The Greedy Bird Did Not Get My Hershey's Kisses

Not manna from heaven but Hershey's kisses

Then she showered me with a dozen Hershey's Kisses from this position

A passage from an email from Professor Mark Niemeyer yesterday--the Norton THE CONFIDENCE-MAN Takes France by storm, Sort of

Just wanted to tell you that, incredibly, the French Ministry of Education has put The Confidence-Man on the official program for the highly competitive agrégation examination for English for 2019 & 2020 (see the beginning of the attached official program) (students who take the exam have to have a Master’s degree already completed, & if they pass the exam they get a tenured job at the top of the heap in a French lycée). I had nothing to do with this & don’t know who made the decision.

I had to wait to pass this on until everyone at Norton knew it was officially announced.
This means that THE CONFIDENCE-MAN will be studied (hard) in France by a couple of thousand of people who already have the equivalents of our Master's degrees. We won't get rich from this (the real Norton money is in the big anthologies) but we will be used as never before. That is marvelous, as far as I am concerned. I put into this NCE many pages about Melville and Unitarianism that I had been brooding about for 20 years. One of the boxes I packed up was largely devoted to Orville Dewey, whom I discovered gave Judge Shaw's funeral address. Now, how that happened was interesting from a biographer's standpoint: I said to myself one day, Shaw's death did not go unnoticed in Boston, so I went to the Boston Public Library and found that despite one of the worst snow storms in the decade it was very big news. No one had looked. Anyhow, I had already connected portions of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN to what Melville (and Greeley) saw as Unitarian hardness of heart, and put in a section which as far as I know has been ignored in the USA. Maybe it will be noticed in France! Maybe people writing on Melville just don't realize that Norton Critical Editions sometimes contain previously unknown documents of high relevance!

This is really delightful--a total surprise.

From the French Ministry of National Education--just announced--Reading List (Required)--The Norton 2nd, THE CONFIDENCE-MAN

Concours externe de l'agrégation du second degré—Section langues vivant étrangères: anglais

ÉCRIT : tronc commun

I – Littérature
1 – John Webster. The Duchess of Malfi [1613-14]. Edited by Michael Neill. New York, London: W. W. Norton Critical Editions, 2015.
2 – Daniel Defoe. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress [1724]. John Mullan, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 2008.
3 – Herman Melville. The Confidence-Man [1857]. Second edition, Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer, eds. New York, London: W. W. Norton Critical Editions, 2006.
4 – Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass [1891-92], dans Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Second edition, Michael Moon, ed. New York: W. W. Norton Critical Editions, 2001.
5 – Ian McEwan. Atonement [2001]. London: Vintage, 2002 (reissued in 2016) ; et le film de Joe Wright réalisé en 2007.
N.B. Mêmes éditions pour l’écrit et l’oral.

Melville's The Confidence-Man Sweeps the Ambitious French Elite--Those with Equivalents of US Master's Degrees Already

An official announcement:
I am delighted to say that, with the publication of the official "programme", all has now been revealed. (I had been told by the chairwoman of the committee that the announcement would be made at the end of April but it appeared on 5 April). Congratulations to Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer on the selection by the Jury d'Agregation of The Confidence-Man as one of the principal titles for this year's Agregation!

Something will follow . . . .

A paragraph from something I wrote when Americans were universally confident and evangelicals were Christian

A paragraph from "The Confidence Man's Masquerade" in the 2nd Norton Critical Edition of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN.

Melville saw in politics, in society, in religion, in philosophy, and in personal relationships the blithe fatuity of a new country which had sold itself on the notion of a divinely manifest destiny. Cheery Americans were confident in being good nominal Christians in a nominally Christian country, bedeviled, to be sure, by true believers who might travel to Utah Territory to establish a new theocracy, for example, but, most days, secure from being embarrassed by witnessing fanatics in the process of selling all they owned and abandoning their families in order to follow Jesus. Americans were confident in the probity of Wall Street and ready to apply its methods to social problems. Americans could succumb to confidence in sweeping social reforms based on appeals to man’s rational altruism. American practitioners of the late-gothic psychological novel could be confident of financial and critical success if only they would “challenge astonishment at the tangled web of some character, and then raise admiration still greater at their satisfactory unraveling of it.” Readers could cherish their confidence in the intellectual and aesthetic value of soporifically tidy fiction, in which characters are ultimately consistent and plot-strings are ruthlessly pulled tight at the end. Anxious Americans were placing confidence in pseudo-sciences like phrenology and psychology which had “for their end the revelation of human nature on fixed principles.” Hopeful Americans were putting confidence in the curative powers of Nature, or, as a fair substitute, in patent panaceas guaranteed to cure all ailments, physical or psychic. Triumphant Americans were confident in the justness of all American wars, including undeclared ones like Polk’s late Mexican incursion (an “Executive’s War”), which Melville had attacked in Mardi. Americans were imbued with confidence that the American press was dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of truth. American Transcendentalists were putting confidence in idealistic doctrines (on friendship, say) which required no application to daily life, and the philosophical parents of Transcendentalism, the Unitarians, were promoting confidence in the belief that reports of poverty in the United States were exaggerated and, in any case, that what seemed like poverty was due to the laziness of the complainant. Jesus might have said that you would always have the poor with you, but New York Unitarians were confident that city streets would be far more pleasant with all beggars removed from them. In the middle of the abolitionist crusade—during the horrors of “Bleeding Kansas”—many Americans were still confident in the “happy results” attending the formation of the federal union; after all, in 1850 most Americans had celebrated the passage of the Compromise which provided for the return of captured runaway slaves to their masters. Many would-be Christians even retained confidence that, despite all evidence to the contrary, a loving Providence still dispatched his guardian angels to preserve his servants. The Confidence-Man was a dazzlingly comprehensive indictment of American confidence on a national scale, but for a century no reader saw its profound coherence.

"Unplugging from the news"? Going into total denial?

In today's mail was something called THE WEEK. Much of it, I saw in my fast scan, involved politics, but I stopped scanning and read the article called "Unplugging from the news--completely," about the "Blockade" Erik Hagerman of Gloster, Ohio, had put up against news more than a year ago. I understand. I spent my time with political obsession, starting that day in October, 1952, when, after working at Red Rock, Oklahoma, as a telegraph apprentice on the Santa Fe, I went on a part time job over into Kansas, where people desperately wanted to watch a TV program, that day, and my boss installed TV antennas as a sideline. We had to install an enceedingly high rod, I recall, and then were invited into the tall wooden structure with tall vicious dogs roaming round. Surely we deserved to see the speech, the Checkers Speech, it turned out to be. I was the only one in the house who understood the manipulative malice of the man, and in the 60s I fought him except when I was fooled into thinking I would not have him to kick around any more. At the last, I was a poorer father for my obsession to that crook, then after the resignation, when I though I could heal, Ford committed the unforgivable sin by pardoning him. Well, at the last national election I knew I could not survive another period with that obsession. At 8 pm on November 8 2016 I said I was through watching news on TV. I got out without ever hearing Kellyanne Conway's voice, though I saw her face several times. I have survived without hearing a single rant by Rachel Maddow. I have not glimpsed Chris or the other more self-righteous yuppy Chris or any of the rest of them. Now, I see headlines and sort of understand them but I have allowed myself only one obsession, and that very recently: Greitens is just so much fun to watch twisting in the wind that I check on him now and then. I gave up Fixer Upper and all other home shows on 8 Nov. 2016 because you never know what face is going to pop out at you on commercial time. Now, what have I done? I wrote 4 pieces for JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, one of which is going to reappear in hardback next month. I finished the 3rd Norton Critical Edition of MOBY-DICK. I and three other veterans finished what Hayford, I, and Tanselle started in 1865, the 15 volume THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE. I am very very far along in my major work, ORNERY PEOPLE, about my American ancestors (whom I had assumed were in no records) in relation to movements in American history. I have agreed to do the LIBRARY OF AMERICA volume on Herman Melville: The Complete Poetry, and am working now on notes for CLAREL. Then Gallimard is publishing a Quarto edition of MOBY-DICK with my very detailed Chronologie decked out by Professor Philippe Jaworski with many gorgeous Melville family photographs--ready and for sale April 19. And today on the Internet the news that 2000 or so Frenchmen and Frenchwomen (mainly) who already have the equivalent of Master's degrees will be buying copies of Mark Niemeyer's and my 2nd Norton Critical Edition of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN for their 2019 and 2020 agregation (imagine the accent mark) exam. I am thinking, hour by hour, about how to my astonishment Union activity survived in public in North Carolina all through the Civil War, with Sparks and Dellinger cousins bravely protesting against the Confederacy and McGehee cousins ardently defending slavery. I have become historian enough to publish in the webzine JAR a dozen or so times, even to be quoted a couple of times in book books, printed and bound histories, and I am learning more every week, if not every day. Rarely has a week gone by that I have not been stunned at some new discovery. I can live, at my age, without Rachel, even if it means not making myself a sacrifice for the next generations. I can live out any years I have left without obsessing about evangelicals who are not Christians and what they have brought into being. Go, Erik Hagerman, go.