a Hershel Parker points out, in his biography (Vol. 2, pp. 15–16), that Melville had likely read a similar passage in an essay by Francis Palgrave: “In considering the actions of the mind, it should never be forgotten that its affections pass into each other like the tints of the rainbow: though we can easily distinguish them when they have assumed a decided colour, yet we can never determine where each hue begins.”
NOTES
These notes are intended primarily as an aid for locating quoted passages, but I have also elaborated on points where a footnote in the text would have distracted from the narrative. Though I have tried to give some sense here of what I owe to previous scholars, anyone writing about Melville incurs a debt too large to be fully enumerated. For guides to the vast range of Melville scholarship and interpretation, the reader may wish to consult the bibliographies in John Bryant, ed., A Companion to Melville Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), and Robert Levine, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For more recent work, a good resource is JSTOR, a continually updated electronic database of journal articles.
With the exception of Billy Budd, all quotations from Melville’s prose works are cited in the standard Northwestern–Newberry Library edition. Because of their editorial scrupulosity and deeply researched historical commentaries, these volumes are of inestimable value. So that readers using other editions can readily locate quoted passages, I have included chapter numbers as well as page numbers for each reference. In the case of Billy Budd, not yet published in the Northwestern–Newberry series, citations are to the Library of America edition, abbreviated as BB. Reliable texts of Melville’s poems other than Clarel can be found in Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago: Hendricks House, 1947), or in The Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Douglas Robillard (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000), and are cited here by individual title.
Melville’s works in the Northwestern–Newberry Library edition, and the indispensable chronological sourcebook The Melville Log, edited by the pioneering scholar Jay Leyda, are abbreviated as follows:
T Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1968)
O Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1968)
Mardi Mardi and A Voyage Thither, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1970)
R Redburn, His First Voyage: Being the Sailor-Boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1969)
WJ White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1970)
MD Moby-Dick, or the Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1988)
P Pierre, or the Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1971)
PT The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, et al. (1987)
IP Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1982)
CM The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1984)
Clarel Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1991)
Journals Journals, ed. Howard C. Horsford with Lynn Horth (1989)
Correspondence Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (1993)
Log The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891, Volumes I and II, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Gordian Press, 1969)
PREFACE
1. “no materials exist”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 13.
2. “vile habit”: HM to Sophia Van Matre, December 10, 1863, in Correspondence, p. 387. See Log, I, xiii–xv, for a speculative account of several bonfires in which Melville’s papers may have been consumed.
3. The “business” of the biographer: Henry James, Hawthorne (1879; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 51.
4. a featureless silhouette: This photograph, first published in Melville Society Extracts 116 (February 1999), was discovered by Mel Hardin, then a curator at Sailors’ Snug Harbor, founded in 1831 on Staten Island as a home for retired seamen. I am grateful to Mr. Hardin for supplying me with a print of this photograph. Thomas Melville, Herman’s younger brother, was governor of Snug Harbor when the photograph was taken, c. 1878, and at first Mr. Hardin believed that Thomas was the figure at the center of the photo. But closer study convinced him, as well as other scholars, that it was his brother Herman, who often went out to the island in summer to escape the heat of Manhattan.
5. “fabulous shadow”: Hart Crane, “At Melville’s Tomb” (1925).
6. Madison Square Park: In an essay entitled “Herman Melville Through a Child’s Eyes”—Bulletin of the New York Public Library 69 (December 1965)—Melville’s granddaughter Frances recalled the day in 1887 when, after running among the tulips while her grandfather rested on a bench, she could no longer find him. “Perhaps,” she wrote, “… he was off in some distant land, or on a rolling ship at sea with nothing to distract his thoughts. Wherever he was, there was no little granddaughter with him. She had ceased to exist.” Frances Thomas’s essay is reprinted in Merton M. Sealts, Jr., The Early Lives of Melville: Nineteenth-Century Biographical Sketches and Their Authors (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), pp. 179–85.
7. “on a personal interview”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 240.
8. “isolatoes”: MD, ch. 27, p. 121.
9. “deliberately [to] drag up the ladder”: MD, ch. 8, p.39.
10. hang a towel over the doorknob: In chapter 5 of Redburn, the narrator writes that he “hung a towel over the knob, so that no one could peep through the keyhole.” In her copy of that novel, Melville’s granddaughter Eleanor noted beside this passage that her mother, Frances Melville Thomas, “told her that H.M. used to do this at times in his own home.” Eleanor’s copies of her grandfather’s works (the Constable edition, published in England, 1922–24) are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
11. “black-letter volume”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, April 16, 1851, in Correspondence, p. 185.
12. “home-feeling with the past”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 11.
13. “wrote from a sort of dream-self”: D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; New York: Viking, 1964), p. 134.
14. “Most of us”: Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 111–12.
15. “I actually shade my eyes”: Emerson, journal entry, December 7[?], 1835, in Joel Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 145.
INTRODUCTION. MELVILLE: FROM HIS TIME TO OURS
1. “the moral law … incarnation of God”: Emerson, Nature (1836), in Stephen E. Whicher, ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 39, 50.
2. “lawless, Godless … soil to the sky”: William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890; New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 160.
3. “until I was twenty-five”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1[?], 1851, in Correspondence, p. 193.
4. “his own generation has long thought”: New York Press, September 29, 1891, quoted in Log, II, 836.
5. “labial melody”: T, ch. 31, p. 227.
6. “indulgent captivity”; O, Introduction, p. 3.
7. “the tornadoed Atlantic”: MD, ch. 87, p. 389.
8. “depths … that compel a man to swim”: Hawthorne to Evert Duyckinck, August 29, 1850, quoted in Log, I, 391.
9. a “moody stricken” captain: MD, ch. 28, p. 124.
10. “like a
revolving Drummond light”: CM, ch. 44, p. 239.
11. “This whole book”: MD, ch. 32, p. 145.
12. “monomania”: HM uses this term (and its adjectival form, “monomaniac”) fifteen times in Moby-Dick to describe Ahab; the first use comes in ch. 41, p. 184.
13. “frantic morbidness … spiritual exasperations”: MD, ch. 41, p. 184.
14. “He has lost his prestige”: G. W. Curtis to Joshua A. Dix, January 2, 1856, quoted in Historical Note to PT, p. 458.
15. “the unavoidable centerpiece”: Michael T. Gilmore, Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 87.
16. More recently, Melville’s personal copy: See David A. Randall, Dukedom Large Enough: Reminiscences of a Rare Book Dealer, 1929–1956 (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 208, for an account of the discovery of Melville’s copy of Beale’s book among some “miscellaneous maritime books” that came into the shop of the famous New York book dealer Max Harzof. “Someone had erased most of [HM’s] writing” in the book, “probably the Brooklyn dealer who bought it—to make it a ‘clean copy.’ ” In 1969, Randall looked forward to the day when “modern technology could find means to recover most of the erasures.”
17. At Yale, students refer: Alvin Kernan, In Plato’s Cave (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 175.
18. “Moby Dick coupon”: New York Post, September 24, 2004.
19. “floor-length periwinkle Grecian gown”: New York Magazine, double issue, July 29–August 5, 2002, p. 57, recommends the dress (“we’re wild” for it), designed by Behnaz Sarafpour and available at Barneys New York for $1,740.
20. “then all collapsed”: Emily Yoffe, “Things Fall Apart: Pamela Anderson’s Breasts Cannot Hold,” Slate.com, May 13, 1999.
21. “literary text acts as a kind of mirror”: Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” in Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 56.
22. “The firm tower”: MD, ch. 99, p. 431.
23. “an Elizabethan force”: Archibald MacMechan, quoted in Michael Zimmerman, “Herman Melville in the 1920s: A Study in the Origins of the Melville Revival” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1963), p. 18.
24. “sinned blackly against”: Raymond Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York: George H. Doran, 1921), p. 18.
25. “like eating hasheesh”: Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., “Herman Melville,” Review 1 (August 1919); reprinted in Hershel Parker, ed., The Recognition of Herman Melville (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), p. 156.
26. “a futurist … of the elements”: Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 146.
27. “Melville desires”: Frank Lentricchia, Lucchesi and the Whale (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 62.
28. “only the haters”: Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961; New York: Vintage Books, 1998), p. 100.
29. “prophetic song … revenge”: E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), p. 200.
30. “in battling against evil”: Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), p. 186.
31. “That inscrutable thing”: MD, ch. 36, p. 164.
32. “dusky phantoms”: MD, ch. 47, p. 216.
33. “the biography of the last days”: C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953; London: Allison & Busby, 1985), p. 68.
34. “I hate goodies”: Emerson, journal entry, June 23, 1838, in Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journals, p. 191.
35. “to devour” a woodchuck raw: Walden (1854), “Higher Laws” chapter, in Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod (New York: Library of America, 1985), p. 490.
36. many writers are good for thinking about: Dominic LaCapra, “Canon, Texts, and Contexts,” in Learning History in America: Schools, Cultures, and Politics, ed. Lloyd Kramer, Donald Reid, and William L. Barney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 123.
37. “Osama bin Laden’s name”: The Observer (London), September 16, 2001.
38. “demagogue [who] can fuse”: Andrew Delbanco, “Melville Has Never Looked Better,” New York Times Book Review, October 28, 2001, p. 14.
39. One scholar has enumerated: Samuel Otter, “Blue Proteus: Moby-Dick and the World We Live In,” unpublished paper.
40. Gary Hart … Richard Gere: Cited ibid. In the spring of 2003, with preparations under way for the invasion of Iraq, the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman took note that Americans wondered if Saddam Hussein might be a modern-day Ahab, obsessed with hatred of the United States. “But what if Saddam is not Ahab?” Dorfman asked; what if “Saddam might be the whale and … George Bush might in fact be an Ahab whose search for the monster in the oceans of sand and oil could end up with the ruin, not of the monster, but of those who were bent on its extermination?”—www.opendemocracy.net, March 20, 2003.
41. “tender-minded” faith in “the great universe of God”: William James, Pragmatism (1907; New York: Meridian, 1955), pp. 22, 35.
42. “Odyssey beneath … foam and night”: Albert Camus, “Herman Melville” (1952), in Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 291, 294.
43. “voids and immensities”: MD, ch. 42, p. 195.
44. “neither believe, nor be comfortable”: Hawthorne, journal entry, November 20, 1856, quoted in Journals, p. 628.
45. “calmly and fixedly gaze away”: MD, ch. 87, p. 388.
46. “I love all men who dive”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, March 3, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 121.
47. “[As] far as any geologist”: P, bk. 21, p. 285.
48. “cannibal of a craft … bones of her enemies”: MD, ch. 16, p. 70.
49. “red hell”: MD, ch. 96, p. 423.
50. “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people”: WJ, ch. 36, p. 151.
51. “repositories … the yes and no of their culture”: Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), p. 9.
CHAPTER 1. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
1. “like sieves … barbarity to the utmost”: Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 507.
2. “wielding the stock”: IP, ch. 3, p. 13.
3. “exhibiting in magnificent terms”: Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 4 vols. (1822; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), III, 134.
4. “Sir:—In answer”: Pomroy Jones, Annals and Recollections of Oneida County (Rome, NY, 1851), p. 355.
5. in Indian garb and warpaint: This anecdote was first reported by Alexander Young in his newspaper column “Here in Boston,” quoted in Sealts, Early Lives of Melville, p. 22.
6. “grand old Pierre … their heads”: P, bk. 2, pp. 29–30.
7. “deluxe Mr. Micawber”: James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Modern Library, 1999), p. 43.
8. “confidential Connexion … eventual success”: Log, I, 29.
9. “Fancy Hdfks. and Scarfs”: Log, II, 905.
10. “ambassador extraordinary”: WJ, ch. 6, p. 22.
11. “element in which we move”: BB, ch. 21, p. 1414. For a discussion of Melville’s dense biblical references, see H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), pp. 126–36, and Dan McCall, The Silence of Bartleby (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 5.
12. “he could smell the burning of Gomorrah”: Nathalia Wright, Melville’s Use of the Bible (Durham: Duke University Press, 1949), p. 27.
13. “Ah, fathers and mothers!”: P, bk. 4, p. 70.
14. “shadowy reminiscences”: R, ch. 1, p. 4.
15. the miniature glass ship: There was evidently such a glass ship in Thomas Melvill’s Boston home. See Sealts, Early Lives
, p. 22.
16. “children are … utmost of your power”: J. M. Mathews, quoted in T. Walter Herbert, Jr., Moby-Dick and Calvinism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977), p. 28.
17. “In this republican country”: The House of the Seven Gables (1851), in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Novels (New York: Library of America, 1983), ch. II, pp. 383–84.
18. “I am destitute … daily expences”: Allan Melvill to Thomas Melvill, December 4, 1830, ms. letter. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University—call number bMS Am 188[116]).
19. “I had learned … almost strangles me”: R, ch. 7, p. 36.
20. “lying in his berth”: MD, ch. 9, p. 45.
21. “ambiguous condition”: Elizabeth Hardwick, Herman Melville (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 17.
22. “a pauper … pity alone could reach him”: “Jimmy Rose” (1855), in PT, p. 342.
23. “Hope is no longer permitted”: Thomas Melvill to Lemuel Shaw, January 15, 1832, in Log, I, 52.
24. “raving in his hammock”: MD, ch. 41, p. 185.
25. “tenacious memory … slow in comprehension”: Allan Melvill to Peter Gansevoort, Jr., September 22, 1827, and August 9, 1826, quoted in Log, I, 25.
26. the Connecticut clergyman Timothy Dwight: Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, III, 296, and see Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (New York: Clarkson-Potter, 1996), p. 65.
27. “In our cities”: P, bk. 3, p. 9.
28. “palm upon the public … disappointed of its prey”: Quoted in William H. Gilman, Melville’s Early Life and Redburn (New York: New York University Press, 1951), pp. 257–58.
29. “one long, long kiss”: PT, p. 204.
30. “Cursing the ignus fatuus”: PT, p. 198.
31. “Absurd conceits”: PT, p. 200.
32. “Herman is happy”: Maria Melville to Gansevoort Melville, June 1, 1839, quoted in Log, I, 86.
Melville: His World and Work Page 44