38. “that direst of storms”: MD, ch. 119, p. 503.
39. “through that transparent air”: MD, ch. 35, p. 159.
40. “clos’d his Swimming Eyes”: Aeneid (Dryden translation), bk. 5, l. 1113.
41. plunges into the ocean and drowns: Anthony Hecht, in Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 219–37, compares Melville’s short-lived Bulkington to Virgil’s helmsman Palinurus. Hecht’s essay is richly suggestive of Melville’s indebtedness to Homeric as well as Virgilian epics. A helpful resource devoted to this subject is Gail H. Coffler, Melville’s Classical Allusions: A Comprehensive Index and Glossary (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), and see, more generally, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Melville’s Sources (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1987).
42. While in London, Melville had acquired: Sealts, Melville’s Reading, p. 214.
43. “marvellously endowed”: Cowen, “Melville’s Marginalia,” VII, 180.
44. “Are you then so easily turned”: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 214.
45. “What say ye men”: MD, ch. 36, p. 163.
46. the idea of Captain Ahab: See the invaluable explanatory notes to the edition of Moby-Dick edited by Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York: Hendricks House, 1962), esp. pp. 648ff. for discussion of many possible influences on HM’s conception of Ahab.
47. “revenge, immortal hate”: Paradise Lost, bk. I, ll. 106–8. Sources have also been suggested in Byron, Goethe, Carlyle, Bulwer-Lytton, and many other writers.
48. “every copy that was come-atable”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, February 24, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 119.
49. “painted hideously”; “very pretty”: Journal entry, November 19, 1849, in Journals, p. 22.
50. “Richard-the-third-humps”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 244.
51. “if another Messiah ever comes”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, February 24, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 119.
52. “dark characters” as “Hamlet, Timon”: “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” in PT, p. 244.
53. “with a crucifixion in his face”: MD, ch. 28, p. 124.
54. “a long, limber, portentous, black mass”: MD, ch. 3, p. 12.
55. “chief mates, and second mates”: MD, ch. 3, p. 22.
56. “This young fellow’s healthy cheek”: MD, ch. 5, pp. 29–30.
57. “could show a cheek”: MD, ch. 5, p. 30.
58. “an island far away”: MD, ch. 12, p. 55.
59. “is a dangerous man”: MD, ch. 3, p. 19.
60. “bosom friend”: MD, title of ch. 10, p. 49.
61. “the color of a three-days’ old Congo baby”: MD, ch. 3, p. 22.
62. “The departure from home”: William Cox, “Traveling—Mentally and Bodily” (first pub. in New York Mirror, January 19, 1833), in Taft, ed. Minor Knickerbockers, p. 279.
63. “thrown over me … I had been his wife”: MD, ch. 4, p. 25.
64. “similar circumstance … longest day in the year”: MD, ch. 4, pp. 25–26.
65. “Instantly I felt a shock”: MD, ch. 4, p. 26.
66. takes up residence in his own psyche: Mansfield and Vincent (Hendrick House edition of Moby-Dick, p. 609) suggest that Melville had in mind Thomas De Quincey’s “The Vision of Sudden Death” (published in Blackwood’s Magazine in December 1849 and briefly excerpted in The Literary World, January 5, 1850). De Quincey describes a child’s dream of temptation and fear: “Perhaps not one of us escapes that dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation, the original temptation of Eden. Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the infirm places of his own individual will; once again a snare is made ready for leading him into captivity to a luxury of ruin; again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man falls from innocence.… Even so in dreams, perhaps, under some secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each several child of our mysterious race completes for himself the aboriginal fall.”
67. “whether it was a reality or a dream”: MD, ch. 4, p. 25.
68. “how elastic our stiff prejudices grow”: MD, ch. 11, p. 54.
69. “No more my splintered heart”: MD, ch. 10, p. 51.
70. “perfect prodigy”: HM to Allan Melville, February 20, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 116.
71. “Mirth and a heavy heart”: Rush, letter to John Coakely Lettsom, April 21, 1788, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), I, 458.
72. “currents of the Universal Being”: Emerson, Nature, in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 24.
73. “In reading some of Goethe’s sayings … upon your head”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1[?], 1851, in Correspondence, pp. 193–94.
74. “When conversing”: Sophia Hawthorne to her mother, September 3, 1850, in Log, I, 393–94.
75. “Mr. Noble Melancholy”: In Log, I, 383.
76. “The freshness of primeval nature”: Sophia Hawthorne to Evert Duyckinck, August 29, 1850, quoted in Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, p. 90.
77. “ocean-experience has given sea-room”: Sophia Hawthorne to her mother, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, quoted in Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2003), p. 227.
78. “was very careful not to interrupt”: Sophia Hawthorne to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, October [?], 1850, quoted in Log, II, 925.
79. “ontological heroics”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 29, 1851, quoted in Log, I, 415.
80. “lasted pretty deep into the night”: Hawthorne’s journal, August 1, 1851, quoted in Log, I, 419.
81. “evasive and enigmatic”: Martin Green, “Herman Melville,” in Penguin History of American Literature to 1900, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 202.
82. But Hawthorne was different: Many scholars have made the point that Hawthorne succeeded HM’s late brother Gansevoort and the limited Evert Duyckinck as his mentor and confidant. See Widmer, Young America, p. 112; Barbour, “ ‘All my books are botches,’ ” p. 36; and Edwin Haviland Miller, who remarks in Melville: A Biography (New York: Perseus Books, 1975), p. 246, that Hawthorne was “a father and a brother come to life.”
83. “Whenever … it is a damp, drizzly November”: MD, ch. 1, p. 3.
84. “the first person”: Sophia Hawthorne to Evert Duyckinck, August 29, 1850, in Log, I, 391.
85. “up to the present day”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 253.
86. “by-gone days”: Henry F. Chorley, review of Twice-Told Tales in the Athenaeum, August 23, 1845, in J. Donald Crowley, ed., Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), p. 96.
87. “spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 243.
88. “time and eternity”: Hawthorne’s journal, August 1, 1851, quoted in Log, I, 419.
89. “dig a deep hole”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, July 22, 1851, in Correspondence, p. 200.
90. “Whence come you, Hawthorne? … both in God’s”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, November [17?], 1851, ibid., p. 212.
91. “let no man”: WJ, ch. 63, p. 260.
92. “great power of blackness”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 243.
93. “You should see the maples”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, October 6, 1850, in Correspondence, p. 170.
94. “imperial muse tosses the creation”: Emerson, Nature, in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 44.
95. Eastern tales of dervishes: See Dorothee Finkelstein, Melville’s Orienda (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).
96. “the remotest spaces of nature”: Emerson, Nature, in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 44.
97. “all the generations of whales”: MD, ch. 104, p. 456.
98. “candidate for an archbishoprick”: MD, ch. 95, p. 420.
99. “Perseus, St. George, Hercules”: MD, ch. 82, p. 363.
100. “Towards thee I roll”: MD, ch. 135, pp. 571–72.
101. “heroes, saints, demigods”: MD, ch. 82, p. 363.
102. “at once masculine and feminine”: Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 547.
103. “A gentle joyousness”: MD, ch. 133, p. 548.
104. “grand hooded phantom”: MD, ch. 1, p. 7.
105. “All men live enveloped in whale-lines”: MD, ch. 60, p. 281.
106. “Herman, I hope returned home safe”: Maria Melville to Augusta Melville, March 1851, quoted in Parker, I, 820.
107. her nephew Robert: For the incident with Robert, see Parker, I, 733.
108. “spring begins to open”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, March 26, 1851, in Log, I, 408.
109. “shaping out the gigantic conception”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Log, I, 416.
110. “at his desk all day”: Log, I, 412.
111. “in a sort of mesmeric state”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 13, 1850, in Correspondence, p. 174.
112. “a sort of sea-feeling … rig in the chimney”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 13, 1850, ibid., p. 173.
113. “everlasting terra incognita”: MD, ch. 58, p. 273.
114. “those dreary regions … too thick for me to master them”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, August 16, 1850, in Correspondence, pp. 167–68.
115. “driven forth”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, February 21, 1850, ibid., p. 154.
116. “matters of course”: HM to Lemuel Shaw, April 23, 1849, ibid., p. 130.
117. “to regard my literary affairs”: HM to John Murray, October 29, 1847, ibid., p. 99.
118. felt compelled to borrow $2,000 more: See G. Thomas Tanselle, Historical Note, in MD, p. 660.
119. “Though I wrote the Gospels … holding the door ajar”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [June 1?], 1851, in Correspondence, pp. 192, 191.
120. “This country is at present”: HM to Richard Bentley, July 20, 1851, ibid., p. 198.
121. “in full blast”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, November 7, 1851, ibid., p. 210.
122. “each silent worshipper”: MD, ch. 7, p. 34.
123. “drooped and fell away”: MD, ch. 9, p. 48.
124. “happiness … of the artist discovering”: Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), p. 201.
125. “did not build himself in with plans”: Mardi, ch. 180, p. 595.
126. “A good half of writing”: Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: New American Library, 1968), p. 28.
127. “Nantucket! Take out your map”: MD, ch. 14, p. 63.
128. “Give me a condor’s quill!”: MD, ch. 104, p. 456.
129. “shallow and scanty”: Hawthorne, notebook entry, July 27, 1844, in The American Notebooks, ed. Claude M. Simpson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972), p. 250.
130. “taking a book off the brain”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 13, 1850, in Correspondence, p. 174.
131. “possible and impossible matters”: Hawthorne’s journal, August 1, 1851, in Log, I, 419.
132. “When we see how little we can express”: Hawthorne, notebook entry, July 27, 1844, in American Notebooks, ed. Simpson, p. 250.
133. “gathering up and piecing together”: Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860), ch. 11, in Novels, p. 929.
134. “send me about fifty fast-writing youths”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 13, 1850, in Correspondence, p. 174.
135. “George Washington cannibalistically developed”: MD, ch. 10, p. 50.
136. “the exact embodiment”: MD, ch. 16, p. 75.
137. “so utterly lost”: MD, ch. 27, p. 119.
138. “with a chest like a coffer-dam”: MD, ch. 3, p. 16.
139. and then, twenty chapters later, summarily dismisses: See Harrison Hayford’s discussion in the Historical Note to MD, p. 657.
140. “two books … being writ”: P, bk. 22, p. 304.
141. “ebullition of mind”: Melville marked this passage in Hazlitt’s essay “On Application to Study,” published in the 1845 American edition of Table Talk. See Wallace, Melville and Turner, p. 111.
142. “in mental life”: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930; New York: Norton, 1961), p. 16.
143. “noble shoulders … dazzling by contrast”: MD, ch. 3, p. 16.
144. “there is but one planet”: CM, ch. 44, p. 239.
145. “Brave as he might be”: MD, ch. 26, p. 117.
146. But that he changed his ideas: See the Editorial Appendix in MD, p. 832, where G. Thomas Tanselle remarks that “Bulkington seems best explained as a vestigial character from an earlier stage in the book’s composition, in which he was to be Ishmael’s ‘comrade,’ a role subsequently assigned to Queequeg.” Parker (II, 933) accepts Geoffrey Sanborn’s suggestion that “Melville based Queequeg on Tupai Cupa, a Maori described in George Lillie Craik’s The New Zealanders (1830),” and surmises that HM “had progressed some distance into his manuscript with Bulkington as Ishmael’s special comrade before he picked up The New Zealanders,” which gave him the idea for a new character.
147. “Some chapters back”: MD, ch. 23, p. 106.
148. “Take heart, take heart”: MD, ch. 23, p. 107.
149. “introduces a character”: Stewart, “The Two Moby-Dicks,” p. 424.
150. “the idea of a connected and collected story”: Review by Henry F. Chorley, Athenaeum, October 25, 1851, in Watson G. Branch, ed., Melville: The Critical Heritage (London: Kegan Paul, 1985; cited hereafter as Critical Heritage), p. 253.
151. “intellectual chowder”: Duyckinck, review in The Literary World, November 15 and 22, 1851, ibid., p. 265.
152. “there are some enterprises”: MD, ch. 82, p. 361.
153. “This man interested me at once”: MD, ch. 3, p. 16.
154. a short, “six-inch chapter”: MD, ch. 23, p. 106.
155. “the unconscious mind”: John Freeman, Herman Melville (London and New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 176.
156. “of romance, philosophy, natural history”: Evert Duyckinck, review of Moby-Dick in The Literary World, November 22, 1851, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 384.
CHAPTER 6. CAPTAIN AMERICA
1. “It seems a golden Hell!”: Mardi, ch. 166, p. 547.
2. “The United States will conquer Mexico”: Emerson, quoted in Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), p. 492.
3. In his copy of the works of William D’Avenant: See Steven Olsen-Smith and Dennis C. Marnon, “Melville’s Marginalia in The Works of William D’Avenant,” Leviathan 6, no. 1 (March 2004): 86.
4. “Let slavery take care of itself”: Evert Duyckinck to George Duyckinck, May 23, 1848, quoted in Davis, Melville’s Mardi, p. 88.
5. “the unacknowledged ghost”: Charles M. Wiltse, The New Nation, 1800–1845 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1961), p. 156.
6. “He looked like a man cut away”: MD, ch. 28, p. 123. For a survey of contemporary descriptions of Calhoun as a man “at once repulsive and fascinating,” see Alan Heimert, “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism,” American Quarterly 15 (1963): 523.
7. “exclusive power of controlling the Government”: Calhoun, speech in the United States Senate, March 4, 1850, in Calhoun: Basic Documents, ed. John M. Anderson (State College, PA: Bald Eagle Press, 1952), p. 300.
8. “cannot … be saved by eulogies”: Ibid., p. 312.
9. “I wish to speak today”: Webster, speech in the United States Senate, March 7, 1850, in The Great Speeches of Daniel Webster (Boston, 1894), p. 600.
10. “Every member of every Northern legislature”: Ibid., p. 617.
11. “nothing to propose”: Ibid., p. 623.
12. “We have the wolf by the ears”: Jefferson, letter to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 198
4), p. 1434.
13. only a few crackpot dreamers: John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), offers portraits of four antebellum public figures—Gerrit Smith, John Brown, James McCune Smith, and Frederick Douglass—who envisioned a racially egalitarian society to be achieved, if necessary, by violence. But Stauffer rightly calls these men “in no way ‘representative’ ” (p. 3) and celebrates them as unheralded prophets. Charles Sumner’s unsuccessful argument before the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1849 for desegregation of the Boston public schools has been recognized in retrospect as a forerunner of Brown v. Board of Education more than a hundred years later. For a convenient gathering of antebellum writings envisioning a society organized on principles of racial justice, see William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Antislavery Argument (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), ch. 10, “Arguments for Racial Equality.”
14. “if they were all landed there in a day … not know what to do”: Lincoln, “Speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act” (October 16, 1854), in Don E. Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1989), I, 316. Tocqueville (Democracy in America, I, 377–78) estimated that “in twelve years the Colonization Society has transported 2500 Negroes to Africa; in the same space of time about 700,000 blacks were born in the United States.”
15. “What has the North to do with slavery?”: The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), p. 243.
16. “Northern Representatives … are no better”: Parker, “Sermon on War,” in Warner, ed., American Sermons, p. 624.
17. “If our resistance to this law is not right”: Emerson, “Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law” (May 3, 1851), in Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, eds., Emerson’s Antislavery Writings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 57–58.
18. Dr. Holmes, who signed a public circular: Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), p. 16.
19. “slavery in its best and mildest form”: Holmes, quoted in Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 11.
Melville: His World and Work Page 48