Billy Budd
But Billy Budd when will these rough sailors get what Moby Dick is all about?
Gen.1:1
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth.
1in principio creavit Deus
caelum et terram
1Au
commencement, Dieu créa les cieux et la terre.
1Nel
principio DIO creò i cieli e la terra.
1No princípio criou
Deus os céus e a terra.
1Im Anfang schuf Gott die Himmel und die
Erde.
1En el principio creó Dios los cielos y la tierra.
1В начале сотворил Бог небо и
землю.
1La început, Dumnezeu a făcut cerurile şi pământul.
Moby Dick
But Billy Budd when these rough sailors get what Moby Dick is all about?
"While such distortions are necessarily present in any attempt to reconstruct any kind of private feeling, investigations into queer history bear a particularly heavy burden of proof. For example, if we know that both Melville and Hawthorne were each married to women, and we can infer that both had enough sex with those women to have fathered good-sized 19th-century families, then it would seem that whatever Melville’s one-sided exuberance for Hawthorne amounts to, it is probably not homosexuality in the typical sense. Most historiographic conventions privilege such biographical facts over the fugitive expressions of feeling that one finds in Melville’s review of or letters to Hawthorne. This smaller evidence of dick jokes is no match for the abundant evidence of both men’s public lives. "
The translators recognized in verse 26 that Elohim—"God"—was speaking to somebody, and He was speaking to someone who was just like Him, which is why the word Us is used. They were forced into using a plural pronoun. "Let Us make man in Our image." In fact, Elohim is used 66 times in a row at the beginning of the Bible before any other Hebrew word is translated into the English "God." That occurs in Genesis 6:5 when finally another word is used for God.
Even before leaving the
first verse, a serious student of the Bible is confronted with a
difficulty—unless he is willing to believe what the Bible consistently shows
from the beginning to the end. The fourth word in the Bible is "God,"
Elohim in Hebrew. But that takes some explaining. Elohim
is God—plural. "In the beginning Gods created the heaven and
the earth." For an English-speaking person, this is confirmed in Genesis
1:26, where the translators finally used plural pronouns to conform
to the plural noun antecedent, Elohim.
The translators recognized in
verse 26 that Elohim—"God"—was speaking to somebody, and He
was speaking to someone who was just like Him, which is why the word Us
is used. They were forced into using a plural pronoun. "Let Us make
man in Our image." In fact, Elohim is used 66 times in a row at the
beginning of the Bible before any other Hebrew word is translated into the
English "God." That occurs in Genesis
6:5 when finally another word is used for God.
Someone reading this
beginning in Hebrew would have to be impressed that the author of this book was
trying to get something across to the reader that "Gods"
(plural) did everything—not an individual but a least two. Elohim is
used in the Old Testament 2,570 times, and every usage is plural—"Gods."
As shown by this plurality,
the God Family clearly consists of more than one Being, or more than one
Person or Personality.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Nature of God: Elohim
DECEMBER 15, 2015
“ALREADY I FEEL that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul,” exults Herman Melville, in an anonymous 1850 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story collection Mosses from an Old Manse. Hawthorne, Melville breathlessly continues, “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 sentences burst with erotic double entendres that only the most willfully tone-deaf modern reader could miss. His homoerotic images leave so little to our contemporary sexual imaginary that they’re almost inelegant. The argot of 2015 abounds in more linguistically concise ways of explaining the same point. One might casually say, for example, that Melville wanted to
bottom Hawthorne so hard.
In less casual registers, however, one sometimes strains for what to say about Melville and Hawthorne’s relationship. Was it love? Lust? Something else? Melville’s review is often enough discussed, because Melville and Hawthorne’s relationship draws together two of 19th-century America’s currently revered authors, and the review is thus routinely anthologized in undergraduate-friendly places like the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
But if you think back to American Lit 101, you almost certainly learned about the desire this review expresses in the demure idiom of friendship. Scholars and teachers are hesitant to expound much more — to speculate, in the austere registers of literary criticism, about a possible sexual connection or attraction between these two canonical authors. Ultimately, we have no idea whether Melville and Hawthorne had sex. Despite the suggestive explicitness of texts like Melville’s review, scholars lack the evidence to definitively conclude what Melville and Hawthorne felt about each other, or what they did about those feelings.
Part of the problem is that writers of the mid-19th century did not have available to them the same expressive concision as those of us today who might speak glibly of topping and bottoming. Though in 1850, some men did pursue the kinds of social and erotic lives that historically anticipated the ones we now call “gay,” neither Melville nor Hawthorne was among them — both were married to women and lived what seem like “straight” lives. Sure, those two might have eventually pursued dalliances on the side, as some functionally heterosexual married men, then as now, surely did. But any such dalliances cannot be what Melville’s erotic metaphors refer to, at least in this letter, if only for reasons of chronology: the two men did not meet until 5 August 1850, three weeks after the publication of Melville’s tantalizing review.
If then we are concerned with Melville and Hawthorne’s relationship — if we believe it will tell us something about these two authors, or about American literature, or about, perhaps most compellingly, the history of desire — we have no access to that desire itself. All we are left with are representations of Melville’s feelings, tantalizingly expressed without being particularly easy to pinpoint. Melville wrote of Hawthorne with undeniably sexy language. What proves more elusive are the feelings to which, with any precision, this language can be said to refer.
Careful readers scan Melville’s prose for glimpses of the unconscious desires he may have buried there. This work, though not exact, is often a lot of fun. The prose style of much of Melville’s writing is effusive, metaphor-rich, and expansive — given the language of the review quoted above, one is tempted to say, tumescent. Whether or not we agree on that last adjective, it is arguably worthy of a writer who was never shy about tucking bawdy jokes into even his most serious contemplations. Like Moby-Dick. As in “dick.”
Are jokes different than reviews, than letters, than literature? Do they imply a different kind of intentionality — a different kind of access to desire? If the reference points for bawdy jokes and double entendres could be fixed, once and for all, then we might learn something we don’t already know about the nature of Melville’s and Hawthorne’s feelings. For scholars trying to reconstruct the more elusive details of their relationship, Melville’s dick jokes, properly understood, may supply evidence that no other source can confirm or deny. These jokes could become the kind of documentary sources that form the building blocks of any historical reconstruction, literary or otherwise.
The issue, then, is whether serious scholars writing about famous authors can reasonably deign to take dick jokes as evidence. And if we are indeed willing to take them as evidence, just how do we go about determining what kind of evidence they are?
¤
Whether Melville ever found Hawthorne’s penetrating powers to be corporeal as well as intellectual remains a detail lost to history. That Melville’s writings were not also lost to history is almost an accident. When he died in September 1891, Melville had long since switched careers and had not published a novel in almost 35 years. His surviving family — especially his widow, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Shaw Melville, and his cousin Catherine “Kate” Gansevoort Lansing — did what they could to preserve and promote the memory of his art. Their task was continued by the next generations of women in the family, and when university professors began to take an interest in Melville after the centenary of his birth in 1919, it was his youngest daughter’s oldest daughter, Eleanor Melville Thomas Metcalf, who retained possession of his papers, including the manuscript of his final, unpublished tale, Billy Budd.
The first generation of Melville scholars spared little attention for these women’s saving labors. Instead, in their efforts to establish Melville’s greatness, they only had eyes for Hawthorne. It was Hawthorne, after all, who worked in the greatest modern literary form, the novel, and it was Hawthorne who chose America and American history as his theme. It was Hawthorne whose works had never been out of print, whose style inspired the next generation of realist writers, whose biography had been penned by Henry James. And, by a wonderful coincidence, it was Hawthorne to whom Melville dedicated Moby-Dick — “In token of my admiration for his genius.” If Hawthorne, who had never been forgotten, could be associated with his friend Melville, who had nearly been eclipsed, surely that eclipse was an awful mistake. Their relationship was copiously documented during the so-called “Melville revival” of the 1920s — the publishing events that returned his works to print and the scholarly endeavors that cemented his literary reputation. The scholars’ eyes for Hawthorne became silently, totally Melville’s eyes for Hawthorne.
Though thereby tainted by something like projection, the documentation the scholars marshaled was nonetheless powerful. It rested mostly on Melville’s letters. At the height of their friendship, during the period in 1850–1851 when Melville was writing Moby-Dick, he was writing to Hawthorne as well. These letters are rich in metaphor and guileless in their meanderings, giving their reader glimpses of feelings that often look astonishingly unguarded. Scholars seized on them for what they could be said to detail about Melville’s state of mind during the composition of his masterpiece. But as later readers have gradually accepted, such interpretations are a little like standing in the Sistine Chapel only to measure the height of the ceiling. It is the musing and poetic artistry of these letters that ranks them among Melville’s most extraordinary works. For example, an epistle from 17(?) November 1851, responding to Hawthorne’s praise of Moby-Dick, reads in part:
Your letter was handed me last night on the road going to Mr. Morewood’s, and I read it there. Had I been at home, I would have sat down at once and answered it. In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous — catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can’t write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then — your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome’s Pantheon. It is a strange feeling — no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content — that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.
Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips — lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. Now, sympathizing with the paper, my angel turns over another page. You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book — and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul. Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon, — the familiar, — and recognized the sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes.
In paratactic sentences whose images twist almost indiscriminately from metaphor to metaphor, Melville finds himself interpenetrated with Hawthorne, sharing a single heart beating in a single bosom, belonging to either of them, or to God. If these paragraphs appertain to any genre, it is surely that of the love letter. And so if early Melville scholars imagined that Melville desired the affiliation with Hawthorne that the scholars themselves were all too eager to pronounce, who can blame them? What Melville expressed to Hawthorne was, to say the least, “not of an incidental feeling.”
¤
The record of any great love affair teases posterity with its incompleteness. Lovers feel more than they can express, and they express more than they preserve. It falls upon historians and biographers to piece together what is missing and not to despair of the likelihood that the most private, the most deeply felt expressions are what is lost.
The problem in this particular case, however, is that the documentation of Melville and Hawthorne’s friendship is uncommonly partial. Indeed, what is missing from the Melville-Hawthorne correspondence is Hawthorne’s entire side of it. His letters to Melville were lost or possibly destroyed, either by Melville or by someone into whose custody they fell. Only 12 letters exist from their correspondence, 11 of which were written by Melville, and all of which were written in the space of two years. The 12th, written half by Hawthorne and half by his wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, was discovered in 1983 in an upstate New York barn. In it, Hawthorne betrays only the emotions that appropriately accompany asking someone to go to the post office for you. Melville’s expressions of feeling to and for Hawthorne are extraordinary. They are also, so far as the extant letters reveal, entirely one-sided.
The fact that we have no evidence for what Hawthorne felt raises the somewhat awkward question of whether we have enough evidence about what Melville felt. His letters to Hawthorne are the most stunning of those of his that still exist. But there is every reason to suppose that Melville wrote many more letters than those that still exist. Having died near the nadir of his fame, Melville’s letters and papers did not find their posthumous home assembled in the neat catalogs of rare-book libraries, but instead moldered for years in disparate locations, including a tin box in Eleanor Metcalf’s attic. (The chief exception are the Melville letters that numbered incidentally among the family records that his cousin Kate bequeathed in 1919 to the New York Public Library, which, subsequent to the Melville revival of the 1920s, amassed one of the most significant collections of Melville’s papers. True to the pre-revival conditions of their provenance, this collection is not named the Herman Melville Papers but the Gansevoort-Lansing Papers.) Among collectors and scholars alike, Melville’s correspondence was not sought, was not valuable. Common sense dictates that aggravatingly large numbers of not-valuable things might fall to dust in the three decades between a writer’s death and his scholarly revival.
When Melville’s literary fortunes did begin to change definitively toward the mid-20th century, collecting, editing, and publishing his correspondence became a small cottage industry for scholars of American literature. These efforts eventually culminated in an authoritative edition of Melville’s Correspondence, published in 1993, which included a total of 313 letters and an impressive textual apparatus noting when letters received by Melville or his correspondents make mention of missives written by Melville (those, for example, to which they are responding) that are as yet unlocated. While the actual number of missing or destroyed letters is a matter for pure speculation, the incompleteness of this posthumously assembled corpus comes into relief with simple arithmetic: 313 letters would mean that on average Melville wrote fewer than six letters a year for every year of his adult life. For a 19th-century literary man and head of household, even double that figure is improbably small.
The smallness of this figure means, quite simply, that posterity is almost certainly missing most of Melville’s letters. So much is probably missing that it’s anybody’s guess whether the letters that do still exist are representative or anomalous. In much the same way that a single fossil can reveal the existence of a whole new species, an undiscovered Melville letter could perhaps show that he sometimes felt tepid toward Hawthorne, or, indeed, that he sometimes felt exuberant toward other correspondents. The effusive tone of an existing May 1850 letter to novelist Richard Henry Dana already holds in the estimation of many scholars a distant second place to the Hawthorne letters for what it suggests about Melville’s feelings. (Reading Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, Melville was, he writes to Dana, “tied & welded to you by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy.”) How many letters like the one to Dana are missing?
Yawning absence isn’t the only thing that makes Melville’s correspondence inconclusive, however. Were a box containing dozens of new Melville letters discovered tomorrow, what they told us would still be a matter for some exposition. If Melville’s letters to Hawthorne are striking for what we might summarize as their exuberance, it remains to be determined whether that exuberance represents the truth of Melville’s feelings. The additional evidence dozens of new letters could provide would surely help that determination. But no such determination is ever final. Letters, like all kinds of writing, have a way of offering imperfect distillations of deeply felt emotion. Melville himself seems to have known as much: “In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous — catch them while you can.”
Melville’s statement could serve as an epigram not only for feelings, but also for the work of literary historians who must reconstruct them. It offers an especially poignant summary for the challenges of writing queer literary history, one of whose enduring difficulties is a scarcity of evidence. Two men may have loved one another, but love, however powerfully felt, doesn’t archive well. Scholars are left instead to reconstruct other people’s relationships and feelings and desires and pleasures from the fragments that blow across the Maginot Line our modern world calls privacy. Letters are prized among such fragments, for their circumscribed audiences and the ephemeral occasions of their composition make them precisely the kinds of representations that promise to record private moments for historians’ prying eyes. Those same qualities that authorize the privacy of letters, however, also render them unofficial records. The ephemerality of letters makes them only loose guides; the fact that they are representations only exacerbates the problem.
¤
Though Melville’s private letters prove frustratingly inconclusive, his public dick jokes curiously endured. Indeed, Melville’s dick jokes probably did much more for his posthumous reputation than most later scholars would admit. Melville’s pre-revival readers did not have the benefit of reading his letters, but many of them picked up on the queer vibes of Melville’s prose all the same. To choose a few examples: sexologist Havelock Ellis (credited with the first English use of the word homosexual) corresponded with Melville in the last years of the latter’s life; the editions of Melville’s early novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) that his widow brought back into print in 1893 were passed from hand to hand in some of New York’s nascent homosexual communities; Hart Crane penned “At Melville’s Tomb” in 1926, in a complex tribute to a queer literary predecessor (even the most attentive Melville scholars would not take his poetry seriously until decades later); Benjamin Britten and E.M. Forster collaborated on a 1951 opera based on Melville’s most exquisitely homoerotic tale, Billy Budd (c. 1891, pub. 1924); and Roger Austen’s post-Stonewall, labor-of-love critical study, Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (1977) seated Melville at the head of its literary tradition. None of these men were academically credentialed as post-revival Melville scholars were. But all of them built artistic and intellectual homes out of Melville’s dick jokes, whose referent, as the 20th century wore on, ever more clearly became legible as the modern version of homosexuality.
We have now arrived at the moment in the story where an attentive historian would remind us of the likelihood that such a coming-into-legibility may be a distortion. To be sure, the antebellum US had both a high tolerance for male-male eroticism and a largely unpunishing naïveté about the homoerotic subcultures that were beginning to take shape in its urban settings. Melville’s letters accordingly speak in terms of an unflinching eroticism that may not entirely have meant, in the moment of its articulation, what it came to mean for readers more than a century later. For all kinds of reasons, it may be historically irresponsible to mistake Melville’s exuberant words to Hawthorne for the kinds of things one perhaps dreams of hearing whispered in one’s ear in a backroom at The Eagle on a Wednesday. This is the moment in the story, in other words, where we are reminded that dick jokes aren’t transhistorical, aren’t the kind of thing that serious scholars can make much of, aren’t, in short, evidence.
If there is a case to be made for Melville’s dick jokes, however, it inheres in the sizable number of Melville’s readers who have seemed to feel something about them. Dick jokes may not traditionally count as scholarly evidence, but evidence is sifted and meanings are made in communities other than scholarly ones. And it was these non-scholarly communities (of turn-of-the-century homosexuals who kept alive Melville’s reputation, as well as the women of the family who preserved Melville’s papers and republished his texts) whose labors many scholars have failed to keep in focus. Both Melville’s female relatives and his queer admirers were initially represented at academic meetings and in publications as scholars began to take over the enterprises of preservation and recovery. And then, gradually, both camps were edged out by the social and intellectual priorities of masculinity and heterosexuality that asserted themselves with the force of weaponized normalcy in the post–World War II decades of academic boomtime. The story of Melville’s recovery that scholars and textbooks now repeat typically begins with the 1921 publication of Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, the critical-biographical study that is said to have launched the Melville revival. The story that scholars tell, in other words, begins with scholars.
Such a narrative endures, even as the queers and the women once edged out of custodial and interpretive responsibility for Melville’s works have found their way back to them and pronounced the significance of his sexier words. Studies like Robert K. Martin’s pathbreaking Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (1985), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s magisterial Epistemology of the Closet (1990), or indeed Harold Beaver’s unjustly forgotten 1981 essay “Homosexual Signs,” all put the vernacular knowledge available to and safeguarded by Melville’s early readers to legitimate scholarly ends. The appearance of this work was deservedly hailed as cutting edge, but largely because by the 1980s so few people recognized that these discoveries were once, in other quarters, known.
It is not easy to write history without distortions, not least because no writing happens unaffected by forces that will in the future become someone else’s history. Queer readers overvaluing Melville’s dick jokes, whether now or at the turn of the century, may indeed distort the historical referents of those jokes by aligning them with modern homosexuality. Yet some amount of wishful projection always colors even the most responsible historical interpretations — a fact already suggested by the early Melville scholars who used his friendship with Hawthorne to justify the recovery of his works. Distortion is the inevitable double of interpretation. Distortion is a record of how things that happen in history — which is to say, a record of how everything — feels.
While such distortions are necessarily present in any attempt to reconstruct any kind of private feeling, investigations into queer history bear a particularly heavy burden of proof. For example, if we know that both Melville and Hawthorne were each married to women, and we can infer that both had enough sex with those women to have fathered good-sized 19th-century families, then it would seem that whatever Melville’s one-sided exuberance for Hawthorne amounts to, it is probably not homosexuality in the typical sense. Most historiographic conventions privilege such biographical facts over the fugitive expressions of feeling that one finds in Melville’s review of or letters to Hawthorne. This smaller evidence of dick jokes is no match for the abundant evidence of both men’s public lives.
And yet the jokes sit there on the page. Even if we are not sure what these jokes refer to — and I cannot with any finality tell you — we readers of Melville are faced with the choice between ignoring something we don’t understand or recognizing at least that its presence complicates the conclusions (about Melville, about Hawthorne, about 19th-century sexuality and friendship, about letter writing) at which we may too hastily have arrived. Dick jokes provide an obscure kind of evidence, but it is evidence just the same. Indeed, their obscurity may be the very reason why they can begin to tell us something we don’t already know.
¤
AUGUST 18, 2013
The Library Foundation of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Public Library are launching a month-long celebration of Moby Dick
, a way to encourage readers “to discover or rediscover the great literary masterpiece,Moby Dick
, through the lens of the modern and equally mythical Southern California state of mind.” Over 8o events city-wide, whale watching, a twitter contest and more (details at whateverhappenedtomobydick.org). We asked novelist, critic, essayist, and editor William Giraldi for this piece on Melville, reading, and writing to help kick it off.
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IN THE GENERAL RARE BOOKS COLLECTION at Princeton University Library sits a stunning two-volume edition of John Milton that once belonged to Herman Melville. Melville’s tremendous debt to Milton — and to Homer, Virgil, the Bible, and Shakespeare — might be evident to anyone who has wrestled with the moral and intellectual complexity that lends Moby Dick its immortal heft, but to see Melville’s marginalia in his 1836 Poetical Works of John Milton is to understand just how intimately the author of the great American novel engaged with the author of the greatest poem in English. Checkmarks, underscores, annotations, and Xs reveal the passages in Paradise Lost and other poems that would have such a determining effect on Melville’s own work.
Captain Ahab, that vengeful seeker puffed with “fatal pride,” simply could not have been imagined without Milton’s Satan, paragon of seditiousness and the heroic sublime. Both tragic heroes are solipsists and madmen who believe that God is an ill-mannered lunatic undeserving of his reign, and yet both evoke our best sympathy in their epic struggles. Ahab knows he is as “proud as Lucifer” and “damned in the midst of Paradise,” and he shares Satan’s mytho-maniacal poeticism: “I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.”
Like Shelley and Blake, Melville was charmed by the individualism and heroic striving of Milton’s Satan, and he imbued Ahab with the same sense of outsized self-mythologizing. His rereading of Paradise Lost during the composition of Moby Dick significantly altered the novel’s meaning and mythic scope. The extraordinary fact is that as late as 1849 (Moby Dick was published in 1851), Melville had yet to conceive of Captain Ahab and was focused instead on the non-epic bildungsroman of a shipmate called Ishmael. Take Milton’s Satan away from Melville and you can forget about the earthshaking achievement of Moby Dick.
In his biography of Melville, Andrew Delbanco contends that Melville’s “immersion” in great writers at this time “lifted him to a new level of epic ambition.” Delbanco gives particular attention not only to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but to Dryden’s seminal translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, which Melville also reread during the writing of Moby Dick. After that “encounter” with the Aeneid, Delbanco writes, Melville “found himself recapitulating Virgil’s story of a haunted mariner voyaging out to avenge a grievous loss.” In other words: a vigorous rereading of epics vivified his creation of the most compelling quester in the American canon.
Delbanco’s use of “recapitulate” stresses the reality that Moby Dick was not born in a vacuum, that Melville’s genius, his far-reaching metaphysical vision, required the verbal and allegorical acumen of the great books. He was incapable of reading one classic without relating it to another — in his edition of Chapman’s Homer he scrawled lines he preferred from Pope’s Homer — or else contemplating how he himself would render the same material. Immersed in Virgil, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, he recreated those myths and human truths for 19th century America, and in doing so, made them his own. As Hershel Parker emphasizes in his meticulous two-volume biography, “Melville was not reading in order to acquire knowledge for its own sake,” but rather, “his evident purpose in reading epics of Western civilization was to learn how to write.”
Melville remains one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books, someone who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.
¤
How might Melville react to today’s writers’ conferences and creative writing workshops in which so many have no usable knowledge of literary tradition and are mostly mere weekend readers of in-vogue books? An untold number of Americans will finish a book manuscript this year, and the mind-numbing majority of them will be confected by nonreaders. How can a nonreader imagine himself an author, the creator of an artifact that he himself admittedly would have no interest in? Can you fathom an architect who’s not fond of impressive buildings, or a violinist who has never listened to music? The erroneous assumption among the multitude is that writing doesn’t demand specialized skills. In The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis offers this explanation why so many wish to “join in” the game of literature: “Because words (unlike palettes and pianos) lead a double life: we all have a competence.”
The Austrian journalist Karl Kraus, an aphorist as scathingly accurate as Oscar Wilde and H.L. Mencken, once quipped: “So many people write because they lack the character not to.” By “character” Kraus meant the good sense to know that not every story is worth telling; not everyone can muster the intellectual, emotional, and narrative equipment needed to succeed as a novelist. But the abracadabra of the internet has transformed us into a society of berserk scribblers; now anyone can have a public voice and spew his middling stories and thoughts at will. Forget that blog is just one letter away from bog, or that the passel of burgeoning “literary” websites is largely a harvest of inanity with only the most tenuous hold on actual literature. Our capacity for untamed, ceaseless communication has convinced us that we have something priceless to say. Amis maintains that “democratization” via the internet “has made one inalienable gain: equality of the sentiments.” He paraphrases Gore Vidal: “Nowadays, nobody’s feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else’s.” Our every precious notion must be broadcast for consumption, tweeted or emailed or posted for attention, otherwise the validity of our existence withers. See me, hear me, all the time.
But we Americans have once again confused the incessant with the important, and somewhere along the line millions of our citizens have taken the illogical leap from being able to sign their names and send an email to the belief that they can write novels, which is rather like deciding to swim the English Channel simply because you’re able to take a bath. They haven’t realized that just as a successful violinist must train her ear in Bach or Stéphane Grappelli, a successful novelist must spend decades training herself in canonical literature. When Samuel Johnson said that “the greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,” he wasn’t exaggerating.
Everyone knows Flannery O’Connor’s barb against MFA programs — they cultivate the mediocre and banal — but less well-known is a line from her superb essay on the Southern grotesque: “The writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.” The great Allan Gurganus tells the story of his first days studying with John Cheever at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the mid-1970s, and how astounded he was to find that his fellow students hadn’t read Cheever’s imperishable work: “When I asked one kid what he thought of our teacher’s brilliant stories, the kid [. . .] replied, ‘I don’t want to be influenced.’ I longed to pat the back of his hand and say, ‘Risk it!’” Near the beginning of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot, one of his central characters says, “Books aren’t about ‘real life.’ Books are about other books.”
If potent writers are by nature a narcissistic lot — if, as Lionel Trilling asserted, referring to Mailer, Bellow, and Malamud, potent writers must “insist on being the center of their universe” — then novice writers who believe they have no need of canonical literature suffer from narcissism’s less effective family members: presumptuousness and self-satisfaction. Their contented delusions about the punch of their own unaided literary powers is a species of audacity with no corollary in other art forms. A ballet dancer who did not apprentice himself raw would never expect to perform in Carnegie Hall, and yet untrained, poorly read writers everywhere are scratching down novels with high hopes of triumph. The vainglorious enterprise of every writer warrants the humbling that first-rate reading provides — it tempers the strut and pomp of the ego’s brash aim.
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If you’ve ever been to a writers’ conference for aspiring authors you might have noticed a ruck of attendees eyeing retirement and praying for a bestseller, or a contingent of troubled twenty-somethings who have been bamboozled by second-raters such as Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski and have arrived to molest you with spontaneous prose which ought to remain incarcerated inside their diaries. You might have glimpsed manuscripts choking on either the toxic stupidity of Tom Clancy or the vapid bathos of Nicholas Sparks. Manuscripts defaced by cliché — the end of the world, a summertime love affair, another young guy’s proud struggle with drugs — doodled by individuals who love Harry Potter and the belching of George R. R. Martin but can’t be bothered by anything more substantive or adult. Always sentences with the totter of a starved hobo. And always the same intimation of why these new writers will not have a relationship with the best literature: because quality reading is difficult, but writing is pleasurable.
Over the last several years, at conferences around the country — from Florida to Utah to New Jersey to Massachusetts to Maine — I’ve been repeatedly astonished by how many attendees genuinely enjoy the act of writing. For me the process has always been maddening at best and soul-strangling at worst. Those who don’t find writing a slow, excruciating endeavor aren’t doing it right — like climbing K2, if it isn’t difficult, someone’s carrying you. Sheridan wrote, “Easy writing’s curst hard reading,” and Samuel Johnson believed that “what is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” Your sentences should be a constant source of disappointment and dread, a reminder of the regretful inadequacy of all language and how bloodily you must labor for emotional truth, intellectual assertion, and le mot juste. Joseph Epstein once wrote that “to be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment.”
When asked, Hemingway never failed to stress how anguished the writing process must be. The author of the most honest stories in the American canon knew that honesty in prose gets fought for in the trenches because the human being’s default mode is self-deception. From this knowledge came his memorable advice that every writer should “develop a built-in bullshit detector,” one capable of catching boy wizards and other flagrant bromides. Barry Hannah once told some writing students that their ghastly work was not deserving of even “an elegant trash can.”
Unread dopes become wealthy, semi-famous authors — the bestseller list has testified to this from the start. And swarms of the uninitiated are taking stabs at their own books because each Sunday afternoon they curl up with lobotomized bestsellers that make writing a book seem as effortless as linking paperclips. Sit down with Middlemarch and The Sound and the Fury instead of Jodi Picoult or Dan Brown and you’ll see you have quite the mountain path to hike before your own words are ready for the world.
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Despite their absurd private yearning for fortune and a fan club, people want to write books for the same reason they want to have children: to be remembered, to contribute a shard of themselves to the swirling madness of the world. But that impact and remembrance won’t happen unless their books are aesthetically meaningful and tightly made, unless they consist of Keatsian beauty and truth. Anemic novels written without anguished toil will vanish into the abyss because time has a reliable knack for promoting what matters and forgetting what doesn’t. And the only way to have any hope of birthing a novel that matters is through an abiding dialogue with literature, an unflagging religious immersion in the great books—not reading as another distraction or emotional indulgence, but reading as formal study, as intellectual nourishment. If you see in Keats only ejaculation of emotion and not the perfection of craft then you aren’t really seeing Keats at all.
“The true artist,” Wilde wrote, “is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything.” One of the most naturally gifted intellects of the 19th century, Wilde nevertheless had the modesty to know that without a commitment to literature his genius would always be an adolescent. If Melville depended upon the Western epics to augment his adventure and provide the language-stimulus for his own literature, Wilde, like Emily Dickinson, seems to have needed no adventure at all, only reading. Many novice old-timers get ensnared in that fallacy, confusing their having had a full life with their ability to write a fully functional novel, while whippersnappers of every ilk spend a summer in the Orient because they believe that being in an interesting place will make them interesting people. Think of all those dippy authors’ bios which proudly declare that X has held dozens of jobs, from the esoteric (circus clown and train conductor) to the painfully quotidian (bartender and construction worker), as if having worked at peculiar and menial labor — or, worse, as if simply living in Brooklyn — ipso facto deems him a skilled writer. It does not.
Francis Bacon hit upon this idea of fullness as far back as 1625, in an essay called “Of Studies.” He wrote: “Reading maketh a full man […] and writing an exact man.” That formulation from reading to writing is vital: one goes from full to exact, not the reverse. Exactitude cannot be achieved without fullness first, and fullness for the writer means an education in literature, not a Hemingway-inspired romp through the African bush. Followers of the Hemingway model conveniently ignore that in addition to being an adventurer he was also one of the best-read writers of his generation; he understood that he needed to grapple with Turgenev and Tolstoy to come into his own and fashion art for the ages — he understood that his own personal story, his own mere experience, wasn’t enough.
In his 1940 essay called “The Cult of Experience,” Philip Rahv memorably dispatched that genus of American writer who promiscuously indulges in his own experience without recourse “to ideas generally, to theories of value, to the wit of the speculative and problematical, and to that new-fashioned sense of irony which at once expresses and modulates the conflicts in modern belief.” In other words: moral, social, and spiritual imagination is sacrificed to the precious immersion in one’s own biography. Rahv goes on to prefer Henry James’s “expansion of life beyond its primitive needs” to Hemingway’s “bedazzlement by sheer experience,” but does acknowledge that writers “less gifted” than Hemingway “have come to grief through this same creative psychology” — the inadequate creative psychology that says your own life story is all you’ll ever need to write important books. Writers who believe this, says Rahv, “have produced work so limited to the recording of the unmistakably and recurrently real that it can truly be said of them that their art ends exactly where it should properly begin.”
Art must pass through art to realize itself and endure. What is Harold Bloom’s notorious theory of “the anxiety of influence” if not a command that we become wiser readers, wiser lovers of poetic tradition, Sherlock-Holmesian text detectives? For Bloom, every “strong” poet is engaged in psychic “agon” with a strong poet who came before because every strong poet unconsciously knows he is “belated,” too late to be original. “Without Tennyson’s reading of Keats,” Bloom writes, “we would have almost no Tennyson.” As on Darwin’s battlefield, agon leads to evolution. An animal’s struggle for survival eventually builds a better beast. A writer’s struggle with classics eventually builds a better book.
Critic Harry Levin wrote this in 1957: “The novelist must begin by playing the sedulous ape, assimilating the craft of his predecessors; but he does not master his own form until he has somehow exposed and surpassed them.” To master and surpass: this is the purpose, the pursuit of every novelist. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot believed the same: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance . . . is the appreciation of his relationship to the dead poets and artists.” So if you’re preparing to author the next great social novel and you haven’t studiedStendhal, James, and Austen’s half-dozen, you might have better luck with badminton.
Would Cervantes and Shakespeare have made their masterworks if they hadn’t been devoted readers? Perhaps. But I hope it goes without saying that the rest of us aren’t Cervantes and Shakespeare. Try to imagine a teenager who never read an important book and yet produced a novel as permanent as Middlemarch. It cannot be done. Literature isn’t music or painting; there are no idiot savants in literature. Of course quality reading never assures success on your own pages. Judging from his latest insult to trees, Dan Brown has apparently tried to read Dante, and yet his sentences are still stacked like so many corpses. Still, quality reading is the only chance born writers have of succeeding in the creation of art.
Out at sea for many perilous months at a time, holed up in cramped quarters, Melville took with him on those voyages only the necessities. And among those necessities were always scores of books, the deathless classics of Western literature that were as critical to him as the rations and water that would keep him healthy. So put down your pen awhile. Pick up Moby Dick.
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