Report: Melville Society-Bezanson Archive Fellowship 2022

Abstract

Report:Melville Society-Bezanson Archive Fellowship 2022 Christopher Rice Click for larger view View full resolution Christopher Rice in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, May 2022. Photo courtesy of Christopher Rice. [End Page 127] When Bob Wallace first wrote to me about visiting the Melville Society Archive in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, it was not easy to foresee it being more than two years before I might set foot inside. A few (too many) catastrophes later, and it became no simple feat to envision the same academic purpose I once had amongst the reverberations of much larger events. Suddenly the archive seemed worlds away across a border which was now mostly sealed shut—at least for the purposes of would-be literary scholars. Soon, I found myself retaining the ambiguous honour of being the longest-standing Bezanson fellow: an honorific of belatedness which I happily wear with pride. I was more than ready to go in spring 2022. With final grades and dissertation work freshly submitted that morning, I hopped in a rental car and made the drive down from Montreal, through the lush, exhilarating old roads of Vermont, towards my New Bedford lodgings, which sat directly across from the "Sawmill" Acushnet River reserve. Here I often returned in the early evenings away, enjoying the trails that threaded through restored wetlands, perhaps even experiencing once or twice something like that temporary "all" feeling on days otherwise spent poring over fragments, maxing out my time in the reading room. I had come (I recalled) to make use of the Melville Society Archive's resources on Clarel and Melville's development as a poet. By the time travel was permitted, I arrived in the archive especially interested in how certain modal patterns or tendencies I had been tracing in Mardi might help illuminate the structure of Clarel. I thought looking at some of the editions of poetry that Melville engaged with during his poetic development could clarify my thinking about the poem's composition and structure. Yet I also came under no illusions; having read many of the previous fellows' reports, the common, nearly gothic, experience of the archive seemed to involve this: that whatever one went in for, the archive had other plans. I have my own theory regarding this apparently recurring phenomenon, since it remains unclear whether the space itself exerts this unconscious effect on all who fall within its orbit, or whether Melvilleans as a class possess some unique propensity that thwarts the pursuit of any single-minded endeavor in the face of such vast, rich resources—possibly, however, some Bezanson fellows are just easily distracted. On my first morning in the archive, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards arrived to greet me. She explained the collection in great detail, got me oriented without delay, and what's more, made me feel incredibly welcome. I was certainly made to feel more welcome than I deserved for which I remain extremely grateful. We chatted away in the stacks as I loaded up the trolley with anything and [End Page 128] everything that happened to catch my eye. The resultant haul looked more like bottom trawling than angling, but its bulk was visibly composed of heavy boxes packed with Walter Bezanson's papers, with some of Jay Leyda's thrown in, too. Bezanson's description of the Leyda papers, which he had donated to the archive, is fairly well-known and quite alluring: he describes receiving them at a time when Leyda and his wife Si-Lan Chen appeared to have no other "place" but the "beat up car in which they arrived," referring to the collection of documents as "merely a fragment from his incredibly productive and slightly mysterious life" (Jay Leyda Papers Finding Aid 1). As I sifted through the notes and letters contained in these boxes, I detected at once the energy and vitality instilled throughout Leyda's endeavour. He was constantly in motion, flitting between places and jotting down stray hunches on the back of correspondence as he persistently pursued an unruly array of creative projects that set off in disparate directions. In the midst of so much motion, Leyda steadily, and meticulously, sought out traces of Melville...