October 18, 2024
Thanks to 2024 Fellow in Ideas, Tyler Wright, for today’s blog.
You know how the saying goes— “There is only one way to eat a whale: one bite at a time.” Most readers get into the work of Herman Melville by tackling his 1851 magnum opus Moby Dick; or, The Whale right from the get-go, politely passing over the shorter pieces dotting his literary output. Like Captain Ahab, the reader is committed to slaying the leviathan of the deep, sometimes walking away victorious and other times bowing out midway through the pursuit. For these ambitious readers, nothing else will satiate them but the whale.
My introduction to Melville, on the other hand, was through a once obscure 1850 essay Hawthorne and His Mosses, a critical review of a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story collection. My motivation for reading this essay was chiefly as a Hawthorne enthusiast, however I would later find that this piece prepared me for The Whale like a gentle palette cleanser.
All that I knew of Melville, up to this point, was that he savored Hawthorne’s short stories, even likening his output to that of William Shakespeare. Melville (1850) went there in his essay Hawthorne and His Mosses:
Some may start to read of Shakespeare and Hawthorne on the same page. They may say, that if an illustration were needed, a lesser light might have sufficed to elucidate this Hawthorne, this small man of yesterday. But I am not, willingly, one of those, who as touching Shakespeare at least, exemplify the maxim of Rochefoucauld, that “we exalt the reputation of some, in order to depress that of others”;–who, to teach all noble-souled aspirants that there is no hope for them, pronounce Shakespeare absolutely unapproachable. But Shakespeare has been approached.
That was my most fundamental understanding of Melville—but then Harrison Middleton University announced the Moby Dick fall discussion series. Suddenly I didn’t have an excuse to leave the dinner table! It was time to eat the whale one bite at a time…
I opened my copy of Moby Dick (Melville, 1977) to its dedication page:
In Token of My Admiration for his Genius, This Book is Inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The Melville/Hawthorne connection again presents itself as our first tangible piece of evidence that Hawthorne helped to shape Melville’s literary achievement. What is the story behind that dedication page, for surely it did not just poof into existence?
Hawthorne was the first to make contact, having reviewed favorably Melville’s first book Typee (Melville, 1846) and commenting that “…no work that gives a freer and more effective picture of barbarian life” (The Library of America, 2010). A few years later the men would meet in-person when Literary World editor Evert Duyckinck invited several writers for a hike in Monument Mountain (Cook, 2024), and both Hawthorne and Melville became fast friends. Melville, upon his return from the outing, dusted off an unread copy of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse and penned an anonymous review for Literary World (Hassel, 2023).
The untrained eye would incorrectly assume that Hawthorne and His Mosses is simply Melville’s review of a book by Hawthorne. Rothschild (2012), however, describes the essay as a critical tool to evaluate Melville’s thoughts on varied topics such as Shakespeare, American nationalism, and the artistic foundations and vision that led to Moby Dick (pp. 318-319); demonstrating greater philosophical and introspective depths than a simple book review would allow. Rothschild (2012) places the value of the Mosses text in the following:
Through this process, the ‘Mosses’ has arguably become the single most important supplementary document used to establish and define our understanding of Melville as both individual and artist (p. 319)
Moby Dick was supposed to be released around that time, but it was deliberately finalized one full year after that fateful first meeting. It was refined amid a blossoming friendship.
Both writers would communicate well past their initial 1850 meeting, influencing each other in their own writings (Hassel, 2023; Popova, 2019). The recovered letters written by Melville to Hawthorne during this period reflect his fraternal bond with his elder Hawthorne (Cook, 2008). Hawthorne even recounts in his diary the deep conversations that he shared with Melville about “time and eternity” and a smorgasbord of other matters “possible and impossible” (Popova, 2019). Melville even created his own “mosses” in the latter portion of life, dabbling in the art of the short story (Rosenberry, 1970) and carrying on themes that were originally explored by Hawthorne in the manse.
We get the theme of “blackness” within the rich tapestry of Hawthorne and His Mosses (Melville, 1850) where the Anonymous Virginian observes:
For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side–like the dark half of the physical sphere–is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black. But this darkness but gives more effect to the evermoving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circumnavigates his world. Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom,–this, I cannot altogether tell.
Melville (1850) wades further in the pools of Hawthorne’s “blackness”:
Now it is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me. It may be, nevertheless, that it is too largely developed in him. Perhaps he does not give us a ray of his light for every shade of his dark. But however this may be, this blackness it is that furnishes the infinite obscure of his background,–that background, against which Shakespeare plays his grandest conceits, the things that have made for Shakespeare his loftiest, but most circumscribed renown, as the profoundest of thinkers.
Do we perceive hints of the mystical blackness within Moby Dick? Loads of it.
Indeed, Hawthorne and His Mosses is now considered a bit of a companion piece to Moby Dick insofar as Hawthorne’s influence affected and shaped Melville’s creative approach, even encouraging significant draft revisions (Cook et al., 2022). The two authors’ fragmentary writings and records provide us with a reference to better understand Hawthorne’s influence on Melville’s artistic direction (Rosenberry, 1970), and this single piece of marginalia has now become inseparable from the core text. The essay was even published as backmatter to select versions of Moby Dick (The Melville Electronic Library, 2017), honoring its spiritual association as miscellany of noteworthiness.
While Melville occupies the role of an anonymous “Virginian spending July in Vermont” (Levine, 2017), and will therefore assume some level of counterfeit in the act, his love of Hawthorne’s mosses is authentic:
To what infinite height of loving wonder and admiration I may yet be borne, when by repeatedly banquetting on these Mosses, I shall have thoroughly incorporated their whole stuff into my being,–that, I can not tell. But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.
Perhaps our line of thinking ought not be so concerned with how Hawthorne’s work influenced Melville’s Moby Dick. Instead, we ought to consider Melville’s critical essay of Hawthorne’s “Mosses” as a look into the very psyche of Melville himself around the time of writing Moby Dick. With so few of Melville’s personal letters and essays extant, this critical review is perhaps the best tool within our possession to comprehend his creative process. We truly glean something of the author’s guiding philosophies, literary interests, spirituality, and politics which undoubtedly creep their way into The Whale.
We are invited into Melville’s appreciation for the work and its creator upon opening his personal copy of Mosses from an Old Manse, where a piece of sea moss is lovingly affixed to its front endpaper and accompanied by a statement on youth:
This moss was gathered in Salem, and therefore I placed it here for a frontispiece. P.S. It may be objected that this is sea-moss; – but then, it only went to sea – like many young mortals – in its youth, and to my certain knowledge has been ashore ever since (Cowen, 1978; p. 284)
References
Cook, J. (2024). Introduction to Melville’s Marginalia in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse. Melville’s Marginalia Online. https://melvillesmarginalia.org/intro.aspx?id=16
Cook, J. A. (2008). Melville’s Mosses review and the proclamation of Hawthorne as America’s literary messiah. Leviathan, 10(3), 62–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-1849.2008.01312.x
Cook, J. A., Olsen-Smith, S., Smith, E. B., Lambie, R., Price, A., & Tonkin, H. (2022). Germinous seeds: Hawthorne’s creative influence on Melville. Leviathan, 24(3), 7–49. https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2022.0029
Cowen, W. (1978). Melville’s marginalia: Hawthorne. Studies in the American Renaissance, 279–302.
Hassel, A. (2023, February 4). The Time Machine: The Relationship Between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Avon van Hassel; Avon Van Hassel. https://avonvanhassel.com/2023/02/04/hawthorne-melville-letters/
Levine, R. S. (2017). Why we should be teaching and writing about The Literary World’s 1850 “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 5(1), 179–189. https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2017.0009
Melville, H. (1846). Typee. Wiley and Putnam.
Melville, H. (1850). Hawthorne and his mosses. The Literary World.
Melville, H. (1977). Moby Dick; or, the whale: The 100 greatest books ever written, collector’s edition. Easton Press. (Original work published 1851)
Popova, M. (2019, February 14). Herman Melville’s Passionate, Beautiful, Heartbreaking Love Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Marginalian. https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/02/13/herman-melville-nathaniel-hawthorne-love-letters/
Rosenberry, E. (1970). Melville and his mosses. American Transcendental Quarterly, 7(1), 47.
Rothschild, I. (2012). Reframing Melville’s “Manifesto” “Hawthorne and His Mosses” and the culture of reprinting. The Cambridge Quarterly, 41(3), 318–344.
The Library of America. (2010). Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne first meet 160 years ago. Loa.org. https://blog.loa.org/2010/08/herman-melville-and-nathaniel-hawthorne.html?m=0
The Melville Electronic Library. (2017). Versions of “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Herman Melville Electronic Library. https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/versions-of-hawthorne-and-his-mosses
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