“He who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains.” — Herman Melville

“Old nineteenth-century New England must have been fearful–in what other country would Thoreau, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson have been so overlooked?” — Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, December 12, 1958

Herman Melville was born on this day in 1819. Here’s a post filled with many many quotes about Melville. They come from everywhere: from reviews of Moby-Dick when it first came out, to John Huston’s comment on the book, to Hart Crane’s stunning poem, to correspondence between Melville and his BFF Nathaniel Hawthorne. I love Moby-Dick but I also love his short fiction. Bartleby! BLB: Be like Bartleby. All you need to say is “I prefer not to.” End-stop. I have grown to appreciate Billy Budd (after scorning it in high school). Its homoeroticism so strong it could be transferred to a bathhouse in 1970s New York no problem, or an Abercrombie & Fitch campaign circa 1994. His poetry, too, has been a revelatory discovery.

Art

by Herman Melville

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt–a wind to freeze;
Sad patience–joyous energies;
Humility–yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity–reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel–Art.

More after the jump:

 
 

The Maldive Shark

by Herman Melville

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw,
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat–
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.

“In these flashing revelations of grief’s wonderful fire, we see all things as they are; and though when the electric element is gone, the shadows once more descend, and the false objects again return; yet not with their former power to deceive.” — Herman Melville, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities

More on Melville below the jump:

 
 

I had to read Moby-Dick in high school and found it a crushing bore (especially those long sections on blubber, etc. Like … WHAT.) – but, strangely enough (or not so strangely) certain events in the book always stayed with me. Pip going overboard. Ahab on the deck at night. The meeting with Queequeg. Many years later, I decided to go back and read all the books I’d been forced to read in high school. Basically put myself through the curriculum again. Many of the books we had to read back then become instant faves (Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Tale of Two Cities), but many I never wanted to read again. So I re-read The Scarlet Letter and Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Red Badge of Courage and Billy Budd and every other damn thing. The big daddy of them all though was Moby-Dick, mainly because I had such a negative reaction to it in high school. Reading it as an adult, though … it was like the top of my head was blown off. CLEARLY I was not ready to take it in at 17. I was blown away. And, even more shocking, the “sections on blubber, etc.” were my favorite! I couldn’t get ENOUGH of them. And Melville’s LANGUAGE. Re-reading Moby-Dick is one of my most treasured reading memories.

Here’s a section from Moby-Dick which I hesitate to call a favorite – it’s an over-used word anyway, guilty as charged – but after reading it I had to put the book down to just ABSORB what I read. It has since become a philosophical touch-stone, a way of being, a way of thinking of how to BE … and in times of struggle, I will suddenly remember it, I will attempt to follow Melville’s command. It’s about BLUBBER.

It might be good to read it out loud. It makes me cry.

A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the north, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then – except after explanation – that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

The whole chapter on the color white – called “The Whiteness of the Whale” is so extraordinary I couldn’t even absorb it as I was reading it. The whole book reads like that – I was in a state of total absorption, I couldn’t take in any more.

I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following examples.

First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness — as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming around him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, “Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?”

Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness is would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the backwoodsmen of the West, who with comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless church-yard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.

QUOTES:

Michael Schmidt, The Lives of the Poets

Moby-Dick proved hard and exhausting to write. But he knew it was original and he understood that it was good. Published in 1851, it was not a success; until the first quarter of the twentieth century it was neglected. Ambitious later books were rejected. The failure of Moby-Dick helped turn his primary attention to verse. Battle-Pieces (1866) was welcomed as peripheral work by a man who had once been famous for his prose. Seriously disturbed in his mind, he made a trip to the Holy Land (meeting with [Nathaniel] Hawthorne in Southport en route), and out of this visit emerged his most ambitious if not his most accomplished poem, the 18,000-line Clarel, twice as long as Paradise Lost, and in the octo-syllabic couplets of Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Eventually, Melville – after working as a minor customs officer in New York – was reduced to dependence on his wife’s money: she gave him an allowance to buy books and to print his later works in small editions for the tiny readership he retained. He died in 1891, quite forgotten, with the manuscript of the prose work Billy Budd completed but unpublished. His reputation was at such a low ebb that even this masterpiece went unpublished until 1924.

Samuel Otter, associate professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Melville’s Anatomies (University of California Press, 1999)

“The paucity of primary sources derives in large part from the downward trajectory of Melville’s career. When Typee came out in 1846, he was only 27 years old. A best seller in its day, the book ‘made him as famous as he would ever be when he was alive.'”

William Faulkner:

“Writers have always drawn, and always will draw, upon the allegories of moral consciousness, for the reason that the allegories are matchless – the three men in Moby-Dick, who represent the trinity of conscience: knowing nothing, knowing but not caring, knowing and caring.”

D.H. Lawrence:

[His sea voyages were flights from] HOME and MOTHER: The two things that were his damnation.

Jennifer Howard, “Chronicle”:

“‘The name died before the man,’ Mr. Olsen-Smith says. ‘Compare Melville to Mark Twain, for instance – a man who remained beloved throughout his life and after, up to the present. People saved every scrap. … It’s a different story with Melville.’ “

At Melville’s Tomb
by Hart Crane

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Melville apparently shouted this, as he sat at his desk writing Moby-Dick:

“Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!”

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

Why is Moby-Dick staggeringly greater than anything else Melville wrote? The novel’s operatic gigantism comes from its force of sexual protest. Its storminess is a reaction against the paralyzing bliss of female status, glimpsed in “The Grand Armada.”

Jorge Luis Borges on the “cosmos” of Moby-Dick:

“…a cosmos (a chaos) not only perceptibly malignant as the Gnostics had intuited, but also irrational, like the cosmos in the hexameters of Lucretius.”

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Melville’s poetry tends to be rugged, even rough-hewn, in some ways premonitory of Thomas Hardy’s poems. Like Hardy, Melville was profoundly influenced by Shelley’s life and work. Shakespeare, the prime engenderer of Moby-Dick, is also echoed frequently in Melville’s poems.

William Faulkner:

“Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I’m sure Moby-Dick didn’t.”

Jose Ferrer visits John Huston and Gregory Peck on the set of “Moby-Dick”

John Huston, An Open Book, 1980:

“Moby-Dick was the most difficult picture I ever made. I lost so many battles during it that I even began to suspect that my assistant director was plotting against me. Then I realized that it was only God. God had a perfectly good reason. Ahab saw the White Whale as a mask worn by the Deity, and he saw the Deity as a malignant force. It was God’s pleasure to torment and torture man. Ahab didn’t deny God, he simply looked on him as a murderer – a thought that is utterly blasphemous: “Is Ahab Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?…Where do murderers go?… Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?”‘

Henry F. Chorley, in London Athenaeum, October 25 1851, review of Moby-Dick:

“We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book…. Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature — since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.

Melville, letter to a friend:

This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him,–which but few men do. For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains. What sort of sensation permanent madness is may be very well imagined–just as we imagine how we felt when we were infants, tho’ we cannot recall it. In both conditions we are irresponsible & riot like gods without fear of fate.–It is the climax of a mad night of revelry when the blood has been transmuted into brady.–But if we prate much of this thing we shall be illustrating our own propositions.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

As Moby-Dick implicitly manifests, Melville’s reading of the Shakespeare of the high tragedies essentially was nihilistic.

Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

June 29 1851

My dear Hawthorne,

The clear air and open window invite me to write to you. For some time past I have been so busy with a thousand things that I have almost forgotten when I wrote you last, and whether I received an answer. This most persuasive season has now for weeks recalled me from certain crotchetty and over doleful chimearas, the like of which men like you and me and some others, forming a chain of God’s posts round the world, must be content to encounter now and then, and fight them the best way we can. But come they will, — for, in the boundless, trackless, but still glorious wild wilderness through which these outposts run, the Indians do sorely abound, as well as the insignificant but still stinging mosquitoes. 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 plowing and sowing and raising and painting and printing and praying, — and now begin to come out upon a less bustling time, and to enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the old farm house 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 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. — I am sure you will pardon this speaking all about myself, for if I say so much on that head, be sure all the rest of the world are thinking about themselves ten times as much. Let us speak, although we show all our faults and weaknesses, — for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it, — not in [a] set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation. — But I am falling into my old foible — preaching. I am busy, but shall not be very long. Come and spend a day here, if you can and want to; if not, stay in Lenox, and God give you long life. When I am quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together. This is rather a crazy letter in some respects, I apprehend. If so, ascribe it to the intoxicating effects of the latter end of June operating upon a very susceptible and peradventure feeble temperament.

Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked — though the hell-fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this. This is the book’s motto (the secret one), — Ego non baptiso te in nomine — but make out the rest yourself.
H.M

Herman Melville:

I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed, and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

I suspect the heart of Moby-Dick was generated by Melville’s ambivalent reaction to Hawthorne’s female-centered work. Running through the novel’s bulky midsection is a chain of improvised sexual images reflecting, I theorize, a process of association from Melville’s dream life.

Robert Penn Warren:

Some critics would place his name among the most important American poets of the nineteenth century, or even today.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language, on the poem “After the Pleasure Party”:

Gnostic and hermetic sources, known to Melville, adumbrate the fall of the divine androgyne into “love and sleep,” sexual division and its consequences. Melville’s violent ambivalence is akin to Ahab’s fury at having been maimed by Moby-Dick. Once he had written his epic, there was no White Whale for Melville to hunt unless it were Nature herself.

London Literary Gazette, December 6 1851:

“Mr. Herman Melville has earned a deservedly high reputation for his performances in descriptive fiction. He has gathered his own materials, and travelled along fresh and untrodden literary paths, exhibiting powers of no common order, and great originality. The more careful, therefore, should he be to maintain the fame he so rapidly acquired, and not waste his strength on such purposeless and unequal doings as these rambling volumes about spermaceti whales.”

Trav S.D. on his excellent blog-post about Melville:

“Melville ranks I think with certain modern artists like Van Gogh and Orson Welles as being the kind of model who inspires me as an indie theatre artist. Yes, the more he pursued his individual vision, the less “commercial” he became, with the irony that just as he was creating his works of lasting genius, those today most prized by the public, he was scorned by the masses. The world expects you to kiss its ass. How much more satisfying it is to say, like Melville, ‘World, kiss mine!'”

John Gardner:

Most of fiction’s great heroes are at least slightly crazy, from Achilles to Captain Ahab, but the problems that make great heroes act are the problems no sane man could have gotten around either. Achilles, in his nobler, saner moments, lays down the whole moral code of The Iliad. But the violence and anger triggered by war, the human passions that overwhelm Achilles’s reason and make him the greatest criminal in all fiction – they’re just as much a problem for lesser, more ordinary people. The same with Ahab’s desire to pierce the Mask, smash through to absolute knowledge. Ahab’s crazy, so he actually tries it, but the same Mask leers at all of us.

Herman Melville:

“I could readily see in Emerson … the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.”

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae:

The Tartarus of Maids, a nightmare condensation of Moby-Dick‘s chthonian theme, is the reverse image of Melville’s last story, Billy Budd, Sailor, which he left in draft at his death in 1891. Tartarus‘ ugly, turgid procreative real is opposed by Billy Budd‘s daylit Apollonian realm of beauty, clarity, and charisma. Billy Budd is the supreme Apollonian work of American literature, to which visionary idealism is foreign because of the cultural bias toward pragmatism…Billy Budd was made possible by Melville’s descent to and escape from the female miasma.

I know, I know, she can be a kook, but I think her commentary about literature and art is often invaluable.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, on a walk on the beach with Melville, 1857:

“Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation…. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.”

Herman Melville, letter to Hawthorne, June 29, 1851:

Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, in a letter to Evert Duyckinck:

“Mardi is a rich book, with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life. It is so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded over it, so as to make it a great deal better.”

Joan Didion:

“And one book I totally missed when I first read it was Moby-Dick. I reread it when Quintana was assigned it in high school. It was clear that she wasn’t going to get through it unless we did little talks about it at dinner. I had not gotten it at all when I read it at her age. I had missed that wild control of language. What I thought discursive were really these great leaps. The book had just seemed a jumble; I didn’t get the control in it.”

John Gardner:

In the long run, Melville’s estate is worth vastly more than the estate of Octave Thanet. Octave Thanet was, I think, the bestselling novelist of the nineteenth century. Melville told the truth, Thanet told high-minded lies. All liars are soon dead, forgotten. Dickens’s novels didn’t sell half as well as a novel of Octave Thanet’s called A Slave to Duty. But you haven’t heard of her, right? I know of her only because I know obscure facts.

Melville on Moby-Dick – in a letter to Richard Henry, Jr.:

It will be a strange sort of book, tho,’ I fear; blubber is blubber you know … and to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the things, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves.

Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne – after Hawthorne read Moby-Dick:

A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.

Evert Duyckinck in his journal, describing a meeting with Melville, 1856:

“…fresh from his mountain charged to the muzzle with sailor metaphysics and jargon of things unknowable,”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, on seeing Melville in 1857:

— “[He is] a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder…. and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind.”

Robert Stone:

“Everybody on a ship reads, whether it’s comic books or Westerns or the Bible or whatever. They always read a lot. I was reading Moby-Dick, which sounds terribly precious, but I thought if you can’t read Moby-Dick in the roaring forties you’ll never read Moby-Dick. So I brought it along. I also read Ulysses on the same trip. I seem to have imprinted the ocean in a very strong way because I end up with all these marine images that just seem so readily at hand for me.”

Henry Melville to Henry Savage:

It is–or seems to be–a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of a joke…. And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed around pretty liberally and impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it.

E.M. Forster, from one of his lectures on the novel, compiled in the wonderful book “Aspects of the Novel“:

Moby-Dick is an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn or an account of whaling interspersed with snatches of poetry. But as soon as we catch the song in it, it grows difficult and immensely important. Narrowed and hardened into words the spiritual theme of Moby-Dick is as follows: a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong way. The White Whale is evil, and Captain Ahab is warped by constant pursuit until his knight-errantry turns into revenge. These are words — a symbol for the book if we want one — but they do not carry us much further than the acceptance of the book as a yarn — perhaps they carry us backwards, for they may mislead us into harmonizing the incidents, and so losing their roughness and richness. The idea of a contest we may retain: all action is a battle, the only happiness is peace. But contest between what? We get false if we say that it is between good and evil or between two unreconciled evils. The essential in Moby-Dick, its prophetic song, flows athwart the action and the surface morality like an undercurrent. It lies outside words…we cannot catch the words of the song. There has been stress, with intervals: but no explicable solution, certainly no reaching back into universal pity and love; no ‘Gentlemen, I’ve had a good dream.’

The extraordinary nature of the book appears in two of its early incidents — the sermon about Jonah and the friendship with Queequeg.

The sermon has nothing to do with Christianity. It asks for endurance or loyalty without hope of reward. The preacher ‘kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.’ Then he works up and up and concludes on a note of joy that is far more terrifying than a menace…

Immediately after the sermon, Ishmael makes a passionate alliance with the cannibal Queequeg, and it looks for a moment that the book is to be a saga of blood-brotherhood. But human relationships mean little to Melville, and after a grotesque and violent entry, Queequeg is almost forgotten. Almost — not quite…

Moby-Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem. It is wrong to turn the Delight or the coffin into symbols, because even if the symbolism is correct, it silences the book. Nothing can be stated about Moby-Dick except that it is a contest. The rest is song.”

“The rest is song.” YES.

 
 
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