The Gay Pursuit of a Perilous Quest

 

 

I have not thought of Childers in a long time. I have been very sick off and on since early 2020 and also have been pushing myself to write AN OKIE’S RACIAL RECKONINGS.  Now, just as I finish, comes the strange book called a novel, DAYSWORK that made me think about my history of risk-taking. I came across this by accident, searching for something else. Now as I am so old I want to think about it in relation to the last few years.

 

"THE GAY PURSUIT OF A PERILOUS QUEST"

Erskine Childers’s THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS continues to enthrall me. Here Carruthers has finally learned why Davies has lured him into what so-far has seemed a ridiculously unaccountable enterprise:

 

Close in the train of Humour came Romance, veiling her face, but I knew it was the rustle of her robes that I heard in the foam beneath me; I knew that it was she who handed me the cup of sparkling wine and bade me drink and be merry. Strange to me though it was, I knew the taste when it touched my lips. It was not that bastard concoction I had tasted in the pseudo-Bohemias of Soho; it was not the showy but insipid beverage I should have drunk my fill of at Movern Lodge; it was the purest of her pure vintages, instilling the ancient inspiration which, under many guises, quickens thousands of better brains than mine, but whose essence is always the same: The gay pursuit of a perilous quest.

 

 

“THE GAY PURSUIT OF A PERILOUS QUEST.”

 

In my extreme old age [This was written years ago.] I define my scholarly life, perhaps vaingloriously, as one in which I was for prolonged periods engaged in the pursuit of a perilous quest. It’s hard to use the term “gay pursuit” when you are damaging your health by transcribing old letters in the middle of the night, or trying to write prose between 2 and 5 morning after morning, while working fulltime. But then I remember 1957-1959 when, still recovering from tuberculosis, I worked 8 at night till 4 in the morning in the KCS Freight House in Port Arthur while going to school at Lamar State College of Technology in the day. In that enormous vacant space of the Freight House I read THE PRELUDE and THE FAERIE QUEENE not for a class but for myself. That was “gay pursuit of a perilous quest” to learn about British poetry. Perilous?  Sure, for who knew whether I could move from railroad to Texas high school? What jobs would there be? Would the state prevent me from being around children and young people, “arrested” TB or not?

          For pure joy I remember 1962, when the New-York Public Library and other NYC and Massachusetts libraries opened their treasures to me. At the Berkshire Athenaeum that summer I sat for hours at a long table, all alone, then when school turned out I shared the tables with fifteen or twenty small children, so that I experienced the fabulous joy of reading century and century and a half old letters in the presence of bustling descendants of some of the Melville neighbors I was reading about.  I remember the day at the NYPL when I said, for ten minutes, to hell with trying to get through what I came up to see, I want to see what’s in the folder of undated letters from unidentified correspondents, and in minutes found an unknown Melville letter. Then there is another sort of rare joys, as when I became the first person in three quarters of a century to read something very closely approximating what Stephen Crane meant THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE to be. Gay pursuit of a perilous quest for knowledge of what American writers really wrote! Just how perilous it was FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS demonstrates!

 

          In MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE, I see that I talk more than once about the joy that a biographical researcher in the archives (paper or virtual) can experience and that no one who writes a biography from other books can ever experience. Here is that final paragraph of the Preface:

 

          These Malay pirates of literary biography, springing up, weapons drawn, from the bottom of the ship in the treacherous fashion Melville describes in Mardi, will not succeed. As long as libraries preserve archives such as the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection of the New York Public Library or the Melville and Morewood papers at the Berkshire Athenaeum or the Melvill-Melville papers at Houghton Library, or the Shaw papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, pilgrim researchers will come, even if only a dedicated few. There will always be a few literary detectives who devote months or years to the pursuit of documents in the confidence that at last they will sit at midnight in a little bare motel room in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and turn through a big shoebox full of what looks like only bills of lading until you spy a blue folded paper, clearly a letter, a letter with the signature “Really Thine, H. Melville”--a letter reassuring Melville’s wife’s young step-cousin Sam Savage: “Concerning the foot-ball part of the business, why, we are all foot-balls, more or less--& it is lucky that we are, on some accounts. It is important, however, that our balls be covered with a leather, good & tough, that will stand banging & all ‘the slings& arrows of outrageous fortune.” [The heroine of this Spartanburg episode is Joyce Deveau Kennedy. In Spartanburg, Professor John B. Edmunds, Jr., acting for his mother, Helen Edmunds, entrusted her with a big shoebox full of papers. She was alone in a motel room late at night when she found Melville’s letter to Sam Savage. She immediately called her husband, Frederick Kennedy then, sleeping very little, she read and reread the letter many times, waiting for morning so she could spring her find on the owner. Scholars live for such moments. [Email from JDK, 26 August 2011.] Joyce had the supreme joy of calling her husband, Frederick J. Kennedy, around midnight, to say “Freddie! Guess what I’ve just found!” “What a happy memory,” FJK says.]

          Literary detectives will sit in dark rooms peering at their computer screens, doing their ultimately-advanced searches. They will imaginatively misspell (Mellvill, Mellville, Hermann, and more) when accurate spellings turn up nothing. They will try their equivalent of “froward” and “godless” on Google every few weeks for most of a decade, as Scott Norsworthy did until he discovered a source for some of Melville’s once-baffling notes in the back of his Shakespeare. They will boggle at a passage in a Melville text and find riches, as I did when I Googled “Napoleon” and “outline” and “tree” and discovered that Melville in The Confidence-Man was referring to a then-famous example of hidden art. Photographs have recently been printed in Leviathan, citing a reference in the new The Confidence-Man, but showing no interest in how the footnote came to be there. In Leviathan it was as it this tidbit came from nowhere except an anonymous footnote. In actuality, I was reading all through the book looking for passages that seemed to be referring to other books or historical events. I had the joy of seeing on the Internet versions of what Melville was talking about, though back then I could not print examples.

          There will always be a few frequenters of known archives, a few imaginative trackers of missing archives, a few librarians who recognize gaps in their institution’s papers and reach out their hands for lost treasures, and a few “divine amateurs” who believe that the facts matter and that they can identify some of them from their computers or in raids on distant libraries. And for literary biography, there will always be readers who want to know about the living man or woman whose deepest being infuses the books they love.

 

 

          Lewis Mumford, Newton Arvin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Andrew Delbanco, and many others never experienced the joy that comes of discovery. Delbanco, picking through my quotations from Melville family letters, knew nothing of the joy of discovery, and of course knew nothing of the larger contexts from which I had made small selections to further particular arguments I was making in particular paragraphs. Biographers like Delbanco know nothing of the joy of reading many pages of documents in chronological order, many of which you have transcribed into the chronology and some of which you have dated or re-dated, for whenever an archival biographer reads through long known and new documents he will experience astonishing insights, often the insights which lead him to say, “I have to stop here and write it down—this is the new chapter in the story.” There’s another side: the archival biographer will sometimes make discovery after discovery that he all but wishes he had never known. One more twist to my knowledge of how cruelly the Harpers treated Melville! One more twist to what I knew about Melville’s indebtedness! One more twist to what I knew of his in-laws’ contempt for him! Or even one more newspaper juxtaposing an inquest to the death of Malcolm Melville with an account of the number of overflowing privies in the neighborhood. Yes, some things you wish Melville never had to experience or to see and that you never had to know about, particularly when you have to write an account of them. But the joy overwhelms the pain. You know these people because you have read their mail and listened to their plans and grief and their own joys, and you love them, even the unlovable ones such as covetous greedy kick-his-bed-partner Allan!

 

I’ll think more about this topic and revise this post. [So this was written about 2013? And reviewed in 2023.]

I never watched Chris Matthews again after he called Hillbilly Elegy "a great book"

 THIS IS VANCE EXCUSING THE REPUBLICANS FOR THE OHIO ELECTION. DID IT EVER OCCUR TO HIM THAT MOST VOTERS REALLY REALLY DISLIKED THE REVERSAL OF ROE VS WADE? THEY JUST KEEP TRYING TO THINK HOW TO TRICK PEOPLE INTO VOTING FOR SOMETHING THEY DON'T WANT.

“It’s depressing,” Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said of the election result in his home state. “It suggests that the pro-life movement, we need to figure out how to actually win because clearly there’s something that’s broken down between what we’re saying and what voters actually believe. We’ve got to figure out how to close that gap.”

“For pro lifers, last night was a gut punch. No sugar coating it,” he also wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Vance noted that a lot of people who didn’t like the way the ballot proposition was drafted still voted for it because they really didn’t like the six-week abortion ban that Republican Gov. Mike DeWine (Ohio) signed into law in 2019.

He said “suburban voters really turned out” while “a lot of rural voters, a lot of exurban voters didn’t turn out,” which he said is often true of off-year elections.

“We just lost a lot of self-identified Republicans and that’s a way to lose an election,” he said.

Some after-thoughts on DAYSWORK

 

 

        Early in September 2023, when I was preparing to celebrate being alive a year after heart surgery, I saw my name in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the New York Sun, then one damn place after another. These were not advance notices of An Okie’s Racial Reckonings, oh no. These were reviews of a book, “a novel” (it says on the cover), Dayswork, by a married couple. It was not a novel. It was not fiction. It was an account of the couple’s acquiring information about Melville starting during the lockdown for Covid. There are recurrent characters recognizable as real people. Melville and his family are real. Many pages are devoted to three people, Elizabeth Hardwick, my cousin Robert Traill Spence Lowell, both dead, and me, called not by name but “The Biographer” throughout while Hardwick and other biographers are lower-case. They portray me often enough to give an honest sense of my working life and  (several times) a distorted sense of me as misogynist.  On the last page the couple, Chris Bachelder and Jennnifer Habel, recognize “the achievements of Hershel Parker, the Biographer, whose prodigious research and writing about Melville we found invaluable.” Looking through this “novel” made for a very odd retrospection of my career during the weeks Alma and I were polishing up the last chapters of An Okie’s Racial Reckonings.

        I enter Daywork just turned twenty, a tubercular, isolated by state’s decree and recumbent for five months, reading only Shakespeare’s plays over and over. The authors say, accurately, that I remember reading for these months as “a great adventure.” I appreciate their portraying me as taking risks. They jump over some years, but bit by bit they print mainly accurate scenes from my later decades. I wince most as the novelists slip into misandry. Why might I dis Cousin Cal’s second wife? Well, why did she lie about me, claiming I championed her in a sexual absurdity? I walked over to check Elizabeth Hardwick’s lower-case biography of Melville only to find it gone, in Pittsfield now.  I wince at being  reproached for changing “scared white doe” to “sacred white doe” in the Mosses essay. How could I know better than Mrs. Melville, the copyist? Well, partly because I knew the context was lofty, and Wordsworthian. Scott Norsworthy even more tellingly shows that Dryden’s hind was on Melville’s mind right there, too, in a correction he made in Mrs. Melville’s transcription. How easy it is to make fun of people who know what they are talking about but don’t stop and take 25 pages to show how they know, the way I know what Melville did when he got to Boston in 1844.

      Dayswork hits several of my good moments. I never said Clarel is the best thing Melville ever wrote, but it’s true that when I get to part four I feel “‘edgy, vaguely dodgy and sore’ because ‘pretty soon there won’t be any more.’” One page shows me demolishing the argument for transcribing by your rhetorical agenda rather than learning to read your writer’s handwriting. The bonus here is that the unnamed self-promoting theorist is the one who always made fun of my hailing from Oklahoma. In my Bronco II I kept the Forebitter version of “Harbo and Samuelsen,” the two young Norwegians who rowed across the Atlantic in 1896. In  those days I was all but overwhelmed by Leyda’s project and Hayford’s projects and the piles of manuscripts I was transcribing. A mile down to the Pacific in the Bronco for my three-mile run, a mile back, 5 or 6 minutes for an 8 minute song, home, usually waiting for the song to end. They quote me as saying I listened and blubbered. Yes, I wept at “the colors of Norway floating behind” and, yes, wept at “they were not only brave but by God they could row.” The writers themselves became enthralled and devoted several pages to the young heroes. You already know my Melville Collection is mainly at the Berkshire Athenaeum. A couple of pages in Dayswork review my “long history” with the Athenaeum, beginning in 1962 when I hitchhiked to Pittsfield from New York City. (Don’t try it yourself.) After I recover from An Okie’s Racial Reckonings I will get help in sending more boxes to Pittsfield. The authors printed my  cool critique of the great Harvard would-be biographer Harry Murray.

        They devote four pages to what they see as my most “triumphant feat of archival research.” They could have chosen other of my feats, some on other authors (I was, after all, the first person to read an almost complete The Red Badge of Courage in three quarters of a century). They celebrate my determination for several years to find a Vermont paper on the chance—I thought, a near certainty--that it would describe a meeting in November 1851 at which Melville gave Hawthorne his presentation copy of Moby-Dick, shortly before Hawthorne left the Berkshires. Decades ago, Hayford had been sure such a meeting had happened, and the great bookman Bill Reece also just knew, people being people, that it happened. The writers capture my exultation when I held with shaking hands what I had longed for. They print this alone on one line: “‘Jesus,” he wrote in his diary, ‘my mind is wild.’” Later they say: “‘Wanted a drink’ he wrote in his dairy,” but in lieu “of a celebratory drink he called Hayford, then Maurice Sendak, and then went back to work.’” (I last drank any alcohol in 1986 when I got home from taking Jay Leyda on his last research trip and faced up to what I would have to do.)

        Now Leyda, Hayford, and Sendak are dead, like Hardwick and my Traill cousin Cal. I emphasize “Traill” because a grandfather of Robert Traill Spence Lowell was also my grandfather, William Traill of Westness in the Orkneys. I think of myself as a Scot, and knowing that Lowell and I are both Traills of Orkney is empowering. It is good, say, to know that my Glenns are from Renfrewshire, near Glasgow, but is any other place as evocative as Orkney, where life is hard and where Pictish and Viking graves have been excavated? In November, the month I turn 88, Dayswork is still being talked about. If the novel continues to sell and enough libraries have copies, some readers will remember “The Biographer” when they see a notice for An Okie’s Racial Reckonings. Even if not a novel, Dayswork may with luck prove a publicity boon for An Okie’s Racial Reckonings.

 

Fierce north wind.