Melville: His World and Work
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13. “My wife … cares not a fig”: “I and My Chimney,” in PT, p. 376.
14. “all this about the wife”: Quoted in Arvin, Herman Melville, p. 204.
15. “ugly attacks”: Sam Shaw to Lemuel Shaw and Hope Savage Shaw, July[?] 1856, quoted in Parker, II, 286.
16. “great anxiety”: Judge Lemuel Shaw to Sam Shaw, September 1, 1856, describing Lizzie’s concern, in Log, II, 521.
17. “even when she was a prisoner”: Cowen, “Melville’s Marginalia,” VII, 193–94.
18. “the recluse life”: Sarah Morewood to George Duyckinck, December 28, 1851, quoted in Log, I, 441.
19. “imaginative, voluptuously inclined”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, April 5, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 128.
20. Don Quixote, which he had acquired: Tom Quirk, Melville’s Confidence Man: From Knave to Knight (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), p. 13.
21. “a series of conversations”: Arvin, Herman Melville, p. 250.
22. “Who can forever resist”: WJ, ch. 44, p. 188.
23. “at a loss to determine”: CM, ch. 41, p. 223.
24. “Martin Takemthrough”: Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, July 1852, p. 137.
25. “swindling was raised”: Joseph Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (1853; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), p. 85.
26. “elaborate machinery”: Ibid., p. 93.
27. “let the public believe”: Ibid., p. 82.
28. “decidedly the worst”: Cincinnati Enquirer, February 3, 1858, quoted in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 506.
29. “We began the book”: London Illustrated Times, April 25, 1857, quoted ibid., pp. 498–99.
30. “pages of crude theory”: Lem Shaw to Sam Shaw, April 21, 1857, in Log, II, 574.
31. “holds up a mirror”: Walter McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 1–2.
32. The amiable Mark Winsome: The first scholar to connect Winsome with Emerson, and Egbert with Thoreau, was Egbert S. Oliver, “Melville’s Picture of Emerson and Thoreau,” College English 8 (November 1946): 61–72. A recent elaboration of Oliver’s argument is to be found in Jonathan A. Cook, Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville’s “The Confidence-Man” (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 160–69.
33. Charlie Noble: On Charlie Noble as Hawthorne, see Cook, Satirical Apocalypse, pp. 144–60. On Poe, see Harrison Hayford, “Poe in The Confidence-Man,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 14 (December 1959): 207–18; for Abbott Lawrence, see William Norris, “Abbott Lawrence in The Confidence-Man: American Success or American Failure,” American Studies 17 (Spring 1976): 25–38, and Helen Trimpi, Melville’s Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850s (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1987), pp. 103–5. Cook, Satirical Apocalypse, pp. 95–106, makes an alternative case for the “Man in Gold Buttons” as a portrait of Lemuel Shaw (and for another character, the college sophomore, as Lemuel Shaw, Jr.). For the “Man in Gray” as Parker, see Trimpi, Melville’s Confidence Men, pp. 94–102. The satire of Fanny Kemble Butler is discussed in the Historical Note by Watson Branch, Hershel Parker, Harrison Hayford, and Alma A. MacDougall, in CM, p. 290. These are only a few of the many interpretations of Melville’s intricate satire. For a case that the book resists interpretation, and that any attribution to it of intentional coherence ought to be suspect, see Peter J. Bellis, “Melville’s Confidence-Man: An Uncharitable Interpretation,” American Literature 59, no. 4 (December 1987): 548–69.
34. “latent benignity”: CM, ch. 36, p. 190.
35. “had she not, on unimpeachable authority”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, February 24, 1849, in Correspondence, pp. 119–20.
36. “allusiveness that only adds”: Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 197. Agnew goes on to remark that “the novel’s many clues lead everywhere and nowhere” (p. 198).
37. “I do not jumble them”: CM, ch. 28, p. 157.
38. “poets send out the sick spirit”: CM, ch. 21, p. 107.
39. “Machines for me”: CM, ch. 22, p. 116.
40. “the mystery of human subjectivity”: CM, ch. 23, p. 129.
41. “haters have at bottom”: CM, ch. 27, p. 154.
42. “Cain afloat”: R, ch. 22, p. 104.
43. “He was just entering upon manhood”: CM, ch. 27, p. 153.
44. “straggling thoughts of other outrages”: CM, ch. 26, pp. 149–50.
45. With full settlement of principal and interest: See Parker, II, 289.
46. “dispirited and ill”: Lemuel Shaw, Jr., to Samuel Shaw, April 21, 1857, quoted in Log, I, 574.
47. “authors … who have written out”: Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837), in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 71.
48. “fresh from his mountain”: Evert Duyckinck, diary entry, October 1, 1856, quoted in Log, II, 523.
49. “the most silent man … East India religions and mythologies”: Maunsell Field, Memories of Many Men (1874), quoted in Log, II, 506.
50. “good story from the Decameron … indecency and blasphemy”: Evert Duyckinck, in his diary, October 1, 1856, in Log, II, 523.
51. “picture of one of the old masters”: Journals, 1856–1857, p. 49.
52. “like flamingoes among the cliffs”: Journals, 1856–1857, p. 50.
53. “depressed and aimless”: Julian Hawthorne, writing in the Dearborn Independent, September 24, 1927, quoted in Parker, II, 343.
54. “An agreeable day”: Journal entry, November 13, 1856, in Journals, p. 51.
55. “November 20th, Thursday” [and on to page 253]: Hawthorne, journal entry, November 20, 1856, in Journals, pp. 628–33.
56. “Art thou the first soul?”: Clarel, pt. II, 27, ll. 124–25.
57. “peeps of villages … covered with bird lime”: Journal entry, November 26, 1856, in Journals, p. 52.
58. “warren of stone houses”: Journal entry, December 2, 1856, ibid., p. 53.
59. “terrible nest … a peice [sic] of old root”: Journal entry, December 2, 1856, ibid., p. 54.
60. “It was a coy disclosure”: Journal entry, December 12, 1856, ibid., p. 58.
61. “nature feeding on man”: Journal entry, January 3, 1857, ibid., p. 74.
62. “a new grave … haunt me horribly”: Journal entry, December 14, 1856, ibid., p. 62.
63. “would make a noble ball room”: Journal entry, December 13, 1856, ibid., p. 60.
64. “a kind of dented appearance”: Journal entry, December 17, 1856, ibid., p. 67.
65. “rascally priests”: Journal entry, December 13, 1856, ibid., p. 59.
66. “old … intense, verbally inventive bandinage”: Parker, II, 512.
67. “From his long curved and crain-like neck”: Journal entry, December 20, 1856, in Journals, p. 69.
68. “flies on the eyes at noon”: Journal entry, January 3, 1857, ibid., p. 74.
69. “dead calm of masonry”: Journal entry, January 3, 1857, ibid., p. 78.
70. “stony mountains & stony plains … figure in the Bible”: Journal entry, January 26, 1857, ibid., p. 90.
71. “foam on beach … these waters of Death”: Journal entry, January 26, 1857, ibid., p. 83.
72. “blank, blank towers”: Clarel, pt. I, 1, l. 61.
73. “… ’tis here”: Clarel, pt. I, 3, ll. 7–11.
74. “Talk of the guides”: Journal entry, January 26, 1857, in Journals, p. 89.
75. “cross-legged & smoking … like a butcher’s slab”: Journal entry, January 26, 1857, ibid., p. 87.
76. “the eaves of”: Encantadas, in PT, p. 134.
77. “the Turk permits the tribes to creep”: Clarel, pt. I, 16, ll. 94–95.
78. “again afflicted with the great curse … robbed us of the bloom”: Journal entry, February 5, 1857, in Journals, p. 97.
79. “bravad
oing mischievousness”: CM, ch. 30, p. 172.
80. “grated nutmeg”: MD, ch. 134, p. 559.
81. “man could have undergone amputation”: WJ, ch. 25, p. 101.
82. “This day saw nothing”: Journal entry, March 15, 1857, in Journals, p. 112.
83. “amity of art & nature”: Journal entry, May 2, 1857, ibid., p. 128.
84. “not going to write any more”: Lem Shaw to Sam Shaw, June 2, 1857, in Log, II, 580.
85. “name the day”: HM to Phillips, Sampson & Co., August 19, 1857, in Correspondence, p. 310.
86. “had begun to suffer”: Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, p. 159.
87. “instantaneously previous”: P, bk. 15, p. 223.
88. “a disappointed man”: John Thomas Gulick, journal entry, April 20, 1859, in Log, II, 605.
89. “My dear darling Herman”: Maria Gansevoort Melville to Augusta Melville, quoted in Walter Bezanson, Historical Supplement, in Clarel, pp. 644–45.
90. “low purse”: P, bk. 20, p. 281.
91. “A lecturer,” Holmes declared: Henry Gansevoort, diary entry, May 27, 1857, quoted in Log, II, 579.
92. “My lectures are written to be read as lectures”: Emerson to Elizur Wright, January 7, 1852, quoted in Joel Myerson, ed., The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 366.
93. “daily progress of man”: HM to G. W. Curtis, September 15, 1857, in Correspondence, p. 314.
94. they can only be very roughly reconstructed: Such reconstructions have been expertly done by Merton M. Sealts, Jr., in Melville as Lecturer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).
95. “justness of vision”: Review of HM’s initial lecture, Lawrence, MA, Courier, November 25, 1857, quoted ibid., p. 22.
96. “articulated so feebly”: Auburn Daily Advertiser, January 6, 1858, quoted ibid., p. 29.
97. “not his forte”: Rockford Republican, March 3, 1859, quoted in Log, II, 603.
98. “some nervous people”: Bunker Hill Aurora, February 13, 1858, quoted in Log, II, 592.
99. “vivid stories”: Henry Gansevoort, quoted in Stanton Garner, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), p. 40.
100. “make the gallows as glorious”: Emerson, quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 545.
101. “never was a man so justly hanged”: Hawthorne, quoted in Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place, p. 473.
102. “through his moustache”: Auburn Advertiser, quoted in Sealts, Melville as Lecturer, p. 29.
103. he spoke, for instance, of how people tend to confuse: My understanding of Melville’s lectures has been greatly influenced by an unpublished seminar paper by William Deresiewicz.
104. “lion of the platform”: Sealts, Melville as Lecturer, p. 113.
105. “countenance [was] slightly flushed”: J. T. Gulick, in Log, II, 605.
106. In three seasons, he earned roughly $1,200: Sealts, Melville as Lecturer, p. 117.
107. “in the unmanning position”: Garner, Civil War World, p. 51.
108. “Mrs. Melville planned to leave Herman twice”: Weaver, quoted in Clare Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), p. 212.
109. “solar optimism”: Peter Conrad, Imagining America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 222.
110. “restore me the power”: CM, ch. 16, p. 82.
111. “Horrible snowy mountains”: Journal entry, August 7, 1860, in Journals, p. 133.
112. “I … read & think”: Journal entry, August 10, 1860, ibid., pp. 134–35.
113. “at a given word … a good-for-nothing one”: HM to Malcolm Melville, September 1 and 16, 1860, in Correspondence, pp. 347–49.
114. “big as chickens … middle of the ocean”: HM to Elizabeth Melville, September 2, 1860, ibid., pp. 350–54.
115. “in pursuit of health”: Daily Evening Bulletin, quoted in Log, II, 627.
116. “Herman Melville, the author of ‘Omoo’ ”: Daily Evening Bulletin, quoted in Log, II, 628.
117. “gloomy lull”: This is Melville’s phrase in his note to his poem “The Conflict of Convictions,” published in Battle-Pieces and Other Aspects of the War (1866): “The gloomy lull of the early part of the winter of 1860–1, seeming big with final disaster to our institutions, affected some minds that believed them to constitute one of the great hopes of mankind, much as the eclipse which came over the promise of the first French Revolution affected kindred natures, throwing them for the time into doubts and misgivings universal.”
118. “take the oath on the Capitol steps”: Richard T. Greene to HM, January 4, 1861, in Correspondence, p. 679.
119. “working hard … Thine, My Dearest Lizzie”: HM to Elizabeth Shaw Melville, March 24–25, 1861, ibid., pp. 365–67.
120. Among the papers found in Shaw’s wallet: See Parker, II, 467.
121. “Yes, my dear friend”: Undated ms. letter from Nancy Wroe Melvill to Lemuel Shaw (Collection of the Social Law Library, Boston).
CHAPTER 11. SEASON OF DEATH
1. “Come, Shepherd”: HM to Daniel Shepherd, July 6, 1859, in Correspondence, pp. 336–39.
2. “Not magnitude, nor lavishness”: “Greek Architecture” was first published in the section entitled “Fruit of Travel Long Ago” in Melville’s Timoleon, etc., privately printed in the year of his death, 1891. The date of its composition is uncertain.
3. “If we are completely to understand”: Robert Penn Warren, Introduction to Selected Poems of Herman Melville (1970; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1998), p. 4. Warren’s introduction is a brilliant assessment of Melville’s poetry, and one of the best general essays about Melville ever written. More recently, HM’s merits as a poet have been vigorously asserted by Helen Vendler, “Desert Storm,” The New Republic, December 7, 1992, pp. 39–42; William Spengemann, “Melville the Poet,” American Literary History 11, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 569–609; and Lawrence Buell, “Melville the Poet,” in Levine, ed., Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, pp. 135–56.
4. “Pray do not mention to any one”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Hope Savage Shaw, March 9, 1875, in Log, II, 741.
5. “ ‘No seeing here’ ”: “Donelson. (February, 1862).”
6. “Bridegroom Dick”: First published in John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), this was probably composed around 1875. A convenient modern edition of Melville’s poetry is Douglas Robillard, The Poems of Herman Melville (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000), which reprints John Marr on pp. 263–301.
7. “Obscure as the wood”: “The Armies of the Wilderness, 1863–4.”
8. “baffled, humiliated”: Whitman, Specimen Days, in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 708.
9. “chronicle … of the patriotic feelings”: Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 479.
10. “saw various battlefields”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville, notes about her husband, in Sealts, Early Lives, p. 172.
11. “when we will be able to talk”: HM to Gansevoort Melville, May 29, 1846, in Correspondence, p. 41. This is the letter that Gansevoort never received.
12. “disordered … decks of a whaleship”: MD, ch. 24, p. 109.
13. “How should they dream”: “Ball’s Bluff. A Reverie (October, 1861).”
14. “One noonday”: “Ball’s Bluff.”
15. “thousands of vivid images”: Warren, Introduction to Selected Poems, p. 7.
16. “rosy clime”: “Ball’s Bluff.”
17. “starry heights”: “The Conflict of Convictions (1860–1).”
18. “gladsome air”: “America.”
19. “War shall yet be”: “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight.”
20. “carding machines, horse-shoe machines”: CM, ch. 22, p. 117.
21. “Per
ish their Cause!”: “Rebel Color-Bearers at Shiloh.”
22. “He hears the drum”: “The Released Rebel Prisoner.”
23. “rhyme’s barbaric cymbal”: “A Utilitarian View.”
24. “bearing the brunt”: Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 944.
25. “We are coming—thanks to the war”: Emerson, “Fortune of the Republic” (December 1, 1863), in Gougeon and Myerson, eds., Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, p. 144.
26. “Strange to say”: Hawthorne to Horatio Bridge, May 26, 1861, in William Charvat et al., eds., The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 23 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962–), XVIII, 380.
27. “I am too old”: Hawthorne, quoted in James Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), p. 541.
28. Union troops had dug a tunnel: See David Cody, “ ‘So then, Solidity’s a Crust’: Melville’s ‘The Apparition’ and the Explosion of the Petersburg Mine,” Melville Society Extracts 78 (September 1989): 1–8.
29. “the cause of the war”: Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1865, in Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, II, 686.
30. “Is it possible”: Howells, Atlantic Monthly, February 1867, quoted in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 527.
31. All survived, though Guert: He was acquitted, but never recovered his reputation; see Parker, II, 518–19. For an assessment of Guert’s career and its impact on Melville, see Eric Homberger, “Melville, Lt. Guert Gansevoort and Authority: An Essay in Biography,” in Faith Pullin, ed., New Perspectives on Melville (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978), pp. 255–74.
32. “was much attached … much shocked”: Maria Gansevoort Melville to Peter Gansevoort, May 24, 1864, in Log, II, 669.
33. Melville’s horse bucked in panic: Berkshire County Eagle, November 13, 1862, in Log, II, 655.
34. “This recovery … is flattering”: HM to Samuel S. Shaw, December 10, 1862, in Correspondence, p. 381.
35. “If I venture to displace”: Poe, Eureka (1848), in W. H. Auden, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1950), p. 512.