Showing posts with label Edmund Wilson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edmund Wilson. Show all posts

Sunday, October 30, 2022

What the Dickens?


Edmund Wilson: Eight Essays (1954)

Can All These Biographies be about the Same Man?

In his celebrated essay "The Two Scrooges," published in The New Republic in 1940, and subsequently collected in The Wound and the Bow (1941), American critic Edmund Wilson claimed to have detected a curious dichotomy in Charles Dickens's work. It is, according to Wilson:

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)


organized according to a dualism which is based ... on the values of melodrama: there are bad people and there are good people, there are comics and there are characters played straight. The only complexity of which Dickens is capable is to make one of his noxious characters become wholesome, one of his clowns turn out to be a serious person. The most conspicuous example of this process is the reform of Mr. Dombey, who, as Taine says, “turns into the best of fathers and spoils a fine novel.”
Earlier this year I posted a piece called "The World of Charles Dickens." In it I attempted to give a quick overview of my various collections of Dickens books, films and other ephemera (including jigsaw puzzles). But I only had space there to make a few references to the fascinating - and distinctly vexed - realm of Dickens biography. This is the brief summary I gave:




Michael Slater: Charles Dickens (2007)


There are many biographies. At times it can seem as if the majority even of bookish people are far less keen on reading him than reading about him. The original Victorian biography by John Forster is still an essential source, and I must confess, too, to a soft spot for Edgar Johnson's exhaustive two-volume account of 1952.



I'm not myself a great admirer of Peter Ackroyd's strange biography-with-fictional-interludes, though it certainly has its moments. A far more significant contribution to scholarship came from Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman: a biography of Dickens's mistress Nelly Ternan, which appeared in the same year, 1990.


Claire Tomalin: Charles Dickens: A Life (2011)


She's followed this up since with a full-dress biography of Dickens, perhaps meant as a riposte to Michael Slater's, also pictured above. Slater is, after all, a bit of a Ternan-sceptic, witness his book The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (2012), which takes issue with many of Tomalin's points.

In any case, whatever your views on this or other contentious points, you won't find too much difficulty in finding material to your taste in the vast untidy field of Dickens scholarship. Even the famously critical Frank Leavis finally decided to admit him to the fold of the 'great tradition' in English fiction.
  1. Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision. London: Headline Book Publishing PLC., 1987.
  2. Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd., 1990.
  3. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. With Thirty-Two Illustrations. 1872-74. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, n.d.
  4. Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens. His Tragedy and Triumph. 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster Inc., 1952.
  5. Pope-Hennessy, Una. Charles Dickens: 1812-1870. 1945. London: The Reprint Society, 1947.
  6. Slater, Michael. Dickens and Women. 1983. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1986.
  7. Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens. 2009. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2011.
  8. Slater, Michael. The Great Charles Dickens Scandal. 2012. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2014.
  9. Tomalin, Claire. The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. 1990. London: Penguin, 1991.
  10. Tomalin, Claire. Charles Dickens: A Life. 2011. London: Penguin, 2012.


F. R. & Q. D. Leavis: Dickens the Novelist (1970)





Michael Slater: The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (2012)


Having now had time to think (and read) some more on the subject, I'd like to expand a bit on that rather bald account. Who exactly was Dickens? How is it possible for two biographies so thoroughly different as Michael Slater's (2007) and Claire Tomalin's (2011) to be published so hard on each other's heels?

It's not so much the protean nature of Dickens the man I mean to call into question: all of us are complex, contradictory, 'a million different people from one day to the next,' as the Verve's 1997 song "Bitter Sweet Symphony" so memorably puts it.

No, what interests me is the extent to which the 'Dickens' of these books resembles Wilson's analysis, quoted above, of the melodramatic assumptions underlying Dickens' own early work: "there are bad people and there are good people, there are comics and there are characters played straight."


Claire Tomalin (b.1933)


Tomalin, it's true to say, does her best to maintain an even playing field. She begins her own biography with an inspiring anecdote about the lengths to which Dickens was prepared to go to help the poor and downtrodden, when - as a juror on a murder case - he fought tooth and nail for the acquittal and subsequent welfare of a young servant girl accused of killing her own child. Dickens, that is to say, as crusader. And you'd have to be pretty jaded not to be impressed by the sheer extent of Dickens' involvement in the case. He just wouldn't let it go. It was no momentary spasm of indignation on his part, but a lifelong commitment.

Unfortunately, in context, this story simply serves as a prelude to Tomalin's very persuasive portrait of Dickens as a tyrannical husband and neglectful papa - not to mention dastardly seducer. Edmund Wilson, too, highlights these traits, remarking that Dickens seems, at times, "almost as unstable as Dostoevsky."
He was capable of great hardness and cruelty, and not merely toward those whom he had cause to resent ... his treatment of Mrs. Dickens suggests, as we shall see, the behavior of a Renaissance monarch summarily consigning to a convent the wife who had served her turn. There is more of emotional reality behind Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop than there is behind Little Nell. If Little Nell sounds bathetic today, Quilp has lost none of his fascination. He is ugly, malevolent, perverse; he delights in making mischief for its own sake; yet he exercises over the members of his household a power which is almost an attraction ... Though Quilp is ceaselessly tormenting his wife and browbeating the boy who works for him, they never attempt to escape: they admire him; in a sense they love him.
For Wilson, Dickens' work as a whole is a haunted palace, full of neglected corridors leading to unspeakable secrets: the very epitome of Gothic melodrama. And he wrote like that because that's how he lived:
Dickens’ daughter, Kate Perugini, who had destroyed a memoir of her father that she had written, because it gave “only half the truth,” told Miss Gladys Storey, the author of Dickens and Daughter, that the spell which Dickens had been able to cast on his daughters was so strong that, after his separation from their mother, they refrained, though he never spoke to them about it, from going to see her, because they knew he did not like it ... “I loved my father,” Miss Storey reports her as saying, “better than any man in the world — in a different way of course. … I loved him for his faults.” And she added, as she rose and walked to the door: “My father was a wicked man — a very wicked man.” But from the memoir of his other daughter Mamie, who also adored her father and seems to have viewed him uncritically, we hear of his colossal Christmas parties, of the vitality, the imaginative exhilaration, which swept all the guests along.
Like Scrooge himself, the ostensible subject of Wilson's essay, Dickens sounds like "the victim of a manic-depressive cycle, and a very uncomfortable person."

How, then, does Michael Slater deal with all this, in his own comprehensive biography of the author?


Michael Slater (b.1936)


Well, for the most part he ignores it, that's how. From the very first pages of his biography, he makes it clear that it's only really Dickens the Victorian man-of-letters who interests him, and whom he feels qualified to write about.

Professor Slater comments in great detail on the idea of serial publication, pioneered in The Pickwick Papers, and then carried on via a variety of vehicles: the monthly numbers used for such novels as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and their various successors; but also the succession of weekly periodicals Dickens edited, among them Master Humphrey's Clock (1840-41), home of The Old Curiosity Shop; Household Words (1850-59), where he published Hard Times and A Child's History of England; and, finally, All the Year Round (1859-90), which eventually housed A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and The Uncommercial Traveller.

That's just the beginning for Slater, though. Amateur theatricals, occasional journalism, travel books, editing jobs such as the great clown Grimaldi's memoirs - all are woven together into a marvellous tapesty of mid-Victorian cultural life. His four-volume annotated edition of Dickens's collected journalism stands him in good stead when it comes to documenting and - above all - making sense of this mountain of circumstantial detail.

This is his crucial break with what might be called the Wilsonian tradition of Freudian (or at least psychoanalytical) criticism, as it's been applied to Dickens since the appearance of "The Two Scrooges" in the 1940s. The first biographer to employ these insights, albeit sparingly, was probably Una Pope-Hennessy in her wonderfully compact Charles Dickens: 1812-1870 (1945).


Edgar Johnson (1902-1995)


The major monument to this tradition would, however, have to be Edgar Johnson's exhaustive two-volume critical biography Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952). Johnson's "life and times" approach - which he applied again, a couple of decades later, to his similarly vast biography of Sir Walter Scott, The Great Unknown (1970) - has been found offputting by some (Peter Ackroyd principal among them). For myself, I love it.

I can see the advantages of focussing principally on Dickens's emotional life, as Tomalin does, or his professional life, as Slater does, but Johnson's system of alternating chapters of pure biography with chapters of analysis of each of Dickens's major works is surprisingly successful. Certainly one emerges from such a reading with a vivid knowledge of each of the novels as well as the minutiae of the novelist's life.

In Slater's terms, Johnson is a 'believer' - one who accepts that Nelly Ternan was Dickens's mistress, and that their relationship was almost certainly a sexual one. So is Pope-Hennessy. And Tomalin, of course, is the high priest of this tradition. Peter Ackroyd, whom I'll come to in a minute, is on the fence. He accepts the evidence of Ternan's importance in Dickens' life, but finds it unlikely that their relationship was ever consummated: his Dickens is far too weird for that. Michael Slater, of course, is the leader of the Denialist school who insists - quite correctly - on the extreme flimsiness of the evidence so far produced for the actual existence of this relationship.

Eppur si muove would be my own conclusion on this vexed matter, thrashed out so thoroughly in so many books over the last century or so. That's what Galileo is alleged to have said as he emerged from the Church tribunal which had just forbidden him to assert as fact the Earth's progress around the Sun: "but it does move, anyway." I just can't bring myself to believe that the whole affair is based on moonshine and a few misunderstood letters. It was too big a scandal to suppress at the time, and salutary though Slater's subsequent attempts to point out the deficiencies of the opposition's case have been, I fear that I would have to award the victory to Tomalin on this one, on points.


Peter Ackroyd (b.1949)


Which brings us to undoubtedly the strangest of all of the modern biographies, Peter Ackroyd's Dickens (1990). Ackroyd's decision to incorporate fictional 'episodes', evocative dreamscapes a little reminiscent of some of De Quincey's opium visions, caused a great deal of comment at the time. Whether or not it's effective, it's certainly different - and while these sections co-exist rather oddly with the rest of his heavily researched text, it can't simply be written off as a failure. There's something in it, though it's not quite clear (to me, at least) just what.

Ackroyd's main innovation as a biographer, though, was his heavy dependence on the backfiles of The Dickensian, the Dickens-enthusiasts' journal which has been charting every minute detail of the Master's work since 1905. This immense heap of articles provided him with ammunition for his demolition of the Johnsonian life-and-times approach. Johnson's research turns out to have been largely library-based, whereas Ackroyd is able to explore both the texts and the landscapes through the eyes of legions of fanatical (and, for the most part, footsore) contributors to The Dickensian.

This does impart a curiously patchwork tone to Ackroyd's text, but given his devotion to psychogeography as a discipline, it also serves to highlight the strange interfusion he posits between Dickens and London, the city that defined him both as an author and a man, expanding in this on his earlier picture book Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision.

Ackroyd was, however, somewhat handicapped by the fact that the magisterial Pilgrim edition of Dickens' complete letters (12 vols, 1965-2002) was not yet complete while he was writing. All subsequent biographies and scholarship on Dickens have been dominated by this massive piece of research, entailing, as it did, an exact charting of his doings on virtually every day of his adult life. Like his predecessors Pope-Hennessy and Johnson, Ackroyd was still forced to resort at times to the woefully incomplete Nonesuch edition of Dicken's correspondence (3 vols, 1938).


Charles Edward Perugini: John Forster (1812-1876)


Might it be said, in fact, that we know a bit too much about Dickens nowadays? The dichotomy between Slater and Tomalin's work seems a bit less surprising when you factor in the sheer weight of material at a modern biographer's fingertips: as well as those 12 volumes of letters, and the serried rows of back-issues of the Dickensian, there are books and articles on virtually every aspect of his life. One must, in other words, be selective: especially if you're trying desperately to cram your conclusions into a single manageable volume.

Which brings me to the great-grandaddy of all Dickens biographies, John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (3 vols, 1872-74). Forster was a close friend of Dickens, and supported and counselled him at all stages of his professional life - not always successfully. He was also an accomplished biographer and man of letters in his own right, author of Oliver Goldsmith: His Life and Times (1848) as well as a life of the poet Walter Savage Landor (1868) - reputedly the original for the character Boythorne in Bleak House.


Lytton Strachey: The Illustrated Eminent Victorians (1989)


Ever since Lytton Strachey did his demolition job on Victorian biographies in Eminent Victorians (1918), there's been a reaction against those respectable, four-square, generally multi-volumed Life and Letters which used to be the mainstay of every library. Many modern readers have got out of the habit of reading them at all, assuming that all the interesting stuff will have been edited out of them according to the wishes of the family, and that what is left will be, at best, the record of a whited sepulchre.

I haven't found it to be so. Forster's biography of Dickens is a masterpiece: famously revelatory of the sufferings of his early boyhood, but wonderfully vivid at every turn. It reads, in fact, like a Victorian three-decker - though probably not one of Dickens' own: more like a novel by Trollope or Thackeray. Often he says things so well that, given the fact that he was also saying them for the first time, there was not a lot to be added to his account subsequently.


John Forster: Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74)


If I had to recommend one biography of Dickens, I'd probably recommend Forster's. For myself, I have an abiding love for Edgard Johnson's, but it is very long, and the abridged one-volume version (which is probably the one most people read) doesn't really do justice to his overall concept.

I once met Professor Michael Slater. It was at a conference at Auckland University, some 25 years ago. He gave a wonderful paper on Douglas Jerrold, and proved to be the gentlest, sunniest, kindest gentleman I think I've ever encountered at such an event. There was not the slightest self-vaunting or sidiness about him, though he was certainly keen to expound the merits of the new edition of Dickens's journalism he was then working on. I'm predisposed in his favour, in other words.

If you're interested mainly in Dickens as a writer, then Slater is the biographer for you. His book is tough going at times, but he keeps all the balls in the air with marvellous dexterity, and the painfully accumulated detail all comes home to roost if you're prepared to persevere.

If you're interested - in Wilsonian style - in the tormented genius behind the books, then Tomalin's biography will suit you much better. It's a more mature book in every way than The Invisible Woman - fascinating though the earlier book was, that particular job only needed to be done once. Tomalin bends over backwards to try to understand Dickens' point of view, but he was just a very difficult man to like - unless you were prepared just to sit back and enjoy the show, as so many of his friends and acquaintances were. His family and his business associates did not have that option, unfortunately.

But do any of these books really get us much closer to Dickens himself? You can end up knowing more raw information about him than you know about any other human being you ever met, and still be struck by how mysterious he seems. His innermost personality - even the most important details of his emotional life - seems, in the end (as the poet said of Robert E. Lee), secure from "the picklocks of biographers":
For he will smile
And give you, with unflinching courtesy,
Prayers, trappings, letters, uniforms and orders,
Photographs, kindness, valor and advice,
And do it with such grace and gentleness
That you will know you have the whole of him
Pinned down, mapped out, easy to understand —
And so you have.
All things except the heart.
...
For here was someone who lived all his life
In the most fierce and open light of the sun,
Wrote letters freely, did not guard his speech,
Listened and talked with every sort of man,
And kept his heart a secret to the end
From all the picklocks of biographers.

Stephen Vincent Benét: from 'Robert E. Lee' (1928)

Robert William Buss: Dickens's Dream (1875)


Monday, April 05, 2021

Hershel Parker: Archivist Agonistes



Hershel Parker: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (2012)
[Cover image by Marianne Jankowski]


I must have read Hershel Parker's great biography of Herman Melville sometime in 2005. It's hard to be more precise than that, but the details about Melville's unpublished (and now lost) eighth novel I used in my own short story "The Isle of the Cross" certainly came from there.



Tina Shaw & Jack Ross, ed.: Myth of the 21st Century (2006)
[Cover image by Bill Hammond]


That story first saw the light of day in Myth of the 21st Century: An Anthology of New Fiction, co-edited by Tina Shaw and me. That's the only reason I can be so precise.

In those days I used to spend lots of time haunting the stacks in the Auckland Public Library. The extensive collection of graphic novels they kept on the ground floor was always beguiling, but for anything more weighty one generally had to fill in a little card and have it hoisted up from the off-limits basement below.

I don't recall if Parker's two immense volumes were kept down there, but I hope not. They were, after all, only a few years old at that point.



Hershel Parker: Herman Melville: A Biography. Vol. 1, 1819-1851 (1996)
[Cover image by Maurice Sendak]


When I mentioned the treasure trove of information in these books to a prominent Melvillean of my acquaintance, I was rather taken aback to receive a belittling reply. A few pages by a real critic, such as Tony Tanner, he informed me, were worth reams of such stupefyingly immersive material.



Hershel Parker: Herman Melville: A Biography. Vol. 2, 1851-1891 (2002)
[Cover image by Maurice Sendak]


I suppose that that was my first intimation that all was not well in the flowery fields of Melville biography - or criticism, for that matter. Clearly there were at least two schools of thought on the matter.



Joseph Oriel Eaton: Herman Melville (1819-1891)


My own rule of thumb (for what it's worth), is always to award the plum to the critic or editor who seems most disposed to provide me with what the great Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys calls my "drug of choice": new printed material.



Biographers International Organisation: Hershel Parker (1935- )


Hershel Parker certainly comes up trumps in that department. As well as his immense biography, he's also largely responsible for a whole series of Melvillean volumes in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's complete works, the Norton Critical Editions series, and the Library of America (you can see some pictures of the more prominent examples here, if you wish).



Herman Melville: Moby-Dick. Ed. Harrison Hayford & Hershel Parker (1967/1999)


It will therefore come as no surprise to you that when I first saw his subsequent book Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative advertised online, I felt extremely curious to read it. At that point I'd made a good resolution to try to read more books from libraries instead of buying them as soon as I saw them, so I duly ordered it for the Massey University Library.



Herman Melville: Redburn. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker & G. Thomas Tanselle (1969)


They wouldn't get it for me! The process of listing books and having them acquired for my delectation had worked quite flawlessly up until then. A new policy of denying Academics the books they needed must have come in, however, and I can't recall them buying anything I've asked for from that day to this!



Herman Melville: Pierre: The Kraken Edition. Ed. Hershel Parker (1995)


Anyway, to make a long story short, the other day I cracked and finally ordered all three books from Amazon.com. Their service had been pretty lousy over lockdown, but they seem to be making up for it now: the books were all with me in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Hence the title of this piece. I've finally succeeded in reading Hershel Parker's book, after almost a decade of waiting, and am busting to tell the rest of you all about it.


Herman Melville: Complete Poems. Ed. Hershel Parker (2019)







Richard F. Burton (1821-1890)


But first, a slight digression. I've always had a lot of time for cranky, obsessive scholars who go a bit strange from excessive concentration on their subject, and who gradually develop a sense of grievance at the world's indifference to their work - not to mention the rewards lavished on other, lesser researchers in the same field. Who do I have in mind?



Richard F. Burton: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (16 vols: 1885-88)


Well, obviously, Sir Richard Francis Burton (you can find more information about him at the link here). On pp. 387-500 of the final volume of his massive translation of the 1001 Nights, he includes a section called 'The Reviewers Review'd.' This is how I described it in an earlier post on this blog:
In one of the six “Supplemental” volumes to his infamous ten-volume translation of the Arabian Nights (1885-88), Richard Burton included a section called “The Reviewers Review’d,” in which he heaped scorn and contumely on various imprudent critics who’d thought to question his command of Arabic. It’s very amusing to read, though occasionally a little unedifying (in another part of the same volume he put in a long essay abusing Oxford’s Bodleian Library, who’d dared to deny him their copy of the famous Wortley-Montague ms. of the Nights – he’d had to employ someone to make primitive photocopies, or “sun pictures,” of it instead. If they had agreed to lend it to him, he crowed, he would have felt honour-bound to suppress some of the more explicit passages, but since he’d had to pay for the pages out of his own pocket, he’d felt at liberty to spell out every last unsavoury detail for the delectation of his readers!)
Yes, that's the attitude, all right. No wonder his employers, the British Foreign Office, exiled him to the backwater of Trieste in the (vain) hope of keeping him out of trouble. What is it they called him? "Brilliant but unsound." One would have to admit that he's had the last laugh in the eyes of posterity, though.



S. T. Joshi: The Stupidity Watch (2017)


My next exhibit is the prodigiously energetic Sunand Tryambak Joshi (1958- ), otherwise known as S. T. Joshi. Like Hershel Parker, he is both editor and biographer, and his work on - in particular - H. P. Lovecraft has definitely revolutionised the field.



Joshi's self-appointed, life-long task has been to tidy up Lovecraft's literary legacy by re-editing his works (not just the fiction, but the essays and poetry as well), as well as chronicling various other aspects of this activities. This resulted, initially, in the lengthy H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), subsequently re-issued in its even longer original form, in two large volumes, as I am Providence.

Does Lovecraft really deserve all this effort? Well, you're talking to the wrong person, I'm afraid. I accept that his prose is clunky and overblown, his plots predictable, and his racial and cultural attitudes pernicious - but I can't help finding him fascinating even so. The same appears to be true for Joshi, who - as an Asian American - can hardly relish all Lovecraft's diatribes about the 'mongrel races' thronging the Eastern seaboard ...



Joshi, to do him justice, is pretty omnivorous in his taste for Fantastic literature. He's edited editions of Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Edward Lucas White, among many, many others. He's also written voluminously on Supernatural Fiction in general.

As the title of his book The Stupidity Watch: An Atheist Speaks Out on Religion and Politics (2017), pictured above, would suggest, however, he's also fairly combative when it comes to any belittling of his views - by other, blander, Lovecraftians, for instance. He, too, then, would have to be seen as a prime example of your textbook "irascible scholar".






Alchetron: Hershel Parker (1935- )


All of which brings us, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to Hershel Parker, the ostensible subject of this post. Who are his particular enemies?

Well, basically anyone who doubts the value of minute archival research on the lives and texts of famous writers is liable to incur his ire: in other words, New Critics, Structuralists, Deconstructionists, and New Historicists (the latter get an extra caning for frivolously pretending to be real researchers without understanding the true rules of the craft). In essence, he's opposed to most of the major trends in American literary-Academic studies since the end of the Second World War.

And, like Burton and Joshi, one has to admit that he makes a strong case. The famous, oft-quoted example of the critic (F. O. Matthiesson) who made a huge to-do over the metaphysical implications of the phrase "soiled fish of the sea" in Melville's White-Jacket, only to end up up with egg on his face when it turned out that Melville actually wrote "coiled", goes a long way to prove his point.

The fact is that, without reliable texts, such hi-faluting scholarship is pretty much of a waste of time. Hence Parker's fifty-odd years of service as co- and eventually managing editor of the 15-volume Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's complete works (1968-2017).



Encyclopedia Virginia: Fredson Bowers (1905-1991)


It isn't quite as simple as that, however. Parker has an additional enemy in the famously irritable (and, according to Parker, not particularly competent) textual authority Fredson Bowers. Parker's monograph - jointly authored with Brian Higgins - denouncing Bower's poor choice of copytext for his edition of Stephen Crane's early novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (suppressed when it was first written, in the 1970s, and not finally published until 1995, here, down under, in the The Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand) constituted his declaration of war:
However purely he began, Bowers became the Mad Scientist of Textual Editing - a Mad Scientist who ran what may have been the world's sloppiest textual lab and promulgated varying self-serving high-sounding textual theories to cover the slovenliness. [29]
In particular, the tedious (and largely pointless) lists of hyphenated words and other trivia in editions of American works of literature promulgated by the Bowers-dominated MLA Center for Scholarly Editions occupied time and space which could more profitably allotted to considering more substantive variants, in Parker's opinion.

When experts disagree, it generally behoves the rest of us to stay silent. It certainly is true that obstrusive over-editing is a feature of many of the scholarly editions produced under the auspices of this organisation.



Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)


But then, that's more or less what Edmund Wilson said, in his late essay "The Fruits of the MLA" (1968). And Wilson - or at any rate his army of followers - is another enemy. One of the principal targets of his essay was the then just published first volume in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's works:
Wilson acknowledged that there was some minimal significance in the textual and historical scholarship. He was even "prepared to acknowledge the competence of Mr. Harrison Hayford, Mr. Hershel Parker, and Mr. G. Thomas Taselle [sic] in the stultifying task assigned them" ... [However,] Wilson's prestige was such that flatterers leapt to endorse his views without ever studying the CEAA editions for themselves. Even thirty and forty years later younger critics justified themselves to their coteries by huddling behind the corpse of Wilson as they lobbed fuzees underhanded toward scholarly editions and biographies. [42-43]
Parker concludes:
The CEAA [Center for Editions of American Authors] had been a nobly conceived enterprise but now it was, in fact, flawed, often deeply flawed. Intelligent, constructive criticism, just then, might have worked some good later on. Wilson and [Lewis] Mumford were so extreme as to be merely destructive. [43]


Andrew Delbanco: Melville: His World and Work (2005)


All of which brings us to Public Enemy No. 1, Andrew Delbanco, author of the above biography of Melville, and a vicious critic - in the reviews pages that matter - of Parker's own biography.

In the chapter 'Agenda-driven Reviewers' [pp.167-93 of his book], Parker documents in immense detail the cabal of New York critics and professors who poured scorn on the plethora of new, archivally gleaned facts in his massive work.
Aside from ingratiating himself with the Wilson-revering New York Review of Books crowd, Delbanco had a pretty clear agenda. He could establish himself as an authority on Melville the easy way, not by doing research on Melville, but by reviewing what I published, then what I published next, and then what I published after that. Thereafter, plundering the Higgins-Parker collection of reviews and my two volumes of the biography, he could emerge with a biography of his own, even if he did not get around to learning some basic episodes in Melville's life until after 2002 ... [182]
The collective contempt shown by these ignoramuses for the "gigantic leaf-drifts of petty facts" [177] in Parker's first volume went into overdrive when the second volume appeared in 2002:
In the May 20, 2002, Nation Brenda Wineapple (whose vulgar ignorance of Melville and desecration of the Lamb of God I look at elsewhere in this book) declared that I was as secure in my fantasy biography "as Edmund Morris is in his imaginary Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" ... [Richard H.] Brodhead in the June 23, 2002, New York Times implied that I had invented The Isle of the Cross (1853) and Poems (1860) out of thin air ... In the New Republic (September 30, 2002) the look-ma-no-hands biographer-to-be Andrew Delbanco said I couldn't be trusted at all on anything because I had merely surmised the existence of those lost books [188].
Needless to say, Parker (pp.295-300) proceeds to produce oceans of documentary evidence for the existence of these two lost books by Melville. More to the point, though, he quotes the following passage from Delbanco's own biography, written a couple of years later:



When Hawthorne replied, in effect, thanks but no thanks, Melville decided after all to have a crack at the story himself. The result was a novel-length manuscript, now lost [my emphasis - JR], submitted the following spring to Harpers under the title The Isle of the Cross and promptly rejected, possibly because the Harpers anticipated a legal dispute involving descendants of Agatha and her bigamous husband. [301]
In other words, precisely what Parker had been saying all along, and a direct contradiction of Delbanco's earlier sneers at the allegedly "merely surmised" existence of this lost book. "Later," Parker goes on, "Delbanco also belatedly recognized the existence of a collection of poems:"
Exactly when Melville started writing verse is unknown, but by the spring of 1860 he had accumulated enough poems to fill a small manuscript, and while in New York waiting to board the Meteor, he asked his brother Allan to place it with a publisher [301].
A very belated acknowledgement by Delbanco of his debt to the "prodigious scholarship" of Hershel Parker, "whose discoveries have immeasurably deepened our knowledge of Melville's life" [303] has done little to placate the latter, especially when it turned out that this phrase was entirely absent from the bound-up proofs of Delbanco's biography, which seem to have somehow fallen into Parker's hands.

Need I go on? Like Caesar's Gaul, Parker's book is divided into three parts: an autobiographical opening, outlining his coming-of-age as a Melville scholar; a long denunciation of modern scholarly ignorance; and, finally, a set of fascinating excursions into particular episodes from Melville's life, designed as a kind of supplement to his biography.

Livid with rage at the effrontery of critics who sneer at a book one day and appropriate its findings the next, he finds it difficult to take his foot off the accelerator at times, but it can be justly said that his book is never dull. And while his opponents may be more typically sold-out products of the Academic machine than Parker acknowledges, preferring to type them as fiends incarnate, there seems little doubt that Delbanco and co. did do considerable damage to his scholarly reputation.

Some of his most extreme vitriol is reserved for a comparative bystander, however, the Hawthorne-biographer Brenda Wineapple, whose comparison of Parker's biography with Edmund Morris's notoriously fraudulent Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan I quoted above:



In her review of the second volume of Parker's biography, Wineapple cast back in time to throw doubt on the veracity of the November 1851 meeting between Melville and Hawthorne which served as the culmination of the first volume. A year later, however, in her own biography of Hawthorne, this "fantasy" meeting appears to have become an historical fact:
Early in November, Hawthorne met Melville for dinner at the Lenox hotel, and that night Melville presumably gave Hawthorne his inscribed copy of Moby-Dick, cooked, Melville hinted, partly at Hawthorne's fire. "I have written a wicked book," Melville was to tell him, "and feel spotless as a lamb." [423]
"Dirty pool, old man, dirty pool!" as Gomez Addams was wont to say. Wineapple can't really have it both ways. Either it was a fantasy, a complete fabrication from a scholarly fraud, or it was a real meeting, abundantly documented by the kinds of sources Parker has made a speciality of delving into.


Brenda Wineapple: Hawthorne: A Life (2003)


Whether Wineapple really merits this much attention is beside the point. She has sinned against the basic tenets of scholarly integrity, sneering in print at a purveyor of facts which she subsequently relied on herself. Parker's denunciations of her "cheeky, vulgar writing" might go a bit far, but he is certainly right to point out that she fundamentally misconstrues the meaning of Melville's "lamb" remark:
Wineapple misquoted what Melville wrote Hawthorne three days or so later, his claiming to "feel spotless as the [not a] lamb." We are dependent on Rose Hawthorne Lathrop's transcription, but this daughter of Hawthorne's knew a biblical reference when she saw one. Melville felt then ... - anyone who knows the Bible or falteringly consults a biblical concordance would have recognized - as spotless as Jesus, the Lamb of God. [424]


As an ex-fundamentalist Christian myself, I must confess it hadn't occurred to me that anyone could miss so obvious a reference, but of course the Bible is no longer obsessively studied by most of the population nowadays. It's not that I think it necessarily should be, but anyone hoping to make a profession of literary criticism had better try to acquire a familiarity with it.

There's scarcely an author in English who doesn't constantly drop in phrases from it from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, a span of approximately five hundred years. And I'm afraid it never really occurred to most of them (including Melville) that these allusions wouldn't be recognised as such.



So, would I recommend that you rush out and buy a copy of Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative, then? Not really - not unless you're a literary biographer or a critic of same. It certainly has an eccentric charm as a book, but one can only salute Parker's wisdom in confining most of this stuff to a single, stand-alone monograph.

His biography will continue to be the one indispensible work on the subject of Melville in English for the foreseeable future, and I guess all his fans continue to await the eventual appearance of his revised edition of Jay Leyda's classic Melville Log.

Parker certainly needed to get all these corrections of fact and emphasis off his chest, but - as is the case with Burton and Joshi (though I doubt the former would relish the comparison) - their true monument remains the splendid works they've managed to usher into the light of day for the rest of us.



Jay Leyda: The Melville Log (1951)







Hershel Parker: Herman Melville: A Biography (2 vols: 1996 & 2002)

Hershel Parker (1935- ):
His Books in my Collection


    As Author:

  1. Herman Melville: A Biography. Volume 1, 1819-1851. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

  2. Herman Melville: A Biography. Volume 2, 1851-1891. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

  3. Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2012.

  4. As Editor:

  5. Herman Melville. Mardi, and A Voyage Thither. 1849. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker & G. Thomas Tanselle. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 3. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 1970.

  6. [with Harrison Hayford]. Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts (1851-1970). A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970.

  7. Herman Melville. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. An Authoritative Text / Backgrounds and Sources / Reviews / Criticism / An Annotated Bibliography. 1857. Ed. Hershel Parker. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971.

  8. Herman Melville. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. 1876. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker & G. Thomas Tanselle. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 12. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 1991.

  9. Herman Melville. Pierre, or The Ambiguities: The Kraken Edition. 1852. Ed. Hershel Parker. Pictures by Maurice Sendak. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

  10. Herman Melville. Published Poems: Battle Pieces; John Marr; Timoleon. 1866, 1888 & 1891. Ed. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising & G. Thomas Tanselle. Historical Note by Hershel Parker. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 11. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 2009.

  11. Herman Melville. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings: Billy Budd, Sailor; Weeds and Wildlings; Parthenope; Uncollected Prose; Uncollected Poetry. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Robert A. Sandberg & G. Thomas Tanselle. Historical Note by Hershel Parker. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 13. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 2017.

  12. Herman Melville. Complete Poems: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War / Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land / John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces / Timoleon Etc. / Posthumous & Unpublished: Weeds and Wildlings Chiefly, with a Rose or Two / Parthenope / Uncollected Poetry and Prose-and-Verse. 1866, 1876, 1888 & 1891. Library of America Herman Melville Edition, 4. Ed. Hershel Parker. Note on the Texts by Robert A. Sandberg. The Library of America, 320. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2019.