In the last year and a half the President of Duke University, Richard Halleck Brodhead, has come under severe criticism unlike anything he experienced during his tenure as Dean of Yale College. Henceforth forever (as defined in terms of Internet life), Brodhead's name will be linked with words such as "cowardly," "craven," "pandering," "weak-kneed," and "smarmy," along with perhaps even more damning words such as "unscholarly." Another word aptly describes Richard Brodhead: "unscrupulous." To justify my use of "unscrupulous" I will have to look analytically at something I have tried to put out of my mind for five and a half years, his contemptuous and contemptible review of the second volume of my biography of Herman Melville as published in the New York TIMES for 23 June 2002 and as available today on the Internet (during its indefinitely prolonged afterlife, sly false passages intact still and poisonously powerful as ever).
As I note later, Brodhead apparently wrote the review over Yale's spring break, not taking the task seriously. He knew that I had spent considerably more than a spring break working on the biography. Indeed, he knew more about my work on the books than I did: "Many years ago Hershel Parker set out to write the biography to end all biographies of Herman Melville, a book in which everything that could be known about the writer would be pieced out and put on record." I have no memory of having set myself such a goal and no memory of having said anything like that to anyone. Did Brodhead just make it up as part of his fictionalized biography of Hershel Parker? I consider his saying this to be unscrupulous, in a dictionary sense of "oblivious to or contemptuous of what is right."
And what did Brodhead mean in his next sentence? Here it is: "Having pursued this quarry with a single-mindedness worthy of a Melville hero, Parker has brought this project to its conclusion with a second 900-plus-page volume to match the one he published in 1996." Surely he did not mean to compare me to the single-minded Melville "hero" Captain Ahab? Did he have in mind another "single-minded" Melville hero? Could "single-minded," in this context, fail to evoke "monomaniacal," the word used of Captain Ahab? Melville's Captain Ahab, everyone knows, is called "crazy." Was I a crazy monomaniac to write a biography of Melville? Was I in fact a monomaniac? I had, after all, done substantial work on writers besides Melville--on Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Norman Mailer, among others. I had written what I considered very substantial essays on G. W. Harris, Whitman, James, and Hemingway while working on the biography.
Michael Gaynor calls Richard Brodhead "smarmy." The Internet explains: fulsome, oily, oleaginous, unctuous, unpleasantly and excessively suave or ingratiating in manner or speech, as in "smarmy self-importance." Uriah Heep is cited under "smarmy." Brodhead is smarmy, and insidiously contemptuous: what looks a little like praise (single-minded pursuit of a quarry) turns out to be (as we remember Ahab) a disaster? The Pequod sank in the Pacific, killing everyone except one, the narrator of Moby-Dick. Had my enterprise ended in wreck, Parker like Ahab doing down with the ship? For sure, Brodhead was not saying that it turned out to be a triumph. But what was he saying? The tone throughout is masterfully controlled: I cannot identify one sentence of unqualified praise in the review. Brodhead here is scrupulous: he scrupulously avoids the sort of sentence publishers delight to quote (although in fact Johns Hopkins managed to make the best of the situation and quote some noncommittal words from the review).
Brodhead says of the two volumes of the biography: "Parker tells this story with a thoroughness that is scarcely to be believed. Nothing is summarized in this biography, nothing foreshortened; this demon researcher treats every phase of Melville's life as equally significant and tracks down (and writes up) every last fact." Well, of course a great deal is summarized and foreshortened. Almost 2000 pages is long, but I discovered unknown episodes throughout Melville's life, especially from his young manhood on, and stories demand to be told. I made up my mind fairly early in my work that I could not pause to explain when I was introducing a new episode, any more than when I was correcting a previous biographer. Working from a growing chronological file of documents in my computer (approaching 9,000 pages, when I finished the second volume), when I got ready to write I would break off a year or two years of documents at a time, trying to see where to identify natural breaks for chapters. Once I defined a chapter topic, I always summarized and foreshortened heroically, I thought.
Had I been demonic, a "demon researcher"? It's hard to know what Brodhead could have meant, since he never did any nineteenth-century archival work on Melville himself. As far as I know, he never learned how to push the tip of a reel of microfilm through the plates and over onto the takeup reel. As far as I knew, he had never transcribed a letter by, say, Melville's father-in-law or his Cousin Priscilla, to name two family members whose hands gave me difficulty, despite my contortionist of a lighted magnifier. I had devoted many months of my life to transcribing and dating the so-called "Augusta Papers," hundreds of letters, the portion of Melville's sister Augusta's correspondence and other papers that the New York Public Library had acquired in 1983. Was that demonic?--putting hundreds and ultimately thousands of new documents into a computerized file along with corrected and reordered versions of Jay Leyda's documents in the 1951 and 1969 The Melville Log ? This total included hundreds of contemporary reviews and other newspaper articles on Melville, many of which I had discovered during months of review-hunting spread over four decades. Demonic? Well, perhaps working like this was demonic, but it should up to me to use the word, not Mr. Brodhead, not someone who does not know what skills and what dedication such research requires--a man who never once in his life had experienced the thrill of biographical discovery.
The paragraph of Brodhead's which gave me the most grief in June 2002 proved to be more damaging than I could have imagined, for Andrew Delbanco in the NEW REPUBLIC and Elizabeth Schultz in the COMMON REVIEW echoed his false allegations even more crudely and accusatorially. Here is the paragraph: "[I]nteresting are Parker's surmises about works Melville never published that did not survive. He makes the case that in 1852-53 Melville wrote a novel based on materials he shared with Hawthorne about a sailor who deserted his wife. If this is true, then the theory that Melville renounced writing after 'Pierre' is just wrong, and the mysterious leap from 'Pierre'' to the work he published after a silence, the very different 'Bartleby the Scrivener,' can be explained in a new way. Parker is also convinced that Melville prepared a volume of poems in 1860 that failed to be published. If this is so, a stretch that had seemed empty of literary strivings was instead a time of new effort and new failure -- a black hole Parker alone has the instruments to detect."
First a minor complaint: the unscrupulous Mr. Brodhead is presenting my thoughts as if they were his. He opines that, if I am right, the "theory that Melville renounced writing after 'Pierre' is just wrong and the mysterious leap from 'Pierre' to the work he published after a silence, the very different 'Bartleby the Scrivener,' can be explained in a new way." Yes, Mr. Brodhead, that is very much what I say on 2.164: "The stories take on a new light now that we know that Melville wrote an entire book between Pierre and the first of the stories, . . . for we have to allow for his honing his craft as a regular storyteller, not as a writer of South Sea adventure books. The evidence is lost with The Isle of the Cross, but never before had he written a book without learning something significant from it. The challenge for readers, given the story of the lost book, is to imagine how writing it allowed Melville to grow from Pierre to 'Bartleby.'" And of course I had shown that "a stretch that had seemed empty of literary strivings was instead a time of new effort and new failure."
These are not the highest and finest insights of my career, but they are mine, poor things or not, and should not have been presented as Mr. Brodhead's. A simple "as Parker says" could have made clear that the ideas were mine. Did anyone ever have his cake and eat it better than Brodhead: he casts doubt on my belief that Melville wrote two lost books, but just in case I might be right he paraphrases and takes credit for my thoughts.
Now for Brodhead's more serious examples of lack of scruples, his use of the word "surmises" and the phrase "If this is true" in relation to my discussion of Melville's writing of what we have long known as the "Agatha" story, the story Melville tried to get Hawthorne to write and ultimately wrote himself. My only "surmise" here relates to the content of The Isle of the Cross, a title I discovered in 1987 and which Brodhead scrupulously avoids using, presumably because it conveys too great a sense of reality to the lost book. Now, Harrison Hayford in 1946 first explored the evidence against the 1920s notion that Melville did not renounce writing after Pierre but thought about writing up a story he had heard in Nantucket in the summer of 1852. Hayford had the letter which Melville wrote Hawthorne after visiting him in Concord in November, 1852, he thought (it turned out to be 2 December)--the letter in which Melville says he will write the story himself. Hayford quoted Melville's mother's assertion that in April 1853 he had a book nearly ready for the press, but he did not feel justified in saying that Melville had finished the book.
Merrell Davis and William H. Gilman in their The Letters of Herman Melville (1960), had more evidence in hand, Melville's letter to the Harpers in November 1853 referring to the work (in context, clearly a book) which he had brought to New York in the Spring but which he had been "prevented" from publishing. Later, Merton M. Sealts worked with the chronology more minutely and spoke flatly about Melville's finishing the book. After I discovered the title (imagine my joy in telephoning Hayford and Sealts with the news, and imagine their joy), Sealts was about as clear as one could be in this 1990 statement: “Hershel Parker, working with Augusta Melville’s correspondence as recently added to the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection, New York Public Library, has established that this work was in fact ‘completed under the title of The Isle of the Cross.'” In 1990, also, I published in Duke's AMERICAN LITERATURE "Herman Melville's The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology." Did the unscholarly Brodhead not read even this lead article in the first issue for 1990?
Sealts’s use of the words “in fact” revealed his unregenerate bias: he believed that sometimes archival evidence could reveal historical and biographical truth. The repudiation of biographical information by the New Critics in the 1940s and 1950s and their successors through the New Historicists in the 1980s and 1990s had, after half a century and more (when Brodhead's New Critic teachers at Yale were teaching their own successors at Yale), led to a professoriate which far too often not only did not know how to conduct archival research responsibly but was skeptical that any new information could ever be gained from archival research.
Had I foreshortened the evidence so much that Brodhead simply could not find any explanation for my saying Melville finished The Isle of the Cross in May 1853? Fearfully, dreading lest I had cut too much out, I look at the biography as published, and find a chapter entitled "The Isle of the Cross: September 1852-June 1853." In it is all that Hayford, Davis-Gilman, and Sealts had found along with much new evidence that I had gathered, mainly from the Augusta Papers. The letters from Cousin Priscilla about The Isle of the Cross are quoted on 2.155. Anyone who read the account would know I was not making any surmises here, except the surmise made by earlier scholars like Sealts, that The Isle of the Cross was based on the Agatha material. Brodhead was unscrupulous in implying that I did not muster detailed, convincing evidence for Melville's work on this lost book.
The villainy of what Brodhead says about my treatment of Poems (1860) is deep and dark, far lower than any mere lack of scruples. What Brodhead says, as a man who had published a book on Hawthorne and Melville, is so ignorant as to be incredible. Or did he write out of some combination of ignorance, malice, arrogance, viciousness, the power-mad Yale Dean showing his stuff over Spring break? Here is what Brodhead said as the second of the "surmises" he attributes to me: "Parker is also convinced that Melville prepared a volume of poems in 1860 that failed to be published. If this is so, a stretch that had seemed empty of literary strivings was instead a time of new effort and new failure -- a black hole Parker alone has the instruments to detect."
This stretch of time--maybe 1852-1866? maybe 1857-1866?--is a black hole I alone have the instruments to detect? Brodhead can't mean that. Perhaps he means (whatever the stretch of time) that I alone had the instruments to detect Poems in that "black hole." Talk about contempt! The demonic researcher deludes himself that he sees something no one else had seen. The problem is that every Melville scholar had known about Poems since 1922, when Meade Minnigerode published a cache of document from the Duyckinck Collection in the New York Public Library about Melville's desire to have his brother Allan work with Evert and George Duyckinck to publish his "Poems / by / Herman Melville" for him, since he was preparing to sail with his brother Thomas for Calcutta. Willard Thorp in 1938 summarized the documents (lxxxiv-lxxxvi). In 1951 Jay Leyda sampled several of the documents and added one he had found (615-620) In 1951 Leon Howard laid out the situation (266-267). In 1953 Melville's oldest granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, discussed the 1860 Poems at length in her Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle. Davis and Gilman in 1960 printed as a letter Melville's 12-point "Memorandum for Allan concerning the publication of my verses." In 1972 William H. Shurr summarized the story in a paragraph. The Northwestern-Newberry Correspondence volume (1993) printed Melville's letters to Evert Duyckinck and his memorandum to Allan.
Everyone--at least every Melvillean--knew about Poems, but Brodhead relied, apparently, on the ignorance of the general public. Was he so desperate to smear me, to brand my scholarly biography as unreliable, that he knowingly lied in saying I was the only person ever to have detected Poems? I don't know. But that a man would review my book in the New York TIMES and say this is worse than unscrupulous. It is despicable. And it's not as if I foreshortened the story: I quoted the documents in the pages that Brodhead was reviewing.
Knowing the power of a review in the New York TIMES BOOK REVIEW, Brodhead told the literary world that after all my demonic researches I was unreliable, having very possibly made up two lost works of Melville's. I had merely surmised their existence. Worse, no one else before me had ever surmised the existence of a volume of poems ready for publication in 1860. Parker had been a demon researcher, a crazy captain of a doomed ship, and he had in at least two conspicuous instances claimed to see islands that were not down in any map. Well, we never thought a demonic researcher could be trusted!
Over spring break 2002, the staff of a Yale publication asked faculty members to say what they were reading “for fun.” Here is what Richard Brodhead offered as his "picks":
"Over break, 'for fun,' I read a novel by a Russian dissident just published in this country, Summer at Baden-Baden, by Leonid Tsypkin—a Dostoyevskian fantasy about Dostoyevsky's gambling and second marriage. Also The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, an account of what recent archaeological finds suggest about the origins of the Hebrew Bible. I'm also rereading Dickens's Little Dorrit, which I haven't read since I was an undergraduate and which is even better than I'd remembered. Also, because I'm reviewing it (so not purely for fun), Hershel Parker's monumental biography of Melville."
"Reviewed but not read"? "Trashed but not read"? In any case, reviewed by an unscrupulous man, more Uriah Heep than any character from Little Dorrit.
