Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  50. the same shops that sold libretti: Lorenzo Da Ponte, Memoirs (1823–1830), trans. Elisabeth Abbott (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), p. 436.

  51. “clapper-clawed” her rival: George Templeton Strong, quoted in Miller, Raven and the Whale, p. 16.

  52. one observer posted himself: Joel Ross, What I Saw in New York (1851), quoted in Spann, The New Metropolis, p. 3.

  53. “A more ingenious contrivance”: Poe (1844), quoted in Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), p. 47. Asphalt was not introduced as a paving material until after the Civil War.

  54. “high above the city’s din”: The Knickerbocker, February 1840, p. 139.

  55. “made considerable noise … other delicacies”: Thomas DeVoe, The Market Book, 2 vols. (New York, 1862), I, 369.

  56. “wading through puddles”: Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), p. 58.

  57. “hurried through the streets”: Briggs, Harry Franco, II, 59.

  58. “babylonish brick-kiln”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 29, 1851, in Correspondence, p. 195.

  59. “as natural … wideness of the world”: Mumford, Herman Melville, p. 11.

  60. “satisfaction that the constant flicker”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; New York: Scribner’s, 1953), p. 57.

  61. “Pinkster’s Day”: See Sterling Stuckey, “The Tambourine in Glory: African Culture in Melville’s Art,” in Levine, ed., Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, pp. 38–40.

  62. “bright silks and sparkling faces”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 28.

  63. “pallidly neat”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 19.

  64. “men are but men”: Briggs, Harry Franco, I, 17.

  65. “crowded hotels … city’s soul and body”: “The New York Park”(1851), in A. J. Downing, Rural Essays (New York, 1890), pp. 147–48.

  66. “crowds, pacing straight for the water”: MD, ch. 1, p. 4.

  67. “insular city”: MD, ch. 1, p. 3.

  68. “an unobstructed view”: Philip Hone, Diary, 2 vols. (New York, 1899), I, 380.

  69. guided toy boats: Elizabeth Hone Smith, Newsboy (1854), quoted in Bergmann, God in the Street, p. 101.

  70. “The gorgeous rainbow”: Greeley, quoted in Spann, The New Metropolis, p. 73. For the prevalence of scavenging and prostitution, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 50.

  71. “creep into a safe retreat”: Margaret Fuller (March 25, 1846), in Judith Bean and Joel Myerson, eds., Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New York Tribune, 1844–1846 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 376.

  72. “worthless foreigners”: Report of the Philadelphia Guardians of the Poor (1827), quoted in Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 17.

  73. “the inmates of [Europe’s] Alms-Houses”: R. C. Waterston, An Address on Pauperism (Boston, 1844), p. 21.

  74. “a sort of common sewer for the filth”: Lydia Maria Child (1863), Selected Letters, 1817–1880, ed. Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), p. 434.

  75. “old men, tottering with age”: R, ch. 33, p. 168.

  76. “one of the out & out Reds”: Browning, quoted in Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 50.

  77. “every shop was shut”: George Duyckinck, quoted ibid., p. 8.

  78. “divine equality”: MD, ch. 26, p. 117.

  79. “to be a born American citizen”: R, ch. 41, p. 202.

  80. “safety-valve”: The phrase was used by Michigan senator Lewis Cass in a speech to the Senate on February 10, 1847, reprinted in Norman Graebner, ed., Manifest Destiny (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), pp. 156–59.

  81. secretly urging New York Democrats: Parker, Introduction to Gansevoort Melville, London Journal (New York: New York Public Library, 1966), p. 10.

  82. “class … who … hedge themselves round”: William Leggett, in the New York Evening Post, November 4, 1834, reprinted in Joseph Blau, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), p. 68.

  83. “Americanos! Conquerors!”: Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok.”

  84. “slavery in the South”: Democratic Review (May 1848), quoted in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 681.

  85. “the seat in his ample pants”: HM, “Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack,” first published in Yankee Doodle, July 24, 1847; reprinted in PT, p. 215. See the Historical Note in PT, p. 467, for discussion of Melville’s opposition to the Mexican War.

  86. “the best kind of conquest”: Whitman, editorial in the Brooklyn Eagle, September 23, 1847, in Graebner, Manifest Destiny, p. 209.

  87. “in that age”: Clarel, pt. I, 4, ll. 11–13.

  88. “romance … see whether”: Preface to Mardi, p. xvii.

  89. “proceeding in my narrative of facts”: HM to John Murray, March 25, 1848, in Correspondence, p. 106.

  90. “Antarctic tenor”: HM to John Murray, June 19, 1848, ibid., p. 109.

  91. “peculiar thoughts & fancies”: HM to Richard Bentley, June 5, 1849, ibid., p. 131.

  92. “the Island of Delights … valve of a shell”: Mardi, ch. 43, p. 147.

  93. “pursuers and pursued flew on”: Mardi, ch. 195, p. 654.

  94. “a walk in Broadway to-day … en rapport with the Revolution”: Evert Duyckinck to George Duyckinck, March 18, 1848, quoted in Merrell R. Davis, Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 82.

  95. a “wondrous” man: Whitman, quoted in Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 20.

  96. “great whale the French revolution”: Evert Duyckinck to George Duyckinck, March 24, 1848, quoted in Davis, Melville’s Mardi, p. 83.

  97. “What if the Kings”: Clarel, pt. II, 4, ll. 99–102.

  98. “Evil … is the chronic malady”: Mardi, ch. 161, p. 529. Compare Thoreau, “Higher Laws,” in Walden, p. 498: “When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.” On Dana, see Reynolds, European Revolutions, ch. 3.

  99. “the world of mind … if wreck I do”: Mardi, ch. 169, p. 557.

  100. “radiant young” muse: Mardi, ch. 43, p. 138.

  101. “far to the South”: Mardi, ch. 119, p. 366.

  102. “rubbishing rhapsody”: Blackwood’s, August 1849, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 241.

  103. a long, respectful review: The review, by Philarete Chasles, was originally published on May 15, 1849, in Paris in Revue des deux mondes, and appeared in translation in The Literary World in the issues of August 4 and August 11, 1849.

  104. “stabbed at”: HM (writing from London) to Evert Duyckinck, December 14, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 149.

  105. “an onward development”: From Evert Duyckinck review of Mardi in Literary World, April 7, 1849, quoted in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 206.

  106. “Like a frigate”: Mardi, ch. 119, p. 367.

  107. “We breakfast at 8 o’clock”: Elizabeth Melville to Hope Shaw, December 23, 1847, quoted in Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 48–49.

  108. “duns all round him”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 14, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 149.

  109. “the necessity of bestirring himself”: Mardi, ch. 180, p. 592.

  110. “When old Zack heard of it”: HM to Allan Melville, February 20, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 116. See Hennig Cohen and Donald Yannella, Herman Melville’s Malcolm Letter: “Man’s Final Lore” (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), for a detailed study of the family context at the time this letter was written.
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  111. “two jobs which I have done”: HM to Lemuel Shaw, October 6, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 138.

  112. “I, the author”: Journal entry, November 6, 1849, in Journals, p. 13.

  113. “pestilent lanes and alleys”: R, ch. 39, p. 191.

  114. “very much such a place”: R, ch. 41, p. 202. In Melville’s City (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 125, Wyn Kelley remarks that Liverpool, as Melville rendered it in Redburn, “appears a faithful portrait of New York.”

  115. his “lady-like” friend: R, ch. 56, p. 281.

  116. “impressed every column”: R, ch. 31, p. 151.

  117. “priory or castle”: R, ch. 31, p. 159.

  118. “two shrunken things”: R, ch. 37, p. 180.

  119. “It’s none of my business”: R, ch. 37, p. 181.

  120. “caught … convulsively”: R, ch. 37, p. 182.

  121. With an infant mortality rate among the poor: James Walvin, English Urban Life, 1776–1851 (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 24. 112 “not a Paradise then”: R, ch. 33, p. 169.

  122. “suffer more in mind”: “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” in PT, p. 296.

  123. “dog-kennels”: R, ch. 47, p. 239.

  124. whom she likened to dogs: Child, letter to Maria Chapman, April 26, 1842, in Selected Letters, pp. 169–70.

  125. “America must have seemed”: R, ch. 51, p. 260.

  126. “Let us waive”: R, ch. 58, p. 292.

  127. “elbowing, heartless-looking crowd”: R, ch. 41, p. 202.

  128. “going thro’ the press”: HM to Richard Bentley, July 20, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 134.

  129. the amazingly short span of two months: See Willard Thorp, Historical Note, in WJ, p. 404.

  130. “a polite, courteous way”: WJ, ch. 4, p. 14.

  131. “Nestor of the crew”: WJ, ch. 86, p. 363.

  132. “Troglodite … goggle-eyes”: WJ, ch. 30, p. 125.

  133. “curling his fingers … an insulted and unendurable existence”: WJ, ch. 67, p. 280.

  134. “our Revolution was in vain”: WJ, ch. 35, p. 144.

  135. “What, to the American slave”: Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed. (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 2003.

  136. “Head-bumping … an especial favorite”: WJ, ch. 66, p. 275.

  137. “I … permit you to play”: WJ, ch. 66, p. 276.

  138. “I have swam through libraries”: MD, ch. 32, p. 136.

  139. “crack’d Archangel”: See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 38–39.

  140. “Like a grand, ground swell”: Mardi, ch. 119, p. 367.

  141. “soul-becalmed”: WJ, ch. 92, p. 393.

  142. “placental”: The word is Howard P. Vincent’s, in The Tailoring of Melville’s White-Jacket (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 223.

  143. “up and down”: WJ, ch. 92, p. 394.

  144. “metropolitan magnificence”: R, ch. 46, p. 234.

  145. “distinct and original signature”: Warner Berthoff, The Example of Melville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 5.

  146. “Like a good wife”: Mardi, ch. 121, p. 376.

  147. “Where does any novelist”: CM, ch. 44, p. 238.

  148. “fantastic, incorrect, overburdened”: Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 62.

  149. “fire flames on my tongue”: Mardi, ch. 119, p. 368.

  150. the nineteenth-century equivalent: David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Space in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 74.

  151. “our blood is as the flood”: R, ch. 33, p. 169.

  152. “vagabonding thro’ the courts”: Journal entry, November 10, 1849, in Journals, p. 16.

  153. “The mob was brutish”: Journal entry, November 13, 1849, ibid., p. 17.

  154. Charles Dickens was present, too: Howard Horsford, “Melville and the London Street Scene,” Essays in Arts and Sciences 16 (May 1987): 23–35.

  155. “struggling to understand”: Dennis Berthold, “Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and Melville’s ‘The Two Temples,’ ” American Literature 71, no. 3 (1999): 453. Berthold’s article gives a fine overview of Melville’s developing political ambivalence in his New York years.

  156. “Herman by birth”: Augusta Melville to Peter Gansevoort, Jr., April 15, 1857, in Log, II, 572.

  157. “in the fields and in the study”: Evert Duyckinck and George Duyckinck, Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855), reprinted in Sealts, Early Lives, p. 95.

  158. “feeling of loneliness … tether us to history”: “With Ishmael in the Island City,” New York Times, October 18, 2001, p. E1.

  159. “In towns there is … soaring out of them”: “I and My Chimney,” in PT, p. 354.

  160. “barbaric yawp”: Whitman, “Song of Myself.”

  CHAPTER 5. HUNTING THE WHALE

  1. “half way” into “a strange sort of book”: HM to R. H. Dana, May 1, 1850, in Correspondence, p. 162.

  2. “watery part of the world”: MD, ch. 1. p. 3.

  3. “howling infinite”: MD, ch. 23, p. 107.

  4. “unaccountable masses”: MD, ch. 3, p. 12.

  5. “pictures of nothing”: Hazlitt, quoted in Robert K. Wallace, Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 36.

  6. “Turner’s pictures of whalers”: Cowen, “Melville’s Marginalia,” II, 275.

  7. “unvarnished facts”: HM, review of Browne, first published in The Literary World, March 6, 1847, in PT, p. 205.

  8. “Blubber is blubber”: HM to R. H. Dana, May 1, 1850, in Correspondence, p. 162.

  9. “a romance of adventure”: HM to Richard Bentley, June 27, 1850, ibid., p. 163.

  10. signed up as a boatsteerer: See Howard, Herman Melville, pp. 63–64.

  11. “rose cold”: Puett, “Melville’s Wife,” p. 71.

  12. “unrivalled either for the beauty”: Robert Melville, advertisement in the Pittsfield Sun, quoted in Parker, I, 595.

  13. “Don’t you buy it”: HM to Sarah Morewood, September [12 or 19?], 1851, in Correspondence, p. 206.

  14. “Glorious place”: Quoted in Log, I, 379.

  15. “grounds would satisfy an English nobleman”: Duyckinck, quoted in Luther Stearns Mansfield, “Melville and Hawthorne in the Berkshires,” in Howard P. Vincent, ed., Melville and Hawthorne in the Berkshires: A Symposium (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1968), p. 17.

  16. Melville moved quickly toward a deal: Parker, I, 778.

  17. “as ridiculous a fanfaronade … Eternal Quiet”: Miller, Raven and the Whale, pp. 82–83.

  18. “The Poets have made no mistake”: Quoted in Parker, I, 743.

  19. Melville’s sister Kate: Puett, “Melville’s Wife,” p. 80.

  20. “Quite a piece … tea party in the harbor”: Quoted in Parker, I, 743.

  21. “to seat himself … merry shouts and laughter”: Log, I, 384.

  22. “One day it chanced”: J. E. A. Smith, Taghconic (1879), quoted in Sealts, Early Lives of Melville, p. 198.

  23. “on the new hay in the barn”: Sophia Hawthorne to Evert Duyckinck, August 29, 1850, in Log, I, 391. Melville’s books were sent to Hawthorne by Duyckinck; see Correspondence, p. 166.

  24. “dropped germinous seeds”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 250.

  25. “truth … finds its way”: Hawthorne, “The Birthmark,” in Hawthorne, Tales (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 767.

  26. “Melville has a new book”: Evert Duyckinck to George Duyckinck, August 7, 1850, in Log, I, 385.

  27. “Revision” is too slight a term: The hypothesis that Moby-Dick underwent radical revision was first advanced by Leon Howard, “Melville’s Struggle with the Angel,” Modern Language Quarterly 1 (1940): 195–206, and was elaborated by Olson (Call Me Ishmael) and by George R. Stewart,
“The Two Moby-Dicks,” American Literature 25 (January 1954): 417–48. James R. Barbour, “ ‘All my books are botches’: Melville Struggles with The Whale,” in James Barbour and Tom Quirk, eds., Writing the American Classics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 25–52, argues that Moby-Dick went through not two but three distinctive phases: first came a straightforward story of the “whale fisheries”; then, after August 1850, the “cetological” chapters were added; and finally, the story of Ahab and his quest took shape in the early months of 1851. Perhaps the most cogent assessment of what can be known about how HM wrote the work is Robert Milder, “The Composition of Moby-Dick: A Review and a Prospect,” ESQ 23 (1977): 203–16. Also valuable is Walter Bezanson, “Moby-Dick: Document, Drama, Dream,” in Bryant, ed., Companion, pp. 176–83.

  28. “You must have plenty of sea-room”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 246.

  29. “to future generations”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 249.

  30. “Nathaniel of Salem”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 246.

  31. “soft ravishments”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 241.

  32. “genius, all over the world”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 249.

  33. “better to fail in originality”: Satan’s speech in Paradise Lost occurs at bk. I, l. 263, an echo of Homer’s Odyssey, bk. 11, ll. 489–91, where Achilles, visited in Hades by Odysseus, declares that he would rather be a slave on earth than a king in Hades. For the impact of Milton on Melville, see Henry F. Pommer, Milton and Melville (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1950). HM’s letters are full of Miltonic references, such as one to Duyckinck of August 16, 1850, where he speaks of “thrones and dominations” (a mistake for “dominions”), echoing the phrase from Paradise Lost at bk. 3, l. 320. See the headnote in Correspondence, p. 166.

  34. “Virgil my minstrel”: Mardi, ch. 119, p. 368.

  35. “Mecaenas listening to Virgil”: WJ, ch. 11, p. 41.

  36. “safety, comfort, hearthstone”: MD, ch. 23, p. 106.

  37. “New Bedford rose in terraces of streets”: MD, ch. 13, pp. 59–60.