Melville in Love
Page 22
1. SAM to Susannah Perrin, [n.d.] (BCHS). For a typical description of the Morewood family’s business in New York, see the advertisement “Rust Proof Iron,” on the front page of the New York Evening Post, October 13, 1849. The Morewood family held valuable patents for galvanizing metal.
2. See Rowland’s ad, “For Sale, A Modern Built Light Wagon,” Pittsfield Sun, August 29, 1850.
3. In 1856 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes sold his house and 286 acres near Broadhall for $18,500 (“Farm Sold,” Pittsfield Sun, August 21, 1856).
4. Caroline Whitmarsh, “A Representative Woman,” Berkshire County Eagle, October 29, 1863.
5. No documents support the claim that Sarah’s purchase of the mansion “stirred up in Herman a brew of feelings in which two of the ingredients were envy and jealousy” (HPBio, 1:735).
6. Elizabeth Shaw Melville to Hope Shaw, December 23, 1847 (quoted in HMC, 799).
7. “Several Days in Berkshire,” Literary World, August 24, 1850; and Evert Duyckinck to Margaret Duyckinck, August 8, 1850 (see Luther Stearns Mansfield, “Glimpses of Herman Melville’s Life in Pittsfield,” American Literature, March 1937, 33).
8. For his description of Cornelius Mathews, see Lowell, A Fable for Critics, 36; HM, “Hawthorne and His Mosses.”
9. HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 13, 1850 (HMC, 173); Parker, Melville Biography, 327.
10. “The Grand Fancy Dress-Ball,” Literary World, September 7, 1850. Mathews’s inscribed copy of Chanticleer: A Thanksgiving Story (1850) to “Mrs. Morewood” is held at BA.
11. Pierre, Book VII.
12. Ibid., Book V.
13. The Dryden edition is noted in Sealts, Melville’s Reading, 57. The edition was published by Routledge in London in 1854. Also see the “Historical Note” in the Northwestern/Newberry edition of Published Poems, 416. The prominent markings in the margins of the Routledge Dryden are on pages 407 and 418. The rest are so faint that they almost escape detection by the naked eye, except for three words underlined on 440 (“mouths without hands”) in “Cymon and Iphigenia.” Next to these words, there is also a faint check mark in the margin. On page 415 in “Sigismonda and Guiscardo” a faintly marked passage includes the lines, “Permitted laurels grace the lawless brow, / The unworthy raised, the worthy cast below.” All the prominent marks are consistent with those in other books owned by HM. (See the indispensable Melville’s Marginalia Online, edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon.)
CHAPTER 5
1. In 1850 HM was reading Smollett’s Roderick Random in a copy borrowed from Evert Duyckinck (Sealts, Melville’s Reading, 95). Smollett was already one of HM’s favorite authors, and he had mentioned his work in three of the five books written before Moby-Dick: Omoo (see note 3 below); Redburn (chapter 29); and White-Jacket (chapters 8 and 12). For Scott on Smollett, see his Lives of the Novelists, 59. It has been suggested that SAM was thinking of Dr. Holmes’s poem “Aunt Tabitha,” but that would not have been possible in 1850 because the poem wasn’t published until 1872. See Holmes, Poetical Works, 2:6–7, and Wyn Kelley, “Melville’s Carnival Neighborhood,” Lectora, 20 (2014). See the malapropisms of “our aunt Tabitha” in the Norton Critical Edition of Humphry Clinker (165, 279, 280, 12, 84, 280).
2. For identification of the costumes at the party, see Melville in His Own Time, 51.
3. Updike, Hugging the Shore, 93. Evan Gottlieb’s Norton Critical Edition of Humphry Clinker spells Melville’s surname with the final e, but the spelling varies in earlier editions. For the reference to Smollett in Omoo, see chapter 77. Gottlieb’s edition of Humphry Clinker reprints the Rowlandson engraving of the “venerable Turk” (120).
4. William Allen Butler to George Duyckinck, August 20, 1850 (see Luther Stearns Mansfield, “Glimpses of Herman Melville’s Life in Pittsfield,” American Literature, March 1937, 35).
5. HMCR, 398.
6. Mansfield, “Glimpses of Herman Melville’s Life in Pittsfield,” 35; Evert Duyckinck, “Notes of Excursions: Glimpses of Berkshire Scenery,” Literary World, September 27, 1851.
7. Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 139.
8. Quoted in Mansfield, “Glimpses of Herman Melville’s Life in Pittsfield,” 28.
9. Melville in His Own Time, 49.
CHAPTER 6
1. Smith, The Poet Among the Hills, 151–54; Holmes, Elsie Venner, 56–57.
2. Holmes, Elsie Venner, 134, 137, 105–6. J. C. Burton, “Through the Berkshires,” Motor Age, September 17, 1914; Smith, The Poet Among the Hills, 151–54. Though he makes no mention of a love affair between HM and SAM, see Rogin, Subversive Genealogy (184–85) for a more modern reference to the connection between SAM and Elsie Venner, and SAM and Pierre.
3. Holmes, Elsie Venner, 157, 57, 156.
4. Bacon, Literary Pilgrimages, 450. This book of 1902 also associates the Pittsfield area of South Mountain with the main setting of Elsie Venner.
5. Smith, The Poet Among the Hills, 151–54; and see John Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.
6. ML, 502.
7. “Forrest or Willis—Mr. Stevens’s Card,” New York Tribune, June 19, 1850.
8. Morse, Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1:56; Holmes, Elsie Venner, 229, 113, 118, 115, 116, 131, 229, 132.
9. Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, 447–48.
10. ML, 636, and Gibian, Oliver Wendell Holmes, 3.
11. Melville in His Own Time, 172.
12. Holmes Jr. to Harold Laski, March 27, 1921 (ML, 936–37). In ML Jay Leyda suggests of Dr. Holmes and HM, “The two writers may have exchanged disguised portraits,” in “I and My Chimney,” and in Elsie Venner (xxviii).
CHAPTER 7
1. SAM to George Duyckinck, November 21, 1851 (NYPL). Emanuel Leutze painted Hawthorne’s portrait in Washington, D.C., in 1862.
2. Wineapple, Hawthorne, 218.
3. Melville in His Own Time, 36.
4. Ibid., 75.
5. HM, “Hawthorne and His Mosses.”
6. See HM’s copy of Mosses from an Old Manse at melvillesmarginalia.org.
7. Melville in His Own Time, 74.
8. Ibid., 75.
9. Wineapple, Hawthorne, 226; Holmes, “At the Saturday Club,” Poetical Works, 2:271.
CHAPTER 8
1. SAM to George Duyckinck, October 27, [1851] (NYPL).
2. “Dedication of the Pittsfield Rural Cemetery,” Pittsfield Sun, September 12, 1850.
3. “Deaths,” Pittsfield Sun, October 22, 1863.
4. Holmes, Elsie Venner, 197
5. “Dedication of the Pittsfield Rural Cemetery.”
6. HPBio, 1:778; HM to Lemuel Shaw, May 22, 1856 (HMC, 295).
7. See the original newspaper passage, an excellent analysis of Smith’s recollections, and early biographical work in Sealts, The Early Lives of Melville, 38–39, 130. In a letter to George Duyckinck (November 21, 1851), SAM had another explanation for “Broadhall” as the name of her house, saying that one of Melville’s sisters had chosen the name (NYPL).
8. HPBio, 1:788, and ML, 396.
9. Melville in His Own Time, 76.
10. HM to Evert Duyckinck, October 6, 1850 (HMC, 170–71).
CHAPTER 9
1. HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 13, 1850 (HMC, 173–74).
2. Sealts, The Early Lives of Melville, 106.
3. Maria Gansevoort Melville to Augusta Melville, March 6, 1852 (NYPL).
4. Sealts, The Early Lives of Melville, 169.
5. HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 13, 1850 (HMC, 174), and ML, 404.
6. See “Knights and Squires,” chapter 27 of Moby-Dick, for an extended treatment of these ideas.
7. Ibid., “The Quarter-Deck,” chapter 36.
8. Melville in His Own Time, 30.
9. “Sunset,” chapter 37, Moby-Dick.
10. HM to Evert Duyckinck, March 3, 1849 (HMC, 121).
CHAPTER 10
1. HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, November [17?,] 1851 (HMC, 212).
2. Henry A. Murray, “In Nom
ine Diaboli,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, Winter 1952, 47–62; Rebecca Stott, “Moby-Dick, into the Wonder-World, Audaciously,” You Must Read This, with Robert Siegel, National Public Radio, June 13, 2007, and updated July 17, 2011.
3. HM to SAM, September [12 or 19?,] 1851 (HMC, 206).
4. The Melville copy of Todd’s Student’s Manual is held at BA.
5. Marvel, Reveries of a Bachelor, 67. See chapter 15 here for the evidence of SAM’s awareness of Marvel’s book.
6. HM to R. H. Dana Jr., May 1, 1850 (HMC, 162).
CHAPTER 11
1. Written in a note at the end of a poem whose first line is “The sky is clear. The moon her silvery light,” SAM to George Duyckinck, [n.d.] (NYPL).
2. SAM to George Duyckinck, October 27, [1851] (NYPL).
3. HM to Evert Duyckinck, December 13, 1850 (HMC, 173).
4. “The Fountain,” chapter 85, Moby-Dick.
CHAPTER 12
1. Review of HM’s White-Jacket in the Athenaeum, February 2, 1850 (HMCR, 296). HM read of Turner’s work as early as 1848 in Ruskin’s Modern Painters (Sealts, Melville’s Reading, 89).
2. Steven Olsen-Smith, “Melville’s Copy of Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale and the Composition of Moby-Dick,” Harvard Library Bulletin 21 (Fall 2010): 1–77; “A Scamper Through the Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” Punch 8 (1845): 233; and “A Peep into the Royal Academy,” New Monthly Magazine, June 1845.
3. Leslie, Autobiographical Recollections, 138.
4. “Loomings,” chapter 1, Moby-Dick.
5. Ibid., “The Pulpit,” chapter 8.
6. Ibid., “The Funeral,” chapter 69.
7. Quoted in Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, 171.
8. “The Needle,” chapter 124, and “The Chase—Third Day,” chapter 135, Moby-Dick. For discussion of another painting in Moby-Dick with suggestions of Turner’s style, see Robert K. Wallace, “Melville and the Visual Arts,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, where Wallace writes about the “squitchy picture” of “unimaginable sublimity” in the Spouter-Inn (349).
9. Finley, Angel in the Sun, 179; Bell, A List of the Works Contributed to Public Exhibitions by J. M. W. Turner, R.A., 155; Rogers, The Voyage of Columbus in Poems, 131.
10. HM’s comment on Italy is quoted in HMJ, 368.
11. Roberts, Samuel Rogers and His Circle, 48; Cunningham, Modern London, 26.
CHAPTER 13
1. Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 1:376.
2. HM to Evert Duyckinck, February 12, 1851 (HMC, 180).
3. HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [January 29?,] 1851 (HMC, 176).
4. Melville in His Own Time, 147.
5. HM, White-Jacket, chapter 4.
6. HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [June 1?,] 1851 (HMC, 191–92); HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 29, 1851 (HMC, 196).
7. Melville in His Own Time, 77. This is the most reliable version of Sophia Hawthorne’s remarks.
8. Wineapple, Hawthorne, 345.
9. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, chapter 11.
10. HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [April 16?,] 1851 (HMC, 185).
11. Ibid. (HMC, 187).
12. HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [May ?,] 1851 (HMC, 191). This letter has been published with an indication that it was written in June, but May seems more likely (see HPBio, 1:840–41); and June 29, 1851 (HMC, 196).
13. HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [May ?,] 1851 (HMC, 191). For the dating of this letter, see the note above.
CHAPTER 14
1. HM to Evert Duyckinck, March 26, 1851 (HMC, 183). SAM’s date of return from England can be determined from shipping news in various periodicals and in documents in BCHS, especially George Morewood to Rowland and Sarah Morewood, May 23, 1851.
2. HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 29, 1851 (HMC, 195). See also HPBio, 1:839–40.
3. SAM to Susannah Perrin, [n.d.] (BCHS).
4. See HPBio, 1:852.
5. ML, 419.
6. HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, July 22, 1851 (HMC, 199).
7. Smith, Taghconic, 156. As evidence of SAM’s authorship of the Greylock essay, see ML, 461. Evert Duyckinck to Margaret Duyckinck, August 7, 1851 (Luther Stearns Mansfield, “Glimpses of Herman Melville’s Life in Pittsfield,” American Literature, March 1937, 39).
8. SAM to George Duyckinck, October 27, [1851] (NYPL), and HPBio, 2:46. For information about Rev. Entler, see his obituary in the Congregational Year-Book of 1887.
9. Evert Duyckinck to Margaret Duyckinck, August 13, 1851 (Mansfield, “Glimpses of Herman Melville’s Life in Pittsfield,” 44–45).
10. Holmes, Elsie Venner, 193.
CHAPTER 15
1. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 153.
2. Melville in His Own Time, 64; Smith, Taghconic, 155.
3. Smith, Taghconic, 152.
4. Ibid., 154.
5. Ibid., 156.
6. “The Candles,” chapter 119, Moby-Dick.
7. For the use of the “motto” in Moby-Dick, see “The Forge,” chapter 113.
8. Smith, Taghconic, 156. SAM to George Duyckinck, October 27, [1851] (NYPL).
9. HPBio, 2:534, and SAM to George Duyckinck, [December 24, 1851] (NYPL).
10. George Duyckinck to SAM, August 18, 1851 (BA); SAM to George Duyckinck, [December 22?, 1851], and August 24, [1853?] (NYPL).
11. Holmes, Elsie Venner, 293, 311.
12. Obituary Notice of the Late George L. Duyckinck, 17.
13. SAM to George Duyckinck, September 14, [1851] (NYPL).
14. SAM to George Duyckinck, December 28, 1851 (NYPL). For Evert’s remark about “a collection of minerals,” see “Marks and Remarks,” Literary World, December 27, 1851 (508).
15. SAM to George Duyckinck, [December ?, 1851] (NYPL).
CHAPTER 16
1. SAM to George Duyckinck, [October 8, 1851] (NYPL).
2. Smith, Taghconic, 42.
3. In his Melville’s Prisoners (132–83), the excellent scholar Harrison Hayford demonstrated conclusively why the various theories of Melville’s “secret” sister won’t stand up to scrutiny. For Hawthorne’s attack on the Shaker men, see Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, 465.
4. Pierre, Book VIII.
5. Ibid., Books XXII and XXI.
6. Ibid., Book V.
7. Ibid., Book VIII. See Murray’s “Introduction” to the 1949 Hendricks House edition of Pierre (liii).
8. Pierre, Books XII and II.
9. Ibid., Book VIII.
10. Ibid., Book XXIII.
CHAPTER 17
1. HM to Nathaniel Hawthorne, November [17?,] 1851 (HMC, 212).
2. Ibid. (213).
3. HM to Sophia Van Matre, December 10, 1863 (HMC, 387).
4. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, 376.
5. HMCR, 384, 415, 387, 397.
6. Ibid., 412, 378, 382, 380.
7. Ibid., 384–86.
8. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, 382.
9. Obituary Notice of the Late George L. Duyckinck, 9.
10. Richard Bentley to HM, May 5, 1852 (HMC, 620), and HM to Richard Bentley, July 20, 1849 (HMC, 133).
11. HMCR, 410.
12. Pierre, Book XXV.
CHAPTER 18
1. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, 374.
2. For details of Stanwix’s birth record, see ML, 430, and Hayford, Melville’s Prisoners, 78–79. Hayford’s book includes a helpful letter from the Pittsfield city clerk.
3. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, 374. Maria’s complaint against HM is quoted in HMC, 784.
4. Maria Gansevoort Melville to Augusta Melville, December 29–30, 1851 (NYPL).
5. HM to SAM, September [12 or 19?,] 1851 (HMC, 205–6). For the phrase “voucher of paradise,” see HM’s poem “The Devotion of the Flowers to Their Lady.”
6. SAM to George Duyckinck, [January ?, 1852] (NYPL).
7. Maria Gansevoort Melville to Augusta Melville, December 29�
��30, 1851 (NYPL). In HPBio, 2:50, this passage in Maria’s letter ends with her remark to SAM “that her conversation affected her.” But, in fact, there is a dash after “her,” and the sentence continues at the top of the letter’s first page, so that it reads “her conversation affected her Husband very painfully & I wished her to change the subject.”
8. SAM to George Duyckinck, [December 28, 1851] (NYPL).
9. HM to the Editors of the Literary World, February 14, 1852 (222).
10. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 471. SAM went to New York the first week of September, but returned to Broadhall September 11. See SAM to George Duyckinck, September 14, [1851] (NYPL), misdated 1850.
11. SAM to George Duyckinck, [September 27, 1851] (NYPL).
12. Wineapple, Hawthorne, 221.
CHAPTER 19
1. HMCR, 441.
2. Ibid., 433, 437, 424.
3. Ibid., 436, 433.
4. Ibid., 419–20, 421, 426.
5. Pierre, Book XXV.
6. Ibid., Book XXII.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., Book XXV.
9. Ibid., Books XVII and XXVI.
10. HMCR, 430–31.
11. SAM to George Duyckinck, December 28, 1851 (NYPL).
12. Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham Selects the World’s Ten Greatest Novels, 218–19.
13. Smith, Taghconic, 151.
14. Pierre, Book XXV.
15. Sealts, Melville’s Reading, 76.
CHAPTER 20
1. ML, 478–89.
2. Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe, 206.
3. HMC, 855. For corroboration, see note 6 in chapter 24.
4. HM to SAM, [December 20?,] 1853 (HMC, 252–53).
5. “Germany,” Christian Times, January 2, 1852; Wilson, An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, 1:523; Chambers, Humor and Irony in Nineteenth-Century German Women’s Writing, 52; and “Foreign Items,” New York Tribune, April 2, 1851.
6. ML, 469.
7. HM to SAM, December 2, 1860 (HMC, 357).
8. Pierre, Book XII.
CHAPTER 21
1. ML, 521 and 525.
2. Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab, 212, and Elizabeth Renker, “Herman Melville, Wife Beating, and the Written Page,” American Literature, March 1994; HM to SAM, [August 29, 1856?] (HMC, 296–97).
3. HMJ, 628.
4. Ibid., 628–29.
5. HM to Sophia Hawthorne, January 8, 1852 (HMC, 219).
6. HMJ, 633.
7. Ibid., 129.