The House Where Moby Dick was Written

Notice of Pierre in the Troy Daily Whig

Troy Daily Whig - August 9, 1852 via Fulton History

Following my own advice about searching for "Mellville" led to this one, from the Troy Daily Whig of August 9, 1852. Not transcribed in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, but cited there in the "Checklist of Additional Reviews" on page 452.

New Work by Mellville.

PIERRE OR THE AMBIGUITIES.--This book is by Mellville, the author of Typee, a narrative well known to the public, and a great favorite with a large portion of it. He dedicates his work to "Greylock's most excellent Majesty," that noble old mountain, that bears aloft the heavens on its Atlantian shoulders, and divides midway, Berkshire Co.--a wall of rock between the disjointed spurs of the Green Mountains. WILLARD has the book.

The Troy Daily Whig was then owned and edited by Charles David Brigham (1819-1894) who later became celebrated for Civil War journalism. As discussed by Paul Starobin in Madness Rules the Hour, Brigham reported from Charleston in 1860 for the New York Tribune.

"In 1862 Brigham reported one of the major stories of the war in a twenty-two-page telegram to the Tribune recounting the battle of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac at Hampton Roads."  --Historical Dictionary of War Journalism, ed. Mitchel P. Roth (Greenwood Press, 1997) page 40.

In 1864 as editor of the Pittsburgh Commercial Brigham

made himself famous in the newspaper world by securing news of the battle of the Wilderness twenty-four hours before any other editor. His correspondent hastened from the battle-field on the second day of the engagement, chartered a ferry-boat for $2,700 to carry him to the nearest telegraph station, and telegraphed the details of the conflict before New York newspapers knew that the armies had met. --The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography

"Melville's hearty praises" for John C. Hoadley's poem on "The Union" - reported by the poet to Evert A. Duyckinck in September 1851

Digitized and available online From The New York Public Library:

John C. Hoadley, Letter to Evert A. Duyckinck - September 9, 1851
Duyckinck family papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NYPL
From The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Transcribed below. Hoadley quotes from Richard II, Act 1 Scene 3.

Pittsfield, Sept. 9th. 1851.
E. A. Duyckinck Esq.

Dear Sir,

I received a copy of the Literary World a few days since, containing an interesting account of your excursion to Grey Lock, for which I suppose I have to thank your kindness. I read it with lively pleasure though not without a twinge of selfish regret that I could not be of your party.— "Can a man hold fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus?”

The Harpers, to whom I had sent my national poem for publication, decline it, and advise me to send it to D. Appleton & Co. which I have accordingly requested the Messers H. to do.— I can not but desire to have it printed, but have not much hope of it. Melville’s hearty praises give me more hope than anything else.

I am, My Dear Sir,
Very Respectfully,
Yours &c.  John C. Hoadley.

Hoadley refers to the account by Evert A. Duyckinck in the Literary World for August 30, 1851 headed  "NOTES OF EXCURSIONS—NO. I / AN ASCENT OF MOUNT SADDLEBACK." The Greylock climb by Herman Melville with his Berkshire friends and visiting literati took place on August 11, 1851, during what Hershel Parker describes as "a second idyll in the Berkshires, fit to rank with that of the previous August" (Herman Melville: A Biography V1.855).  Sarah Morewood also wrote of That Excursion to Greylock in a chapter she contributed to J. E. A. Smith's 1852 volume Taghconic.

I don't remember seeing this letter before now, anywhere. Google it?

 No results found for "melville's hearty praises"

"Melville" in a letter from Pittsfield to Evert A. Duyckinck has to be Herman. So Hoadley regrets not participating in the ascent of Greylock (he was invited?), reports the rejection of his "national poem" by the Harpers, but takes consolation in the "hearty praises" of his future brother-in-law, Herman Melville.

This John C. Hoadley also turned out to be one of the best friends Herman Melville ever had. Noticing that Herman's sister Augusta Melville listed one of Hoadley's poems ("A Man Should Never Weep?") in her commonplace book on October 7, 1850, Hershel Parker was already wondering:

"Is it possible that Herman Melville was never favored with a recital of it by its author?" "--Melville: The Making of the Poet

Not hardly. That is (to eliminate the negatives), the conjectured recital by Hoadley in the hearing of Melville seems likely enough in view of Hoadley's September 9, 1851 letter to Evert A. Duyckinck, which nicely corroborates the view of an early bonding over Hoadley's poetry as well as Hoadley's courtship of Herman's sister. Herman Melville did hear Hoadley's poem on "The Union." Probably on the Fourth of July.

As recorded in Jay Leyda's Melville Log, Melville's future brother-in-law had recited his poem in Pittsfield on July 4, 1851:

For the holiday, John C. Hoadley pronounces a newly composed poem, "The Union" [later retitled "Destiny"]  --The Melville Log Volume 1 - [416]

Hershel Parker:

"On that occasion, momentous for the entire family, Hoadley met Catherine Melville...." --Herman Melville: A Biography V1.850

 John and Kate were married on September 15, 1853.

Related posts:

• Hoadley's national poem cheered by Herman Melville
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/hoadleys-national-poem-cheered-by.htm

• Refresher on heroic measure
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/refresher-on-heroic-measure.html

• Destiny: a poem by John C Hoadley 648 lines plus endnotes, transcribed here
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/07/destiny-poem-by-john-c-hoadley.html

Seeking Enceladus

Last time around we were looking for a natural counterpart to Melville's Enceladus and almost found him in a couple of Berkshire glens: Dalton's Wizard's Glen or "Gulf" as described by Godfrey Greylock, and Ice Glen near Stockbridge. Also called Icy Glen, this Ice-Glen was celebrated in prose and poetry for just the sort of giant moss-topped rocks that Melville describes in the Enceladus dream-vision of Pierre. In verse, Mary M. Chase anticipated Melville's figure of rocks as defeated Titans when she imagined

the Titan rocks gloomy and vast,
Fettered firm to the earth, where in wrath they were cast. --The Ice-Glen at Stockbridge

Icy Glen seems all the more appealing since Melville definitely knew the place and famously had visited there in a company of literary adventurers that included Evert Duyckinck and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As often recounted, Melville and Hawthorne first met that day--August 5, 1850, the day of the unforgettable excursion to Monument Mountain.

Symbolically, critics find Hawthorne all over Pierre (as Plinlimmon, as Isabel), and Mildred K. Travis for one has already interpreted Enceladus as another version of Hawthorne in stone, in "Hawthorne and Melville's Enceladus," ATQ 14 (Spring 1972): 5-6.

We might get there yet (to deep layers of symbolism I mean), but for now the problem is finding a model in the natural world. As widely recognized, Pierre's Memnon Stone also called the Terror Stone closely resembles Balance Rock, a real phenomenon that tourists can still visit and apparently vandalize today. Likewise Pierre's Enceladus dream is supposedly inspired by a real rock in the neighborhood of the Mount of Titans which critics reasonably take to be Greylock. Did Melville have in mind one gigantic rock in particular, or does his imagined Enceladus blend imagery from Wizard's Glen and Ice Glen, Greylock and Monument Mountain? Should we be looking out of state to, say Monadnock?

Melville further particularizes the natural habitat of with topographical and even historical details that I neglected to consider in the previous post. Some clues, especially concerning the early attempt by energetic "young collegians" to dig out the giant rock, might prove essential to any proper quest for Enceladus. Melville's junior archaeologists dig out "a circular well" with picks and spades, "to the depth of some thirteen feet." Williams College seems evoked in this passage--did Geology students or faculty ever do such a thing on an expedition from Williamstown? Leads might be awaiting in Sketches of Williams College and Geological Excursions in the Vicinity of Williams College. And of course we've got to find out what others have discovered already--while I check the newspapers and that promising 1839 gazetteer, JSTOR and why not? Monadnock, let's review the textual clues. Grab a spade if you please and come along...

No more now you sideways followed the sad pasture's skirt, but took your way adown the long declivity, fronting the mystic height. In mid field again you paused among the recumbent sphinx-like shapes thrown off from the rocky steep. You paused; fixed by a form defiant, a form of awfulness. You saw Enceladus the Titan, the most potent of all the giants, writhing from out the imprisoning earth;—turbaned with upborn moss he writhed; still, though armless, resisting with his whole striving trunk, the Pelion and the Ossa hurled back at him;—turbaned with upborn moss he writhed; still turning his unconquerable front toward that majestic mount eternally in vain assailed by him, and which, when it had stormed him off, had heaved his undoffable incubus upon him, and deridingly left him there to bay out his ineffectual howl.

To Pierre this wondrous shape had always been a thing of interest, though hitherto all its latent significance had never fully and intelligibly smitten him. In his earlier boyhood a strolling company of young collegian pedestrians had chanced to light upon the rock; and, struck with its remarkableness, had brought a score of picks and spades, and dug round it to unearth it, and find whether indeed it were a demoniac freak of nature, or some stern thing of antediluvian art. Accompanying this eager party, Pierre first beheld that deathless son of Terra. At that time, in its untouched natural state, the statue presented nothing but the turbaned head of igneous rock rising from out the soil, with its unabasable face turned upward toward the mountain, and the bull-like neck clearly defined. With distorted features, scarred and broken, and a black brow mocked by the upborn moss, Enceladus there subterraneously stood, fast frozen into the earth at the junction of the neck. Spades and picks soon heaved part of his Ossa from him, till at last a circular well was opened round him to the depth of some thirteen feet. At that point the wearied young collegians gave over their enterprise in despair. With all their toil, they had not yet come to the girdle of Enceladus. But they had bared good part of his mighty chest, and exposed his mutilated shoulders, and the stumps of his once audacious arms. Thus far uncovering his shame, in that cruel plight they had abandoned him, leaving stark naked his in vain indignant chest to the defilements of the birds, which for untold ages had cast their foulness on his vanquished crest.

Not unworthy to be compared with that leaden Titan, wherewith the art of Marsy and the broad-flung pride of Bourbon enriched the enchanted gardens of Versailles;—and from whose still twisted mouth for sixty feet the waters yet upgush, in elemental rivalry with those Etna flames, of old asserted to be the malicious breath of the borne-down giant;—not unworthy to be compared with that leaden demi-god—piled with costly rocks, and with one bent wrenching knee protruding from the broken bronze;—not unworthy to be compared with that bold trophy of high art, this American Enceladus, wrought by the vigorous hand of Nature's self, it did go further than compare;—it did far surpass that fine figure molded by the inferior skill of man. Marsy gave arms to the eternally defenseless; but Nature, more truthful, performed an amputation, and left the impotent Titan without one serviceable ball-and-socket above the thigh.

Such was the wild scenery—the Mount of Titans, and the repulsed group of heaven-assaulters, with Enceladus in their midst shamefully recumbent at its base;—such was the wild scenery, which now to Pierre, in his strange vision, displaced the four blank walls, the desk, and camp-bed, and domineered upon his trance. But no longer petrified in all their ignominious attitudes, the herded Titans now sprung to their feet; flung themselves up the slope; and anew battered at the precipice's unresounding wall. Foremost among them all, he saw a moss-turbaned, armless giant, who despairing of any other mode of wreaking his immitigable hate, turned his vast trunk into a battering-ram, and hurled his own arched-out ribs again and yet again against the invulnerable steep.

"Enceladus! it is Enceladus!"—Pierre cried out in his sleep. That moment the phantom faced him; and Pierre saw Enceladus no more; but on the Titan's armless trunk, his own duplicate face and features magnifiedly gleamed upon him with prophetic discomfiture and woe. With trembling frame he started from his chair, and woke from that ideal horror to all his actual grief.  --Pierre, Or, The Ambiguities