Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  36. “I have a voice”: WJ, ch. 75, p. 321.

  37. “insinuation, that had he lived in those days”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, March 3, 1849, in Correspondence, p. 121.

  38. “square, old-fashioned”: Stanwix Melville to Augusta Melville, September 30, 1862, quoted in Parker, II, 520.

  39. “As for scribbling anything about it”: HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 31, 1863, in Correspondence, p. 389.

  40. “bards … love wine, mead”: Emerson, “The Poet” (1840), in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 234.

  41. “I won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June [1?], 1851, in Correspondence, p. 191. Hawthorne had written to G. W. Curtis on April 25, 1851, that Melville “is an admirable fellow, and has some excellent old port and sherry wine” (Log, I, 410).

  42. “keep some Champagne or Gin”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, October 25, 1852, in Correspondence, p. 240.

  43. “have ready a bottle … morning till night”: HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 29, 1851, ibid., p. 196.

  44. “attach the screw of your hose-pipe”: P, bk. 22, p. 301.

  45. “I could drink a great deal”: P, bk. 22, pp. 299–300.

  46. “periodically violent to his wife”: Olson, Call Me Ishmael, p. 92. See Elizabeth Renker, “Wife Beating and the Written Page,” in Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 49–68. Renker believes that Melville may have beaten Lizzie in response to her threat to leave him (p. 50).

  47. “His moods he had”: Clarel, pt. II, 4, ll. 140–41.

  48. “convinced that her husband is insane”: Samuel S. Shaw, letter to Henry Whitney Bellows, May 6, 1867, first published in Walter D. Kring and Jonathan S. Carey, “Two Discoveries Concerning Herman Melville,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 87 (1975): 140.

  49. “whatever further trial”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville, letter to Henry Whitney Bellows, May 10, 1867, ibid., p. 141. Eleven responses to the discovery of the two letters bearing on the Melvilles’ marital crisis are gathered in Donald Yannella and Hershel Parker, eds., The Endless, Winding Way in Melville: New Charts by Kring and Carey (Glassboro, NJ: The Melville Society, 1981). One respondent, Paul Metcalf (Melville’s great-grandson), reports that Charles Olson told him that Melville had come home “smashed on brandy” and thrown his wife down the stairs. Metcalf surmised that his mother, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, had been privy to the “dirt” and had shared it with Henry Murray and Howard P. Vincent; but, according to a footnote, neither Murray nor Vincent recalled such a conversation. Other respondents interpret the letters as nothing more than confirmation that “most serious authors are trials to their wives” (Leon Howard, in Endless, Winding Way, p. 23).

  50. “purity … gentleness”: Hoadley, quoted in Parker, II, 640.

  51. According to Sam Shaw’s account: Sam Shaw to Hope Savage Shaw, September 12, 1867, in Log, II, 688.

  52. “And there were the children”: Paul Metcalf, Genoa: A Telling of Wonders (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), p. 73.

  53. “no motive having appeared”: New York Evening Post, September 16, 1867, quoted in Parker, II, 643–44.

  54. “I wish you could have seen him”: HM to John C. Hoadley, between September 14 and September 18, 1867, extract printed in Correspondence, pp. 399–400.

  55. “He’s a perfect prodigy”: HM to Allan Melville, February 20, 1849, ibid., p. 116.

  56. There is a poem, “Monody”: See Harrison Hayford, Melville’s “Monody”: Really for Hawthorne? (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990). Douglas Robillard, in The Poems of Herman Melville (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000), p. 341, suggests that HM more likely had Malcolm in mind.

  57. “fairly devour”: Augusta Melville to Helen Melville, December 31, 1850, in Correspondence, p. 605.

  58. “little round curls”: Stanwix Melville to Hope Savage Shaw, July 11, 1861, ms. (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University—call number bMS Am 188 [239]).

  59. “fearlessness of an old equestrian”: Hawthorne, American Notebooks, ed. Simpson, p. 448.

  60. “loved Mr. Melville”: Ibid., pp. 467–68.

  61. “I am very happy”: HM to Julian Hawthorne, February [9?], 1852, in Correspondence, p. 221.

  62. “So good, so young”: Quoted in Parker, II, 649.

  63. “one representing him … speak of Mackie”: HM to Maria Melville (HM’s niece), October 22, 1867, in Correspondence, pp. 400–401.

  64. “barrenness of Judea”: Journal entry, January 26, 1857, in Journals, p. 83.

  65. “innate and incurable disorder”: “Bartleby,” in PT, p. 29.

  66. “the mind is ductile”: CM, ch. 4, p. 20.

  67. “a metrical affair”: HM to James Billson, October 10, 1884, in Correspondence, p. 483.

  68. “dreadful incubus of a book”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Catherine Lansing, February 2, 1876, in Log, II, 747.

  69. “philosophical verse-novel”: Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 88.

  70. “Frost believed”: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott, Homage to Robert Frost (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), p. 63.

  71. “whitish mildew pervading whole tracts”: Journal entry, “Barrenness of Judea,” January 1857, in Journals, p. 83.

  72. “blind arches … sealed windows”: Clarel, pt. I, 1, ll. 163–64.

  73. “The student mused”: Clarel, pt. I, 25, ll. 81–84.

  74. “How … be derived from things”: Clarel, pt. I, 34, ll. 16–17.

  75. “Hand is amputated now”: Emily Dickinson, poem #1581.

  76. “Men have come to speak”: Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 107.

  77. “to feed only on inspirations”: Orestes Brownson, “Introduction,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review 1 (January 1844): 10.

  78. “the divine aura”: Emerson, “The Poet,” in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 233.

  79. “floods of life stream around”: Emerson, Nature, ibid., p. 26.

  80. “as young today as when it was created”: “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p. 246.

  81. “Every happy little wave”: R, ch. 13, p. 64.

  82. “I could not see”: R, ch. 16, p. 78.

  83. “departed the last hope”: Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 97.

  84. “the craving of the heart”: William James, “The Will to Believe” (1896), in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 40.

  85. “Shall Science then”: Clarel, pt. II, 25, ll. 154–57.

  86. “The abbot and the palmer rest”: Clarel, pt. I, 35, ll. 108–11.

  87. “Won men to look for solace there”: Clarel, pt. I, 13, l. 43.

  88. “hands, nailed down”: Clarel, pt. II, 3, ll. 155–57.

  89. “last adopted style”: Clarel, pt. II, 1, ll. 35–36.

  90. “Yea, long as children feel affright”: Clarel, pt. I, 31, ll. 187–90.

  91. “nothing but a simple cavity” Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History (1863), quoted in the explanatory notes by Walter Bezanson in the Hendricks House edition of Clarel, p. 584. Bezanson’s notes to this edition of Clarel constitute a monumental work of scholarship.

  92. “faces, yet defacements too”: Clarel, pt. I, 26, l. 4.

  93. “Dim showed across the prairie green”: Clarel, pt. I, 17, ll. 58–60.

  94. “Alone, and at Doubt’s freezing pole”: Clarel, pt. I, 17, ll. 193–95.

  95. “a source that well might claim”: Clarel, pt. I, 17, ll. 198–99.

  96. “bigoted Hebrew nationality”: R, ch. 33, p. 169.

  97. “looking for [the Messiah]”: Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in PT, p.246.

  98. “
the mind infertile of the Jew”: Clarel, pt. I, 17, l. 25.

  99. “The Hebrew seers announce in time”: Clarel, pt. I, 17, ll. 261–64.

  100. “deliberately hobbled his muse”: Gay Wilson Allen, Foreword to Vincent Kenny, Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973), pp. xii–xiii.

  101. “dark quarries”: Clarel, pt. I, 16, l. 34.

  102. “Slant on the shore”: Clarel, pt. II, 39, ll. 15–18.

  103. “He’s gone”: Clarel, pt. II, 39, ll. 67–70.

  104. “One he perceived”: Clarel, pt. I, 17, ll. 157–67.

  105. “while pacing the floor”: Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, p. 76.

  106. “Sands immense”: Clarel, pt. II, 12, ll. 38–50.

  107. “Herman … is in such a frightfully nervous state”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Catherine Lansing, February 2, 1876, in Log, II, 747.

  108. “There’s none so far astray”: Clarel, pt. II, 4, ll. 148–56.

  109. “well-kept secret of one’s self”: Cowen, “Melville’s Marginalia,” I, 116.

  110. of which about a third were sold: See the Historical Note in Clarel, pp. 539–40, 659.

  111. When Lewis Mumford, in 1925: Mumford, Sketches from My Life (New York: Dial Press, 1982), p. 456.

  CHAPTER 12. THE QUIET END

  1. “there are no second acts”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (New York: Scribner’s, 1941), p. 189.

  2. “Melville Medal”: John Updike, Bech Is Back (New York: Knopf, 1982), p. 167. I owe this reference to Lee Siegel.

  3. “My vigor sensibly declines”: HM to Archibald MacMechan, December 5, 1889, in Correspondence, p. 519.

  4. “More than once”: Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., eds., Melville’s Billy Budd: The Genetic Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 1.

  5. “whoever … dost seek happiness”: Quoted in Wallace, Melville and Turner, p. 11.

  6. “the sparkle, the verve”: Raymond Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York: George H. Doran, 1921), p. 381.

  7. “songful passages”: Edward Said, interview, in Carola Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White, eds., Conrad in the Twenty-first Century (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 285.

  8. “reaches straight back into the universal”: Forster, Aspects of the Novel, p. 206.

  9. “clinging like a weary but tenacious barnacle”: George Parsons Lathrop to Horace Scudder, October 20, 1890, quoted in Log, II, 826.

  10. “Towards the end he sailed”: Auden, “Herman Melville.”

  11. Later, he was assigned to an East River pier: Elizabeth Shaw Melville, notes on her husband, in Sealts, Early Lives, p. 170.

  12. wearing a brass-buttoned woolen coat: Larry Reynolds, “Billy Budd and American Labor Unrest: The Case for Striking Back,” in Donald Yannella, ed., New Essays on Billy Budd (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 38.

  13. It was not savory work: See Stanton Garner, “Melville in the Customhouse, 1881–1882: A Rustic Beauty Among the Highborn Dames of Court,” Melville Society Extracts 35 (September 1978): 12–14; and Parker, II, 694.

  14. “surrounded … by low venality”: Hoadley to George Boutwell, January 9, 1873, in Log, II, 730–31.

  15. “unprotected … were debauched”: Dorman B. Eaton, The “Spoils” System and Civil Service Reform in the Custom-House and Post-Office at New York, Publications of the Civil Service Reform Association, 3 (New York, 1881), quoted in Garner, “Melville in the Customhouse,” p. 12.

  16. “For a year or so past”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Catherine Lansing, January 10, 1886, in Log, II, 796.

  17. “man of genius”: Log, II, 832. Arthur Stedman, who assisted Lizzie Melville as her husband’s literary executor, reports in his introduction to an 1892 edition of Typee that Melville was reading Schopenhauer during his final illness. Between February 5 and 12, 1891, HM borrowed Schopenhauer’s Counsels and Maxims from the New York Society Library and later purchased a copy of the work, along with Religion: A Dialogue, Studies in Pessimism, The Wisdom of Life, and The World as Will and Idea. See Sealts, Melville’s Reading, pp. 129–30.

  18. “within a very short distance”: Frederick Busch, The Night Inspector (New York: Harmony Books, 1999), p. 23.

  19. “You are young … I aint crazy”: HM to John C. Hoadley, March 31, 1877, in Correspondence, pp. 451–54.

  20. Later that year, Melville’s behavior: Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, p. 259.

  21. “morbidly sensitive”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Catherine Lansing, February 25, 1877, in Log, II, 759.

  22. “Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish”: Cowen, “Melville’s Marginalia,” VIII, 72.

  23. “Like tides that enter creek or stream”: John Marr. For Melville’s use of Omar Khayyám, see Robert K. Wallace, “Melville’s Prints: David Metcalf’s Prints and Tile,” Harvard Library Bulletin 8, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 23.

  24. “cries decrease—”: Clarel, pt. IV, 15, ll. 60–62.

  25. “I have been recently improving”: HM to Catherine Melville Hoadley (HM’s sister Kate), December 28, 1881, in Correspondence, p. 477.

  26. “Melville, whose magic drew Typee”: Log, II, 792.

  27. “vein of true poetical feeling”: New York Mail and Express, November 20, 1888, in Higgins and Parker, eds., Contemporary Reviews, p. 545.

  28. “unique merits”: Archibald MacMechan to HM, November 21, 1889, in Correspondence, p. 752.

  29. “Putnam’s group”: Henry James, June 11, 1898, in Leon Edel, ed., Henry James: Literary Criticism—Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 683.

  30. “as for Herman Melville”: Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Scribner’s, 1934), p. 68.

  31. “it is hard enough to get along”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Hope Savage Shaw, March 9, 1875, in Log, II, 741.

  32. “topped by strange plaster heads”: Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, p. 283.

  33. “I could play with anything … palish blue color”: Frances C. T. Osborne (HM’s granddaughter), “Herman Melville Through a Child’s Eyes,” in Sealts, Early Lives, p. 184.

  34. There was a back porch: Hershel Parker, “The Melville House at 104 East 26th Street,” Harvard Library Bulletin 8, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 38.

  35. “pale, sombre, nervous”: Log, II, 782.

  36. “bowel trouble”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Hope Savage Shaw, July 20, 1875, in Log, II, 742.

  37. “the most profitable business”: Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Hope Savage Shaw, March 14, 1874, in Log, II, 736.

  38. “serious obsticle”: Stanwix Melville to Hope Savage Shaw, April 25, 1873, in Log, II, 732–33.

  39. “unable to find solace”: Helen Griggs to Catherine Lansing, May 5, 1886, in Log, II, 800.

  40. “As the growing sense of his environment”: See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., “Innocence and Infamy: Billy Budd, Sailor,” in Bryant, ed., Companion, p. 411.

  41. “the consciousness of having done my duty”: Mary Ann Gansevoort to Peter Gansevoort, January 2, 1843, in Log, I, 161.

  42. A prose work began to grow: The best account of the genesis and development of Billy Budd is Hayford and Sealts, eds., Editors’ Introduction, in Melville’s Billy Budd: The Genetic Text, reprinted in Hayford and Sealts, eds., Billy Budd, Sailor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 1–39.

  43. “tarry hand”: BB, ch. 30, p. 1434.

  44. “unworldly servers”: John Marr, l. 37, in Robillard, ed., Poems, p. 268.

  45. Melville noted in the manuscript on April 19, 1891: See Hayford and Sealts, eds., Billy Budd: The Genetic Text, p. 425.

  46. “ragged edges”: BB, ch. 28, p. 1431.

  47. “and despite his all but fully developed frame”: BB, ch. 2, p. 1359.

  48. “rueful reproach … Sorry”: BB, ch. 1, p. 1356.

  49. “in the time before steamships”: BB, ch. 1, p. 1353.

/>   50. “A virtue went out of him … at the Bellipotent”: BB, ch. 1, pp. 1356–57.

  51. “in a terrible breach … Down, sir!”: BB, ch. 1, p. 1358.

  52. “The will to it”: BB, ch. 1, pp. 1358–59.

  53. “A novice in the complexities”: BB, ch. 2, p. 1360.

  54. “to deal in double meanings”: BB, ch. 1, p. 1359.

  55. “the contact of one man with another”: Mardi, ch. 3, p. 14.

  56. “of self-consciousness … composer of his own song”: BB, ch. 2, p. 1361.

  57. “which the Greek sculptor … gave to his heroic strong man”: BB, ch. 2, p. 1360.

  58. “expression of sweet and divine gravity”: Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912), trans. David Luke (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 216.

  59. the “Me” and the “Not-Me”: Emerson, Nature, in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 22.

  60. “became … disunited with himself”: Ibid., p. 55.

  61. “a period prior to Cain’s city”: BB, ch. 2, p. 1362.

  62. “Who was your father?”: BB, ch. 2, p. 1361.

  63. “Men may seem detestable”: MD, ch. 26, p. 117.

  64. “Under sudden provocation”: BB, ch. 2, p. 1362.

  65. “master-at-arms”: In WJ, ch. 6, p. 26, HM had described the master-at-arms as “a sort of high constable and schoolmaster … whom all sailors hate.”

  66. “hue of time-tinted marbles”: BB, ch. 8, p. 1373.

  67. “peculiar ferreting genius”: BB, ch. 8, p. 1375.

  68. “The two men … come, socially speaking”: Arendt, On Revolution, p. 83.

  69. “He looked like a man … in the sky”: BB, ch. 8, pp. 1373–75.

  70. “Jemmy Legs is down … Baby Budd”: BB, ch. 15, p. 1392.

  71. “His portrait I essay”: BB, ch. 8, p. 1372.

  72. “What was the matter”: BB, ch. 11, p. 1381.

  73. “motiveless malignity”: Coleridge, Lectures, 1808–1819, on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 315.

  74. “the death of Satan”: Wallace Stevens, “Esthetique du Mal.”

  75. “elemental evil”: BB, ch. 12, p. 1385.

  76. “the opinion of the million”: Emerson, “Fate” (1860), in Whicher, ed., Selections, p. 345.