Reposted after Don Yannella's death on 3 March 2012: Stanton Garner, Yannella, Hershel Parker

Stanton Garner died on 20 November 2011 at 86.
Yannella 3 March 2012 at almost 78

Stanton Garner, Donald Yannella, & Hershel Parker, Arrowhead 1991

A Groveling Apology to Donald Yannella, Who Knew his Way Around the Duyckinck Papers

At the 1991 centennial meeting in Pittsfield Donald Yannella alluded to Sarah Morewood's improper fascination with George L. Duyckinck. We all shouted him down, I crying, "She was a religious woman!"

Well, Yannella had read Sarah's letters in the Duyckinck Collection and none of the rest of us had.

I thought I knew her through the letters in the Augusta Papers and in the Log, but I knew only part of the story, and in fact had not known what to make of one fragment of a letter about a servant sent with a midnight message across the hill from Broadhall to Arrowhead. Later, Lion Gardiner Miles, a Berkshire researcher, went to Yale for me to look in the Gardiner papers (his family's papers) where he found a dumbfounding letter about Sarah's notorious pursuit of the young brother-in-law of President Tyler two summers before Melville's Idyl in the Berkshires.

I was still naive in 1991, slow to learn that minor members of my cast of characters might be much more complex than I was giving them credit for being. I thank Lion Miles and apologize here to Yannella for simplifying a very complicated woman and wrongly challenging him in public. I was right about Helen Melville when I challenged Yannella that day in 1991, but embarrassingly wrong about Sarah Morewood--much more wrong than even Yannella or anyone else knew at that time.

A few words in defense of Helen Maria Melville Griggs

In HERMAN MELVILLE’S MALCOLM LETTER Hennig Cohen and Donald Yannella are harsh toward Helen Maria Melville, Herman's older sister, describing her as "superficial and conventional." After quoting her preference for "solid reading, really enlarging and cultivating the mind" over a slight novel or even history romantically written, they ask: "How could the creative, imaginative, intellectually, and artistically gifted Herman have responded to such observations that so clearly flew in the face of his own theory of fiction? Our suspicion is that her remarks, which were not untypical of popular thinking, would have been yet another reason for his turning inward" (after Malcolm's death).

They scold her: "Such views from one's own sister carried greater weight by virtue of their very source: a family member, a sister, with whom he had shared their parents' roof and whom he had also helped provide a roof for when he was first married." When Yannella at the 17 May 1991 Berkshire Athenaeum Panel on biography described Helen as "the least capable, intellectual, of the brothers and sisters," I am recorded as crying, "Oh no . . . Oh no!"

Helen was brilliant, verbally inventive, the intellectual equal of Gansevoort and Herman, I would think, the first three children getting the most attention and thriving from it, despite later deprivations, or perhaps just innately superior. Herman loved writing to her more than any other family member because he knew she would understand his humor. Here is Helen on 20? June 1854, telling Augusta about her settling into a new house:

. . . it is more than three weeks since Herman's letter reached me . . .
You ask about the wardrobe--two able-bodied, but by no means Samsonic looking men, carried it up stairs, without much apparent effort; but I thought it my duty to restore their expended strength by a glass of wine after the feat was performed. Tell Herman (for Mama's edification) that they gulped it down at one swallow, and did not stop "to sip and taste the flavor as gentlemen do who are accustomed to drink wine daily,"--I quote from the maternal--perhaps they did wisely, considering the quality of the liquid, our vintner cheated us in that last pipe.
I am truly sorry that Demosthenes broke his back--his neck I mean--in trying to assist its descent--but never mind--you shall have a marble bust of Judge George Griggs on the same pedestal one of these days.

Here is Helen on 14 January 1855:
Herman's letter with the spirited etching as a vignette at the close, afforded us much amusement, George is well acquainted with the unfortunate individual left in the Cimmerian darkness of the depot, but until Herman's letter arrived, had no idea that his more happy brother, about to leave it for the opening realms of day, had condescended to bid adieu to the last sojourner in the confines of gloom. He fully reciprocates the love, or respects, whichever sentiment he intended for him, and looking upon him (Herman) as a glorious leader, has followed his illustrious footsteps even to the counter of the Ship-Bread-Baker, where he purchased a half-barrel of the self same flinty abomination; which three times a day, he essays to bite, break, soak, or otherwise subdue its innate hardness of nature, and crunches, and munches, the vile concentrated essence of bread-stuff, with so much apparent gusto, that my teeth stand on edge, and my throat feels dry and husky, in pure sympathy with what I imagine to be the state of his chewing & swallowing apparatus. In mercy to his elbows (the cloth ones, I mean) and his hands, please get from Herman a full, true, minute, and succinct account of the process of breaking these adamantine biscuits. George proposes that I shall say masticating instead of chewing--deglutinating instead of swallowing--take your choice . . . .

Herman's drawing has been lost, but the evidence of the loving badinage of brother and sister has emerged in the Augusta Papers.

Helen had been under a financial cloud all the time when she might otherwise have profited by being sheltered in the house of the Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw for so many months in the early 1840s. Her husband George Griggs was a gruff man even when younger, and was not a young man when he finally proposed to Helen. By then she was so far past her youth that the boy she carried almost to full term died in her womb. Yes, she could express herself conventionally on occasion, but she was much brighter than her other sisters, and treasured by Herman (if not, something I puzzle about, by her brother Gansevoort; the problem is that so little evidence survives, probably). She should have been the wife of a splendid man like John Hoadley, the engineer-poet, whom her anxious, precisionist younger sister Kate did not deserve. Every biographer who submerges himself or herself into the archives would have made better marital decisions than some of their characters did. My heart ached for Helen, and year after year I wished her better than she was experiencing. Here, a few words in her favor.

Series,The Lost Skill of Accurate Manuscript Transcription, No. 2, Cohen and Yannella

The Loss of Transcribing Skills When We Don’t Practice Them

Even older scholars lose some of their archival skills if they don’t stay in practice. In 1992 Hennig Cohen and Donald Yannella published Herman Melville's Malcolm Letter: "Man's Final Lore" –the letter being the one in the Augusta Papers to Allan about the birth of his first child, Malcolm. They took the occasion to relate the 1849 letter to paternalism, authoritarianism, and attitudes toward death displayed in the Melville and associated families. Yet Cohen and Yannella confuse family members, as in quoting Maria's letter to her brother, Peter Gansevoort, and his wife about the care being given to Peter and Maria's mother. Peter had no wife at the time of the letter, and the "Sister Mary" thanked for "her kindness & attentions to Mamma" is really Mary Chandonette Gansevoort, Guert Gansevoort's mother. Cohen and Yannella quote Maria Melville's letter to her niece Kate Gansevoort, Peter's daughter, about the death of Dr. Howard Townsend without realizing that Mrs. Townsend, Justine (whose name they give as Justina), is known in the Melville family as Cousin Teny, a Van Rensselaer, the sister of Augusta's dear friend Nilly Van Rensselaer Thayer.

As you would expect from older Melville hands, their transcriptions were conscientious, although they misread one important word in the "Malcolm Letter" itself (preferring the "robust" over "valiant" ("as valiant as Julius Cesear") and made heavy weather of a good many words they call "undeciphered," including the three on 189 that were clear to me.

When you dip here and there into different years in an archive it’s easy to make snap judgments on slight evidence. Like so many Melvilleans since Raymond Weaver, Cohen and Yannella proved unable to judge Maria Gansevoort Melville, Herman’s mother, quite fairly. Weaver and Lewis Mumford were so over-the-top in their denunciations of the woman that even the rational Leon Howard was infected with their horrified disdain for her, as when he assumed she was prevaricating in April 1853 when she said Herman had a new book almost ready for the press. Cohen and Yannella devote a long remarkable analysis to one letter to her niece Kate Gansevoort, now married to Abraham Lansing:

For Maria there was a poignancy that more strongly suggests the profound sense of family and continuity. She wrote Kate in February 1872 and reflected, "How well we all remembered the evening when the ring came for my father." So in making this gesture, Henry [Gansevoort] and Kate who carried out his [Peter's] request, were maintaining a Victorian memorializing tradition. Her aunt continues, "He opened it at the dinner table--and was so much pleased with it. He wore it, all during his illness . . . and it was only on the morning of the day he died that I took it off his hand . . . by his desire and have had it ever since. Mama says that I am to keep it now. With that ring which I cannot too highly prize with its double associations, I have now the beautiful gift from Cousin Henry. How beautiful it is--how I wish my father could have seen it."

In a footnote they "note the confusion in generations":
Maria is clearly talking about the ring received by her father from her grandfather, but her mother had been dead for more than forty years at the time this letter to Kate was penned. Perhaps the explanation is that she was merely confused or flustered. It should be noted that the letter is in her hand and signed 'Maria G. Melville.'"

In fact, the letter is not "in the hand" of Melville's mother, Maria G. Melville.

The letter is altogether characteristic of the hand of the person who wrote it, Maria G. Melville, Allan's first daughter, born the month Malcolm was born in 1849, and known as Milie. "Mama" is her stepmother, the appalling Jane Dempsey Melville. The willingness to assume that Melville's mother was a mentally doddering old woman but strong enough to write a fantastically confused letter, is perfect evidence of how the 1920's maligning of Melville’s mother has persisted. At the time the letter was written Maria was dying, absolutely devastated by the death of her son Allan in February 1872, but she was not out of her mind, not grotesquely confused or flustered as Cohen and Yannella assumed.

In another post I will apologize for doubting Yannella (in a very public way) about his assertion that Sarah Morewood was infatuated with George Duyckinck. I apologize now, Don, and will grovel later.