Letter to the Conference Organizers, from Walter Bezanson and Gail Coffler

Letter to the Conference Organizers, from Walter Bezanson and Gail Coffler [No conference focused on Melville’s Clarel could have gone forward without numerous references to Walter Bezanson’s ground-breaking work in editing the poem and making it fully accessible to twentieth-century readers. Attendees evoked Bezanson’s name at every opportunity. Old friends missed him and reminisced affectionately. At Jericho we toasted him on the occasion of his ninety-seventh birthday. Thinking ahead, Timothy Marr had written to Walter and his wife Gail before the conference and read this reply at our festive gathering.] T hank you for your kind and generous emails about the Jerusalem conference and my 97th birthday. In reply I cite two or three “Melville moments” from past years. I am still grateful for the privilege offered to Yale graduate students of American literature in 1937. It was a turning point in the re-discovery of Melville and his works. Merton Sealts, Harry Hayford, and I, after sharing a seminar, became co-conspirators to rescue Herman for posterity. Then Stanley Williams, our mentor, called me into his study one day and said, “Walter, I have a great topic for your dissertation. How would you like to work on— Cooper’s Sea Tales? There’s room for a good book there.” I thanked him, but clung to the Melville conspiracy. As for Cooper? “I’d prefer not to,” I told him. For I had already discovered that Melville in his late years was reported to have written the longest poem in American literature, and that it was still unavailable to an audience, unread, and declared un-readable. Melville, an unreadable poet? What a challenge! In all innocence, I bet a Ph.D. that I could read, and perhaps rescue, Clarel, a Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land; 2 vols. 1876—if I could find a copy. Early in 1943 I received a letter addressed to Lieutenant Walter Bezanson , USNR. That letter was my graduation ceremony from Yale, for I had just finished my dissertation on Clarel. Apparently Clarel was readable, and I had won the bet with myself to prove it. I often thought about Melville when I was in the Pacific, his Pacific. My ship, the aircraft carrier Intrepid, was nine times the size of the Acushnet. The sea is forever formidable to “baby man,” as Herman said, and as I discovered C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 77 W A L T E R when the Intrepid got caught in a three-day typhoon in the China Sea, I was grateful to Ishmael for his chapter on the Hyena Laugh as a way to survive. My edition of Clarel was not published until 1959. Hendricks House was having troubles. Finally they sent me a single book, enclosing a bill for my own copy! Nor did I ever receive a dollar from them. The New York Times refused to review its own copy. No matter. Clarel had been rescued from oblivion. And many fine articles and books have been written on the “unreadable poem, Clarel” since then. My introduction and Notes have been reprinted without change in the Northwestern-Newberry edition, for which no money came, along with no mention on the cover, but at least this time they did not bill me for my own copy. The best of all my “Melville moments” came at the Melville Society meeting in New Orleans. It was December, 1988 [Note from Gail: Walter was then the incoming President of the Melville Society, the third time that honor was conferred on him]. At the start of that meeting, I was sad, for my second wife, Jean, had died earlier that year. But after the meeting, everything changed when I met a wonderful younger Melville professor, Dr. Gail Coffler. She had made important discoveries about Billy Budd, she was interested in Melville’s allusions to the classics and to religion, and she could quote...