observations and conjectures about the interrupted publication of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853)

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border" resumes in the March 1853 number of the Southern Literary Messenger after a hiatus of five months.  The interruption was long enough to require some explanatory cue when the series resumed, hence this formal acknowledgement at the start of the March 1853 installment:   

"(Continued from Sept. No., 1852.)"

The length of the gap between published installments possibly reflects a break of some months in the writing, The next installment (May 1853) begins with the same cue, "(Continued from Sept. No., 1852.)." One final installment appeared in August 1853.  The three installments published in 1853—March, May, August—may have been submitted as a single batch, concluding the series. 

Thematically, the defensive posture of the narrator in relation to critics and audiences appears also to link at least two of the three installments appearing in 1853.  The specter of Pierre, or rather the specter of two negative reviews of Pierre in the New York Literary World (August 21, 1852) and New York Herald (September 18, 1852), hangs over the March and August numbers.  In March 1853, the mock tragedy "Cub" effectively burlesques the putdown of Pierre in the New York Herald; in August 1853 the last dialogue on the prairie between the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons and his imaginary friend (!) "Frank" precisely invokes the terms of Evert Duyckink's attack on Pierre in the Literary World.  Duyckinck repeatedly faulted Melville for literary sins against "nature and truth."  As if speaking (and protesting) for Melville, the injured Captain answers:

"But I have been writing, Frank, something for your especial approval; I have been setting forth grim realities;—and most philosophically.   I did strike at last, but most naturally and truly, a little vein of—"

F.— "—Poetry, perhaps?  by the merest accident in the world." (August 1853)

In between, the May 1853 installment evokes the music-box incident at Balance Rock.  The Captain fantasizes a fairy dance that seems to recall (and celebrate) the association of Sarah Morewood with fairies and fairy lore, and with enchanting costome balls at Broad Hall.

"Methinks I see a 'high hall,' whose lights might shame the day; the many white robed fair,—the far-reaching couples, floating in that fairy dance,—revolving, like the moon around the sun, in circling circles."  May 1853

Dubbed "Fairy Belt" by Cornelius Mathews, Sarah Morewood contributed a chapter on "That Excursion to Greylock"  for Taghconic (1852) by Godfrey Greylock (J. E. A. Smith), where she had plenty to say about fairies in the wild:

The pathway up the mountain side is rough, but filled with beauty; and some of the openings in the woods almost persuade one that the days of fairy gambols are not yet past, but that in these spots, in these very rings of fresh, green grass—so fresh and green that they seem just to have awakened from their Winter sleep—the elfin revels must still be nightly held.

… I feel sure that had we remained only a little while longer, we should have seen more than the pen of the author of “Pilgrims of the Rhine” has yet been able to describe, of forest fairy gayety.
(Taghconic 1852)

The May 1853 fairy dance sequence in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" charmingly provides the "forest fairy gayety" that Melville's friend Sarah Morewood said she expected in her chapter on Greylock for Smith's 1852 Taghconic. 

Melville mentions Taghconic in the second "Agatha Letter" to Hawthorne on October 25, 1852.  The first Agatha letter to Hawthorne was written August 13, 1852 a week before the review of Pierre appeared in the Literary World.  In February 1852 Melville had canceled his subscription to the Literary World, or tried to, but they kept sending it anyway.  Complementary copies? I figure he saw the review one way or another.  And I'm guessing the March-May-August segments from 1853 were written in between Melville's first two Agatha Letters to Hawthorne, in the wake of those bad reviews of Pierre, September-October 1852.  Ha!  The fairy content in the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" appears in-between the self-consciously literary and reactive episode titled "Cub: a tragedy in three acts"  in March 1853 and the Captain's self-conscious apology in August 1853 for poetical experimental writing.

Working backward then.  August 1852 is clearly a high, in some ways the creative climax of the series:

"O! my friend! Is there not then a pure soul-love, a deathless friendship, 'passing the love of women,' which all life's trials and the world's baseness cannot soil or sap?"

I. F. the imaginary friend becomes Frank, and the dialogue of F. and C. zings, revealing perhaps something of the tension between Melville and Duyckinck that led Melville to satirize his critical friend in Pierre, in the late chapters on Pierre as juvenile author.  September 1852 appears to retain vestiges of Pierre, for example in the assertion of a genuine American aristocracy, but also seems to reflect rejection of Melville's terms by his English publisher Bentley, in the bitter polemic for international copyright and against "cockney condescension" and "foreign fashion-loving public taste."  So then, July 1852, August 1852, September 1852 probably formed a batch, probably written March-April 1852.

April 1852  begins new matter of 1845 (previous installments covered military escort of Santa Fe traders in 1843).  Now drawing on new source material, including Carleton's "Occidental Reminiscences."   The narrator's odd preoccupation with professed experts on "Human Destiny" lines up with Melville's, suggesting these installments may have been composed, say late February 1852.  Probably this batch contained the installments published in April, May, June 1852.   We know a batch containing the May 1852 material was sent to John Esten Cooke on March 14, 1852.  Writing from Carlisle Barracks, Philip St George Cooke complained that editor John Thompson had only been providing one copy of published installments, when PSGC had specifically "asked him to send two of each" (my emphasis).  Later on in the March 14 letter to his Richmond nephew, PSGC wanted clarification of something in the manuscript.  Evidently perplexed by the use of the word "braggart," he asked JEC for editorial assistance:

"There is an omission, page 3, of the name of the Spanish Com[mander] who went to Vera Cruz with a large force commissioned to supercede Cortez; you, or Jno. T. can supply the name:--I have not a book to refer to:  I suppose he was a 'braggart'?"
(Letter to John Esten Cooke, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University)

 Before publication in May 1852, JEC or John Thompson did in fact identify the "braggart" as Narvaez:

"The master-stroke of the career of Cortez, was his desperate march to Vera Cruz, his attack and defeat of the braggart Narvaez and his vastly superior numbers." (May 1852)

Though confusing to PSGC, the use of "braggart" to characterize a superior opposing force is pure Melville, as when the biblical giant Goliath, unnamed as such, is described as "the great braggart of Gath."  (Mardi)

Again, April-May-June 1852 installments were probably written in February 1852.

December 1851, January 1852.  Echoes of Moby-Dick in the December 1851 number, some altered  or expurgated in revision.  Written c. October 1851?

1.  June 1851, September 1851.  September number prints two installments in one issue.  Exuberant tone, opening echoes that invitation to Hawthorne from May 1851 where Melville says

"Don't trouble yourself, though, about writing; and don't trouble yourself about visiting; and when you do visit, don't trouble yourself about talking. I will do all the writing and visiting and talking myself."  (Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne)

I would guess these first installments, beginning with the June 1851 number, were probably written sometime in April 1851.  They were enclosed for consideration by the Southern Literary Messenger with a letter dated May 15, 1851 from PSGC to John Esten Cooke, then acting as guest-editor.  Writing from Carlisle Barracks, PSGC told his nephew he would accept minor corrections but otherwise wanted no editorial interference:

"If you see any mistakes, please to correct, for I am rusty & was never classical—but as to altering, omitting &c. to any extent, —by any one, — I had rather not print—."

(Letter to John Esten Cooke, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University)

One especially revealing statement in this letter from PSGC to JEC of May 15, 1851, gives away the existence of a ghostwriter. PSGC describes the manuscript enclosure as follows:

"These few pages (eno' to fail, or be refused) are copied almost verbatim from what I wrote 29 Aug. 1843, in my tent after a hot hard day's march. As to the heading or title, I care not.  The "Written on the Prairie" part at least, might be omitted, or the fact expressed in some other way.  Editor's note?  that it is the offhand prairie production in reality, which if rough & faulty, may have a relish too of real impressions &c."

The real "offhand prairie production" is Cooke's 1843 Santa Fe Journal,which served as the main source for the highly literary, maybe hyper-literary rewrite that begins in the first installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border." Another day, perhaps, we can look more closely at what somebody did to Cooke's 1843 journal.  It's a long way from verbatim.