In
2015 a conference sponsored by the Melville Society of Japan “concluded with John
Bryant reading from his projected two-volume biography of Melville.” The
description continues: “This promises to be an exceptional work—from John’s archival
research, psychological and editorial insight, and narrative fluency. On
this occasion he read from the chapter in which young Melville crosses the
Atlantic for the first time as a sailor on a merchant ship—a perfect transition
to our 2017 conference, which will be held in London and Liverpool.”
John Bryant at
that 2017 conference was described as “the author of a two-volume biography of
Melville whose first volume is nearing completion.” A sample is included: “Here
at the British Library, John read a chapter from near the end of the first
volume of the new biography. This chapter follows the early stages of
Melville’s first whaling voyage from New Bedford, Massachusetts, down the
Atlantic to the coast of South America before rounding Cape Horn into the
Pacific. John’s account of Melville’s life is based on a wide range of
archival research but it also carries the reader into Melville’s physical body
and out from his evolving imagination at every stage of the future writer’s
embryonic growth. This chapter, after the frigid January departure from
New Bedford, eases into the sweet Equatorial breezes sending the ship
southward, situating young Melville, as his ship lays over for a week in Rio de
Janiero, at a nexus of sights, sounds, and tensions I did not previously
connect with Melville’s experience as a novice whaler. John’s
contextualization was at times as expansive as certain of Melville’s seeming
digressions in Moby-Dick, and in order to keep
this blog entry from being any more of a ‘spoiler’ about this particular
chapter than it already is, I will say nothing more here other than that he
reeled everything in at the end with a two-word phrase from the end of
Melville’s Benito Cereno, published fourteen years after
Melville’s maiden voyage down the South American coast.”
So in 2017 the
projected two-volume biography was well along, the first volume “nearing
completion,” and far from compressing his treatment, Bryant's “contextualization was
at times as expansive as certain of Melville’s seeming digressions in Moby-Dick.
It is not clear
what has happened. Is this “projected two-volume biography” the “relatively
brief” one that is currently advertised as to be published on May 18, 2020? Is
this May volume only the first, which was nearing completion in 2017? One of
Amazon’s listings says that “Bryant wants to write a
book that offers readers a relatively brief but thorough study of the life and
works, one that places Melville’s accomplishment in the context of his
nineteenth-century world and our modern world as well, and one that provides
some guidelines for reading the man, his time, his writing. His hope is that it
will be accessible, inviting, and above all readable, and stimulating to
student and scholar alike.” The advertisement explains that “Bryant is not
proposing to write an inventory of facts (such as overwhelm Hershel Parker's
massive two-volume biography) but to provide a rounded portrait of Melville in
the full context of his writings, beyond Moby- Dick, with key concluding chapters concerning his reception.”
Unfortunately, Amazon does not include the promised description: “The contents
provided here show in considerable detail how Bryant means to proceed.”
Curiously, the advertisement goes from saying that “an inventory of facts”
overwhelm my “massive two-volume biography” to deploring the “paucity of
biographical information about the man.” Perhaps we will see on May 18, 2020.
Bryant may have labored on “a wide range of archival
research” in recent decades, but I tremble, remembering my horror at first
seeing his annotations to my essay which he published in the 1997 Melville’s Ever-Moving Dawn.
Here is the next page:
I rely on old photographs because my copy of this book is part of what I have sent to the Berkshire Athenaeum. Can you see from my corrections my deep humiliation,
although I was not the one who made so astonishingly many errors? When I conveyed my anguish on the phone, John Bryant was totally unfazed. My strong recollection is that he said coolly,
“One Aunt Mary is as good as another.” That is, names of Melville’s family were
decorative, like garnish on a cake. Never in the many times he consulted me
about articles submitted to MELVILLE SOCIETY EXTRACTS did I feel that he
understand the biographical points I tried to make. Well, perhaps he has
transformed himself into a great archival scholar. Let us hope he is not going
to say Sarah Morewood was Melville’s Muse. I tremble still, however, for in a 2019 LEVIATHAN article Bryant said that Richard
Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and (I assume) Elizabeth Schultz had “fair-enough”
grounds for their doubting my description of the book Melville called POEMS in 1860. Only I in my “dark hole”
had heard of that book, said Brodhead. Delbanco said this of POEMS: “Such a
book was never published--and it is a surmise that Melville ever wrote it.”
This of course despite Melville’s 12-point memo to his brother Allan, whom he
helped would see the volume into print! This despite our knowing that two New
York publishers rejected the volume! Why, why, in 2019 would this man (the man who was
projecting his own two-volume biography of Melville) defend these critics’
saying that I only surmised it?
I need to write a bit about John Bryant’s
manner of self-magnifying himself, self-aggrandizing his achievements,
particularly in the way he exalted himself in a series of reflective vignettes as
the man who stood shoulder to shoulder with Harrison Hayford as strongly as
Churchill and Roosevelt ever sat shoulder to shoulder.
