Tuesday, January 01, 2019

The Garnett Family (1): Richard, Edward et al.



Sir Leslie Ward: Richard Garnett (1895)


They certainly were a remarkable clan. And what better way to start off the New Year than with some bibliographical reflections on all these Garnetts, young and old?

I'm in the rather unusual position of having encountered the eldest of them first, in multiple adolescent readings and rereadings of Richard Garnett's entertaining short story collection The Twilight of the Gods (1888).



Richard Garnett: The Twilight of the Gods (1888)


Let's start with him, then. Richard Garnett (1835-1906) was, in the succinct words of his wikipedia entry, "a scholar, librarian, biographer and poet" - distinguished in each of those fields. Mainly, though, he spent half a century, from 1851 to 1899, working in the Reading Room of the British Museum, first as an assistant, and finally in the top job as "keeper of printed books."



Carolyn A. Heilbrun: The Garnett Family (1961)


Mind you, this choice of career was already a bit of a family affair. His father, also called Richard Garnett (1789-1850), also worked in the British Museum. His main distinction was as a philologist, though he also penned some attacks on the then-current Roman Catholic theory of miracles.

So what's so entertaining about The Twilight of the Gods? T. E. Lawrence wrote of it, in his preface to the 1924 edition:
The scholarship in these tales is beautiful: so deep, so unobtrusive, so easy and exact ... It wants no learning to enjoy the Twilight of the Gods; but the more learning you have, the more odd corners and hidden delights you will find in it.

The Gods are the main element. Poisons, the science of toxins, are perhaps third element. Second place, I think, falls to black magic. Here again, so far as my competence extends, Dr. Garnett is serious. His spells are real, his sorcery accurate, according to the best dark-age models. His curious mind must have found another escape from the reading-desk in the attempts of our ancestors to see through the veil of flesh, downwards.
"It will be a tough business," observed the sorcerer. "It will require fumigations."
"Yes," said the bishop, "and suffumigations."
"Aloes and mastic," advised the sorcerer.
"Aye," assented the bishop, "and red sanders."
"We must call in Primeumaton," said the warlock.
"Clearly," said the bishop, "and Amioram."
"Triangles," said the sorcerer.
"Pentacles," said the bishop.
"In the hour of Methon," said the sorcerer.
"I should have thought Tafrac," suggested the bishop, "but I defer to your better judgment."
"I can have the blood of a goat?" queried the wizard.
"Yes," said the bishop, "and of a monkey also."
"Does your Lordship think that one might venture to go so far as a little unweaned child?"
"If absolutely necessary," said the bishop.
"I am delighted to find such liberality of sentiment on your Lordship’s part," said the sorcerer. "Your Lordship is evidently of the profession."
It seems to me that the learned Doctor would have been in some danger, too, if the nineteenth century had been the ninth or the seventeenth.
"Yet they say it never sold," was Lawrence's reluctant conclusion. It has always remained a bit of a secret vice for many readers: a complex set of stories which, in aggregate, emphasise all the untrodden byways of the Greek and Roman classics: the bits forbidden to public schoolboys, who might find them just a bit too interesting.



Peter Koch: Map of Poictesme (1898)


As for their legacy, I think it's pretty obvious that James Branch Cabell must have read them. His imaginary kingdom of Poictesme, the setting for such works as Jurgen (1919) and Figures of Earth (1921) is not dissimilar in style or attitude (though more self-consciously erotic, certainly). They no doubt influenced Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, too - a heritage of the comic fantasy narrative which culminates in contemporary masters such as Terry Pratchett and Jack Vance.



Richard Garnett, ed.: Original Poetry by Victor & Cazire (1898)


The influence of Richard Garnett's stories at the time can be seen directly in Kenneth Grahame, Lord Dunsany, and a number of other writers who came to prominence in the 1890s. As for his other writings - his rich crop of editions of Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, and a host of other authors, his translations from myriad languages, and his own original poetry - these have faded with time, but The Twilight of the Gods will, I think it's safe to say, continue to be read.



George Jefferson: Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature (1982)


As for the rather surprising literary dynasty he founded, the first truly notable member of it is undoubtedly his son, Edward Garnett (1868-1937), famous not so much in his own right, as for his Max Perkins-like influence on an impressive set of early twentieth century geniuses: D. H. Lawrence, certainly, but also Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, John Galsworthy, T. E. Lawrence, and Edward Thomas. Like Perkins, he was the reader for an important publishing house (first T. Fisher Unwin, then Gerald Duckworth and Company, and finally Jonathan Cape), but his efforts on behalf of 'his' authors went far beyond this.



In retrospect, however, his reputation as a kingmaker has been somewhat dwarfed by that of his wife, Constance Garnett (1861-1946), whose translations of Russian literature are still in common use; as well as his son, writer and ocasional Bloomsburyite David Garnett (1892–1981).

I've been collecting their respective works for some time now, as part of my affinity for Edwardian writing generally, I suppose - certainly for its leading lights: Chekhov, Conrad, Kipling, Mansfield, Masefield, Wells and Woolf. I don't think I can do all those other Garnetts justice in one blogpost, though, so I'll talk about Constance and David in separate posts.

In other words, watch this space!



Richard Garnett: The Twilight of the Gods (1926)

Richard Garnett
(1835-1906)


  1. Garnett, Richard. The Twilight of the Gods. 1888. Rev. ed. 1903. Introduction by T. E. Lawrence. The Week-End Library. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head Ltd., 1927.

  2. Garnett, Richard. The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales. 1888. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947.

  3. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. The Garnett Family: The History of a Literary Family. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1961.

  4. Jefferson, George. Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.


Friday, December 21, 2018

The Talented Mr. Carpenter



Humphrey Carpenter with Dame Antonia Fraser (1988)


Alan Bennett's 2009 play The Habit of Art, a curious work devoted almost wholly (it would seem) to denigrating the late great W. H. Auden (cf. the Guardian article on Bennett entitled "why Auden the bore almost turned me off writing") was broadcast as a "live theatre" performance to cinemas all over the world in 2010.

One of those locations was the Bridgeway theatre in Northcote, Auckland. As an Auden fanatic - unaware at the time of Bennett's views on the poet - I duly turned up to watch the strange farrago unfold.



Alan Bennett: The Habit of Art (2009)


Reading between the lines, it seems probable to me that Bennett set out to write a play about Auden's unhappy last days domiciled in Christ Church, Oxford. It must have got away from him somehow - perhaps it seemed too nakedly spiteful, even to him? - so he decided to turn it instead into a play-within-a-play. "The Habit of Art," then, actually consists of a dress rehearsal for another play called "Caliban's Day". As Bennett explained to the author of the article mentioned above:
in order to address the many queries and notes on the text ("do we need this?"; "too much information") from the play's director, Nicholas Hytner, he invented a framing device: the play would be set in a rehearsal room.

"Queries about the text could then be put in the mouths of the actors who (along with the audience) could have their questions answered in the course of the rehearsal."
In other words, any crappy writing in the Auden play could then be explained away by someone in the cast exclaiming: "what crappy writing!" - one of the many reasons (I speak as one who knows) why such metafictional structures tend to appeal so much to authors and so little to their audiences.
The device also allowed Bennett to introduce the character of the author – himself – who complains about real cuts that Hytner suggested to the play.


Alan Bennett: The Habit of Art (2009)
[l-to-r: Richard Griffiths as Auden; Adrian Scarborough as Carpenter; Alex Jennings as Britten]


The tone of the whole was set early on, when one of the other characters makes a remark about the latest book by Auden's old friend and teacher, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien. "More fucking elves," quips Richard Griffiths (standing in for Michael Gambon at this particular performance).

This may very well encapsulate Alan Bennett's views on Tolkien's Middle-earth, but it seems most unlikely to represent Auden's, given that the poet praised The Lord of the Rings so fulsomely, in so many places, over the years.



Who knows, though? Maybe the worm had turned by the early 70s, when the play is set. There was, after all, a famous controversy between the two over Auden's alleged "denigration" of the house Tolkien lived in (he was quoted in the New Yorker in 1966 as having called it as “a hideous house — I can’t tell you how awful it is — with hideous pictures on the wall.”)



Another less forgivable dig in Bennett's ill-natured play is what seems a weirdly unmotivated assault on the memory and reputation of Tolkien's first biographer, Humphrey Carpenter. As the wikipedia summary puts it:
Auden has hired a rent boy, Stuart (Tim) and when Humphrey Carpenter (Donald) - who will write biographies of both Auden and Britten after their deaths - arrives to interview him, Auden mistakes him for Stuart.
It isn't quite so simply as that, in context, though. In the actual play as broadcast, the actor playing Carpenter comes on in drag, screeching like a lunatic, and generally embodying some of the "research" the former has been doing on him - as he explains to the director when the latter objects to this rather over-the-top impersonation.

And, yes, apparently Carpenter was a keen amateur musician, who occasionally performed in drag, and generally came across as somewhat larger than life. It's only after that exchange that the play limps on into the long, unfunny and unbelievable scene of Auden's mistaking Carpenter for the teenage rent boy he has "ordered."

To add insult to injury, Bennett tries to undo the rather spiteful impression given by this awful set of caricatures of Auden, Britten and Carpenter by giving his own alter-ego, the author, a long pompous monologue about the "value" he places on each of these lives - the rentboy as much as the poet, the bit-player as much as the star - towards the end of his melodrama.

I guess the reason this rings so false is that the actual nature of these walk-on parts is so stereotyped and perfunctory that one would never know from internal evidence that the writer placed the slightest importance on any of them. If Bennett had made them strong characters in the first place, he wouldn't have needed the face-saving soliloquy.

Why do I dwell so much on this rather forgettable play of Alan Bennett's? I guess because it should remind us all of how fickle is literary fame and reputation. No-one's really in much danger of forgetting the fact of Humphrey Carpenter's remarkable series of trail-blazing biographies, but at the same time their author seems to be receding more and more into oblivion. His wikipedia page doesn't even contain a partial bibliography, though there are a couple of paragraphs describing his books, some not even with their correct titles.

Here's my own attempt at a list (most - though not all of them - from my own collection):



Humphrey Carpenter: J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977)

Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter
(1946–2005)


[titles I own are marked in bold]:

  1. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977.
  2. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978.
  3. Jesus. Past Masters Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
  4. W. H. Auden: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981.
  5. O.U.D.S.: A Centenary History of the Oxford University Dramatic Society 1885–1985. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
  6. Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985.
  7. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. London: Unwin Hyman Limited, 1987.
  8. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 1988.
  9. The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends. London: Faber, 1989.
  10. Benjamin Britten: A Biography. London: Faber, 1992.
  11. The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1946–1996. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996.
  12. Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.
  13. Dennis Potter: A Biography. London: Faber, 1998.
  14. That Was Satire That Was: The Satire Boom of the 1960s. London: Victor Gollancz, 2000.
  15. The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s. London: Allen Lane, 2002.
  16. Spike Milligan: The Biography. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003.
  17. The Seven Lives of John Murray: The Story of a Publishing Dynasty. London: John Murray, 2008.



  18. Humphrey Carpenter: The Angry Young Men (2002)


    Edited:

  19. [with Mari Prichard]. A Thames Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
  20. [with Christopher Tolkien]. Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981.
  21. [with Mari Prichard]. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
  22. Shakespeare Without the Boring Bits. London: Viking, 1994.


Humphrey Carpenter & Mari Prichard, ed.: The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (1984)


Of course, that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Carpenter. His interest in children's literature manifested itself in a strong desire to make a lasting contribution to the field. After a few ranging shots with such works as The Joshers: Or London to Birmingham with Albert and Victoria (1977) and The Captain Hook Affair (1979), he eventually arrived at Mr Majeika. Long before Harry Potter made the whole idea of wizards as school-teachers a commonplace, the former gave rise to a dizzying variety of titles:



Humphrey Carpenter: Mr Majeika Collection (1984-98)


  1. Mr Majeika
  2. Mr Majeika and the School Trip
  3. Mr Majeika and the Lost Spell Book
  4. Mr Majeika and the Ghost Train
  5. Mr Majeika and the Dinner Lady
  6. Mr Majeika and the School Caretaker
  7. Mr Majeika and the Music Teacher
  8. Mr Majeika and the Haunted Hotel
  9. Mr Majeika and the School Book Week
  10. Mr Majeika and the Internet
  11. Mr Majeika and the School Inspector
  12. Mr Majeika joins the Circus
  13. Mr Majeika and the School Play
  14. Mr Majeika Vanishes
Mr Majeika was also successfully filmed as a children's TV series (1988-90), which resulted in the spin-off book The Television Adventures of Mr Majeika.

But who exactly was Humphrey Carpenter, and why has his star gone into (at least partial) eclipse? When you add to the works listed above a punishing schedule as a radio presenter and interviewer - not to mention his regular gigs as a jazz musician (the double-bass was his instrument) - the answer must surely include the words "a workaholic."

One of the last of the great English eccentrics, Humphrey Carpenter was brought up in the Warden's Lodgings at Keble College, Oxford, where his father worked until his appointment as Bishop of Oxford. He lived virtually all of his life in Oxford, though his work as a biographer took him all over the world. There's an interesting aside in the acknowledgements at the end of his monumental life of Ezra Pound (p. 973):
my American hosts in the spring of 1985 ... coped with me on my whirlwind research trip when I was at least as mad as Ezra Pound was ever supposed to have been.
What exactly is that supposed to mean? Ample evidence for eccentric behaviour on Pound's part has been given in the 900-odd pages preceding this disclaimer - for Carpenter to describe himself in similar terms is really saying something, therefore.

Perhaps, then, the grotesque caricature who comes flouncing out in Bennett's play is not so far from the reality of Carpenter's ebullient personality as might have been thought from the thorough-to-the-point-of-sober-sidedness nature of (at least) his scholarly books. Who knows? Certainly I don't.

There's room, I would have thought, for a life of Carpenter himself. He must have been a fascinating, many-sided man. Some at least of his biographies can never be superseded, given their priority in setting the terms of the discourse on such authors as Tolkien and Auden. Some of the others (the Pound, the Waugh, for instance) are already receding from view as a result of the ever-increasing outpouring of writing on certain mid-century literary figures.

The sheer range of his interests: not just literary but musical, not just theatrical but theological, too, may have perversely worked to his disadvantage. Only a reader interested in all of these things is likely to notice the solid work done by him in virtually all of the fields he touched.

Carpenter's life of Tolkien was read by all the Lord of the Rings obsessives in my family - which was most of us - the moment it appeared in 1977 (as a double-bill with the first edition of The Silmarillion). We hated it. The lack of empathy he seemed to show with his subject (whom he only actually met once) contrasted greatly with Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper's life of C. S. Lewis, which preceded it by three years.

Over time, though, I came to appreciate the distanced, nuanced nature of Carpenter's approach to biography. he didn't really major on scandal, but he never ignored it, either. His pioneering life of Benjamin Britten, for instance, examines in detail all the sexual innuendos alleged against the composer at various points in his life (and afterwards) with admirable balance and finesse. He isn't so much concerned to make you like his subjects, as to understand them better.

Having a Humphrey Carpenter biography about you guarantees a certain standard of scholarly documentation and research. Far from the grotesque figure of fun of Bennett's play, he shines as a man of protean talents who applied them cannily to create a major and lasting body of work.



Humphrey Carpenter: The Inklings (1978)


Closer examination of his otherwise prodigious rate of production reveals certain recurrent patterns. There is, for instance, his tendency to produce at least two books rather than one from the same approximate area of research. His work on J. R. R. Tolkien (1977) led to a 1978 book on his circle of friends, the Inklings (C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, et al.) - as well as an edition of Tolkien's Letters (1981), co-edited with Christopher Tolkien. His 1981 biography of w. H. Auden must have helped immensely with his later work on Auden's early friend and collaborator Benjamin Britten a decade later, in 1992. His 1988 biography of Ezra Pound is closely shadowed by Geniuses Together (1987), a book on American writers in Paris in the 1920s.

Need I go on? Work on Spike Milligan also informs his work on British satire in the 1960s (not to mention the OUDS). Secret Gardens (1985), his book on classic children's writing, comes hot on the heels of his magisterial Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (1984).

I guess that everyone works like that to some extent: one project motivating and informing the next. In aggregate, though, it does have the effect of making Carpenter seem like a kind of octopus, with a finger in every cultural pie.

Efficient workers work efficiently. It would be different if Carpenter had produced a series of slipshod, perfunctory, ill-researched books. In fact the opposite is the case. There's nothing belletristic in his approach to his craft. If anything, at times one could wish him to be a bit less self-effacing.



Humphrey Carpenter: Quotes


Saturday, December 08, 2018

Herman Melville as Poet



Herman Melville: Complete Poems (2019)


Complete Poems: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War / Clarel / John Marr and Other Sailors / Timoleon / Posthumous & Unpublished. 1866, 1876, 1888 & 1891. Library of America Herman Melville Edition, 4. Ed. Hershel Parker. The Library of America, 320. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2019.

I remember remarking to a fellow Melvillian (or Melville-omaniac, if you prefer), A/Prof Alex Calder of the University of Auckland, how great it would be if the Library of America decided to follow up their three-volume set of all his prose works with an equally complete edition of his poetry. He agreed, but clearly thought it unlikely ever to happen.



  1. Typee, Omoo, Mardi. 1846, 1847, 1849. Library of America Herman Melville Edition, 1. Ed. G. Thomas Tanselle. The Library of America, 1. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1982.

  2. Redburn, White Jacket, Moby-Dick. 1849, 1850, 1851. Library of America Herman Melville Edition, 2. Ed. G. Thomas Tanselle. The Library of America, 9. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983.

  3. Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales & Billy Budd. 1852, 1855, 1856, 1857, 1922 & 1924. Library of America Herman Melville Edition, 3. Ed. Harrison Hayford. The Library of America, 24. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1985.

It's with a certain satisfaction, then, that I've just seen on Amazon.com a pre-announcement of just such a volume. Mind you, the timing of it is not exactly a surprise. Even by the somewhat lax standards of other magisterial editions of American writers, the completion of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's complete works has been a long time coming: almost fifty years, in fact.



  1. Melville, Herman. Published Poems: Battle Pieces; John Marr; Timoleon. 1866, 1888 & 1891. Ed. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising & G. Thomas Tanselle. Historical Note by Hershel Parker. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 11. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 2009.

  2. Melville, Herman. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. 1876. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker & G. Thomas Tanselle. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 12. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 1991.

  3. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings: Billy Budd, Sailor; Weeds and Wildlings; Parthenope; Uncollected Prose; Uncollected Poetry. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Robert A. Sandberg & G. Thomas Tanselle. Historical Note by Hershel Parker. The Writings of Herman Melville: the Northwestern–Newberry Edition, vol. 13. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University Press & The Newberry Library, 2017.

It all started with a hiss and a roar in the mid-1960s. The first volume appeared in 1968, with a vague estimate that the whole project might take five years or so. As you can see from the dates listed above, it took a bit longer than that: the final volume devoted to Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings finally appeared last year, in 2017.

Admittedly it was volume 13, which might be thought to predispose it to bad luck, and the trawl through the archives for unpublished and uncollected material always takes longer than editing the works that appeared in an author's own lifetime. (If you're curious, you can find Meaghan Fritz's account of the whole strange saga here, on the Northwestern University Press website.)





Herman Melville: Collected Poems (1947)


Melville, Herman. Collected Poems. Ed. Howard P. Vincent. Chicago: Packard and Company / Hendricks House, 1947.

Until that monstrous feat of scholarship was complete, however, it was no good even thinking of a new edition of Melville's Complete Poems to replace Howard P. Vincent's pioneering Collected Poems. Probably the best that could be done was the volume below, a collection of all three of the books of poems published during Melville's lifetime, with a few selections from Clarel to give an idea of its scope and complexity:



Douglas Robillard, ed.: The Poems of Herman Melville (1976)


Melville, Herman. The Poems of Herman Melville: Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War; John Marr and Other Sailors; Timoleon. 1866, 1888 & 1891. Ed. Douglas Robillard. 1976. Kent, Ohio & London: Kent State University Press, 2000.

As America's Civil War obsession grew and grew - especially after the success of Ken Burn's 1990 documentary TV series - more attention came to be focussed on Melville's 1866 book Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, probably the only collection of its kind which can stand comparison with Whitman's Drum-taps (1865). Facsimile and other separate editions of that began to appear, also:



Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces: The Civil War Poems. 1866. Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 2000.

At this point a little-known critic named Jack Ross decided to weigh in with his own opinions. This is what he had to say on the subject on Amazon.com in 2005 (underneath Douglas Robillard's 1976 edition of The Poetry of Herman Melville, pictured above):
J. Ross:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Is Melville's poetry really worth reading?
October 22, 2005
Format: Paperback

If the difficulty of getting hold of it is any indication, then most people think Melville's poetry isn't worth it. I've been waiting for years for the poetry volume of the Northwestern-Newberry edition to appear (it was promised for 2002, but still shows no signs of coming out). That will be the ultimate answer, as it'll include all the materials, commentaries, etc. that one could desire.

In the meantime, it makes a lot of sense to collect Melville's own three published volumes of verse in this beautifully compact book. This may not represent his poetic legacy as a whole, but it shows (at any rate) his public face as a poet.

And a very odd poet he is indeed. He has a lot in common with Thomas Hardy, I think: both are addicted to convoluted diction, impossibly complex and confining stanza forms and metrical schemes, a general sense of labouring over every line and of lack of music and ease.

Hardy is, nevertheless, a great poet. When the occasion demands it - "The Convergence of the Twain" about the Titanic disaster, the superb poems of 1912 about his dead wife - there's a kind of clumsy power about him which overpowers any reservations.

Melville's technical shortcomings are - if anything - even greater. The chains of rhyme and metre chafe him more than virtually any other nineteenth-century poet I can think of. He seems to have almost no natural facility for verse.

And yet (as all readers of his prose are aware) he is a genius. His prose-poetry in Moby-Dick, "Benito Cereno" and "Las Encantadas" is incomparable. And every now and then it glimmers out in the midst of the most clotted poems. There are certain lines from his Civil War poems included in Ken Burns' PBS documentary series which seem almost to beat Whitman at his own game:
In glades they meet skull after skull
Where pine-cones lay ...
... Some start as in dreams,
And comrades lost bemoan:
By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged -
But the Year and the Man were gone. [102]
The equation between the skulls and the pine-cones is haunting, yet unobtrusive, and the invocation of Stonewall as a kind of force of nature works brilliantly. There's a mythic force in some of these Civil War poems which is unsurpassed.

Once you get over the surface defects, then, there's a lot encoded in the depths of Melville's verse - a submerged continent of perceptions every bit as vivid as his fiction. The wait continues for the definitive edition, but for now I'm just grateful to have this one. It seems somehow characteristic that he should have to wait so long for the critical establishment to do justice to his talents in this field -- Herman Melville (both as a man and a writer), was, it seems, born to be overlooked.

Certainly that bit about my long wait for the poetry volume of the Northwestern-Newberry edition rings true - I didn't then realise that there would be two: one for the poetry published during his lifetime, and another for his posthumous and uncollected work. I already had a copy of their edition of Clarel, which was some comfort, at least.

I see from their site that I first ordered books from Amazon.com in 1997, and virtually the first things I went after were Melville's Poetry (Northwestern-Newberry edition) and the Complete Poems of W. H. Auden (a two-volume edition, edited by Edward Mendelson, then promised for 1998). I 'pre-ordered' both, only to endure years of delays and excuses and finally their complete disappearance from the site.

The Melville project has now - almost - cranked to a close, awaiting just that last Library of America volume to complete the tally. Auden's Complete Works, however, took a long detour through six volumes of his collected prose, on top of two of his plays and libretti, and so, twenty years later, I'm still waiting for those poems. Never say die, though: I'm sure that when they do eventually appear, they'll be very thoroughly collated and annotated.



W. H. Auden: Prose (Volume 1: 1997)


So do I have much to add now to the rather self-assured remarks I made in 2005? I read somewhere recently that America's three greatest nineteenth-century poets were Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson - and Herman Melville. That does indeed seem to be the view which has become prevalent, judging at any rate by the amount of critical prose spewed out on each of them.

Certainly it's a shift from Emerson, Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Whittier and all those other Boston Brahmins who seemed to have the field sewn up at the time, in the late 1800s. Poe is still in the running in either schema, I suppose.

These new "big three" do indeed have a lot going for them - if contemporary obscurity can be seen as the most reliable gauge of merit. Dickinson was almost invisible till well after her death. Melville's early vogue as a writer of sea-going romances did not translate into a scintilla of interest in his later poetry. Whitman was visible: but more as a figure of fun or opprobrium than someone to be taken seriously except by a few disciples and true believers.

More to the point, perhaps, all three are strange: their poetics defy the conventional practice of the time, and yet have gone on to have an immense influence on the writing of the twentieth century (in particular).

In Harold Bloom's terms (The Western Canon) they are canonical because otherwise unassimilable: they simply can't be pigeonholed beside anyone else - even each other. I do think this Library of America volume will be timely for Melville enthusiasts to try to substantiate their claims, therefore. It's not much use calling him one of America's greatest poets if readers can't get proper access to his work.

It'll always be a tough nut to swallow: harder even than Dickinson and Whitman, given his more earnest attempts to accommodate himself to conventional nineteenth-century prosody - but I think, in the end, there's no point in trying to overlook it any more. If Moby-Dick - then Clarel. The latter is not that much more difficult than the former. He is weird, though: best to bear that in mind from the start.

Here's "The Portent," his poem about the "martyr" John Brown:
Hanging from the beam,
Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
(Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.

Hidden in the cap
Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.
"Lo, John Brown", eh? ... Law / more / war and Shenandoah as rhymes ... You see what I mean about the strange clumsiness of his proceedings? There's generally something to it, though - his choice of words ("weird John Brown" / "the meteor of the war") repays scrutiny.

In any case, here are some more samples from my own Melvilliana:



John J. Healey: Emily & Herman: A Literary Romance (2013)

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

  1. Melville, Herman. Romances: Typee; Omoo; Mardi; Moby-Dick; White-Jacket; Israel Potter; Redburn. 1846, 1847, 1849, 1851, 1850, 1855 & 1849. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1931.

  2. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. 1851. Ed. Harold Beaver. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

  3. Melville, Herman. Pierre, or The Ambiguities: The Kraken Edition. 1852. Ed. Hershel Parker. Pictures by Maurice Sendak. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

  4. Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. An Authoritative Text / Backgrounds and Sources / Reviews / Criticism / An Annotated Bibliography. 1857. Ed. Hershel Parker. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971.

  5. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Edited from the Manuscript with Introduction and Notes. 1891 & 1924. Ed. Harrison Hayford & Merton M. Sealts, Jr. 1962. A Phoenix Book. Chicago & London: The University Of Chicago Press, 1970.

  6. Leyda, Jay, ed. The Portable Melville. 1952. The Viking Portable Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

  7. Branch, Watson G., ed. Melville: The Critical Heritage. 1974. The Critical Heritage Series. London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1985.

  8. Parker, Hershel, & Harrison Hayford, ed. Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts (1851-1970). A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970.


Patrick Arrasmith: Herman Melville (2013)