THE NEW YORK SUN 11 OCTOBER 2023
CARL ROLLYSON Wednesday, October 11, 202306:33:00 am
‘Dayswork: A Novel’
By Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
W.W. Norton & Company, 240 pages
This original, learned,
and droll novel is as much about biography and biographers as it is about
marriage, literature during a pandemic, the hazards and rewards of research —
and Herman Melville.
The narrator is
sorting through Melville biographies, compiling lists of dates, locations where
her subject lived, meditating on his personality at different periods while
comparing all this data to the diurnal life of her own marriage, as her husband
quarantines himself in their basement after suffering exposure to a Covid outbreak.
She is constantly
returning to the indefatigable discoveries of “the biographer,” named
relatively late in the narrative as Hershel Parker, author of a mammoth
two-volume Melville biography. The biographer has been immersed for much of his
career in working up to the point when he can display all he has learned in
2,000 pages of narrative and analysis.
Full disclosure: I
know Hershel Parker, and just how obsessive and certain he is about his
discoveries. In the Wall Street Journal, I reviewed his book, “Melville
Biography,” in which he takes to task many of his contemporaries, including me,
for what they get wrong about Melville while also providing an unsurpassed
account of how biographers work in archives and assemble their narratives.
The narrator of
“Dayswork” is beholden to “the biographer,” as all of us Melvillians are, but
she cannot help having fun with his certitudes and with the way “the
biographer” exceeds his authority.
My favorite passage
in “Dayswork” occurs when the narrator is arrested by the biographer’s
identification of the happiest day in his subject’s life: presenting a copy of
“Moby Dick” to his esteemed friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.
“The claim seems
dubious,” she observes, “but last night I couldn’t figure out if the problem
lies in the selection of this particular day out of all of Melville’s many
days, or if it lies in the presumption to assess the happiest day in the life
of someone else, particularly someone so mysterious and dead, or if it lies in
the potential confusion of happiest with other superlatives such as most
content or most consequential or most memorable, or if it lies in the belief in
the very concept of a happiest day of a life.”
The word
“presumption” leaps out as I am reminded that Boswell said biography is a “presumptuous
task.” Here the problem of biography is complicated by the narrator’s musings:
“I lay awake, thinking of some of the happy days of my life, but the thought
that any one of them might be the happiest day of my life I found unhappy.”
Also, as a wife who
from time to time divagates on her husband’s strengths and weaknesses, she goes
on: “Of course I didn’t like the idea that on the happiest day of Melville’s
life, his wife was at home nursing their newborn son despite suffering from a
breast infection so painful the walls in her room had been draped with sheets
because the pattern of the wallpaper made her dizzy.”
The implication is
that the husband’s happiness is sustainable only by ignoring the wife’s plight
— as was the case with Robert Lowell, who has a major role to play in this
novel as the narrator dissects his horrendous treatment of his ever-faithful
wife Elizabeth Hardwick, whose own temperament is also on display in the
narrator’s tender treatment of Hardwick’s Melville biography.
It does not spoil a
first reading of the novel to report that it ends with a magnificent tribute to
Melville’s wife Elizabeth, who stood by him, even when he turned violent — how
violent the narrator, like all Melville biographers, cannot say, but there are
indications, shall we say, of wife abuse.
It would be
presumptuous to say there would be no Melville without his wife, but the force
of his rediscovery in the 1920s, the narrator insists, could not have been
possible without her strenuous efforts to keep the memory of her husband and
his work alive.
I cannot think of
another work of fiction that says more about why biographies are written and
what they portend, or how the lives of biographers get enmeshed in their
subjects, and all told as if you, the reader, are part of the day’s work.
