with visceral horror: here was the bloodless New Criticism blandly, smugly indicting itself. In Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons (1984) I summarized biographical evidence for the "two very different and imperfectly combined creative processes" that went into Pierre, "the second one destructive of part of the achievement of the first." Then in a footnote I took up Brodhead:

While most critics find unity at all costs even in books known to have a strange compositional history, now and again a critic of the post-New Criticism generation (like a good many first generation American Literature scholars such as Leon Howard) is content to place less stock in formal perfection. Richard Brodhead, in particular, has displayed a remarkable tolerance toward Melville's altering the direction of Pierre half way through the book as we know it. Brodhead observes, as Leon Howard and many others had done, that the second half of Pierre has little to do with the first, then with mild benignity decides that "Melville was wise not to let a foolish consistency keep him from exploring the subjects and methods he does" . . . even though the inclusion of new material "has a curious effect on the book's narration." Brodhead knows the book is split in two. Rather than demanding a verbal icon, however, he makes the best of a bad situation, finding interest where he can--but at the cost of closing his eyes to the agony that lay behind Melville's decision to record his rage against his reviewers and his fears about the death of his career as a writer, even if doing so meant wrecking what might well have been the most tightly unified work he had yet written.

"Closing his eyes to the agony" sums up for me the bloodlessness of modern literary criticism written by academics trained in the New Criticism by students of the original New Critics like Charles Feidelson or their descendants. They have been trained not to think of biography as even potentially relevant to literary criticism, so that "Melville" was an intellectual construction, an abstraction, not a real person. Milder and Brodhead wrote coherent essays about an incoherent book written in part by an agonized author. My realistic scholarly account of "Why Pierre Went Wrong" by contrast was not anywhere near so polished, and in fact for years I kept amassing new documents and gradually comprehending their information and their implications so as to refine my impressions into something like a coherent description of what happened, or what almost surely happened.

Cody Marrs and the Conspiracy (?) to Minimize or Deny Melville's POEMS

In the March 2010 "American Literature" Cody Marrs quotes from "Melville: The Making of the Poet" but engages in verbal gymnastics to avoid treating "Poems" (1860) as a real part of Melville's career. Marrs says not a word about the disappointment Melville might have felt about having Harpers refuse two of the poems (as they seem to have done) and about having at least two publishers reject "Poems," so that it, like his "The Isle of the Cross," went unpublished and lost, at least as a collection. Marrs's minimization starts in this summary:
Let us begin with the facts: upon completing the "Piazza Tales" (1856) and "The Confidence-Man" (1857), Melville plunged himself into verse, studying the poetry of Dante, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, John Milton, Matthew Arnold, and John Keats, among others. He began experimenting with his own poems, producing a slim volume in 1860 that did not find a publisher; and then, in 1866, one year after the fall of Richmond, Virginia, he published his first book of verse, 'Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War.'"


The mention of "The Piazza Tales" is strange, since only the introductory sketch dates from 1856, and the mention of The Confidence-Man seems not as important as the financial disaster of May 1856 and the long trip to the Scotland, England, the Mediterranean, and back to England--a trip in which Melville had time to reflect on his future. Instead of writing more fiction, he began late in 1857 an abortive career as a lecturer, delivering the last of the third lectures early in 1860.


All the evidence suggests that by late 1857, certainly by 1858 and 1859, Melville was writing poetry. When the opportunity came to sail with his brother Thomas, captain of the clipper ship "Meteor," bound for Calcutta, Melville hastily tried to assure that his "Poems" would be published soon after he sailed. There is direct evidence that there was a page 111 in the manuscript and no indication of the number of the last page. Cody Marrs's phrasing "slim volume" is wholly unsupported by any documentary evidence. Perhaps it is an echo of Andrew Delbanco who in 2005 referred to the "small manuscript" Melville tried to publish. Delbanco was contemptuous of Melville's 1859 poetic epistle to Daniel Shepherd ("this bit of drinking doggerel") and positive that many of the poems Melville wrote in the late 1850s and hoped to publish in 1860 "were not much stronger." Perhaps this contempt lies behind Marrs's phrasing "experimenting with his own poems" (that is, writing poems). In Giles Gunn's "A Historical Guide to Herman Melville" (2005) Robert Milder had similarly minimized the contents of Poems as the work of "a fledgling poet" unlikely to write "thematically and technically accomplished" poems. If Melville was a fledgling poet in 1857 or early 1858, what might he have been in 1860? what, given his advance from "Redburn" to "Moby-Dick" in 2 years from publication to publication, but in only six or seven months between finishing the former and staring the latter?

Critics deny the existence of lost books or else minimize the significance of those books, as when Milder calls "The Isle of the Cross" a "narrative" which Melville "evidently" wrote and when Delbanco (after implying in 2002 that I had made up "Poems") says in 2005 the suddenly real "Poems" was a "small" volume or when Marrs calls it a "slim" volume. Marrs elaborates a theory of Melville's turning to poetry in which the chronology is wildly altered, in which the shift to poetry takes place during the Civil War: "Melville understood poetry first and foremost as a mode and medium of worldly engagement. As such, we should grasp the birth of his poetic career not as a withdrawal but as a politico-aesthetic realignment--and as a profoundly situated one at that. One of the most glaring shortcomings of Spengemann's and Parker's counternarratives is that neither one acknowledges the degree to which the Civil War reshaped Melville's career, despite the fact that his first book of published poems is not about imaginary islands or sailors in the Pacific but about America's descent into 'Nature's dark side,' that 'conflict of convictions' which brought about unprecedented national bloodletting. The fact that Melville's inaugural public verses are war lyrics is indispensable to our understanding of his shift from prose fiction.¶ . . . What we discover in the structures and meanings of "Battle-Pieces" is nothing less than an immanent account of Melville's poetic turn, an inside narrative revealing that Melville's adoption of verse originates in his experience and understanding of the Civil War as a historical event."


To begin at the end of this quotation: No, Melville's adoption of verse originated in the years before the Civil War when he was apparently preoccupied with the Risorgimento in Italy (particularly as it had entered poetry in English), preoccupied with classical literature and classical values, and constantly steeping himself in the finest poets working in the English language, among them contemporary poets including Tennyson and the Brownings. The honorific word "inaugural" itself seems selected precisely to deflect attention from the lost but very real "Poems," the contents of which Melville labored on for at least two years, very likely for at least two and a half years.


To call "Battle-Pieces" "Melville's inaugural public verses" is sleight-of-hand meant to deflect attention from "Poems," which Melville meant to be his "inaugural public verses" and which he thought for months had indeed been published as his "inaugural public verses." Only the rejection of "Poems" by publishers kept it from marking the "birth" of Melville's "poetic career." What went into making Melville a poet had taken place before May, 1860.


What anything could stimulate Melville critics to take account of the simple fact that he thought he was a poet by the late 1850s and in 1860 was ready to face the world as a poet? Marrs refers to my "meticulous account of Melville's reading and writing habits" but pays no attention to what I said about the damage done by the failure of critics to visualize his lost books as real, as products of months or years of his working life. What will it take to encourage critics to think about Melville as a human being?

Will scholarship on American literature and will the journal AMERICAN LITERATURE recover from Cathy Davidson's editorship during which she cobbled together a Politically Correct "New Melville" issue the motive of which, it was clear, was to drive Melville from the classrooom (as an allegedly abusive husband) while launching a pre-emptive strike against all ongoing archival scholarship and my forthcoming biography in particular: "WE ALREADY HAVE FULL-SCALE BIOGRAPHIES OF MELVILLE"? Has there ever been a more damning sentence in a learned journal?

Passing or Failing the Test of Useful Intelligence in Academia--the case of Robert Milder

What I found when I was discovering pretty often new episodes in the life or Herman Melville or at least new sidelights on previously known episodes was that the "full" implications of the discoveries rarely revealed themselves at the moment of discovery (not that the full implications ever reveal themselves). The more we thought we knew about Melville, it seemed, the harder it was to give up the familiar story and tell a new story or a partly new story, and the harder it was to put the new information into meaningful relationship to what we knew of the rest of Melville's life. The way I was working meant that I kept plowing onward after many of the moments of discovery, so that some of the implications began to come clear only long afterwards, when I read great swatches of the LOG on the computer, 1951 and 1969 all mixed in with what I had been adding from the Augusta Papers and other sources.

Many professors, I found, could not adjust to new information if they thought they knew something about an episode in Melville's life.

Many more professors, I found to my horror, could not admit that new information could be discovered about Melville after, say, the 1930s, even if the evidence was right there on a page they were supposed to be reading before writing their reviews.

I've talked about the difficulty of comprehending a new and fuller trajectory of Melville's career. Robert Milder conspicuously fails to do so in my "Part 2" post: he simply cannot think of Melville's real life, of THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS as taking months and (for the poems) years of his creative life. In his "A Brief Biography" in the Gunn collection he says Melville "evidently" wrote "a narrative entitled "The Isle of the Cross." As for POEMS, the contents could not have been very good because Melville in them was only "a fledgling poet." A fledgling poet? Melville started in 1857 or early in 1858 and for two or three years wrote only poetry except for a couple of lectures and never got very good at poetry in that time? The man who went from OMOO (1847) to MOBY-DICK (1851), or REDBURN (1849) to MOBY-DICK (1851)? Melville was, really now, a pretty fast learner for someone without a PhD.

Series: Academics in the Death-Grasp of the New Criticism, No. 1, Robert Milder, Part 2

In the preface to his Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (2006) Robert Milder declared that the two volumes of my biography had made available "more than any reasonable person would want to know about the outward particulars of Melville's life while leaving room for new imaginative uses of its material." In practice, what Milder did instead of displaying “new imagination uses” was disastrously irresponsible and unimaginative. This is clear in an examination of his passage on Melville's "forty-five-year development." There Milder traced Melville's production in "the first decade or so" of his career: Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, "magazine pieces," Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man, "and finally silence" (then Battle-Pieces in 1866). Milder immediately went on to say that "successful biography is a labor of integrating the outer life and the inner life." Despite "the richness" of the merely external, factual Melville "family archive" there is little, Milder said, in the way of "testimonies to the interior life," the truly valuable materials "from which the biographer must reconstruct or imagine or invent a 'Melville.'"

So what is wrong with this list?--Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, "magazine pieces," Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man, "and finally silence" (then Battle-Pieces in 1866). What’s wrong is that Milder's "eleven-year parabola of Melville's rise and putative fall" is radically incomplete. It omits two books, both now lost, The Isle of the Cross and Poems, as well as some tortoise material that was not published in The Encantadas. It is as if it never occurred to Milder that there was anything to be “reconstructed” or “imagined” or “invented” from the fact that Melville spent many months during this "parabola" writing The Isle of the Cross, some days writing lost tortoise material, and two or three years writing Poems. Even if a critic declares himself a devotee of the life which he "imagines" rather than the life which a scholar retrieves from the archives and interprets, that critic has an obligation to imagine as much of Melville's "development" as he responsibly can. A responsible critic would exercise his reconstruction or imagining or inventing on a "Melville" who produced Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Isle of the Cross, some "magazine pieces," Israel Potter (serialized before book publication, overlapping with some of the stories), one unpublished magazine diptych, The Piazza Tales (including the introduction, never a magazine piece), The Confidence-Man, Poems, and Battle-Pieces, as well as miscellaneous now-lost material (such as more tortoise material than was published in The Encantadas).

Contemptuous of mere fact, Milder could not make "new imaginative uses" of all the "material" of "Melville's life" since he had relegated so much of the material into the category of "more than any reasonable person would want to know." Milder simply could not make himself aware of all the "material" which might repay imaginative attention. In consequence, the sum of what he regarded as "material" was diminished by whatever facts he had dismissed. A quick comparison can clarify this point: textual critics make much the same mistake when they talk about the meaning of "the text as a whole." Often, what they are calling the "whole" is only what happens to be left after the expurgation of some of its most powerful scenes, such as the longest chapter in The Red Badge of Courage. The "text as a whole" is not necessarily "the whole text." The book subtitled "Melville and the Life We Imagine" is necessarily limited to the fragments of material Milder chose to exercise his imagination upon. In this instance, some of the facts which beg for imaginative use cannot be held in the hand. For Milder to write about Melville's development in the Gunn collection without mentioning The Isle of the Cross and Poems is to stand at the doorway to biography, not to enter the room even briefly, and to shout into the room, like the red-bearded stranger at the Chicago Melville Society Meeting in 1990, "THE FACTS DON'T MATTER."

Series: Academics in the Death-Grasp of the New Criticism, No. 1, Robert Milder, Part 1

In the Melville chapter of the COLUMBIA LITERARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES (1988), Robert Milder ignores all new documentary discoveries about Herman Melville (even the rich and well-publicized trove of papers acquired by the New York Public Library in 1983), yet begins with this intrinsically biographical sentence: "Reading Herman Melville in his fullness means attending to the peremptory inward development that impelled his most ambitious books,strained the confines of his literary forms, and gave his career an organic unity that subsumes and transcends the cumulative achievement of his works."

Do you see how dehumanizing this is? Melville is a New Critical artifact embodying an "organic unity." Here Milder extrapolates the old New Critical version of organic unity onto biography (without looking at biographical evidence) although Melville's own career suffered violent truncation rather than anything that obviously resembles an organic progression.

The critic can talk around the forbidden topic of biography (without doing the scholarly work of biography) only by converting a ragged, truncated career into a smooth, shining New Critical artifact. "Gave his career an organic unity"! It breaks your heart.

Irresponsible Reviewers Series--Robert Milder

 

The MLA Session on American Literature Anthologies, 1990

Christmas Day 1990
AMERICAN LITERATURE AS NATIONAL SCRIPTURES AESTHETIC VALUE vs. POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
HERSHEL PARKER
When I sent Jim Justus my title, I did not know Martha Banta and Paul Lauter were to be on the program, and I intended to talk about some frustrations I had encountered with my section of the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. In the essay "Contingencies of Value" (1983) Barbara Herrnstein Smith said: "Those who are in positions to edit anthologies and prepare reading lists are obviously those who occupy positions of some cultural power; and their acts of evaluation--represented in what they exclude as well as in what they include--constitute not merely recommendations of value, but also determinants of value." Later the same year Paul Lauter boldly asked how "we decide what to include in a course or an anthology" and decided that the answer "is not foreordained by God, the curriculum committee, or even the Norton anthology." I liked the climactic order of that, but for a job that confers great cultural power, anthology-making affords some severe lessons in powerlessness. You can put something in an anthology, Professor Smith, but you can't make anyone teach the whole of Margaret Fuller's THE GREAT LAWSUIT or the more radical Thoreau pieces, or thirty pages from my darling candidate for canonicity, CLAREL.


After knowing that Martha Banta and Paul Lauter were the other speakers, I can't talk just about my own aspirations and brushes with powerlessness, but I still want to concentrate on my period, the "American Renaissance." The death of John Benedict this year at 57 (an infuriating, absolutely preventable death from cigarette smoking) was the end of an era in the anthologizing of literature, not just American literature, and some historical sidelights on the creation of the NAAL are in order now. NAAL began in February of one of the more painful years in our recent history, 1969, with a letter from me to John Benedict analyzing the faults of the then-current Norton anthology, THE AMERICAN TRADITION IN LITERATURE, and continuing in a letter of April 1990 analyzing the faults of the Heath anthology--not Paul's but the old AMERICAN LITERATURE: TRADITION AND INNOVATION. The most urgent problem, in 1969, was to free up some of the space uncritically devoted to the Bearded poets. The second edition of the Norton American Tradition in Literature gave 90 pages in the first volume to James Russell Lowell and eight in the second volume to Robert Lowell.


The 1969 letters led, in all deliberate speed, to the 1979 NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, a companion anthology to the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Its aims and assumptions seemed noncontroversial at the time. Believing that some literature was more valuable than other literature, we wanted to present good texts of much of the greatest American literature along with a large sampling of lesser works of special literary interest or else of high historical interest. The problem of conveying a sense of a general continuity of American literature (even if some voices are heard by one generation then apparently forgotten for decades) was acute at the time the anthology appeared, when the once-standard eleventh grade course in American literature was yielding to innovative, diverse courses. We tried to achieve a coherence missing in previous anthologies, so that interrelations of writers could be taught, and at least we did not print Mourt's Relation and then omit Hawthorne's "Maypole." The Bearded Poets were still there, tightened, but so was Harriet Beecher Stowe and the entire first version of Frederick Douglass's Narrative—both of them (like Dickinson) edited by Ronald Gottesman, although placed in the first volume. What I most regret is that we did not find an adequate way of showing the relation of our literature to British literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No anthology has yet done so. At a time when many of us feel increasingly isolated from much of the rest of the world, it strikes me that an upcoming MLA American Literature Sections might review the historical circumstances under which American Literature was separated from British Literature in American colleges and address the question of how we can teach American Literature in relation to other literatures, especially British.

I was excited when I saw the Harper anthology announced, since I assumed Helen Vendler would do the Whitman section and have something wonderful to say, so I was disappointed that Justin Kaplan did the period. Later I was disappointed with the way he did it. How can I say this discreetly? I hope Kaplan was as humbly grateful to me for my footnotes to “The Great Lawsuit” as I was to Walter Harding for his footnotes to WALDEN. The Harper anthology had stellar contributors, but its aims were pretty familiar, so I won't be saying much about it. The Heath anthology demands attention. Paul always demands attention.

Just before MLA in 1983 I received the Feminist Press flyer for RECONSTRUCTING AMERICAN LITERATURE, the forthcoming collection of revisionist syllabi from American literature courses. At the Hilton in 1983 (feeling like a character from THE CONFIDENCE-MAN) I carried the flyer around the hallways until I found a man passing out copies of it. Now, I don't hang out with strangers very much, but my interest in expanding the canon is intense, and has been since 1961, when I read through dozens of books (around 200, really) cited in different literary histories as unjustly neglected works of American literature. From the time I began teaching I found I could not avoid and reading from them in carrying into class out-of-print books order to show literary influences and cultural continuities and discontinuities, so I wanted to know the man who wrote that flyer, and I hung out with Paul. On December 29 we burrowed far beneath the Sheraton, down where the signs still said “Americana.” At the end of the tunnel were the bound copies of Reconstructing American Literature, and Paul gave me the first signed copy, "to continue & develop the debate." I promptly required it in an undergraduate class and in two graduate classes, and later talked about it in several others.

As part Choctaw and Cherokee I felt condescended to by some of the contributors. I thought some of the syllabi were sexist--biased against men (the delightful Caroline Kirkland could be rediscovered but not the marvelous Joseph Kirkland). I thought the syllabi were biased against regions of the country, particularly the South, but also the West and the Midwest, including Chicago (Joseph Kirkland had two strikes against him). I thought they were biased against even women regional writers unless they happened to be from New England, biased against stories about fundamental Protestantism, biased against any writer who did not have leftist leanings, or leanings that could be construed as leftist. I made these points at the 1984 MLA on a panel Paul and I organized with Coral Lansbury. The weaknesses I pointed to in Reconstructing American Literature are present also in the Heath anthology.

I missed in the syllabi in Reconstructing American Literature evidence that the contributors had embarked on a grand promiscuous reading of all the American literature the contributors could lay hands on, open to finding merit anywhere, the way David Shields was then reading every Colonial poem he could find. It now seems to me that Paul's contributors to the Heath anthology went ahunting with the specific intention of locating voices of minority writers who had not been heard from in previous anthologies. In so far as they did original research, established the biographies of their writers, authenticated texts, identified their places in literary history, they deserve thanks and will hold a place in the history of American literary history. But what I miss in the innovative selections of the Heath anthology is, of all things, diversity--a wide representation of American humorous literature, of sporting literature, of literature dealing with religious customs, of early international novels, of the writings of historians (after the colonial period, where they are well enough represented), of the literature of local color and regionalism--literature of the South, West, Midwest, of literature which depicts American customs and mores (including sexual mores), and any attempt to demonstrate the literary traditions out of which American literature developed, especially its debts to British literature.

Paul's contributors try to represent a range of minority voices, particular voices of blacks and American Indians. In the anthology, as in Reconstructing, I felt condescended to, patronizing, at the inclusion of inferior and textually dubious material purely on the grounds that it was by reds or blacks or yellow-skinned writers. In my experience people of mixed blood are usually aware of shades of darkness and lightness and don't think of themselves as simply black or red or whatever, although white anthology-makers may find it convenient to disregard percentages. That's a visceral reaction. More rational is my anger at being presented Indian chants or Indian stories as translated by white men--or as reconstructed and substantially or written or rewritten by whites. How come white men hold copyright to some of the so-called Indian songs and stories? Give my surviving dark aunts their tribal rights, clean up some of the horrors sheltered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, do something about alcoholism and the prevalence of fetal-alcoholism syndrome on the reservations, but don't placate me with a translation of dubious authenticity, not when my tribes so lost their identity that their languages play no role at all in American Literature.

My literary heritage is English. In the eighth grade (in what had been, when my father was born there, the Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory), I found an old copy of an anthology of American Literature and read (among other works) Thoreau's "The Bean Field" and Whitman 's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live (Oak Growing" and a dozen or so poems by Dickinson and a batch of poems from Spoon River Anthology. I was twice damned as a Depression Okie and part Indian, but from the time I found that anthology I inherited American literature in the English language. When I left high school after the 11th grade and became a railroad telegrapher in southwestern Louisiana, I read my way through a one volume Shakespeare I bought in New Orleans. This is what Americans have done throughout our history--make the best of our English heritage. Millions of European immigrants sacrificed their languages so their children would be Americanized. Yes, there was terrible loss of cultural heritage, but immigrant parents usually made that sacrifice willingly. In their eagerness to represent minority writers who actually wrote in English the contributors to the Heath anthology sometimes lose sight both of aesthetic value and historical significance, so that Frederick Douglass hardly seems to be a more important writer than Harriet Jacobs. Jacobs’ book is a moving human document. Anytime a victim of memorable suffering looks in his or her heart and writes, the result is apt to be a moving human document--but not necessarily a great literary document. Douglass's terse 1845 Narrative is one of the greatest human documents in all of American literature, and one of the greatest American stories in the Franklin tradition of self-education and rise from humble beginnings to national prestige. But Douglass did not simply look in his heart and write. As a slave-boy in Baltimore he learned to comprehend the dialogues and forensic disputes in his copy of the Columbian Orator. We've got a copy in Special Collections at the University of Delaware. I hadn't realized until I read our copy that "Columbian" (it's obvious if you think about it) meant "American"; even in slavery Douglass was training himself with a textbook for would-be national orators. With greater advantages Melville's brother Gansevoort was doing exactly the same thing at the same time. And before he wrote down his Narrative Douglass tried parts of it out, night after night, before live audiences, getting the story right before putting it into print--just as, at the same time, Herman Melville was trying out the sexier episodes of TYPEE upon his fellow sailors. Taste has changed, and we have to remind ourselves that Douglass's purple passages, such as the set piece on the sails on the Chesapeake Bay which Garrison praises in the preface, were not only proof that Douglass could write the sort of bravura display which the times admired: such passages were profoundly functional, because "fine writing" in prose is like poetry—quotable, memorable, and even memorizable, and therefore powerful in the crusade to awaken the consciences of the North. Even in slavery Douglass was struggling with something very few freeborn people ever conquer--style, and by the time he wrote the NARRATIVE (although a white man in Maryland held title to him) he was his own literary master. Anyone can produce a memorable narrative if it is based on a memorable life, but to lump Douglass with Jacobs is to ignore his triumphant struggle to become not just the author of a book but an American writer.

From the time of the first white settlements children have grown up more poorly educated than their fathers—take Melville (with his cosmopolitan father), Douglass (with a white father), or the Pike County migrants Clarence King observed. Now in Washington, D. C. and elsewhere many young black men are less well educated than their grandmothers and grandfathers. At Delaware and elsewhere the blacks who get through college are more and more likely to be female, not male. Thoreau is a threat to anyone who wants to bring literature down to the lowest common denominator, to offer "Little Reading" in the classroom rather than to offer literature that students have to stand on tiptoe to read.

NEWSWEEK last week had a cover story on the "thought police" in American universities. An aesthetic squad of that police force was at work in the 1940's and 1950's telling us it was unseemly to talk about the creative process. No wonder many professors have renounced the idea that there is such a thing as a great literary work which deserves (after whatever vicissitudes) to be known as a classic. A few years ago I called the creative process the Outcast of the MLA. She is banned because if we talk about the creative process we not only admit the existence of the author but also have to admit the authority of the author. You haven't heard much mention at MLA, this last decade, of a monumental study of the creative process, Albert Rothenberg's The Emerging Goddess (Chicago, 1979). Hopkins, of all places, just published Rothenberg's new book Creativity and Madness, a popularization and an extension of the earlier book. Here he defines creativity as "the production of something that is both new and truly valuable." To many people in this room the idea that some art is more valuable than other art (outside of the auction room) is something that emerges profanely from the mouth of Senator Helms. I am still committed to the idea that some works of art are better than others. Worse, I still believe that the better the work of art the more apt it is to be of enduring cultural and political value.

The Heath anthology of course needs to be seen in the wider context of the writings of the New Historicists or more broadly those Frederick Crews calls the New Americanists. I would include some of Emory Elliott's contributors to the Columbia Literary History of the United States and some of the people who will be in Sacvan Bercovitch's Cambridge literary history. On the basis of the initial evidence I have been complaining that the New Americanists are producing, for the most part, literary history without the bother of historical research. Elliott says his contributors are storytellers, not truthtellers. When he says that, he is telling the truth. Robert Milder, the author of the Melville chapter, for instance, does not even refer to the great trove of biographical material available at the NYPL since 1983. Bercovitch has been extoling a particular history of the literary marketplace in the American Renaissance for which the author did absolutely no archival research into contracts and promotion tactics and distribution systems and sales figures, as if William Charvat had done all the research ever to be done. It is possible to feel that the New Americanists are taking the Celestial Railway to literary history, literary history without research, but with intense political correctness. Running through much writing and editing by the New Americanists is a wish that American society had been fairer all along, and a winsome notion that we can rewrite the past to make it right. In an "Extra" in American Literature Annette Kolodny put the case most strongly. We were to acquire somehow "an integrity of memory"--an integrity of national memory in which buried voices were heard as loud as Emerson's voice or Hawthorne's voice. Once, at the beginning of the 19th century, propagandists had envisioned the American National Literature that was yet to be written; in the middle of the century Melville complained that critics were still looking to the future instead of seeing that American literature was already being created; now at the end of the 20th century we are told to rewrite history so as to imagine that the oppressed, the forgotten, were always vivid, alive, and triumphant in the American collective memory. Close your eyes, and wish, wish, oh wish.

I must not be the only teacher who feels pressured to let other people vote my conscience. We all just got a flyer from SUNY Press on a book edited by Henry A. Giroux, Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational Boundaries. The flyer itself struck me as an effort to intimidate anyone who did not want to teach according to a prescribed political agenda. I have taught Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and Thoreau's "Life without Principle" in every survey class for a quarter century because there has never been a time when someone didn't want my proxy for one issue or another. In the Heath anthology some of the contributors seem to push on users a notion of political correctness at the cost of misusing the writers and distorting history. Melville is presented as a proletarian, writing books out of a bleeding social conscience, an enemy of "capitalism and slavery." I don't recognize this Melville. The Melville I know thought that the intrusion of contemporary issues into a literary work was always a mistake, as when he criticized the section of "Lycidas" on the corruption of the English church: "Mark the deforming effect of the intrusion of partizan topics & feelings of the day, however serious in import, into a poem otherwise of the first order of merit." I think what we see in the Heath Melville is what Barbara Herrnstein Smith might call adaptive misuse--misuse of Melville as--what? a nineteenth-century Jack Abbott? We know that Thoreau lost sleep--literally lost sleep--over the remanding of fugitive slaves to the South. As far as we know Melville never did: "Who aint a slave? Tell me that." Great writers do not always respond in the same ways to the same momentous political issues of their times, and I feel no compulsion to grade Hawthorne and Emerson and George Washington Harris on a chart of political correctness as established by me or anyone else. I think some members of this audience need to be reminded that American Literature professors can be decent, responsible people even if they didn't give their moral proxies away during the Nixon presidency and even if they refuse today to give their moral proxies to J. Hillis Miller, Stanley Fish, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Annette Kolodny, to H. Bruce Franklin, to Phyllis Franklin, to Paul's contributors, to Winnie Mandela, to George F. Will, to Dan Quayle, to William Bennett, to Mike Royko, or even to Studs Turkel.

I want to talk more about the costs of political correctness. In the Heath anthology Carolyn Karcher says that Melville's father-in-law Lemuel Shaw was "a staunch defender of racial segregation and of the infamous Fugitive Slave Law." How is the student reading that supposed to feel? In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Bill could not have been adopted as part of the Compromise if in fact it had been infamous. Most Americans, even most of those who opposed slavery, accepted the bill as a necessity because their strongest commitment was to the preservation of the Union, not to a redress of a wrong built into the Constitution and plaguing every subsequent generation. Students need to know how profound the love of the union was, a decade before the Civil War began. In 1962 at the Boston Public Library I read through the coverage of the fugitive slave cases and learned that during the Sims case, in the spring of 1851, all the respectable newspapers of both parties, Democratic and Whig, were united in wanting Sims to be promptly and peacefully remanded. Put it another way: almost all respectable citizens thought the Law should be enforced in order to preserve the union. Only a couple of papers on the lunatic fringe advocated rescuing a fugitive slave or otherwise actively resisting the law--the Liberator and the Commonwealth. Yet only four years after the Sims case the Massachusetts legislature passed, over the veto of the governor, the Personal Liberty Act--the purpose of which was to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law. In those few years public opinion in Massachusetts had been reversed--by activists like Garrison and Parker and Phillips and Whittier. Thoreau helped. Such idealists achieved one of the most dramatic reversals of public opinion in American history. In the late 1960s, fresh from reading the thunderous denunciations of the Boston papers of the lunatic and incendiary "higher law" advocates, I was able, in class after class, to put into historical perspective the changes in public attitudes toward the war in Viet Nam. Here, in American history, was proof that a handful of people following their consciences could sway a majority to their side. When you tell a student only that the Fugitive Slave Law was infamous you distort history, and you close off any chance of using the past in order to illuminate wise changes in the present.

I confess to some wishful thinking of my own, a lingering hope that there can be an eleventh-grade high school class and a sophomore college class in which all students will have a chance to read works of American literature which have entered most deeply into the collective American consciousness--American scriptures. This is infinitely problematical. Franklin's autobiography became one of the American scriptures as soon as it was published. "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" became American scriptures as soon as they were published (and became a British scripture too--look at Dickens's early use of Irving). Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" {a.k.a. "Civil Disobedience"), Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," Melville's "Bartleby," became American scriptures much later. The canon, plainly, is shifting, and someday "Life without Principle" may be one of the great American scriptures. Maybe there never was a time when Americans were united by exposure to a common body of literature. Yet when I read Hart Crane' s "The Bridge" I sometimes think that some sort of national awareness of common literary classics may have emerged in 1910's and 1920's, when textbooks were pretty much of a piece, when the canon of American literature seemed more or less stable, when immigrant parents were determined that their children would be Americans, would speak only English. Voices were excluded from the textbooks which "everyone" read. Melville was excluded, most of the time Dickinson was excluded, and Whitman some of the time. But I wonder if there was not something powerful, healing, and uniting about a generation or two of youngsters all exposed to "Rip Van Winkle" and "Self-Reliance" and "Evangeline" and "The Barefoot Boy," no matter how removed such literature was from urban life or rural life as it had become. Whitman said: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Where I live Whitman is a bridge, and every time I hear the Philadelphia Shadow Traffic report I rejoice. You can't read the New York Times in the summer without encountering a reference to Melville, even if only for his Berkshire County house or even if, as in this last Sunday's Travel section, the journalist puts him in Indonesian waters he only dreamed of sailing. Whatever good there is in an ideal of a national literature, that good will be subverted by any anthology of doctrinaire voices of the politically correct.

I still hope that in later revisions the Norton Anthology of American Literature can represent still more diverse American voices than it does now--while at the same time acknowledging and perhaps enlarging the canon of works which are of enduring national importance, the nearest we can get to a body of national scriptures.

[Notes at end: “probably not use” . . . . Maybe I meant to put the latter part of this up with the part about the Heath contributors not being quite serious about diversity]

My criteria for greatness are of course debatable, but based on the consensus of many decades of lovers of American literature. In teaching I act on an elitist assumption--that there is at least a remote possibility that documents which afford rich, complex aesthetic experiences might also be the very documents most likely to work transforming enlightenment--social, cultural, political enlightenment--in earnest young students. Could Thoreau's "Life without Principle" possibly achieve Thoreau's aim--to encourage any hearer or reader to stand for principles against the pressures of the times, to resist the short cuts to wealth of any kind, to resist the pollution of the mind from the media? Paul Lauter says his students find Thoreau irrelevant; that's worse than the late 60's, when some students carried Walden around long after they were too zonked out to read any passage in it.

The best lessons come from the classics. During the Viet Nam war journalists and politicians beat their breasts lamenting that America had lost its national innocence, that for the first time in our history we were fighting an unjust war. Any historian and any teacher of American literature could point to the Whig outcries over Polk's invasion of Mexico and McKinley's invasion of the Philippines. Every two generations or so America had lost her virginity (as the commentators said) then magically had regained it as national memory faded. During the remanding of slaves to the South Thoreau had cast about to define what he had lost and had realized that what he had lost was a country. For years I carried about a Thermofax of Bill Gibson's 1940s article on Howells' and Mark Twain's opposition to the Spanish-American war, where he quoted Howells' lament at the loss of a national idealism and innocence. Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer have been making old discoveries. Teachers who saw a recurrent pattern could use writings by classic American authors to teach something immeasurably significant about the American national character--a pattern of slow arousal of conscience, of action on the basis of that conscience, and afterwards the pall of a collective amnesia.
When I wished the Reconstructing syllabi had included more establishment authors like Thomas Bailey Aldrich I wasn't asking for equal time for bigots. Then, in the depths of the first Reagan administration, I thought we might as well know how some of the kindly people who had voted for Reagan had learned to fear and hate some people less fortunate than themselves. It seemed to me that we could not learn that from reading the writings of labor agitators but we might get it from reading John Hay, Henry Adams, and even some of the xenophobic passages of the later Stowe. If we want to understand one of the dark sides of the American Psyche, I thought, we ought to be willing to go to any lengths--even to the extreme of reading some minor literature by representatives of the Establishment at different periods in our history. Now, when many teachers will want to say, and perhaps even do, something about homelessness in America it might be very good to teach Stephen Crane's "Experiment in Misery" and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, but it might do even better to teach some of the conservative voices of the 1870's and 1880's when unemployed people (many of them not native born) began wandering out of cities into small towns and rural areas looking for work and food, and creating what became known as the Tramp Menace. In December 1990 we are told of a shift in public opinion, a hardening of sensibility about the unemployed and the homeless. To teach practical compassion and well as idealism and sentimentality, we could do worse than to listen to some frightened and angry conservative voices that helped mold American public opinion--the voices of Harriet Beecher Stowe or John Hay, for example, or the ambivalent voice of Mary Wilkins in The Portion of Labor.

Irresponsible Reviewers Series-- Robert Milder