Quote of the Day (Herman Melville, on ‘Human Madness’)

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick or, the Whale (1851)

In the novel Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab personified “human madness.” Gregory Peck, shown here, played the character in the 1956 film adaptation directed by John Huston.

Flashback, July 1924: TLS ‘Billy Budd’ Essay Further Fans Melville Revival

 

Literary critic John Middleton Murry, noting a curious addition to the recently published 16-volume Collected Works of Herman Melville, lavishly praised the novella “Billy Budd, Foretopman,” in the influential U.K. Times Literary Supplement, generating interest in this late-career return to form by the great but troubled 19^th-century American novelist.

The rise, fall, and revival of literary reputations has long fascinated me. But the case of Herman Melville (pictured) strikes me as especially compelling.

From bestselling author semi-autobiographical fiction set in the South Seas in the 1840s to more symbolic, ambitious fare that led his readers to abandon him in the 1850s, Melville had fallen into almost complete literary obscurity by the time of his death in 1891.

Yet roughly 30 years later, he would be propelled into the circle of American authors that college English majors are expected to read. Even the author with the closest similar critical and commercial trajectory that I can think of, F. Scott Fitzgerald, only had to wait less than four years after his death for a revival, when the Council on Books in Wartime handed out free copies of The Great Gatsby to American service personnel serving overseas.

At the behest of Carl Van Doren, a faculty member of Columbia University and literary editor of The Nation, Raymond Weaver—a colleague at the school—had written for the magazine an August 1919 essay coinciding with the centennial of the birth of Melville. The piece made Melville the subject of critical and biographical interest.

The boom gained further momentum stateside in 1921, as Weaver produced the first full-length biography of Melville, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, and Van Doren made the case for the novelist with a full chapter devoted to him in the critic’s influential study The American Novel.

While performing his research on Melville, Weaver had received from the novelist’s granddaughter pages from “Billy Budd” that had been stored in a family breadbox after Melville’s widow, faced with deciphering his scratch-outs, insertions, and shaky handy, had left it to others to edit.

Weaver set to work on the abandoned project. Even he sometimes lost patience with the material, making some questionable editorial decisions (believing the manuscript was essentially finished, when modern scholars have determined that Melville was still working on it) and some outright errors (e.g., rendering “innocence and infamy, spiritual depravity and fair repute” as the nearly incomprehensible “innocence and infirmary, spiritual depravity and fair respite”).

When it was done, Weaver regarded it as more of a curiosity than a late-life masterpiece by one of America’s greatest authors.

Yet, flawed as Weaver’s work was, it still was enough to lead Murry to make the case for Melville as an essential American novelist.

In his TLS article, “Herman Melville’s Silence,” the English critic took note of the abrupt turn away from fiction—the “silence”—that the writer took after The Confidence-Man in 1857.

He found something infinitely poignant in the former bestselling novelist of the sea returning to maritime matter in Billy Budd. The novella constituted, he asserted, Melville’s “last will and spiritual testament.”

Murry—who was already deeply into the other critical work for which he is best remembered, securing the place of his late wife Katherine Mansfield in the critical canon—had a considerably higher estimate of “Billy Budd” than Weaver. After pondering the matter further, the American’s respect for this short work considerably improved.

With British admirers such as Murry, D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature, and John Freeman’s 1926 biography of Melville (which compares “Billy Budd” to John Milton’s Paradise Regained), the renewed American appreciation for the novelist was being reinforced across the Atlantic. It has remained a classroom staple since then.

In an essay published a few months ago in IM—1776, critic Lafayette Lee predicted: “As Billy Budd is further dissected and its subtleties slowly erased, it is likely to fall out of favor with the general public and return to the shadows from whence it came.”

I am not so sure about this. Readers have found so much to ponder and muse over here (e.g., including the 1951 Benjamin Britten-E.M. Forster novel and the 1963 film starring Terrence Stamp) that they will be sounding its depths about the innocent and doomed sailor for years.

Quote of the Day (Herman Melville, on an American ‘Confidence Man’ on April Fool’s Day)

“At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis….

“From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger.

“In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favorite steamer Fidele, on the point of starting for New Orleans. Stared at, but unsaluted, with the air of one neither courting nor shunning regard, but evenly pursuing the path of duty, lead it through solitudes or cities, he held on his way along the lower deck until he chanced to come to a placard nigh the captain's office, offering a reward for the capture of a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given; but what purported to be a careful description of his person followed.”—American novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891), The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857)

In a case of life imitating art, The Confidence-Man was published by Dix, Edwards & Co., on April Fool's Day. Its first chapter, excerpted above, took place on this same day, featuring a swindler out to bilk passengers on a Mississippi steamboat.

Best known to his contemporary public for tales based on his own experience in the South Pacific in the early 1840s, Herman Melville wrote this satire without ever journeying on the great river that divides America into east and west. 

Now regarded as perhaps the most modernist of his fiction, it mystified readers at the time, failing so dismally that Melville would never publish another novel in his lifetime. (His masterful novella, Billy Budd, would not be released until 1924, more than 30 years after the author died virtually forgotten.)

But Melville had anticipated, by more than a quarter-century, Mark Twain’s shrewd depiction of “The Duke and the Dauphin,” two con men plying their trade along the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn. Even the name of the ship where Melville’s protagonist (as you might guess, the “mysterious impostor” of the passage), “Fidele” (Latin for “faith”) hints at the credulity exploited all too easily among these passengers into the American Heartland.

In this cavalcade of conning, the reader comes across promoters of stock in failing companies, peddlers of fake medicine, even collectors for a fraudulent Seminole Widows and Orphans Society. In an American society built on mobility, people can shed their old misfortunes at will—or, more negatively, gull a new set of suckers.

One sentence in the novel captures the dual qualities that enable these shysters to operate--not just self-belief but also deceit: "Confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions.” 

In 2023, Melville’s ship of fools now encompasses an entire nation, all ready to fall for the next Internet hoax or the phantom electoral fraud claim. George Santos and Donald Trump differ from Melville’s “man in cream-colors” only in how much higher they aimed.

Quote of the Day (Herman Melville, on Creating Art)

“In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt–a wind to freeze;
Sad patience–joyous energies;
Humility–yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity–reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel–Art.” —American novelist, short-story writer, and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891), “Art,” from American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2: Herman Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals, edited by John Hollander (The Library of America, 1993)

Photo of the Day: Herman Melville’s ‘Arrowhead,” Pittsfield MA—In Honor of the Novelist’s Bicentennial

This week, America celebrates the 200th birthday of Herman Melville. Like Walt Whitman, another foundational American writer with a bicentennial this year, the creator of Moby Dick, Billy Budd and other tales was born in New York State and wrote numerous poems during the Civil War. Unlike the “Sage of Camden,” Melville wrote from a dark vision of humanity in general and America’s mission in particular, and died with his reputation in such eclipse that it would take another three decades for it to emerge from the shadows.

Nearly two years ago, for the third time over the past 30 years, I visited “Arrowhead,” the rambling homestead in Pittsfield, Mass., where Melville lived with his family for 13 years. I took the attached photo during that late-summer 2017 visit. 

I’ve always been fascinated by the notion that Melville could write about the sea so much in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, but maybe I shouldn’t be: his imagination was so fertile that he likened Mount Greylock, visible from his second-floor study window, to the white whale that obsessed him. 

Because Pittsfield was so inextricably tied to his family’s fortunes, Melville invested an enormous amount psychologically in these grounds. He first came to the area in 1837, at a time when his father’s death had plunged the surviving family members into debt. Working for his uncle Thomas that year, teenage Herman found the experience far different from what he knew in New York: eating well and working in the fields. 

More than a decade later, still with these fond memories, he thought it was an opportune time to relocate here from Gotham. This time, though, he had nothing like his earlier carefree experiences.

Herman thought sales of his books would enable him and his family to live comfortably. Inspired by a brief friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne (described in this prior blog post of mine), a fellow Berkshires resident, he created a book on the short list of Great American Novels, Moby Dick. But this turn from adventure fiction to more symbolic, experimental fare sent his sales plunging.

Arrowhead (named after an Indian artifact that Melville found on the property) was, and is, a site of pastoral beauty. But increasingly, it produced problems for the Melvilles. 

With wife Lizzie and son Malcolm soon joined by three more children, plus his mother and several sisters, it could not have been an easy environment for Herman to create. His indefatigable attempts to carve out time—notably, writing till 9 pm, when he couldn’t see anymore—strained his health and, his family feared, his sanity. (Afflicted by hay fever, Lizzie had her own health issues in the home.)

In 1863, a financially strapped Melville sold his home to his brother Allan, who expressed his admiration through an inscription on the chimney from Herman’s Piazza Tales story, “I and My Chimney.”

When Melville died in 1891, only a single obit noted his passing. He is read constantly in high schools and colleges now, of course. 

But  a visit to Arrowhead is a must for any Berkshires travelers, as well as just anyone who wants to better understand this essential writer who still has so much to say to us today about unfulfilling work (“Bartleby the Scrivener”), American race relations (“Benito Cereno”), a leader who drives his followers to catastrophe (Moby Dick), and the national tendency to fall for empty promises and fraud (The Confidence Man).

Photo of the Day: Monument Mountain, The Berkshires, Western Massachusetts

Monument Mountain is now an open-space reservation in Great Barrington, Mass. But it looms large not only in the topography of the Berkshire Mountains, but also in the art and literature of this region in Western Massachusetts. 

In late August, while on vacation in the Berkshires, I took this photo of the mountain from a distance—to be exact, from the back porch of Chesterwood, the summer home of Daniel Chester French, the renowned sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial, in the town of Stockbridge. Beholding this site surely inspired French every day while he was here.

Well before French lived in this region, though, this mountain had fired the imagination of writers. In the early 19^th century, for instance, the American Romantic poet William Cullen Bryant wrote “Monument Mountain,” which told the sad tale of a young Native American woman who, because of tribal disapproval of the man she loved, threw herself from what is now called Squaw’s Peak. This portion of the Bryant poem gives a sense of what this sublime landscape was like in its wilder years:

“…Thou shalt look

Upon the green and rolling forest tops,

And down into the secrets of the glens,

And streams, that with their bordering thickets strive

To hide their windings. Thou shalt gaze, at once,

Here on white villages, and tilth, and herds,

And swarming roads, and there on solitudes

That only hear the torrent, and the wind,

And eagle's shriek.”

More famously, Herman Melville developed a friendship with older writer Nathaniel Hawthorne as a result of a picnic with mutual friends on the mountain in 1850. The relationship between the two  authors heavily influenced Melville, who as a result transformed a rather realistic rendering of the sea into the symbolic novel Moby Dick.

Quote of the Day (Herman Melville, on Men and Secrets)

“It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.”— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

He achieved success with novels of sea adventure that promised so much sensation that they would seem to be nothing like acts of concealment. But as I toured Arrowhead, the homestead Herman Melville owned and farmed in Pittsfield, Mass., for a dozen years, it became more and more clear to me that not only were the works of his maturity anything but transparent, but that his private life remains heavily shrouded in mystery. For instance, what was his true relationship with his wife? Did he have an affair with a neighbor, or might he have been bisexual, with powerful unrequited feelings for Nathaniel Hawthorne?

And why did he leave the Berkshire Mountains, a region that a relative would later claim was his first real love?

We may never know. What we do know is that, even on the surface, this giant of the great 19^th century American literary flowering wrote works with the same type of turbulence as the South Seas where he worked and that provided the experiences he needed to work through on paper.

Quote of the Day (Herman Melville, on Truth)

“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.”— Herman Melville (1819-1891), Billy Budd (posthumously published, 1924)