Tokens of ghostwriting

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Tokens of ghostwriting by Scott Norsworthy

Writing, talking, and rewriting like Herman Melville in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853). Chapter 2.

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Leave it for the commentators

"Indeed, the settlement of this question must be left to the commentators on Mardi, some four or five hundred centuries hence." 

-- Herman Melville, Mardi: And a Voyage Thither 

...and so drown--or hang himself: (the author cannot decide which--even after a post mortem examination;--and so leaves the decision of this important point to the commentators.)

--March 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army.

Melvilliana: 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

And you must take it

What "you must take" in both cases is somebody's creative writing: Hawthorne's book of short stories and the narrator's unexpected burst into verse.

HAWTHORNE AND HIS MOSSES

Take these raspberries, and then I will give you some moss."—"Moss!" said I—"Yes, and you must take it to the barn with you, and good-bye to 'Dwight.'"

--The Literary World Volume 7 (August 17, 1850) page 125.

SCENES BEYOND THE WESTERN BORDER 

How dreary must be a great Commodore ,
Alone in the cabin of a seventy-four.

Be not alarmed ! I make a rhyme but once a year ; the idea came in that shape , and you must take it as it comes .

-- Southern Literary Messenger Volume 17 (June 1851) page 372; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia, 1857) page 228.

You have me there, or not

MOBY-DICK, chapter 78 Cisterns and Buckets. American edition first published November 1851.

We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye.... 

SCENES BEYOND THE WESTERN BORDER. January 1852 installment, Southern Literary Messenger; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army.

You have me there!

Towering mothers

... the baffled lady-mother left (unceremoniously) full of towering and demonstrative rage....  --Scenes Beyond the Western Border March 1853; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army. 

Then, high-up, and towering, and all-forbidding before Pierre grew the before unthought of wonderful edifice of his mother's immense pride;—her pride of birth, her pride of affluence, her pride of purity, and all the pride of high-born, refined, and wealthy Life, and all the Semiramian pride of woman. 

--Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities, 1852.

Officers and social equals

"Hundreds go and come at my word; none are my "equals," so none are my social friends."

-- First installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 1851; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857).

Southern Literary Messenger Vol. 17
June 1851

Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.

The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the Specksnyder.... in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal.

-- Moby-Dick chapter 33 The Specksynder