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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810127098 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2013 |
| Series: | Melville Series |
| Pages: | 587 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Melville Biography
An Inside NarrativeBy Hershel Parker
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Hershel ParkerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2709-8
Chapter One
Melville and the Footsteps Theory of Biography
Paul Murray Kendall in The Art of Biography (1965) emphasizes that the modern biographer needs to be "acutely conscious of the importance of locale." He is sure that the "physical ambiences" of "the subject's habitat" can "enable the life-writer to tighten his grip on character, even to solve enigmas of behavior, mysterious responses to experience" (150). The biographer steeped in the subject's locales tells a better life but also develops "the life-relationship"—the unique if "indefinable" relationship between the biographer and the subject (151):
The biographer opens himself to all that places and things will tell him, in his struggle to visualize, and to sense, his man in being. Deepest of all, the particular kind of biographer of whom I am speaking, cherishes, I believe, a conviction—call it a romantic quirk, if you will—that where the subject has trod he must tread, what the subject has seen he must see, because he thus achieves an indefinable but unmistakable kinship with his man. The winning of this kinship, more than anything else he can do, helps to annihilate the centuries, the spaces, the deceptions of change, the opacity of death.
Calling Kendall's book his "favorite work about biography" (8), Frank E. Vandiver in "Biography as an Agent of Humanism" (1983) endorses Kendall's insistence on going where the subject went, even to Louis XI's battlefield at Montlhéry, however much the terrain had changed in half a millennium (9). This notion of the "life-relationship" is enormously appealing because it exalts the biographer toward the level of the subject. What biographer would not want "to annihilate the centuries, the spaces, the deceptions of change, the opacity of death" and stand face to face with his subject, perhaps lending an elbow or a shoulder now and then?
Richard Holmes in the 1986 Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer is a soul-brother to Kendall. Writing on Romantic and romantic literary figures, Holmes is himself a romantic fellow, not a hard-nosed postmodern biographer but a lover of writers, what they wrote, and where they wrote. The youthful Holmes with his grown man's pipe and his willingness to try any drink was endearing to the French, for there is nothing like sharing little pleasurable vices to foster intimacy. Of course he encountered folks who knew just whose ancestor stabled Robert Louis Stevenson's donkey! Holmes is so adept at teasing out the significances of places for him and for his nominal subjects such as Stevenson that one yearns to believe him when he describes his great early revelation:
Have I explained myself at all? It is the simplicity of the idea, the realisation, that I am after. It was important for me, because it was probably the first time that I caught an inkling of what a process (indeed an entire vocation) called "biography" really means. I had never thought about it before. "Biography" meant a book about someone's life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past, a following of footsteps. You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeing figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present. (27)
This man is a Whitmanesque charmer: "Have I explained myself at all?" We surrender ourselves to his complex storytelling, becoming as interested in Holmes, for the moment, as in Stevenson. And we glorify ourselves as trackers of more than physical trails.
Even more staid biographers like me will admit that Richard Holmes's sort of direct involvement may pay off. If he had worked on Melville the ineffable Holmes would have found a way to sail on the Charles W. Morgan for a week or two guided by the globe-navigating Melville scholar Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, whom he, with his luck, would have found harbored, like the whaleship, at Mystic Seaport. He would have discovered a hectare in Tahiti absolutely untouched by Westerners since 1842, would have taken in all the smells of Peru, would have gnawed duff in the bowels of the Constitution and slept there in a hammock by special permission of the U.S. Navy and the National Park Service. And we would have loved him more for the sensual, tactile impressions he brought to us.
Holmes would never have suffered my discomfiture in 1988 when I wanted to see what Melville had seen in 1849 in Dupuytren's Museum in the School of Medicine in Paris. Even that year, as a man of middle age, and even if he had not spoken French, Holmes would not have been subjected to a thirty-minute preliminary negotiation with Mme. Thérèse. Non, this "Herman Melville" could not have seen nothing in 1849 because the museum was founded in 1936, hein! Melville, whoever he was, could not have seen the museum because it had not existed pas! I might if I were so minded—it was up to me—return to my hotel for Melville's journal, even printed in English, and return, and then it might be decided that I could enter into the museum, but if I did not return in fifty minutes—she used an unfamiliar expression which was not tant pis but some more brutal French vernacular word for "Tough!" And besides the journal I would have to have with me a guide who spoke English because I would not understand nothing merely by looking, and no such guide was visible. To the hotel, on the right bank, seizing merely photocopies of the journal, all I had, not the tome itself, and back. Would the tome be demanded? Mme. Thérèse nowhere visible. Isabelle, the speaker of anglais! Sweet Isabelle! Two-headed French babies. French babies joined at chest. French babies joined at belly. French cancers. Vats. French tumors. Many big French tumors. Vats. Heart of a French miser with a big franc stuck in aorta. Genitals and parts of genitals—nonfunctional parts of French genitals. Vats of formaldehyde. Away, flushed with victory, fifty francs well spent, in time to behold a modern marvel—French athletes in the Luxembourg Gardens vigorously smoking their Gauloises while moderately engaged in du jogging.
What good had it done me to see the two-headed French babies? In Mardi, written before his trips abroad in 1849 and 1856–57, Melville had described Hooloomooloo, the Isle of Cripples, and in White-Jacket (chap. 61) he had described the Parisian cast of the head of an elderly woman with "a hideous, crumpled horn, like that of a ram, downward growing out of the forehead." Melville knew, already, of the departments of Morbid Anatomy and the Anatomical Museums of Europe, and knew he wanted to see them, for his friend Evert A. Duyckinck had been to Dupuytren's museum of monstrosities. Melville was a man who would pay to look at the grotesque. So, I persisted until I saw the miser's heart, plugged up by a franc, just as I persisted in the always closed Natural History Museum in Florence, where my wife with her UCLA Italian proclaimed the stature of her husband the professor and got us into the great room with large wax figures of pregnant women and men with bisected penises designed for students of anatomy to study and copy. Then she chatted up the attendant while I peered at the dioramas of Naples in the time of the plague. Again, I asked, what good had it done me, since I knew already that Melville was interested in monstrosities? So much for the romance of scholarship? But against such skepticism is the late-nineteenth-century vignette Scott Norsworthy found about New York City during the cholera epidemic of July 1849—a recollection by an "Old Fogy" who had ventured out and encountered Melville in company with Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews. During long moments those four men were the only New Yorkers visible in the deserted streets. Also, Melville remembered being left (did he think abandoned?) in Albany in the time of the plague, 1832, when his mother and the other seven children all fled to the safety of Pittsfield, only half a year after his father had died. Melville knew what it was to be in cities in the time of the plague.
No such romantic pilgrim as Holmes, I nevertheless did my best to follow Melville, visiting and revisiting places where his feet had trod and his horses' hooves had trod in the United States and even some where his feet had trod in Europe. Almost always, I was reflecting, with lurking skepticism and a tinge of guilt, on just how valuable it really was to see what he saw, other than as a tax write-off. I went to Albany, Amsterdam, Chester, Coblenz, Cologne, Como, Edinburgh, Florence, Gansevoort, Glasgow, Glens Falls, Lansingburgh, Lenox, Liverpool, London, Nantucket, New Bedford, Paris, Pittsfield, Rome, San Francisco, Staten Island, Troy, and even Venice, where it's hard to follow footsteps. What I saw, sometimes, was pretty much what Melville saw, such as the cathedral he and Hawthorne went to in Chester. One room, the Tribuno at the Uffizi, seemed almost fixed in time, so many of the same paintings and sculptures were still there. In Florence, also, there were clear remnants of the old architecture so we could see that in Melville's time the now squared-off Caffè Doney would have looked exotic, a bit like a masonry caravanserie. Sometimes little or nothing was left. Liverpool in the 1980s was rough, left to decay with only the folly of a new "cathedral" to mock the impoverished scene. At least I got a sense of how high above the squalid dock area the once-elegant Adelphi stood, where Evert Duyckinck and then Lemuel Shaw, Jr., stayed, and saw how decrepit it had become. Not one historical postcard of Liverpool was for sale, but the Nelson statue was where Melville had seen it. (The only other strangers in town were two teenage Japanese girls looking for Strawberry Fields.) After the Blitz the narrow London streets Melville had wandered through were gone. I had to reconstitute the village of Gansevoort in my mind from the directories and the family letters.
I went through Arrowhead many times, and slept one night there. I got no frisson from prowling spirits of the Melvilles but I got what any tourist could get—a realizing sense of the power of the sight, on a good hour, of Mount Greylock to the north from Melville's study window. Still, in her "Optical Research" in Mark Bostridge's collection Lives for Sale I knew just what Antonia Fraser meant: "I would never have understood the pattern of events following the murder of Riccio at Holyrood, had I not been able to go and investigate the layout of the palace myself" (113). Very much in her spirit, I climbed into the attic of the Lansingburgh house because I was pretty sure some of the boys slept up there, low headroom or not. I climbed into the attic of Broadhall because I wanted to see how the house had been altered from the time that Melville described the spot where he was working on his whaling book in August 1850. I got into the Mount Vernon Street house of Melville's father-in-law by accosting the owner with a copy of the advance proofs of my first volume. I walked round and round the Gansevoort, New York, house and made a detailed floor plan of it on the basis of dozens of references in family letters, although I did not get inside. The ineffable Holmes would have hailed a child to summon a caretaker, have been admitted, and been offered at least a cold collation and tea. I worried about the careless way one downstairs room was identified in a letter: "state" room or "slate" room? Finally, exercising one of the few powers of a biographer, I decreed that it would be the "slate" room; if a captain could "make it noon," I could "make it slate." Only after this chapter was drafted did John Gretchko present me with a room by room inventory of what was in the house after Melville's sister Frances died. What casual treasures of mahogany furniture! I made a floor chart of the Twenty-sixth Street house, based on a great range of evidence including Melville's granddaughter Frances's corrections in her copy of Lewis Mumford's biography then in the possession of Priscilla Ambrose. I identified with Melville's love of strong old elegant furniture and shared his distaste for new geegaws. It is no coincidence that my humbler but memento-filled study in Pennsylvania was photographed for the New York Times Magazine.
But what help did I get from all my charts of preserved or lost houses, including the Manor House of the Van Rensselaers (disassembled stone by stone and transported out of the state) and Uncle Peter Gansevoort's house and the Governor's House at Sailors' Snug Harbor (which Melville frequently visited while his brother Tom was the occupant)? In an obvious way, I could contrast better the substantial unostentatious house where Elizabeth Shaw Melville grew up with what she experienced as a visitor at his mother's rented Lansingburgh house while Melville was in the Pacific and at Arrowhead. Knowing that Melville had paid for the small, rundown Arrowhead exactly what the Morewoods paid for the moldering grandeur of the Melvill estate (with much greater acreage) told me something about Melville's business sense. I knew that on a smaller scale than the Morewoods' Broadhall, Uncle Herman's Gansevoort house where Melville's mother spent her last years was furnished with fine strong colonial pieces as well as some imported furniture and that she reigned there in near-feudal splendor. I understood Melville daughter Frances's anger the better for knowing Melville as a collector and preserver of beautiful objects, however destructive he had been, at times, of his own writings and of letters that now would be worth good money to lucky descendants or other owners, such as the letter from Hawthorne in praise of Moby-Dick, or the manuscript of The Isle of the Cross. (Someone who reads this book may know just where some Melville treasures are stored.) Knowing the houses inside and out let me understand the human relationships better, sympathize responsibly with suppressed feelings, understand human weaknesses. Truly, there was value in knowing where and how the family lived, even if I never in a mystical moment caught the scent of Melville's "segar" or heard the swish of colonial gowns when they were brought down from the attic at Gansevoort for airing and possible use in ceremonies in 1876.
Melville sought out high places for superb views and reminders of satanic temptation. I knew what it felt like to live beneath mountains. During the war, when Henry J. Kaiser transported Southerners west to build ships, Mount Hood had dominated the terrain to the east on clear days. Photographs of Cavanough Mountain from my parents' eastern Oklahoma farm are hard to distinguish, sometimes, from photographs of the much higher Greylock. Some things I intuited, as when I declared that Melville experienced the sense of Vermont shouldering up behind him while he was at Lansingburgh. I was going by what I would have felt, and what I knew of his older brother Gansevoort's fur-buying expeditions into Massachusetts and Vermont. Melville would have lifted up his eyes unto the hills, from whence his help just might come. This I absolutely knew because of a religious indoctrination similar to his.
Myself a lover of the Romantics, I seized the chance in Rome to wend my way down from the Baths of Caracalla to the Protestant Cemetery—by a natural progression, as Melville recorded in his journal in early 1857. The comment might be elliptical to moderns since he did not mention Shelley, but it would have been obvious to any educated person in his time, who would have expected Melville, like any tourist, to have thought of Shelley's composing parts of Prometheus Unbound there, perhaps to have remembered an engraving of the scene, and then naturally to have made his way down to see where Shelley's heart was buried. Did my trek down to outside the walls of Rome help? Well, as I worked my way through the torturous working-class streets from the Baths of Caracalla to the Protestant Cemetery, following Melville following Shelley, I had time to reflect on Shelley's significance to him. The unexpected benefit was the perception that Melville, musing on Shelley, might have been blindsided by the proximity of the tomb of the lesser-known Keats. Perhaps much of the value in following the footsteps of writers lies in leaving yourself open to the indirect and unanticipated.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Melville Biography by Hershel Parker Copyright © 2012 by Hershel Parker. Excerpted by permission of NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................xiPreface....................xiii
1 Melville and the Footsteps Theory of Biography....................7
2 Textual Editor as Biographer in Training: The Norton Moby-Dick and the Northwestern-Newberry Writings of Herman Melville....................19
3 Entangled by Pierre: Doing Biography Away from the Archives....................45
4 Creating The New Melville Log and Writing the Biography....................75
5 Facts That Do Not Speak for Themselves....................121
6 Desiderata and New Discoveries in Traditional Archives and Databases....................143
7 Agenda-Driven Reviewers: Melville in the Insular New York Newspapers and Magazines vs. Global Loomings from "Ragtag Bloggers" and Litblogs....................167
8 Little Jack Horners and Archivophobics....................195
9 Biographical Scholars and Recidivist Critics....................225
10 Presentism in Melville Biography....................251
11 The Late Twentieth-Century Mini-Melville: New York Intellectuals Without Information....................265
12 The Early Twenty-First-Century Mini-Melville: New York Intellectuals Without Information....................287
13 Melville as the "Modern Boccaccio": The Fascinations of Fayaway....................317
14 Melville's Courtship of Elizabeth Shaw....................331
15 Melville's Short Run of Good Luck (1845–1850): Fool's Paradise Without International Copyright....................357
16 Melville Without International Copyright (1850–1854): A Harper "Sacrifice" for the "Public Good"....................383
17 Melville and Hawthorne's Dinner at the Hotel in Lenox....................411
18 Why Melville Took Hawthorne to the Holy Land: Biography Enhanced by Databases and an Amateur Blogger....................433
19 Melville as a Titan of Literature Among High-Minded British Admirers: The Kory-Kory and Queequeg Component....................459
20 Damned by Dollars: Moby-Dick and the Price of Genius....................481
Notes....................499
Works Cited....................545
Index....................563