35. “Tell me”: MD, ch. 54, p. 258.
36. “writing something”: Allan Melville, quoted in Parker, I, 378.
37. “it was impossible”: Recollections of Frederick Saunders, Spring[?], 1845, quoted in Log, I, 196.
38. “gas and glory”: Horace Greeley, editorial in the New York Tribune, October 12, 1844, quoted in Log, I, 186.
39. “Young Hickory”: Hershel Parker, Introduction to Gansevoort Melville’s 1846 London Journal (New York: New York Public Library, 1966), p. 9.
40. “scented the forbidden thing”: Murray, quoted in Log, I, 200.
41. “kept him from church”: Gansevoort Melville, diary entry, January 11, 1846, quoted in Log, I, 202.
42. “Get it and read it”: Reprinted in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 36. The review appeared on April 1, 1846.
43. Hawthorne expressed delight: Salem Advertiser, March 25, 1846, reprinted ibid., pp. 22–23.
44. “sensitive and alive all over”: Hazlitt’s essay, first published in the Examiner, May 26, 1816, is reprinted in W.J. Bate, ed., Criticism: The Major Texts (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 301–3.
45. “tacking … somewhere off Buggery Island”: T, ch. 4, p. 23.
46. “Do not suffer your hand”: Catherine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy For the Use of Young Ladies At Home, And At School (1841), quoted in Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 127.
47. “a radiant and tender smile”: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ch. 18, p. 201.
48. “free pliant figure”: T, ch. 11, p. 85.
49. “inconceivably smooth and soft”: T, ch. 11, p. 86.
50. “Her complexion was a rich and mantling olive”: T, ch. 11, p. 85.
51. though in some underground fictions: See Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 202–3; David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1982), pp. 215–18; David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 202; and Carl N. Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 79, no. 5 (December 1974): 1467–90.
52. “exactly what the American Victorian lady”: Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 297.
53. a “warm, wild” reception: MD, ch. 40, p. 176.
54. “I have more than one reason”: T, ch. 26, p. 191.
55. “on the very best terms possible”: T, ch. 18, p. 133.
56. “peculiar favorite”: T, ch. 11, p. 85.
57. “dance all over”: T, ch. 20, p. 152.
58. “like a woman roused”: O, ch. 16, p. 58.
59. “spreading overhead”: O, ch. 31, p. 120.
60. “plunged into the recesses … upon my ear”: T, ch. 4, p. 28.
61. “protuberance in front”: T, ch. 6, p. 36.
62. “You dear creature”: Quoted in Parker, I, 464. The phrase occurs in an October 1846 letter to HM’s sister Augusta from Ellen Astor Oxenham, who addresses HM in the second person.
63. “Oh! ye state-room sailors”: T, ch. 1, p. 3.
64. Before the end of the year: See Amy Elizabeth Puett, “Melville’s Wife: A Study of Elizabeth Shaw Melville” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1969), pp. 44–45. Parker, I, 450, suggests that they were engaged by the end of August 1846.
65. “And Lemuel said”: Elizabeth Shaw, ms., n.d. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University—call number bMS Am 188 [160]).
66. Yet he had no illusions: Parker points out (I, 483) that Murray hoped Melville’s second book would stimulate new interest in his first book, which had not yet paid its expenses.
67. “brood of unfortunates”: Charles F. Briggs, in the Broadway Journal, January 4, 1845, quoted in Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 245.
68. an incentive to push sales: See William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), p. 49. There is an irresistible, if inexact, analogy to be made here with today’s distinction between a trade book and an academic book: when a bookstore buys a trade book, it typically gets a discount of approximately 50 percent, but if it buys a scholarly book, the discount may be only 20 percent, which means less incentive to display and sell it. Behind this distinction, of course, lies the publisher’s estimate of the size of the book’s potential audience.
69. “sixpence … International Copyright”: Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1988), pp. 124, 127.
70. developments that eventually worked: Michael Davitt Bell, “Conditions of Literary Vocation,” in Bercovitch, ed., Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 2, pp. 16–17.
71. “Here have I a choice of books”: Charles Brockden Brown, “A Sketch of American Literature,” published in The American Register (1806), quoted in James D. Wallace, Early Cooper and His Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 61.
72. why authorship in America remained more a hobby: As Washington Irving wrote in 1813, “In America, the man of letters is almost an insulated being, with few to understand, less to value, and scarcely any to encourage his pursuits.” Quoted in Bell, “Conditions of Literary Vocation,” p. 17.
73. “Literature is not yet a distinct profession”: Jefferson, quoted in Harold Laski, The American Democracy (New York: Viking, 1948), p. 393.
74. “the old evangelical hostility”: Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1888), in Leon Edel, ed., Henry James: Selected Fiction (New York: Dutton, 1964), p. 587.
75. Hawthorne imagines: Hawthorne, “The Custom House,” preface to The Scarlet Letter, p. 12.
76. “were merely slight transformations”: Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Crowell, 1976), p. 15.
77. “You know I am apt to swing my arms”: Hope Savage Shaw to Lem Shaw, May 25, 1852, quoted in Parker, II, 109.
78. “Who reads an American book?”: Sidney Smith, writing in the Edinburgh Review, 1820.
79. “wide-awake youngster”: Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: Five Hundred Years of Western Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 91.
80. “satirically said to have thought”: P, bk. 15, p. 218.
81. “small number of men”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (1835–40; New York: Vintage, 1990), II, 55–56.
82. “Long enough … have we been skeptics”: WJ, ch. 36, p. 151.
83. “an original comedy”: The prize was sponsored by the comic actor James H. Hackett. I owe this reference to Matthew Rebhorn.
84. Between 1820 and 1830: Samuel Goodrich, cited in James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 67–68, 90.
85. “the peculiar nature”: William Gilmore Simms, Views and Reviews (1845; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 13.
86. “Believe me, … literary flunkeyism toward England”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 245.
87. “the expression of [the] nation’s mind”: William Ellery Channing, “On National Literature” (1830), in Works, 6 vols. (Boston, 1848), I, 243.
88. “literary sin … in sinning”: BB, ch. 4, p. 1365.
89. they could have run along a raw coral beach: See the Historical Note by Leon Howard in T, p. 292.
90. “no ear … exclaimed the last”: Stevenson, quoted in the Explanatory Notes by Harrison Hayford and Walter Blair in Omoo (New York: Hendricks House, 1969), p. 344.
91. “He gets up voluptuous pictures”: Review by George Washington Peck, American Whig Review, July 6, 1847, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 137.
92. which, he claimed, he had declined
to join: Hershel Parker believes that Melville, worried about contracting venereal disease, abstained until he got “inland, where the sexual welcome would be as enthusiastic and where the brown girls, if Providence were kind, would never have been touched by men from whaleships”—Parker, I, 213.
93. “These swimming nymphs”: T, ch. 2, pp. 14–15.
94. “penalty of the Fall”: T, ch. 26, p. 195.
95. “There was not a padlock”: T, ch. 27, p. 201.
96. “social acerbities”: MD, ch. 94, p. 416.
97. “bathing in company with troops of girls”: T, ch. 18, p. 131.
98. “We dream all night”: Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” (1862), in Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 609.
99. “At first, Kory-Kory goes to work”: T, ch. 14, p. 111.
100. “long exile from Christendom”: MD, ch. 57, p. 270.
101. “We can’t go back”: Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 137.
102. “down into the bosom”: T, ch. 7, p. 49.
103. “to concentrate all my capabilities”: T, ch. 8, p. 53.
104. “Robinson Crusoe … could not have been more startled”: T, ch. 7, p. 44.
105. “partly hidden by the dense foliage”: T, ch. 10, p. 68.
106. “a struggling child”: T, ch. 11, p. 80.
107. “fiction … of the nervous white mind”: Sanborn, “Invented Appetites,” p. 10. Caleb Crain, “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Novels,” American Literature 66, no. 1 (March 1994): 25–53, argues that fear of cannibalism in antebellum America was a deflected expression of anxiety about the equally scandalous practice of homosexual sex. For an informative and amusing survey of the debate among modern anthropologists as to whether cannibalism has ever existed in human culture or is merely a matter of “culturally malicious hearsay,” see Lawrence Osborne, “Does Man Eat Man?: Inside the Cannibalism Controversy,” Lingua Franca, April–May 1997, pp. 28–38.
108. “the disordered members”: T, ch. 32, p. 238.
109. “green winding sheets”: T, ch. 32, p. 235.
110. “in leaves of the hibiscus”: Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2 vols. (New York, 1833), I, 276.
111. “remembered of the Islands of the Pacific”: Anonymous review in The New Englander (July 1846), in Parker, ed., The Recognition, p. 4.
112. “I must throw a veil”: John Coulter, Adventures in the Pacific (Dublin, 1845), p. 232.
113. “every Author, as far as he is great”: See Thomas Heffernan, “Melville and Wordsworth,” American Literature 49, no. 3 (1977): 350.
114. “when between sheets”: MD, ch. 11, p. 54.
115. “a painter of his own face”: Hardwick, Herman Melville, p. 36.
116. “if you rightly look for it”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 249.
117. “laced chapeau”; “tattooed savage”: T, ch. 4, p. 29.
CHAPTER 4. ESCAPE TO NEW YORK
1. a familiar presence in the office: See Parker, I, 355.
2. “his countenance spoke”: Augusta Whipple to Augusta Melville, January 14, 1846, quoted in Robertson-Lorant, Melville, p. 137, and Parker, I, 381.
3. “I would to God Shakspeare had lived later”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, March 3, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 122.
4. “I don’t know how it is precisely … merry little walk?”: HM to Catherine Melville, January 20, 1845, ibid., pp. 27–30.
5. “the country is tired”: Willis, quoted in Benjamin T. Spencer, The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1957), p. 85.
6. “intoxicating way of crushing her eyes up”: Willis, quoted in Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music, Vol. 1: Resonances, 1836–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 325.
7. “And I have felt”: These lines appear in Willis’s poem “The Lady in the White Dress, Whom I Helped into the Omnibus,” first collected (along with “City Lyric”) in his Poems, Sacred, Passionate, and Humorous (New York, 1844).
8. “pulled up stakes somewhere”: E. B. White, Here Is New York (New York: Little Bookroom, 1999), p. 19.
9. “fills up [his] mouth”: Charles F. Briggs, The Adventures of Harry Franco: A Tale of the Great Panic, 2 vols. (New York, 1839), I, 24.
10. “threw up [her] … skirts”: T, ch. 1, p. 8.
11. “utterly incredible”: Review in the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, April 17, 1846, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, pp. 46–47.
12. “opera-dancers, and voluptuous prints”: Review in the New York Evangelist, April 9, 1846, ibid., p. 46.
13. “Typee is a true narrative”: HM’s comments were published as a letter to the editor of the Albany Argus (April 21, 1846), which had reviewed Typee favorably in its issue of March 26. The reviewer praised the book, but expressed some incredulity by attributing to it the “charm of a beautiful novel.” See the review in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 23, and HM’s reply in Correspondence, p. 35.
14. “I sometimes fear”: Gansevoort Melville to HM, April 3, 1846, in Correspondence, p. 576.
15. “I … think I see you”: HM to Gansevoort Melville, June 29, 1846, ibid., pp. 40–41.
16. “No doubt, two years ago”: Journals, p. 28.
17. “ ‘How my heart thumped’ ”: WJ, ch. 59, p. 245.
18. “exceedingly embarrassed circumstances”: HM to Secretary of State James Buchanan, June 6, 1846, in Correspondence, p. 43.
19. The Sunday Times: May 2, 1847, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 98.
20. “racy lightness”: Greeley, in the Tribune, June 26, 1847, ibid., p. 130.
21. “restless and … lonely”: Maria Gansevoort Melville to Augusta Melville, May 30, 1847, quoted in Parker, I, 522.
22. “continued from, tho’ wholly independent of”: HM to John Murray, October 29, 1847, in Correspondence, pp. 98–99.
23. “BREACH OF PROMISE SUIT”: New-York Daily Tribune, August 7, 1847, in Log, I, 256.
24. “half Bostonian”: Parker, I, 497.
25. “the capital of the universal Yankee nation”: New York Independent, December 28, 1848, quoted in Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 7.
26. “it somehow or other happens”: Briggs, Harry Franco, II, 104.
27. “without a background”: Yvor Winters, Foreword to Maule’s Curse, reprinted in Winters, In Defense of Reason (Chicago: Swallow Press, n.d.), p. 173.
28. not “fleshy … exactly”: Willis, “Miss Albina McLush,” first published in American Monthly Magazine (July 1830); reprinted in Kendall B. Taft, Minor Knickerbockers: Representative Selections (New York: American Book Company, 1947), p. 294.
29. “dallying with her grass fan … the carnal part”: O, ch. 46, p. 178.
30. “cross-lights of a druggist’s window”: P, bk. 16, p. 237.
31. “very clerical looking”: Whitman, quoted in Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 21.
32. “Ay, ay, Arcturion!”: Mardi, ch. 1, p. 5.
33. “elegant inutilities”: The friend was Joann Miller. See Donald Yannella, “Writing the ‘Other Way’: Melville, the Duyckinck Crowd, and Literature for the Masses,” in Bryant, ed., Companion to Melville Studies, p. 66. For an evocative account of the Duyckincks, see Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), p. 72.
34. when that day of which every author dreams: Leonard Cassuto, in his introduction to Edgar Allan Poe: Literary Theory and Criticism (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), p. vii, remarks that antebellum American writers faced “a Catch-22—their work could get published only if it were popular, and they could become popular only if their work were published.”
35. “The most ‘popular’ ”:
Poe’s essay, first published in installments from May to October 1846 in Godey’s Lady Book, is excerpted in Cassuto, Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 111–24. Duyckinck described Melville at this time “agitating the conscience” of John Wiley while simultaneously “tempting the pockets of the Harpers” with the manuscript of Omoo. See the Historical Note in PT, p. 464.
36. “From the proprietors of the Magazines”: P, bk. 17, p. 253.
37. the Duyckincks’ request: See Yannella, “Writing the ‘Other Way,’ ” p.65.
38. “petitioning and remonstrating”: P, bk. 17, p. 255.
39. the “wide-spread and disastrous” fire: P, bk. 22, p. 300.
40. “If there is la jeune France”: Cooper, Home as Found (1838), quoted in Widmer, Young America, p. 59.
41. “world capital of invective”: Miller, Raven and the Whale, p. 186.
42. “Horace Greeley, BA and ASS”: Bennett (April 20, 1841), quoted in Hans Bergmann, God in the Street: New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), p. 32.
43. “the only way of securing exemption”: James Silk Buckingham, “Metropolis and Summer Watering-Place” (1841), in Allan Nevins, ed., American Social History as Recorded by British Travellers (New York: Henry Holt, 1923), p. 319.
44. “superannuated dust-box”: George Sanders, quoted in John Stafford, The Literary Criticism of “Young America” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), p. 20.
45. “country town of litterateurs”: Evert Duyckinck, “Traits of American Authorship,” first published April 17, 1847, in The Literary World; reprinted in Kay S. House, Reality and Myth in American Literature (New York: Fawcett, 1966), p. 157.
46. “Eat sh—t!”: Evert Duyckinck, quoted in Miller, Raven and the Whale, p. 74. Miller points out that Duyckinck used dashes even when recording this bit of medical advice in his private diary.
47. “He’s in joke half the time”: James Russell Lowell, “A Fable for Critics” (1848), quoted ibid., p. 49.
48. “You Gothamites strain hard”: Lowell to Briggs, quoted ibid.
49. “New York the empress queen”: Allan Melvill to Lemuel Shaw, January 16, 1819. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University—call number *93M-70.) I am grateful to Dennis Marnon for calling to my attention his recent discovery of this unpublished letter.
Melville: His World and Work Page 46