The Smith College Library Rap

Melville biographer Newton Arvin was Professor of English at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. The Library honored in Jodi Shaw's great Library Rap has a large collection (18.5 linear feet; 43 boxes) of Newton Arvin papers. In 1938, as mentioned a few years back in the Melvilliana post

• Forty Years of Philip Hale on Melville
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/08/forty-years-of-philip-hale-on-melville.html

Smith College got Philip Hale's library of 2000 books from Mrs. Hale his widow, including first editions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Melville's Moby-Dick. 

Springfield MA Republican - May 5, 1938
via Genealogy Bank

Does one of the Smith College Libraries still have Philip Hale's copy of Moby-Dick? What did Jodi Shaw say in that Smith College Library Rap?

"You go online and you take your pick

 From the Five College Catalog just one click."

With one or two maybe three clicks I found two first editions of Melville's Moby-Dick. Remember, five colleges. One of the two 1851 volumes is at AC = Amherst College. The other is at SC/RBR which I guess means Smith College/Rare Book Room? "Special Collections, there are three parts...

And the rare books, you know the written word

The name is Mortimer I don't know if you heard

The collection is deep the collection is wide

 From medieval manuscripts to literary archives."

 Yes! Acquired by "Gift: Mrs. Philip Hale, 1938" and described as follows:

SC/RBR: Original blue cloth (front free endpaper wanting; inner front hinge cracked); signature of Philip Hale cut and mounted on front flyleaf.

LOCATION: SC Rare Book Room Stacks / 825 M495m 1851

Just one click, after all: 

• search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,sso&db=cat09206a&AN=scf.oai.edge.fivecolleges.folio.ebsco.com.fs00001006.9ebf2d7c.2ca7.5482.939c.131f6334c663&site=eds-live&scope=site

Arvin on Derwent

Meanwhile, one misses much of the intellectual tragicomedy of Clarel, much of its deceptively quiet play of irony, if one fails to observe how the cheery Derwent, who begins by striking one as a merely fatuous Yea-sayer, grows in grace as the poem proceeds, developing lights and shades of personal quality one had not suspected, inspiring a more and more genuine liking in the very Melvillean Rolfe, and giving expression in his modest and kindly manner to insights that Melville elsewhere expresses as his own. One must attend to both Ungar and Derwent, as well as to some of the others, if one wishes to distinguish all the intonations of Melville’s own voice.  --Newton Arvin

Herman Melville's Clarel (1876) 4.20

Lighting it up

Ben Jonson's joke about burning a ballad to light a pipe:

"One who fired a Tobacco pipe with a ballet [ballad] the next day having a sore-head, swoare he had a great singing in his head, and he thought it was the ballet: A Poet should detest a Ballet maker."
--Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden

made me think of Melville's bit in Pierre about lighting cigars with sonnets:

Now, the dollars derived from his ditties, these Pierre had always invested in cigars; so that the puffs which indirectly brought him his dollars were again returned, but as perfumed puffs; perfumed with the sweet leaf of Havanna. So that this highly-celebrated and world-renowned Pierre—the great author—whose likeness the world had never seen (for had he not repeatedly refused the world his likeness?), this famous poet, and philosopher, author of "The Tropical Summer: a Sonnet;" against whose very life several desperadoes were darkly plotting (for had not the biographers sworn they would have it?); this towering celebrity—there he would sit smoking, and smoking, mild and self-festooned as a vapory mountain. It was very involuntarily and satisfactorily reciprocal. His cigars were lighted in two ways: lighted by the sale of his sonnets, and lighted by the printed sonnets themselves.  --Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities

William Drummond of Hawthornden does not appear in Melville's Reading or Melville's Sources or the Online Catalog of Melville's known reading. Only stray references to William Drummond in Melville scholarship, it seems. I would be glad to know of anything at all in print, especially on Melville and those notes of Ben Jonson's talking.

We do know Melville owned the 1692 folio edition of The Works of Ben Jonson which he bought in London, November 1849. Formerly in the collection of Albert Boni, this volume now is held by the New-York Historical Society, as indicated in Online Catalog at Melville's Marginalia Online.

Stanton Garner charts the influence of Jonson on the last of Melville's poems in the John Marr volume, in "Rosemarine: Melville's 'Pebbles' and Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness," Melville Society Extracts 41 (February 1980): 13-14. Before Garner, Newton Arvin in the October 1949 Partisan Review had noted the same borrowing but thought it more of a happy accident, "an unconscious but felicitous echo" of Jonson.