"All I want is a good listener": promiscuous apostrophe at the start of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border"

The beginning of Typee displays another of Melville's techniques, what can be called promiscuous apostrophe. He begins by addressing the reader directly, fades into soliloquy, and in subsequent paragraphs addresses the rooster, another sailor, and the "poor old ship" itself. The impression created is of a voice ready to fix on any imaginable auditor.  --Bryan C. Short on Melville's Self-Discovery in Typee

Oh reader! "gentle" or not,—I care not a whit,—so you are honest—I will tell you a secret. I write not to be read, and I swear never even to transcribe for your benefit, unless I change my mind. All I want is a good listener; I want to converse with you; and if you are absolutely dumb, why I will sometimes answer for you.

(opening lines of the first installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger vol. 17, June 1851, 372; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army, Part II.)

But "Oh reader!" only makes one apostrophe—when does it get promiscuous? From the same first chapter:

Oh, wide and flat,—shall I say "stale and unprofitable"—prairies! ...
Oh, gentle Herald [Mercury], that I could fly with thee!
Oh! ye hypocrites,—demagogues....
"Friend," thought I ....
Oh Truth!
Oh Sirius! thou brightest and nearest sun;
"Immortal man, brave General ———."
Oh Steam!

All these occur in quick succession, right at the start of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border."

Image Credit: Rita's Dog Blog

locomotive bipeds and state-room sailors

Image Credit: Steamboat Times

Point is, they should quit whining:

At the foot of these rapids was a passenger barge in tow of a steam keel-boat, with about twenty passengers, who had already waited some two weeks with Turkish resignation, for fate, or higher water, to forward them on their journey. Genius of railroads! spirit of a travelling age! Think, ye eastern locomotive bipeds, who, spirited over the earth at the rate of 600 miles a day, snarl at the grievous detention of a minute,—think of this, and learn moderation.

--Notes and Reminiscences No. 3 (Army and Navy Chronicle / July 23, 1840); and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (June 1842; 1857)

Deleted from the first page of Typee:

Oh! ye state-room sailors, who make so much ado about a fourteen-days’ passage across the Atlantic; who so pathetically relate the privations and hardships of the sea, where, after a day of breakfasting, lunching, dining off five courses, chatting, playing whist, and drinking champaign punch, it was your hard lot to be shut up in little cabinets of mahogany and maple, and sleep for ten hours, with nothing to disturb you but “ those good-for-nothing tars, shouting and tramping over head,”—what would ye say to our six months out of sight of land?

Cut by Melville along with many other expurgations, the passage above does not appear in the Revised American edition of Typee. On the likely reason for this particular deletion, Bryan C. Short observes:

Removal of the “state-room sailors” passage dispels an early belligerence out of tune with Tommo’s narrative personality in the rest of the work. --Bryan C. Short, "The Author at the Time": Tommo and Melville's Self-Discovery in Typee.

About mortgages

Scored with pencil in Herman Melville's copy of David Dudley Field's History of the County of Berkshire:

Mortgage is certain to prove in the general, what the word signifies, a death-gage to the property upon which it is fastened, and to the prosperity of the man who allows it to be fastened upon his estate.  --Melville's Marginalia Online

This book is inscribed in ink on the front flyleaf:  "H Melville. / Pittsfield July 16, 1850" According to the Documentary Note on this volume at Melville's Marginalia Online, Melville

made notes on the verso of the rear flyleaf that indicate he consulted A History throughout the 1850s, using it as a source for Israel Potter and "The Apple-Tree Table."

Prairie near the Mouth of the St. Peters - Buffalo Hunt / Seth Eastman, 1846-8
Image Credit: Minnesota Historical Society

This unerring and deadly shot after so long and pertinacious a pursuit, gave him credit with us all; until at last, we came up; and there surely lay the bull: but, strange to say, no scrutiny could discover a wound!—and soon the marvel was, how he had lived so long; he had only closed a longstanding mortgage to the crows;—the ardent hunter was not there to dispute possession!  --June 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

I'm not claiming Field's History of Berkshire inspired "mortgage to the crows," which phrase gets one (and only one?) other hit via Google Books. But Melville had the burden of mortgage on his mind after privately borrowing $2050 from T. D. Stewart in May 1851, on top of his remaining debt for the Arrowhead farm. In his essay "Damned by Dollars" (first published in the 2nd Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick; revised and condensed in the 2nd Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man) Hershel Parker examines the details of Melville's financial difficulties and their impact on his writing.

Here's a related gem from the second volume of Parker's Melville biography:

What with Maria's daily reproaches for his religious lapses, Hope's and the younger Shaws' carping criticism of his lost reputation, what with his enormous debts and his defaulting on a payment on 1 May [1852], what with the failure of The Whale and Moby-Dick after publication and the humiliating American contract for Pierre and no English contract for it at all, Melville chose to escape as best he could: he went outdoors into the Berkshire spring. --Herman Melville: A Biography, V2.110

That buffalo hunter with his pertinacious pursuit sounds kind of like a prairie Ahab.