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Charles Olson and the Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick.

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Melville scholars," writes Dennis Berthold, "widely regard Olson as eccentric." (1) I do not intend to dispute that judgment, but the matter has gone beyond eccentricity. In 1988 complaints about Olson's behavior graduated from colloquial myth into the annals of the discipline through the editorial notes of the Northwestern-Newberry (NN) edition of Moby-Dick. I will take up in series the three misdemeanors alleged against him there, hoping to show that Olson is not such an easy mark as he might appear to be.

(i)

The first complaint concerns a conversation that Olson and Howard Vincent had when they first met in late August 1945. Olson was completing Call Me Ishmael (published 1947), and Vincent had still four years to go on his The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick. As the editors of the NN Moby-Dick put it, Vincent "unwarily" divulged information that he would have been better off keeping to himself, that is, "the name (Perc S. Brown) of the owner of Melville's copy of Owen Chase's Narrative with bound-in leaves of Melville's manuscript memoranda about the Essex": "Engaged now in refashioning his earlier manuscript study of Melville, Olson with no ado and with no apparent lucubrations scooped Vincent. Calling on the collector, he obtained Melville's memoranda and rushed into print with them in his elliptical Call Me Ishmael" (NN MD, 652).

The ethical question here is whether or not Olson could, without blame, publish the Owen Chase notes before Vincent. To some extent the answer depends on whether or not Vincent registered his claim. The evidence suggests he did not. Responding with enthusiasm to their meeting, Vincent wrote Olson on 16 September 1945 (in a letter now at the University of Connecticut Library): "Too bad you didn't see the Essex notes. I am writing to Perc Brown today asking him to hurry up on those photostats, and maybe that will get results. As soon as I get them I will copy them and then send them on to you for examination, unless by that time you have inspected the original." These comments (and Vincent says no more on this topic in the letter) indicate an urgency to have Olson see the Owen Chase material and do not impose any restriction on his use of it.

Perhaps the editors of the NN Moby-Dick felt that any scholar would have refrained, recognizing Vincent's deserving priority. But it is obvious, once the full history is considered, that if anybody deserved first go at the Essex notes it was Olson. He had, as he told Jay Leyda, "been hunting the book since 1933!" (2) He had it listed in the bibliography of his M.A. thesis, "The Growth of Herman Melville, Prose Writer and Poetic Thinker" (Wesleyan University, 1933), where he mentions Melville's annotations on the basis of an auction catalogue....

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