29 June 2011
MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE
00 Foreword
01 The Footsteps Theory of Biography
02 The Biographical Basis of Textual Editing
03 Entangled by Pierre: The Inexorable Summons to the Archives
04 Creating The New Melville Log
05 Desiderata and Puzzlements
06 Melville’s Courtship of Elizabeth Shaw
07 The “Modern Boccaccio,” Our First Literary Sex Symbol:
The Fascinations of Fayaway
08 Facts Which Do Not Speak for Themselves
09 Presentism in Biography
10 Little Jack Horners and Archivophobics
11 Biographical Scholars and Recidivist Critics
12 The Malign Legacy of the New Criticism
13 Melville's Short Run of Good Luck
14 Melville and Hawthorne at the Hotel in Lenox
15 A Sacrifice for the Public Good
16 Late 20th-Century Intellectuals without Information
17 Early 21st-Century Intellectuals without Information
18 Why Melville Took Hawthorne to the Holy Land
19 Melville as a Titan of Literature: High-Minded English Admirers
and the Kory-Kory Component
20 Damned by Dollars: Moby-Dick and the Price of Genius
Showing posts with label biography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biography. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Deconstructing THE ART OF THE NOVEL and Liberating James's Prefaces
One of the two or three articles I am proudest of, although it has seldom been cited by Jameseans. I so strongly wanted to write it that I took the great risk of breaking away from the Melville biography, knowing that I might not be able to return and complete it. This is a loving tribute to the man I would happily have spent my career working on, had things been different.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
MELVILLE AND BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE
MELVILLE AND BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE is a book I “completed” and then laid aside in May 2010.
I am picking it up in May 2011 after spending a year on the first print volume of THE NEW MELVILLE LOG (now far along, with Robert Sandberg’s help) and on THE POWELL PAPERS (the book with the index that took 2 months instead of 3 weeks), now slated for publication in mid-July 2011. Now that I look at the pile of print-outs I made in May, 2010 (the first time I had printed any of the book), some chapters, such as “The Footsteps Theory of Biography,” look about ready for publication. Others need work. I wanted a paired Hetero Sex Symbol and Homo Sex Symbol set of chapters but did not have the “Historical Note” of the 1988 NN MOBY-DICK “Historical Note” in my computer. In the intervening months I have bought ReadIris and may use it to copy pages from that “Historical Note” on the part British homosexuals played in the Melville Revival then see if I can update those pages by looking on the Internet (Google Books should help now) and checking newspaper and magazine databases (of course, unavailable in 1988). I might make this a demonstration chapter, showing what can be found now on the Internet. To some extent other chapters, notably the one on why Melville took Hawthorne along with him to the Holy Land, have already benefited by new research in the databases available to me for free online, from NEGHS, and from the University of Delaware. Several chapters are already “demonstration chapters” on how to use evidence. The order and titles and contents of chapters will change in the next weeks, but this is what I am starting with on 18 May 2011.
MELVILLE AND BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE
00 Foreword
01 The Footsteps Theory of Biography
02 What I Brought to the Melville Edition
03 Entangled by Pierre: The Summons to the Archives
04 Creating The New Melville Log
05 Puzzlements and Desiderata
06 Little Jack Horners and Archivophobics
07 Scholars and Recidivist Critics
08 Facts which do not Speak for Themselves
09 The Repudiation of Facts
10 Presentism in Biography
11 The Courtship of Elizabeth Shaw
12 Melville and Hawthorne's Last Meeting in the Berkshires
13 Why Melville Took Hawthorne to the Holy Land
14 The Modern Boccaccio: Melville as Heterosexual Sex Symbol
15 Melville as Homosexual Sex Symbol
17 Intellectuals without Information through 1997
18 Intellectuals without Information After 2000
19 Melville's Short Run of Good Luck
20 A Sacrifice for the Public Good
21 Damned by Dollars
I am picking it up in May 2011 after spending a year on the first print volume of THE NEW MELVILLE LOG (now far along, with Robert Sandberg’s help) and on THE POWELL PAPERS (the book with the index that took 2 months instead of 3 weeks), now slated for publication in mid-July 2011. Now that I look at the pile of print-outs I made in May, 2010 (the first time I had printed any of the book), some chapters, such as “The Footsteps Theory of Biography,” look about ready for publication. Others need work. I wanted a paired Hetero Sex Symbol and Homo Sex Symbol set of chapters but did not have the “Historical Note” of the 1988 NN MOBY-DICK “Historical Note” in my computer. In the intervening months I have bought ReadIris and may use it to copy pages from that “Historical Note” on the part British homosexuals played in the Melville Revival then see if I can update those pages by looking on the Internet (Google Books should help now) and checking newspaper and magazine databases (of course, unavailable in 1988). I might make this a demonstration chapter, showing what can be found now on the Internet. To some extent other chapters, notably the one on why Melville took Hawthorne along with him to the Holy Land, have already benefited by new research in the databases available to me for free online, from NEGHS, and from the University of Delaware. Several chapters are already “demonstration chapters” on how to use evidence. The order and titles and contents of chapters will change in the next weeks, but this is what I am starting with on 18 May 2011.
MELVILLE AND BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE
00 Foreword
01 The Footsteps Theory of Biography
02 What I Brought to the Melville Edition
03 Entangled by Pierre: The Summons to the Archives
04 Creating The New Melville Log
05 Puzzlements and Desiderata
06 Little Jack Horners and Archivophobics
07 Scholars and Recidivist Critics
08 Facts which do not Speak for Themselves
09 The Repudiation of Facts
10 Presentism in Biography
11 The Courtship of Elizabeth Shaw
12 Melville and Hawthorne's Last Meeting in the Berkshires
13 Why Melville Took Hawthorne to the Holy Land
14 The Modern Boccaccio: Melville as Heterosexual Sex Symbol
15 Melville as Homosexual Sex Symbol
17 Intellectuals without Information through 1997
18 Intellectuals without Information After 2000
19 Melville's Short Run of Good Luck
20 A Sacrifice for the Public Good
21 Damned by Dollars
Monday, May 2, 2011
Brenda Wineapple's Claims to being a Melville scholar vs Harrison Hayford
Great Melville Authority Brenda Wineapple vs Harrison Hayford--Challenge to Wineapple
This is the first of three posts to be read as a group; here I am reposting only one to May, leaving the others in April.
HERE IS SOME OF THE SCATHING DISMISSAL OF MY BIOGRAPHY BY BRENDA WINEAPPLE, WHO WROTE MUCH OF “HAWTHORNE: A LIFE” IN THE GENRE OF “ROMANTIC FICTION” (Denis Donoghue’s term in his review of her book)—Brenda Wineapple, whose outright errors (and pervasive vulgarities) about Melville and Hawthorne are detailed in other posts in my blog already posted and will be supplemented in more posts.
Brenda Wineapple accused me of “fudging the biographical imperative”; in her treatment of Melville and Hawthorne she did not fudge that imperative so much as repudiate it altogether for a prose that vacillates between “romantic fiction” and the luridness of the “bodice ripper.” Think of Melville sprinting from rock to jutting rock! Think of Melville spotless as a Berkshire lamb! Think of the years Wineapple had free to perfect her method of fictionalizing documentary material thanks to the ACLS and NEH!
Will you believe Hayford or Wineapple? Did Wineapple spend even one day on the two volumes of my biography of Melville? I vouch for HH’s spending the 10 days and nights he specifies he devoted to the first volume. (He did not live to read the second volume but he read a draft of it a decade before it was published.)
Wineapple in the NATION: As Hawthorne held Moby-Dick in his hand, "he could open the book in his nervous way (more nervous even than normally)," writes Parker, "and get from his friend a guided tour of the organization of the thing now in print, and even sample a few paragraphs that caught his eye or that the author eagerly pointed out to him." He could indeed. Whether he did is another matter, though not for Parker, as secure in his fantasy as Edmund Morris is in his imaginary Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Yet despite the hulking material he's amassed from a mountain of newspapers, a fairly new cache of family papers and a host of collateral letters, to name just a few of his sources, Parker continually veers into unwonted speculation that then careens into certainty, moving back and forth between data and guesswork, seamlessly fusing the two and squandering his credibility as biographer along the way. . . .
Wineapple in the NATION: [Q]uestions remain, skirted by Parker, as if his dizzying array of biographical detritus would prevent our posing them. Cramming his book with long, bloodless catalogues of what Melville might have seen or read, Parker layers each sentence with so much stuff he sacrifices drama, insight and even, on occasion, grammar. "Knowing Melville's sightseeing habits as detailed in his journals," Parker obfuscates, "chances are he saw all he could see, keeping a lookout for superb views." He then provides us with all these vistas, plus newspaper reports and tangential historical information, fudging the biographical imperative: to show how Melville transforms the shaggy minutiae of life and its myriad characters (whether Hawthorne, Malcolm, a besieged wife or a shipmate) into an alembic of wishes, conflicts and disappointments that, taken together, reflect him, a mysterious, roiling, poignant writer alive, painfully alive, in every phrase he wrote.
MY CHALLENGE:
I challenge Brenda Wineapple: take any 10 scenes in my biography and justify your saying that I “continually” veer “into unwonted speculation that then careens into certainty, moving back and forth between data and guesswork, seamlessly fusing the two” and squandering my “credibility as biographer along the way.” Brenda Wineapple, you got an early copy of my second volume in order to make this accusation in a way to set the tone for all subsequent reviews. Now you have matured even more as a scholar and are able to give examples of what you accuse me of, I invite you a fair debate. Show people what so offended you about my handling of evidence. I promise to swat up my Hawthorne scholarship to deal with you on your ground, too, on 10 scenes of my choosing from HAWTHORNE: A LIFE.
This is the first of three posts to be read as a group; here I am reposting only one to May, leaving the others in April.
HERE IS SOME OF THE SCATHING DISMISSAL OF MY BIOGRAPHY BY BRENDA WINEAPPLE, WHO WROTE MUCH OF “HAWTHORNE: A LIFE” IN THE GENRE OF “ROMANTIC FICTION” (Denis Donoghue’s term in his review of her book)—Brenda Wineapple, whose outright errors (and pervasive vulgarities) about Melville and Hawthorne are detailed in other posts in my blog already posted and will be supplemented in more posts.
Brenda Wineapple accused me of “fudging the biographical imperative”; in her treatment of Melville and Hawthorne she did not fudge that imperative so much as repudiate it altogether for a prose that vacillates between “romantic fiction” and the luridness of the “bodice ripper.” Think of Melville sprinting from rock to jutting rock! Think of Melville spotless as a Berkshire lamb! Think of the years Wineapple had free to perfect her method of fictionalizing documentary material thanks to the ACLS and NEH!
Will you believe Hayford or Wineapple? Did Wineapple spend even one day on the two volumes of my biography of Melville? I vouch for HH’s spending the 10 days and nights he specifies he devoted to the first volume. (He did not live to read the second volume but he read a draft of it a decade before it was published.)
Wineapple in the NATION: As Hawthorne held Moby-Dick in his hand, "he could open the book in his nervous way (more nervous even than normally)," writes Parker, "and get from his friend a guided tour of the organization of the thing now in print, and even sample a few paragraphs that caught his eye or that the author eagerly pointed out to him." He could indeed. Whether he did is another matter, though not for Parker, as secure in his fantasy as Edmund Morris is in his imaginary Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Yet despite the hulking material he's amassed from a mountain of newspapers, a fairly new cache of family papers and a host of collateral letters, to name just a few of his sources, Parker continually veers into unwonted speculation that then careens into certainty, moving back and forth between data and guesswork, seamlessly fusing the two and squandering his credibility as biographer along the way. . . .
Wineapple in the NATION: [Q]uestions remain, skirted by Parker, as if his dizzying array of biographical detritus would prevent our posing them. Cramming his book with long, bloodless catalogues of what Melville might have seen or read, Parker layers each sentence with so much stuff he sacrifices drama, insight and even, on occasion, grammar. "Knowing Melville's sightseeing habits as detailed in his journals," Parker obfuscates, "chances are he saw all he could see, keeping a lookout for superb views." He then provides us with all these vistas, plus newspaper reports and tangential historical information, fudging the biographical imperative: to show how Melville transforms the shaggy minutiae of life and its myriad characters (whether Hawthorne, Malcolm, a besieged wife or a shipmate) into an alembic of wishes, conflicts and disappointments that, taken together, reflect him, a mysterious, roiling, poignant writer alive, painfully alive, in every phrase he wrote.
MY CHALLENGE:
I challenge Brenda Wineapple: take any 10 scenes in my biography and justify your saying that I “continually” veer “into unwonted speculation that then careens into certainty, moving back and forth between data and guesswork, seamlessly fusing the two” and squandering my “credibility as biographer along the way.” Brenda Wineapple, you got an early copy of my second volume in order to make this accusation in a way to set the tone for all subsequent reviews. Now you have matured even more as a scholar and are able to give examples of what you accuse me of, I invite you a fair debate. Show people what so offended you about my handling of evidence. I promise to swat up my Hawthorne scholarship to deal with you on your ground, too, on 10 scenes of my choosing from HAWTHORNE: A LIFE.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
The Footsteps Theory of Biography
The Footsteps Theory of Biography
This is the draft of a chapter for MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE, to be published by Northwestern University Press. I post this piece with the approval of Henry L. Carrigan of NU Press in the hope that it will elicit helpful commentary from other biographers, particularly those associated with THE BIOGRAPHER'S CRAFT. I am re-posting it in Mat so it will be easy to find.
Paul Murray Kendall in The Art of Biography (1965) emphasizes that the modern biographer needs to be "acutely conscious of the importance of locale." Kendall is sure that the "physical ambiences" of "the subject's habitat" can "enable the life-writer to tighten his grip on character, even to solve enigmas of behavior, mysterious responses to experience." The biographer steeped in the subject's locales tells a better life but also develops "the life-relationship"--the unique if "indefinable" relationship between the biographer and the subject:
The biographer opens himself to all that places and things will tell him, in his struggle to visualize, and to sense, his man in being. ¶Deepest of all, the particular kind of biographer of whom I am speaking, cherishes, I believe, a conviction--call it a romantic quirk, if you will--that where the subject has trod he must tread, what the subject has seen he must see, because he thus achieves an indefinable but unmistakable kinship with his man. The winning of this kinship, more than anything else he can do, helps to annihilate the centuries, the spaces, the deceptions of change, the opacity of death.
Calling Kendall's book his "favorite work about biography," Frank E. Vandiver [1982, 1983 see in copyright page of Biog as High Adventure] endorses Kendall's insistence on going where the subject went, even to Louis XI's battlefield at Montlhéry, however much the terrain had changed in half a millennium. This notion of the "life-relationship" is enormously appealing because it exalts the biographer toward the level of the subject. What biographer would not want "to annihilate the centuries, the spaces, the deceptions of change, the opacity of death" and stand face to face with his subject, perhaps lending an elbow or a shoulder now and then?
Richard Holmes in the 1986 Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer is a soul-brother to Kendall. Writing on Romantic and romantic literary figures, Holmes is himself a romantic fellow, not a hard-nosed postmodern biographer but a lover of writers, what they wrote, and where they wrote. The youthful Holmes with his grown man's pipe and his willingness to try any drink was endearing to the French, for there is nothing like sharing little pleasurable vices to foster intimacy. Of course he encountered folks who knew just whose ancestor stabled Robert Louis Stevenson's donkey! Holmes is so adept at teasing out the significances of places for him and for his nominal subjects such as Stevenson that one yearns to believe him when he describes his great early revelation:
Have I explained myself at all? It is the simplicity of the idea, the realisation, that I am after. It was important for me, because it was probably the first time that I caught an inkling of what a process (indeed an entire vocation) called "biography" really means. I had never thought about it before. "Biography" meant a book about someone's life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past, a following of footsteps. You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeing figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.
This man is a Whitmanesque charmer: "Have I explained myself at all?" We surrender ourselves to his complex storytelling, becoming as interested in Holmes, for the moment, as in Stevenson. And we glorify ourselves as trackers of more than physical trails.
Even more staid biographers like me will admit that Richard Holmes's sort of direct involvement pays off. If he had worked on Melville the ineffable Holmes would have found a way to sail on the Charles W. Morgan for a week or two guided by the globe-navigating Melville scholar Mary Kay Bercaw, whom he, with his luck, would have found harbored, like the whaleship, at Mystic Seaport. He would have discovered a hectare in Tahiti absolutely untouched by Westerners since 1842, would have taken in all the smells of Peru, would have gnawed duff in the bowels of the Constitution and slept there in a hammock by special permission of the U. S. Navy and the National Park Service. And we would have loved him more for the sensual, tactile impressions he brought to us.
Holmes would never have suffered my discomfiture in 1988 when I wanted to see what Melville saw in Dupuytren's Museum in the School of Medicine in Paris. Even that year, as a man of middle age, and even if he had not spoken French, Holmes would not have been subjected to a thirty minute preliminary negotiation with Mme Thérèse. Non, this "Herman Melville" could not have seen nothing in 1849 because the museum was founded in 1936, hein! Melville, whoever he was, could not have seen the museum because it had not existed pas! I might if I were so minded--it was up to me--return to my hotel for Melville's journal, even printed in English, and return, and then it might be decided that I could enter into the museum, but if I did not return in fifty minutes--she used an unfamiliar expression which was not tant pis but some more brutal French vernacular word for "Tough!" And besides the journal I would have to have with me a guide who spoke English because I would not understand nothing merely by looking, and none was visible. To the hotel, on the right bank, seizing merely photocopies of the journal, all I had, not the tome itself, and back. Would the tome be demanded? Mme Thérèse nowhere visible. Isabelle, the speaker of anglais! Sweet Isabelle! Two-headed French Babies. French Babies joined at chest. French Babies joined at belly. French Cancers. Vats. French Tumors. Many big French Tumors. Vats. Heart of a French miser with a big franc stuck in aorta. Genitals & parts of genitals--nonfunctional parts of French genitals. Vats of formaldehyde. Away, flushed with victory, fifty francs well spent, in time to behold a modern marvel--French athletes in the Luxembourg Gardens smoking their Gauloises vigorously while moderately engaged in du jogging.
What good had it done me to see the two-headed French babies? In Mardi, written before his trips abroad in 1849 and 1856-57, Melville had described Hooloomooloo, the Isle of Cripples, and in White-Jacket (Ch. 61) had described the Parisian cast of the head of an elderly woman with "a hideous, crumpled horn, like that of a ram, downward growing out of the forehead." Melville knew, already, of the departments of Morbid Anatomy and the Anatomical Museums of Europe, and knew he wanted to see them, for his friend Duyckinck had been to Dupuytren's Museum of monstrosities. Melville was a man who would pay to look at the grotesque. So, I persisted until I saw the miser's heart, plugged up by a franc, just as I had persisted in the always closed Natural History Museum in Florence, where my wife with her UCLA Italian proclaimed the stature of her husband the professor and got us into the great room with large wax figures of pregnant women and men with bisected penises designed for students of anatomy to study and copy, and she chatted up the attendant while I peered at the dioramas of Naples in the time of the plague. Again, I asked, what good had it done me, since I knew already that Melville was interested in monstrosities? So much for the romance of scholarship? But against such skepticism is the late-century vignette Scott Norsworthy found about New York City during the cholera epidemic of July 1849--an "Old Fogy" who recollected venturing out and encountering Melville in company with Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews. For long Manhattan moments those four men were the only New Yorkers visible in the deserted streets. Also, Melville remembered being left in Albany in the time of the plague, 1832, when all the rest of the family fled to the safety of Pittsfield. He knew what it was to be in cities in the time of the plague.
No such romantic pilgrim as Holmes, I nevertheless did my best to follow Melville, visiting and revisiting places where his feet had trod and his horses' hooves had trod in the United States and even some his feet had trod in Europe. Almost always, I was reflecting, with lurking skepticism and a tinge of guilt, on just how valuable it really was to see what he saw, other than as a tax write-off. I went to Albany, Amsterdam, Chester, Coblenz, Cologne, Como, Edinburgh, Florence, Gansevoort, Glasgow, Glens Falls, Lansingburgh, Lenox, Liverpool, London, Nantucket, New Bedford, Paris, Pittsfield, Rome, San Francisco, Staten Island, Troy, and even Venice, where it's hard to follow footsteps. What I saw, sometimes, was pretty much what Melville saw, such as the cathedral he and Hawthorne went to in Chester. One room, the Tribuno at the Uffizi, seemed almost fixed in time, so many of the same paintings and sculptures were still there. In Florence, also, there were clear remnants of the old architecture so we could see that in Melville's time the now squared-off Donay would have looked exotic, a bit like a masonry caravanserie. Sometimes little or nothing was left. Liverpool in the 1980s was rough, left to decay with only the folly of a new "cathedral" to mock the impoverished scene. At least I got a sense of how high above the squalid dock area the once-elegant Adelphi stood, where Evert Duyckinck and then Lemuel Shaw Jr stayed, and saw how decrepit it had become. Not one historical postcard of Liverpool was for sale, but at least the Nelson statue was where Melville had seen it. After the Blitz the narrow London streets Melville had wandered through were gone. I had to reconstitute the village of Gansevoort in my mind from the directories and the family letters.
I went through Arrowhead many times, and slept one night there. I got no frisson from prowling spirits of the Melvilles but I got what any tourist could get--a realizing sense of the power of the sight, on a good hour, of Greylock to the north from Melville's study window. Still, in Mark Bostridge's collection Lives for Sale I knew just what Antonia Fraser meant: "I would never have understood the pattern of events following the murder of Riccio at Holyrood, had I not been able to go and investigate the layout of the palace myself." Very much in her spirit, I climbed into the attic of the Lansingburgh house because I was pretty sure some of the boys slept up there, low headroom or not. I climbed into the attic of Broadhall because I wanted to see how the house had been altered from the time that Melville described the spot where he was working on his whaling book in August 1850. I got into the Mount Vernon Street house by accosting the owner with a copy of the advance proofs of my first volume. I walked round and round the Gansevoort, New York, house and made a detailed floor plan of it on the basis of dozens of references in family letters, although I did not get inside. The ineffable Holmes would have hailed a child to summon a caretaker, have been admited, and been offered at least a cold collation and tea. I worried about the careless way one downstairs room was identified in a letter: "state" room or "slate" room? Finally, exercising one of the few powers of a biographer, I decreed that it would be the "slate" room; if a captain could "make it noon," I could "make it slate." (Only after this chapter was drafted did John Gretchko present me with the executor's room-by-room inventory of the furnishings of the Gansevoort house.) I also made a floor chart of the 26th Street house, based on a great range of evidence including Melville's granddaughter Frances's corrections in her copy of Mumford's biography then in the possession of Priscilla Ambrose. I identified with Melville's love of strong old elegant furniture and shared his distaste for new geegaws. It is no coincidence that my humbler but memento-filled study in Pennsylvania was photographed for the New York Times Magazine.
But how did all my charts of preserved or lost houses, including the Manor House of the Van Rensselaers (disassembled stone by stone) and Uncle Peter Gansevoort's house and the Governor's House at Sailors' Snug Harbor, help me? In an obvious way, I could contrast better the substantial unostentatious house where Elizabeth Shaw Melville grew up with what she experienced as a visitor at the Lansingburgh house while Melville was in the Pacific and at Arrowhead. Knowing that Melville had paid for the small, rundown Arrowhead exactly what the Morewoods paid for the mouldering grandeur of the Melvill estate (with much greater acreage) told me something about Melville's business sense. I knew that on a smaller scale than Broadhall Uncle Herman's Gansevoort house where Melville's mother spent her last years was furnished with fine strong colonial pieces as well as some imported furniture and that she reigned there in near-feudal splendor. I understood Melville daughter Frances's anger the better for knowing Melville as a collector and preserver of beautiful objects, however destructive he had been, at times, of his own writings and of letters that now would be worth good money to lucky descendants or other owners, such as the letter from Hawthorne in praise of Moby-Dick, or the manuscript of The Isle of the Cross. (Someone who reads this may know just where some treasures are stored.) Knowing the houses inside and out let me understand the human relationships better, guess responsibly at suppressed feelings, understand human weaknesses better. Truly, there was value in knowing where and how the family lived, even if I never in a mystical moment caught the scent of Melville's "segar" or heard the swish of colonial gowns when they were brought down from the attic at Gansevoort for airing and possible use in ceremonies in 1876.
Melville sought out high places for superb views and reminders of satanic temptation. I knew what it felt like to live beneath mountains. During the War, when Southerners were transported west to build ships, Mount Hood had dominated the terrain to the West on clear days. Photographs of Cavanough Mountain from my parents' eastern Oklahoma farm are hard to distinguish, sometimes, from photographs of the much higher Greylock. Some things I guessed at, as when I declared that Melville experienced the sense of Vermont shouldering up behind him while he was at Lansingburgh. I was going by what I would have felt, and what I knew of Gansevoort's fur-buying expeditions into Massachusetts and Vermont. Melville would have lifted up his eyes unto the hills, from whence his help just might come. This I absolutely knew because of a religious indoctrination similar to his.
Myself a lover of the Romantics, I seized the chance to wend my way down from the Baths of Caracalla to the Protestant Cemetery-- by a natural progression, Melville recorded. The comment might be elliptical to moderns since he did not mention Shelley, but it would have been obvious to any educated person in his time, who would have known that at the baths Melville, like any tourist, would thought of Shelley's composing parts of Prometheus Unbound there, would perhaps have remembered an engraving of the scene, and then naturally have made his way down outside the walls of Rome to stand beside the grave that purported to contain some ashes, at least, from Shelley's body. Did my trek help me? Well, as I worked my way down the torturous working-class streets from the baths of Caracalla to the Protestant Cemetery, following Melville following Shelley, I had time to reflect on Shelley's significance. The unexpected benefit was the perception that Melville, musing on Shelley, might have been blindsided by the proximity of the tomb of Keats's, little known in the United States in Melville's early life and still not as famous as Shelley. Perhaps much of the value in following the footsteps of writers lies in leaving yourself open to the indirect and unanticipated.
On the whole, I decided, it was much more important to follow Melville around the paintings and sculptures in the Tribuno in Florence than to look at Saint Mark's in Venice. Having coffee at Florian's was pleasant, but did it bring me closer to Melville? Only ironically, for a card on each of the outside tables listed notables who had sat there, Melville among them--Melville who had been an inconspicuous, almost broken man when he was there. The grander the monument the less of it Melville could have taken in, I suspected, but I never regretting peering a painting he had seen, or a piece of sculpture. Melville himself drew the connection between Italian paintings and English literature, noting in his Milton that the devils in Paradise Lost were influenced by the paintings the poet saw in Italy. I thought it was valuable to have touched the green drapery marble of the Jesuit Church in Venice that Melville had so admired and that the snobbish noncombatant Howells would soon scorn. Melville's appreciation of the marble showed me something I liked about his sense of aesthetics--something for which most of the evidence lay in his marginalia.
Was I able to fake what I did not see? Would readers of my biography hoot at how obvious it was that I never got to the Marquesas or Mar Saba? Did I describe Honolulu successfully on the basis of newspapers and histories and ships' logs, or has Hawaii so changed that a person born after it became a state would not know how close or how remote I was from an accurate description of what it felt like to have been there in 1843? Did I give a sense of the now lost Greek splendor of the buildings of the Sailors' Snug Harbor as you saw them from across the Bay in Manhattan? Did I convey the sense of what you would have encountered in the 1870s as you walked along the Hudson around the Battery and up the East River? What I learned in my researches was a revelation to me--sawmills on the Hudson; north of Coenties Slip bowsprits run in over street traffic so you could touch the figureheads; the ship-chandlery shops north of Market Street (halfway between the Battery and Corlears Hook). These last details I took thankfully from Charles H. Farnham's "A Day on the Docks" in the May 1879 Scribner's Magazine.
Perhaps following Melville was not as valuable as knowing what it was to live a nineteenth-century life. I survived one northern Oklahoma winter in a tent and lived for years without electricity and running water and some years with electricity but without running water. Therefore I knew what it meant when I belatedly discovered from an 1850 advertisement that the Fourth Avenue house Melville left in 1850 had water closets and hot water to the third floor, and I knew what it meant for Elizabeth Shaw Melville to go to Arrowhead, which had a kitchen pump and no water closet or hot water. I knew how to picture the scene Melville’s brother-in-law John Hoadley sketched in his 28 March 1854 letter to Augusta in which he envisions the "Arrowheads" in the evening (bereft of Maria and Fanny, who are with him in Lawrence):
I can see you now, your face, shaded by your hand,--glowing in the ruddy light, and full of changeful expression, as the flickering fire burns brighter or subsides;--changeful, yet continuous, like the notes of an Irish melody; while Lizzie looks up at intervals from her sewing or her book, to recall by a tone and look of love, the musing wanderer from his enchanted Isles."
I knew about reading by firelight and the light from a coal oil lamp, though not a whale-oil lamp.
I knew about modes of transportation. I had traveled in a wagon drawn by a team of horses I had harnessed up myself, and I had ridden horses I had saddled. I knew how to plough and build fences and milk cows. I had walked for hours at night on railroad tracks and dirt roads, so I knew what it meant for Melville to walk fifteen or twenty miles home to Lansingburgh from where he was teaching. I could imagine what it meant to Melville to have, in different decades, crossed the whole of Massachusetts in a stagecoach and then to have crossed the same parts of Massachusetts on a train. From talk about the early 1930s and from what I witnessed once in Hebronville, Texas, I knew what it meant to go out on foot looking for work, although I never did it myself. I had traveled thousands of miles in a Model T and thousands of miles on a troop train in 1942 and many thousands of miles on trains when I was deadheading as a railroad telegrapher in the early 1950s. I had a realizing sense of the weeks of travel Uncle Thomas and his family experienced in 1837, going from Pittsfield to Galena, Illinois. Better than most people I understood just what the change meant to Cousin Priscilla, a decade and a half later, when she boarded a train in Manhattan and went all the way to Chicago and beyond to Galena in a few days. Perhaps no other American biographer working in the 1990s had as instinctive a sense as I did of changes in modes of transportation in the 19th century.
The Melvillean Warner Berthoff, whom I never met, wrote me on 29 January 1997 that he was "a sucker for various topographical details." He had been amused, he said, "by a remark about the tedious journey from Pittsfield to Albany--tedious, of course, in the 1830s before the railroad came in, but also tedious, I can imagine, to a late 20th century researcher who had to travel it oftener than he liked." That was the response I wanted. I had, in fact, hitchhiked from Albany to Pittsfield on a hot August day in 1962 and remembered the repeated undulations of the topography and could imagine the difference between an early stagecoach ride across that stretch and, after Melville's return from the Pacific, the speed of transit on the railway cars. With Berthoff, at least, I succeeded in making use of my attempts to follow Melville's footsteps.
I was no good at ocean voyaging, but I paid attention to Melville and water within the continents. He knew waterfalls from his youth, Poesten Kill in Troy, a few miles south of the house his mother rented in Lansingburgh, and Cohoes Falls where the Mohawk enters the Hudson. He would have known Glens Falls early. We assume he knew the falls at Kaaterskill Clove, the scene of Asher B. Durand's painting of Cole and Bryant. He saw Niagara, and probably went to see the falls of Saint Anthony when he was in Galena. In Melville's first book in the descent into the interior of the island, his companion Toby is deterred neither by "Typees or Niagaras." Melville made repeated trips to Bash-Bish to see the divided waterfalls. In 1840 he may have seen the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi and the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi; later they were certainly vivid in his mind's eye. In 1849 he went to the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine at Coblenz, the name of which, he knew, meant confluence. In 1856 he saw the confluence of the Clyde and the Leven below Dumbarton Castle. Why would he not seek out confluences of rivers, since from childhood he had walked on the Battery, seeing where the East River and the Hudson (or "North River") merged after they poured separately into the Bay.
To declare that Melville was interested in bodies of water, lakes, ponds, flowing water, waterfalls, and confluences of rivers, and oceans is to announce the obvious. But there was more. Melville was fascinated by, perhaps haunted by, feelings of being subterranean, in the orlop-deck, in vaults, in passages such as Belzoni wormed his way through, in depths below depths as in the Hotel de Cluny. He was particularly intrigued by waters that went subterranean and emerged far away. From Tuckerman, apparently, Melville learned the story of the Arethusa fountain which he told in Ch. 41 of Moby-Dick:
So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strella mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whaleman.
The "pouring in of contributory streams (Pierre 283) fascinated Melville because he associated flowing water, on the surface or subterranean, with processes of the mind and particularly with the way literary influences work on a man engaged, as he was, in a lifelong course of self-education. Whole ships could float, intact, up to the surface of a lake? So could memories surge up, terrifyingly intact. Images from distant sources could suddenly, shockingly invade the conscious mind from the subconscious. In Pierre (107) Melville pledged: "I shall follow the endless, winding way,--the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land." Rivers, particularly subterranean rivers, flowed like the streams of thought in the depths of the human mind. After a while, when I looked at waterfalls and confluences he had seen I began to see them as I thought he had seen them.
What's important for a biographer, I decided, is not visiting Niagara but understanding that Melville, born near where both the East River and the Hudson poured into the Bay, raised on a great river near spectacular confluences and waterfalls, thought of diverse literary influences as waves at work on him simultaneously: "Homer's old organ rolls its vast volumes under the light frothy wave-crests of Anacreon and Hafiz; and high over my ocean, sweet Shakespeare soars, like all the larks of the spring" (Mardi Ch. 119). There Melville concludes: "And as the great Mississippi musters his watery nations: Ohio, with all his leagued streams; Missouri, bringing down in torrents the clans from the highlands; Arkansas, his Tartar rivers from the plain;--so with all the past and present pouring in me, I roll down my billow from afar." Had Melville in 1849, weeks or months after his rapt encounter with Shakespeare, felt that Milton was flowing in over the currents of Shakespeare which were still flowing in his memory? Did Spenser, first read as soft pornography that stimulated him in early adolescence, flow in upon the current of Wordsworth about the time Melville finished Moby-Dick? In the spring of 1862, if he read Ruskin's Modern Painters then, did he think of Ruskin's words as flowing over sometimes identical words in the preface Arnold had written to his Poems?
Melville was particularly moved by complex literary influences such as I described (183) in Melville: The Making of the Poet, his meditation on Arnold's tribute to Wordsworth in Wordsworth's tribute to Collins' tribute to Thomson. He knew the two earlier poems in 1862 when he was caught by the first line of Arnold's "The Youth of Nature":
Rais'd are the dripping oars--
Silent the boat: the lake,
Lovely and soft as a dream,
Swims in the sheen of the moon.
The mountains stand at its head
Clear as the pure June night,
But the valleys are flooded with haze.
Rydal and Fairfield are there;
In the shadow Wordsworth lies dead.
So it is, so it will be for aye.
Nature is fresh as of old,
Is lovely: a mortal is dead.
Melville noted "And oft suspend the dashing oar / To bid his gentle spirit rest," and identified the words as coming from the poem by Collins on Thomson ("Ode on the Death of Thompson. The Scene on the Thames near Richmond"). Then Melville wrote "Then let us, as we float along / For him suspend the dashing oar." Here Melville identified these words as Wordsworth's on Collins ("Remembrance of Collins. Composed upon the Thames near Richmond"). Melville commented: "How beautifully appropriate therefor this reminiscent prelude of Arnold concerning Wordsworth." This vividly shows Melville's sensitivity to literary echoes which for him represent a literary continuity to be treasured. As it happens, I copied the lines from Arnold from my copy of the 1856 Ticknor and Fields Poems which John Greenleaf Whittier had owned and which Samuel T. Pickard had annotated: "Many pages uncut. I fear thee did not read thy book through, Friend John." Now, there's a slight frisson, in concluding this paragraph, one Kendall and Holmes might have enjoyed, and an added frisson in knowing, as we do now, that Whittier and Melville were cousins, through Melville's paternal grandmother, although probably neither man knew of the relationship.
I did what I could, but about biography as "a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past" I am skeptical--indeed, almost an unbeliever. I was, in the 1990s, following emotional trails through family letters and Melville's prose and poetry, and most of them were harrowing and required bravery. When I was luckiest in absolutely capturing an episode, the episode usually was too painful to live with, it seemed. How many other biographers discovered one painful new episode after another in decades of their subjects' lives, with very little alleviation from new scenes of joy? Those discoveries awakened my sympathies for Melville the man. What I would have given, months on end, to have been following only physical trails, and cheerful physical trails at that, no matter how many blackflies swarmed on the slopes of Monument Mountain! Yet by looking at contributory streams, gazing at great confluences, I may have learned better to understand both Melville's sense of depth psychology and his sense of the gigantic power of literary influences, literal inflowings.
Kendall's "what the subject has seen" must be reinterpreted to include sculpture, paintings, and especially books and words in books. You see what "the subject has seen" very clearly in Melville's marginalia, where you see his direct response to what he has just read on the page. In the long run, I think my convalescent five-months 1956 sederunt with Shakespeare before reading Moby-Dick, then my having had a seminar on Milton in 1957, and having the next year read Spenser and then Wordsworth on my own, as he did, before beginning to write on Melville, is what annihilated the "deceptions of change" and the "opacity of death" in the matter of Melville and me. I have known some brave men. Paul Watson, the heroic captain, valiantly ate my sourdough blueberry pancakes here by the Pacific. My own fantasy of high adventure (sailing as a superannuated factotum with Watson against Japanese whale ships) pales against the real dangers I had confronted in following Melville's mental processes, discovering his greatest joys, sharing his high literary ambitions, discovering his greatest sorrows, understanding his financial misery, seeing him as a human being who always, always, ignored my sagest warnings that the footpaths he was taking were disastrous.
This is the draft of a chapter for MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE, to be published by Northwestern University Press. I post this piece with the approval of Henry L. Carrigan of NU Press in the hope that it will elicit helpful commentary from other biographers, particularly those associated with THE BIOGRAPHER'S CRAFT. I am re-posting it in Mat so it will be easy to find.
Paul Murray Kendall in The Art of Biography (1965) emphasizes that the modern biographer needs to be "acutely conscious of the importance of locale." Kendall is sure that the "physical ambiences" of "the subject's habitat" can "enable the life-writer to tighten his grip on character, even to solve enigmas of behavior, mysterious responses to experience." The biographer steeped in the subject's locales tells a better life but also develops "the life-relationship"--the unique if "indefinable" relationship between the biographer and the subject:
The biographer opens himself to all that places and things will tell him, in his struggle to visualize, and to sense, his man in being. ¶Deepest of all, the particular kind of biographer of whom I am speaking, cherishes, I believe, a conviction--call it a romantic quirk, if you will--that where the subject has trod he must tread, what the subject has seen he must see, because he thus achieves an indefinable but unmistakable kinship with his man. The winning of this kinship, more than anything else he can do, helps to annihilate the centuries, the spaces, the deceptions of change, the opacity of death.
Calling Kendall's book his "favorite work about biography," Frank E. Vandiver [1982, 1983 see in copyright page of Biog as High Adventure] endorses Kendall's insistence on going where the subject went, even to Louis XI's battlefield at Montlhéry, however much the terrain had changed in half a millennium. This notion of the "life-relationship" is enormously appealing because it exalts the biographer toward the level of the subject. What biographer would not want "to annihilate the centuries, the spaces, the deceptions of change, the opacity of death" and stand face to face with his subject, perhaps lending an elbow or a shoulder now and then?
Richard Holmes in the 1986 Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer is a soul-brother to Kendall. Writing on Romantic and romantic literary figures, Holmes is himself a romantic fellow, not a hard-nosed postmodern biographer but a lover of writers, what they wrote, and where they wrote. The youthful Holmes with his grown man's pipe and his willingness to try any drink was endearing to the French, for there is nothing like sharing little pleasurable vices to foster intimacy. Of course he encountered folks who knew just whose ancestor stabled Robert Louis Stevenson's donkey! Holmes is so adept at teasing out the significances of places for him and for his nominal subjects such as Stevenson that one yearns to believe him when he describes his great early revelation:
Have I explained myself at all? It is the simplicity of the idea, the realisation, that I am after. It was important for me, because it was probably the first time that I caught an inkling of what a process (indeed an entire vocation) called "biography" really means. I had never thought about it before. "Biography" meant a book about someone's life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past, a following of footsteps. You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeing figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.
This man is a Whitmanesque charmer: "Have I explained myself at all?" We surrender ourselves to his complex storytelling, becoming as interested in Holmes, for the moment, as in Stevenson. And we glorify ourselves as trackers of more than physical trails.
Even more staid biographers like me will admit that Richard Holmes's sort of direct involvement pays off. If he had worked on Melville the ineffable Holmes would have found a way to sail on the Charles W. Morgan for a week or two guided by the globe-navigating Melville scholar Mary Kay Bercaw, whom he, with his luck, would have found harbored, like the whaleship, at Mystic Seaport. He would have discovered a hectare in Tahiti absolutely untouched by Westerners since 1842, would have taken in all the smells of Peru, would have gnawed duff in the bowels of the Constitution and slept there in a hammock by special permission of the U. S. Navy and the National Park Service. And we would have loved him more for the sensual, tactile impressions he brought to us.
Holmes would never have suffered my discomfiture in 1988 when I wanted to see what Melville saw in Dupuytren's Museum in the School of Medicine in Paris. Even that year, as a man of middle age, and even if he had not spoken French, Holmes would not have been subjected to a thirty minute preliminary negotiation with Mme Thérèse. Non, this "Herman Melville" could not have seen nothing in 1849 because the museum was founded in 1936, hein! Melville, whoever he was, could not have seen the museum because it had not existed pas! I might if I were so minded--it was up to me--return to my hotel for Melville's journal, even printed in English, and return, and then it might be decided that I could enter into the museum, but if I did not return in fifty minutes--she used an unfamiliar expression which was not tant pis but some more brutal French vernacular word for "Tough!" And besides the journal I would have to have with me a guide who spoke English because I would not understand nothing merely by looking, and none was visible. To the hotel, on the right bank, seizing merely photocopies of the journal, all I had, not the tome itself, and back. Would the tome be demanded? Mme Thérèse nowhere visible. Isabelle, the speaker of anglais! Sweet Isabelle! Two-headed French Babies. French Babies joined at chest. French Babies joined at belly. French Cancers. Vats. French Tumors. Many big French Tumors. Vats. Heart of a French miser with a big franc stuck in aorta. Genitals & parts of genitals--nonfunctional parts of French genitals. Vats of formaldehyde. Away, flushed with victory, fifty francs well spent, in time to behold a modern marvel--French athletes in the Luxembourg Gardens smoking their Gauloises vigorously while moderately engaged in du jogging.
What good had it done me to see the two-headed French babies? In Mardi, written before his trips abroad in 1849 and 1856-57, Melville had described Hooloomooloo, the Isle of Cripples, and in White-Jacket (Ch. 61) had described the Parisian cast of the head of an elderly woman with "a hideous, crumpled horn, like that of a ram, downward growing out of the forehead." Melville knew, already, of the departments of Morbid Anatomy and the Anatomical Museums of Europe, and knew he wanted to see them, for his friend Duyckinck had been to Dupuytren's Museum of monstrosities. Melville was a man who would pay to look at the grotesque. So, I persisted until I saw the miser's heart, plugged up by a franc, just as I had persisted in the always closed Natural History Museum in Florence, where my wife with her UCLA Italian proclaimed the stature of her husband the professor and got us into the great room with large wax figures of pregnant women and men with bisected penises designed for students of anatomy to study and copy, and she chatted up the attendant while I peered at the dioramas of Naples in the time of the plague. Again, I asked, what good had it done me, since I knew already that Melville was interested in monstrosities? So much for the romance of scholarship? But against such skepticism is the late-century vignette Scott Norsworthy found about New York City during the cholera epidemic of July 1849--an "Old Fogy" who recollected venturing out and encountering Melville in company with Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews. For long Manhattan moments those four men were the only New Yorkers visible in the deserted streets. Also, Melville remembered being left in Albany in the time of the plague, 1832, when all the rest of the family fled to the safety of Pittsfield. He knew what it was to be in cities in the time of the plague.
No such romantic pilgrim as Holmes, I nevertheless did my best to follow Melville, visiting and revisiting places where his feet had trod and his horses' hooves had trod in the United States and even some his feet had trod in Europe. Almost always, I was reflecting, with lurking skepticism and a tinge of guilt, on just how valuable it really was to see what he saw, other than as a tax write-off. I went to Albany, Amsterdam, Chester, Coblenz, Cologne, Como, Edinburgh, Florence, Gansevoort, Glasgow, Glens Falls, Lansingburgh, Lenox, Liverpool, London, Nantucket, New Bedford, Paris, Pittsfield, Rome, San Francisco, Staten Island, Troy, and even Venice, where it's hard to follow footsteps. What I saw, sometimes, was pretty much what Melville saw, such as the cathedral he and Hawthorne went to in Chester. One room, the Tribuno at the Uffizi, seemed almost fixed in time, so many of the same paintings and sculptures were still there. In Florence, also, there were clear remnants of the old architecture so we could see that in Melville's time the now squared-off Donay would have looked exotic, a bit like a masonry caravanserie. Sometimes little or nothing was left. Liverpool in the 1980s was rough, left to decay with only the folly of a new "cathedral" to mock the impoverished scene. At least I got a sense of how high above the squalid dock area the once-elegant Adelphi stood, where Evert Duyckinck and then Lemuel Shaw Jr stayed, and saw how decrepit it had become. Not one historical postcard of Liverpool was for sale, but at least the Nelson statue was where Melville had seen it. After the Blitz the narrow London streets Melville had wandered through were gone. I had to reconstitute the village of Gansevoort in my mind from the directories and the family letters.
I went through Arrowhead many times, and slept one night there. I got no frisson from prowling spirits of the Melvilles but I got what any tourist could get--a realizing sense of the power of the sight, on a good hour, of Greylock to the north from Melville's study window. Still, in Mark Bostridge's collection Lives for Sale I knew just what Antonia Fraser meant: "I would never have understood the pattern of events following the murder of Riccio at Holyrood, had I not been able to go and investigate the layout of the palace myself." Very much in her spirit, I climbed into the attic of the Lansingburgh house because I was pretty sure some of the boys slept up there, low headroom or not. I climbed into the attic of Broadhall because I wanted to see how the house had been altered from the time that Melville described the spot where he was working on his whaling book in August 1850. I got into the Mount Vernon Street house by accosting the owner with a copy of the advance proofs of my first volume. I walked round and round the Gansevoort, New York, house and made a detailed floor plan of it on the basis of dozens of references in family letters, although I did not get inside. The ineffable Holmes would have hailed a child to summon a caretaker, have been admited, and been offered at least a cold collation and tea. I worried about the careless way one downstairs room was identified in a letter: "state" room or "slate" room? Finally, exercising one of the few powers of a biographer, I decreed that it would be the "slate" room; if a captain could "make it noon," I could "make it slate." (Only after this chapter was drafted did John Gretchko present me with the executor's room-by-room inventory of the furnishings of the Gansevoort house.) I also made a floor chart of the 26th Street house, based on a great range of evidence including Melville's granddaughter Frances's corrections in her copy of Mumford's biography then in the possession of Priscilla Ambrose. I identified with Melville's love of strong old elegant furniture and shared his distaste for new geegaws. It is no coincidence that my humbler but memento-filled study in Pennsylvania was photographed for the New York Times Magazine.
But how did all my charts of preserved or lost houses, including the Manor House of the Van Rensselaers (disassembled stone by stone) and Uncle Peter Gansevoort's house and the Governor's House at Sailors' Snug Harbor, help me? In an obvious way, I could contrast better the substantial unostentatious house where Elizabeth Shaw Melville grew up with what she experienced as a visitor at the Lansingburgh house while Melville was in the Pacific and at Arrowhead. Knowing that Melville had paid for the small, rundown Arrowhead exactly what the Morewoods paid for the mouldering grandeur of the Melvill estate (with much greater acreage) told me something about Melville's business sense. I knew that on a smaller scale than Broadhall Uncle Herman's Gansevoort house where Melville's mother spent her last years was furnished with fine strong colonial pieces as well as some imported furniture and that she reigned there in near-feudal splendor. I understood Melville daughter Frances's anger the better for knowing Melville as a collector and preserver of beautiful objects, however destructive he had been, at times, of his own writings and of letters that now would be worth good money to lucky descendants or other owners, such as the letter from Hawthorne in praise of Moby-Dick, or the manuscript of The Isle of the Cross. (Someone who reads this may know just where some treasures are stored.) Knowing the houses inside and out let me understand the human relationships better, guess responsibly at suppressed feelings, understand human weaknesses better. Truly, there was value in knowing where and how the family lived, even if I never in a mystical moment caught the scent of Melville's "segar" or heard the swish of colonial gowns when they were brought down from the attic at Gansevoort for airing and possible use in ceremonies in 1876.
Melville sought out high places for superb views and reminders of satanic temptation. I knew what it felt like to live beneath mountains. During the War, when Southerners were transported west to build ships, Mount Hood had dominated the terrain to the West on clear days. Photographs of Cavanough Mountain from my parents' eastern Oklahoma farm are hard to distinguish, sometimes, from photographs of the much higher Greylock. Some things I guessed at, as when I declared that Melville experienced the sense of Vermont shouldering up behind him while he was at Lansingburgh. I was going by what I would have felt, and what I knew of Gansevoort's fur-buying expeditions into Massachusetts and Vermont. Melville would have lifted up his eyes unto the hills, from whence his help just might come. This I absolutely knew because of a religious indoctrination similar to his.
Myself a lover of the Romantics, I seized the chance to wend my way down from the Baths of Caracalla to the Protestant Cemetery-- by a natural progression, Melville recorded. The comment might be elliptical to moderns since he did not mention Shelley, but it would have been obvious to any educated person in his time, who would have known that at the baths Melville, like any tourist, would thought of Shelley's composing parts of Prometheus Unbound there, would perhaps have remembered an engraving of the scene, and then naturally have made his way down outside the walls of Rome to stand beside the grave that purported to contain some ashes, at least, from Shelley's body. Did my trek help me? Well, as I worked my way down the torturous working-class streets from the baths of Caracalla to the Protestant Cemetery, following Melville following Shelley, I had time to reflect on Shelley's significance. The unexpected benefit was the perception that Melville, musing on Shelley, might have been blindsided by the proximity of the tomb of Keats's, little known in the United States in Melville's early life and still not as famous as Shelley. Perhaps much of the value in following the footsteps of writers lies in leaving yourself open to the indirect and unanticipated.
On the whole, I decided, it was much more important to follow Melville around the paintings and sculptures in the Tribuno in Florence than to look at Saint Mark's in Venice. Having coffee at Florian's was pleasant, but did it bring me closer to Melville? Only ironically, for a card on each of the outside tables listed notables who had sat there, Melville among them--Melville who had been an inconspicuous, almost broken man when he was there. The grander the monument the less of it Melville could have taken in, I suspected, but I never regretting peering a painting he had seen, or a piece of sculpture. Melville himself drew the connection between Italian paintings and English literature, noting in his Milton that the devils in Paradise Lost were influenced by the paintings the poet saw in Italy. I thought it was valuable to have touched the green drapery marble of the Jesuit Church in Venice that Melville had so admired and that the snobbish noncombatant Howells would soon scorn. Melville's appreciation of the marble showed me something I liked about his sense of aesthetics--something for which most of the evidence lay in his marginalia.
Was I able to fake what I did not see? Would readers of my biography hoot at how obvious it was that I never got to the Marquesas or Mar Saba? Did I describe Honolulu successfully on the basis of newspapers and histories and ships' logs, or has Hawaii so changed that a person born after it became a state would not know how close or how remote I was from an accurate description of what it felt like to have been there in 1843? Did I give a sense of the now lost Greek splendor of the buildings of the Sailors' Snug Harbor as you saw them from across the Bay in Manhattan? Did I convey the sense of what you would have encountered in the 1870s as you walked along the Hudson around the Battery and up the East River? What I learned in my researches was a revelation to me--sawmills on the Hudson; north of Coenties Slip bowsprits run in over street traffic so you could touch the figureheads; the ship-chandlery shops north of Market Street (halfway between the Battery and Corlears Hook). These last details I took thankfully from Charles H. Farnham's "A Day on the Docks" in the May 1879 Scribner's Magazine.
Perhaps following Melville was not as valuable as knowing what it was to live a nineteenth-century life. I survived one northern Oklahoma winter in a tent and lived for years without electricity and running water and some years with electricity but without running water. Therefore I knew what it meant when I belatedly discovered from an 1850 advertisement that the Fourth Avenue house Melville left in 1850 had water closets and hot water to the third floor, and I knew what it meant for Elizabeth Shaw Melville to go to Arrowhead, which had a kitchen pump and no water closet or hot water. I knew how to picture the scene Melville’s brother-in-law John Hoadley sketched in his 28 March 1854 letter to Augusta in which he envisions the "Arrowheads" in the evening (bereft of Maria and Fanny, who are with him in Lawrence):
I can see you now, your face, shaded by your hand,--glowing in the ruddy light, and full of changeful expression, as the flickering fire burns brighter or subsides;--changeful, yet continuous, like the notes of an Irish melody; while Lizzie looks up at intervals from her sewing or her book, to recall by a tone and look of love, the musing wanderer from his enchanted Isles."
I knew about reading by firelight and the light from a coal oil lamp, though not a whale-oil lamp.
I knew about modes of transportation. I had traveled in a wagon drawn by a team of horses I had harnessed up myself, and I had ridden horses I had saddled. I knew how to plough and build fences and milk cows. I had walked for hours at night on railroad tracks and dirt roads, so I knew what it meant for Melville to walk fifteen or twenty miles home to Lansingburgh from where he was teaching. I could imagine what it meant to Melville to have, in different decades, crossed the whole of Massachusetts in a stagecoach and then to have crossed the same parts of Massachusetts on a train. From talk about the early 1930s and from what I witnessed once in Hebronville, Texas, I knew what it meant to go out on foot looking for work, although I never did it myself. I had traveled thousands of miles in a Model T and thousands of miles on a troop train in 1942 and many thousands of miles on trains when I was deadheading as a railroad telegrapher in the early 1950s. I had a realizing sense of the weeks of travel Uncle Thomas and his family experienced in 1837, going from Pittsfield to Galena, Illinois. Better than most people I understood just what the change meant to Cousin Priscilla, a decade and a half later, when she boarded a train in Manhattan and went all the way to Chicago and beyond to Galena in a few days. Perhaps no other American biographer working in the 1990s had as instinctive a sense as I did of changes in modes of transportation in the 19th century.
The Melvillean Warner Berthoff, whom I never met, wrote me on 29 January 1997 that he was "a sucker for various topographical details." He had been amused, he said, "by a remark about the tedious journey from Pittsfield to Albany--tedious, of course, in the 1830s before the railroad came in, but also tedious, I can imagine, to a late 20th century researcher who had to travel it oftener than he liked." That was the response I wanted. I had, in fact, hitchhiked from Albany to Pittsfield on a hot August day in 1962 and remembered the repeated undulations of the topography and could imagine the difference between an early stagecoach ride across that stretch and, after Melville's return from the Pacific, the speed of transit on the railway cars. With Berthoff, at least, I succeeded in making use of my attempts to follow Melville's footsteps.
I was no good at ocean voyaging, but I paid attention to Melville and water within the continents. He knew waterfalls from his youth, Poesten Kill in Troy, a few miles south of the house his mother rented in Lansingburgh, and Cohoes Falls where the Mohawk enters the Hudson. He would have known Glens Falls early. We assume he knew the falls at Kaaterskill Clove, the scene of Asher B. Durand's painting of Cole and Bryant. He saw Niagara, and probably went to see the falls of Saint Anthony when he was in Galena. In Melville's first book in the descent into the interior of the island, his companion Toby is deterred neither by "Typees or Niagaras." Melville made repeated trips to Bash-Bish to see the divided waterfalls. In 1840 he may have seen the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi and the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi; later they were certainly vivid in his mind's eye. In 1849 he went to the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine at Coblenz, the name of which, he knew, meant confluence. In 1856 he saw the confluence of the Clyde and the Leven below Dumbarton Castle. Why would he not seek out confluences of rivers, since from childhood he had walked on the Battery, seeing where the East River and the Hudson (or "North River") merged after they poured separately into the Bay.
To declare that Melville was interested in bodies of water, lakes, ponds, flowing water, waterfalls, and confluences of rivers, and oceans is to announce the obvious. But there was more. Melville was fascinated by, perhaps haunted by, feelings of being subterranean, in the orlop-deck, in vaults, in passages such as Belzoni wormed his way through, in depths below depths as in the Hotel de Cluny. He was particularly intrigued by waters that went subterranean and emerged far away. From Tuckerman, apparently, Melville learned the story of the Arethusa fountain which he told in Ch. 41 of Moby-Dick:
So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strella mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whaleman.
The "pouring in of contributory streams (Pierre 283) fascinated Melville because he associated flowing water, on the surface or subterranean, with processes of the mind and particularly with the way literary influences work on a man engaged, as he was, in a lifelong course of self-education. Whole ships could float, intact, up to the surface of a lake? So could memories surge up, terrifyingly intact. Images from distant sources could suddenly, shockingly invade the conscious mind from the subconscious. In Pierre (107) Melville pledged: "I shall follow the endless, winding way,--the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land." Rivers, particularly subterranean rivers, flowed like the streams of thought in the depths of the human mind. After a while, when I looked at waterfalls and confluences he had seen I began to see them as I thought he had seen them.
What's important for a biographer, I decided, is not visiting Niagara but understanding that Melville, born near where both the East River and the Hudson poured into the Bay, raised on a great river near spectacular confluences and waterfalls, thought of diverse literary influences as waves at work on him simultaneously: "Homer's old organ rolls its vast volumes under the light frothy wave-crests of Anacreon and Hafiz; and high over my ocean, sweet Shakespeare soars, like all the larks of the spring" (Mardi Ch. 119). There Melville concludes: "And as the great Mississippi musters his watery nations: Ohio, with all his leagued streams; Missouri, bringing down in torrents the clans from the highlands; Arkansas, his Tartar rivers from the plain;--so with all the past and present pouring in me, I roll down my billow from afar." Had Melville in 1849, weeks or months after his rapt encounter with Shakespeare, felt that Milton was flowing in over the currents of Shakespeare which were still flowing in his memory? Did Spenser, first read as soft pornography that stimulated him in early adolescence, flow in upon the current of Wordsworth about the time Melville finished Moby-Dick? In the spring of 1862, if he read Ruskin's Modern Painters then, did he think of Ruskin's words as flowing over sometimes identical words in the preface Arnold had written to his Poems?
Melville was particularly moved by complex literary influences such as I described (183) in Melville: The Making of the Poet, his meditation on Arnold's tribute to Wordsworth in Wordsworth's tribute to Collins' tribute to Thomson. He knew the two earlier poems in 1862 when he was caught by the first line of Arnold's "The Youth of Nature":
Rais'd are the dripping oars--
Silent the boat: the lake,
Lovely and soft as a dream,
Swims in the sheen of the moon.
The mountains stand at its head
Clear as the pure June night,
But the valleys are flooded with haze.
Rydal and Fairfield are there;
In the shadow Wordsworth lies dead.
So it is, so it will be for aye.
Nature is fresh as of old,
Is lovely: a mortal is dead.
Melville noted "And oft suspend the dashing oar / To bid his gentle spirit rest," and identified the words as coming from the poem by Collins on Thomson ("Ode on the Death of Thompson. The Scene on the Thames near Richmond"). Then Melville wrote "Then let us, as we float along / For him suspend the dashing oar." Here Melville identified these words as Wordsworth's on Collins ("Remembrance of Collins. Composed upon the Thames near Richmond"). Melville commented: "How beautifully appropriate therefor this reminiscent prelude of Arnold concerning Wordsworth." This vividly shows Melville's sensitivity to literary echoes which for him represent a literary continuity to be treasured. As it happens, I copied the lines from Arnold from my copy of the 1856 Ticknor and Fields Poems which John Greenleaf Whittier had owned and which Samuel T. Pickard had annotated: "Many pages uncut. I fear thee did not read thy book through, Friend John." Now, there's a slight frisson, in concluding this paragraph, one Kendall and Holmes might have enjoyed, and an added frisson in knowing, as we do now, that Whittier and Melville were cousins, through Melville's paternal grandmother, although probably neither man knew of the relationship.
I did what I could, but about biography as "a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past" I am skeptical--indeed, almost an unbeliever. I was, in the 1990s, following emotional trails through family letters and Melville's prose and poetry, and most of them were harrowing and required bravery. When I was luckiest in absolutely capturing an episode, the episode usually was too painful to live with, it seemed. How many other biographers discovered one painful new episode after another in decades of their subjects' lives, with very little alleviation from new scenes of joy? Those discoveries awakened my sympathies for Melville the man. What I would have given, months on end, to have been following only physical trails, and cheerful physical trails at that, no matter how many blackflies swarmed on the slopes of Monument Mountain! Yet by looking at contributory streams, gazing at great confluences, I may have learned better to understand both Melville's sense of depth psychology and his sense of the gigantic power of literary influences, literal inflowings.
Kendall's "what the subject has seen" must be reinterpreted to include sculpture, paintings, and especially books and words in books. You see what "the subject has seen" very clearly in Melville's marginalia, where you see his direct response to what he has just read on the page. In the long run, I think my convalescent five-months 1956 sederunt with Shakespeare before reading Moby-Dick, then my having had a seminar on Milton in 1957, and having the next year read Spenser and then Wordsworth on my own, as he did, before beginning to write on Melville, is what annihilated the "deceptions of change" and the "opacity of death" in the matter of Melville and me. I have known some brave men. Paul Watson, the heroic captain, valiantly ate my sourdough blueberry pancakes here by the Pacific. My own fantasy of high adventure (sailing as a superannuated factotum with Watson against Japanese whale ships) pales against the real dangers I had confronted in following Melville's mental processes, discovering his greatest joys, sharing his high literary ambitions, discovering his greatest sorrows, understanding his financial misery, seeing him as a human being who always, always, ignored my sagest warnings that the footpaths he was taking were disastrous.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Biographer at work: one report from the trenches, 1989-1990
The Revolution was "not such a calm, majestic movement as I supposed," a child says in Hawthorne's "Liberty Tree."
Surely biography, by contrast, is a calm, majestic movement in which the writer does the first page, then the second page, and so on to the conclusion.
How one biographer worked:
20 December 1989. 344 pm 20th started writing Biography. Woke up rested & cheerful.
Happy mg--dancing around the job of starting to draft some pp of the Biography. Read Sandberg on "B[urgundy] Club"--incl new "The House of the Tragic Poet." . . . 28º and wcf [wind chill factor] of 0º but not very windy so Ran 4½. Reckless--after gg around Tower crossed frozen Brandywine over Swinging Bridge with no floorboards. Taking a big chance--so went home & started writing last chapter my key being decline of Hawthorne in ct to his [M's] decline. Never mind that I only did a page plus--I started. Lay down 20 mins, maybe 5 min deep sleep.
21 December Wed night Thurs mg. Restless night. 15º up to 25º before going down precipitously Thurs night. Wk on HM Biography--in a confused state, o/c--no tone established, & no sense of selectivity yet. Assembling material from various files--apparently I destroyed all the MD [Historical note] files!!
But be resolute--this o/c = a necessary stage.
22 Wkg on start of Pierre --why Mamma had more time to be on Herman's case.
23 Did not write any on biography (want to do s/t every day)
24 Trying Pierre--see I can't present all the evidence--have to give conclusions & blaze ahead not strewing page with "the evidence is" or probably or very likely--A new technique
27 At 7 am actually began the biography--"Pulled Hither & Thither"--on sale of NYC house and readjustment of expectations--doing a story. BEGAN (i.e. getting tone & proportion & strategies) working on early 1851.
28 December 1989 Up working on biog 2-3:30 & slept rest of night till 6 up there in 3rd floor.
30 Haunted--the Haunting by the Family has begun. Some work on Aug 1851. Sat. Morning 30th-- the problem starts--being haunted by a throng of characters. The sisters, Mamma, EAD, NH, Robert so I have to live with them for the next year and a half and have to find strategies for making this nocturnal haunting useful, focused.
1 January 1990. Melville biography absorbing all energy--awake at 1 am with the thronging, clamoring characters--result (immediately) of adding some parts of EAD letters not in Log
5 January 1990. Decided to start with Redburn, backing up to get a running start--& after a little confusion it went great & I got on to WJ before 5 pm. . . . So extremely busy [with other demands including Reading BILLY BUDD and the Checklist of Melville Reviews and The Powell Papers and the G. K. Hall book on MD]--& seeing that I will succeed if I just keep myself in the chair in front of the screen.
6 Some work on WJ period.
7 Up early & off (60 dollars each) to Wash DC . . . Natl Gallery East Wing for a terrifically spaced 49 ptg F. E. Church show incl one Kate gave to Albany Institute of History & Art--wow!
9 Awake at 130 & up till 430 wkg on BB book then jarred awake by alarm & bk to BB at nearly noon trying hard to keep my focus as I plow on thru the chapter-by-chapter section--aware of the need to keep an intensity going until I am done--& then to be vigilant as I revise on the screen. Exalted but fearful--exalted by the fact that almost all of it is good, fearful that I will not make all the needed final revisions.
10 up on BB 3am-5am then slept till 845
15 Did not get to write. . . . Trying to keep perspective on interruptions--part of the business of living.
22 January 1990 I am starting on getting Shak editions into biog summer 1850 section--HM & what was on his mind as he went to Pittsfield, aesthetic/historical problems.
23 Progressed on 1850 into Idyl in good day's work. . . . Worked 11-1 am. Realized EAD decided to stay till 12th on Wed or early Thurs (Maria knew)--Have to change LOG.
24 Almost prodigious day of pushing on through Aug 9-12
25 Up 130-330 a.m. on Aug 12-15 1850. Rain when I looked out at 330 am. 11 am that tension of not wanting to lose the momentum yet knowing that hours have to pass before I get down late Aug--WI[rving], Sophia, NH, Augusta--the retelling in sequence--. . . . [On Run at Water Tower:] Bummed paper & pencil at Sam Francis [DuPont] statue & made excellent notes on Sophia & Tappan & other motivations from Sept 50--coming alive--pushed on till 410 no nap. . . . About here the 25th I said, "I put it in the book already"--used the term "the book"--
26 Tired but soldiered on thru the day--inching up to purchase of Arrowhead & febrile about discoveries. . . . Realized how very pissed Leon would have been at what I've done in the last days--me the father pleaser.
29 January 1990 Mumford died Friday January 26 at 94.
2 February 1990 Up at 4 am needing to get down stoicism → recklessness & Mardi to EAD Feb 50--why HM cd let go.
7 February 1990 Slave labor up at 4:30 am pausing at 530 pm-- Drove thru Isle of the Cross & Office-Seeker
9 February 1990 Resigned from NCL & SAF & Review and other editorial boards. No time for them. Painful to resign from NCL.
15 February 1990 Jay Leyda dead 2 years--and today Willard Thorp died. Walking home, exhausted, umbrella--attacked in Plaza Parking lot by 8-10 black men (some teenagers)--hit with brick in left buttock--("You got a problem," I heard—as I was trying to get away.) . . . Chased them but in Earth Shoes--no help [from anyone].
16 February 1990 Work on [writing of] Typee trying not to lose momentum but wiped out from classes, [chairman's] insistence that his secretary can smoke directly under my cubicle], and gang attack--very perturbing, making me more wary than ever. Copy of Mod Lang Studies (Winter 1990) with Log article came 26 February 1990; Isle of the Cross offprints came from AL the same day
2 March 1990 Trip to NYC. NYPL. Got the Hoadley. Got Powell refs in EAD to GLD--Corrected some of the Picnic [on Monument Mountain] letters & got more refs to picnic 1850 then before noon in folder of undated letters from unidentified correspondents discovered HM letter to EAD-- Ecstatic trembled . . . . DISCOVERED A MELVILLE LETTER.
12 March 1990 Stunning letter from Nina Murray--AM to HM 17 Oct. 1844. [Henry Murray had owned it for decades.]
18 March 1990 Holland PA almost to Trenton. Fascinating. [Daughter-in-law of Milie, born 1849. Yes, daughter-in-law of the child born just after Malcolm.] Anna Morewood 84 years old, widow of Henry (Larry) Gansevoort--"The only Melville or Gansevoort that counts is the one standing in my own shoes." Locket February 1872 [each girl got a mourning locket charged to the estate] AM to Florence, Flo to Agnes--carte de visite photo of Allan. Gold--gorgeous Tiffany locket--Big, great photo of Allan in field north of Arrowhead--Took it off with me to have it copied. [She had Lathers's copper humidor.]
31 March 1990 Serious cleaning up--adding & moving about (of marginalia). Before getting out of bed the fine idea of saying "one 'decision'" [M made] was to take NH along on the journey [in Clarel].
March 1990--[Battling post-surgical infections all month and regularly sickened, desperately sickened, by tobacco at the university. Enlisted OSHA, who on 30 March said it was the dean's call--not true, I am sure--and the dean smokes. Among other things trying to figure out how to use Bezanson's 1960 introduction and yet update it.] Big confrontation 2-3 April 1990 everyone against me [on smoking] except Robinson.
Other things going on in 1990:
Member of the board of the University Press of Delaware, 1990-1991
"Authorial Intention and the New Historicism," given at the annual meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing in Washington, D. C., November 1989
"Writing a Life in a Decade of Theory," given in Albuquerque at a meeting of the English Department of the University of New Mexico, November 1990
"The Puissance and Pusillanimity of the Anthology Editor," delivered at the second American Literature Section session at the Chicago MLA, December 1990
"Historical Research vs. the New Historicism," given at the Melville panel organized by the Association for Documentary Editing at the Chicago MLA, December 1990
"Very Loose Fish," Melville Society Extracts, 75 (November 1988 [published November 1989]), pp. 14-15, a short version of the progress report on The New Melville Log in Modern Language Studies (Winter 1990).
"Billy Budd, Foretopman and the Dynamics of Canonization," College Literature, 17 (Winter 1990), pp. 21-32 (Bernard Oldsey's "Farewell Issue").
"Herman Melville's The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology," American Literature, 62 (March 1990), pp. 1-16.
"The New Melville Log: A Progress Report and an Appeal," Modern Language Studies, 20 (Winter 1990), pp. 53-66.
"Melville to Duyckinck: A New Letter," Melville Society Extracts, 81 (May 1990), p. 9.
Review of David S. Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance, Modern Language Quarterly, 49 (September 1988 [published September 1990]), pp. 298-302.
"A Position Paper on Authorial Intention and the Socialization of Texts," Documentary Editing, 12 (September 1990), pp. 62-65. (This is part of an exchange of views; Jerome J. McGann's "The Socialization of Texts" appears on 56-61 in the same issue.)
Reading "Billy Budd" (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. ix and 190.
Surely biography, by contrast, is a calm, majestic movement in which the writer does the first page, then the second page, and so on to the conclusion.
How one biographer worked:
20 December 1989. 344 pm 20th started writing Biography. Woke up rested & cheerful.
Happy mg--dancing around the job of starting to draft some pp of the Biography. Read Sandberg on "B[urgundy] Club"--incl new "The House of the Tragic Poet." . . . 28º and wcf [wind chill factor] of 0º but not very windy so Ran 4½. Reckless--after gg around Tower crossed frozen Brandywine over Swinging Bridge with no floorboards. Taking a big chance--so went home & started writing last chapter my key being decline of Hawthorne in ct to his [M's] decline. Never mind that I only did a page plus--I started. Lay down 20 mins, maybe 5 min deep sleep.
21 December Wed night Thurs mg. Restless night. 15º up to 25º before going down precipitously Thurs night. Wk on HM Biography--in a confused state, o/c--no tone established, & no sense of selectivity yet. Assembling material from various files--apparently I destroyed all the MD [Historical note] files!!
But be resolute--this o/c = a necessary stage.
22 Wkg on start of Pierre --why Mamma had more time to be on Herman's case.
23 Did not write any on biography (want to do s/t every day)
24 Trying Pierre--see I can't present all the evidence--have to give conclusions & blaze ahead not strewing page with "the evidence is" or probably or very likely--A new technique
27 At 7 am actually began the biography--"Pulled Hither & Thither"--on sale of NYC house and readjustment of expectations--doing a story. BEGAN (i.e. getting tone & proportion & strategies) working on early 1851.
28 December 1989 Up working on biog 2-3:30 & slept rest of night till 6 up there in 3rd floor.
30 Haunted--the Haunting by the Family has begun. Some work on Aug 1851. Sat. Morning 30th-- the problem starts--being haunted by a throng of characters. The sisters, Mamma, EAD, NH, Robert so I have to live with them for the next year and a half and have to find strategies for making this nocturnal haunting useful, focused.
1 January 1990. Melville biography absorbing all energy--awake at 1 am with the thronging, clamoring characters--result (immediately) of adding some parts of EAD letters not in Log
5 January 1990. Decided to start with Redburn, backing up to get a running start--& after a little confusion it went great & I got on to WJ before 5 pm. . . . So extremely busy [with other demands including Reading BILLY BUDD and the Checklist of Melville Reviews and The Powell Papers and the G. K. Hall book on MD]--& seeing that I will succeed if I just keep myself in the chair in front of the screen.
6 Some work on WJ period.
7 Up early & off (60 dollars each) to Wash DC . . . Natl Gallery East Wing for a terrifically spaced 49 ptg F. E. Church show incl one Kate gave to Albany Institute of History & Art--wow!
9 Awake at 130 & up till 430 wkg on BB book then jarred awake by alarm & bk to BB at nearly noon trying hard to keep my focus as I plow on thru the chapter-by-chapter section--aware of the need to keep an intensity going until I am done--& then to be vigilant as I revise on the screen. Exalted but fearful--exalted by the fact that almost all of it is good, fearful that I will not make all the needed final revisions.
10 up on BB 3am-5am then slept till 845
15 Did not get to write. . . . Trying to keep perspective on interruptions--part of the business of living.
22 January 1990 I am starting on getting Shak editions into biog summer 1850 section--HM & what was on his mind as he went to Pittsfield, aesthetic/historical problems.
23 Progressed on 1850 into Idyl in good day's work. . . . Worked 11-1 am. Realized EAD decided to stay till 12th on Wed or early Thurs (Maria knew)--Have to change LOG.
24 Almost prodigious day of pushing on through Aug 9-12
25 Up 130-330 a.m. on Aug 12-15 1850. Rain when I looked out at 330 am. 11 am that tension of not wanting to lose the momentum yet knowing that hours have to pass before I get down late Aug--WI[rving], Sophia, NH, Augusta--the retelling in sequence--. . . . [On Run at Water Tower:] Bummed paper & pencil at Sam Francis [DuPont] statue & made excellent notes on Sophia & Tappan & other motivations from Sept 50--coming alive--pushed on till 410 no nap. . . . About here the 25th I said, "I put it in the book already"--used the term "the book"--
26 Tired but soldiered on thru the day--inching up to purchase of Arrowhead & febrile about discoveries. . . . Realized how very pissed Leon would have been at what I've done in the last days--me the father pleaser.
29 January 1990 Mumford died Friday January 26 at 94.
2 February 1990 Up at 4 am needing to get down stoicism → recklessness & Mardi to EAD Feb 50--why HM cd let go.
7 February 1990 Slave labor up at 4:30 am pausing at 530 pm-- Drove thru Isle of the Cross & Office-Seeker
9 February 1990 Resigned from NCL & SAF & Review and other editorial boards. No time for them. Painful to resign from NCL.
15 February 1990 Jay Leyda dead 2 years--and today Willard Thorp died. Walking home, exhausted, umbrella--attacked in Plaza Parking lot by 8-10 black men (some teenagers)--hit with brick in left buttock--("You got a problem," I heard—as I was trying to get away.) . . . Chased them but in Earth Shoes--no help [from anyone].
16 February 1990 Work on [writing of] Typee trying not to lose momentum but wiped out from classes, [chairman's] insistence that his secretary can smoke directly under my cubicle], and gang attack--very perturbing, making me more wary than ever. Copy of Mod Lang Studies (Winter 1990) with Log article came 26 February 1990; Isle of the Cross offprints came from AL the same day
2 March 1990 Trip to NYC. NYPL. Got the Hoadley. Got Powell refs in EAD to GLD--Corrected some of the Picnic [on Monument Mountain] letters & got more refs to picnic 1850 then before noon in folder of undated letters from unidentified correspondents discovered HM letter to EAD-- Ecstatic trembled . . . . DISCOVERED A MELVILLE LETTER.
12 March 1990 Stunning letter from Nina Murray--AM to HM 17 Oct. 1844. [Henry Murray had owned it for decades.]
18 March 1990 Holland PA almost to Trenton. Fascinating. [Daughter-in-law of Milie, born 1849. Yes, daughter-in-law of the child born just after Malcolm.] Anna Morewood 84 years old, widow of Henry (Larry) Gansevoort--"The only Melville or Gansevoort that counts is the one standing in my own shoes." Locket February 1872 [each girl got a mourning locket charged to the estate] AM to Florence, Flo to Agnes--carte de visite photo of Allan. Gold--gorgeous Tiffany locket--Big, great photo of Allan in field north of Arrowhead--Took it off with me to have it copied. [She had Lathers's copper humidor.]
31 March 1990 Serious cleaning up--adding & moving about (of marginalia). Before getting out of bed the fine idea of saying "one 'decision'" [M made] was to take NH along on the journey [in Clarel].
March 1990--[Battling post-surgical infections all month and regularly sickened, desperately sickened, by tobacco at the university. Enlisted OSHA, who on 30 March said it was the dean's call--not true, I am sure--and the dean smokes. Among other things trying to figure out how to use Bezanson's 1960 introduction and yet update it.] Big confrontation 2-3 April 1990 everyone against me [on smoking] except Robinson.
Other things going on in 1990:
Member of the board of the University Press of Delaware, 1990-1991
"Authorial Intention and the New Historicism," given at the annual meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing in Washington, D. C., November 1989
"Writing a Life in a Decade of Theory," given in Albuquerque at a meeting of the English Department of the University of New Mexico, November 1990
"The Puissance and Pusillanimity of the Anthology Editor," delivered at the second American Literature Section session at the Chicago MLA, December 1990
"Historical Research vs. the New Historicism," given at the Melville panel organized by the Association for Documentary Editing at the Chicago MLA, December 1990
"Very Loose Fish," Melville Society Extracts, 75 (November 1988 [published November 1989]), pp. 14-15, a short version of the progress report on The New Melville Log in Modern Language Studies (Winter 1990).
"Billy Budd, Foretopman and the Dynamics of Canonization," College Literature, 17 (Winter 1990), pp. 21-32 (Bernard Oldsey's "Farewell Issue").
"Herman Melville's The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology," American Literature, 62 (March 1990), pp. 1-16.
"The New Melville Log: A Progress Report and an Appeal," Modern Language Studies, 20 (Winter 1990), pp. 53-66.
"Melville to Duyckinck: A New Letter," Melville Society Extracts, 81 (May 1990), p. 9.
Review of David S. Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance, Modern Language Quarterly, 49 (September 1988 [published September 1990]), pp. 298-302.
"A Position Paper on Authorial Intention and the Socialization of Texts," Documentary Editing, 12 (September 1990), pp. 62-65. (This is part of an exchange of views; Jerome J. McGann's "The Socialization of Texts" appears on 56-61 in the same issue.)
Reading "Billy Budd" (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. ix and 190.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Great Melville Authority Brenda Wineapple vs Harrison Hayford--Challenge to Wineapple
This is the first of three posts to be read as a group.
HERE IS SOME OF THE SCATHING DISMISSAL OF MY BIOGRAPHY BY BRENDA WINEAPPLE, WHO WROTE MUCH OF “HAWTHORNE: A LIFE” IN THE GENRE OF “ROMANTIC FICTION” (Denis Donoghue’s term in his review of her book)—Brenda Wineapple, whose outright errors (and pervasive vulgarities) about Melville and Hawthorne are detailed in other posts in my blog already posted and will be supplemented in more posts.
Brenda Wineapple accused me of “fudging the biographical imperative”; in her treatment of Melville and Hawthorne she did not fudge that imperative so much as repudiate it altogether for a prose that vacillates between “romantic fiction” and the luridness of the “bodice ripper.” Think of Melville sprinting from rock to jutting rock! Think of Melville spotless as a Berkshire lamb! Think of the years Wineapple had free to perfect her method of fictionalizing documentary material thanks to the ACLS and NEH!
Will you believe Hayford or Wineapple? Did Wineapple spend even one day on the two volumes of my biography of Melville? I vouch for HH’s spending the 10 days and nights he specifies he devoted to the first volume. (He did not live to read the second volume but he read a draft of it a decade before it was published.)
Wineapple in the NATION: As Hawthorne held Moby-Dick in his hand, "he could open the book in his nervous way (more nervous even than normally)," writes Parker, "and get from his friend a guided tour of the organization of the thing now in print, and even sample a few paragraphs that caught his eye or that the author eagerly pointed out to him." He could indeed. Whether he did is another matter, though not for Parker, as secure in his fantasy as Edmund Morris is in his imaginary Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Yet despite the hulking material he's amassed from a mountain of newspapers, a fairly new cache of family papers and a host of collateral letters, to name just a few of his sources, Parker continually veers into unwonted speculation that then careens into certainty, moving back and forth between data and guesswork, seamlessly fusing the two and squandering his credibility as biographer along the way. . . .
Wineapple in the NATION: [Q]uestions remain, skirted by Parker, as if his dizzying array of biographical detritus would prevent our posing them. Cramming his book with long, bloodless catalogues of what Melville might have seen or read, Parker layers each sentence with so much stuff he sacrifices drama, insight and even, on occasion, grammar. "Knowing Melville's sightseeing habits as detailed in his journals," Parker obfuscates, "chances are he saw all he could see, keeping a lookout for superb views." He then provides us with all these vistas, plus newspaper reports and tangential historical information, fudging the biographical imperative: to show how Melville transforms the shaggy minutiae of life and its myriad characters (whether Hawthorne, Malcolm, a besieged wife or a shipmate) into an alembic of wishes, conflicts and disappointments that, taken together, reflect him, a mysterious, roiling, poignant writer alive, painfully alive, in every phrase he wrote.
MY CHALLENGE:
I challenge Brenda Wineapple: take any 10 scenes in my biography and justify your saying that I “continually” veer “into unwonted speculation that then careens into certainty, moving back and forth between data and guesswork, seamlessly fusing the two” and squandering my “credibility as biographer along the way.” Brenda Wineapple, you got an early copy of my second volume in order to make this accusation in a way to set the tone for all subsequent reviews. Now you have matured even more as a scholar and are able to give examples of what you accuse me of, I invite you a fair debate. Show people what so offended you about my handling of evidence. I promise to swat up my Hawthorne scholarship to deal with you on your ground, too, on 10 scenes of my choosing from HAWTHORNE: A LIFE.
HERE IS SOME OF THE SCATHING DISMISSAL OF MY BIOGRAPHY BY BRENDA WINEAPPLE, WHO WROTE MUCH OF “HAWTHORNE: A LIFE” IN THE GENRE OF “ROMANTIC FICTION” (Denis Donoghue’s term in his review of her book)—Brenda Wineapple, whose outright errors (and pervasive vulgarities) about Melville and Hawthorne are detailed in other posts in my blog already posted and will be supplemented in more posts.
Brenda Wineapple accused me of “fudging the biographical imperative”; in her treatment of Melville and Hawthorne she did not fudge that imperative so much as repudiate it altogether for a prose that vacillates between “romantic fiction” and the luridness of the “bodice ripper.” Think of Melville sprinting from rock to jutting rock! Think of Melville spotless as a Berkshire lamb! Think of the years Wineapple had free to perfect her method of fictionalizing documentary material thanks to the ACLS and NEH!
Will you believe Hayford or Wineapple? Did Wineapple spend even one day on the two volumes of my biography of Melville? I vouch for HH’s spending the 10 days and nights he specifies he devoted to the first volume. (He did not live to read the second volume but he read a draft of it a decade before it was published.)
Wineapple in the NATION: As Hawthorne held Moby-Dick in his hand, "he could open the book in his nervous way (more nervous even than normally)," writes Parker, "and get from his friend a guided tour of the organization of the thing now in print, and even sample a few paragraphs that caught his eye or that the author eagerly pointed out to him." He could indeed. Whether he did is another matter, though not for Parker, as secure in his fantasy as Edmund Morris is in his imaginary Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. Yet despite the hulking material he's amassed from a mountain of newspapers, a fairly new cache of family papers and a host of collateral letters, to name just a few of his sources, Parker continually veers into unwonted speculation that then careens into certainty, moving back and forth between data and guesswork, seamlessly fusing the two and squandering his credibility as biographer along the way. . . .
Wineapple in the NATION: [Q]uestions remain, skirted by Parker, as if his dizzying array of biographical detritus would prevent our posing them. Cramming his book with long, bloodless catalogues of what Melville might have seen or read, Parker layers each sentence with so much stuff he sacrifices drama, insight and even, on occasion, grammar. "Knowing Melville's sightseeing habits as detailed in his journals," Parker obfuscates, "chances are he saw all he could see, keeping a lookout for superb views." He then provides us with all these vistas, plus newspaper reports and tangential historical information, fudging the biographical imperative: to show how Melville transforms the shaggy minutiae of life and its myriad characters (whether Hawthorne, Malcolm, a besieged wife or a shipmate) into an alembic of wishes, conflicts and disappointments that, taken together, reflect him, a mysterious, roiling, poignant writer alive, painfully alive, in every phrase he wrote.
MY CHALLENGE:
I challenge Brenda Wineapple: take any 10 scenes in my biography and justify your saying that I “continually” veer “into unwonted speculation that then careens into certainty, moving back and forth between data and guesswork, seamlessly fusing the two” and squandering my “credibility as biographer along the way.” Brenda Wineapple, you got an early copy of my second volume in order to make this accusation in a way to set the tone for all subsequent reviews. Now you have matured even more as a scholar and are able to give examples of what you accuse me of, I invite you a fair debate. Show people what so offended you about my handling of evidence. I promise to swat up my Hawthorne scholarship to deal with you on your ground, too, on 10 scenes of my choosing from HAWTHORNE: A LIFE.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
My Excellent Reasons (despite Tuttleton!) for not Correcting the Great Thicket of Old Mistakes Promiscuously Piled up by all Previous Biographers
Should a Biographer Signal when Correcting Earlier Biographers? NEVER NEVER NEVER.
Early in the 21st century, after many (but far from all) old gaps in basic knowledge have been filled and after many often-repeated errors have long been corrected, mysteries remain and misconceptions still persist, carelessly repeated from Raymond Weaver or from other obdurate sources of errors. Corrections have often gone unregarded for years or even decades. In my biography I resisted the impulse to flag an episode with "Watch me set Weaver Straight Again!" or "Heads Up Now--New Portion of Old Episode Starts Here!" or even "Be Alert Now--Previously Unknown Episode Coming Up!"
In the Preface" to the first volume I explained:
"The abundance of new documentation afford me the extraordinary--almost unique--luxury of telling my new story without reference to other biographers, after these prefatory pages. The alternative would have been to choke the pages with modifications, corrections, and rebuttals, some significant, some quite trivial. . . . I never correct any biographer in the body of this book, and I have resisted coming down emphatically when I am quoting a document that someone else had mistranscribed or misdated.
Who would have thought that anyone wanted extraneous gloating?
Yet a reviewer of the first volume of my biography, James W. Tuttleton, in the December 1996 New Criterion was deeply vexed at my "deliberate refusal to engage with previous biographers," never to "correct any biographer in the body of this book," or to point out that I was quoting a document that previously had been "mistranscribed or misdated":
Such an attitude, in my view, is really an impediment to Melville studies and an obstacle to learning itself, which is cumulative and aggregative and which proceeds, among other ways, by the careful documentation and elimination of error. Parker's method presupposes that his life is the really accurate one, that only his need be consulted, that it displaces all previous work, and in all this we have to take him at his word. Such a viewpoint discourages collation of information, the comparison of various biographical accounts, and the verification of fact. I have the greatest respect for Parker's work on Melville. And I am convinced that he knows more about Melville's life and books than anyone else in the world. This will be the standard biography for years to come. But he has tried to close the door to comparative analysis and it won't do.
The last thing I wanted was to be "an impediment to Melville studies and an obstacle to learning itself." Far from meaning my biography to close the door to investigation, I had hoped earnestly to encourage careful scrutiny of the evidence. The reader certainly did not need to take me on faith: I documented everything. If I quoted a letter, I dated it and named the archive where it was held. I was encouraging anyone to check my work. I expected that my biography would send dozens of young academics to the libraries wanting to see why I said what I did and find that still more needed to be explored and presented to the world. (It was not my fault that nothing like that raid on the archives took place!)
Yes, learning is "cumulative and aggregative," as Tuttleton said, and almost everything I had ever written on Melville had built upon the work of Jay Leyda, Wilson Heflin, Harrison Hayford, Merton M. Sealts, William H. Gilman, Merrell Davis, Elizabeth Foster, and other students of Stanley T. Williams and occasional later contributors such as Frederick J. and Joyce Deveau Kennedy. The glory, for me, in finding the title The Isle of the Cross was precisely the fact that I was building upon the work of Hayford and Sealts, both then still alive to rejoice at my telephone calls, and on the work of men who would have rejoiced with them if they had been alive, Gilman and Davis, and William Charvat. (I took Amtrak up to tell Jay Leyda in person in his bed at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine.)
But to stop the narrative in the biography in order to weigh what Hayford said or almost said in 1946 about what Melville was writing in the winter of 1852-1853, what he and Davis did in 1949 and what Davis and Gilman added in 1960 and what Charvat added in 1968 and then to triumphantly proclaim the title, The Isle of the Cross--that would have been to blur the news. I was not writing the history of scholarship but a biography.
I guarantee you, Harrison Hayford and Jay Leyda knew just how strongly I acknowledged--and celebrated--scholarship as "cumulative and aggregative." Anyone reading the chapter in my first volume on Melville and Hawthorne's last dinner in the Berkshires will see a demonstration of scholarship as cumulative and aggregative, and scholarship as lovingly respectful of those who went before. We add our grains of sand; a few times, if we are lucky, we pile on a handful of sand all at once. Imagine Hayford's joy when I called him to tell him that the Agatha story which he had written about in the mid-1940s had been finished in late May 1853 and that the title was The Isle of the Cross. Imagine our mutual delight when I told him about Melville and Hawthorne’s dinner in Lenox, Hayford being the man who had first tried to list all the NH-HM meetings.
Howard thought Melville had money in the bank in the first half of the 1850s. Once we began to learn how deeply in debt he was, there was no point talking about what Leon thought. I would have been a fool to engage biographical fantasies such as Edwin H. Miller's lurid claim in his critical biography (p. 247) that "Something occurred" in the relationship between Melville and Hawthorne in September 1850, "possibly during Sophia's three-week absence from Lenox." Previously, Hawthorne had "kept Melville at a distance a great deal of the time," but now Hawthorne wrote to Sophia of "our trouble" and said that "we shall never be comfortable in Lenox again." The [249] "younger man must have introduced the subject of male friendship, not once but many times," Miller asserted. Then Melville had "maniacally indulged himself in wild capers, like signing a letter 'his X mark,' visiting Hawthorne in a Spanish cavalier's costume, and cavorting in the company of the Duyckinck brothers during an August day that included a visit to a Shaker village."
Not knowing of the meetings in early and mid-November, Miller speculated that Hawthorne in his letter of 17 November "may have informed Melville for the first time of his departure." How many paragraphs would it take to explain to the reader's satisfaction that Melville did not, really did not, dress up in a Spanish cavalier's costume but merely called out something on the order of "Buenos días, Señor" or "Hola, señor"? Miller's vivid fantasizing would have taken dozens of pages to correct. (There’s enough to do to deal with the way professedly (professionally) gay critics have responded to my own description of Melville's homoerotic feelings.) The only responsible thing to do was to ignore Miller.
I shared Tuttleton's feelings much more than he could have realized, but I was haunted by the memory of a long evening in Los Angeles in the late 1970s when Carvel Collins, who had promised a Faulkner biography for many years, had fascinated and appalled me, Regina Fadiman, Michael Millgate, Meta Carpenter Wilde, and others with his stories of how he was correcting Joseph Blotner's biography of Faulkner one line at a time. Might he have finished his biography before he died if he had simply written it without correcting Joe? Michael, already an aspiring biographer, observed to me cautiously that Carvel was "an accumulator." I was not yet an aspiring biographer, and far from being a hoarder was still at the stage of hastening to share anything I found, usually by publishing it as fast as I could in the Melville Society newsletter. I had not yet gone down the pages of the biography by Leon Howard, whom I loved like an uncle, putting "No" "No" "No" in the margins, but even in the 1970s I understood the lesson about fixating on someone else's errors rather than telling your own story. Fredson Bowers had already cost me too many days identifying his errors and trying to sort out his convoluted truculencies, a period I remembered in the late 1970s as an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, particularly because Bowers kept out of print a very long detailed article I had done with Brian Higgins. In the early 1990s I was determined not to go Carvel's way. For me madness lay in approaching a biography by focusing on earlier biographers' errors. Besides, to have done what Tuttleton wanted would have meant doubling the length of the book, at least, while turning it into a relentless ongoing celebration of my superiority to previous benighted tellers. No, I had told myself, you will never get anywhere if you correct other people's errors.
Visualize this: many biographers write their books from earlier biographies. Laurie Robertson-Lorant, whatever her faults, really did not, for the most part; Andrew Delbanco did. I was writing a biography from documents, not from other biographies, so I would not profit from reading other biographers' outdated stories. After getting very far along with expanding the Log I did, I confess, make a fast turn-through of the biographies to be sure Leyda and I had not missed a document that someone else had seen. Once I began writing, I never read any chapter of an earlier biography (and later found nothing that was both accurate and new to me in Robertson-Lorant's 1996 volume).
My reason for leaving biographies aside was that in every period of Melville's life my new documents, when intermixed in sequence with the previously known documents, dictated a very different story than anyone had told. My biography was new to the point that not a single episode could be told as an earlier biography had told it. My massive labor of the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially, was to put all the old and all the new documents together in a sequence. Finally, I reached the point of having what seemed a sufficiency of documents incorporated but not as yet assimilated. About the same time I experienced keen psychological urgency to see what the documents meant so I could start writing. Enough of the gathering phase--at least for a time! The trick you have to master is to know when you have really done enough gathering. Carvel Collins had fixated at the state of accumulating documents and correcting Joe Blotner, and understandably so, for to go on and begin to write a biography is terrifying, or ought to be, if the writer is serious. Nevertheless, the imperative to stop accumulating and start writing ultimately becomes ever more more powerful as the accumulation goes on. Resolved to start, I cleared my mind of preconceptions and began to read a stretch of documents, new ones all intermixed with old ones (often old ones in a corrected order). I read on until I saw a chapter-length story emerge, and then tried to blaze ahead writing the story.
Like Tuttleton, I find the idea of tracing the history of scholarship enthralling, and trace that history repeatedly in MELVILLE AND BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE, but he had no idea of the sheer number of places where I got on with my story only by ignoring small and large errors in previous biographies. The time to engage other biographers would have been if the evidence was inconclusive and there was real reason for uncertainty. That just did not happen.
Jay Leyda had taken the Virginian of the Mosses essay as speaking for Melville when he declared he had never met Hawthorne. When I worked through the 1850 Augusta Papers for 1850 for the 1988 Moby-Dick Historical Note I constructed, mainly from Maria Melville's letters, a day-by-day account of the first two weeks of August 1850. I had then far more evidence than anyone else had worked with and felt no joy at all in discovering that Jay Leyda had been wrong. I had a four-aspirin headache as I changed the LOG, and I called Hayford and Sealts before doing so. Would Tuttleton have wanted me to set straight Jay and everyone else who had ever argued that Melville read Mosses from an Old Manse before meeting Hawthorne? Now, my word! Brenda Wineapple in her 2003 Hawthorne biography announces that the question of whether Melville read the essay before or after meeting Hawthorne is undecided!!!!
You can’t make critics pay attention to your corrections of old mistakes. Even if I laid out a complicated new (or partially old) story with great clarity, I could not make critics pay attention to it. Literary critics and even many biographers continue to act according to our natures, which is to ignore facts.
Early in the 21st century, after many (but far from all) old gaps in basic knowledge have been filled and after many often-repeated errors have long been corrected, mysteries remain and misconceptions still persist, carelessly repeated from Raymond Weaver or from other obdurate sources of errors. Corrections have often gone unregarded for years or even decades. In my biography I resisted the impulse to flag an episode with "Watch me set Weaver Straight Again!" or "Heads Up Now--New Portion of Old Episode Starts Here!" or even "Be Alert Now--Previously Unknown Episode Coming Up!"
In the Preface" to the first volume I explained:
"The abundance of new documentation afford me the extraordinary--almost unique--luxury of telling my new story without reference to other biographers, after these prefatory pages. The alternative would have been to choke the pages with modifications, corrections, and rebuttals, some significant, some quite trivial. . . . I never correct any biographer in the body of this book, and I have resisted coming down emphatically when I am quoting a document that someone else had mistranscribed or misdated.
Who would have thought that anyone wanted extraneous gloating?
Yet a reviewer of the first volume of my biography, James W. Tuttleton, in the December 1996 New Criterion was deeply vexed at my "deliberate refusal to engage with previous biographers," never to "correct any biographer in the body of this book," or to point out that I was quoting a document that previously had been "mistranscribed or misdated":
Such an attitude, in my view, is really an impediment to Melville studies and an obstacle to learning itself, which is cumulative and aggregative and which proceeds, among other ways, by the careful documentation and elimination of error. Parker's method presupposes that his life is the really accurate one, that only his need be consulted, that it displaces all previous work, and in all this we have to take him at his word. Such a viewpoint discourages collation of information, the comparison of various biographical accounts, and the verification of fact. I have the greatest respect for Parker's work on Melville. And I am convinced that he knows more about Melville's life and books than anyone else in the world. This will be the standard biography for years to come. But he has tried to close the door to comparative analysis and it won't do.
The last thing I wanted was to be "an impediment to Melville studies and an obstacle to learning itself." Far from meaning my biography to close the door to investigation, I had hoped earnestly to encourage careful scrutiny of the evidence. The reader certainly did not need to take me on faith: I documented everything. If I quoted a letter, I dated it and named the archive where it was held. I was encouraging anyone to check my work. I expected that my biography would send dozens of young academics to the libraries wanting to see why I said what I did and find that still more needed to be explored and presented to the world. (It was not my fault that nothing like that raid on the archives took place!)
Yes, learning is "cumulative and aggregative," as Tuttleton said, and almost everything I had ever written on Melville had built upon the work of Jay Leyda, Wilson Heflin, Harrison Hayford, Merton M. Sealts, William H. Gilman, Merrell Davis, Elizabeth Foster, and other students of Stanley T. Williams and occasional later contributors such as Frederick J. and Joyce Deveau Kennedy. The glory, for me, in finding the title The Isle of the Cross was precisely the fact that I was building upon the work of Hayford and Sealts, both then still alive to rejoice at my telephone calls, and on the work of men who would have rejoiced with them if they had been alive, Gilman and Davis, and William Charvat. (I took Amtrak up to tell Jay Leyda in person in his bed at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine.)
But to stop the narrative in the biography in order to weigh what Hayford said or almost said in 1946 about what Melville was writing in the winter of 1852-1853, what he and Davis did in 1949 and what Davis and Gilman added in 1960 and what Charvat added in 1968 and then to triumphantly proclaim the title, The Isle of the Cross--that would have been to blur the news. I was not writing the history of scholarship but a biography.
I guarantee you, Harrison Hayford and Jay Leyda knew just how strongly I acknowledged--and celebrated--scholarship as "cumulative and aggregative." Anyone reading the chapter in my first volume on Melville and Hawthorne's last dinner in the Berkshires will see a demonstration of scholarship as cumulative and aggregative, and scholarship as lovingly respectful of those who went before. We add our grains of sand; a few times, if we are lucky, we pile on a handful of sand all at once. Imagine Hayford's joy when I called him to tell him that the Agatha story which he had written about in the mid-1940s had been finished in late May 1853 and that the title was The Isle of the Cross. Imagine our mutual delight when I told him about Melville and Hawthorne’s dinner in Lenox, Hayford being the man who had first tried to list all the NH-HM meetings.
Howard thought Melville had money in the bank in the first half of the 1850s. Once we began to learn how deeply in debt he was, there was no point talking about what Leon thought. I would have been a fool to engage biographical fantasies such as Edwin H. Miller's lurid claim in his critical biography (p. 247) that "Something occurred" in the relationship between Melville and Hawthorne in September 1850, "possibly during Sophia's three-week absence from Lenox." Previously, Hawthorne had "kept Melville at a distance a great deal of the time," but now Hawthorne wrote to Sophia of "our trouble" and said that "we shall never be comfortable in Lenox again." The [249] "younger man must have introduced the subject of male friendship, not once but many times," Miller asserted. Then Melville had "maniacally indulged himself in wild capers, like signing a letter 'his X mark,' visiting Hawthorne in a Spanish cavalier's costume, and cavorting in the company of the Duyckinck brothers during an August day that included a visit to a Shaker village."
Not knowing of the meetings in early and mid-November, Miller speculated that Hawthorne in his letter of 17 November "may have informed Melville for the first time of his departure." How many paragraphs would it take to explain to the reader's satisfaction that Melville did not, really did not, dress up in a Spanish cavalier's costume but merely called out something on the order of "Buenos días, Señor" or "Hola, señor"? Miller's vivid fantasizing would have taken dozens of pages to correct. (There’s enough to do to deal with the way professedly (professionally) gay critics have responded to my own description of Melville's homoerotic feelings.) The only responsible thing to do was to ignore Miller.
I shared Tuttleton's feelings much more than he could have realized, but I was haunted by the memory of a long evening in Los Angeles in the late 1970s when Carvel Collins, who had promised a Faulkner biography for many years, had fascinated and appalled me, Regina Fadiman, Michael Millgate, Meta Carpenter Wilde, and others with his stories of how he was correcting Joseph Blotner's biography of Faulkner one line at a time. Might he have finished his biography before he died if he had simply written it without correcting Joe? Michael, already an aspiring biographer, observed to me cautiously that Carvel was "an accumulator." I was not yet an aspiring biographer, and far from being a hoarder was still at the stage of hastening to share anything I found, usually by publishing it as fast as I could in the Melville Society newsletter. I had not yet gone down the pages of the biography by Leon Howard, whom I loved like an uncle, putting "No" "No" "No" in the margins, but even in the 1970s I understood the lesson about fixating on someone else's errors rather than telling your own story. Fredson Bowers had already cost me too many days identifying his errors and trying to sort out his convoluted truculencies, a period I remembered in the late 1970s as an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, particularly because Bowers kept out of print a very long detailed article I had done with Brian Higgins. In the early 1990s I was determined not to go Carvel's way. For me madness lay in approaching a biography by focusing on earlier biographers' errors. Besides, to have done what Tuttleton wanted would have meant doubling the length of the book, at least, while turning it into a relentless ongoing celebration of my superiority to previous benighted tellers. No, I had told myself, you will never get anywhere if you correct other people's errors.
Visualize this: many biographers write their books from earlier biographies. Laurie Robertson-Lorant, whatever her faults, really did not, for the most part; Andrew Delbanco did. I was writing a biography from documents, not from other biographies, so I would not profit from reading other biographers' outdated stories. After getting very far along with expanding the Log I did, I confess, make a fast turn-through of the biographies to be sure Leyda and I had not missed a document that someone else had seen. Once I began writing, I never read any chapter of an earlier biography (and later found nothing that was both accurate and new to me in Robertson-Lorant's 1996 volume).
My reason for leaving biographies aside was that in every period of Melville's life my new documents, when intermixed in sequence with the previously known documents, dictated a very different story than anyone had told. My biography was new to the point that not a single episode could be told as an earlier biography had told it. My massive labor of the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially, was to put all the old and all the new documents together in a sequence. Finally, I reached the point of having what seemed a sufficiency of documents incorporated but not as yet assimilated. About the same time I experienced keen psychological urgency to see what the documents meant so I could start writing. Enough of the gathering phase--at least for a time! The trick you have to master is to know when you have really done enough gathering. Carvel Collins had fixated at the state of accumulating documents and correcting Joe Blotner, and understandably so, for to go on and begin to write a biography is terrifying, or ought to be, if the writer is serious. Nevertheless, the imperative to stop accumulating and start writing ultimately becomes ever more more powerful as the accumulation goes on. Resolved to start, I cleared my mind of preconceptions and began to read a stretch of documents, new ones all intermixed with old ones (often old ones in a corrected order). I read on until I saw a chapter-length story emerge, and then tried to blaze ahead writing the story.
Like Tuttleton, I find the idea of tracing the history of scholarship enthralling, and trace that history repeatedly in MELVILLE AND BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE, but he had no idea of the sheer number of places where I got on with my story only by ignoring small and large errors in previous biographies. The time to engage other biographers would have been if the evidence was inconclusive and there was real reason for uncertainty. That just did not happen.
Jay Leyda had taken the Virginian of the Mosses essay as speaking for Melville when he declared he had never met Hawthorne. When I worked through the 1850 Augusta Papers for 1850 for the 1988 Moby-Dick Historical Note I constructed, mainly from Maria Melville's letters, a day-by-day account of the first two weeks of August 1850. I had then far more evidence than anyone else had worked with and felt no joy at all in discovering that Jay Leyda had been wrong. I had a four-aspirin headache as I changed the LOG, and I called Hayford and Sealts before doing so. Would Tuttleton have wanted me to set straight Jay and everyone else who had ever argued that Melville read Mosses from an Old Manse before meeting Hawthorne? Now, my word! Brenda Wineapple in her 2003 Hawthorne biography announces that the question of whether Melville read the essay before or after meeting Hawthorne is undecided!!!!
You can’t make critics pay attention to your corrections of old mistakes. Even if I laid out a complicated new (or partially old) story with great clarity, I could not make critics pay attention to it. Literary critics and even many biographers continue to act according to our natures, which is to ignore facts.
Monday, March 21, 2011
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.
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.
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