Dragooned: Ghostwriting

Inspired by recent encounters with Hawthorne, in particular by their heady and hearty barn-talk that March, Melville might have found a way to get the gist of their stimulating conversations into print. Echoes of Melville’s letters in the opening installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” lead me to suspect it may be haunted by Hawthorne. At any rate, coincidence or no, the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” talks to the reader like Melville talked in letters to Hawthorne. Here’s one example from the first of Melville’s Agatha letters to Hawthorne dated August 13, 1852.24
In this example, wording and structure of the Captain’s pledge to do most of the talking for his singular reader match the “and if / why I” construction in Melville's 1852 letter to Hawthorne (emphasis mine):
“… and if you are absolutely dumb, why I will sometimes answer for you.”
“And if I thought I could do it well as you, why, I should not let you have it.”
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84865/page/n197/mode/2up
Introducing likely topics of conversation, the Captain sounds quite like Melville when promising a good time to his invited guest:
MELVILLE
“Hark— There is some excellent Montado Sherry awaiting you & some most potent Port. We will have mulled wine with wisdom, & buttered toast with story-telling & crack jokes & bottles from morning till night.”
— Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 29 January? 1851; emphasis mine.
CAPTAIN
“We will talk on all subjects, from the shape of a horse-shoe to that of the slipper of the last favorite—say the 'divine Fanny,’ from great battles, or Napier's splendid pictures of such, down to the obscurest point of the squad drill—from buffalo bulls to elfin sprites.”
—Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 185125
These elaborate invites are similarly themed and structured. Each presents an inventory of delightful activities in store for the recipient, each inventory being divided in three main parts. Melville’s three groupings of promised events are separated by three ampersands; the Captain’s by the word from, used thrice. The invitation in each case extends to just one person: Melville to Hawthorne, the Captain to his Imaginary Friend the reader. The plural “We” brings together speaker and singular reader as joint enjoyers of good times ahead, chiefly to be spent in stimulating conversation....

https://open.substack.com/pub/melvilliana/p/all-i-want-is-a-good-listener?r=n51cr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Friday, November 16, 2012

tale of the x-ray specs, plundered from Emory's Notes of a Military Reconnaissance

Narrating the homeward bound journey of U. S. Dragoons from the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains in 1845, Philip St George Cooke (or his ghostwriter) relates a comical incident supposed to have occurred while visiting a friendly tribe of Cheyenne people in July 1845. From the entry for July 16th [1845], originally published in the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border":

But whilst engaged in the formalities of the council and distribution of presents, we were startled by shouts and laughter so vociferous and continued as to excite great curiosity, and induce some of us to retire to satisfy it: a merry and comical confusion reigned without; very infectious, but difficult to understand: it seems that while the young squaws were so gently engaged at their painting, a certain bachelor captain, whose countenance at home is considered quite mild and engaging, but whose wont is now to give of it but an uncertain view through a vast bunch of reddish hair, had the curiosity to take a closer view—he is near-sighted—of the colored design;—possibly he was artlessly examining a natural model;—a matter of highly civilized precedent and practicability:—be this as it may, the belle sauvage of intent and downcast eyes, suddenly raising them, was startled by this hairy apparition hanging over her shoulder; so much so as to indulge in a shrill succession of those shrieks so successfully practised by unfortunate heroines of the boards, and natural, of course, to very young or pretty ladies: attributing it to his uncouth looks, for, according to his experience, no imaginable offence had been given, the captain's confusion was natural and complete; and so too was the astonishment of many, when this lady-like screaming was repeated by one and another,—all the young girls toward whom the hapless and blushing captain directed his appealing regards. They ran, shouted, hid, laughed; his own puzzled and innocent laughter was the most ridiculous; for an explanation soon began to be whispered about, which did not much abate the merriment. The captain wore spectacles; and we learned that these girls, lamentably ignorant of optics—as of science generally—were full believers in a little theory of their own, upon the subject of the mysterious glasses; and it was no less than that they enabled the fortunate spectator to penetrate opaque bodies; and consequently—although unusually well and completely dressed—they supposed that, to his eyes, their modest garments were no protection!

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," May 1853; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 397-398)

Nothing like the excitement of screaming girls and blushing bachelor is reported in the accounts of other participants in the expedition. Engineer William B. Franklin relates:

"We had a talk and a smoke with them, made them a few presents, and in about half an hour, left them perfectly delighted with us." (March to South Pass)

Captain Henry S. Turner dutifully reports the council meeting, giving a detailed account of Colonel Kearny's speech and the distribution of presents, but says nothing about the external commotion.

Cooke's story in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" is an elaborate retelling of an incident that actually happened in the following year, 1846, on the march of U. S. dragoons under S. W. Kearny to New Mexico and California. The affair of the see-through spectacles took place among the Maricopas of southern Arizona, as first reported by Lieutenant W. H. Emory in Notes of a Military Reconnaissance (1848):

November 13 and 14.—With the morning came the Maricopas women, dressed like the Pimos. They are somewhat taller, and one peculiarity struck me forcibly, that while the men had aquiline noses, those of the women were retroussés. Finding the trade in meal had ceased, they collected in squads about the different fires, and made the air ring with their jokes and merry peals of laughter. Mr. Bestor's spectacles were a great source of merriment. Some of them formed the idea that with their aid, he could see through their cotton blankets. They would shrink and hide behind each other at his approach. At length, I placed the spectacles on the nose of an old woman, who became acquainted with their use and explained it to the others.
(Emory's Notes)

"Mr. Bestor" is the civilian statistician Norman Bestor, who according to Richard G. Beidleman was "responsible for specimen collecting and sketching" while serving as Emory's "naturalist aide." Speaking of Bestor, Beidleman can't help but mention the spicy anecdote of the specs from Emory's Notes:

"Bestor proved his worth, having wisely carried the chronometers separately in a basket on his arm. Later he would also prove to be a source of amazement to southwestern Indians because of his spectacles." (California's Frontier Naturalists)

Friday, July 27, 2012

what to do with a snake-bitten horse

Tennyson, Smoking

See how Cooke's careful and elaborately described treatment of a snake-bitten horse, back in July 1843, gets worked into the fictionalized dialogue between the Captain and his "Imaginary Friend" in the entry for October 7, 1843:

July 10
"... Just as I arrived on the Camp ground this evening a rattle snake struck a valuable led horse of mine in the rim of the nostril; I immediately scarified it deeply with my penknife, and had it copiously washed until—fifteen minutes after—the hospital wagon arrived, and I procured some ammonia, which I applied until the skin came off (which it soon did). After swelling for twenty minutes, it is getting well."
(Cooke's 1843 journal)

October 7
... After supper—The Hunter in the mouth of his tent reclines, with a pipe, upon a glossy bearskin;—before him, a desert expanse of grass and river;—his attention is apparently divided between the moon, suspended over the western hills; the flickering blaze of a small fire, and the curling smoke which he deliberately exhales. His friend stirs a toddy, reading with difficulty a crabbed manuscript.

Loquitur. "When I saw you yesterday, beside your usual duties, acting as guide, surgeon,—(for you have effectually cured the snake-bitten horse)—as hunter, or as butcher"—

"Say commissary!"

"I conceived hopes of you, that the poetic spirit was layed; and when at supper to-night you ate so heartily of the elk-steak, I little thought you had been indulging again in such pathetic"—

"Pshaw! it serves for a gilding to Life's bitter pill! The delicious supper should have mended your humour: for I stake my reputation on it— as 'guide, surgeon and hunter'"—

Imaginary Friend. "And butcher"—

—"That the flesh, cooked, as it was, with a little pork, cannot be distinguished from that of the fattest buffalo cow that ever surrendered tongue and marrow-bones to hungry hunter."

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," January 1852) and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Wonderful!

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Bigelow on Gregg

John Bigelow via NYPL Digital Collections

In Garden and Forest Volume 7 (January 10, 1894), John Bigelow (1817-1911) describes his editorial "laundry work" on Commerce of the Prairies, and the personality of its author, Josiah Gregg:

It gives me pleasure to comply with your request for such information as I can furnish about Mr. Josiah Gregg and my humble part in the preparation for the press of his Commerce of the Prairies.

I owed the acquaintance of Mr. Gregg to the late William Cullen Bryant, to whom, in 1843, Mr. Gregg applied for a reference to some competent person to revise some notes of his and put them in shape for publication. Mr. Bryant advised him to call upon me. I found Mr. Gregg to be at that time a man about forty years of age and about five feet ten inches in height, though from the meagreness of his figure looking somewhat taller; he had a fine head and an intellectual cast of countenance and temperament, though his mouth and the lower part of his face showed that he had enjoyed to but a limited extent the refining influence of civilization. He had fine blue eyes and an honest, although not a cheerful, expression, due, as I afterward learned, to chronic dyspepsia. He was withal very shy and as modest as a schoolgirl. We were soon at work together. He had previously confided his notes to Count Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro, subsequently and for many years a translator in the State Department at Washington, but their views of the way in which the work they were engaged upon should be executed were so widely divergent that their partnership was speedily dissolved. As I became more acquainted with Mr. Gregg I had no difficulty in discerning the cause of their incompatibility. He had no notions of literary art and he knew it, but he was morbidly conscientious, and nothing would induce him to state anything that he did not positively know as if he did know it, or to overstate anything. Tasistro had no such infirmity. Then Gregg had about as little imagination as any man I ever knew, while Tasistro had such an excess of it that he had no difficulty in believing and affirming things that never happened. It was not strange, therefore, that they soon parted with opinions of each other not in the least improved by their association.

I soon found that all I had to do was to put his notes into as plain and correct English as I knew how, without in the least modifying the proportions of his affirmations. He would not allow his version of a fact to be expanded or contracted a hair's-breadth, no matter what might be the artistic temptation, nor however unimportant the incident; he always had the critics of the plains before his eyes, and would sooner have broken up the plates and reprinted the whole book than have permitted the most trifling error to creep into his description of the loading of his mules or the marshaling of one of his caravans.

Although Mr. Gregg's early education had been limited and his reading not extensive, he had a vague notion, not unnatural to a frontier man of reflection, that there is no fame so enduring as authorship, nor any way in which a man may multiply himself so many times by the forces of other men as by writing a book. His whole soul, therefore, was completely absorbed in the work upon which we were engaged, as if it involved the destiny of empires. He had no family; he had a competence for all his moderate wants, and he dreamed of a fame from this work which should place him among the authors of his generation and compel his acquaintances to look up to him as he himself was accustomed to look up to those whose writings had delighted or instructed him.

Josiah Gregg via Missouri Encyclopedia

Mr. Gregg had his lodgings at the Franklin Hotel, then standing on the corner of Broadway and Liberty or Cortlandt Street, and in his room there he spent pretty much his whole time, when not eating or sleeping, upon his manuscript and proofs. He rarely went out, except to the store of his publishers under the Astor House; he never went to the theatre, or, indeed, to any place of amusement. He took no recreation of any kind so far as I could learn. He did not appear to visit anywhere, nor did he appear to have any acquaintances. His heart was wholly in his book; it was his joy by day and his dream by night. His stay and life in the city during its incubation was his great trial. He pined for the prairies and the free open air of the wilderness. New York to him was a prison, and his hotel a cage. Whatever value his book possesses—and as a history of the trans-Mississippi commerce before the invasion of the railway, it has, I think, great and enduring value—was due to him and to him only. My laundry work added no more value to it than the washing and ironing adds to the value of a new garment.

Nowhere in all our literature can be found so full and entirely reliable an account of our early transcontinental commerce, and of every kind of life that flourished over the territory which it traversed, as in The Commerce of the Prairies; and the time is not distant when very little can be learned of the condition upon which that commerce was conducted, except from his book. It was favorably received by the public, and in due time reached a second edition. His publishers were unfortunate, and I doubt if Mr. Gregg ever derived any pecuniary advantage from his literary venture; that was a secondary matter with him, though there were some circumstances connected with his failure to receive the pecuniary returns to which he was entitled that did not enhance his respect for the publishing trade, and may have strengthened his preference for the frontier life and the unsophisticated dwellers of the wilderness.

-- Garden and Forest January 10, 1894

In Scenes and Adventures in the Army, Philip St George Cooke's ghostwriter has done as much inventing and rewriting as editing, but the straightforward, practical character of Gregg reminds me very much of Cooke the "stern" and "forbidding" dragoon officer remembered in the History of California: lacking in imagination and literary polish, but strongly motivated by the desire for high reputation as a published author.

Monday, October 10, 2011

ghostwriting in the 19th century

Washington Irving

Maybe "collaborative writing" is the better term, after all, since it embraces the "as told to" class of narratives, together with numerous other modes of literary teamwork. In Melville's youth a famous and perhaps instructive product of collaborative writing was Washington Irving's Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), reputedly based on the manuscript journal (lost) that Benjamin L. E, Bonneville (1796-1878) sold to Irving for $1,000.


Benjamin L. E. Bonneville

Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen officially edited the journals of Lewis and Clark (Philadelphia, 1814). Unofficially, the 1804-1806 expedition was already famous through the published account of Patrick Gass and popular counterfeits by "Hubbard Lester" and others, all more or less ghostwritten.

Benjamin Morrell's dramatic Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Sea (1832) was ghostwritten by Samuel Woodworth.

In the nineteenth-century (as now), would-be authors and publishers routinely employed experienced professionals to make entertaining, salable books out of rough first-hand narratives. The use of professional writers and editors for tasks we now call "ghostwriting" was generally taken for granted. Nonetheless, some readers might prefer an unpolished original. One anonymous reviewer in the New York Literary World liked J. Quinn Thornton's Oregon and California in 1848 all the better for its unassuming style:

The incidents which we have glanced at in the aggregate will be found in Mr. Thornton's volumes related in a simple unaffected manner, though with little of the art of the trained writer. Yet upon the whole we would not have the book altered, though it were to pass through the hands of the most accomplished magazinist. Narratives of this kind are valuable, as they bear the authentic marks of the author's personality. We know, then, how to appreciate his facts—but let the same facts be related by a Captain Marryatt, or other adept in book-making, and we lose a proper guide to their valuation. There is sufficient personality thus infused into Mr. Thornton's story to put us in communication with the man. We learn his tastes and education; we know the books he has read, and even the sermons which he has listened to. We see the miscellaneous education, the good heart and clear head of the best specimen of the western Colonist—the Judge, Governor, or Member of Congress of the new settlement. He has not the literary tastes and condensation of the educated circles of the metropolis; on the contrary, he is somewhat diffuse, but the man is there, simple, sagacious, and in earnest—and the man, on such a spot, is more essential than the author. (Literary World, March 3, 1849)

The reference to "Captain Marryatt" alludes to plagiarisms by English novelist Frederick Marryat--for example unattributed borrowings, in Marryat's Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet (1843), from earlier newspaper printings of portions of G. W. Kendall's Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition (1844) and Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies (1844).

In his 1960 doctoral dissertation "Melville as a Magazinist," Norman E Hoyle conjectured that the 1849 Literary World reviewer who favored Thornton's plain "unaffected" style of writing over that of a "trained writer" was Herman Melville.

Melville himself was nominated by Nathaniel Hawthorne to ghostwrite the account of Matthew Perry's 1853 voyage to Japan. As Christopher Benfey tells it:

When Commodore Perry returned to the United States, he expected a hero’s welcome, but Washington had other things to think about, including the threat of civil war. Commodore Perry decided he needed better PR, and asked Nathaniel Hawthorne if he would consider writing a book about the opening of Japan, with Perry as hero. Hawthorne was tempted. As he wrote in his journal on December 28, 1854, "It would be a very desirable labor for a young literary man, or for that matter, an old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than Japan." But Hawthorne had other books on his mind, and suggested that Perry ask Herman Melville, who knew something about the Pacific, to write the book. Perry, stupidly, decided to write the book himself. Herman Melville’s book on the opening of Japan remains one of the great might-have-beens in American literature. ("Herman Melville and John Manjiro")

But Commodore Perry did get help. After Hawthorne politely declined, the job of ghostwriting, or rather collaboratively writing, the official narrative of the Japan expedition went to Francis Lister Hawks.

ghostwriting in the 21st century

Arbor Services supplies writers for busy celebrities, politicians, business leaders and military personnel

In the UK, professional clients of Elizabeth Hall Associates include military officers.

ghostwriting clients of Venture Capital Advisors include "United States Military, officers, non-coms, and enlisted personnel"

Need "someone with the skill to turn your ideas into an exciting, organized, well-written manuscript ready for publication"? Not to worry my friend, "Tate Ghostwriting, a division of Tate Publishing, has a staff of experienced, professional writers ready to do just this."

Jenkins Group answers FAQ's about ghostwriting, for example:

How much does it cost?
A ghostwritten manuscript for a 100- to 250-page book will cost between $10,000 and $60,000, depending upon the extent of the required research and the selected writer's credentials. All ghostwriters recommended for interviews by Jenkins Group will have extensive experience in writing non-fiction books.

Who will own the rights?
All Jenkins Group ghostwriters are contracted on a "work for hire" basis. You own all the rights to the manuscript and you are free to exploit all rights in any way you determine is in your best interest. (Jenkins Group)

Looking for "the only ghostwriting service you'll ever need"? That would be Houston's The Writers for Hire

A few books on the subject...
Andrew Crofts, Ghostwriting (A & C Black, 2004)
Jennie Erdal, Ghosting: A Double Life (Anchor Books, 2004)
Bruce W. Speck, Collaborative Writing: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press, 1999)

Non-fiction ghostwriter Bob Olson breaks it down:

People hire me to write their books for four reasons:

They don’t have the TIME to write a book

They don’t have the TALENT to write a book

They don’t have the DISCIPLINE to finish a book

They don’t have the KNOW-HOW to properly structure a book.

People hire me to ghostwrite their books because they don't have the time, talent, discipline or know-how. I really respect my clients because it takes honesty, personal insight and courage for many people to admit that they don’t have what it takes to finish a book on their own. It also indicates to me that this person is a doer rather than a dreamer. Dreamers talk about the book they are writing or are going to write, but it never gets done. Doers who hire ghostwriters recognize that their book is not getting written so they find a way to get it done. That takes enormous strength of character. (The Olson Interviews on Ghostwriting)

"I'm a Celebrity, Get Me a Ghostwriter"

"The demand for more ghostwriters stems from the need for more books that are authored by celebrities whose name might help market the book-like product but who themselves are unable to write." (Jack Hitt, "The Writer is Dead," New York Times, May 25, 1997).

Nowadays, even social media pros need Twitter Ghostwriters. Ghostwriting is ghostwriting.