All I want is a good listener

https://open.substack.com/pub/melvilliana/p/all-i-want-is-a-good-listener?r=n51cr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

 

New essay on Substack, excerpt below...

Inspired by recent encounters with Hawthorne, in particular by their heady and hearty barn-talk that March, Melville might have found a way to get the gist of their stimulating conversations into print. Echoes of Melville’s letters in the opening installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” lead me to suspect it may be haunted by Hawthorne. At any rate, coincidence or no, the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” talks to the reader like Melville talked in letters to Hawthorne. Here’s one example from the first of Melville’s Agatha letters to Hawthorne dated August 13, 1852.24

In this example, wording and structure of the Captain’s pledge to do most of the talking for his singular reader match the “and if / why I” construction in Melville's 1852 letter to Hawthorne (emphasis mine):

“… and if you are absolutely dumb, why I will sometimes answer for you.”

“And if I thought I could do it well as you, why, I should not let you have it.”

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84865/page/n197/mode/2up

Introducing likely topics of conversation, the Captain sounds quite like Melville when promising a good time to his invited guest:

MELVILLE

“Hark— There is some excellent Montado Sherry awaiting you & some most potent Port. We will have mulled wine with wisdom, & buttered toast with story-telling & crack jokes & bottles from morning till night.”
— Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 29 January? 1851; emphasis mine.

CAPTAIN

“We will talk on all subjects, from the shape of a horse-shoe to that of the slipper of the last favorite—say the 'divine Fanny,’ from great battles, or Napier's splendid pictures of such, down to the obscurest point of the squad drill—from buffalo bulls to elfin sprites.”
—Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 185125

These elaborate invites are similarly themed and structured. Each presents an inventory of delightful activities in store for the recipient, each inventory being divided in three main parts. Melville’s three groupings of promised events are separated by three ampersands; the Captain’s by the word from, used thrice. The invitation in each case extends to just one person: Melville to Hawthorne, the Captain to his Imaginary Friend the reader. The plural “We” brings together speaker and singular reader as joint enjoyers of good times ahead, chiefly to be spent in stimulating conversation....

https://open.substack.com/pub/melvilliana/p/all-i-want-is-a-good-listener?r=n51cr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Two birthdays, one happy

Elizabeth Shaw Melville aka "Lizzie" was born on June 13, 1822, two hundred years ago today. In her handwriting, mostly, the 1850 manuscript of her husband's now famous endlessly-anthologized review essay Hawthorne and His Mosses is accessible online via NYPL Digital Collections.

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "“Hawthorne and his mosses”" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 13, 2022. 

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/23ebb010-184f-0133-f66c-58d385a7bbd0 

Happy Bicentennial Birthday, Elizabeth S. Melville!!!

Coincidentally, Herman Melville's devoted wife shared a birthday with cavalry officer Philip St. George Cooke, born in Loudoun County,Virginia on June 13, 1809.

Gen. Philip St. G. Cooke

Birthday musings below are from the July 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border in the Southern Literary Messenger; reprinted in Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia, 1857) pages 331-333. "I. F." in the magazine version stands for Imaginary Friend, the narrator's fictive travelling companion. Later in the series named "Frank," but only referred to as "Friend" in the revised book version. "C." designates the narrator, in 1845 a Captain of U. S. Dragoons. On his birthday the Captain describes the "melancholy" effects of scenery along the Oregon Trail, somewhere between Scotts Bluff in western Nebraska and Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The Captain is particularly impressed, and depressed, by the sight of blasted cottonwood trees.

Scenes Beyond the Western Border
Southern Literary Messenger - July 1852

June 13th.— Twenty-four miles to-day, over a desert! hills and river valley equally a desert! In this last, we have seen many large cotton-woods, seemingly the wrecks of a blasting tempest, mere limbless or distorted stems of trees; and others, the bleached and desolate drift of a flood.

We came over a lofty bluff almost overhanging the river, which commanded a view over vast and sternly sterile plains, breaking up at last into confused mountain spurs, and dim blue peaks beyond; but to this gloomy grandeur the river, far winding amid white sands and green islands, and the foot of many another precipitous bluff adorned with evergreens, lent an element of softening beauty.

I. F.  What oppresses you? You seem in mournful harmony with these silent wastes !

C. “ Behold those spectral ruins of trees, strangely white and gleaming in the starlight ! —they are melancholy. But no—it is a day that ever, since it first gave me unhappy life, leaves its influences upon me.”

I. F.  Such a mood should always be resisted. [1857: But better resist such a mood.] How do you succeed with your diary now? We are passing remarkable scenery; most wildly picturesque; and there is always some incident.

C. “What is written, may always chance to be printed, if not read: how charming then to the busy denizens of the world, whose very brains have received an artificial mould, to read such incident! Now if I could only introduce the word 'dollar,'—good heavens! it was never heard here before ! tis enough to disturb the ghosts of the grim old warriors, who, I dare say, have fallen here in defence of this narrow pass: fighting for what? at Ambition's call? not, I hope, of intriguing diplomatist—better for Love, or mere excitement sake.

"Whom then shall I address ? —the mock sentimentalist? and begin the day: 'Our slumbers this morning were gently and pleasantly dissolved by the cheerful martins, which sang a sweet reveille with the first blush of Aurora, at our uncurtained couches.' Or the statist? 'Not a sign of buffalo to-day; it were melancholy and easy to calculate how soon the Indians, deprived of this natural resource, and ignorant of agriculture'—but I should soon get too deep."

I. F. But this soil is devilish shallow.

C. “Few will follow me pleasantly or patiently through these solitudes, though sometimes 'pleasant places.' I care not at all, — but that I feel I may fail to awaken the sympathy of any, while, like an artist retouching with kindled affection his painted thought, I linger to answer the appeal of Wasted Beauty to so rare appreciation."

I. F. This profoundly silent Desert—like a world without life—awes and stills the senses : but the soul is excited to speculations on the origin, the history—if it have one—and the destiny of these boundless wastes.

C. “ Or surrounds itself with the airy creations of fantasy, —or, mournfully wanders back among the dim traces of joys and sorrows gone. I address not, then, the shallow or hurried worldling; but the friendly one, who in the calm intervals from worldly cares, grants me the aid of a quiet and thoughtful,—and if it may be,— a poetic mood !"

Scottsbluff and the old Oregon Trail, Nebraska
Library of Congress

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• Isle of the Crux
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/03/isle-of-crux.html

• Elizabeth S. Melville, happy 198th birthday
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/06/elizabeth-s-melville-happy-198th.html

• Sealts and Kier on Elizabeth Shaw Melville
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2014/10/sealts-and-kier-on-elizabeth-shaw.html

Re-printings of 1853 Pittsfield news that "Herman Melville has gone to New York to superintend the issue of a new work."

As Gary Scharnhorst reported in Melville Society Extracts 75 (November 1988), news of Melville's working trip to New York in June 1853 originally appeared in the Springfield Republican on June 11, 1853. Melville's "new work" sounds like a book, probably the one his mother had said (in a letter to her brother Peter Gansevoort on April 20, 1853) was nearly ready for the press. Later the same year, in November 1853, Herman alluded to his having been "prevented from printing" it in New York. The only work in progress we know about for sure is the Agatha project, which Hershel Parker logically relates to the working title "Isle of the Cross," mentioned twice in family letters from Herman Melville's cousin Priscilla to his sister Augusta.

I have a different view, admittedly conjectural and based on just nothing in the way of satisfying documentary evidence. Inspired by what strikes me as unusually strong internal evidence, I've long been holding out for a project of re-writing by Melville called "Fragments of Military Life," the working title of the book that Philip St. George Cooke eventually published as Scenes and Adventures in the Army. Both parts of Scenes and Adventures were previously published in the Southern Literary Messenger, and the 1851-3 series Scenes Beyond the Western Border which became Part II would be concluded in the August 1853 issue. Hypothetically, the job of "superintending" that project would have meant providing Harper & Brothers with printed copies of the magazine installments, much in the same way that, a few years later, Melville did publish the book version of Israel Potter. Either the Harpers' lawyers or then Lt. Colonel Cooke himself might have "prevented" Melville from publishing a ghost-written or ghost-edited narrative of western travel that did not properly credit the well-known, highly regarded cavalry officer whose journals supplied most of the raw material.

Well, that Christmas business chastened me all over again. It's always been hard to voyage chartless, with no external evidence anywhere in the historical record linking Melville and the wandering dragoon, Philip St George Cooke. The revived claim for Henry Livingston's authorship of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" perfectly exemplifies how wrong one can go without reliable facts.

For the record, here is the original notice that Scharnhorst found in the Springfield Republican, June 11, 1853. Images of this and the following items are available in the online archives of Historical Newspapers at Genealogy Bank.
:

Springfield Republican / June 11, 1853

"Herman Melville has gone to New York to superintend the issue of a new work."

Four days later the Pittsfield news was reprinted verbatim in the Boston Weekly Messenger (June 15, 1853):

Boston Weekly Messenger / June 15, 1853

The Franklin Democrat [Greenfield, Massachusetts], June 20, 1853 reprinted the same Melville item under the head of "LOCAL INTELLIGENCE. / BERKSHIRE COUNTY.":

"Herman Melville has gone to New York to superintend the issue of a new work."

In early July the news from Pittsfield about Melville's trip to New York showed up in the Boston Flag of our Union (July 2, 1853) under the heading, "Editorial Inkdrops":

Boston Flag of our Union / July 2, 1853

First installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border
Southern Literary Messenger - June 1851

Related post:

• Isle of the Crux
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/03/isle-of-crux.html