A closer look at the disputed date of Melville's most quotable letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne
Somebody said give me the data
Somebody said it must have been about dates.
— Van Morrison, Dangerous
Some
while back I rashly promised to re-examine Hershel Parker's re-dating
of Herman Melville's long, luscious, endlessly anthologized "Dollars
damn me" letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, from June 1? 1851 to early May
of that momentous year in the history of American Literature.
It's also the "All my books are botches" letter; the "ruthless
democracy" letter; the tell the Truth "and go to the Soup Societies"
letter; the champagne-heaven letter; and more. Young Melville (only
almost 32!) you remember was then busy at Arrowhead doing home renovations and farm-work, with his monster of a Whale
book nearly finished but still in manuscript--unpublished, and not yet
called Moby-Dick.
As first transcribed and printed by Julian Hawthorne in 1884, the letter in question is accessible via Google Books, here
https://books.google.com/books?id=2SlAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA402&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
and as collected in The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), here:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84865/page/n165/mode/2up
Electronic text of the letter under consideration is conveniently accessible, still, at the evergreen Life and Works of Herman Melville website, here:
Whereabouts
unknown. Sad to say, the actual letter is nowhere to be found.
Vanished, alas! it is one of six missing epistles including all of
Melville's other 1851 love letters to Hawthorne,
so called. Although the physical document is lost, we never tire of
quoting it. And truth to tell, non-specialists (which is to say, most
normal people) never cared much about the date either way. Nevertheless,
on general principles I'm inclined to agree with Parker's opinion in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative
(Northwestern University Press, 2012) at pages 239-40 that academic
commentators, especially professed Melville experts, might reasonably be
expected either to accept the verdict of an exceptionally careful and
competent scholar, or explain why they don't.
Samuel Otter in Melville's Anatomies (University of California Press, 1999) and more recently Jennifer Greiman in Melville's Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form
(Stanford University Press, 2023) offer both dates and leave them for
their readers to reconcile, or not. Other Melville experts have embraced
Parker's re-dating. For example, both Jonathan A. Cook in Neither Believer nor Infidel (Cornell University Press, 2023) page 19; and editor Mark Niemeyer in The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville's Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne
(Orison Books, 2016) positively affirm Parker's "early May 1851" as the
likeliest time-frame of the letter in question. When the date makes
little or no difference (which is almost always, to be honest), Melville
critics may be excused from having to choose. As exemplified in A New Companion to Herman Melville
edited by Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), it's
perfectly fine to cite the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's Correspondence and just give the page number on which your quoted passage appears.
Until now, nobody has accepted Parker's dare:
"A critic or biographer is free to challenge my dating but only if he or
she will work through the evidence." — Hershel Parker in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (Northwestern University Press, 2012) page 240.
For
me the issue of dates resurfaced when I wanted to cite the letter under
consideration in the first part of my Substack essay, All I want is a good listener.
For that open investigation I was and am still keen to learn as much as
possible about the period of late April and early May 1851 in Melville's
life. I needed to quote and footnote Melville's undated letter to
Hawthorne, but how? Checking back just now, I see my compromise in a
couple of places was to favor Parker's revision while tacking on a
question mark. Despite my inclination to trust Parker's judgment, I had
to add the customary sign of uncertainty upon realizing that I did not
very well understand the basis of his re-dating. Grasping that
required that I obtain and transcribe Augusta Melville's letter of May
16, 1851 to her and Herman's brother Allan in New York City. Reason being, Parker repeatedly has
cited Augusta's letter as crucial support for his re-dating of Herman's
letter to Hawthorne from June 1? to early May 1851 in successive Norton Critical Editions of Moby-Dick,
and elsewhere (see 3rd ed. page 566, footnote 2, for example).
After
obtaining a copy of the letter and transcribing it in full
I had to admit that I still did not have a very good handle on Parker's case for early
May. So I vowed to take a closer look and communicate the results of my
investigation.
My Findings
Specifically
in the matter of Parker's re-dating, and the indefiniteness of its
acceptance, or non-acceptance, in subsequent Melville studies, where
Parker has blamed the laziness and incompetence of "archivophobic" critics, I
find understandable puzzlement. In my view, the problem with Parker's
re-dating as presented in Volume 1 of his magnificent and commensurately
flawed biography is that he skipped a step by thoroughly weaving the
"early May" date into the narrative fabric of chapter 39 The Final Dash at The Whale without first providing a clear and persuasive rationale for the change.
Indeed,
Melville's best biographer never deigned to define "early May." What
can "early May" mean, really? Not May 1st but maybe the 2nd? How about
the 7th or 11th? As late as the 15th? Any day before the tail end of the
month? On reflection, "early May" seems impractically vague, too loose
perhaps to serve for a very useful construction of the evidence. Seems
to me, its vagueness and consequent inutility might deter many a
commentator from embracing Parker's revision.
Then, too, merely
acknowledging Parker's revised time-frame can be a tricky business in
traditional academic settings, particularly in light of the wide and
deserved esteem for Northwestern-Newberry editions as the gold standard
of responsibly edited Melville texts. If you, being a highly trained and
conscientious sort of English Major, decide to cite the famous "Dollars
damn me" letter in print, then naturally you want to quote from and
properly footnote the N-N volume of Melville's Correspondence, superbly edited in 1993 by Lynn Horth. The editorial headnote there begins with a long paragraph of
reasons for placing Melville's letter "in late May or early June 1851." For clarity's sake (even if not required by a publisher's house style) you might as well use the tentative date provided in your source, including the editorial question mark that indicates uncertainty about both the month and day:
"[1 June?] 1851"
Where "early May" came from
The
wording of Parker's "early May" time-frame and its application to the
letter formerly assigned to June 1? 1851 are carried over from The Melville Log
(Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), edited by Jay Leyda. As shown
below in the detail from Volume 1, page 410, Leyda confusingly
introduced the first of several quotations from Melville's "June 1 (?)" letter to Hawthorne with the un-italicized label "Early May."
As
laid out by Leyda in the documentary record for 1851, it almost looks
as if "Early May" could be Melville's own statement of when he wrote the
letter. It's not really that at all, of course. Rather, "Early May"
here is Leyda's way of indicating approximately when Melville had
stopped working on his yet unfinished Whale manuscript "some three
weeks" before. Right or wrong, Parker's revised date of "early May"
verbally reproduces the potentially misleading and perhaps unduly
influential label that Jay Leyda editorially employed to introduce the
same letter in The Melville Log.
🚩🚩🚩🚩
To my
mind, Parker's assurance in Volume 1 (page 906) that "Hayford concurs in
this redating" comes off as a red flag, signaling weakness. Are we
hobbits now at the foot of Orthanc? (As the scene unfolds in Tolkien's
book, I mean, not Peter Jackson's movie version.) If the wise ones
agree, then all will be well. Careful, our wizard of a biographer has powers you do not guess. Beware of his voice!
To break the spell, take this alleged agreement of Parker's legendary mentor Harrison Hayford for
interesting hearsay, and keep looking for the evidence and reasoning.
As
Parker has made clear, his "early May" revision hinges on evidence to
be found in Augusta Melville's letter to her and Herman's brother Allan,
written on May 16, 1851 from the "Manor House" in Albany NY. Lately
transcribed in full on Melvilliana, here:
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2023/05/augusta-melville-letter-to-allan.html
The crucial passage appears near the end of Augusta's letter:
So you had a flying visit from Herman? When does he make the longer one?
That book of his, will create a great interest, I think. It is very
fine. By the way, have you seen Willis' Hurry-Graphs? Mr Sherman, says
there is a capital portraiture of Wise in it? He has been visiting him.
Next month, he expects a visit from another author, Mr Mitchell of the
"Reveries of a Bachelor." Ask Sophia to read them, they are so
interesting.
From somebody sometime, Augusta has learned
that Herman recently paid "a flying visit" to Allan and Sophia at their
home in New York City. Writing on May 16th, Augusta knows about this
relatively brief trip and also about plans for "a longer one" in the
near future. One or both of these visits could well be connected with
Herman's "very fine" new book. Augusta's source of information about
both events, the "flying visit" passed and "the longer one" to come, was
unspecified. In Volume 1 of Herman Melville: A Biography,
1819-1851 (page 840) Parker takes her source to be "the single letter
she had received from Arrowhead." Although Augusta does not say how she
knows about the "flying visit," she mentions getting the one letter from
Arrowhead and complains of not having received a "promised" letter from
Allan. When and how did her brother convey that promise? Possibly
Augusta had Allan's and/or Sophia's latest communication (whatever the
date) before her as she wrote. On the 16th of May Augusta had not heard
from Allan in
a fortnight = 2 weeks. Conceivably, Allan or his wife might have
reported Herman's "flying visit" (either recent or imminent) in a letter
from NYC forwarded to Augusta in Albany and dated, say, on or shortly
before the first of May.
Either way it was already the middle of
May when Augusta wrote to Allan from Albany. Writing on the 16th, she
knows all about the extensive renovations underway back at Arrowhead:
"They are all so busy there, that I suppose they dont feel as if they
could spare the time to write often. The whole place will have been so
much improved by the time of my return, that I expect hardly to
recognize it. No doubt you have had letters since the date of mine &
know just how far they have progressed."
Nothing
in Augusta's letter to Allan suggests the home repairs and improvements
might be nearing completion. The timing is important for trying to date
the letter under consideration because Herman Melville told Hawthorne
"some three weeks" had passed since he "left" the Whale to do manual
labor around the farm. Setting aside for now the question of what
exactly Herman meant by
leaving the Whale (taking a break from
writing? or, dropping off the completed portion of his manuscript for
stereotyping in Manhattan?), the placement of Herman Melville's letter
to Hawthorne in "early May" does not adequately account for the
three-week interval of farmwork specified in the letter itself.
To
some extent Parker seems to have conflated activities that did take
place in early May 1851 with Herman Melville's writing of the letter to
Hawthorne, "some three weeks" later. Without a doubt, exciting events in
Melville's life were happening early in May. Besides his being occupied
with home improvements and seasonal jobs around the farm, we have
definite evidence (courtesy of Augusta Melville and the excerpts from
her letter transcribed and first published by Hershel Parker) of
Herman's "flying visit" to Allan in New York City. We already knew about
Melville's acceptance of a huge loan from Tertullus D. Stewart, and his
making arrangements for writing the last chapters of Moby-Dick
in New York City while the finished ones were being proofed and
stereotyped. For that job Melville hired Robert Craighead, a veteran
Manhattan printer. At the time, Craighead conducted his printing
business on the third story of the large four-story brick building at
112 Fulton street, located on the corner
of Fulton and Dutch streets. Previously overlooked in Melville
scholarship, the fact of the printer's office being situated ON THE
THIRD STORY is the subject of another post on Melvilliana, here:
https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2023/10/robert-craigheads-third-story-rooms-on.html
Even accepting all of Parker's terms and calculations as set forth in Herman Melville: A Biography
Volume 1, 1819-1851 on page 841, "early May" turns out to be the middle
of May, at the earliest. Say Melville suspended work on his Whale on
April 25th, the same day he wrote the Harpers asking for an advance;
adding on the required interval of three weeks after that brings us to
May 16--also, coincidentally, the date of Augusta's letter to Allan.
If
Melville had stopped writing on May 1st, he might have been writing
Hawthorne around the 21st or 22nd, well into the third week of May. If
by leaving the Whale Melville meant dropping off some completed
portion of the manuscript at Robert Craighead's third-story printing
office in Manhattan ("I was in New York for four-and-twenty hours the
other day"), the probable date of his letter to Hawthorne could
reasonably be advanced another week or two. That is, and still
hypothetically, if Melville had made his initial "flying visit" around
May 9th (a full week before Augusta mentioned it in her letter of the
16th), then adding three weeks of home repairs and farm chores would
bring the date of Melville's writing all the way to May 30th--almost the
end of the month, and pleasingly consistent with the time-frame of "late
May or early June 1851" assigned in the excellent headnote to this letter in the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry edition of Herman Melville's Correspondence.
As
shown above, "Early May" was originally Jay Leyda's approximation of
when Melville took a break from writing on the work-in-progress that
became Moby-Dick. Having examined and transcribed Augusta's
letter of May 16th to Allan in NYC, Parker made Leyda's "Early May" the
date of Melville's letter to Hawthorne. As constructed in Parker's biographical treatment, two specific events referenced in Augusta's letter match up
exactly with two specific statements in Melville's letter to Hawthorne.
First, Parker has equated the "flying visit" by Herman in Augusta's
letter with the day trip of 24 hours to which Herman alludes in his letter to Hawthorne:
Another thing. I was in New York for four-and-twenty hours the other day,
and saw a portrait of N. H. And I have seen and heard many flattering
(in a publisher's point of view) allusions to the "Seven Gables." And I
have seen "Tales," and "A New Volume" announced, by N. H.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife page 405.
And
second, the future "longer" visit to NYC in Augusta's letter lines up
with Melville's scheme, as he revealed it to Hawthorne, for completing
Moby Dick in Manhattan:
"In
a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room,
and work and slave on my "Whale" while it is driving through the press.
That is the only way I can finish it now, I am so pulled hither and
thither by circumstances."
In Parker's reading
(implied in the telling), Melville's stay of "four-and-twenty hours" in
New York has to be the "flying visit" to Allan that Augusta mentioned in
her letter of May 16, 1851.
Having decided the "flying visit" and 24-hours in New York must
reference one and the same event, Parker believed the purpose of that
visit to be obvious in light of Melville's stated plan to finish the
Whale in New York, and his subsequent letter to Hawthorne on June 29th, where he tells of his return with his new book "only half through the press":
The "Whale" is only half through the press; for, wearied
with the long delay of the printers, and disgusted with the heat
and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York, I came back to
the country to feel the grass -- and end the book reclining on
it, if I may.
Melville's longer visit, as documented in Jay Leyda's 1951 Melville Log,
had extended into the middle of June, at least, as indicated by the
return on June 14th of two works by William Scoresby to the New York
Society Library: An Account of the Arctic Regions (Sealts Number 450); and Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale-Fishery (Sealts Number 451). Both of these important sources for Moby-Dick are duly listed in the catalog of books owned and borrowed at Melville's Marginalia Online.
To recap: in Parker's view, Augusta's knowledge before May 16, 1851 that
Herman has already made a "flying visit" to Allan and Sophia in NYC; and
that Herman already plans on making a longer (and doubtless
related) stay, means we need to put Melville in Manhattan, unfinished
manuscript of his unpublished Whale book in hand, 3 or 4 weeks earlier
than previous biographers did. In the telling, Parker takes the main
purpose of both visits to be obviously connected with the job of printing and proofing "The Whale," the not-quite completed book his
copyist Augusta regarded as "very fine" in manuscript.
Parker
allows for one and only one visit by
Melville to NYC before "the longer one" that extended at least two weeks
into June, maybe longer. The "flying visit"
by Herman to Allan completed before May 16th = the recent (just "the
other day") visit of 24 hours related to Hawthorne in the letter under
consideration. As dramatized by Parker in the first volume of Herman Melville: A Biography on page 839, Melville's one "flying visit" to New York City becomes THE daytrip that launched Moby-Dick, as the harried but hopeful author
"arrived
in Manhattan armed with Stewart's money and more obviously cumbered
with a substantial portion of the manuscript."
Freshly
funded by a $2050 loan from Tertullus D. Stewart on May 1st, Melville
arranged with printer Robert Craighead for stereotyping of his new,
not-quite completed book in manuscript. Working title: THE WHALE. In
Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (page 488) Parker explains that
"in
his anger at the Harpers Melville decided to pay for the setting and
plating of the book himself in the hope of selling the plates to another
publisher for a better deal than the Harpers would give him. In early
May, not later, as we had thought, Melville carried the bulk of the
manuscript to town, and left it with Richard [Robert] Craighead, the man
who had stereotyped Typee for Wiley and Putnam."
No bidding war ensued, however. Melville did sign a contract with Harper & Brothers
who formally agreed to publish Moby-Dick or The Whale from "plates in the possession of Robert Craighead."
Assuming
that Augusta and Herman must be talking about one and the same trip to
NYC, Parker turns Melville's "four-and-twenty hours" into a three-day
affair, counting travel time.
"Melville
made an urgent trip to New York in early May--one day in the cars down,
one day for business, one day in the cars for home... There he tested
out Allan's new and inconvenient uptown house on Thirty-first Street for two nights, so as to have his one full day in the city." (V1.839)
Designed
to allow Melville "one full day" in Manhattan, Parker's generous
stipulation of "two nights" at Allan's house extends Herman's visit
beyond the "four-and-twenty hours" mentioned in the letter to Hawthorne.
Strictly regarded, any period of 24 hours should include just one
night, not two or three. Travel by rail from Pittsfield to New York
normally would have taken eight hours. Trains ran twice daily both ways,
according to the expanded schedule "for the Summer of 1851" advertised
in May by the Housatonic Railroad.
I
worked out an alternative plan that would keep to Melville's stated boundary of "four-and-twenty hours," making his experience less
pleasant, to be sure, but more like the "flying visit" to which Augusta
alluded in her letter of May 16, 1851:
Literal 24-hour itinerary
Take
the morning train down, arriving in NYC at 4 p.m. Spend the evening and
overnight with Allan. Catch up on family news at breakfast. Make your
business calls in Manhattan the next morning and early afternoon; then
return to Pittsfield by the evening train, departing at 3:55 p.m.
Familiarity
with both the morning and evening trains from New York City would seem
to inform Melville's advice to Evert A. Duyckinck before his visit later
that summer:
"If you will advise me of the day of
your starting, I shall have our waggon at the Depot in time for you--as
we are three miles from there. Mention whether you take the morning or
afternoon train. I recommend, by all means, the morning train." -- Letter of 28 July 1851 in N-N Correspondence, page 201.
Perhaps
Melville did spend the extra night granted in Parker's biography. Who
knows? All we really have to go on are references in two different
letters to "a flying visit" and a 24-hour stay when Melville saw
Hawthorne's portrait somewhere in NYC. My point in bringing up the issue
is mainly to show the narrative pressure exerted in Parker's biography
by his conflation of the two references. Melville had a great deal to
accomplish if he was going to visit Allan and family, call on Evert
Duyckinck, look for a printer who could stereotype his new book, hire
Robert Craighead, all while carrying around the manuscript of Moby-Dick.
No wonder Parker gave him another night in New York! Alternatively, the
"flying visit" and "four-and-twenty hours" could be interpreted as
documentary evidence of different day-trips, one early in May, the other
some weeks later. Seems to me, the business of finding and arranging
with Robert Craighead to get "The Whale" set in type and plated might
well have required more than one "flying visit" to 112 Fulton Street.
Significantly,
perhaps, Parker's construction finesses the problem of where and how
Melville met with his old friend T. D. Stewart in order to borrow a ton
of money. We know when, May 1st, and we know specific terms of the loan,
$2050 for 5 years at 9% interest. But we don't know where exactly
Melville signed for and received the borrowed funds. Parker hints that
Stewart maybe came to Melville in Pittsfield on the basis of an earlier
offer, communicated to Herman's mother (V1.824-5). However, the fact of
Stewart's being at Allan's home in March raises the possiblility of
Stewart's being there again in May, with Herman. Needing cash, Herman
might have wanted to deal with TDS in the company of a good lawyer,
namely his own loyal brother. Allan on more than one occasion served as
intermediary in Herman's communications with New York publishers
including Harper & Brothers. More specifically, as Parker reports,
Allan Melville at some time endorsed and annotated the letter addressed
to Herman in Pittsfield, declining his request for an advance. Late in
April, Melville had been talking with Nathaniel Hawthorne of their going
to New York--together, seemingly at their leisure. Once the Harpers
refused to give him the advance he had requested, Melville had a more
urgent financial reason to confer in person with his lawyer-brother and
sometime literary agent.
However it played out in real life, the
loan from Stewart closely followed the Harper's decision not to advance
Herman any money on "The Whale." Perhaps Herman made a "flying visit"
to NYC on or about the first of May 1851 to get paid, one way or
another. In which case, physical delivery of the "Whale" manuscript
might have required a separate, later visit to Robert Craighead.
In
my alternative construction, admittedly hypothetical, Herman Melville's
"flying" and 24-hour visits reference two different trips to New York
City; one around May 1st (to sign for the loan of $2050 from Tertullus
D. Stewart) and one a week or two or three later (to hire Robert
Craighead).
Even on Parker's own terms (accepting the
presumed unity of Herman's "flying visit" in Augusta's letter with the
24-hour visit related in Herman's letter to Hawthorne) the "early May"
date fails to accommodate the period of three weeks also specified in
the letter under consideration.
Internal evidence in the text
of Melville's letter to Hawthorne points to the merry month of May. For
one thing, May is prime sowing time, and as Melville plainly stated, "I
had my crops to get in,--corn and potatoes." Meaning, he had planted
crops at some time in the past three weeks. And May is strongly
indicated also in Melville's statement to Hawthorne that he had read
about that "sad fellow" Ethan Brand "in the last 'Dollar Magazine.' "
Here Melville refers specifically to the May 1851 issue of Holden's Dollar Magazine where he had read Hawthorne's short story "The Unpardonable Sin." In this context Melville's adjective last
probably means the "latest" or "most recent" issue of the magazine.
Evidently then, at the time of his writing to Hawthorne in the letter
under consideration, Melville has not yet seen or received the June number of the Dollar Magazine.
The relevance of seasonal planting and Melville's reading in Holden's Dollar Magazine
was addressed in the previously cited headnote to the letter under
consideration in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's Correspondence.
One overlooked bit of support for a later rather than earlier date in
May is provided by correspondences of tone and content in the next letter Melville wrote to Hawthorne, the one dated June 29th.
Since
you have been here, I have been building some shanties of houses
(connected with the old one) and likewise some shanties of chapters and
essays. I have been ploughing and sowing and raising and printing and
praying, and now begin to come out upon a less bristling time, and to
enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the
old farmhouse here. Not entirely yet, though, am I without something to
be urgent with. The "Whale" is only half through the press; for,
wearied with the long delays of the printers, and disgusted with the
heat and dust of the Babylonish brick-kiln of New York, I came back to
the country to feel the grass, and end the book reclining on it, if I
may.
— as presented by Julian Hawthorne in Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife Volume 1 (Boston and New York, 1884) page 399.
Melville
has been to New York and back, superintending the typesetting of his
half-finished Whale-book. In spite of the intervening ordeal at
Craighead's third-story printing office, Melville's jumble of news and
excuses on June 29th sounds pretty much the same as in the previous
letter, only now more poetically compressed into "ploughing and sowing
and raising and printing and praying." As in the preceding letter,
Melville holds the focus on himself and Hawthorne, exclusively. Neither
missive contains any message or even greeting to Nathaniel's wife Sophia
Hawthorne and their children. According to Parker, Melville would have
heard about the birth of Rose Hawthorne on May 20, 1851 before he left
for New York (Herman Melville: A Biography, V1.844), but Melville does not acknowledge this important event in either letter.
By contrast, the letter prior
to the one under consideration expressly acknowledges "Mrs. Hawthorne
and the children." Its actual date might be a week
later than the conjectural date of April 16, 1851 usually assigned--say Wednesday, April 23rd, closer to April 27th when Sophia Hawthorne
mentioned to her sister Elizabeth "an extraordinary letter" they had
received from Melville about Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables; quoted in the Supplement to The Melville Log
(Gordian Press reprint, 1969) on page 926. When viewed in its
chronological place between letters to Hawthorne in late April and late
June, Melville's "Dollars damn me" letter feels appreciably closer in
focus, language, and subject matter to the letter of June 29th, further
from the April letter with its flattering remarks on Hawthorne's latest
book ostensibly copied from the "Pittsfield Secret Review."
VERDICT
On
the question of dating Herman Melville's undated "Dollars damn me"
letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, it would be a mistake to equate the date
of Melville's writing it with the date of events that Melville says
happened in the past. More particularly, you have to allow, as Hershel
Parker did not sufficiently do, for three weeks of home improvements
and farm chores AFTER he quit his Whale-book in progress. Then you have
to guess not only when he "left" Moby Dick (April 25th? May 1st? later
still?) but what exactly he meant by leaving it (taking a break from
writing, or leaving the completed portion of his manuscript at 112
Fulton street in the third-floor printing office of newly hired
typesetter Robert Craighead?). Even if, as Parker assumes, the "flying visit" to New York City that Augusta mentioned in her letter to Allan on May 16th was the same visit of 24 hours referenced by Herman as an event of just "the other day," we still don't know for sure how much time really had passed between that particular trip and Herman's undated letter to Hawthorne. Any way you game it out, Parker's "early
May" time-frame lands you smack dab in the middle of the month.
For the benefit of anyone wanting to pin a reasonable date on the 1851
letter formerly assigned to "June 1?" and re-dated in Parker's great
biography to "early May," here are three evidence-based options:
When you want to be definitely right and don't need to be too precise, just make it
May 1851
Grounds: the "last 'Dollar Magazine' " where HM read about Hawthorne's wretched hero Ethan Brand can only be the May issue, and Melville's last means "most recent."
- Leaning
Hershel Parker's way on the probable unity of the "flying visit" Herman
made before May 16th (referenced in Augusta's letter to Allan) and the
"four-and-twenty hours" he passed in New York shortly before writing to
Hawthorne, you'd best go with
Mid May?
- Desperadoes with a guiding "Go big or go home!" philosophy will run with
Late May?
Grounds:
Melville's daytrip "the other day" to New York might not have been his
first or only visit that month. Perhaps he had needed to "fly" there on
May 1st to meet T. D. Stewart at Allan's house. Whatever happened in
Manhattan, there was an awful lot going on at Arrowhead to account for
before the letter in question was written, what with Melville's reading
"Ethan Brand," planting corn and potatoes, and overseeing or hammering
away on extensive renovations. Give the man another week to do the work he claims to have done. He
also needed to prepare for another, longer trip to NYC "in a week or
so." Stated purpose, to "work and slave" on his yet uncompleted book
"while it is driving through the press." We have long known what he was
going for, but still lack proof of his being there before the second
week in June...
- Which kind of helps to explain why Jay Leyda in the good old Melville Log made it
June 1 (?)
Like
Melville's RAZOR-BACK, the ratonale behind Leyda's conjectural date has
eluded both hunters and philosophers. I know little more of it, nor
does anybody else.
- Should you demand a more definite
period than any day in May (option #1 above) yet struggle with
commitment, please consider the advantages of my last and final offer:
Mid to late May?
conveniently and comprehensively including all the benefits of options #2 and #3 in one bundle.
One thing more before I hit the
Publish
button and turn up the volume for Ray Charles. Although Melville's
super-quotable letter to Hawthorne bears no date, the year in which it
was written, 1851, is certain--most obviously from Melville's reference
to his "Whale" book in progress. May is almost as safe, also on the
basis of interal evidence. Beyond that, the True Scholar (you know who
you are) will honor and respect the question mark.
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