Hershel Parker Makes Local News in SLOCOAST JOURNAL

http://slocoastjournal.com/docs/news/parker.html

Morro Bay Resident Hershel Parker, Biographer of Herman Melville,
Cited in Three National Publications

Morro Bay resident Hershel Parker, biographer of literature giant Herman Melville, was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Biography and twice, in 1997 and 2003, won the highest award for biography from the Association of American Publishers. This year he has been cited in three national publications for his new book, Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative.

The New Yorker blog said this about Parker's new book in its Books to Watch Out for in January:

"Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative" (Northwestern University Press), by Hershel Parker, out January 15th. "When I started to work on Melville," writes Parker, who won two Pulitzers for his landmark biography of the author, "I assumed most of the work had been done." But he quickly found the existing scholarship to be full of holes and half-answered questions. In his new book, Parker recalls the years he spent delving into archives to piece together the life and literature of his subject. This wide-ranging new book is a recollection of Parker's own intellectual project, woven together with a history of Melville scholarship and reflections on the state of literary criticism and the nature of the biographer's project. Parker writes with a rare combination of humor and passion that hooks the reader into this potentially arcane subject. [Parker points out that he was one of two Pulitzer finalists in 1997 but that what he calls a fictional misery memoir, "Angela's Ashes," actually won the prize for biography.] The article can be read here: New Yorker - Books to Watch Out for / January

Another article, by David Wescott, is A Leviathan Task of Biography, in The Chronicle Review of Higher Education, February 11, 2013. What follows are quotations with omissions marked by ellipsis dots, with our summaries enclosed in square brackets.

Herman Melville On August 1, 2013 Melville would have been 194. He was born on August 1, 1819.

Hershel Parker, a longtime Melville scholar, is an archival research fanatic. Working with Jay Leyda on The Melville Log (a long documentary compendium of Melville's life) in the 1980s, Parker rescued documents from cockroach-infested apartments, painstakingly transcribed letters, tracked down dates, and worked with what he calls "bloodied, bescissored, and beflagged" proofs.

Parker's two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography (Johns Hopkins University Press) was published in 1996 and 2002. Each volume was over 900 pages. In many ways the culmination of a scholarly career, the biography garnered Parker awards from the Association of American Publishers, recognition as a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and, to Parker's mind, unwarranted condemnation from many within the academy.

Critical reviews appeared in newspapers, magazines, and journals, and Parker, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Delaware, found himself at odds with such Melville scholars as Richard Brodhead (who raised questions about Parker's "editorial principles" in The New York Times) and Andrew Delbanco (who, while criticizing Parker's misreading of sex and sin, did declare, in The New York Review of Books, that "Parker's biography is written with love and devotion").

Critics' skepticism centered on two issues: the name of a lost Melville story (The Isle of the Cross) and the importance of an 1860 manuscript called Poems. A falling-out followed, and Parker, who felt he had been victimized, drifted away from groups like the Melville Society. [Parker describes this paragraph as a falsification to protect the Ivy League reviewers. The name of the story was not at issue. He had no "editorial" differences with Brodhead at all. His complaint about Brodhead and Delbanco, expressed clearly to Wescott, the reporter, was that these reviewers both claimed that he had simply made up two lost books by Melville, one a novel finished in 1853 (which everyone had known about since 1960, although it was not until 1987 that Parker discovered the title, The Isle of the Cross) and one a volume called Poems which Melville tried to publish in 1860 (which everyone had known about since 1922). These false charges made him out to be an untrustworthy biographer.]

[The Chronicle described Parker's book as examining "the plight of archival biographers in the wake of New Criticism. It suggests new problems for Melville biographers to consider in the future. And, finally, it reflects optimistically on how technology is enabling amateurs and professionals alike to work with archival material." . . . . After looking at Parker's "frequent, caustic broadsides at the scholarly community, especially the New Critics, the mid-20th-century group of scholars who favored close-reading techniques and often treated works of art as self-contained objects," the Chronicle continued with Parker's hopeful comments on lit bloggers like Daniel Green: "Most of the resolute bloggers are independent. They're setting a standard which is more glamorous and exciting. They're more adventurous in prose and field of study." The Chronicle concluded with Parker's comments on what he calls "divine amateurs."] Read the Chronicle Article Here

But while the Melville biographer is down on academe, he is confident that archival research in literary study will proceed. "I really think great scholarship five to 10 years from now won't be in schools, but by people like me. Crazy people. Obsessive people. Local historians, genealogist types. The internet is transforming opportunities for research." As for Parker, he says he's researching a book on the Okies, a group he identifies with. "It's the story of immigration and migration," he says, "of heroic people and strange heroic things." The working title? Ornery People. [The full title will be Ornery People: What Was a Depression Okie?]

Regarding the third of the articles cited above:

The Hunt for Herman Melville by Carl Rollyson
Published in The Wall Street Journal, 30-31 March 2013

"The best biographers are scholars on wheels assiduously dogging their subjects' footsteps."

Saying that Hershel Parker is as angry as Ahab isn't a flippant or disparaging remark. Like Herman Melville's enraged sea captain, this supremely accomplished scholar believes he is taking on a world that has tried to destroy him. Mr. Parker is the author of the most thorough and authoritative account of Melville's life Herman Melville: A Biography, published in two volumes, in 1996 and 2002. The capstone of five decades of research, textual editing, and literary analysis, the work is a masterpiece of the biographer's art. Nearly every page abounds with discoveries that plug the holes and correct the errata of other biographers, even as Mr. Parker adds to their best insights.

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative

By Hershel Parker
Northwestern, 587 pages, $45

Melville by Patrick Arrasmith

Biography is accretion, where one detail builds gradually upon another creating over time a complex portrait. Mr. Parker has spent a lifetime in archives in New York City, London, and virtually everywhere else Melville traveled, resided, or worked uncovering all sorts of fresh material. He has tried, for instance, to find every book, magazine, or newspaper Melville ever read. Even Mr. Parker marvels at the single-mindedness with which he has pursued his subject "more than half a century for a biography of only one writer!" he exclaims in his fascinating new account of his career and his craft. [This, Parker points out, is a private joke of Rollyson's. Never having met Rollyson, Parker in his Preface contrasted his meager output with Rollyson's long string of biographies.]

Mr. Parker is one of the class of scholar-adventurers that originated in the 18th century, with James Boswell scooping up every scrap of Dr. Johnson's words and exploring every relationship that made the slightest difference in the Great Cham's life. . . .

The best biographers aren't your stay-at-home types. They are scholars on wheels on foot, on skis doing whatever it takes to get the story. In the episodic chapters of "Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative" (a play off the subtitle of "Billy Budd"), Mr. Parker sets out to explain and justify his work as researcher and biographer. He writes about theories of biography, the importance of textual fidelity and the travails of archival work. Anyone who wants to learn how to write a multi-volume life of a writer could start here.

But Mr. Parker also believes that critics representing two mighty forces (academia and the New York intellectual world) are bent on destroying the kind of scholarship that he has practiced his whole career. "Despite its immense popularity, literary biography is under attack from subversive interlopers," he writes, and ticks off a literary enemies list of academic critics, mainstream book reviewers and "interpretive" biographers who scorn careful research while favoring their own pet theories and interpretations. In "Melville Biography," he wants to turn the tables on "agenda-driven reviewers" and "recidivist critics" who have written negatively about his own books or who, he believes, have recklessly distorted Melville's life and work. Unusually, he names names critics like Edmund Wilson, James Wood and Andrew Delbanco and many other prominent intellectuals come in for rough treatment. . . .

The Melville of theorists and literary critics, Mr. Parker suggests, is an "amputated manikin," "a condensed version" primarily a high-minded writer of literary prose, and not the workaday writer whom Mr. Parker presents. . . . 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.

The point of this particular disagreement becomes clear when Mr. Parker notes that, in Melville: His World and Work (2005), Mr. Delbanco described Melville as "the randy young globe-trotter up in the attic reliving his escapades." Imagine Mr. Parker's chagrin when he saw Mr. Delbanco's words referring to the novelist as bait for the "nineteenth-century equivalent of a rock star's groupies"! He has a right to wonder: "Is there a technical term in rhetoric, poetics, or jurisprudence for what Delbanco has achieved here in the reuse of material, mine and his?"

Such subtle pilfering, indeed, is all too characteristic of the high-toned critics writing for the major book-reviewing publications. They are paid to review a biography and instead raid the text in order to show off their knowledge (gained from the very book under review), adding some interpretive flourish and later republishing the agglomeration in their own books. A new biography is always welcome, but too often the popular press pays attention only to the new, and Mr. Parker clearly feels that authors who write "interpretive biographies" and lean on his scholarship are in some way passing his work off as their own.

Mr. Parker has a word for the mentality of such men: archivophobic. "We have entered a period when very few academics do archival research," he writes. They hardly ever venture in the stacks and almost never explore the wider world. . . . The contemporary aversion to research is bitterly ironic because it is easier to do than ever before. The digitization of old documents and proliferation of scholarly databases has revolutionized the way scholars can pursue a paper trail, providing virtually instant access to materials from across the world. Mr. Parker himself revels in the new online world, in the new Melville facts to be gleaned from newly available newspaper archives, for instance. He takes great enjoyment in drawing a contrast between the ephemera produced by prominent dilettantes and the lasting contributions of diligent but barely known literary bloggers "divine amateurs" who have made important discoveries of Melville sources. One blogger, Nicole Perrin, even discovered, through her "marathon reading of Melville," a source for a passage in the author's book-length poem "Clarel" a source that Melville scholars had never considered.

Digging in the archives, Mr. Parker believes, is the only method for turning up new discoveries about important figures like Melville. The pleasures of the text will always make an exclusive appeal to academic and literary critics who prefer their literature pure. . . . Melville Biography is a superb contribution to a fledgling field: the study of the writing of literary lives. To a young academic with even the faintest interest in biography, Mr. Parker's book may come as a revelation, as well as a horrifying insight into the way biographers and biography have been abused. It should also be a call to arms, although I doubt that in the tenure-bound, cliquish world of the academy many will follow Hershel Parker into the breach.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography. His most recent biography is "American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath." The article can be read here. 

Parker points out that on January 16 Rollyson in the blog of Biographers International Organization gave a succinct preview of the long review just quoted from: "Reading Hershel Parker's Melville biography. I don't mean his biography of Melville but his book about writing the Melville biography. He is concerned, though, with much more than Melville. He is really writing a fascinating study of biography as a genre and why it has incurred so much hostility." Parker likes this short comment very much. His book, he says, is indeed a study of biography as a genre. He confesses a fondness for his endnotes, not discussed in the Wall Street Journal review, for they constitute a seminar in which dozens of biographers, British and American, discuss problems in biography which Parker has identified in his own work on Melville biography. Parker hopes the book in the long run will be used by people interested in the genre of biography as well as by people primarily interested in Herman Melville. The first ten comments in Amazon.com, he notes, are remarkably favorable. Two signed comments are by authors of books on Sam Peckinpah--David Weddle, the writer for Battlestar Galactica and other TV series, and Paul Seydor, the editor of Tin Cup and other movies. Still despairing of academia, Parker rejoices in such readers! And he insists that Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is indeed written with "a rare combination of humor and passion," just as the New Yorker blog said.