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

Multiplying books by hand

via medievalbooks

By making copies in manuscript, the way publishing used to be done in pre-modern times before the printing press. In a dialogue on writing from Melville's Mardi (1849), the philosopher Babbalanja explains to his host King Abrazza how the great ancient writer Lombardo reluctantly "multiplied" copies of his masterpiece the "Koztanza," compelled to publish by the urgent need to feed himself and his family.

BABBALANJA.—Your Highness, even in his calmer critic moods, Lombardo was far from fancying his work. He confesses, that it ever seemed to him but scrawled copy of something within, which, do what he would, he could not completely transfer. "My canvas was small,” said he; “crowded out were hosts of things that came last. But Fate is in it.” And Fate it was, too, your Highness, which forced Lombardo, ere his work was well done, to take it off his easel, and send it to be multiplied. "Oh, that I was not thus spurred!” cried he; but like many another, in its very childhood, this poor child of mine must go out into Mardi, and get bread for its sire.”  

-- Mardi: and a Voyage Thither Vol. 2, Some Pleasant, Shady Talk in the Groves.

In a dialogue on writing from the first installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border (June 1851), the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons marvels at the incredibly rapid production and mass circulation of popular novels by means of the modern steam-powered printing press. To illustrate the staggering increase in productive capacity enabled by modern technology, he imagines (by way of contrast) English workers in the industrial cities of Birmingham and Manchester trying to manufacture or "multiply" Last of the Barons, the 1843 novel by Edward Bulwer Lytton. At best, copying by hand, the most industrious English factory workers might reproduce "one week's supply" of books in manuscript.

Could all the private wealth of England,— could all the hands of Birmingham and Manchester multiply the "Last of the Barons," for instance as in the days of the polished and literary Greeks,—in manuscript—to equal one week's supply! Published in London—and in two months a wanderer in the Rocky Mountains will pass the sultry noon, poring over its pages! Oh! Steam! —

June 1851 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; also in Part II of Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia, 1857) page 233.

How Melvillean is the narrator's conceit of factory workers or "hands" (children mostly, in those days) being tasked with publishing literary works by making handwritten copies? Very. 

Detail, 1850 letter from Herman Melville - NYPL Digital Collections

Can you send me about fifty fast-writing youths, with an easy style and not averse to polishing their labors? If you can, I wish you would, because since I have been here I have planned about that number of future works & cant find enough time to think about them separately.  -- Herman Melville, December 1850 letter to Evert Duyckinck.

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "1850-1851" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 - 1851. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/af5f4110-1793-0133-6506-58d385a7bbd

Transcribed in The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (Yale University Press, 1960).  https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84865/page/n155/mode/2up

Katie McGettigan calls this 1850 conceit "Melville's imagined fiction factory." Introducing her 2017 book on Melville's "aesthetic engagement with the material text," McGettigan points out that "Melville figures himself as a manufacturer" and thus conveys "a sense of dash and daring, a desire for the speed and scope that textual production on an industrial scale would offer, and a reveling in the superfluity of production."  Herman Melville: Modernity and the Material Text (University of New Hampshire Press, 2017) page 17.

Just six months after the "imagined fiction factory" in Melville's correspondence, Scenes Beyond the Western Border premiered in the June 1851 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger with more such "reveling in the superfluity of production":

... Published in London—and in two months a wanderer in the Rocky Mountains will pass the sultry noon, poring over its pages! Oh! Steam! 

scribblers getting defensive

They anticipate attack in conversation with a real or imagined critic:

"But some of us scribblers, My Dear Sir, always have a certain something unmanageable in us, that bids us to do this or that, and be done it must—hit or miss.” --Herman Melville, Letter to Richard Bentley, June 5 1849; page 132 in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's Correspondence

Image Credit: British Library

But here comes Frank again: well, rest is evidently not a time for dull narrative.

F. "Most industrious of scribblers, I give you good evening!"  --August 1852 - Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and  Scenes and Adventures in the Army

But now, “the morn is up again,”—and we have marched many miles fasting, and have been attracted through a turbid river by the sight of grass, and have stopped for breakfast under some cotton woods,—and in their shade I am scribbling with a pencil—  

F.—“Yes, and fine work you are making of it! The day should commence with the morning, and the brighter the better; not with the nightmare of a sleeper, who should have watched.--March 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border ["scribbling" deleted in revision of this dialogue for the 1857 book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army]

C.—   "... I scribble by no rule, and with no object but pastime; and, to compare in some future day the old with the new tone of mind."--August 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Dollars, damn!

Look how Herman Melville likes to alliterate the "d" in dollars: with damn and Devil; with diplomas; with derived and ditties:

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. --Herman Melville, 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Never mind, sir, never mind, sir; though rogues sometimes be gentlemanly; gentlemen that are gentlemen never go abroad without their diplomas. Their diplomas are their friends; and their only friends are their dollars; you have a purse-full of friends."  --Melville's Pierre, 1852

Now, the dollars derived from his ditties, these Pierre had always invested in cigars; so that the puffs which indirectly brought him his dollars were again returned, but as perfumed puffs; perfumed with the sweet leaf of Havanna.  --Pierre

Compare the examples above to this, the revised book version of the prairie dialogue that originally appeared in the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, without any reference to dollars, dealing, or dens:

Let us have a fling at the world,—the poor dollar-dealing sinners, cooped up in their great dens—" --Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Woo hoo!

Elsewhere in the original magazine version our Captain of U. S. Dragoons has been thinking of dollars--and in connection with writing and publishing, as the following passage shows:

" What is written, may always chance to be printed, if not read: how charming then to the busy denizens of the world, whose very brains have received an artificial mould, to read such incident! Now if I could only introduce the word 'dollar,' — good heavens! it was never heard here before! 

--July 1852, Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Don't think Melville only ever speaks of plural dollars:

 And who will refuse, what Turk or Dyak even, his own little dollar for sweet charity's sake?  --The Confidence-Man

Or that our Captain of U. S. Dragoons only employs the singular dollar:

Imaginary Friend. — You are wandering again. What could have caused that strange circle in the grass there? — it is forty feet across, and, sure enough, it is of the rank sun-flower.

"Why, my friend, if you were imaginative you could people it with the fairies which have been frightened from the continent by the clink of gold, and have here found refuge—pretty far too from the sound of dollars."  -- June 1851 installment and Scenes and Adventures

For further consideration of that passage on dollar-dealers which appears only in the book version, see previous Dragooned posts on

• dollar-dealing sinners as the Duyckincks
• Den Koopman
• Flings at the World