14. At one point in the negotiations: Parker, II, 77, and see Parker, Introduction to Pierre (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
15. “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY”: New York Day Book, September 7, 1852, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 436.
16. “fancy is diseased”: George Washington Peck, in American Whig Review, November 1852, ibid., pp. 441–51.
17. “Let Mr. Melville stay his step”: Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, February 1853, in Branch, ed., Critical Heritage, pp. 323–29.
18. “the burning out of Melville’s volcano”: Murray, Introduction to Pierre, p. xiv.
19. “runs a constant fever”: John Updike, “Melville’s Withdrawal,” The New Yorker, May 10, 1982, p. 124.
20. “disappointment with the married state”: W. S. Maugham, “Moby-Dick,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1948, p. 102.
21. “English-looking woman … He wasn’t”: Quoted from Raymond Weaver papers in Hershel Parker, Reading Billy Budd (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), p. 45.
22. “only one condition … alienation from his family”: Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford: The Early Years (New York: Dial Press, 1982), p. 456. I owe this reference to my colleague Casey Blake.
23. “dear old crooked Boston”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Samuel H. Savage, September 12–18, 1847, quoted in Parker, I, 554.
24. “as bewitchingly as possible”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Hope Savage Shaw, December 23, 1847, in Log, I, 266.
25. “tone and look of love”: John Hoadley to Augusta Melville, March 28, 1854, quoted in Parker, II, 215.
26. “Of all chamber furniture … in the mizzen-top”: WJ, ch. 12, p. 46.
27. In the winter of 1852, while she was nursing Stanwix: Maria Gansevoort Melville to Augusta Melville, November 5, 1851, quoted in Parker, II, 31.
28. “Claggart could even have loved Billy”: BB, ch. 17, p. 1394.
29. “the most desperate in our literature”: Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 471.
30. “playfulness of … unclouded love”: P, bk. 1, p. 5.
31. “much that goes to make up the deliciousness”: P, bk. 1, p. 7.
32. “ardent sentiment”: P, bk. 15, p. 218.
33. “the preliminary love-friendship”: P, bk. 15, p. 217.
34. “Why hast thou made us”: In P, bk. 2, p. 27, HM writes that bringing Pierre and Lucy together required “no maneuvering at all. The two Platonic particles, after roaming in quest of each other … came together before Mrs. Tartan’s [Lucy’s mother] own eyes; and what more could Mrs. Tartan do toward making them forever one and indivisible?”
35. “much more than cousinly attachment”: P, bk. 15, p. 216.
36. “the letters of Aphroditean devotees”: P, bk. 15, p. 217.
37. “uncertainty in regard … inhibited development”: Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), p. 43.
38. “uncelestial” desires: P, bk. 1, p. 16.
39. “reverential, and most docile”: P, bk. 1, p. 20.
40. “Methinks … one husbandly embrace”: P, bk. 3, p. 58.
41. the pallor associated with female purity: See Hart, The Popular Book, p. 87.
42. “stiffness, formality … a milliner’s doll”: T, ch. 22, p. 161.
43. “passion for fat women”: Willis, “Miss Albina McLush,” in Taft, Minor Knickerbockers, p. 293.
44. “skinny scrawny arms”: Journal entry, November 20, 1849, in Journals, p. 23.
45. “flirtations with South Sea beauties”: Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton Longfellow, ed. Edward Wagenknecht (New York: Longmans, Green, 1956), p. 132.
46. “an early and most cherished friend”: P, bk. 2, p. 25.
47. “dark-eyed haughtiness”: P, bk. 1, p. 20.
48. “Yes, [Lucy is] a very pretty little pint-decanter”: P, bk. 3, p. 60.
49. “contracting and expanding” velvet collar: P, bk. 3, p. 46.
50. “all too obvious emotion”: P, bk. 3, p. 47.
51. Maurice Sendak is more explicit: See the illustrations in the HarperCollins edition of Pierre, ed. Hershel Parker (1995).
52. “beneath the pendulous canopies”: P, bk. 3, p. 61.
53. “was not the universe”: Mumford, Herman Melville, p. 211.
54. “features [are] transformed”: P, bk. 3, p. 62.
55. “two souls, alas”: Faust, I, l. 1112.
56. “distinctly to feel two antagonistic agencies”: P, bk. 3, p. 63.
57. “boundless expansion”: P, bk. 3, p. 66.
58. “Dearest Pierre”: P, bk. 3, p. 64.
59. “Not only was the long-cherished image”: P, bk. 5, p. 88.
60. “scaly, glittering folds of pride”: P, bk. 5, p. 90.
61. “the dark-haired ‘forest girl’ ”: Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 253.
62. “not yet … dropped his angle”: P, bk. 21, p. 284.
63. “spiritual autobiography in the form”: Murray, Introduction to Pierre, p. xxiv.
64. “Here [was] a sick man”: Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, p. 135.
65. One theory that has proven especially enduring: See Amy Puett Emmers, “Melville’s Closet Skeleton: A New Letter About the Illegitimacy Incident in Pierre,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), pp. 339–42; Henry Murray, “Allan Melvill’s By-Blow,” Melville Society Extracts 61 (February 1985): 1–6; and Philip Young, “History of a Secret Sister,” in The Private Melville (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 9–26.
66. “Judging from what we know”: Parker, I, 65.
67. “the heroic flourished”: Thornton Wilder, “Toward an American Language,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1952, p. 36.
68. “from ambiguity to ambiguity”: Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, p. 28.
69. “his eyes fixed upon”: P, bk. 6, p. 119.
70. “The wild girl played on the guitar”: P, bk. 6, p. 126.
71. the “image … of white-browed”: P, bk. 5, p. 99.
72. “Mr. Falsgrave was just hovering”: P, bk. 5, pp. 98–99.
73. “Heaven had given him”: P, bk. 5, p. 98.
74. “In heaven’s name, what is the matter”: P, bk. 8, p. 162.
75. “For heaven’s sake, … heartlessness of the world?”: P, bk. 8, p. 163.
76. “the immense difficulty”: Harold Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 23.
77. “ultraism of all sorts”: Joseph Story (“Literary Tendencies of the Times,” 1842), quoted in Robert A. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 248.
78. “all a little wild”: Emerson to Carlyle, October 30, 1940, in Joseph Slater, ed., Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 283–84.
79. “I do not wish”: Garrison, in The Liberator, January 1, 1831, in Fredrickson, ed., William Lloyd Garrison, p. 23. For an argument that HM gave Pierre the attributes of an abolitionist zealot, see Nancy F. Sweet, “Abolition, Compromise and ‘The Everlasting Elusiveness of Truth’ in Melville’s Pierre,” Studies in American Fiction 26, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 3–28.
80. “formalist” who usurps the pulpit: Emerson, “Divinity School Address” (1838), in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 109.
81. “intense and doating biasses”: Dana (April 1856), quoted in Log, II, 514.
82. “almost infantile delicacy”: P, bk. 5, p. 98.
83. “The Ch. Justice read the petition”: Dana, Journal, II, 412.
84. “virtuous expediency”: P, bk. 14, p. 214.
85. “the absolute [is] introduced”: Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), p. 84.
86. Melville had purchased a set of literary illustrations: See Howard Sc
hless, “Flaxman, Dante, and Melville’s Pierre,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 64, no. 2 (February 1960): 68–69.
87. “Francesca’s mournful face”: P, bk. 2, p. 42.
88. “long dark shower”: P, bk. 6, p. 126.
89. “writhing from out the imprisoning earth”: P, bk. 25, p. 345.
90. “gospelize the world anew”: P, bk. 19, p. 273.
91. “sublime heaven of heroism”: P, bk. 23, p. 310.
92. “frantic, diseased-looking men and women”: P, bk. 16, p. 240.
93. “I will write such things”: P, bk. 19, p. 273.
94. “From eight o’clock in the morning”: P, bk. 22, pp. 303–4.
95. “unstinted fertilizations”: P, Dedication to “Greylock’s Most Excellent Majesty,” p. vii.
96. “THE COMPLETE WORKS OF GLENDINNING”: P, bk. 17, p. 247.
97. “According to Fichte”: Quoted in Barbara L. Packer, “The Transcendentalists,” in Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 2: Prose Writing, 1820–1865, p. 363.
98. “I look for the new Teacher”: Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” in Whicher, ed., Selections, pp. 115–16.
99. “the priest departs”: Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1870), in Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 932.
100. “out-reaching comprehensiveness … placard capitals”: MD, ch. 104, p. 456.
101. “pasteboard mask … naught beyond”: MD, ch. 36, p. 164.
102. “Say what some poets will”: P, bk. 25, p. 342.
103. “all-controlling and all-permeating wonderfulness”: P, bk. 7, p. 139.
104. “almost a nun”: P, bk. 23, p. 313.
105. “Never, never would he be able”: P, bk. 7, p. 142.
106. “there is no sex”: P, bk. 8, p. 149.
107. “He held her tremblingly”: P, bk. 12, p. 192.
108. “tremendous displacing”: P, bk. 26, p. 353.
109. “he ‘fell’ for the Face”: Murray, Introduction to Pierre, p. lix.
110. “I am too full without discharge”: P, bk. 6, p. 113.
111. “Oh, I am sick, sick, sick!”: P, bk. 19, p. 273.
112. “O blood”: Melville refers to Reni Guido’s painting of the Cenci in P, bk. 26, p. 351.
113. “Oh, praised be the beauty of this earth”: P, bk. 2, p. 32.
114. “Lo! … I strike through thy helm”: P, bk. 3, p. 66.
115. “emotion is in excess”: T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), pp. 121–26. Without alluding to Eliot, Mumford (Herman Melville, pp. 208–9) makes essentially the same argument about Pierre: since “Pierre’s emotional reaction to Isabel is entirely out of proportion to the fact that he has a found a sister,” Melville’s novel suffers from a “disproportion between stimulus and effect.”
116. “married in order to combat inclinations”: Maugham, “Moby-Dick,” p. 102.
117. impulses for which there was no established language: Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), p. 51, writes that “prior to Whitman there were homosexual acts but no homosexuals.”
118. the term “adhesiveness”: See Michael Lynch, “ ‘Here is Adhesiveness’: From Friendship to Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 29, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 67–96.
119. “excessive adhesiveness”: By the 1870s, the English classicist John Addington Symonds, who wrote appreciatively to Whitman, used interchangeably such terms as “inversion,” “paiderastia,” and, occasionally, “homosexuality.” See ibid., p. 93.
120. Though it is hard now to take seriously: See Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. 2: The Tender Passion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 217; and Sally Satel, review of The Cult of Personality by Annie Murphy Paul, in the New York Times Book Review, October 10, 2004, p. 14.
121. “chickenship … all over his body if he don’t”: B. R. Burg, An American Seafarer in the Age of Sail: The Erotic Diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk, 1851–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 78–79.
122. “eye for masculine beauty”: Maugham, “Moby-Dick,” p. 102.
123. “matchless symmetry of form”: T, ch. 18, p. 135.
124. “never for one moment”: T, ch. 14, p. 109.
125. “adjusting everything”: T, ch. 14, p. 111.
126. “whole body”: T, ch. 14, p. 110.
127. “a rich-cheeked … gushing from every rent”: R, ch. 49, p. 247.
128. “in dreams Elysian”: R, ch. 49, p. 251.
129. “pulling and twitching”: R, ch. 49, p. 249.
130. “make, unmake me”: R, ch. 49, p. 250.
131. “every positive depiction of sexuality”: Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger, p. 63.
132. “circle jerk”: Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 587.
133. “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze!”: MD, ch. 94, p. 416.
134. “androgynic personality”: Murray, “In Nomine Diaboli,” in Moby-Dick: Centennial Essays, ed. Tyrus Hilway and Luther S. Mansfield (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1953), p. 16.
135. “the expectation of sexual intercourse is more exciting”: Maugham, “Moby-Dick,” p. 102. Mumford (Herman Melville, p. 219) read Pierre as evidence of Melville’s sexual immaturity.
136. “Isabel is the personification … barred by culture”: Murray, Introduction to Pierre, p. lii.
137. “such a creature as civilized, domestic people”: MD, ch. 50, p. 231.
138. “odds and ends of strange nations”: MD, ch. 50, p. 230.
139. “self-reciprocally efficient hermaphrodite”: P, bk. 18, p. 259.
140. “felt himself emotionally trapped”: Arvin, Herman Melville, p. 204.
141. “transferring his guilt”: James Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 122.
142. “the wink of homosexuality”: Ibid., p. 95.
143. He never reduced the complexity of experience: The same cannot always be said for his readers, as when the homophobic Edward Dahlberg accused Melville in 1960 of “sodomy of the heart” and dismissed Moby-Dick as a book for “hermaphrodites and spados.” Dahlberg complained that “after the blubber pots and love scenes of these corrugated mammoth Don Juans of the sea, what virile male reader does not yearn for … a sweet bosom that would set Ilium on fire?” Dahlberg, “Moby-Dick: A Hamitic Dream,” in The Edward Dahlberg Reader (New York: New Directions, 1967), pp. 191, 194.
144. “for the deeper that some men feel”: P, bk. 15, p. 224.
145. the “woman-soft” boy: P, bk. 26, p. 362.
146. “For Pierre is neuter now!”: P, bk. 26, p. 360.
147. “Watch yon toddler … not without shrieks”: P, bk. 22, p. 296. In light of such an indictment, one may question Mumford’s judgment that “Melville identified himself with Pierre and defended his immaturity” (Herman Melville, p. 210).
148. “that an author can never”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 14, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 149.
149. “in this world of lies”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 244.
150. “we cannot pass without remark”: Evert Duyckinck, review in The Literary World, August 21, 1852, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 431.
151. “the finest psychological novel”: Hershel Parker, Introduction to Pierre (HarperCollins, 1995), p. xii.
152. “short, quick probings”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 244.
CHAPTER 8. SEEING TOO MUCH
1. “the Harpers think Melville is a little crazy”: Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard, quoted in Parker, II, 125.
2. sold fewer than two thousand copies: See Tanselle, “The Sales of Melville’s Books,” p. 214.
3. “might be supposed
to emanate”: Boston Post, August 4, 1852, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, pp. 419–20.
4. “loathsome”: Simms, Southern Quarterly Review, October 1849, in Branch, ed., Critical Heritage, p. 187.
5. “gone ‘clean daft’ … the better”: Simms, Southern Literary Messenger, October 22, 1852, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, pp. 439–40.
6. “the solitary Crusoeish island”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, July 17, 1852, in Correspondence, p. 230.
7. “a wife (for a night) … all tender obligations”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, October 25, 1852, ibid., p. 240.
8. “the great patience, & endurance”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, August 13, 1852, ibid., p. 232.
9. Drawn to Agatha, perhaps: Leon Howard offers this hypothesis in his Herman Melville, p. 197.
10. “in this matter you would make a better hand”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, August 13, 1852, in Correspondence, p. 234.
11. “Supposing the story to open”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, August 13, 1852, ibid., p. 235.
12. “prevented from printing”: HM to Harper & Brothers, November 24, 1853, ibid., p. 250.
13. “glorious” and “noble cock”: “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” in PT, pp. 274, 275.
14. “looked underdone”: “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” in PT, p. 268.
15. “any gentleman hereabouts”: “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” in PT, p. 281.
16. “the constant in-door confinement”: Maria Gansevoort Melville to Peter Gansevoort, April 20, 1853, in Log, I, 469.
17. He was drifting away from Duyckinck: Duyckinck’s review of Moby-Dick (The Literary World, November 15 and 22, 1851) is in Branch, ed., Critical Heritage, pp. 264–68.
18. “There is something lacking … done rare”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, February 12, 1851, in Correspondence, p. 181.
19. “Hawthorne has simply availed himself”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 243.
20. “exclusively imported”: James, Hawthorne, p. 67.
21. “This name of ‘Hawthorne’”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, July 17, 1852, in Correspondence, p. 230.
22. “The divine magnet is in you”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, November [17?], 1851, ibid., p. 213.
23. “My breast is full of thee”: Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody, quoted in Edwin Haviland Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 177.
Melville: His World and Work Page 50