Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  24. “it is an age since thou hast been”: Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody, August 22, 1841, in Henry W. Sams, ed., Autobiography of Brook Farm (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1958), p. 31.

  25. “self-centered, self-reproductive”: Charles King Newcomb, quoted in Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place, p. 195.

  26. “unsearchable eyes”: Moncure Conway, quoted in Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life, p. 270.

  27. “Nothing pleases me more”: Sophia Hawthorne to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, May 7, 1851, in Log, II, 926.

  28. “that queer monster, the artist”: Henry James to Henry Adams, March 21, 1914, in The Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Anchor Books, 1960), p. 169.

  29. “on a personal interview”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 240.

  30. “Under cheer”: Clarel, pt. I, 29, ll. 31–33. Walter Bezanson discusses the affinities of Hawthorne and Vine in his introduction to his great edition of Clarel (New York: Hendricks House, 1960), pp. xcii–xciii.

  31. “there appears to be a certain”: CM, ch. 30, pp. 171–72.

  32. “could lure / Despite reserve”: Clarel, pt. I, 17, ll. 19–21.

  33. “dryness and tiredness”: Arvin, Herman Melville, pp. 205–6.

  34. an apparently “unperplexed” man: James, Hawthorne, p. 43.

  35. “a fountain sealed”: Clarel, pt. II, 17, l. 22.

  36. Some scholars speculate: See, for example, Philip Young, Hawthorne’s Secret: An Untold Tale (Boston: David Godine, 1984), which argues that Hawthorne felt and may have acted upon incestuous desire for his sister Elizabeth.

  37. “hiddenly reside”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 253.

  38. “negative capability”: John Keats to his brothers, December 21, 1817, in Bate, ed., Criticism: The Major Texts, p. 349.

  39. “constant brain labor”: Edwin Croswell to Caleb Cushing, April 29, 1853, in Log, I, 471.

  40. “perhaps the craziest fiction extant”: Boston Post review, August 4, 1852, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, pp. 419–20.

  41. “much the best Mag.”: Thackeray, quoted in the Historical Note to PT, p. 513.

  42. Putnam’s was broadly anti-slavery: See Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), pp. 420–23.

  43. “Herman has always been a firm Democrat”: Peter Gansevoort, quoted in Miller, Raven and the Whale, p. 321.

  44. “pent up in lath and plaster”: MD, ch. 1, p. 4.

  45. nicknamed Turkey and Nippers: Hans Bergmann, God in the Street, suggests (p. 161) that “Turkey” is a slang word meaning drunk and “Nippers” may be slang for a thief or pickpocket.

  46. “afternoon devotions”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 16.

  47. “twitching in his chair”: “Bartleby,” in PT, pp. 22–23.

  48. “an eminently safe man”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 14.

  49. “The Business Man”: First published in the Broadway Journal, August 2, 1845; reprinted in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 373–81. Parker (II, 176) notes the affinity between Poe’s tale and Melville’s, which was written seven years later.

  50. “I was not unemployed”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 14.

  51. “dull business”: Briggs, Harry Franco, II, 99.

  52. one enterprising penmanship teacher: Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine & Commercial Review, April 1852, p. 522.

  53. “the prudent, penniless beginner”: Abraham Lincoln, “Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society,” September 30, 1859, in Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, II, 2, 97–98.

  54. The glut in the Manhattan labor supply: See Allan S. Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1975).

  55. “an unobstructed view”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 14.

  56. In his “cadaverous” gloom: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 30.

  57. his “advent”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 15.

  58. “I would prefer not to”: First appearance is in “Bartleby,” PT, p. 20.

  59. “the least uneasiness”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 21.

  60. “ ‘Why do you refuse?’ ”: “Bartleby,” in PT, pp. 21–22.

  61. “I burned … Windsor soap”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 24.

  62. “ ‘Bartleby,’ said I”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 25.

  63. “Nippers’s ugly mood”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 22.

  64. “ ‘Say now you will help’ ”: “Bartleby,” in PT, pp. 30–31.

  65. “Bartleby moved not a limb”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 31.

  66. “It is not seldom the case”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 22.

  67. “sole spectator … friendlessness and loneliness”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 27.

  68. “For the first time in my life”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 28.

  69. “not-unpleasing” representations: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 28.

  70. “making merry in the house of the dead”: R, ch. 37, p. 184.

  71. “all that is solid melts into air”: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).

  72. “ ‘I’ll take odds he doesn’t’ ”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 34.

  73. “entertain … with your conversation?”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 41.

  74. his “motionless” vagrant: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 39.

  75. “You are responsible”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 39.

  76. “the pathetic and the ludicrous”: Dana, letter to Evert Duyckinck, January 25, 1854, quoted in Log, I, 484.

  77. “opulent in withheld replies”: Clarel, pt. IV, 5, l. 67.

  78. “great sacks, locked and sealed”: Article in the September 23 issue of the Albany Daily State Register, quoted in Parker, II, 138.

  79. One suit, brought against the Boston & Worcester Railroad in 1842: Frederick Wertheim, “Slavery and the Fellow Servant Rule: An Antebellum Dilemma,” New York University Law Review 61, no. 6 (December 1986): 1127–28. See also Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), pp. 468–75, and Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), for arguments that American law in the antebellum period tended to defend corporate interests.

  80. “a bit of wreck”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 32.

  81. “the things I had seen disqualified me”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 29.

  82. “not only … the business of Sabbath days”: Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 383–84.

  83. “the old Adam of resentment”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 36.

  84. “the limits of moral responsibility”: Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” in Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 252.

  CHAPTER 9. THE MAGAZINIST

  1. “ejaculatory prose”: Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 426.

  2. “the nicer strings”: Dana, Sr., letter to Evert Duyckinck, January 25, 1854, in Log, I, 484.

  3. “Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders”: Encantadas, in PT, p. 126.

  4. “bandit birds”: Encantadas, in PT, p. 135.

  5. “prostrate trunks”: Encantadas, in PT, p. 129.

  6. “mass of rubbish”: New York Herald, December 11, 1853, quoted in Parker, II, 187.

  7. “Before Hunilla’s eyes they sank”: Encantadas, in PT, p. 154.

  8. “trod the cindery beach”: Encantadas, in PT, p. 155.

  9. “fat-paunched, beadle-faced”: “The Two Temples,” in PT, p. 303.

  10. “pungent” satire risked “offending”: Charles F. Briggs to HM, May 12, 1854, in Correspondence, p. 636; and see James Duban, “Transatlantic Counterparts: The Diptych and Social Inquir
y in Melville’s ‘Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,’ ” New England Quarterly 66 (1993): 274–86.

  11. “undulatory as an anaconda”: “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” in PT, p. 325.

  12. “in case I serve up”: Journal entry, December 18, 1849, in Journals, p. 43.

  13. “harassed by night and day”: Israel Potter, Life and Adventures, ed. Leonard Kriegel (New York: Corinth Books, 1962), p. 43.

  14. “exile as a lifetime experience”: Alfred Kazin, Introduction to Israel Potter (New York: Warner Books, 1974), p. 5.

  15. “before hastening to one duty”: IP, ch. 3, p. 13.

  16. “sturdy farmer”: R, ch. 56, p. 281.

  17. “primeval orientalness”: IP, ch. 8, p. 46.

  18. “jaunty barbarian in broadcloth”: IP, ch. 11, p. 63.

  19. “sour fruit … doors have been cut”: IP, ch. 19, p. 126.

  20. “in view of this battle”: IP, ch. 19, p. 130.

  21. “Desperate with want”: IP, ch. 23, p. 154.

  22. “spavined-looking old men”: IP, ch. 25, p. 165.

  23. “ridged and mottled sky”: IP, ch. 23, p. 156.

  24. “himself home into the mists”: IP, ch. 25, p. 165.

  25. “to get a glimpse of his father’s homestead”: IP, ch. 26, p. 168.

  26. “certain caprices of law”: IP, ch. 26, p. 169.

  27. “brace of fowl”: HM to Harper & Bros., September 18, 1854, in Correspondence, p. 269.

  28. “I should have sent”: Helen Griggs to HM, May 29, 1854, ibid., pp. 640–41.

  29. “so bad that he was helpless”: See Elizabeth Shaw Melville, notes on her husband, in Sealts, Early Lives, p. 169.

  30. “rather gruff taciturn man”: Holmes, Jr., quoted in Log, II, 936.

  31. “half a (½) dozen lb”: Maria Gansevoort Melville, letter to Elizabeth Shaw Melville, June 7, 1855, quoted in Parker, II, 253.

  32. “does everything too hurriedly now”: G. W. Curtis to J. A. Dix, April 20, 1855, in Log, II, 501.

  33. “decline any novel from Melville”: G. W. Curtis to J. A. Dix, mid-April 1855[?], in Log, II, 500.

  34. “arthritically clumsy”: Warner Berthoff, headnote to “The Bell-Tower,” in Great Short Works of Herman Melville (New York: Harper, 1969), p. 223.

  35. “Who does not feel his faith”: Thoreau, Walden, p. 587.

  36. “small shining beetle or bug”: “The Apple-Tree Table,” in PT, p. 389.

  37. “anxious to see”: G. W. Curtis to J. A. Dix, April 17, 1855, in Log, II, 500.

  38. “a skeleton of actual reality”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, April 13, 1852, in Correspondence, p. 237.

  39. “a little spun out”: G. W. Curtis to J. A. Dix, April 19, 1855, in Log, II, 501.

  40. “to dance upon … cross wires”: “Our New President,” Putnam’s, September 1853, pp. 308, 303.

  41. “the leading review”: DeBow’s Review (February 1857), quoted in Mott, History of American Magazines, p. 423.

  42. “the suicide of slavery … marauders of Missouri”: “The Kansas Question,” Putnam’s, October 1855, pp. 427–28.

  43. “who kept constantly at the elbows … confidant and companion”: Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (Boston, 1817), p. 324; reprinted in PT, p. 818.

  44. “human treachery”: Mumford, Herman Melville, p. 246.

  45. Sterling Brown: The Negro in American Fiction (Washington, DC: Association of Negro Folk Education, 1937), pp. 12–13; reprinted in Robert Burkholder, Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), pp. 24–25.

  46. “blindness to evil”: Benjamin Barber, Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 53.

  47. “the African Diaspora”: Russell Banks, “Who Will Tell the People?” Harper’s, June 2000.

  48. “tie up a lame young woman”: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 29–30.

  49. “to mutilate … a powder magazine”: Theodore Parker, “A Sermon on the Dangers That Threaten the Rights of Man in America,” July 2, 1854, in Pease and Pease, The Antislavery Argument, p. 255.

  50. Two years after the Amistad incident: See Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and, for the Creole case, Maurice G. Baxter, One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 327–28.

  51. “Depravity in the oppressed”: WJ, ch. 34, p. 142.

  52. “strange sail … showed no colors”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 46.

  53. “shreds of fog here and there”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 48.

  54. “Delano continued … to be dropped”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 47.

  55. “shield-like stern-piece”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 49.

  56. “captain, mate, people”: Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels, p. 322; reprinted in PT, p. 816.

  57. “Climbing the side … object about him”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 49.

  58. “a shepherd’s dog”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 51.

  59. “master and man … before him”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 57.

  60. “for some unknown purpose”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 87.

  61. “singularly undistrustful … nature”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 47.

  62. “childlike, affectionate, docile”: Orville Dewey, A Discourse on Slavery and the Annexation of Texas (1844), quoted in Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, p. 102. “Romantic Racialism” is the subject of chapter 4 of Fredrickson’s important book.

  63. “Delano could not but bethink”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 94.

  64. the “whole story”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 54.

  65. “He is like one flayed alive”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 93.

  66. reverts to “tranquilizing” thoughts: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 70.

  67. “an apprehensive twitch”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 59.

  68. some “low-born” impostor: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 64.

  69. “he leaned against the carved balustrade”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 74.

  70. “If a man be told a thing wholly new”: P, bk. 14, p. 209.

  71. “There is something in the negro”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 83. For the occupations of free blacks, see Joe William Trotter, Jr., River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).

  72. “low down under the throat”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 84.

  73. “Setting down his basin”: Benito Cereno, in PT, pp. 84–85.

  74. “castle in a blood-red field diagonal … a man at the block”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 85.

  75. “which stained the creamy lather”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 86.

  76. “with comb, scissors and brush”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 87.

  77. “Ah, ah, ah … nothing had happened”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 88.

  78. “Adieu, my dear”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 97.

  79. “Don Benito sprang over the bulwarks … desperate fidelity”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 98.

  80. “most unique collection”: Journal entry, December 5, 1849, in Journals, p. 33.

  81. “larger, darker, deeper part”: MD, ch. 41, p. 185.

  82. a delicately carved ivory mirror case: This artifact is illustrated in Alain Erlande-Brandenburg et al., Musée Nationale du Moyen Age Thermes de Cluny: Guide to the Collections (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1993), p. 135.

  83. Especially striking were several alabaster carvings: For illustrations, see Christiane Prigent, Les Sculptures Anglaises d’Albatre: Musée Nationale du Moyen Age, Thermes de Cluny (Paris: Musée de Cluny, 1998).

  84. “dark satyr in a mask”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 49. I am grateful to Dawn Delbanco for pointing out the Christian iconography implicit in Benito Cereno.

  85. “prostrate Negro”
: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 99.

  86. “Captain Delano … whole story”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 99.

  87. “with upthrown gestures”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 100.

  88. “the long, mild voyage”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 114.

  89. “ ‘you are saved’ ”: Benito Cereno, in PT, p. 116.

  90. “the story that a community”: Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic, p. 132.

  91. “American innocence so opaque”: Barber, Fear’s Empire, p. 53.

  92. “spoil Benito Cereno”: Mumford, Herman Melville, p. 245.

  93. “had managed … to work on more than one level”: Sealts, Historical Note, in PT, p. 513.

  CHAPTER 10. ADRIFT

  1. “black years”: Arvin, Herman Melville, p. 210.

  2. “feel that the author is capable”: London Weekly Chronicle, June 2, 1855, quoted in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 465.

  3. After deductions for advances: Parker, II, 268.

  4. “should do something higher and better”: New York Times, June 27, 1856, in Branch, ed., Critical Heritage, p. 357.

  5. “after an ecstasy of a courtship”: Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 141.

  6. “proved no fulfillment”: Arvin, Herman Melville, p. 203.

  7. “if [Lizzie] had breasts”: De Voto, The Year of Decision, 1846, p. 36. I owe this reference to Katherine Barger.

  8. “winter’s folic skirmisher … oblation of old”: “To Winnefred,” in Robert C. Ryan, “Weeds and Wildings Chiefly, with a Rose or Two, by Herman Meville: Reading Text and Genetic Text, Edited from the Manuscripts, with Introduction and Notes” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1967), p. 6. “To Winnefred” is also printed in Vincent, ed., Collected Poems of Herman Melville, pp. 481–83. Hershel Parker, in Reading Billy Budd, p. 39, dates its composition to August 1891, a month before HM’s death.

  9. “surgical operation”: “I and My Chimney,” in PT, p. 356.

  10. “humbly bowing over it”: “I and My Chimney,” in PT, p. 353.

  11. “maxim is, Whatever is”: “I and My Chimney,” in PT, p. 360.

  12. “is desirous that … I should retire”: “I and My Chimney,” in PT, p. 362.