Exotics in and out of genial soil

 

I. F. — Bah! Better continue your catalogue raisonneé of newspapers. What immense sheet is that?

The Weekly Louisville Journal; an excellent farmer's paper. Prentice has a characteristic quality which now needs a name—better than repartee writer. But, heaven and earth! he is the best abuser too of his time—an exotic in a genial soil." 

--Sept. 1851 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

There he sits, a strange exotic, transplanted from the delectable alcoves of the old manorial mansion, to take root in this niggard soil. No more do the sweet purple airs of the hills round about the green fields of Saddle Meadows come revivingly wafted to his cheek. Like a flower he feels the change; his bloom is gone from his cheek; his cheek is wilted and pale.  --Melivlle's Pierre - 1852

So George Dennison Prentice is really a transplanted Yankee, Connecticut-born but now thriving in the genial southern soil of Kentucky. Interesting that Melville similarly equates "genial" with "southern":

But where was slipped in the entering wedge? Philosophy, knowledge, experience — were those trusty knights of the castle recreant? No, but unknown to them, the enemy stole on the castle's south side, its genial one, where Suspicion, the warder, parleyed. In fine, his too indulgent, too artless and companionable nature betrayed him.
--The Confidence-Man - 1857

But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.  --Melville's 1850 revew-essay Hawthorne and His Mosses

"... this horrid and indecent Right whaling, I say, compared to a spirited hunt for the gentlemanly Cachalot in southern and more genial seas, is as the butchery of white bears upon blank Greenland icebergs to zebra hunting in Caffraria, where the lively quarry bounds before you through leafy glades." --Melville, Mardi  - 1849

One person whom Prentice had abused in print was Herman Melville's older brother Gansevoort. Herman's younger brother Allan told him so in October 1844, as Hershel Parker reports:

The opposition have of course made their attacks upon him [Gansevoort Melville] & some of them are very severe. Prentiss the witty editor of the Louisville Journal was right down upon him.  --Herman Melville: A Biography V1.314

But what ’s the theme? The theme was bent—
Be sure, in no dry argument—
On the Picturesque, what ’tis—its essence,
Fibre and root, bud, efflorescence,
Congenial soil, and where at best....  

--Herman Melville, At the Hostelry

"George D. Prentice was a Connecticut Yankee, by birth, but in his brilliant career he was a Southerner by residence and characteristics. Born in 1802, a graduate of Brown University in 1823, a New England editor until 1830, he began to build the monument of his fame in the latter year at Louisville, Kentucky, where for over thirty years he edited the Louisville Journal, and made it conspicuous for its wit. He wrote some beautiful poetry, but his forte was repartee. The pungency of this prince of paragraphers has never been surpassed. There has never been a journalist who could dash off more felicitous rejoinders than George D. Prentice. A strong Whig, he loved the South and the Union with about equal devotion. The last decade of his life was saddened by the conflict between the North and the South, and also by his own increasing weakness for strong drink. He lives in the admiration of those who remember his sallies of wit, but permanent literature will soon pass him by, forgetful, perhaps, of his very name. Some of his poems, however, are replete with lofty sentiment, elegantly expressed. Mr. Prentice died in 1870."

--Frank Gilbert, American Literature

harps, wolves, memory

THE AEOLIAN HARP

At The Surf Inn

List the harp in window wailing
Stirred by fitful gales from sea:

Shrieking up in mad crescendo—
Dying down in plaintive key!

Listen: less a strain ideal

Than Ariel's rendering of the Real.

What that Real is, let hint

A picture stamped in memory's mint....  --Herman Melville

The emphasis on memory, and Melville's virtuosity in deploying its varying tropes, is meant, thereby, as touchstone, a passkey into the collection at large. It is in this respect that "The Aeolian Harp" does immediate good service.
--A. Robert Lee, "A Picture Stamped in Memory's Mint" in Melville as Poet

It is near midnight. Silence reigns in the desert; but now and then, come the cries of wolves from the mountains. They give an almost supernatural tone to these solemn solitudes. The repose which twenty hours of excitement and toil demand, is banished. Hark! how they howl! Be grandly dreary, and ye will be attuned to the heart! Yes, never better to a sentimental girl, the gentlest breathings of an Æolian harp. Ah! how very doleful is that plaint! Never, never the doleful! Give me the placid calm, with which the soul may revel in fairy creations, adorned by all the flowers of thought, or proud action, the storm of wild and passionate will. The gilded and painted memory, or fierce oblivion. --August 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures

wailing, howling, wandering

Joseph Mallord William Turner /  The Cave of Despair, c.1835
Image Credit: Tate

The Desert truly is here—Moral and Natural Wastes.—Gray stunted trees in wintry mourning—draped with moss. Chill winds wail,—wild beasts howl,—and my heart echoes, ‘Far—lone—forgot.’
--March 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border and Scenes and Adventures

"That may not be, said then the ferryman,
Least we unweeting hap to be fordonne;
For those same islands seeming now and than,
Are not firme land, nor any certein wonne,
But stragling plots which to and fro do ronne
In the wide waters; therefore are they hight
The Wandering Islands; therefore do them shonne;
For they have oft drawne many a wandring wight
Into most deadly daunger and distressed plight;
For whosoever once hath fastened
His foot thereon may never it secure
But wandreth evermore uncertain and unsure."

"Darke, dolefull, dreary, like a greedy grave,
That still for carrion carcasses doth crave;
On top whereof ay dwelt the ghastly owl,
Shrieking his baleful note, which ever drave
Far from that haunt all other cheerful fowl,
And all about it wandring ghosts did wayle and howl."

-- Epigraph to The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles (Sketch First, The Isles at Large) from Spenser's Faerie Queene. Melville adapted the first part from 2.11-12 on the Wandering Islands which he then melds with 1.33 on the Cave of Despair.

Birthdays and Deserts

Image Credit: YesterYear Once More

Later: forgot to mention that June 13th was also the birthday of Elizabeth Shaw ("Lizzie") Melville, Herman's wife.

Elizabeth Shaw was born June 13, 1822 in Boston, Massachusetts.
--Civil War Women  

"For her sixty-fourth birthday, on June 13, he bought for her four books which had been published in the year of their marriage [1847]...."  --Leon Howard, Herman Melville

Philip St, George Cooke, "Born in Leesburg, Virginia on June 13, 1809."
--Elmwood Historic Cemetery

Herman Melville paid attention to birthdays of writers. We know this from notations that he made in his books, for example this pencil notation, inscribed by Melville on the front flyleaf verso to Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse:

"July 4.  Born 1804"

You can see the above inscription at  Melville's Marginalia Online where the editors explain:

"In the copies of works he admired, Melville regularly inscribed the authors' birth and death dates, as well as other key dates in their careers."

In the July 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," the temporarily depressed Captain of U. S. Dragoons makes a melancholy reference to his own birthday on his birthday (June 13th, the birthday of Philip St. George Cooke). The Captain's unexpectedly dark allusion occurs in one of many prairie dialogues with his Imaginary Friend:

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 cottonwoods seemingly the wrecks of a blasting tempest, mere limbless or distorted stems of trees: and others, the bleeched [1857: 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 at 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....
--July 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border and

Scenes and Adventures in the Army

A likely source for scenery and events of the 1845 march by U. S. dragoons to the Rocky Mountains is the narrative by J. Henry Carleton. Carleton's journal entry specifies that this June 13th in 1845 was Friday the 13th. Cooke's "spectral ruins" of whitened cottonwood trees are melancholy enough. According to Carleton, the cottonwood trees at the campsite of Friday, June 13th once held human corpses:

The reader knows that the Dahcotahs place bodies of their deceased friends upon scaffolds, and in the forks of trees, having previously wrapped them carefully in buffalo robes; so it is not worth while to describe how they do it, just at the bottom of a sheet. Many of the cotton-woods about our present encampment have borne aloft upon their branches this death-fruit. The fire having caught two of them and burned off their limbs, the charred and crackled bones have dropped down, and now lay in confused masses upon the ground below. I speak of this because one of the trees stands right in front of my tent, and while I sit here writing I can almost touch the bones with my feet.

--The Prairie Logbooks

Now I'm wondering what the other diarists of the 1845 expedition--H. S. Turner, and the engineer William B. Franklin--wrote about Friday the 13th, in particular about those cottonwood trees.  Let me check.

First, here's the matter-of-fact description by H. S. Turner, transcribed from his manuscript journal available with subscription online at fold3:

On this part of the river there has been a growth of Cottonwood & Ash, but from proximity to Fort Laramie & other causes but few trees remain. As we approach Fort Laramie the barrenness of the soil increases, little vegetation visible anywhere—scarcely more in the valleys than on the hills. Distance 24 miles. Direction about N. W. Weather of pleasant temperature: clear sky.

Turner's details closely agree with the beginning of the entry for June 13th in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border. Indeed, the first sentence in the June 13th Scenes Beyond the Western Border entry looks like a direct paraphrase, neatly reworking Turner's remark of "scarcely more [vegetation] in the valleys than on the hills":

June 13th.—Twenty-four miles to-day, over a desert! hills and river valley equally a desert!

How about Franklin? Same scenery of course but notice the lack of any comparable phrasing with the words valleys and hills in the full entry for June 13, 1845:

June 13. To-day we travelled 24 miles. Our direction for the first 12 miles was NW. We then struck the Platte again, and the direction for the remainder of the distance was 30° N of W. Far on our left were the high bluffs of sandstone perfectly barren, and on the right hills of gravel or sand, covered with a stunted or parched growth of grass. The river is lined with Cottonwood timber from where we struck it, and may be said to be slightly timbered from this point to the Sweetwater where we left it. We found a scant supply of grass in one of the bottoms to-night, but consoled ourselves with the expectation of getting to Laramie to-morrow. Every one looked forward to our arrival there as the end of all our troubles, we supposed that the voyageurs would have plenty of good horses, and that we could buy them for almost nothing, but we were undeceived before we left them.  --March to South Pass

Carleton's report of corpses in the cottonwoods near Fort Laramie is confirmed, and illustrated, by Lodisa Frizzell in her 1852 journal:

We are about 5 ms. from Ft. Laramie. Near by where we nooned to-day, there was 2 dead indians in the top of a cottonwood tree, this being their manner of disposing of their dead. They were wraped in well dressed buffalo hides, & then lashed to several small poles, which were fastened to the limbs of the tree, it was a very singular sight, they must have been there some time, as I found a part of an old rusty knife, which had probably been one of the many things which had been hung on the tree, such as, knife, bow & arrow, & whatever he might have posessed.  --Across the Plains to California in 1852

Tree-burial, as illustrated by Lodisa Frizzell
From Across the Plains to California in 1852

Three versions of the Missouri-Mississippi confluence

1840

The morning after, I passed the mouth of the Missouri. This river, after draining the vallies of the Rocky Mountains, rushes through a valley of 3,000 miles, receiving the tribute of all its waters, and precipitates its turbid currents right across the placid bosom of the Mississippi, to which, losing its name, it imparts its character. The latter, 'till now transparent, reveals in an extraordinary manner the wonders of the secret depths of the opaque waters of the Missouri.   

-- July 23, 1840 Army and Navy Chronicle

1842

The morning after, I passed the mouth of the Missouri. This river, after draining the vallies of the Rocky Mountains, and receiving tributaries throughout a course of three thousand miles, precipitates its turbid currents right across the placid bosom of the Mississippi, to which, losing its name, it imparts its character. A mind fertile in conceits might fancy in the coming of this turbid and soil-stained river of the west, to join the clearer and gentler stream, the approach of a red warrior to woo a fair damsel of the settlements; at first the white face edges away and keeps aloof from the strange lover, but his suit is vehement and irresistible, and soon she is in his dusky arms, and her gentleness is lost, and his wild nature gives its complexion to her own. To be sure the circumstance that the Mississippi is the acknowledged "Father of Waters" is an obstacle of sex, and hurts the conceit somewhat. -- Southern Literary Messenger Volume 8, June 1842

1857

The morning after, I passed the mouth of the Missouri. This river, after draining the valleys of the Rocky Mountains, and receiving tributaries throughout a course of three thousand miles, precipitates its turbid currents right across the placid bosom of the Mississippi, to which, losing its name, it imparts its character.   

--Scenes and Adventures in the Army 

And one more:

Down on it like a Pawnee from ambush foams the yellow-jacked [painted?] Missouri....The Missouri sends rather a hostile element than a filial flow. Longer, stronger than the father of waters like Jupiter he dethrones his sire & reigns in his stead. Under the benign name Mississippi it is in short the Missouri that now rolls to the Gulf....

-- Herman Melville, "The River." About which see John D. Seeley, “Timothy Flint’s ‘Wicked River’ and The Confidence-Man.” PMLA 78, no. 1 (1963): 75–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/461227.

Early comment on the racy style of Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1842 magazine version)

The confluence of the Mississippi (right) and the Missouri (left) Rivers.
Photo Credit: Doc DeVore via MU High School

Glad to know I'm not the only one who noticed the loose tendencies already evident in the first part of Scenes and Adventures in the Army. From the Augusta [Georgia] Chronicle, Wednesday, June 22, 1842:

We have read “Scenes and Adventures in the Army, by a Captain of U. S. Dragoons” —with a good deal of enjoyment. The style of composition is not so severely chaste as it might be, but it is nevertheless an agreeable and entertaining paper, especially after the matter-of-fact article of the Naval Officer.

--Found in the newspaper archives at Genealogy Bank.

The most obvious example of less-than-chaste style from the June 1842 installment has to be the extended metaphor of the Missouri River's confluence with the Mississippi as a persistent Indian lover's courting and conquering a white maiden. The candidly experimental and romanticized "conceit" of the "red warrior" and "fair damsel of the settlements" had not appeared in the earlier 1840 version (Army and Navy Chronicle 11, 23 July 1840, p61) of the narrative and would be deleted in revision for the 1857 book version. (Compare the three different versions here.)

The morning after, I passed the mouth of the Missouri. This river, after draining the vallies of the Rocky Mountains, and receiving tributaries throughout a course of three thousand miles, precipitates its turbid currents right across the placid bosom of the Mississippi, to which, losing its name, it imparts its character. A mind fertile in conceits might fancy in the coming of this turbid and soil-stained river of the west, to join the clearer and gentler stream, the approach of a red warrior to woo a fair damsel of the settlements; at first the white face edges away and keeps aloof from the strange lover, but his suit is vehement and irresistible, and soon she is in his dusky arms, and her gentleness is lost, and his wild nature gives its complexion to her own. To be sure the circumstance that the Mississippi is the acknowledged "Father of Waters" is an obstacle of sex, and hurts the conceit somewhat.  --June 1842 Scenes and Adventures

Up north, newspapers in Boston and New York City seemed glad to reprint the account of "An Indian Battle" from the July 1842 installment of "Scenes and Adventures in the Army" in the Southern Literary Messenger. The sketch was given under the following brief editorial introduction which did not appear in the original magazine series:

AN INDIAN BATTLE—[The Southern Literary Messenger, for July, has an entertaining article entitled “Scenes and Adventures in the Army,” which relates incidents which took place a few years since in the country watered by the Arkansas, and stretching from the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The following is a lively description of a contest with the Indians.]

Newspaper re-printings of the "Indian Battle" sketch from the July 1842 Southern Literary Messenger include:

• New York Sun, Friday, July 8, 1842 
• New York Evening Post, Saturday, July 9, 1842 
• Albany Argus, Tuesday, July 12, 1842 
• Boston Traveler Tuesday, August 2, 1842
• Vermont Gazette [Bennington, Vermont], Tuesday, August 9, 1842

None of these 1842 excerpts acknowledged the prior, 1840 publication of "Scenes and Adventures in the Army" in the Army and Navy Chronicle under a couple of different titles, the last being "Notes and Reminiscences of an Officer of the Army." The Indian Battle episode was first published in the September 10, 1840 issue of the Army and Navy Chronicle (volume 11) with the rest of No. VII of "Notes and Reminiscences of an Officer of the Army" by "F. R. D."

Army and Navy Chronicle 10-11 (1840)