New MLA Newsletter: "Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award to W. J. T. Mitchell"--longtime editor of CRITICAL INQUIRY.

 In the 1970s the sloppy and probably senile bully Fredson Bowers used his power to ban me from the handful of journals publishing textual scholarship. I saved the articles and eventually found homes for them. This is from the Introduction to AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS:

 In the late 1970s I was gradually being intellectually rehabilitated by younger textual program planners. I gave a talk at the new Association for Documentary Editing conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 1981. The next morning the Lafayette scholar Stanley Idzerda came over at breakfast to say, “You blew Greg out of the water.” I had not thought about it that way, but he was right, and I reworked my arguments into the book I was writing for Gerald Graff at Northwestern University Press. While I was drafting the preface for it, the latest issue of Critical Inquiry arrived. This was already by far the most prestigious theoretical journal in the United States. In this issue was an essay by two young theorists, “Against Theory,” though of course they were only theorizing against theory. Would Critical Inquiry even consider something by a textual scholar?

Would I risk delaying the Northwestern book? I thought about it: I had taken a bigger risk in 1959 when I gave up seven years’ seniority as a telegrapher on the railroad, a lifetime job, to go north to an uncertain future. I started writing on 28 June 1982 and mailed the essay to Critical Inquiry on 8 July. The reply from the editor, W. J. T. Mitchell, came on the 19th. He asked me not to change it because he wanted to publish it “in the earliest possible issue of Critical Inquiry.” He concluded with the kindest editorial words I had ever seen: “Let me say again how pleased I am to have received your thoughtful and challenging response to this piece; we will be proud to have it appear in our pages.” Mitchell used it in the June 1983 issue along with several other belated responses (one from a student of mine at USC), then in June 1985 he printed it in book form with still more responses, some of which cited me as saying something I had not said. Okies are frugal: I used my piece as my new preface in the 1984 Northwestern book with one change: at Critical Inquiry someone, momentarily befuddled, had altered one phrase in a way that unintentionally proved my point about editorial tinkering.

HOW LONG AGO WAS THAT? FOUR DECADES, MORE OR LESS. THE FALL 2023 MLA NEWSLETTER REMEMBERS: "MITCHELL SERVED AS EDITOR OF THE RENOWNED JOURNAL CRITICAL INQUIRY FROM 1978 TO 2020." This is the man I already wrote into my Introduction.

 

My review of DAYSWORK by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

                      REVIEW of 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  New York Sun. 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 erratically but persistently acquiring information about Herman Melville through the Internet during and after the lockdown for Covid. Recurrent characters are recognizable as real people. Melville and some of his family are real. Many pages are devoted to three modern people, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, 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 a sense of my working life and (several times) a distorted sense of me as misogynist. On the last page the couple, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, recognize “the achievements of Hershel Parker, the Biographer, whose prodigious research and writing about Melville we found invaluable.” They had been invasive, indecently so a time or two, when I must, once, have spoken or written unguardedly, and revealed something I should not have told anyone. I began to regard the book as a fragmented shorthand tour of my career.

        It was hard to read the pages of Dayswork without correcting or supplementing them. Helen Vendler read Clarel the first time in 1976 before coming to Pittsfield, where after my speech a Hawthorne worshipper exploded at me, purple faced and foaming at the mouth—a public paroxysm. Her companion told me what Helen said during the man’s frenzy. That would have been a story! The authors print my cool critique of the great Harvard would-be biographer Harry Murray. They started the story, and I am tempted but will never tell what Murray confided to the late Brian Higgins at New Bedford in 1980. It’s strange to know “the rest” of many stories the couple were telling--and many more stories they did not know. All this 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.

        They put me in Daywork just turned twenty, a tubercular, released from a sanitorium but isolated by state’s decree and recumbent for another five months, during which I read Shakespeare’s plays over and over. The authors say, accurately, that I remember reading for these months as “a great adventure.” They jump over some years, but bit by bit they print mainly accurate scenes from my later decades. I wince at the worst invasions and the times when the novelists reflexively slide into misandry. Elizabeth Hardwick made me her partner in a false claim about Melville’s sexuality. I walked over to check 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, and I knew Melville’s handwriting which his wife was copying. Scott Norsworthy even more tellingly shows that Melville was thinking of Dryden’s hind right then, too, in a correction he made in Mrs. Melville’s transcription. He also puts “sacred white doe” into a thick context of Berkshire stories. Melville wrote “sacred white doe.” 

    Everyone can say misogyny. Dayswork made me learn to say misandry. How easy it is to be flippant toward people who know what they are doing 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. The two novelists could have read twenty-five tightly argued pages on the Melvilles’ courtship in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. There I use familiar documents along with many family documents no one else has ever transcribed, read, and dated, and used. I worked it out. I knew what Melville had to have done in Boston. No, he was not drinking himself blind. 

      Dayswork misfires slightly several times. No, 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.’” But Dayswork chooses some issues well. One page shows me demolishing the argument for transcribing by your rhetorical agenda rather than learning to read your writer’s handwriting. The bonus the novelists did not know 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 tape of “Harbo and Samuelsen,” the two young Norwegians who rowed across the Atlantic in 1896. A half mile down to the Pacific in the Bronco for my three-mile run, a half mile back, a 5 or 6 minutes ride for an 8 minute song, so usually home, waiting for the song to end. I played the song on days I was all but overwhelmed by Leyda’s project and Hayford’s projects and the piles of manuscripts I was transcribing (not to mention teaching every class originally). They quote me as saying that I listened and blubbered. Perhaps I am excessively emotional, but, yes, I wept at “the colors of Norway floating behind” and, yes, wept more at “they were not only brave but by God they could row.” The task I was part way through seemed like rowing across the Atlantic alone. The writers themselves became enthralled and devoted several pages to the young Norwegian heroes.

        You know my Melville Collection is already 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.

        They devote four pages to what they see as a “triumphant feat of archival research,” celebrating the success of my long hunt for a Windsor, Vermont paper in November 1851. I was hunting on the chance—I thought, a near certainty--that it would describe a meeting in 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 Reese also just knew, people being people, that it happened. The novelists 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 let myself face up to how advanced his Parkinson’s was.)

         I did not stop to read Dayswork but I kept dipping into it. The scattered episodes on me run from 1956 up into the 1990s. The passages on Lowell ought to have displayed his love of Melville, but they did not, so why is he here? The writers did not like my dissing Hardwick’s little book on Melville. For it she did no research at all and she lied about me in it, pulling me into a sexual fantasy of hers. It’s a trivial book which a reviewer in the New York Times called “brief but meaty”! Hardwick features in Dayswork as the modern Griselda, patient--but making sure readers know just how deeply she is suffering from Lowell’s mistreatment during his recurrent madness. Lowell’s reputation as a poet suffers the more she suffers.

        In the February 2020 Harper’s Helen Vendler accepts Hardwick’s self-portrait as Griselda, but nevertheless thinks Lowell’s reputation as a great writer is secure: “The passing of time makes the personal irrelevant.” I wish that were true, but Lowell is already disappearing from lists of great American poets. Go to Google for “The Best 20^th Century American Poets” and see. Despite Vendler’s optimism, I fear Hardwick may already have cost Lowell his high place in American literature. If only the writers had shown how much Lowell loved Melville!

        The writers of Daysworth read my blog (they mention one title, not credited to me, on page two!) so they must know I work on my own genealogy. Perhaps oddly, they do not mention my work on An Okie’s Racial Reckonings. They did not check Lowell and me for kinship. The only intermittently mad great poet in my family is Robert Traill Spence Lowell, twice winner of the Pulitzer prize. “Cal,” Lowell was called. Both Cal and I are Traills (and Balfours and Spences). We share grandparents, “William Traill of Westness” in the Orkneys and his wife Barbara Balfour, she from yet more ancient Orkney families. We share notable older ancestors such as James Baikie of Tankerness House (now the Orkney Museum). I think of myself as a Scot, and realizing that a great poet and I share such Orkney kinship is empowering. Is any other part of Scotland as evocative as the Orkneys, where a farmer’s pickaxe can reveal a Pictish tomb and where one morning after a storm a Viking village stood, open to the air? No wonder in his madness Cousin Cal announced that he was the King of Scotland! While reading my cousin’s poetry and pondering his tortured yet triumphant life, I rejoice in knowing he made a pilgrimage to the Orkneys to visit to the poet Charles Mackay Brown, who knew more about our Traill and Balfour ancestors than we ever did, or ever will.

        With luck, Dayswork, misandry or not, may prove a publicity boon for An Okie’s Racial Reckonings. Their “novel” was still being talked about on November 13 when DeNeen L. Brown published a stunning article in the Washington Post: “Army Clears Buffalo Soldiers Century-Old Convictions, Blames Racism.” Alma and I had just put into final form my “One Bad Cop,” the chapter about my Cousin Lee Sparks whose racist pistol-whipping of black women and men caused the Houston riot. Other chapters are timely, and may become news again. Who knows?

        Any Depression Okie like me is now kin not to hundreds or thousands of other Americans but to millions, many more millions than when I started looking. There is an audience. Cousin Kevin built the baseball field and thousands of cars came rolling into Iowa. I have built my Reckonings with hundreds of names and hundreds of stories never told before. Perhaps many people will care.

        My disrespected Okies are Americans. None of us entered through Ellis Island. Why, few of us came to the United States. My own white folks were all here before there was a United States, and the Choctaws were already here many millennia before them. Neither of my parents, I remind you, was born in one of the American states. They were born in different Territories. That alienated heritage may go toward accounting for the trajectory of my career. In 1962, the two Columbia students were amused to think I had come to New York from the vague Northwest Territory. The truth is, I was from a Territory where facts mattered. They matter in this book. Yes, I hail from Oklahoma. Steinbeck said it. We are, after all, Goddamn Okies. Facts and families matter.

 

 

 

An oddity in DAYSWORK--the writers forget that Lowell ought to be here because he loved Melville and wrote about him.

 I'm saying they have no function for him except to denounce him for mistreating Elizabeth Hardwick. Now, Lowell had long bouts of madness, real howling madness, in between writing great poetry. What is he doing in this book if he never read Melville?

        Now Leyda, Hayford, and Sendak are dead. I loved all three and think of them differently but poignantly. 

    Hardwick, who died in 2007 at 95, had a successful later life. In Dayswork she is the modern Patient Griselda all the while making sure a host of impressionable woman know just how deeply she is suffering. The authors seem to have brought her and Lowell into Dayswork only to portray what they see as my slight mistreatment of her (I was polite but I despised her sloppy book) and Lowell’s monstrous abuse of her. What else is Lowell doing here? He is not a great poet, here. You would think, in a book so much about Melville, that they would mention the poetry, at least the early “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and the prose adaptation of Benito Cereno for the stage. Melville has vanished from their passages on Lowell. Here, Lowell is a madman who at the end can write poetry only by plagiarizing Hardwick’s noble letters to him. She said this to everyone and probably believed it herself. We all believed it, but see William Logan’s word-count in the New Criterion (February 2020). I reeled back several times from the force of reflexive misandry in the treatment of me, but mainly of Lowell. Maybe it’s best in Dayswork that Lowell is not identified as a reader of Melville (even in this book supposedly about Melville) and that he and I are never identified as kinsmen in this book about genealogy.

        Lowell was, I still believe, one of the greatest American poets of his century, worth mourning, but he does not appear on most modern lists of mid twentieth-century poets. Look at Google. Lowell is being erased or cancelled while I still cherish his memory. We have in common a love of Melville and we have in common, also, a grandfather, not a Boston Brahmin but William Traill of Westness in the Orkneys, and we descend from still more ancient Orkney families, the Spences and Balfours. As I have said, I think of myself as a Scot, and knowing that a great poet and I both have those Orkney heritages is empowering. Is any other part of Scotland as evocative as the harsh Orkneys, where a Viking village stands washed open to the air and a farmer’s pickaxe can open Pictish tombs? No wonder in his madness Lowell announced in a restaurant that he was the King of Scotland! While pondering my cousin’s tortured and triumphant life, I rejoice in knowing he made a pilgrimage to the Orkneys to visit to the poet Charles Mackay Brown, who knew more about our Traill and Balfour ancestors than we ever did, or ever will.