3-23 July 2010
Jay Leyda's two-volume The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951) was one of the great scholarly works of the mid 20th Century, the magnificent achievement of a film-maker and film-historian, an amateur Melvillean who at the outset simply wanted to make an accurate chronology of the writer's life for his teacher, Sergei Eisenstein. As he compiled his documents in the late 1940s Leyda was baffled by a few Melvilleans, notably Henry A. Murray, who hoarded their discoveries (sometimes for decades, while reveling in secret knowledge and hinting at eventual publication). He was befriended by Harrison Hayford, one of the group of Yale students who did dissertations on Melville under Stanley T. Williams in the 1940s. Hayford and some others of these young scholars, notably William H. Gilman, shared their finds as early as they could without great risk of jeopardizing their degrees (which depended upon incorporating unpublished evidence) and jobs. Leyda was challenged by impatient publishers who imposed their notions upon him, as in forbidding him to identify the location of a document right along with the quotation from it. Some correspondence about Leyda's often thwarted progress on the Log is quoted in Clare L. Spark's Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001). In this Introduction I look at how the Log was received and used or not used. From documents I found in 1962 and afterwards, I supplied about half of the "Supplement" to the reissue of the Log (New York: Gordian Press, 1969) and saw it through the press for Leyda, who was working in the East German Filmarchiv. In Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Northwestern University Press, 2012) I devote a chapter to what happened after Leyda entrusted me to expand the Log again two years before his death in 1988. The full saga of Leyda's pursuit of documents and his attempts to enlist other searchers for Melville documents remains untold.
At the outset of his 1951 Introduction Leyda declared: "In the making of this book I have tried to hold to one main aim: to give each reader the opportunity to be his own biographer of Herman Melville, by providing him with the largest possible quantity of materials to build his own approach to this complex figure." Leyda was confident that he had allowed Leon Howard to become his own biographer of Melville by presenting him with the working Log and joining with Hayford in "browbeating" Howard into writing a narrative from the documents he had been handed, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). After a few months in 1988 spent transcribing documents into the enlarged The New Melville Log in my computer I became skeptical of what I began calling the "silver platter theory" of biography, in which one person gathers documents and expects another to transform them into a narrative. By the early 1990s I knew for sure that Leyda and Hayford had been wrong--even Howard, shrewd as he was, had failed to capture the essential Melville, as anyone would do, I decided, who had not, year after year, soiled his or her own hands in devoted labor in the archives.
Others believed as passionately in the silver platter theory as Leyda had. More than one critic eager to try his or her hand at biography badgered me to turn over my ongoing expansion of the Log. At the worst, a critic who had counted on my giving him my work stiffed his publisher for an enviably outsized advance after I refused. I had always rushed new documents into print, so I acknowledged to myself that I was self-serving in holding on to my transcriptions in the burgeoning The New Melville Log both for my own narrative biography and for ultimate printing in the Log, but I was more realistic than self-serving. I had learned that all that would be new and most valuable in my biography was emerging from my years of studying the original manuscripts during which I dated (or redated) documents, identified and then became familiar with people in those documents, and recovered episodes that had been only partially known and even wholly unknown.
Leyda's approach "forbade an emphasis on any part" of Melville's life "to the exclusion of any other part, and forbade the neglect of material that seemed, in itself, of small importance." Nevertheless, rather than being undiscriminating the 1951 edition was shaped by Leyda's special point of view. Few of the longer documents were reprinted in full, and Leyda made the cuts not only to shorten but also to play up some his particular interests, not to say preferences. Not being as fond of Melville's mother or his brother Gansevoort or his wife as I am, he could make three ellipsis dots satirical, and once or twice he saw what he expected to see in a letter rather than the actual word on the page. The Log in fact had to be highly selective not only because of the limits of space but simply because Leyda typically did the excerpting in uncomfortable, constraining circumstances. Living below the edge of poverty, staying in YMCAs or cadging rooms from acquaintances or their friends, he worked on the fly, unable to stay long enough in New York City to exhaust the archives in the New York Public Library, for instance. Similarly, Leyda was dependent on the courtesy of Melville's grandniece Agnes Morewood in Pittsfield as he took notes on the papers she laid out for him on a table. Unable to take time to copy out in longhand every paragraph of any long review of one of Melville's books, Leyda made on-the-spot decisions about what to copy. If he had had before him full texts of all the known reviews he would have excerpted differently, so as to acknowledge influences more sharply or to brand plagiarism or to highlight different themes as the most salient. If he had held photocopies of all sides of a correspondence represented by letters at Harvard, say, and others at the New York Public Library, he would surely have made different excerpts. As it was, his uncanny ability to seize on significant passages in a document and his phenomenal memory infused the pages with heartwrenching significance and seeming coherence.
The Melville Log was accepted as impressively monumental and useful for scholars but not of any obvious significance for literary critics. William Braswell in the May 1952 American Literature called the Log a notable achievement, but his wording was tepid: "The Melville that one becomes acquainted with in these pages will probably be rather different from the man he had in mind. Here, minus the legends, is the man as he acted, as he appeared, and, so far as the nonfictional documents reveal, as he thought. For one who likes his facts neat the book makes fascinating reading from beginning to end." More imaginative critics, of course, would not like their facts neat but embroidered, and would not find the Log fascinating. In American Quarterly 5 (Spring 1953) Carlos Baker was far from enthusiastic: "Being, perforce, a patchwork of snippets from family letters, ships' records, and other similar data, as well as autobiographical reminiscences culled from Melville's own writings, The Melville Log makes disappointing reading." So went other reviews, for The Melville Log was published just as the New Criticism (which saw biographical research as irrelevant to interpretation) was triumphing in one American university after another as the post-War generation of professors assumed power.
Over the long term, the most virulent and influential enemy of the Log was Charles Feidelson, ironically the man promoted by Yale to "replace" Stanley T. Williams, the director of that extraordinary series of factually-based Melville dissertations in the 1940s by Walter E. Bezanson, Merton M. Sealts, Harrison Hayford, William H. Gilman, Merrell R. Davis and others, studies which prepared Leyda's way. Paul Lauter has recorded the shock to students in 1953 when previous bibliographical, biographical, and historical class notes from Stanley T. Williams proved to be useless in the new order at Yale embodied by the new authority at the podium, Feidelson. An early convert to the New Criticism and a lifelong proselytizer for it, Feidelson dismissed the Log in the December 1951 Yale Review as wayward, a "mere accumulation of data," much of it "rather dreary stuff," and as a "welter of disconnected and often trivial data" irrelevant to literary criticism. Feidelson depicted Leyda, Leon Howard, and Gilman (author of the 1951 Melville's Early Life and REDBURN) as representing the "earth-bound" historical school of Melvilleans in contrast to "intuitional, or high-flying, school of Melville studies." Leyda was earth-bound when he included "even such items as the fact that on July 21, 1836, Melville's sisters received awards at the Albany Female Academy." This was the only "sort of truth" the Log offered. Unless "our interests are merely anecdotal," the welter of trivial data "would seem to demand an even greater exercise of imagination than any for which earlier biographers can be reproached." Feidelson knew for sure that in the new Yale and the new American university system any "exercise of imagination" upon such dreary data would be misplaced: "While earlier biographers made the error of treating their images as objective facts of Melville's life, the new school" (of Leyda and Howard, and of course of the pedestrian students of his predecessor at Yale) was "in danger of reducing Melville to the simplistic terms of an external chronicle." The hapless Leyda and Howard had tried to resolve "the Melville problem" by "an appeal to fact when what is needed is enriched speculative interpretation." How often during the more than third of a century until 1988 did Feidelson inveigh or rant against that compendium of dreary facts, The Melville Log? Year after year, when he came to Melville in his courses? It seemed so, to judge from the publications of his more notable students who continue to reveal their disdain for mere facts even into the new century.
Adequate praise came at last in a reconsideration in the Winter 1955 Hudson Review when George Barbarow dismissed an unnamed reviewer's contempt for the "'tag-ends and jots and tittles'" in the Log. [Does anyone know who this reviewer was?] For Barbarow, the "minutiae tend to reinforce the illusion of authenticity, upon which the book leans heavily for its effect, and to provide a continuing measure of contrast between Melville's imaginative flights and his routine business of living." Barbarow perceived that the Log proceeded "by contrasts, strikingly appropriate to its subject." He insisted: "The significance of any one piece of evidence is found in its difference from those before and those after; no detail is absolutely trivial, as the angry reviewer [the 'tag-ends' carper] implied, it is only more or less trivial than its fellows, or, to speak in a more favorable tone, more or less tremendous." Barbarow understood that Leyda had gone beyond what he promised in the Introduction:
Leyda's method imposes a task upon the reader: the valuation of particular pieces of evidence, taken in conjunction with others. It goes further than his announced intention (". . . to give each reader the opportunity to be his own biographer") and requires that reader to be a critic, not only of the Log, but also of the materials that go to make it up. Leyda does not summarize the evidence, he presents it, making changes mostly by elision. The primary rules of the method are, 1)--to reproduce the evidence by copying it, and 2)--to exclude any comment of his own. Given these rules, the only legitimate quarrel the reader might have would come from disagreement about the quantity and quality of the material that has been left out or cut out.
According to Barbarow's analysis, the Log worked by forcing the reader to attempt "to reconcile blanks and differences in the sources, so that what he finds, or thinks he finds, contributes mightily to the illusion of discovery, surely one of the most powerful factors in any kind of entertainment." Barbarow elaborated this theory of "blanks":
So far as the Log is concerned, blanks are important because there are so many blanks about Melville. Leyda does not attempt to fill the holes; in point of fact he increases them by cutting almost every document, substituting the conventional three dots for the parts left out. This deliberate cutting has at least one very important function besides keeping the size of the work within bounds: it holds the reader in a state of constant realization that not everything is here, that there are holes, gaps, and blanks, as there are in the original mass of material itself. The cutting tends to increase awareness of the extent of the material that has been lost, and it emphasizes what most biography blandly skips or smoothes over: the difficulty of being certain about a famous man who lived in another age.
As a brilliantly formulated response to the Log this ranks with that of Maurice Sendak, who confided to me that he had edited it all with an old-time moviola in his own mind. Sendak's experience suggests forcefully that Leyda's "cutting" needs to be seen in relation to his experiences in film editing. When Eisenstein entrusted him with the only complete copy of The Battleship Potemkin, Leyda of course preserved it intact, but, entrusted with the Log, I have not scrupled to recut many documents from the originals Leyda had worked with. I had to choose which parts to add from documents Leyda did not know about (and a few which he excluded), and therefore I had to recut the documents in the 1951 Log differently because many more connections and different sorts of connections are now visible.
Minutiae reinforce authenticity, as Barbarow said, but they do more, I found, when I worked with old documents freshly and worked with new Melville material, notably the trove discovered in 1983, a surviving remnant of the comprehensive archive of Melville's sister Augusta (known as "the Augusta Papers"). Merely by dating Stanton Garner's discovery of the firing of a clerk from a store in Galena, I made a dramatic story of Melville's arrival in the West where he expected to rise with the help of his uncle, Major Melvill. Merely by dating a grocery shopping list by "Cousin John," I discovered that Melville's mother had exuberantly thrown a great party to welcome him and his bride home from Canada. Merely by redating Melville's brother Tom's start at a diary on the Navigator, I discovered what precipitated Melville's decision to write Redburn and why writing that slight book propelled the unprepared Melville into exploration of psychological depths. I agreed with Leyda on the doctrine of inclusiveness because I learned that you never know what detail may prove to be of dazzling relevance. The devil was always in the details, but, Barbarow knew, so were the angels. Responsible high-flying imagination, responsible literary criticism, I found, always had to be built from data that included tag-ends and jots and tittles.
Though Leyda thought of the Log as an end in itself, the tool by which anyone could write his own biography of Melville, he also thought of it as a hunting tool. He was confident that the Log would send researchers back to the archives, but that did not happen in the 1950s. In 1962 I mailed my Melville books from Evanston, Illinois, to New York City, General Delivery, then, after paying a visit in Port Arthur, Texas, hitchhiked from there to Florida along the Gulf then north to Manhattan. Once there, I retrieved my books and carried my new set of The Melville Log to libraries, starting with the New York Public Library. There I began annotating it with passages Leyda had omitted, making small corrections, and copying into it full or partial texts of new documents Leyda had not seen or had not used. In trying to piece together a story about Melville and politics from letters and newspapers I exulted in finding that no one had touched the archives since the great Yale students and Leyda (and sometimes Wilson Heflin) had plowed through the files in the 1940's. Sometimes when I asked a librarian for something it was promptly handed to me although it had been withheld in whole or in part from Leyda and the Yale scholars. When I asked to see Gansevoort Melville's 1846 London journal at the New York Public Library I was told it was on hold. For whom was it held? The great librarian Victor Paltsits. He had been dead since 1952. Merrell R. Davis, who had been granted glimpses of the diary, and who with William H. Gilman had co-edited Melville's Letters in 1960, was himself already dead, in 1961. No one had come asking for Gansevoort's journal during the whole decade, 1952-1962. Yes, I could edit it for three issues of the Bulletin of the New York Public Library and yes, later on, it could be published and sold as a "separate," a little pamphlet.
I found easy access to materials everywhere. At the New-York Historical Society there were scathing comments on Melville's brother Gansevoort in Philip Hone's diaries, just as I had hoped. Hitchhiking to Pittsfield later in the summer, I became the first scholar to study the documents deposited in the Berkshire Athenaeum in the 1950s in the new Melville Collection, papers that Melville's brother Allan's granddaughters had preserved. Among them were letters and other items that Agnes Morewood had not shown to Leyda in the 1940s, as I found when I sent copies to him in the mid-1960s. All the documents were handed over to me, and many of them went into the 1969 Supplement to the Log. As it turned out, there was another twist: Leyda had seen items that were not deposited later and had simply disappeared. Some of them emerged in 1999, when Paul Metcalf found a cardboard liquor box containing parts of this archive, documents loaned by Agnes Morewood before 1952 to her second cousin, Eleanor Metcalf, Melville's granddaughter and Paul's mother. But where, for instance, was Gansevoort's 1834 diary? Dumped out with the trash in Santa Barbara decades ago, when someone disposed of Margaret Morewood's effects after she died? (Here, knowing the subsidiary characters and locations better, I have made a few conjectural corrections to Leyda's partial transcription of the 1834 journal while ruing the loss of the original.)
In that summer of 1962 in New York I met two candidates for the PhD at Columbia who were fascinated that Northwestern granted PhDs and that I could be writing a dissertation that required going to New York City. They were dumbstruck when I told them I went to the New York Public Library or the New-York Historical Society every day to copy out nineteenth-century letters and diary entries about Melville and politics, or else read nineteenth-century newspapers looking for Melville's brother Gansevoort's speeches and reviews of Melville's works and other articles about Melville and his family. They had a great story to regale their fellow students and Professor Richard Chase with at Columbia, their meeting this skinny guy with a skinny tie who was going to libraries every day and looking at old newspapers and manuscripts! In 1962, a graduate student going to the archives as if the New Criticism had never triumphed! Coming all the way to New York to do it! They were too polite to laugh outright, but the way they kept looking at each other showed they thought this was the quaintest damned thing they had ever heard. It probably was. They made it plain enough that the research required by my dissertation topic had pushed me out of step with my sprightly New Critical contemporaries. In the summer of 1962 I was happier than I had ever been in my life, aware that the New Criticism was triumphant but never conceiving that it could damage a career as a textual scholar and theorist and as a Melville biographer.
Later in the 1960s I worked mainly on Melville's texts for the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville, although I began a systematic gathering of known and unknown reviews of Melville's books and, while Leyda was still abroad, saw the 1969 edition of the Log into print for him. We put some valuable documents in the Supplement, but nothing to rival the discoveries of the 1940s. Home at last, Leyda, the man who had never gone to college was hired as the Pinewood Professor at New York University. In a 1973 essay in The Chief Glory of Every People: Essays on Classic American Writers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press) Leyda expressed his profound disappointment at finding how little and how unimaginatively The Melville Log had been used. In a mere quarter century under the New Criticism, the "art of Herman Melville" had been reduced "from discovery to a reading assignment." Professors had taken over the great writer, so that what "we once read for joy has been transformed into a 'subject,' or rather, an object for criticism and interpretation." In what was being published there was "not much room any more for either man or works," Leyda lamented. Perhaps these new academics were to be forgiven for not knowing what they did: "We cannot expect second-rate scholars to acknowledge or consider the harm they are doing, to writer and reader, both." Leyda's fiercest frustration arose from his knowing that opportunities were being missed and some opportunities were being lost forever: "With so much left to be known, how can we allow the present state of our knowledge to freeze and become permanently acceptable? Perhaps we have become too content with the biographical material already at our disposal. And this contentment leads away from simple logic and toward such habitual self-deceit! It's so easy to leap to the conclusion that there can be nothing more."
In 1973 Leyda was appalled at "second-rate scholars" (by which he meant "critics") who pushed aside Melville and his works in order to pursue, for one example, "a close, a very close hunt for the sexual puns in Israel Potter." In the next years I let Leyda know of yet more outrages, such as the studies of Melville's short stories in which it never occurred to the critics that they might try to establish the order of the composition of the stories from the somewhat different order of publication. We went from sexual puns in Israel Potter to solemn spoil-sport pontificating about the masturbatory imagery in the fire-starting scene in Typee at which Melvilleans had long smiled and kept silent. Yet in the mid 1970s and the 1980s old hands Henry A. Murray, Wilson Heflin, and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and a few new researchers began making Melville discoveries (or revealing old information)--not big caches of documents but single documents or little caches often of significance quite disproportionate to their size. Among the new researchers were Patricia Barber, Hans Bergmann, Stanton Garner, David Jaffe, very notably Joyce Deveau Kennedy and Frederick J. Kennedy, Alice P. Kenney, Kathleen E. Kier, Walter D. Kring and Jonathan S. Carey, George Monteiro, Amy Puett, John P. Runden, David K. Titus. I separate the name of one, a slightly later researcher, because Leyda laid on me the responsibility of giving Francis E. Plumeau (who died in January 1985) full credit as the true discoverer of the Augusta Melville papers which the New York Public Library acquired in 1983 (or acquired almost all of, to be precise). Beginning later in the 1980s, Robert K. Wallace searched out the identity of works of art which Melville owned and the significances of the artifacts he saw. Later, beginning in the 1990s, Richard E. Winslow III made many discoveries among hard copies of old newspapers, and Rita Gollin, Warren Broderick, Geoffrey Sanborn, Heddy-Ann Richter, Patricia Cline Cohen, Chris Coughlin, Ruth Degenhardt, Scott Norsworthy, and Dennis Marnon made important discoveries in the archives and on the Internet, as George Monteiro continued to do. Almost alone except for Broderick and Marnon, John Gretchko has been mining public records, particularly in New York City. Lion Gardiner Miles, an amateur historian of the Berkshires, amplified Patricia Barber's 1970s discoveries about the forced sale of part of Melville's farm, Arrowhead, and the convoluted legal aftermath, and about a scandal just before Melville moved to Pittsfield, Sarah Morewood's attentions to a kinsman of Miles's, the brother-in-law of President Tyler. The Berkshire County resident Mandy Victor makes discoveries both by alertness to serendipity and shrewd knowledge of collectors who have treasure-troves of photographs and manuscripts. Since the 1940s there have been only a handful of new archival investigations on Melville. My test is whether or not a dissertation has sent me to the archives to verify a report: Amy Puett passed, with her study of Melville's wife; Mary K. Bercaw with her study of Melville's documentable sources, Steven Olsen-Smith with his study of Melville as a bookman, and Robert Sandberg, the coder and layout design coordinator for The New Melville Log, with his dissertation on two early long poems and the Burgundy Club material Melville was working on in his last years. [Have I left out any names here? It's easy to let an important name slip out of mind.]
What Leyda saw in 1973 is truer than ever in the new century, despite discoveries by a few traditional scholars and Internet searchers. No more than then are Melville critics reading the 1951 Log straight through, and almost never does a critic show that he or she has made an effort to imagine the items in the 1969 Supplement into their rightful places in the 1951 sequence. Of those critics who cite the Log more of them still cite the 1951 edition than the 1969 edition with the Supplement. Deploring the way critics were ignoring scholarship, Leyda was spared the painful realization of the way critics later commandeered the appurtenances of scholarship in the pursuit of purely critical enterprises. In the early 1980s, while Leyda was planning a third edition of the Log, there burst forth a collective urge among critics to "do" literary history without the muss and fuss of research into literary history. Hardly was this urge satisfied by rival compendiums when in the mid 1980s the urge manifested itself among them and their slightly younger colleagues to "do" historicism, but without the bother of historical research. At the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s a few "Little Jack Horners" (students of students of students of the original New Critics) yielded to the urge to "do" biography without learning basic tools, such as how to read nineteenth-century handwriting, a lack of preparation papered over in the early 2000s with the celebration of transcribing according to the critic's "rhetorical agenda" rather than the absolute (if unattainable) goal of recovering exactly what the writer wrote.
Now even prominent critics shamelessly display their ignorance of documents printed in the Log and other standard works, including the Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), the 1989 Northwestern-Newberry Journals, the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry Correspondence, Brian Higgins's and my Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and my two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). A series of writers including John Updike, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Andrew Delbanco, have all but ignored Melville's exposure to architecture, sculpture, and paintings in Europe in 1849 and again in 1856-1857, particularly minimizing Melville's gallery-going in 1849 in London and Paris. These writers also minimized the emerging evidence about Melville's long progressive quest for an aesthetic credo. How, you ask, could these writers have ignored Melville's rapturous study of art and later, his intense pondering of writings on aesthetics? Why, because they revered Newton Arvin, the author of a "critical biography" of Melville but, more important, as a once-idealistic 1930s Communist and later as a persecuted homosexual. Arvin, a self-described "bad traveler," had been so miserable during his few weeks in London and Paris in 1929 that two decades later in writing his Herman Melville (Toronto: William Sloane, 1950) he assured his readers that Melville (exactly like Arvin himself) had been too old to profit from Europe: "The trip had no very profound effect on Melville's development: it was too late in the day for that." Updike, Hardwick, and Delbanco were writing biography from other books, not primary documents. Sheep in experiments in animal behavior leap over non-existent obstacles because a sheep earlier in the line had leapt over an object that had later been removed; why should literary critics not skip friskily over even the most dramatic scenes if their sourcebook left them out?
Despite the evidence Hayford, Davis and Gilman, and Sealts had gathered about the book Melville completed in May 1853, and despite my discovery of the title, The Isle of the Cross, in 1987, three reviewers of my biography in 2002, Richard Brodhead (the quintessential product of Feidelson's Yale--undergraduate, graduate, lengthy stay as assistant professor before promotion and tenure, then deanship), Andrew Delbanco (announced already as the author-to-be of a Melville biography), and Elizabeth Schultz, all treated the 1853 book as a mere surmise of mine. Despite the lavish evidence published by Meade Minnigerode in 1922 about the book Melville left for publication in 1860 when he sailed on the Meteor with his brother Thomas (evidence reprinted in many books over the decades, including The Melville Log, the Letters, the Correspondence, and the second volume of my biography), the same three reviewers all denied the actuality of Melville's Poems. Following such critics, other critics, including Robert Milder in "A Brief Biography" in the misnamed A Historical Guide to Herman Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), likewise refused even to attempt to imagine the full trajectory of Melville's career, which included the completion of The Isle of the Cross between Pierre and his first stories and the completion of Poems between The Confidence-Man and Battle-Pieces.
The dismaying truth is that the anti-biographical tenets of the New Criticism have been perpetuated in all subsequent academic fads, some still recurrently in vogue, including phenomenology, structuralism, reader response criticism, deconstruction (which cannot perform its dismantling unless it starts with a perfect verbal icon), and the New Historicism (which is not a movement which does historical research). Most middle-aged college professors now wittingly or unwittingly display a New Critical mind-set learned from students of the original New Critics or their students, so rapid is the generational replication in American universities despite the longevity of individual professors. What all this meant for Melville studies was clear in a special 1994 issue on the "New Melville" in the venerable scholarly journal American Literature, where academic hostility to new research was baldly and triumphantly emblazoned: "We already have full-scale biographies of Melville." That was the mid-1990s. In a weird twist, powerful groups in twenty-first-century biography are expanding the concept of archives in ways that tend, and perhaps were designed, to define traditional archives out of existence.
Defiantly, with the first of three planned volumes The New Melville Log launches itself into hostile academic waters and also launches itself, more realistically than Coriolanus, into "a world elsewhere," a world still peopled by lovers of literature and lovers of research into the lives of great authors. In this first volume new documentary evidence found by Wilson Heflin and Rita Gollin enriches the story of Melville's stays in Tahiti and Eimeo, but most of the new archival material comes from the "Augusta Papers." Those papers included the letters from Julia Maria Melvill to her cousin Augusta which allowed me to straighten out the tangled evidence about Melville's stays at the Melvill farm in the 1830s. A letter from a Gansevoort cousin in Bath, New York, enabled me to speculate about his schoolteaching near Lansingburgh, a speculation later confirmed from a letter in Paul Metcalf's liquor box. Melville's courtship of Elizabeth Shaw, his composition of Typee, his beginning Mardi, his marriage and settling in New York City, and his beginning Redburn are all newly illuminated by documents in the Augusta Papers, with cross-lights shed from many other sources, notably my discovery of Oakey Hall's letters to the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin (whose gossip included the news that Melville had written White-Jacket in "a score of sittings"). Patricia Cohen's discovery of letters from Thomas Low Nichols to a Charleston newspaper confirms this man's story of acting as godfather to Typee in 1845. Melville's set of Modern British Essayists (long known but not looked at) revealed to me his early (then lifelong) grapplings not just with literary criticism but with aesthetic theories. Identifications of some of Melville's source books by Geoffrey Sanborn and Scott Norsworthy, in particular sources for his famous notes in the final volume of his Shakespeare set, reveal more signs of creative grapplings with English and Continental models. A short letter to Richard Bentley in the Reese Collection (not in Correspondence) confirms the argument in my biography of Melville that in October 1849 Melville expected to be away many months on a Grand Tour of Europe. Such new evidence, along with many newly recovered reviews, enlivens the documents that were printed or excerpted in the 1951 and 1969 editions; in turn, the long-known documents provide illuminating contexts for the new evidence. From Melville's birth in 1819 until he left Portsmouth for home at the end of December 1849, this is a very different documentary life of Herman Melville's first three decades.
A few words on form. As Leyda had wanted to do, I identify the source of items where they are quoted, not in a section of "Sources" in the back. Grouping reviews in monthly magazines at the end of the month was a mistake imposed upon Leyda, resulting in the printing of items discussing a particular review before the review itself was printed. July magazines, say, normally came out several days before the end of June, for example, so I have placed magazine items at the start of the month unless I have reason to know that they were particularly early or particularly late (as could happen with magazines shipped from Charleston or New Orleans). When items from different sites have the same dates, I have gone by longitude, London before Boston, Boston before New York, and with newspapers of the same date, I have quoted morning papers before evening papers, and within morning papers, say, I have gone alphabetically. I have in most cases made my own fresh transcriptions of family letters and have used Northwestern-Newberry for Melville's journals and for his correspondence except for letters that have been surfaced quite recently. Quotations from reviews are from the fresh transcriptions for the Higgins-Parker Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
In his 1973 essay Leyda cited me as one of those who had reduced his "sins of omissions": "Completely unforeseen things turned up: it was Hershel Parker who saw the 1860/1867 whale's tooth on the shelves of the New York Historical Society--and now we should be looking for Captain Worth and E. S. Doolittle." As an inducement to research, Leyda had printed in the 1969 Supplement a full-page photograph of the tooth as inscribed to Melville by Captain Worth and by Melville to Doolittle. On 4 July 2006, after Google and other Internet tools were available, Scott Norsworthy (a non-academic, despite his PhD in literature) informed me that the recipient was the Albany artist Edwin Stafford Doolittle (1843-1879), who in 1867 had a studio in New York City. He was one of who knows how many artists Melville knew personally. Then in February 2010 while I was looking for something else in the free fultonhistory.com database I found a 1 June 1887 article by S. S. Stafford, Doolittle's heir (a nephew?), written for the Albany Journal, headed: "A SPERM WHALE'S CAPTURE / THE LIVES OF THREE MEN AND SIX HOURS' WORK REQUIRED." Stafford began: "Lying on my desk and used as a paper weight is the tooth of a "Cachelot" or sperm whale," a "mass of solid ivory, nine inches long by three wide and weighing 33 ounces." Then he told a thrilling story which Captain Worth, a son-in-law of Owen Chase, must have told Melville in person. It's hard to know whether to be more pleased at having Doolittle and Worth identified or more chagrined at our taking so long to identify them. And when did Worth meet Melville? During the months he was home from December 1861 to October 1862, during which Melville was for some months at one or another rented lodging in Manhattan? Such question will not be answered by contributors to academic journals like American Literature, those critics still satisfied, even now, that all they need to know about Melville is in the vaunted pre-1994 "full-scale biographies." Such critics are not driven by love of Melville.
Grant and Sherman did their casual best to wipe out Southern history by burning newspaper offices, and in the 1950s heyday of the New Criticism many libraries made room for paperback reprints of novels by tossing out old newspaper files from all parts of the country, but surviving files are now once again being cherished, and every year more documents are being digitized and put into databases which any Melville lover can search, more and more often for free (or for a nominal sum, as at the New England Historic Genealogical Society). The Massachusetts Historical Society has long offered the papers of Melville's father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, on microfilm. Although some of the Melville family manuscripts in the Berkshire Athenaeum are on microfilm, the papers in the New York Public Library and Houghton Library are not, and none of these libraries has put manuscripts on the Internet. Dedicated, technically adept scholars working on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson have digitized many manuscripts and posted them in archival databases. Their examples will be followed, sooner or later, but in the meantime we can hope that some of the brilliant amateurs will be joined by a motley group of contrarians, historically minded professors and graduate students, academics who, having resisted the allure of the New Criticism and subsequent ahistorical academic fads, will find their way into the surviving traditional, non-digitized "hard paper" archives pursuing what they have seen in books like The New Melville Log and in newspaper databases. Just as I found many new documents in Oakey Hall's letters to the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, others, I predict, will find revealing references to Melville in the surviving letters from other newspapers' special correspondents, for the files of the letters of special correspondents constitute, I aver, the greatest nineteenth-century historical resource which remains all but untapped by researchers. This is all the more likely to happen now that various digital tools, especially the resources of the Internet, are available to zealous researches who have time or will make time for their laudable obsessions. Above my computer I have kept a photograph I took of Jay Leyda in the basement of the Troy Public Library as he read on a blue-and-white oilcloth covered table a review of Moby-Dick I had just discovered in a badly foxed volume of the Troy Budget. He declared himself happier there, that moment, than he could have been in the Pierpont Morgan Library. Remembering that excursion, Leyda's last research trip, I place my faith in the joy of the enthusiast and in the addictive nature of research, whether it starts in a moldy basement or an airless attic of a public library or in cyberspace.
Long ago I found in the London News of the World (2 November 1851) one of the earliest definitions of the Melville lover: "There are people who delight in mulligatawny. They love curry at its warmest point. Ginger cannot be too hot in the mouth for them. Such people, we should think, constitute the admirers of Herman Melville." In 1899 Melville's most prescient and most dedicated early admirer, Archibald MacMechan, dared to hope that Moby-Dick could become a classic open to every lover of literature but was certain that it would always appeal to one core constituency, "the class of gentleman-adventurer, to those who love both books and free life under the wide and open sky." MacMechan did not know that women had been among Melville's fervent early admirers, and that by the time he published his essay Melville's reputation was quietly burgeoning in England, where a lover of Melville might hand three volumes of The Whale (the earlier title of Moby-Dick) to an acquaintance along with other books and await the result. If the borrower returned raving about the majesty of The Whale, the acquaintance became a treasured friend. In Melville's century, his reputation never rested on the opinions of literary historians but on the opinions of enthusiasts such as a band of admirers in Leicester. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., testified to the way a lover of Moby-Dick might arrange hail a friend to his lodgings to read aloud from the book without interruption, sure that he would create a new enthusiast for Melville. Melville, then, was still a cult obsession. Beyond any doubt, Melville lovers can count on amateurs like Lion G. Miles and Scott Norsworthy more than on college professors and their students to follow all the hints Leyda gave in his 1851 Log and his 1973 essay or to follow up hundreds of suggestions in my two-volume biography.
My great hope is that scholarly research will be pursued outside the academy. For many years already, the most responsible historical use of the Internet has been made by genealogists, professional and amateur, and respect for evidence is high in family forums, higher, often, than even in famous genealogical sites where information may not be carefully sifted before being incorporated. The searching out of ancestors' wills and land deeds is now a commonplace in genealogical research, and researchers pride themselves in transcribing documents accurately and in employing the latest technologies. These obsessive amateurs may yet turn to Melville, as amateurs did in the nineteenth century. Internet bloggers, I recognize, can be as witless, opinionated, and lazy as any professors, but their potential for yielding to the itch of obsessive research is higher, so I list them among genealogists, armchair historians, out-in-the-field local historians, movie-makers, unprofessional Melville-lovers of all callings. These divine amateurs, alone or in teams, may soon constitute the most visible of Melville researchers and the best augmenters of The New Melville Log.
When Leyda used the odd phrasing, "It was Hershel Parker who saw the 1860/1867 whale's tooth," he meant that new Melville documents were lying waiting to be discovered by anyone who kept his or her eyes open. For decades I told my graduate students, "Put out your hands," knowing that if they reached out for information their hands would never come away empty: they would find something valuable, even it not what they hoped for. In this spirit I buy copies of Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography when I can. After all, he never returned Melville's drawing of Arrowhead to his grand-daughter Eleanor Metcalf, so the nearest thing to it is the reproduction in Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, and the original drawing just might be tucked into a copy of the book. Some time ago I bought a copy on eBay that Weaver had inscribed soon after publication to Thomas Monro, who stashed clippings in it. One was a newspaper article entitled "Passing on the Torch," a partial reprint from the "Gossip Shop" in The Bookman of February 1922, presumably by John Farrar. Here is the full text:
The history of "Moby Dick", Melville's titanic dramatization of human fortitude and implacable resolve, has been the history of a book's laudation by literary artists who recognized in Melville an artist who transcended all that they themselves could do in words. The most interesting genealogy of "book recommending," the passing on of a torch from one hand to another, was supplied one day recently by James Stephens, the wizard who wrote "The Crock of Gold," "Mary, Mary," and "The Demi-Gods." Reveling over "Moby-Dick" with Samuel McCoy, who has just returned from Ireland, Stephens said:
"Did I ever tell you how I first heard of the book? George Meredith, who was about twenty years old when 'Moby Dick' was first published, read it, recognized a master in Melville, and passed the book on to Watts-Dunton. Watts-Dunton, equally enthralled, urged Dante Gabriel Rossetti to read it. Rossetti ran with it to Swinburne, crying out that Swinburne must read it. Swinburne, finding in it the roar of the sea described as he himself could not, with all his music, silently passed it on to Oscar Wilde, then the most glittering star among the literary lights of London. Wilde, a Dubliner, handed the book on to another Irishman, young William Butler Yeats, making, as he did so, an epigram on Melville's greatness that would be worth repeating--if I could remember it. Yeats, coming back from London to Dublin, brought a copy of the book with him and presented it to George Russell, 'A.E.,' essayist, poet, painter, and seer, commanding him by all the ancient gods of Eire to read it at once. And 'A.E.,' chanting solemn rhapsodies through his beard, handed it on to us, his disciples. I pass it on to all I know, as the greatest prose work in the English tongue.
"Melville," added Stephens thoughtfully, "was the last of the bards. He was wider than Shakespeare."
Pronounced on the afternoon of August 7, 1921, in the dingy little dining room of the hotel in Galway town on the west coast of Ireland, where bearded sailors from all the ports of the world once drank Spanish wine in the Galway inns.
In tribute to Jay Leyda I offer a challenge to readers of The New Melville Log: "Using the Internet, using the archives, verify this account of the passing of the torch, Oh divine amateurs." For, as Leyda said, the study of Melville is endless.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 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 February so it will be easy to find.
The Footsteps Theory of Biography
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 a detailed floor plan 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 February so it will be easy to find.
The Footsteps Theory of Biography
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 a detailed floor plan 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.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
“Literary Authority in American Fiction.”
11 June 85
Address at the Association of Departments of English, Western Seminar, Jackson Hole:
When Thoreau was off giving a lecture he overheard one of the local citizens ask another: “What does he lecture for?" The asker would have been happy with a simple answer: “$25 dollars and one supper.” But Thoreau said the question made him quake in his boots. He believed in getting his living by loving, and determined to give his audiences a strong dose of himself. This may be the only chance I have to talk to you.
What do I lecture here for? Best I can figure out by collating texts, it's because William Bennett couldn't come. So I wouldn't have got to meet him if he had come, and I've wanted to meet him. Last fall I was preparing an unfashionable talk on the hot topic of the MLA convention-¬-the Canon. Early in the semester I asked the dean how many literature courses a typical Delaware non-English major took and was told, “One.” If I had an undergraduate non-major in a survey class that might be the one shot anyone in the department had at him or her. I became more of an elitist than ever. Then To Reclaim a Legacy came out. So at MLA I told George Farr and Helen Aguera how strange it was to be in Washington, D. C., staying in a big hotel, not picketing anybody, and sounding just like another Texan who was up for a big Reagan appointment.
"What does he lecture for?" Well, the Summer issue of AMERICAN SCHOLAR has a review of my FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS that starts off by saving it's in a familiar genre--quest literature. The reviewer says I am in quest of a perfect copy-text. No, really not--that makes it all editorial. But there's no denying that I have been campaigning for something all the last decade and a half-¬an audience, because after years of editing and testing editorial theory I had something to say. Now, it was hard to get an audience. Too many of my fellow editors still thought soiled fish instead of coiled fish was a classic case of textual corruption and they were still begging for a chance to talk for fifty minutes about variant spellings of alleged and Affganistan and worrying in public about how they were going to deal with that ever-vexing problem of or/our variants. They're still doing it. You announce a program for SAMLA on the aesthetic implications of textual evidence and they offer you papers on accidental variants in the fourth edition of Young's Nights Thoughts.
From my chequered childhood I remember that the Rogue River runs fairly near here. a state or two away. This is near enough to be just the place for a rogue's confession. What a great hideout! I want to tell you how I became a textual editor. I was a high school dropout (if you had ended up there in eastern Oklahoma you would have dropped out too). I got out on a railroad that ran nearby, and became a railroad telegrapher in Louisiana. I got TB. In those days you still got TB. That was also before drugstore paperbacks, so for months I lay in bed (by that time I was in California) and read Shakespeare, over and over, and about the sixth time I read ROMEO AND JULIET I realized that Mercutio was saying something dirty. The realization was not just that Shakespeare was bawdy: it was that even those words in prose were supposed to mean something. Then I realized that maybe all the words in all the plays were supposed to make sense. This may not sound like much to you, but to a Southern boy it was a revelation, and it transformed the way I read. Slowed me down, for sure, but the conviction that words were supposed to make sense equipped me, a little later, in Illinois, to stop dead when I saw the word "nations" in TYPEE and change it to "matrons," and stop dead when I saw the word "argued" in MOBY-DICK and change it to "augured," and stop dead when I saw the word "murder" in THE CONFIDENCE-MAN and change it to "number" and then stop and change "bold" man" to "bald man." (Often enough, documentary evidence, in a source, for instance, can confirm such guesses--I'm not talking about flighty self-indulgent conjectural emendations.) But "stop dead" isn’t always right. You can be so caught up in the reading that you don't stop. I was visualizing the topography of Pierre's mind--mountain and cloud and mist imagery--after the Northwestern-Newberry PIERRE came out, and when I came to "nearer mist" I just scribbled "neather" in the margin and did not think any more about it, just kept on reading. Months later I noticed it, noticed I had spelled the word nether "neather," and told Harrison Hayford so he could correct the passage in the Library of America reprint, and later NN printings.
What reading this way meant was that I had learned to submit myself to the authority of the writer, to be absolutely humble in an attempt to follow meaning, which I assumed was there, so that when the meaning was violated sometimes I was paying such close attention that I was able to supply the word that should have been there. You see why I disagree so strongly with Jane Tompkins and Stanley Fish when they exalt their minds, not the author's mind, into the theatre where textual meaning takes place. I belong to the humble handmaiden school. Is there a nonsexist way of saying that? "Body-servant" won't do. So dropout or not I learned fast enough that while every sentence was supposed to make sense a lot didn't make sense because something had been corrupted. That was easy.
The harder part came years later, back in California, when I began to see that on a grander scale a lot of the texts we read all the time did not make sense or did not make authorial sense. We found meanings as we progressed from page to page even when some of those meanings were not authorial--not devised by the author at all but adventitious, the result of some cut or addition or reordering or other mishap. We were reading a PUDD’NHEAD WILSON where the Democrats who wanted to run the town pariah for office looked like fools afflicted with a political death wish, but they did that because when Mark Twain wrote the scene Wilson had just had a great courtroom triumph and was the town hero. We were reading the Cowley reordering of TENDER IS THE NIGHT where there was a great to-do for many pages about what happened in the bathroom at the Villa Diana when any reader of the Cowley edition knew precisely the sort of thing that had happened in that bathroom. Big phony mystery, it looked like. That's not what Fitzgerald wrote and it's not what he wanted. In the Cowley edition we met two male characters, Dick Diver and Abe North, and recognized right away that they were parallel characters, both on the slide, Abe farther down than Dick but Dick about to gain speed; what Fitzgerald had intended was that we would perceive them as contrasting characters for a long time, then poignantly realize that they were, after all, alike, not different. The apparent meaning in the reordering was sometimes lurid: we watched a screening of Rosemary's movie Daddy's Girl while knowing that Nicole was in the audience--Nicole who had been driven insane by incest with her father. We were reading AN AMERICAN DREAM where the hero's crucial equality with the police detective had been so reduced that one of the best critics did not mention the detective till fifty-five pages into a fifty-seven page chapter, and then only to say that Detective Roberts must be in the book for some reason.
I found plenty of examples of critics who were hell bent on reading works as if they made perfect sense when sometimes they made no sense at all. Every text you hold is a verbal icon, isn't it? It was fascinating to look at critics of PUDD’NHEAD WILSON. Now, as Mark Twain said about one form of that book, it could unseat your reason. Let me just say that what we know as PUDD’NHEAD is part--about half--of what had been PUDD’NHEAD WILSON. It had been a story about Italian twins--Siamese twins (2 heads, 4 arms, 2 legs)--who came to stay a while in Dawson's Landing, south of St. Louis, and who had a wonderful set of adventures. There was a sappy local girl who spent her time reading Scott and had renamed herself Rowena, and she fell in love with one of the Siamese twins. Mark Twain needed a love rival for Angelo, so he invented a local boy, Tom Driscoll, who drank and gambled, and who later on became a sneak thief. Mark Twain had loads of fun with his one-joke book--the joke being that you could never blame the right twin for anything they or he or it did, and that the wrong twin had to suffer for any indulgence of the other. (Luigi got drunk and Angelo had the hangover.) Jealous Tom Driscoll provoked the twin, or one of the twins, to kick him at a public meeting of the anti-temperance crowd, and there was a long trial in which the point of contention was which twin did the kicking. Far, far along in this Mark Twain had an inspiration--Tom Driscoll would be part black and a changeling, and he went ahead and completed the story that way without changing what he had already written. What he wanted to get published, for months, was this thing in which the twins were conjoined and Tom was specified as being part black part of the time. but in which the many pages written early, where Tom was lily white, were never changed to make him part black. Is that all clear?
Now, what Mark Twain published had the twins separated, except for a couple of dozen places where he overlooked references which make sense only if they are conjoined. And Tom was specified to be part black and a slave in certain points, and the reader was left to assume he was part black in the chapters Mark Twain wrote first, but which were now in the middle of the book. Because Mark Twain made money by telling on himself when he published part of the waste material as THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS, Mark Twain critics have been in a terrible bind. Instead of just assuming the formal unity of the text they held in their hands, they had to explain away an apparent disunity. The situation flushed all their assumptions about literature out of hiding. They rose wonderfully to the occasion. One critic leapt in with "what is necessary"--"a thematic analysis that can answer" charges that Twain' s artistry was "uncertain" by demonstrating a coherence that "has too often been denied." One said there is "some fundamental thematic connection." namely "the necessity of the fall of man." Another argued that despite some “a priori” for doubts about the book's coherence, Mark Twain exercised "surprising control" throughout the novel: “When given a sufficiently attentive and unbiased reading, PUDD’NHEAD WILSON reveals a cogency and power that distinguish it as a classic American fable." The "real subject of the novel" is the presence in the New World of a form of feudalism. This is just a sample, mind you.
I had lots of examples of critics falling all over themselves reading unreadable texts, but saying shame-shame wasn't the point. I needed to k now why intelligent people could be driven to make sense out of nonsense. (In my book I deliberately used fine critics to make my points--if I showed Wayne C. Booth celebrating adventitious aesthetic frissons in the Cowley TENDER IS THE NIGHT, people might be willing to see themselves in the mirror I was holding up.) It wasn’t just that critics had been docile graduate students who had internalized the intentional fallacy at first reading. (Well. it was partly that. A younger theorist like Jonathan Culler, who had missed all the bloody battles could in fact internalize it that way.) I didn't know how to account for making sense out of nonsense until Ralph Rader told me about James Gibson and the Cornell group of cognitive psychologists. What Gibson explained was that just being the beasts we are, having senses which are perceptual systems, we are forced to make sense, to rule out anomalies, in order to function successfully. At first I tried to talk to literary critics about the implications textual evidence could have for interpretation. My message was simple: Look, you people, please stop writing your essays about the function of the Preface in BILLY BUDD when that thing that used to be known as the preface was really a discarded part of a late chapter. Or, please stop writing essays about foreshadowing throughout PUDD’NHEAD WILSON unless you take account of the fact that the middle part was written first, when the villain was all white, and was never revised to make him part black, although we come to those middle chapters after reading the last written part, which includes the exchange of the babies, slave and master. Or, please stop writing about the unity of PIERRE when the biographical evidence shows that it had been complete in a much shorter form and was then enlarged in an erratic, self-destructive response to some traumatic events. They did not want to hear, of course. When is the last time you heard a critic asking a textual bibliographer about anything? This exhorting did no good at all except to get people who were determined to write on, say, the unity of PIERRE to accuse me of bad things--of facile biographicizing, as James Duban did a couple of years ago.
The joke was that a biographer and student of the process of composition like me would be the last one to deny literary unity. The drive toward unity was what I was encountering every day; it is what is brilliantly described now by the clinical psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg in EMERGING GODDESS, a book about the creative process. Rothenberg showed that all during the creative process the writer struggles "actively and adaptively to achieve certain goals," engaging "in a task that makes him increasingly anxious as he pushes onward." Though the process "characteristically involves a progressive uncovering of unconscious material with attendant anxiety, the progression is controlled." (Rothenberg defines "arousal boost" as "pleasure derived directly from moderate increments of arousal.") All during the highly conscious and controlled process of composition, anxiety is followed by relief, with "delicate balances between discomfort and relief, attraction and aversion." One of the "hallmarks of the creative process” which "justifies the risks and anxieties involved " is "the struggle toward psychological freedom," a struggle which is basic “to the value and appeal of art” to the artist, freedom attained with the composing and finally the completing of the work. Struggles end with the completion of the work and the freedom (or compulsion) of the writer to turn to the creation of a new work, it being a law of creativity that a writer will usually take up "another creative task as soon as he has finished the last one.” Ironically. the New Critics had cut themselves off from the best possible evidence of literary unity when they ruled out study of the creative process and jibed at those gauche people who wanted to understand it. I'm not exaggerating. Remember the disdain that dripped from Wimsatt's description of the sort of reader who longed to have his heart throb in unison with the heart of the creating artist. (Didn't see many readers like that at Yale after 1955). In the most influential essay on authorial intention in the 1970's. Michael Hancher described three kinds of intention. one kind which preceded composition, another which immediately followed composition, and another which followed composition at some indeterminate future. Only in one footnote did he mention the possibility that intention might be identified during the actual process of composition. Rothenberg and others were showing that it was only during the process of composition that intention counted for anything, because the creative process, like any process, came to an end, ended with great finality, out of body out of mind.
Then I began trying to talk to critics and to editors at the same time, about the need to remember the creative process, and neither bunch liked being associated with the other and neither bunch liked being reminded of anything so tacky. What fascinated me at that time was the way the literary critics who ventured over into textual territory and wrote about Henry James's revisions (that is what they wrote about when they ventured over) were still pure New Critics. They did not mention Wimsatt and Beardsley, but almost without exception (until Sister Stephanie Vincec came on the scene in the late 1970s) they assumed like Wimsatt and Beardsley that in the case of revisions there was only one authorial purpose--James just could not achieve his purpose in 1877 and masterfully achieved precisely the original purpose in 1905. They almost never, until Vincec, took a look at the circumstances of composition and the circumstances of revision. Not one critic of James cited any study of the creative process, not one critic of James cited any authority on human memory. They were doing textual work in a biographical vacuum.
Editors, at the same time, were also working in a biographical vacuum. That's why Fredson Bowers thought he could edit anyone once he had the American patent on W. W. Greg's editing kit, the rationale of copy-text. Reasonable man that he was, Greg assumed that the author's control over anything he wrote lasted as long as he lived and that a responsible editor had to print the text as the author last revised it. The creative process was open ended. Not one editorial theorist tried to justify Greg's rationale by testing it against what is known of the creative process or what is known of human memory. An editor could have learned how easily an author can lose control of a literary work after the creative process is over, could have learned, from Ulrich Neisser and others of the Cornell group, how fallible human memory is, and the ways in which it is fallible.
Fail with two groups, try a third. I couldn't get the literary critics and the editors to listen, so I went for bigger game--the literary theorists. When the Summer 1982 issue of CRITICAL INQUIRY with the theoretical Knapp¬Michaels article called, ingenuously, "Against Theory," I dropped everything for a few days and wrote a response. Phyllis Franklin's former colleague and my former student Steve Mailloux dropped everything and wrote a response. Every metacritic and metatextualist in Florida dropped everything and wrote a response. I wanted to be CRITICAL INQUIRY because I was sure the theorists were aching to have a textual-bibliographer straighten them out. I knew just why E. D. Hirsch had not had the impact he should have had: he'd be glad to hear that it was his deference to the New Criticism that was holding him back--he was too kind to his old teachers like Wimsatt, gave away too much ground, conceded too fast that the author's intention is never recoverable. It wasn't just Hirsch. Show me a new glamor area of theory--reader response, the feminist aesthetic, structuralism, "deconstruction, McGann's new historicism, and I'll show you just what I found in the editors and the literary critics--the same failure to break free of the New Critical distrust of any information about the creative process, the same determination to write in a textual-biographical vacuum.
This little volume came last week--the original Knapp-Michaels article plus responses and their response to the responses, and some after shocks. I got to look at it on the plane. The editors published me and republished me and they are calling me names--what do they mean, I'm a "textual objectivist"?
And the worst thing is that Knapp and Michaels still haven't read me. In their reply Knapp and Michaels say that I believe all meaning is intentional. Folks, the title of my response in this issue of CRITICAL INQUIRY is "Lost Authority: Non-Sense, Skewed Meanings, and Intentionless Meanings." I know you think you are misunderstood too, but something weird is going on. I am regularly misunderstood in all the other time zones. Here is my buddy Jerry Klinkowitz in American Literary Scholarship, 1982: "Parker believes Mailer’s intention for the psychological equality of the novel's male characters changed between his initial composition and final revision, with the result that many narrative passages have been weakened." You know Parker doesn't believe that. Mailer's intention did not change--he had no idea these consequences would result from a little cutting. In the review in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR John P. Sisk, who doesn't have anything personal against me, who really seems to have a lot of good will, says, "Believing as he does that there can be no intentionless meanings, Parker"-----. "Hmmmmmmm. And how LONG, Hershel, have you sensed that people were misunderstanding you?"
I don't take it personal. It goes to show that the notion that apparent meaning can be unintended, the notion that real aesthetic thrills can be derived from the author's words and still be unintended, is awfully hard for people in this business to comprehend. (Cheap thrills, I call them, because they didn’t cost the writer any effort to create.) Literary critics simply do not want to be told that they have been explicating unreadable texts and literary theorists don't want to be told that they are building their theories on unreadable texts. Sure, some of them want to call a text unreadable, but that's just funning around and being fashionable. The text has to be a verbal icon, perfectly constructed and packaged, if Hillis Miller is going to rip off the cellophane, violently, and deconstruct the icon right before your aghast eyes. But people like that are scared silly when a text turns out to be really unreadable.
I frequently take consolation from reviews in the New York Times Arts and Leisure section and in TLS that discuss the divisions in arts besides literature, analogous divisions between (on the one hand) historical, biographical, textual scholars and (on the other hand) theorists. There is much greater self-consciousness than in the study of literature, it seems to me. I instance the review by Lorenz Eitner in the 12 April 85 TLS of Norman Bryson's TRADITION AND DESIRE: FROM DAVID TO DELACROIX. Eitner complains: "The tone is authoritative, the form relentlessly conceptual, and the content far removed from any historical, biographical or psychological reality." Think how unusual that sort of comment would be in reviewing in American academic journals; it sounds like the very refreshing American Literature review by Jay Martin of Eric Sundquist's HOME AS FOUND, one of the very few recent reviews to demand that a post-Freudian structuralist pay a little attention to history. Even more interesting is Christopher Wintle's review of Joseph Kerman's Musicology in the 10 May 85 TLS, where Wintle deplores the separation of "textual criticism, archival research, lexicography, performing practice, dance and iconography" from interpretation and theory.
Plainly, it's easier for critics and scholars of the other arts to talk about gaps between approaches and the need for what Wintle calls a "composite programme." It's certainly easier for them to talk about the aesthetic implications of documentary evidence, and there is a lot of up-front comment on how textual authority can be damaged. My friend Paul Seydor does wonderful things with textually caused aesthetic anomalies in his book PECKINPAH: THE WESTERN FILMS. Newspaper reviewers regularly analyze the different aesthetic effects that a reconstructed film classic has, or analyze the effects of cutting or merging characters in an opera or shifting scenes about. Even local newspaper reviewers complain about the disastrous effects of cutting a film down for television to make room for commercials and casually talk about the wav the omission of a scene can destroy a character's motivation. You see, they weren't told about the celluloid icon.
I was planning to end my book with a chapter about textual authority in other fields, but I took the easy way out and ended it with a survey of the current practice of theory, in relation to textual evidence. Hardest thing I ever wrote. There's a great challenge for someone who takes on the whole subject of textual authority in all the arts.
So I've been trying in these years to build bridges--trying to persuade editors and editorial theorists to pay attention to the creative process, trying to persuade literary critics to pay attention to biographical and textual evidence, trying to persuade literary theorists to pay attention to creativity theory and cognitive psychology and textual-biographical evidence. I got propaganda pieces into any journal that would take something on the aesthetic implications of textual evidence, whatever that meant, and if I saw a special issue of a journal looming up I lunged for it. I also went wherever I was invited. I talked to an audience of five in San Antonio and the next year talked to an audience of four in Fort Worth. They never asked me to Lubbuck, but I'd have gone in a minute if they had gathered two or three together, and I'd have stopped over at Waco to boot. After I did Berkeley, Toronto, and New Bedford in the same year, out of LA, Michael Millgate said I was just promiscuous--I'd go anywhere. That was before I went to Laramie.
I'm in a curious suspended phase now, waiting for reviews in the academic journals, hoping that FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS will not be relegated to the textual and bibliographical journals. This trip is it. I'm through being promiscuous. The next five years I am going to work on a big biography of Melville. I tell myself I may never read a literary critic or a literary theorist again, and if anyone calls me a metatextualist or a textual objectivist, that person better smile. Out here in Jackson Hole I've learned how to deal with that kind of low talk.
Address at the Association of Departments of English, Western Seminar, Jackson Hole:
When Thoreau was off giving a lecture he overheard one of the local citizens ask another: “What does he lecture for?" The asker would have been happy with a simple answer: “$25 dollars and one supper.” But Thoreau said the question made him quake in his boots. He believed in getting his living by loving, and determined to give his audiences a strong dose of himself. This may be the only chance I have to talk to you.
What do I lecture here for? Best I can figure out by collating texts, it's because William Bennett couldn't come. So I wouldn't have got to meet him if he had come, and I've wanted to meet him. Last fall I was preparing an unfashionable talk on the hot topic of the MLA convention-¬-the Canon. Early in the semester I asked the dean how many literature courses a typical Delaware non-English major took and was told, “One.” If I had an undergraduate non-major in a survey class that might be the one shot anyone in the department had at him or her. I became more of an elitist than ever. Then To Reclaim a Legacy came out. So at MLA I told George Farr and Helen Aguera how strange it was to be in Washington, D. C., staying in a big hotel, not picketing anybody, and sounding just like another Texan who was up for a big Reagan appointment.
"What does he lecture for?" Well, the Summer issue of AMERICAN SCHOLAR has a review of my FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS that starts off by saving it's in a familiar genre--quest literature. The reviewer says I am in quest of a perfect copy-text. No, really not--that makes it all editorial. But there's no denying that I have been campaigning for something all the last decade and a half-¬an audience, because after years of editing and testing editorial theory I had something to say. Now, it was hard to get an audience. Too many of my fellow editors still thought soiled fish instead of coiled fish was a classic case of textual corruption and they were still begging for a chance to talk for fifty minutes about variant spellings of alleged and Affganistan and worrying in public about how they were going to deal with that ever-vexing problem of or/our variants. They're still doing it. You announce a program for SAMLA on the aesthetic implications of textual evidence and they offer you papers on accidental variants in the fourth edition of Young's Nights Thoughts.
From my chequered childhood I remember that the Rogue River runs fairly near here. a state or two away. This is near enough to be just the place for a rogue's confession. What a great hideout! I want to tell you how I became a textual editor. I was a high school dropout (if you had ended up there in eastern Oklahoma you would have dropped out too). I got out on a railroad that ran nearby, and became a railroad telegrapher in Louisiana. I got TB. In those days you still got TB. That was also before drugstore paperbacks, so for months I lay in bed (by that time I was in California) and read Shakespeare, over and over, and about the sixth time I read ROMEO AND JULIET I realized that Mercutio was saying something dirty. The realization was not just that Shakespeare was bawdy: it was that even those words in prose were supposed to mean something. Then I realized that maybe all the words in all the plays were supposed to make sense. This may not sound like much to you, but to a Southern boy it was a revelation, and it transformed the way I read. Slowed me down, for sure, but the conviction that words were supposed to make sense equipped me, a little later, in Illinois, to stop dead when I saw the word "nations" in TYPEE and change it to "matrons," and stop dead when I saw the word "argued" in MOBY-DICK and change it to "augured," and stop dead when I saw the word "murder" in THE CONFIDENCE-MAN and change it to "number" and then stop and change "bold" man" to "bald man." (Often enough, documentary evidence, in a source, for instance, can confirm such guesses--I'm not talking about flighty self-indulgent conjectural emendations.) But "stop dead" isn’t always right. You can be so caught up in the reading that you don't stop. I was visualizing the topography of Pierre's mind--mountain and cloud and mist imagery--after the Northwestern-Newberry PIERRE came out, and when I came to "nearer mist" I just scribbled "neather" in the margin and did not think any more about it, just kept on reading. Months later I noticed it, noticed I had spelled the word nether "neather," and told Harrison Hayford so he could correct the passage in the Library of America reprint, and later NN printings.
What reading this way meant was that I had learned to submit myself to the authority of the writer, to be absolutely humble in an attempt to follow meaning, which I assumed was there, so that when the meaning was violated sometimes I was paying such close attention that I was able to supply the word that should have been there. You see why I disagree so strongly with Jane Tompkins and Stanley Fish when they exalt their minds, not the author's mind, into the theatre where textual meaning takes place. I belong to the humble handmaiden school. Is there a nonsexist way of saying that? "Body-servant" won't do. So dropout or not I learned fast enough that while every sentence was supposed to make sense a lot didn't make sense because something had been corrupted. That was easy.
The harder part came years later, back in California, when I began to see that on a grander scale a lot of the texts we read all the time did not make sense or did not make authorial sense. We found meanings as we progressed from page to page even when some of those meanings were not authorial--not devised by the author at all but adventitious, the result of some cut or addition or reordering or other mishap. We were reading a PUDD’NHEAD WILSON where the Democrats who wanted to run the town pariah for office looked like fools afflicted with a political death wish, but they did that because when Mark Twain wrote the scene Wilson had just had a great courtroom triumph and was the town hero. We were reading the Cowley reordering of TENDER IS THE NIGHT where there was a great to-do for many pages about what happened in the bathroom at the Villa Diana when any reader of the Cowley edition knew precisely the sort of thing that had happened in that bathroom. Big phony mystery, it looked like. That's not what Fitzgerald wrote and it's not what he wanted. In the Cowley edition we met two male characters, Dick Diver and Abe North, and recognized right away that they were parallel characters, both on the slide, Abe farther down than Dick but Dick about to gain speed; what Fitzgerald had intended was that we would perceive them as contrasting characters for a long time, then poignantly realize that they were, after all, alike, not different. The apparent meaning in the reordering was sometimes lurid: we watched a screening of Rosemary's movie Daddy's Girl while knowing that Nicole was in the audience--Nicole who had been driven insane by incest with her father. We were reading AN AMERICAN DREAM where the hero's crucial equality with the police detective had been so reduced that one of the best critics did not mention the detective till fifty-five pages into a fifty-seven page chapter, and then only to say that Detective Roberts must be in the book for some reason.
I found plenty of examples of critics who were hell bent on reading works as if they made perfect sense when sometimes they made no sense at all. Every text you hold is a verbal icon, isn't it? It was fascinating to look at critics of PUDD’NHEAD WILSON. Now, as Mark Twain said about one form of that book, it could unseat your reason. Let me just say that what we know as PUDD’NHEAD is part--about half--of what had been PUDD’NHEAD WILSON. It had been a story about Italian twins--Siamese twins (2 heads, 4 arms, 2 legs)--who came to stay a while in Dawson's Landing, south of St. Louis, and who had a wonderful set of adventures. There was a sappy local girl who spent her time reading Scott and had renamed herself Rowena, and she fell in love with one of the Siamese twins. Mark Twain needed a love rival for Angelo, so he invented a local boy, Tom Driscoll, who drank and gambled, and who later on became a sneak thief. Mark Twain had loads of fun with his one-joke book--the joke being that you could never blame the right twin for anything they or he or it did, and that the wrong twin had to suffer for any indulgence of the other. (Luigi got drunk and Angelo had the hangover.) Jealous Tom Driscoll provoked the twin, or one of the twins, to kick him at a public meeting of the anti-temperance crowd, and there was a long trial in which the point of contention was which twin did the kicking. Far, far along in this Mark Twain had an inspiration--Tom Driscoll would be part black and a changeling, and he went ahead and completed the story that way without changing what he had already written. What he wanted to get published, for months, was this thing in which the twins were conjoined and Tom was specified as being part black part of the time. but in which the many pages written early, where Tom was lily white, were never changed to make him part black. Is that all clear?
Now, what Mark Twain published had the twins separated, except for a couple of dozen places where he overlooked references which make sense only if they are conjoined. And Tom was specified to be part black and a slave in certain points, and the reader was left to assume he was part black in the chapters Mark Twain wrote first, but which were now in the middle of the book. Because Mark Twain made money by telling on himself when he published part of the waste material as THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS, Mark Twain critics have been in a terrible bind. Instead of just assuming the formal unity of the text they held in their hands, they had to explain away an apparent disunity. The situation flushed all their assumptions about literature out of hiding. They rose wonderfully to the occasion. One critic leapt in with "what is necessary"--"a thematic analysis that can answer" charges that Twain' s artistry was "uncertain" by demonstrating a coherence that "has too often been denied." One said there is "some fundamental thematic connection." namely "the necessity of the fall of man." Another argued that despite some “a priori” for doubts about the book's coherence, Mark Twain exercised "surprising control" throughout the novel: “When given a sufficiently attentive and unbiased reading, PUDD’NHEAD WILSON reveals a cogency and power that distinguish it as a classic American fable." The "real subject of the novel" is the presence in the New World of a form of feudalism. This is just a sample, mind you.
I had lots of examples of critics falling all over themselves reading unreadable texts, but saying shame-shame wasn't the point. I needed to k now why intelligent people could be driven to make sense out of nonsense. (In my book I deliberately used fine critics to make my points--if I showed Wayne C. Booth celebrating adventitious aesthetic frissons in the Cowley TENDER IS THE NIGHT, people might be willing to see themselves in the mirror I was holding up.) It wasn’t just that critics had been docile graduate students who had internalized the intentional fallacy at first reading. (Well. it was partly that. A younger theorist like Jonathan Culler, who had missed all the bloody battles could in fact internalize it that way.) I didn't know how to account for making sense out of nonsense until Ralph Rader told me about James Gibson and the Cornell group of cognitive psychologists. What Gibson explained was that just being the beasts we are, having senses which are perceptual systems, we are forced to make sense, to rule out anomalies, in order to function successfully. At first I tried to talk to literary critics about the implications textual evidence could have for interpretation. My message was simple: Look, you people, please stop writing your essays about the function of the Preface in BILLY BUDD when that thing that used to be known as the preface was really a discarded part of a late chapter. Or, please stop writing essays about foreshadowing throughout PUDD’NHEAD WILSON unless you take account of the fact that the middle part was written first, when the villain was all white, and was never revised to make him part black, although we come to those middle chapters after reading the last written part, which includes the exchange of the babies, slave and master. Or, please stop writing about the unity of PIERRE when the biographical evidence shows that it had been complete in a much shorter form and was then enlarged in an erratic, self-destructive response to some traumatic events. They did not want to hear, of course. When is the last time you heard a critic asking a textual bibliographer about anything? This exhorting did no good at all except to get people who were determined to write on, say, the unity of PIERRE to accuse me of bad things--of facile biographicizing, as James Duban did a couple of years ago.
The joke was that a biographer and student of the process of composition like me would be the last one to deny literary unity. The drive toward unity was what I was encountering every day; it is what is brilliantly described now by the clinical psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg in EMERGING GODDESS, a book about the creative process. Rothenberg showed that all during the creative process the writer struggles "actively and adaptively to achieve certain goals," engaging "in a task that makes him increasingly anxious as he pushes onward." Though the process "characteristically involves a progressive uncovering of unconscious material with attendant anxiety, the progression is controlled." (Rothenberg defines "arousal boost" as "pleasure derived directly from moderate increments of arousal.") All during the highly conscious and controlled process of composition, anxiety is followed by relief, with "delicate balances between discomfort and relief, attraction and aversion." One of the "hallmarks of the creative process” which "justifies the risks and anxieties involved " is "the struggle toward psychological freedom," a struggle which is basic “to the value and appeal of art” to the artist, freedom attained with the composing and finally the completing of the work. Struggles end with the completion of the work and the freedom (or compulsion) of the writer to turn to the creation of a new work, it being a law of creativity that a writer will usually take up "another creative task as soon as he has finished the last one.” Ironically. the New Critics had cut themselves off from the best possible evidence of literary unity when they ruled out study of the creative process and jibed at those gauche people who wanted to understand it. I'm not exaggerating. Remember the disdain that dripped from Wimsatt's description of the sort of reader who longed to have his heart throb in unison with the heart of the creating artist. (Didn't see many readers like that at Yale after 1955). In the most influential essay on authorial intention in the 1970's. Michael Hancher described three kinds of intention. one kind which preceded composition, another which immediately followed composition, and another which followed composition at some indeterminate future. Only in one footnote did he mention the possibility that intention might be identified during the actual process of composition. Rothenberg and others were showing that it was only during the process of composition that intention counted for anything, because the creative process, like any process, came to an end, ended with great finality, out of body out of mind.
Then I began trying to talk to critics and to editors at the same time, about the need to remember the creative process, and neither bunch liked being associated with the other and neither bunch liked being reminded of anything so tacky. What fascinated me at that time was the way the literary critics who ventured over into textual territory and wrote about Henry James's revisions (that is what they wrote about when they ventured over) were still pure New Critics. They did not mention Wimsatt and Beardsley, but almost without exception (until Sister Stephanie Vincec came on the scene in the late 1970s) they assumed like Wimsatt and Beardsley that in the case of revisions there was only one authorial purpose--James just could not achieve his purpose in 1877 and masterfully achieved precisely the original purpose in 1905. They almost never, until Vincec, took a look at the circumstances of composition and the circumstances of revision. Not one critic of James cited any study of the creative process, not one critic of James cited any authority on human memory. They were doing textual work in a biographical vacuum.
Editors, at the same time, were also working in a biographical vacuum. That's why Fredson Bowers thought he could edit anyone once he had the American patent on W. W. Greg's editing kit, the rationale of copy-text. Reasonable man that he was, Greg assumed that the author's control over anything he wrote lasted as long as he lived and that a responsible editor had to print the text as the author last revised it. The creative process was open ended. Not one editorial theorist tried to justify Greg's rationale by testing it against what is known of the creative process or what is known of human memory. An editor could have learned how easily an author can lose control of a literary work after the creative process is over, could have learned, from Ulrich Neisser and others of the Cornell group, how fallible human memory is, and the ways in which it is fallible.
Fail with two groups, try a third. I couldn't get the literary critics and the editors to listen, so I went for bigger game--the literary theorists. When the Summer 1982 issue of CRITICAL INQUIRY with the theoretical Knapp¬Michaels article called, ingenuously, "Against Theory," I dropped everything for a few days and wrote a response. Phyllis Franklin's former colleague and my former student Steve Mailloux dropped everything and wrote a response. Every metacritic and metatextualist in Florida dropped everything and wrote a response. I wanted to be CRITICAL INQUIRY because I was sure the theorists were aching to have a textual-bibliographer straighten them out. I knew just why E. D. Hirsch had not had the impact he should have had: he'd be glad to hear that it was his deference to the New Criticism that was holding him back--he was too kind to his old teachers like Wimsatt, gave away too much ground, conceded too fast that the author's intention is never recoverable. It wasn't just Hirsch. Show me a new glamor area of theory--reader response, the feminist aesthetic, structuralism, "deconstruction, McGann's new historicism, and I'll show you just what I found in the editors and the literary critics--the same failure to break free of the New Critical distrust of any information about the creative process, the same determination to write in a textual-biographical vacuum.
This little volume came last week--the original Knapp-Michaels article plus responses and their response to the responses, and some after shocks. I got to look at it on the plane. The editors published me and republished me and they are calling me names--what do they mean, I'm a "textual objectivist"?
And the worst thing is that Knapp and Michaels still haven't read me. In their reply Knapp and Michaels say that I believe all meaning is intentional. Folks, the title of my response in this issue of CRITICAL INQUIRY is "Lost Authority: Non-Sense, Skewed Meanings, and Intentionless Meanings." I know you think you are misunderstood too, but something weird is going on. I am regularly misunderstood in all the other time zones. Here is my buddy Jerry Klinkowitz in American Literary Scholarship, 1982: "Parker believes Mailer’s intention for the psychological equality of the novel's male characters changed between his initial composition and final revision, with the result that many narrative passages have been weakened." You know Parker doesn't believe that. Mailer's intention did not change--he had no idea these consequences would result from a little cutting. In the review in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR John P. Sisk, who doesn't have anything personal against me, who really seems to have a lot of good will, says, "Believing as he does that there can be no intentionless meanings, Parker"-----. "Hmmmmmmm. And how LONG, Hershel, have you sensed that people were misunderstanding you?"
I don't take it personal. It goes to show that the notion that apparent meaning can be unintended, the notion that real aesthetic thrills can be derived from the author's words and still be unintended, is awfully hard for people in this business to comprehend. (Cheap thrills, I call them, because they didn’t cost the writer any effort to create.) Literary critics simply do not want to be told that they have been explicating unreadable texts and literary theorists don't want to be told that they are building their theories on unreadable texts. Sure, some of them want to call a text unreadable, but that's just funning around and being fashionable. The text has to be a verbal icon, perfectly constructed and packaged, if Hillis Miller is going to rip off the cellophane, violently, and deconstruct the icon right before your aghast eyes. But people like that are scared silly when a text turns out to be really unreadable.
I frequently take consolation from reviews in the New York Times Arts and Leisure section and in TLS that discuss the divisions in arts besides literature, analogous divisions between (on the one hand) historical, biographical, textual scholars and (on the other hand) theorists. There is much greater self-consciousness than in the study of literature, it seems to me. I instance the review by Lorenz Eitner in the 12 April 85 TLS of Norman Bryson's TRADITION AND DESIRE: FROM DAVID TO DELACROIX. Eitner complains: "The tone is authoritative, the form relentlessly conceptual, and the content far removed from any historical, biographical or psychological reality." Think how unusual that sort of comment would be in reviewing in American academic journals; it sounds like the very refreshing American Literature review by Jay Martin of Eric Sundquist's HOME AS FOUND, one of the very few recent reviews to demand that a post-Freudian structuralist pay a little attention to history. Even more interesting is Christopher Wintle's review of Joseph Kerman's Musicology in the 10 May 85 TLS, where Wintle deplores the separation of "textual criticism, archival research, lexicography, performing practice, dance and iconography" from interpretation and theory.
Plainly, it's easier for critics and scholars of the other arts to talk about gaps between approaches and the need for what Wintle calls a "composite programme." It's certainly easier for them to talk about the aesthetic implications of documentary evidence, and there is a lot of up-front comment on how textual authority can be damaged. My friend Paul Seydor does wonderful things with textually caused aesthetic anomalies in his book PECKINPAH: THE WESTERN FILMS. Newspaper reviewers regularly analyze the different aesthetic effects that a reconstructed film classic has, or analyze the effects of cutting or merging characters in an opera or shifting scenes about. Even local newspaper reviewers complain about the disastrous effects of cutting a film down for television to make room for commercials and casually talk about the wav the omission of a scene can destroy a character's motivation. You see, they weren't told about the celluloid icon.
I was planning to end my book with a chapter about textual authority in other fields, but I took the easy way out and ended it with a survey of the current practice of theory, in relation to textual evidence. Hardest thing I ever wrote. There's a great challenge for someone who takes on the whole subject of textual authority in all the arts.
So I've been trying in these years to build bridges--trying to persuade editors and editorial theorists to pay attention to the creative process, trying to persuade literary critics to pay attention to biographical and textual evidence, trying to persuade literary theorists to pay attention to creativity theory and cognitive psychology and textual-biographical evidence. I got propaganda pieces into any journal that would take something on the aesthetic implications of textual evidence, whatever that meant, and if I saw a special issue of a journal looming up I lunged for it. I also went wherever I was invited. I talked to an audience of five in San Antonio and the next year talked to an audience of four in Fort Worth. They never asked me to Lubbuck, but I'd have gone in a minute if they had gathered two or three together, and I'd have stopped over at Waco to boot. After I did Berkeley, Toronto, and New Bedford in the same year, out of LA, Michael Millgate said I was just promiscuous--I'd go anywhere. That was before I went to Laramie.
I'm in a curious suspended phase now, waiting for reviews in the academic journals, hoping that FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS will not be relegated to the textual and bibliographical journals. This trip is it. I'm through being promiscuous. The next five years I am going to work on a big biography of Melville. I tell myself I may never read a literary critic or a literary theorist again, and if anyone calls me a metatextualist or a textual objectivist, that person better smile. Out here in Jackson Hole I've learned how to deal with that kind of low talk.
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