Ephemeral Firmament

The Boxes in the Basement

I've already gotten all sentimental here once about old, impeccably-dressed nonfiction writers and their work habits, back when Robert Caro and his biographical outlines pinned neatly to the wall just about made me cry. Now let's turn to Gay Talese. I came to Talese a little second-hand: my dear friend Brad has been obsessed with him forever (almost as obsessed as he is by Robert Evans). And then I became intrigued too by the idea of Talese, partly as a once-towering figure who's become a bit forgotten, as his books haven't remained as well-read as those of his New Journalist peers like Wolfe, Capote, and Mailer; partly as I caught on to some of those oddball stories that have floated around about him for years, about his habit of dressing up in a suit to go down to his basement office to work every day (even as he didn't publish a new book for almost fifteen years), about his long-lived it-works-for-us marriage with Nan Talese, about his very participatory research for his sex book, Thy Neighbor's Wife; and partly thanks to his visit to the Amazon offices, which must have been around the time A Writer's Life came out in 2006, although I would have thought it was a little later. (If I took notes like Talese, I'd know.) We learned he had arrived when someone said, "There's a well-dressed older man out by the elevators," and I'm not sure what he thought of us, a group of slackishly dressed youngsters sitting with him on stools around the table in the break room, but he curiously went around the table asking us about ourselves and taking notes (for what?!) on his trademark shirt boards. (And, I'm vain enough to mention, he was impressed that I knew who Edward Bennett Williams was. I have no memory of how Edward Bennett Williams came up in the conversation.) Through all of these stories there's an element of eccentricity and even absent-mindedness in his character that might be what you'd expect from a physicist, say, but not a journalist, especially one who, by the evidence on the page, is as aggressive, worldly, ambitious, and brilliantly observant as they come.

So I'm still intrigued, and although in my usual magpie grazing style I've read as much about him as by him and haven't read more than a little of any of his big books, I was happy that I did get two Talese stories into A Reader's Book of Days, one on The Neighbor's Wife and one from his best-known magazine piece, perhaps the ur-text of the New Journalism, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold."

Which is all a preamble to my real purposes for posting today, which are to share the photo above and to point you to its source. The photo is of Talese in his famous basement, wearing only two pieces of his famous three-piece suit. It's not quite how I'd imagined that space (I think I'd pictured wood paneling), but I'm happy to have this image replace the one in my head, especially those stacks of archival boxes on the left! As Talese has said, he's kept every note he's ever taken, and this must be where they--or at least some of them--are. (Is my name on a shirt-board in there somewhere? I don't even care!). If this were a Google Maps street view, that's where I'd navigate, especially to examine all those collaged images that he appears to have taped to the outsides of the boxes. Oh, there's something so modest about that sort of hand-crafted obsessiveness! Is "modest" the right word? Not quite: it's a paradoxical combination of selfless curiosity and the kind of hoarder's agglomeration that makes a kind of fortress around the self. Of course, when you also make great books out of what you collect, it's not hoarding--or it's not just hoarding.

And speaking of archives, the photo comes from a wonderful new addition to them: an annotated online edition of "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," published as part of the Nieman Foundation's Annotation Tuesday series, which are like DVD commentary tracks for feature journalism. Elon Green asked Talese questions about the story he had written a half-century before, and Talese remembered nearly everything: who he had access to, how he got access, why he chose a certain element and told it in a certain way. It's worth it just to read the Sinatra piece, again or for the first time, but it's also worth it for the background Talese provides, and for his feisty, confident voice. Here's a passage, about a series of quotes he dropped, without connection or explanation, into the middle of the narrative:

“He is better than anybody else, or at least they think he is, and he has to live up to it.” –Nancy Sinatra, Jr.

“He is calm on the outside — inwardly a million things are happening to him.” –Dick Bakalyan

“He has an insatiable desire to live every moment to its fullest because, I guess, he feels that right around the corner is extinction.” –Brad Dexter

“All I ever got out of any of my marriages was the two years Artie Shaw financed on an analyst’s couch.” –Ava Gardner

“We weren’t mother and son — we were buddies.” –Dolly Sinatra

“I’m for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel.” — Frank Sinatra <What is the narrative purpose of these quotes?/eg <Some of those quotes I thought were very interesting, and belonged in this piece somewhere. The most succinct, and I thought interesting, way to do it would be to produce these quotes — many of them contradictory — in the same place, without having to explain them, to say, “On the other hand, Ava Gardner says. … On the other hand, Frank Sinatra’s mother said…” This is part of my whole style. For example, I did this in “The Ethics of Frank Costello.”/gt<It’s interesting…/eg <It’s a different way of breaking away from formulaic journalism. I never liked “New Journalism” because I never thought it was new journalism. It was writing short stories with real names. But it’s not very interesting to put it that way./gt<Right./eg <When you choose not to attribute Zolotow, or these quotes, it is a literary device which predicates the most important thing is form. It’s not as important as fact, but form and fact break the barrier between nonfiction and fiction as a method of communication. If you are asked, “Where did you get this? Where did you get that?”, which is what you’re doing, you can say this is where I got this information. “Why didn’t you quote it?” Because I didn’t want to quote it. Because if I had quoted it I would be losing the point of having this form, the uninterrupted voice of the writer. The difference between writing and reporting is voice. Writers, whether Philip Roth in fiction or Tom Wolfe or Halberstam or Breslin or John McPhee or me or whoever in nonfiction, the voice is very important. And there are times when you cannot interrupt the voice if you have it. It carries an atmosphere./gt <By having the quotes stand alone, aren’t you ceding the voice?/eg <It’s Dos Passos! It’s out of Dos Passos./gt

I love that last line.

 

The Paymaster's Counterfoil

I have an idle dream that you could pull any book off a library shelf and from it unravel an endless string of cultural connections that would eventually thread through the entire library. I think that's both true and not true: every book may in some way lead to every other, but not every book makes you want to start following the thread where it goes. But the other day (actually it was months ago, when I was too busy to even think of opening a TypePad window), when I took a break from my labors and pulled out the first book I noticed from the shelf closest to my favorite reading room, I was rewarded in just the way I'd hoped. Yesterday (after much more effort--I couldn't remember the title, so I opened a dozen or two other books on those shelves whose lack of distinction, compared to the memory of what I was looking for, only confirmed the luck of my original find) I tracked down the book again.

The shelves--DT 934 for the LC aficionados out there--held books on the Boer wars (I had forgotten there were two), and the one I opened (in part because of its evocatively colonial title, with its implicit patriotism and its reference to an outdated place name that must have once been familiar to any reader in the Commonwealth) was The Relief of Mafeking, by someone named Filson Young. The first part is called "England in the Time of War," and the first chapter is called "How the Reserves Came Up," and here is its first paragraph:

From a seat in the paymaster's office of the depôt barracks at Bury one afternoon in November, 1899, I could look either into the barrack yard or out along the Bolton Road. A four-wheeler clove its way through the crowd surrounding the gates, and the sentries presented arms to it. It contained my friend, the paymaster, who presently came upstairs carrying a bag in which were several hundred pounds sterling--the real sinews of war. This was the man whose business it was to call up the Reservists, and he had a very simple way of doing it. He had several books containing large forms divided by perforation into four parts. The first was a counterfoil on which was written the Reservist's name and the date of posting the order; the second was a railway warrant requesting the railway company to furnish him with a ticket available by the most direct route from his place of residence to the depôt; the third was the order requiring him to present himself at the barracks on or before a certain date; and the fourth was a money-order for three shillings, officially called an advance, but virtually a present from a considerate Government. On the 11th of the month the paymaster at Bury had signed about six hundred of these notices, and had seen them posted; on Sunday and Monday they had begun to fall like bombs on the breakfast tables of prosperous civilians all over the country; and soon the pieces of blue paper had made a sad disturbance in several hundreds of cottage homes, and added several hundred men to the strength of the 2nd Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. The business of the pay office, or at least my friend's part of it--a few subalterns rushing up in a hurry to get money for their various companies; eighty pounds for A, a hundred pounds for D, and so on--was soon over, and then he told me something of how the Reserve system works.

Is it me, or is that a thrilling opening to a book? In part because it's so patiently, modestly unthrilling an opening to a book that promises eventual combat drama. Only a confident storyteller could start so small. But there are so many other skillful details. The immediate placing of the speaker's perspective, in that office chair, while retaining a mystery of who he is. (Is he in the military himself? What is his friendship with the paymaster?) The way the deliberately mundane details are cut every so often by a more writerly, but fully justified, flourish: the four-wheeler that "clove" through the crowd, the call-up notices that "fall like bombs" on breakfast tables. And the phrase that really told me I was in the hands of a sharp and knowing narrator: "the real sinews of war."

But the section I found most thrilling--and this really may just be me--was the methodical explanation of the paymaster's notice book: the perforation of each page into four parts; the beautiful word "counterfoil," whose meaning I'm still not quite sure of; and the pages' separate, detachable elements--the railway voucher, the reporting date, and the money-order--that evoke both the hundreds of individual journeys that will bring the battalion together and the bureaucratic ingenuity that has make that complex undertaking systematic (and almost affectionate, as the "present from a considerate Government" implies, although the door is open that the comment could be ironic). These are the kinds of details that are so exact and true-sounding they could only come from close observation (though in fact they are just the sort of details I love making up in fiction).

It's really an opening that would do John McPhee proud. Does the rest of the book fulfill this early promise? I've hardly read further enough to judge, although I suspect the colonialist blinders will doom the enterprise to some extent. I'm also curious if the author can maintain that placidly discerning eye when his scenes become more conventionally dramatic.

But who is the author anyway? My impression when I first picked up the book (I think from that "my friend, the paymaster") was that this was a soldier's memoir, but this time I took the trouble to look up "Filson Young" and found he was a journalist with a fairly lengthy Wikipedia entry (and I also found an online biography, written by Young's grand-nephew and published by his step-grandson, that I haven't had time to look into further). Finding out he was a pro made the skill of his opening seem a little less remarkable, but even a pro should be proud of that paragraph.

There are many threads you could begin to unravel from this book--the words "Boer War" alone evoke a century and a half's worth of terrible history--but Filson himself is also a promising place to begin. A war correspondent at twenty-four in the era of adventurous wunderkinds like Stephen Crane and John Reed, he had published a novel on spiritualism called A Psychic Vigil under the pseudonym "X. Ray" but this was the first book of many written under his own name. In the coming years, in Wikipedia's words, "to make a career in publishing he would write continually on his many enthusiasms," which included motorcars and airplanes, travel, Wagnerian opera, and, apparently, prostitution. And he's best known for having publishing Titanic, the first book on the disaster, just thirty-seven days after the ship went down. (By the way, of the many publishers now offering versions of that out-of-copyright book on Amazon, one has enterprisingly renamed it Downton Abbey: The Sinking of the Titanic.)

But my favorite of Young's claims to fame is his cameo in Richard Ellmann's James Joyce: he turns out to be the reader for the publisher Grant Richards who first approved of Dubliners in 1905. It took almost a decade until Richards, after a series of censorship battles with printers, finally published Joyce's stories, and by then, as Ellmann reports without further explanation, Young was unavailable to write an introduction to the book, as Richards would have liked. That's all Ellmann has to say about him, but, well, once your thread has led to James Joyce, there's hardly anywhere you can't go after that.

From the Archives: The Likes and Dislikes of Anthony Trollope

One of the tiny, human pleasures of the archive laborer is a lively index, a phrase whose usual status as an oxymoron hints at the joy that finding a rare one prepared with some wit can evoke in the middle of a day at your desk. (For an excellent recent example, you can turn to Ken Jennings's Maphead, which includes such just-wanted-to-make-sure-you-were-paying-attention entries as "Benson, oddly terrifying episode of, 135," "Macedonia, Greece calling 'dibsies' on, 72," and "Jennings, Ken, potentially mistaken for pedophile, 200.")

Some subjects demand such entries, and in Richard Mullen's 1990 biography, Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World, it's not clear whether Mullen is having fun with some of his subentries under "Trollope, Anthony," or was just conscientiously cataloging his subject. But two sections in particular have a cumulative poetry and comedy that I thought it would be worth sharing here. They almost make a biography of their own, and I admire a biographer who can keep such close track of his subject's crucial and character-revealing preferences, and a subject who held so many strong opinions. You get a sense that he may have enjoyed some of his dislikes as much as his likes. (Note: I've edited somewhat for punchiness, but not much.)

Likes: art, 30; Titian, 289; good butter, 224; cigars, 128, 182, 335, 337, 426, 428, 473, 554, 605, 640; cities, 248, 390; coffee, 314-15, 446, 473; croquet, 425-6; dancing, 57-8, 134; forests, 179; trees, particularly oak and pine, 602-3; fruit, 40, 399-400, 425; gardens, 349, 426, 634-5; glee-singing, 92, 498; Ireland & the Irish, 67, 114, 120, 134, 202, 204, 265, 283; Irish humour, 230; kissing, 41, 135-6; Latin, 72-3; long novels, 169; mountains, 123, 285, 290, 332-3, 337, 347, 391; mutton, 16, 36, 215, 440; expensive notepaper, 427-8; picnics, 287; poetry, 100; swimming, 37, 67, 129, 335, 389, 443; tea, 100, 242, 449, 620; theatre, 30, 222; vegetables, 436; walking, 92, 123, 247, 690; whist, 588-9; wine, 436-7, 649, Chateau Leoville (1864) his favorite, 437; Australian wine, 541; South African wine, 622

Dislikes: advertising, 171-2, 632; British railway sandwiches, 525; Calvinism, 104; continental duvets, 602; French hats, 442; "Gladstone" claret, 437; lust, 134; Madeira wine, 399; mail coaches, 84, 546; military, 406, 627; moving house, 349-50; mourning, excessive, 427, 432, 708; Parliamentary Committees, 37, 316-17; sermons, 32, 269-70; service à la Russe, 438-40; snobbery, 617; sombre dress of Victorian men, 122, 345; spiritualism, 111; stamp collecting, 431; statistics, 397, 539; Utopian "philanthropists," 208, 324, 486; opponents of fox-hunting, 121-2. For his political dislikes, see Disraeli; Peel; Napoleon III.

I should add one other note from another Trollope biography I consulted. He strongly disliked crinolines.

From the Archives: The Melville Log, Pt. 2

I was already planning a followup to Monday's Melville Log post, with a quotation I alluded to there, but then I had the pleasure of receiving a short comment to the post from Professor Hershel Parker himself (you can't speak without being heard in the age of the Google Alert), who took my comparison of him to the mad whale-hunter with good humor and passed on a link to a history on his blog of the Log and its reception (and expansion) that to me is fascinating and dramatic, both for its further sketching in of the background of Leyda's work and for its thumbnail (but very personal) history of American literary criticism in the past 50 years. For the latter I urge you to turn to the full post--it's a passionate argument for the attention to biography and history that's been lost in that time, which, for someone who spent his graduate-school years in the age of "historicism" without ever really learning how to do history (no doubt my fault as well as the age's), hit home.

And for the former, here's a glimpse of the conditions of the Log's creation, which just adds to the weight of its documentation:

The Log in fact had to be highly selective not only because of the limits of space but simply because Leyda typically did the excerpting in uncomfortable, constraining circumstances. Living below the edge of poverty, staying in YMCAs or cadging rooms from acquaintances or their friends, he worked on the fly, unable to stay long enough in New York City to exhaust the archives in the New York Public Library, for instance.

Somebody needs to do a Leyda Log! Or write a biography of that singular man. I love Parker's story of his own embarkation into the archives, carrying his copies of the Log into the New York Public Library to follow its leads, just as Leyda had hoped. There's a lot more in the post, including Parker's skepticism of Leyda's "silver platter" method of biography (which, as noted last time, has a lot to do with Eisenstein's montage), which allows readers to, as it were, write their own biographies from his material, versus Parker's argument for a stronger biographical hand. (The photo above, also borrowed from Parker's blog, is of Leyda and Parker, and must be quite late in Leyda's life. UPDATE: And the photo to the left, contributed by Parker (see comments below), is of Leyda reading a review of Moby-Dick that Parker had unearthed in the Troy Public Library.)

But in the spirit of the archives, finally, here is the primary material I originally meant to pass along. It's from a letter from John Hoadley to George Boutwell on January 9, 1873, concerning the position by which Melville supported his family as the works of his decade of furious creation were forgotten. Who are Hoadley and Boutwell? The first volume of the Log, which I don't have at hand, has the helpful biographical notes, but Hoadley was Melville's brother-in-law, with whom he apparently was on close terms with, and Boutwell was the Secretary of the Treasury and therefore Melville's ultimate boss (short of President Grant).

There is one person in the employment of the Revenue Service, in whom I take so deep an interest, that I venture a second time to write you about him;--not to solicit promotion, a favor, or indulgence of any sort,--but to ask you, if you can, to do or say anything in the proper quarter of his modest, hard-earned salary, as deputy inspector of the Customs in the City of New York--Herman Melville. --Proud, shy, sensitively honorable,--he had much to overcome, and has much to endure; but he strives earnestly to so perform his duties as to make the slightest censure, reprimand, or even reminder,--impossible from any superior-- Surrounded by low venality, he puts it all quietly aside,--quietly declining offers of money for special services,--quietly returning money which has been thrust into his pockets behind his back, avoiding offence alike to the corrupting merchants and their clerks and runners, who think that all men can be bought, and to the corrupt swarms who shamelessly seek their price;--quietly, steadfastly doing his duty, and happy in retaining his own self-respect--

    By the rules of any conceivable "civil service," he must be secure against removal.--Advancement or promotion he does not seek,--nor would his friends seek it for him.--The pittance he receives ekes out his slender income and that of his wife, (who is a daughter of the late Lemuel Shaw, C.J. of Mass--) and affords him the quiet, simple livelihood he values--The loss of $5000.--by the Boston fire, carrying with it an income of $500.--part of the small property left her by her Father, making Mrs. Melville additionally solicitous that Mr. Melville should retain his place--I most earnestly wish that representations might be made in the proper quarter so that in the event of any general change in the Custom House in New York, Mr. Melville might find a sheltering arm thrown over him.--Pardon me: my sincere feeling must be my excuse...

It's a moving letter, in its picture both of the aging Melville and of his brother-in-law's care for him, that can largely speak for itself, but I just want to note two things: the obvious echoes of Bartleby, who Melville had created 20 years before, although this Melville is not merely a sayer of "No," but one whose "No"s are more active attempts to do good; and the fact that Hoadley sees no necessity to mention Melville's literary work, which in earlier years, when he was better known, was the highlight of his applications for such sinecures. Now it seems of no import; he's just an honorable worker with family responsibilities who should be allowed to go on doing his work.

UPDATE: Professor Parker's Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative, with much more about Jay Leyda and many others, no doubt, is due out in January, as mentioned in the comments below, and the cover, while not the work of Maurice Sendak like the two volumes of his main biography, is indeed striking:

From the Archives: The Melville Log

Two of my favorite (and most useful) discoveries in the library stacks lately have been a pair of works by Jay Leyda, The Melville Log and The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. There are plenty of biographical chronologies available that list the activities of major writers more or less day by day, but they are pretty soulless. Leyda's books are anything but. They are immense books (each two large volumes), clearly constructed out of love and obsession, that flesh out these two strange careers with generous quotations from letters, journals, reviews, and other contemporary documents, not only from the writers themselves, but from seemingly everyone in their orbit. If you want to know Melville's recorded expenses for his 1858 lecture tour (including charges for ale, a cigar, and the Police Gazette), they are in the Log. If you want to read a letter between two administrators asking that he be protected from dismissal from his position as a Customs inspector, that's there too. But there's little of Leyda. Both books read like thorough biographies in which all signs of the biographer have disappeared, except those of his industry.

I had thought of Leyda mainly as a film scholar, and indeed that is what he was best known for (what other scholarly book on Melville would carry this dedication: "This book was begun as a birthday present for my teacher, Sergei Eisenstein"?). But his labors on Melville and Dickinson can only have been matched by a few. A rare autobiographical hint at his work on the Log comes at the very end, in a bibliographical note called "The Endless Study," which by listing the sources Leyda did not consult, paints a fairly extraordinary portrait of all those he did. It's so hilariously thorough (and I think knowingly so) that I'm tempted to quote it in full here. We'll see how my typing stamina holds up:

When brought together, the bibliography intended for this book added too many pages to an already cumbersome work. I must be content to say that, to the best of my knowledge, all materials in print relevant to Melville were consulted, though my reading of criticisms printed since his death may have been less thorough. Printed materials quoted in the text are identified there, with further information, when necessary, given in the locations of textual sources.

    It seemed better to use this space for a listing of my sins of omission, numerous though they may be. These are the things I am conscious of having left undone--the errands I should have run, the unfollowed hints, the pursuits still waiting for a hunter. Although the Log offers a maximum number of clues for further investigation, there are certainly important clues and materials left behind, unnoticed by me, in every collection searched, whether public (such as the bottomless riches of the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection) or such concentrated private collections as the whaling libraries of Paul C. Nicholson and M.M. Armstrong. Here are some of the waiting jobs:

    There is more to be learned about the childhood through the papers of early family friends, doctors, ministers, teachers, and business associates of Allan Melvill, so it would have been very worthwhile to look for the descendants of Caroline Yates Taylor, Daniel P. Parker, Joseph Greenleaf, and others mentioned in those years. (Though the family of the Rev'd Robert Swan does not now live in Pittenweem, it should be somewhere in Scotland.)

    Whole branches of the family were left untraced, merely through my discouragement with the known destruction of family papers. Where are the papers of the Peebles? Van Schaicks? Of the D'Wolfs? And some relatives have been left total mysteries--for example, cousin Doolittle, the Lenox expressman. A main hope in outlining the family tree of the Melvills, Gansevoorts, and Shaws (among the biographical sketches) is that this may lead to other relevant archives.

    The newspapers of each port touched by one of M's ships should have been examined for the period while the Acushnet, the United States, the Cortes, etc., were in port. A knowledge of Spanish would have encouraged this, perhaps.

    Despite his many names and peculiar talents, the career of John B. Troy before and after Tahiti should be traceable.

    No real search was made for Franklin D. Roosevelt's trunk of ships' logs--reported missing on 30 July 1947 by the Director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park.

    Luther Fox of Rensselaerville, N.Y., was too close to a Melville neighborhood to be ignored either before or after Honolulu. If Fox is found to have worked on an Erie Canal boat, Steelkilt will have been located.

    Where are the papers and journals of M's messmates and traveling companions--of Hubbard, Cunningham, Mr & Miss Rousse? Where are the descendants of Herman Melville Greene and Herman Melville Russ?

    I left two places of prime importance unvisited and unsearched: Galena and Gansevoort. And I did not go to England. And the promises of East Hampton, Long Island, were never tested.

    Certain newspapers were not carefully examined, even such promising ones as Cramer's Daily Wisconsin; and vital years of the Berkshire Eagle, now missing from the office file, remain unfound and uninspected.

    There is more published work by M than has been identified--there is surely more in The Albany Microscope, and there are too many later suggestions (essays of the Mardi period, the excursion to West Point, perhaps even "Agatha") to ignore this probability.

    The papers of those supporters of M (outside the Duyckinck circle), such as Willis and Curtis, should have been more persistently sought, along with the papers of friends on the edge of literature, such as Doctors Lockwood and Gardner. And it seems unthinkable that no more remains to be discovered about the life and ideas of E.J.M. Fly, E.C. Hine, Col. Rankin, Alexander Bradford, William E. Cramer, Dr Oscar De Wolf.

    More hard work should have gone into the identification of M's reviewers, both friendly and unfriendly, to see what lies behind their anonymity, and the personal papers of identified reviewers (such as Briggs, Bourne, Ripley, Jones) should have been located and examined for further information.

    With the voyages of Thomas Melville occurring during M's first creative years, all his ships & experiences should be more fully investigated, as a source possibly drawn on by his brother.

    It is merely another symptom of incompleteness that the only foreign language comments on M should be from France, a country that did not (as far as it is known) publish his works during the author's lifetime, while the reviews in those countries that did publish translations have not been located--though they certainly exist. Many contemporary translations may remain to be discovered.

    I have left the "Powell Papers" as much a mystery as I found them; the second volume of his Living Authors of America, announced by Stringer & Townsend for publication in 1850, with a chapter on Melville, could not have vanished so totally. Newspaper serial publication is a probability.

    The trickle through the autograph market of M's letters to his American publishers and editors indicates the chance that a fuller picture of his relations with Wiley & Putnam, Harper's, etc., is yet to be uncovered.

    Despite the almost accidental finds of reprintings (as far scattered as Buffalo and Salem) of M's anonymous periodical writing, no systematic search of all American newspapers was made.

    I did not employ a maximum effort to examine the Special Collections of Columbia University for Melville references.

    With the number of Melville's friends and relatives whose lives ended at the Bloomingdale and other asylums, the archives of those institutions should have been examined--correspondence, visitor records, case histories--if any of this material has been preserved.

    A conspicuous failure: my inability to trace the originals of those Melville letters to Hawthorne that we are still obliged to use through the published transcripts by Hawthorne's children.

    Who wrote and syndicated "The Career of Mocha Dick" (copyright 1892)? Is it a fake?

    The movements of Stanwix Melville, especially in California, were not too secret to be traced; the archives of the hospital in which he died were not destroyed in the San Francisco fire of 1906.

    Hudson, Loti, Conrad--they were certainly touched off by a spark of Herman Melville, but when and how, exactly?

    Perhaps this book should have been more rightly named--Melville: The Endless Study.

That is indeed the whole thing! And after typing it I searched a little further about the book and found, unsurprisingly, that many others have appreciated Leyda's work before me. To read more, see posts by Dan Visel (the source of the page spread image above) and John Latta, both of whom point out that the book itself is organized according to the philosophy of Eisenstein's beloved cinematic montage: placing things next to each other so that bridges across them might be built. And I also came across the blog of Hershel Parker, Melville's indefatigable biographer, whose two-volume opus (with wonderful cover illustrations by Sendak!) I just happened to purchase at a library sale; about the blog, I can only say: I cannot be the first person to compare Parker to Captain Ahab.