It was in the NEW REPUBLIC 30 September 2002 that Andrew Delbanco warned readers away from both volumes of my biography by stating this about the 1853 THE ISLE OF THE CROSS, which he does not name: "he [Parker] is sure that immediately after completing Pierre, Melville wrote an unpublished novel." Well, not "immediately," and I never say, as Delbanco does, that "Melville burned it." Delbanco says this about the volume Melville completed in 1860 and called POEMS: "Such a book was never published--and it is a surmise that Melville ever wrote it." He added: "In short, Parker trusts his own intuition completely, and, presenting inferences as facts, he expects his readers to trust it, too."
The evidence, of course, was on the pages of my biography. How can you look at Melville's 12-point memo to his brother Allan on the publication of POEMS and say what Delbanco said? Weirdly, in his 2005 book Delbanco refers to the existence of both of these lost books without saying how he learned about them.
The NEW REPUBLIC continues to print Andrew Delbanco with never a hint of apology for providing space for his slanders in 2002.
Can he have been as ignorant in 2002 as the review in the NEW REPUBLIC shows him to be? And I am not talking about minor errors in this passage, such as his having Melville sail from New York City for San Francisco instead of Boston.
Delbanco's slanders were picked up by Alan Helms, in particular, who on their basis called me a "slippery fish" with evidence.
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Comment on this article on MOOCs by Andr4w Delbanco:
An old Melville biographer Hershel Parker isn't happy with Andrew Delbanco: "The Hunt for Herman Melville The best biographers are scholars on wheels assiduously dogging their subjects' footsteps" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324532004578358183100732300.html “Mr. Parker's greatest enmity is reserved for Andrew Delbanco, professor of American studies at Columbia University, who the biographer believes has deliberately tried to discredit him. Mr. Delbanco dismissed the first volume of "Herman Melville" in the New York Review of Books in 1997. He not only disparaged the new data that Mr. Parker contributed to Melville biography but also suggested that Mr. Parker invented details to suit his all-consuming quest to tell his subject's story—a nearly mortal blow to a biographer who has spent his entire career documenting every aspect of his subject's life. Mr. Parker quotes Mr. Delbanco questioning the former's characterization of Melville as "the first American author to become a sex symbol" and dismissing the evidence as merely a phrase taken from "one woman's fan letter." In fact, Mr. Parker says, he was relying on what he calls "many diverse pieces of evidence," including the responses of numerous men in contemporary reviews and newspaper notices who found "Typee" titillating because it described the sailor-narrator's romps with native women on a South Seas island. Mr. Parker cites one newspaper that greeted Mr. Melville's engagement announcement with the quip that the "fair forsaken Fayaway [the novel's South Seas heroine]" should sue for "breach of promise." Mr. Parker emphasizes that he was describing reactions to Melville's writing, not the behavior of the man: Mr. Delbanco's claim that the biographer portrays a strutting, "randy young man" attributes a vulgar idea to Mr. Parker that is nowhere in his text....."
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