Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  33. “says he would give all the sights”: Maria Melville to Allan Melville, September 25, 1839, quoted in Log, I, 92.

  34. “Now our ship”: Norman Knox Wood, Sea Journal: N.Y. to Liverpool (1838), ms. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University—call number MS Am 889.340).

  35. “Let to rove”: Clarel, pt. 1, 1, ll. 109–10.

  36. “Talk not of the bitterness”: R, ch. 2, p. 11.

  37. “a whaleship was my Yale College”: MD, ch. 24, p. 112.

  38. “with the most painful feelings”: Log, I, 96.

  39. “family post-man”: HM’s aunt Helen Melvill Souther (January 5, 1840), quoted in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819–1851, Vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; cited hereafter as Parker, I), p. 159.

  40. “strangely docile”: P, bk. 1, p. 16.

  41. “an old negro”: WJ, ch. 74, p. 311.

  42. “How is you?”: HM to Allan Melville, December 7, 1839, quoted in Log, I, 98. Robertson-Lorant, Melville, p. 79, hypothesizes that HM had been subject to “racist barbs about his suntan.”

  43. “Money has not for many years”: Peter Gansevoort to Maria Melville, October 18, 1839, in Log, I, 97.

  44. “thinks of going far-west”: Maria Melville to Peter Gansevoort, May 16, 1840, in Log, I, 104.

  45. “that laziness which consists”: Gansevoort Melville to Allan Melville, January 21, 1840, in Log, I, 103.

  46. “Agathe believed”: Wilson Walker Cowen, “Melville’s Marginalia,” 11 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1965), II, 213–14. Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 334, asserts that as a child and young adult, Herman “played second fiddle to the brilliant Gansevoort.”

  47. “a little heterodox”: Hawthorne, journal entry, November 20, 1856, quoted in Journals, p. 628.

  48. “Posted like silent sentinels”: MD, ch. 1, p. 4.

  49. “billiard-room and bar-room … ocean-like expansiveness”: MD, ch. 54, pp. 248–49.

  50. “In their interflowing aggregate”: MD, ch. 54, p. 244.

  51. “in the groggeries”: BB, ch. 1, p. 1354.

  52. “if you travel away inland”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), in PT, p. 249.

  53. “Rosebeefrosegoosemuttonantaters!”: Parker, I, 181.

  54. “far inland”: HM, “A Thought on Bookbinding,” review of Cooper’s The Red Rover, in The Literary World, March 16, 1850, reprinted in PT, p. 238.

  55. “tied and welded”: HM to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., May 1, 1850, in Correspondence, p. 160. Michael Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 5, suggests that Cooper’s “romance may have influenced his decision to abandon his family for the sea.”

  56. “The Melville family”: Julia Maria Melvill to Allan Melville (HM’s brother), quoted in Robertson-Lorant, Melville, p. 91.

  57. “It is a great consolation … no use to a sailor”: Gansevoort Melville to Allan Melville, January 14, 1841, ms., Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

  58. “Last week I received”: Maria Melville to Augusta Melville, January 8, 1841, quoted in Correspondence, p. 24.

  CHAPTER 2. GOING NATIVE

  1. “another West, prefigured in the Plains”: Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (1947; San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1958), p. 13.

  2. the most satisfying husbands: Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (New York: Viking, 2000), p. 13. Philbrick writes (p. 17) that the women of Nantucket referred to their dildoes as “he’s-at-homes” in honor of their absent husbands. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur reports that Nantucket women followed “the Asiatic custom of taking a dose of opium every morning,” perhaps as an aid in facing the trials of solitude.

  3. These were meager wages: Lee A. Craig and Robert M. Fearn, “Wage Discrimination and Occupational Crowding in a Competitive Industry: Evidence from the American Whaling Industry,” Journal of Economic History 53, no. 1 (March 1993): 123–38.

  4. “You will find”: Benjamin Franklin to Susanna Wright, November 21, 1751, in Leonard Labaree et al., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 21 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–), IV, 211.

  5. “in raptures with her”: Margaret S. Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 175–78.

  6. “Where’s your girls … bursting grapes”: MD, ch. 40, pp. 174, 176. Some critics read HM’s references in chapter 42 of White-Jacket to sailors “polishing [their] bright-work” and “embracing … monkey-tails … screws, prickers, little irons and other things” as coded language for the widespread practice of masturbation aboard ship. On the evidence of a surviving diary kept by one American whaleman, B. R. Burg (in Burg, ed., An American Seafarer in the Age of Sail: The Intimate Diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk, 1851–1870 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994], p. 26) concludes that mutual masturbation may also have been fairly common.

  7. “the deprivations peculiar to whalemen”: The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel Potter (1824; New York: Corinth, 1962), p. 12.

  8. “New England mothers”: Gregory Gibson, Demon of the Waters, quoted in New York Times Book Review, May 19, 2002, p. 11.

  9. “clannish commitment to the hunt”: Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, p. 13.

  10. “there were still skippers”: Olson, Call Me Ishmael, p. 21.

  11. “Yankees in one day”: MD, ch. 53, p. 239.

  12. a survey published in Hunts’ Merchants’ Magazine: February 1849, p. 182.

  13. “The native American … ends of the earth”: MD, ch. 27, p. 121.

  14. Captain E. C. Williams: Pamphlets sold at these shows survive. See E. C. Williams, History of the Whale Fisheries (New York, 1862). An example of a roughly contemporaneous book with the image of a whaleman (in this case a South Seas islander) on the cover is James Montgomery, Poetical Works (Philadelphia, 1846).

  15. Dispersed among villages: See John Bryant, Introduction to Typee (New York: Penguin, 1996).

  16. Captain David Porter: See T. Walter Herbert, Jr., Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), esp. ch. 4.

  17. “cordial detestation”: T, ch. 5, p. 32.

  18. “Leaning … dry, sarcastic humor”: T, ch. 5, pp. 33, 32.

  19. “Jack Nastyface … MacAdamized road”: Quoted in Parker, I, 200.

  20. “one of that class of rovers”: T, ch. 5, p. 32.

  21. “who had resided on the Island”: “Toby’s Own Story,” Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, July 11, 1846, quoted in Parker, I, 217.

  22. “small, slatternly looking craft”: O, ch. 1, p. 5.

  23. “a twang … beginning with one”: O, ch. 53, p. 204. From an account by one of their earlier employees, William G. Libbey (“Autobiography of a Quondam Sailor,” published in 1878 in the Shaker Manifesto), Zeke has been identified as James Martin and Shorty as one “Edward by name”—whether first name or surname is unknown. See Parker, I, 228.

  24. the ship’s library was stocked with wholesome books: Wilson L. Heflin, New Light on Herman Melville’s Cruise in the Charles and Henry (Glassboro, NJ: The Melville Society, 1977), and see Parker, I, 232–33.

  25. “ten-stroke”: WJ, ch. 23, p. 94.

  26. “a man of any education”: O, ch. 30, p. 113.

  27. “On Board the Lucy Ann”: HM, letter to George Lefevre, for Henry Smyth, September 25, 1842, in Correspondence, pp. 25–26.

  28. “students versed more in their tomes”: Clarel, pt. II, 5, ll. 13–14.

  29. “the olden voyagers”: T, ch. 1, p. 5.

  30. “naked houris”: T, ch. 1, p. 5.

  31. “lovely houris”: See the List of Textual Expurgations in the Penguin edition of Typee, ed. Bryant, pp. 275–87.

  32. “groves of cocoa-
nut … strangely jumbled anticipations”: T, ch. 1, p. 5.

  33. “the contrast between ‘savagery’ and ‘civilization’ ”: Michael P. Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 166.

  34. “pseudo … civilized”: George Featherstonhaugh, quoted in John Ehle, Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), p. 315.

  35. “their lives … in their baggage”: Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880 (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1980), p. 23.

  36. “the wondrous custom”: Robert Beverly, quoted in Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), p. 43.

  37. displaying the severed hands: WJ, ch. 64, pp. 226–67.

  38. “to be found in any of his savage grandeur”: Cooper, Notions of the Americans, 2 vols. (1828), I, 245.

  39. “Indians’ bones must enrich the soil”: James Farnham, quoted in Pearce, Savagism, p. 65.

  40. “already established”: Quoted in Ehle, Trail of Tears, p. 324.

  41. “it is impossible to conceive”: Quoted ibid., p. 273.

  42. “the superior ideas … the cannon”: Theodore Parker, “Sermon on War,” in Michael Warner, ed., American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1999), p. 622.

  43. According to the most advanced students: See Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 180–85.

  44. “implement in the hand”: Simms, quoted in George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 55.

  45. “nature has plainly assigned”: Emerson, journal entry, November 8, 1822, in Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), II, 43.

  46. “Tahitians … can hardly be said”: O, ch. 45, p. 174.

  47. “a wild race”: Horace Bushnell, “Barbarism the First Danger” (1864), in Work and Play (New York: Scribner’s, 1910), pp. 231–32.

  48. “fireside stories … human tongue”: Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, 2 vols. (1851; Boston, 1883), I, 37.

  49. “attached to us no more merit”: Porter, quoted in Herbert, Marquesan Encounters, p. 80.

  50. “First, we see men living together”: James Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 8 vols. (Edinburgh, 1773), I, 240–43.

  51. “frugivore to a cannibal”: Geoffrey Sanborn, “Invented Appetites: Cannibalism in Melville’s Pacific Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1992), p. 39.

  52. “Let a philosophic observer commence”: Jefferson, letter to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824, quoted in Pearce, Savagism, p. 155.

  53. “The friendly and flowing savage”: Whitman, “Song of Myself” (sect. 39, 1855 version).

  54. speculated that sedentary life leads: Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (Philadelphia, 1812), pp. 17–27.

  55. “constitutional affinity”: Higginson, journal entry, November 21, 1863, in Christopher Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 175.

  56. “primitiveness and freshness”: Schoolcraft, quoted in The Literary World, vol. 2, November 13, 1848.

  57. “sententious fulness”: James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), in Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1985), I, 473. For a discussion of these themes, see Helen Carr, Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender, and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

  58. “children and savages use only nouns”: Emerson, Nature, in Whicher, ed., Selections, pp. 31–32.

  59. “Prone, prone”: Clarel, pt. II, 8, ll. 39–40.

  60. The German scholar … morality and wisdom: Barbara Packer, “The Transcendentalists,” in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 2: Prose Writing, 1820–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 344–46.

  61. “called what revolted him”: Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloane, 1950), p. 54.

  62. “What a contrast”: Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1840), in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 165.

  63. “Among savages”: Mardi, ch. 24, p. 77.

  64. “A Parisian will be surprised”: Abner Kneeland, Review of the Trial, Conviction and Final Imprisonment … of Abner Kneeland (Boston, 1838), pp. 13–14.

  65. “savages we call them”: Franklin, Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (1782), quoted in Pearce, Savagism, 139.

  66. “[Wooloo] seemed a being”: WJ, ch. 28, p. 118.

  67. “the science of the age”: Quoted in Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 139.

  68. a gallery on Chambers Street: John J. M. Gretchko, “Melville at the New York Gallery of the Fine Arts,” Melville Society Extracts 82 (September 1990): 7–8.

  69. “a mass of bones and ashes”: Dwight, quoted in Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat, Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861 (New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2000), p. 124.

  70. “The prairie-wolf”: William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies” (1831).

  71. “ ‘A harree ta fow’ ”: O, ch. 49, p. 192.

  72. “until I was twenty-five”: Parker (I, 842), points out that Melville may have “used ‘twenty-fifth’ year accurately” to designate the year that began in August 1843, after his twenty-fourth birthday—a year spent at sea.

  73. “He was mad”: Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 134.

  74. “gallant rascally epicurean”: Ibid., p. 140.

  CHAPTER 3. BECOMING A WRITER

  1. “swinging half round … can’t help you now!”: Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (1840; New York: Airmont, 1965), p. 84.

  2. “St. Domingo melodies … against the metal”: WJ, ch. 15. p. 58.

  3. “dunderfunk”; “burgoo”: WJ, ch. 32, p. 132.

  4. “Sailors, even in the bleakest weather”: WJ, ch. 9, p. 36.

  5. “airy perch”: WJ, ch. 4, p. 15. For the debate over whether Melville actually served in the maintop, see Charles Anderson, “A Reply to Herman Melville’s White-Jacket by Rear-Admiral Thomas O. Selfridge, Sr.,” American Literature 7 (May 1935): 123–44.

  6. “spacious and cosy”; “a kind of balcony”: WJ, ch. 4, p. 15.

  7. “Jack had read”: WJ, ch. 4, p. 14.

  8. “man-of-war hermit”: WJ, title of ch. 13, p. 50.

  9. “scoured all the prairies”: WJ, ch. 13, p. 51.

  10. “Never mind, my boy”: WJ, ch. 45, p. 192.

  11. “peep from below”: T, ch. 11, p. 86.

  12. “lingering or malingering”: Hardwick, Herman Melville, p. 41.

  13. “the social and political respectabilities”: Dana, quoted in Log, II, 514. For Shaw’s career, see Frederic Hathaway Chase, Lemuel Shaw: Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 1830–1860 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928).

  14. “bearded lips”: Parker, I, 311.

  15. “The flood-gates of the wonder world”: MD, ch. 1, p. 7.

  16. “scanned the page”: Helen Melville, letter of September [?], 1841, to Augusta Melville, quoted in Robertson-Lorant, Melville, p. 132.

  17. “beguiled the long winter hours”: Willis, review of Redburn, New York Home Journal, November 24, 1849, quoted in Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995; cited hereafter as Contemporary Reviews), p. 283.

  18. “vague prophetic thought
”: R, ch. 1, p. 7.

  19. “the odor … maladie de mer”: Cooper, Preface (1849) to The Pilot (orig. pub. 1823; New York: Putnam’s, n.d.), p. vi.

  20. “he managed … a detailed description”: William Charvat, “Melville and the Common Reader,” in Studies in Bibliography, ed. Fredson Bowers, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, vol. 12 (1959), p. 43.

  21. “If he meets a native”: Review of Typee in the New Haven New Englander, July 1846, quoted in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 52.

  22. Polynesian girls applying tropical oil: This passage, from the fragment of the Typee manuscript discovered in 1984 in a trunk in an upstate New York barn, was never printed in full in Melville’s lifetime. See the discussion in Parker, I, 365, and the Penguin edition of Typee, ed. Bryant, p. 310, for a transcription of the ms. fragment. The expurgated passage appears in T, ch. 4, p. 110.

  23. “have held forth”: Hardwick, Herman Melville, p. 43.

  24. “who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, November 17[?], 1851, in Correspondence, p. 212.

  25. “a man of humorous desperation”: Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 140.

  26. “unfortunate affair”: O, ch. 2, p. 12.

  27. “life is a pic-nic”: CM, ch. 24, p. 133.

  28. “low musical voice”: BB, ch. 10, p. 1380.

  29. “difficult art”: WJ, ch. 47, p. 199.

  30. “when he describes any thing”: Sophia Hawthorne, letter to her mother, October 24, 1852, quoted in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851–1891, Vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; cited hereafter as Parker, II), p. 141.

  31. “a fight which he had seen”: Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 2 vols. (Boston, 1884), I, 407.

  32. “a man with a true warm heart … if it were anywhere”: Sophia Hawthorne, quoted in Log, I, 393.

  33. “With his cigar”: Willis, quoted in Hershel Parker, “Herman Melville,” American History Illustrated, September–October 1991, p. 36.

  34. “a lounging circle”: MD, ch. 54, p. 243.