Herman Melville’s Soft Withdrawal

Art work by Francis Day. Photograph from The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

In the midsummer of that year, while a friend, Evert Duyckinck, was informing his brother that “Melville has a new book mostly done—a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery—something quite new,” Melville almost all at once visited his cousin Robert’s farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; was given a copy of Hawthorne’s “Mosses from an Old Manse;” decided to bring his wife and young son from New York to Pittsfield for a summer vacation; met Hawthorne...

The plot is this: Pierre, a young country gentleman happily ensconced in rural wealth and in lyrical engagement to a suitable local gentlewoman called Lucy, upon discovering that his dead father in likelihood was also the father of an illegitimate daughter named Isabel reacts by renouncing his fiancée, his wealth, and his mother’s affection and carrying his sister off in the semblance of a wife to the big city, where, the gentle fiancée with equal quixoticism following him, all three...

He cannot eat but by force. He has assassinated the natural day; how then can he eat with an appetite? If he lays him down, he cannot sleep; he has waked the infinite wakefulness in him; then how can he slumber? Still his book, like a vast lumbering planet, revolves in his aching head. The population of the United States in 1850 was about twenty-three million, so “Typee” ’s sale here of nearly six thousand can be multiplied by ten to give us a modern equivalent; a sale of sixty thousand hardbound copies might get you a low rung on thebest-seller list for six weeks or so.

For the equivalent of those ribbons and graceful elbow tips one has to go back to Fayaway in “Typee.” “Israel Potter” also holds a number of matchless descriptions of battles at sea, Olympian in their mood and startling in their playful poetry: Many burdensome things happened to Melville in the years after the writing of “Moby-Dick” besides that novel’s indifferent reception. Hawthorne and his family rather abruptly left the Berkshires for eastern Massachusetts after a brief year and a half; though too much can be made, I believe, of Melville’s love for Hawthorne, it undoubtedly existed, as his monody on the older man’s death and the oddly inactive but intense figure of Vine in “Clarel” show.

IzquierdoEmilio Emilio pensé te ibas a dedicar a lo que más te gusta escribir y reflexionar

Our show is co-hosted by the great-great-great grandson of Mr Melville. Listen to a few episodes (particularly Ep 23 and Ep 26) to gauge any similarities, other than being bearded

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