Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  20. John C. Hoadley: Parker, I, 801.

  21. “dwelt together in greater peace and affection”: Hawthorne, quoted in Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land, p. 12.

  22. “I hate to see the poor creatures”: Lincoln, letter to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855, in Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, I, 360.

  23. “like a black squall”: Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Journal, ed. Robert F. Lucid, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), II, 412.

  24. “What a moment was lost”: Emerson, quoted in Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 28. For the connection between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Crafts, see Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 212.

  25. “pure, fearless, and upright”: Frederic Hathaway Chase, Lemuel Shaw: Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Masschusetts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 164.

  26. “an owner of a slave”: Quoted ibid., pp. 164–65.

  27. “It is strange”: Quoted in Von Frank, Trials of Anthony Burns, p. 30.

  28. “abstains from doing downright ill”: P, bk. 14, p. 214.

  29. “NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!”: Garrison, in The Liberator, May 31, 1844, reprinted in George M. Fredrickson, ed., William Lloyd Garrison (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 52.

  30. “I wake in the morning”: Emerson, “Address to the Citizens of Concord,” in Gougeon and Myerson, eds., Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, p. 53.

  31. “woe-begone figures of captives”: R, ch. 31, p. 155.

  32. “Thank God! I am a white”: WJ, ch. 67, p. 277.

  33. “each answering all”: Whitman, “Salut au Monde!”

  34. “superstitious, ignorant, and thievish race”: Whitman, letter to his mother (1868), quoted in Newton Arvin, Whitman (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 33.

  35. “so inferior a race”: Emerson, journal entry, September 10, 1840, in Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journals, p. 245.

  36. put the Negro just above: See Kenneth Silverman, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Knopf, 2003), p. 401.

  37. “the extent to which the Americans”: Charles Lyell, Travels in North America in the Years 1841–42 (New York, 1845), excerpted in Clement Eaton, The Leaven of Democracy (New York: George Braziller, 1963), p. 422.

  38. “Seamen have strong prejudices”: HM, “The ‘Gees,’ ” in PT, p. 347.

  39. “no distinction as to color”: John Allan, quoted in James Farr, “A Slow Boat to Nowhere: The Multi-Racial Crews of the American Whaling Industry,” Journal of Negro History 68, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 165.

  40. Robert Lucas: See Brook Thomas, Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 94–95.

  41. “a man can be honest”: MD, ch. 3, p. 21.

  42. Mungo Park’s Travels: “I … enter many nations,” HM wrote in Mardi (ch. 119, p. 368), “as Mungo Park rested in African cots.” See Sterling Stuckey, Going Through the Storm So Long: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 154–56.

  43. “to be short, then”: MD, ch. 32, p. 137.

  44. “Narwhale”; “Nostril whale”: MD, ch. 32, p. 142.

  45. “the Fin-Back is not gregarious”: MD, ch. 32, p. 139.

  46. “sentimental Indian eyes”: MD, ch. 32, p. 144.

  47. “a zestful-skeptical running commentary”: Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 212. See also Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), who remarks that “Melville employs the whale’s massive corpus as the revealing stage on which to play out the tragedy and comedy of nineteenth-century bodily investigations” (p. 132).

  48. “It is in vain … repellingly intricate”: MD, ch. 32, pp. 138–39.

  49. “sin it is, no less”: Mardi, ch. 162, p. 534.

  50. “from the Southern States”: WJ, ch. 34, p. 141.

  51. “no hearts above the snow-line”: MD, ch. 125, p. 522.

  52. “humanity cries out”: Mardi, ch. 162, p. 534.

  53. “like a slave”: R, ch. 13, p. 66.

  54. “about to be dashed to pieces”: Mississippi senator Henry Foote (1848), quoted in Heimert, “American Political Symbolism,” p. 500.

  55. “the ferocity and carnage”: Thoreau, “Brute Neighbors,” in Walden, p. 507.

  56. “the American army”: MD, ch. 27, p. 121.

  57. “coal-black” harpooneer Daggoo: MD, ch. 27, p. 120.

  58. “The sight of little Flask”: MD, ch. 48, p. 221.

  59. “Thy race is the undeniable dark side”: MD, ch. 40, p. 177.

  60. an “Alabama boy” and a native of Connecticut: Pip is identified as being from Alabama in MD, ch. 27, p. 121, and as a native of Tolland County, Connecticut, in ch. 93, p. 412.

  61. “Beat thy belly”: MD, ch. 40, p. 174.

  62. “Stick to the boat … hurried traveller’s trunk”: MD, ch. 93, p. 413.

  63. “ringed horizon … at least they said he was”: MD, ch. 93, p. 414.

  64. “Upon my soul … they look”: MD, ch. 99, p. 434.

  65. “white squalls”: MD, ch. 40, p. 178.

  66. “Will ye do one little errand for me?”: MD, ch. 110, p. 479.

  67. “Where sayest thou … Pip the coward?”: MD, ch. 125, p. 522.

  68. “strange sweetness of his lunacy”: MD, ch. 110, p. 479.

  69. “Come! I feel prouder”: MD, ch. 125, p. 522.

  70. “darkness … licked up by”: MD, ch. 96, p. 422.

  71. “spermaceti, oil, and bone”: MD, ch. 98, p. 427.

  72. “iron horse … breathing fire”: Thoreau, “Sounds,” in Walden, p. 415.

  73. “With huge pronged poles”: MD, ch. 96, p. 423.

  74. “grand, ungodly … deeper wonders than the waves”: MD, ch. 16, p. 79.

  75. “ribbed bed … not before”: MD, ch. 19, pp. 91–92.

  76. a “lividly whitish” scar: MD, ch. 28, p. 123.

  77. “Reality outran apprehension”: MD, ch. 28, p. 123.

  78. “erect” and “nervous” Ahab: MD, ch. 28, p. 124; ch. 36, p. 160. In M, ch. 162, p. 534, HM had portrayed Calhoun as the “hard-hearted” character “Nulli.” See Heimert, “American Political Symbolism,” p. 525.

  79. “was the huge reservoir of rebellion”: G. W. Curtis, Orations and Addresses, 2 vols. (New York, 1894), I, 128.

  80. “like an anvil”: MD, ch. 128, p. 532.

  81. “to prevent excitement”: Calhoun, Basic Documents, p. 299.

  82. “violently agitated” and “clamorous crowd”: Mardi, ch. 161, p. 524.

  83. “the so-called democratic party”: Parke Godwin, “Our New President,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, September 1853, pp. 304, 308.

  84. “an incorrigible old hunks”: MD, ch. 16, p. 74.

  85. “hickory, with the bark”: MD, ch. 113, p. 489.

  86. these freighted political symbols: See Heimert, “American Political Symbolism,” passim.

  87. “destroys all sin”: MD, ch. 9, p. 48.

  88. “top-gallant delight”: MD, ch. 9, p. 48.

  89. the “higher law” of God: On Seward and other proponents of the “higher law” in the 1850s, see Gregg D. Crane, Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 1.

  90. the black abolitionist James McCune Smith: “Horoscope,” Frederick Douglass’s Paper, March 7, 1856. This early example of political interpretation of Moby-Dick was recently discovered by John Stauffer; see Black Hearts, p. 66.

  91. Robert C. Winthrop as a likely model: See Charles H. Foster, “Something in Emblems: A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick,” New England Quarterly 34 (1961), reprinted in Hersh
el Parker and Harrison Hayford, eds., Moby-Dick as Doubloon (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 283.

  92. plausibly identified as Thomas Hart Benton: Heimert, “American Political Symbolism,” p. 530.

  93. William Lloyd Garrison: The identification of Ahab with Garrison was proposed by Willie T. Weathers, “Moby-Dick and the Nineteenth-Century Scene,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 1, no. 4 (Winter 1960): 477–501.

  94. “distortion of the ‘political Messiah’ ”: Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 192.

  95. “comprehensive, combining, and subtle”: MD, ch. 74, p. 331.

  96. “many myths and many men”: Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 43. In his copy of Shelley’s Essays, Melville underscored a passage in which Satan is described as “far superior to God … one who perseveres … in spite of adversity and torture”; see F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), note at p. 450.

  97. Watson and the Shark: Copley’s painting was widely available in the form of engraved printed copies. The painting itself, which had been given by the artist’s son “to a near relative in Boston,” very likely hung through the first half of the nineteenth century in a Beacon Hill drawing room, where it may have been known to the Melvill and Shaw families. See Theodore Stebbins et al., A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting, 1760–1910 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1983), p. 211.

  98. “man of stone and iron”: Emerson, “Napoleon,” in Representative Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 133–36.

  99. “out-reaching comprehensiveness”: MD, ch. 104, p. 456.

  100. “original character … is like a revolving Drummond light”: CM, ch. 44, p. 239.

  101. “be careful in the hunt”: MD, ch. 22, p. 105.

  102. “athirst for human blood”: MD, ch. 41, p. 181.

  103. “His three boats”: MD, ch. 41, p. 184.

  104. “wondrous story”: Owen Chase’s narrative is reprinted in Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick, eds., The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale: First-Person Accounts (New York: Penguin, 2000). Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea (2000) is a highly readable retelling of the frightful events. For Melville’s annotations in his copy of Chase, see Sealts, Melville’s Reading, pp. 23, 69, and Cowen, “Melville’s Marginalia,” IV, 245–68.

  105. “an old bull whale”: See Howard P. Vincent, The Trying-out of Moby-Dick (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1980), pp. 169–75.

  106. “for long months of days and weeks”: MD, ch. 41, pp. 184–85.

  107. “entire, and to all appearances lusty”: MD, ch. 106, p. 463.

  108. “the rare ambiguous monster”: W. H. Auden, “Herman Melville.”

  109. Ahab, “dismasted”: MD, ch. 28, p. 124; ch. 36, p. 163.

  110. “so great a multitude”: MD, ch. 87, p. 382.

  111. expose “themselves to increased attack”: Robert L. Pittman et al., “Killer Whale Predation on Sperm Whales: Observations and Implications,” Marine Mammal Science 17, no. 3 (July 2001): 494.

  112. “Beheld through a blending atmosphere”: MD, ch. 87, pp. 382–83.

  113. “calmly and fixedly gaze away”: MD, ch. 87, p. 388. See Elizabeth Schultz, “Melville’s Environmental Vision in Moby-Dick,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) 7 (2000): 97–113, and, for an early instance of “green” criticism, Robert Zoellner’s The Salt Sea-Mastodon: A Reading of Moby-Dick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), especially chapter 9, “Fraternal Congenerity: The Humanizing of Leviathan,” in which Zoellner repeatedly refers to the aged dying whale of chapter 81 as “The Medicare Whale.”

  114. “Lost in … reminiscence sore”: Clarel, pt. I, 11, ll. 25–26.

  115. “I’d strike the sun”: MD, ch. 36, p. 164.

  116. “To accomplish his object”: MD, ch. 46, p. 211.

  117. “the waves curling and hissing … grazed by the iron, escaped”: MD, ch. 48, p. 224.

  118. “churned his long sharp lance … corpse he had made”: MD, ch. 61, p. 286.

  119. “vocal organ was in itself”: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, p. 241.

  120. “an oral world in which the spoken word was central”: Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 36.

  121. “declaiming some stormy passage”: Whitman, quoted ibid., p. 37.

  122. “vague thoughts of becoming a great orator”: R, ch. 7, p. 36.

  123. “mount that might not be touched”: Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1990), p. 23.

  124. “animal sob”: MD, ch. 36, p. 163.

  125. “language of the screamer”: Chase, Herman Melville, p. 91. See Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), for a penetrating discussion (pp. 195–96) of how “comedy remains in Moby-Dick like the strong trace of an irresistible mood.” Reading Rourke on nineteenth-century American humor remains the best way to appreciate Ahab as a tall-tale braggart in the lineage of such folklore heroes as Sam Slick (“I am Sam Slick the Yankee peddler—I can ride on a flash of lightning and catch a thunderbolt in my fist,” p. 73). Later scholars, notably Joel Porte, in an essay entitled “Melville: Romantic Cock-and-Bull; or, The Great Art of Telling the Truth” (In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991], pp. 189–212), go so far as to argue that Ahab’s speeches, in their “rhetorical overopulence,” are “mere tinsel Shakespeare” (pp. 196–97) in the style of the worst melodramatic actors of the day, and that Melville wrote them at least in part in a parodic mood. See also Edward H. Rosenberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), and Jane Mushabac, Melville’s Humor: A Critical Study (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1981).

  126. “country gentlemen …‘T’will soon be out’ ”: MD, ch. 36, p. 160.

  127. “bigotry of purpose … ‘a stove boat!’ ”: MD, ch. 36, p. 161.

  128. “whosoever of ye … call Moby Dick”: MD, ch. 36, p. 162.

  129. “ ‘Moby Dick?’ shouted Ahab … ‘Moby Dick!’ ”: MD, ch. 36, pp. 162–63.

  130. “ ‘Captain Ahab,’ said Starbuck”: MD, ch. 36, p. 163.

  131. “the moderate man”: CM, ch. 21, p. 112.

  132. “ ‘Captain Ahab … ye do look brave’ ”: MD, ch. 36, p. 163.

  133. “he drilled deep down”: MD, ch. 38, p. 169.

  134. “ ‘Aye, aye!’ shouted the harpooneers”: MD, ch. 36, p. 163.

  135. “lower layer … if it insulted me”: MD, ch. 36, p. 164.

  136. “a representation”: W. H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 134.

  137. “comfort would be the destruction”: Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, quoted ibid.

  138. “All my means are sane”: MD, ch. 41, p. 186.

  139. “All that most maddens”: MD, ch. 41, p. 184.

  140. “every sufferer instinctively seeks”: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), pp. 263–64. I owe this reference to Roosevelt Montás.

  141. “hatred becomes stronger”: Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington (1928; New York: Norton, 1969), p. 6.

  142. “homogeneous, impassioned group”: Ibid., p. 5.

  143. “provided an ominous glimpse of what was to result”: Matthiessen, American Renaissance, pp. 438, 459.

  144. “as profoundly aware of the existence of radical evil”: Mumford, review of William Ellery Sedgwick’s Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind, in the New York Times Book Review, January 21, 1945, p. 103.

  145. “prophecy of the essence of fascism”: Henry Murray, Introduction to Pierre (New York: Hendricks Ho
use, 1949), p. xxxi.

  146. “intense subjectivism”: James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, p. 56.

  147. “a pliant, disciplined, committed”: Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 287.

  CHAPTER 7. “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY”

  1. “Your letter was handed me … can’t write what I felt”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, November [17?], 1851, in Correspondence, pp. 212–13.

  2. “to bury myself”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [June 1?], 1851, in Correspondence, p. 191.

  3. The new title, he said, is “legitimate”: The best short treatment of discrepancies between the English and American editions is G. Thomas Tanselle, Note on the Texts, in the Library of America edition of Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick (New York: Library of America, 1983), pp. 1414–20. For a more detailed account of how Moby-Dick came into print, see Tanselle’s discussion in MD (Northwestern–Newberry Library edition), pp. 659–89.

  4. “The proofs … were replete with errors”: P, bk. 25, p. 340.

  5. “before them with a crucifixion”: MD, ch. 28, p. 124.

  6. “anonymous babies all over the world”: MD, ch. 88, pp. 392, 393.

  7. “miners in a pit”: Review in the London Spectator, October 25, 1851, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 360.

  8. there was someone who expressed respect: Such as the reviewer who credited HM in the London Morning Advertiser of October 24, 1851 (reprinted in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 353), with “an unusual power … rising to the verge of the sublime.”

  9. “Try to get a living by the Truth”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [June 1?], 1851, in Correspondence, p. 191.

  10. Total earnings from the American sales: See G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Sales of Melville’s Books,” Harvard Library Bulletin 17 (April 1969): 195–215.

  11. “The Fates … rural bowl of milk”: HM to Sophia Hawthorne, January 8, 1852, in Correspondence, p. 219.

  12. “unquestionable novelty”: HM to Richard Bentley, April 16, 1852, ibid., p. 226.

  13. “in too rapid succession”: Richard Bentley to HM, March 4, 1852, ibid., p. 618.