7
David O. Dowling
“Don’t you read it,” Herman Melville sternly warned his Pittsfield neighbor Sarah Morewood in September of 1851 in response to her polite query regarding his forthcoming book, Moby‐Dick. Rather than gently courting this potential reader, Melville all but drove her away with rhetoric echoing the American Tract Society’s alarmist diatribes denouncing the toxic evils of popular literature. The book’s rough‐hewn “horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hausers” was sure to offend her finer sensibility, he insisted with his signature comic hyperbole. She should not expect the soothing atmosphere of the tropical paradise featured in his debut novel, Typee, because a “Polar wind blows through it & birds of prey hover over it.” She would be well advised to “Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book – on risk of a lumbago & sciatics,” or acute spinal pain (Melville 1993: 206). Dispensing with the formalities of a welcoming invitation to read his book, he instead issued an audacious dare: join this dangerous and risky narrative, like the whaling industry itself, only at your peril.
This inversion of the expected authorial courtship between authors and their reading publics came on the heels of Melville’s turbulent five‐year relationship with the mass audience that wildly swung from vaulting optimism to bitter execration. If he was not exasperated by critical and popular responses to his works, he was buoyed by the few readers – Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Horace Greeley, and N.P. Willis among them – who validated his vision in the commercial press. Melville’s fraught interdependence on the popular and critical reading publics that attended his career from 1846 to the dawn of the Civil War forms the subject of this chapter. After an auspicious debut, Melville endured an onslaught of critical assault after which he “picked himself up stoutly,” as Hershel Parker (2002) observed, and recalibrated his efforts toward magazine fiction throughout the late 1850s (163). The demise of his career as a novelist resulted from the tide of dissent that arose beginning with his second novel, Omoo (1847), which reached overwhelming heights with Moby‐Dick (1851), and virtually eliminated him from relevance with Pierre (1852). But rather than renounce the mass reading public, Melville reformulated his narrative approach specifically for the popular Putnam’s and Harper’s monthly magazine audiences, gamely trying his hand at short stories and serial fiction. This aesthetic and professional reinvention occurred after roughly a decade of stubbornly defining himself exclusively through books and circulating minimally if at all in the periodical press.
Melville has been cast as indifferent to the demands and expectations of a reading public blind to his creative strengths by critics who “account for his gradual withdrawal from publication” by pointing to the “tragic opposition” to his repeated attempts to transcend the aesthetic limitations of salable genre conventions (Parker 1967: vi). More recent Melville research has contextualized his position at the intersection of book publishing and the periodical press. I build on these studies to show that Melville adjusted each of his subsequent projects to compensate for and often precipitate controversy and opposition from his readers. Portraits of him as a proto‐Joycean modernist before his time who rejected his audience for failing to apprehend his singular genius neglect Melville’s acute ongoing responsiveness to the publishing industry and the mass readership it served. His bitterness at the folly and blindness of the antebellum reading public in Pierre (1852) did not signal a permanent break with his publisher Evert Duyckinck and readers, but was followed instead with persistent relentless efforts to produce marketable fiction (Dowling 2012). He was one of his generation’s harshest critics of the publishing industry, while also working through its channels and strategizing to become a celebrity within it. This perspective, like any concerned with “how a particular writer or artist organized his or her fame,” is “at base actually about the nature of commercial civilization and the expansion of […] media, as much as [it is] about the special nature or the special self‐consciousness of an individual” (Braudy 2011: 1071). In Melville’s case, the rapidly developing book and periodical publishing industries represented that expanding media within commercial culture, which converged with the special self‐consciousness of his colossal creative ambition.
Shocking the “Tribe of Common Readers”
In tracing chronologically the reception of his novels and magazine tales, a pattern emerges in which Melville took measures to endure a series of critical firestorms that paradoxically both inspired some of his best creative work and pressed him to search for new business models for professional survival. Striking vacillations emerge between frustration with the antebellum reading public – “Dollars damn me! […] What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot” – and a desire to appease that same public with material “very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine,” as he promised Richard Bentley, the prospective British publisher of Pierre (Melville 1993: 191, 226). Melville’s “characteristic recklessness” with which he approached his novels was missing from his formally astute magazine tales because of the profound influence of the reading public on his work in the early stages of his career. If “seeing his book [Moby‐Dick] mutilated and mocked had the effect of angering Melville permanently against publishers and critics,” as Andrew Delbanco (2005) points out, Melville did not respond by withdrawal into quietism or complete refusal to continue to seek an audience (78). Just the reverse: through magazine fiction, especially in Harper’s, he found an audience of 100 000 readers for his stories that he could reach faster than he had in the book market. His Putnam’s works enjoyed a healthy readership of over 35 000. Critics have repeatedly noted how Melville encoded his anger at the reading public and critical community into his short stories as a form of revenge on the mass market. Such readings of Melville’s Putnam’s and Harper’s tales as allegories of “going under” (Fisher 1977; Smith 1978) neglect his careful tailoring of them to both editorial policy and conventions of popular journals. Instead, Melville was indeed writing the other way quite consciously and deliberately to fit his fiction into the parameters of literary journalism.
Melville’s first audience consisted of friends and family who were captivated by his oral renditions of his nautical adventures. Had they not urged him to write, he likely might have never proceeded with the manuscript of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), his first and most popular novel that cemented his reputation, much to his chagrin, as “the man who lived among the cannibals” (Melville 1993: 193). In his famous June 1851 letter to Hawthorne, Melville rightly speculated that he would be remembered for Typee rather than his highly abstract allegorical mixed‐form novels. Self‐effacing complaints about his own obscurity are designed to flatter and amuse Hawthorne, who “is in the ascendant.” He bears witness to Hawthorne’s success in a one‐day trip through New York City during which he “saw a portrait of N.H.” and “have seen and heard many flattering (in a publisher’s point of view) allusions to the ‘Seven Gables’ [The House of the Seven Gables]. And I have seen ‘Tales,’ and ‘A New Volume’ announced, by N.H.” In contrast, he draws a clownish caricature of his own obscurity among “the babies who will be probably born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost,” musing that “‘Typee’ will be given to them, perhaps, with their gingerbread.” The principle of “Fame as the most transparent of all vanities” for “there is no patronage in that” appears a flimsy comic pose beside his true desire for fame. This is evident in his envy of the powerful impact of Hawthorne’s “The Unpardonable Sin” in Dollar Magazine – later titled “Ethan Brand – A Chapter from an Abortive Romance” in The Snow Image, and Other Twice‐Told Tales (1852) – and ubiquitous celebrity presence in print culture, an impressive feat “responsible for many a shake and tremor of the tribe of ‘general readers’” (Melville 1993: 192–193).
Melville was not disparaging the “tribe of general readers” as much as he was showing a profound desire to emulate Hawthorne’s ability to send a “shake and tremor” through their ranks. Although Melville “deem[s] the plaudits of the public […] strong presumptive evidence of mediocrity,” he admitted to being “guilty of the charge” of fandom with his “vociferous braying” on behalf of Hawthorne. The formulation clearly accommodates for both mass appeal and “merit due to originality” marked by “great depth and breadth,” for “without merit, lasting fame there can be none” (Melville 1987: 251, 253). Indeed, Melville in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” marveled at the prospect of electrifying the world with one “shock of recognition.” Publicity, he believed, was essential, as he exhorts the reading public to catapult American writers to fame by embracing “the whole brotherhood. For genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round,” encircling the planet (Melville 1987: 249). The sensational image foresees an interconnected chain of humanity illuminated by the power of recognition. Achieving that recognition in its most ideal state was more than simply a matter of expressing it seemingly unmitigated into the ether. In his more pragmatic moments, Melville (1993) was well aware that “Solomon was the truest man who ever spoke, and yet […] he a little managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism” (193).
While Melville found the superficiality of fame unbearable, he lamented his failure to make concessions to it, to placate its demands as Hawthorne had, and even to manage his work with a view to popular consumption. In February of 1851, Melville refused his editor Evert Duyckinck’s invitation to pose for a daguerreotype to be featured in Dollar Magazine, a decision he would come to regret when he saw Hawthorne’s featured in the same venue the following spring. “To see one’s ‘mug’ in a magazine is presumptive evidence that he’s a nobody,” was the reason he supplied Duyckinck. Melville showed a similar aversion to assuaging the demands of the mass market when he refused Duyckinck’s request to review for his Literary World Joseph C. Hart’s The Romance of Yachting, a lightweight trifle pandering to the least reflective of nautically inclined readers. “On bended knee, & with tears in my eyes, deliver me from writing ought upon this crucifying Romance of Yachting,” he begged his editor (Melville 1993: 179, 113). In Melville’s own role as reviewer, he preferred not to write the sort of scathing reviews he commonly received throughout his career. He operated most comfortably as a reviewer of a book he could back, such as Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse. What began as a conventional review titled “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850) grew into a manifesto for nothing less than an American literary revolution, an exhortation of the reading public to show its support for its native authors like Hawthorne, whose quality, he urged, promised to surpass that of Shakespeare. Of course, the piece functioned not just as altruistic praise for Hawthorne, but also as a crafty piece of publicity on behalf of his own career recruiting the mass audience into the project of lifting authors like himself to success. Much of the appeal was aimed not only at common readers, but also the mostly conservative religious factions of the critical community that had seriously opposed his work from his first publication.
The Typee Publicity Campaign
Typee enjoyed the best reception of any of Melville’s works during his lifetime. But this novelization of Melville’s adventure on the South Pacific island of Nukuheva, where he was detained by a cannibal tribe after deserting a whaling expedition, had its detractors. They formed a two‐pronged attack consisting of the religious press who objected to Melville’s unflattering portrait of missionaries on the island and critics who objected to it as a fabricated and exaggerated account. Although the Typee tribe was reputed to consist of savage cannibals, “his sojourn there (involuntary as it was) seems to have been far from unpleasant, for he was treated with the utmost kindness” (Melville 1995: 23). Interestingly, the story’s skeptics were mainly American critics, which would go far to explain Melville’s emphatic plea for a sympathetic American readership in “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” He felt “heartily vexed,” according to a letter to Alexander W. Bradford, co‐editor of the American Whig Review, that “intelligent Editors” of British venues such as the Edinburgh Journal should “endorse the genuineness of the narrative” while “so many numbskulls on this side of the water should heroically avow their determination not to be ‘gulled’ by it” (Melville 1993: 38). The work’s status as fiction did not prevent Melville or others from holding it to a non‐fictional standard of verisimilitude, despite its dilation of his original three‐week stint into what the subtitle of the volume described as a “Four Months Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas.”
When faced with allegations that Typee was deliberately fabricated, Melville righteously defended its veracity rather than arguing for its status as fiction. In doing so, he squandered the more reasonable alternative of defending his artistic license as a novelist. Yet the escalation of the controversy only generated more interest in the book, and thus provided free publicity. A kind of public trial emerged in which reviewers openly considered how and whether “evidence against the authenticity of the book is more than sufficient to satisfy a court of justice.” Readers flocked, intent on judging the case for themselves and in the process delighting in the vagaries of what was developing into a sensational controversy. The British press, led by the London Times, mostly ruled in his favor, since “Our limits forbid us to prosecute it further,” concluding that as for “evidence against the smartness and talent of the production there is none” (Melville 1995: 45).
The fortuitous return of Melville’s companion who accompanied him on the original adventure answered challenges to Typee’s validity and provided a prime opportunity for publicity. Originally presumed to have been lost or dead, Richard Tobias “Toby” Greene immediately corroborated Melville’s tale upon his arrival on the mainland. Seizing the opportunity to spread the testimony of this eyewitness, Melville immediately went to work on a publicity campaign, exulting to his editor Duyckinck that Toby’s miraculous return would “but settle the question of the book’s genuineness.” But Duyckinck did little to spread the news, as was the case with his London editor, John Murray, who received three newspaper accounts of Greene’s reappearance from an ecstatic Melville. Taking matters into his own hands, he penned a letter to several key journals posing as a reader vouching for the novel as “a true narrative of events which actually occurred to him,” as he explained to his friend Alexander Bradford. Melville “endeavored to make it appear as if written by one who had read the book & believed it.” The deliberate deception was intended to manufacture consent among the reading public, for he knew that the American readers fetishized facticity in their literature, and that Greene’s testimony provided the perfect defense. Deliberately deceiving his readers in this case was justifiable, he insisted, because “I feel confident that unless something of this kind appears the success of the book here as a genuine narrative will be seriously impaired.” His rejoinder answered to one particularly “malicious notice” that worried Melville because it “has been copied into papers in the Western part of the state – It will do mischief unless answered.” Curiously, Melville knew such a tactic was underhanded and “may not be exactly the right sort of thing,” but he persevered, fashioning a response designed to answer to the groundswell of opposition rising in reviews. “Indeed, I have moddled [sic] some of my remarks upon hints suggested by some reviews of the book,” as he described his method of counter‐defense (Melville 1993: 38).
Melville’s self‐promotional ruse harnessed the massive marketing engines of the commercial press. Among the widest circulating dailies of the penny press, which was in its heyday when Melville began publishing in the 1840s, the New York Daily Tribune was by far the most influential. Melville found a particularly powerful ally in its editor Horace Greeley. Another influential supporter was Walt Whitman, who understood the debate over Typee’s authenticity had little to do with the larger question of its merit. “The question whether these stories be authentic or not has, of course, not so much to do with their interest,” he urged. Lauding the “richly good natured style,” Whitman recommended it “as thorough entertainment – not so light as to be tossed aside for its flippancy, nor so profound as to be tiresome,” pinpointing the formula of success Melville would struggle to replicate the rest of his career (Melville 1995: 101). Whitman seems to have anticipated the goal of reaching both “the superficial skimmer of pages” and the “eagle‐eyed reader” Melville sets for his generation of American authors in “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Whitman, like Tribune literary editor Margaret Fuller, of course, was a politically progressive author. Thus, unlike many critics who were not themselves creative writers, nor bent on exposing and inverting cultural and political hierarchies in their own reviews, Fuller and Whitman represented strong emerging radical forces in antebellum literature that promoted Melville in the daily press.
But other more conservative critics with considerable influence and power were not uniformly against Melville. Nathaniel Parker Willis, editor of the Home Journal, stands out as such an example of an arbiter of genteel values one would expect to be at odds with Melville, who nonetheless supported his work. This supporter of domestic propriety would initially seem a strange bedfellow with Melville’s wild literary and ideological inversions bent on shocking the staid conservatism of the general tribe of readers. But, like Melville, Willis was a whipping boy of the religious press, his chief sin being an adulterous affair involving famous actor Edwin Forrest’s wife, which became a scandal in the national media. Further, his regional bias as a New York editor and predilection for sophisticated literature inclined him to favor Melville’s novels, all of which he uniformly praised in the Home Journal, often with uncanny accuracy. Willis found Melville’s autobiographical novel White Jacket; or, The World in a Man‐of‐War (1850) unexpectedly high in literary value, especially for a sailor, crediting him for transcending the limitations of genre, a maneuver most found intolerable. “One might expect interest of adventure,” Willis claimed, “but not taste and high literary ability” from a man of “keen perceptions” whose “eye permits nothing to escape” (Melville 1995: 335).
Critical Allies and Enemies
Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, and N.P. Willis were Melville’s most powerful sympathizers, while his own editor Evert Duyckinck withdrew support at several key intervals, and other arbiters of taste on behalf of the antebellum reading public irreparably damaged his reputation. The Boston Post’s Charles Greene began his series of devastating blows in response to Omoo, a book he maligned for its “heathenish and cattle‐ish appellation,” leading him to “hope his next book may have a Christian title” (Melville 1995: 101). Melville’s next book and his first fully fictional work, the allegorical and philosophical Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (1849), of course did not realize his hope. With his review of Mardi, Greene began to destroy Melville’s Boston readership with vicious assaults on each succeeding publication. Greene charged this “hodge‐podge, lacks incident and meaning” and is “a mass of downright nonsense” replete with “uninteresting” characters making for a reading experience “not only tedious but unreadable” with its “prosiness and puerility” (Melville 1995: 212).
Crushed, Melville responded with the longest comment on the reception of his own writings he had ever produced. That response, interestingly, came in the form of a letter to his new father‐in‐law, the well‐to‐do power broker Justice Lemuel Shaw. Melville’s decision to address his most substantial response to his negative reception to his wealthy father‐in‐law speaks volumes of his understanding of the antebellum reading public and the financial ramifications of critical reviews. Shaw held the purse strings in Melville’s life, and in many ways represented the primary patron financing his career. Not only had Melville benefited handsomely from the dowry Shaw bestowed on his daughter, Elizabeth, he also received ongoing support well after marriage, including $2000 toward the purchase of a New York house (Parker 1996: 553–554). Melville biographer Hershel Parker (1996) notes that when he first courted Elizabeth Shaw in October of 1844, the “now darkly tanned” Melville was “most likely in sailor’s gear still” when he ascended the palatial steps of a “large new brownstone entrance supported by elegant pillars” under a “protruding archway leading into a sheltered recess” (306). Melville’s dedication of Typee to Shaw reflects a desire to position him as a patron of his career as a professional author. Parker (1996) conjectures that “some sort of assistance and encouragement lies behind the dedication” (309). Indeed, Melville’s letter accompanying the copy of Typee he sent Shaw indicates “the dedication is very simple, for the world would hardly have sympathized to the full extent of those feelings with which I regard my father’s friend and the constant friend of all his family” (Melville 1993: 33).
In an attempt to explain the public bloodletting Shaw had inevitably witnessed in all the major newspapers, Melville’s April 1849 letter began with a confession. To appease his benefactor and patron, he admitted “that Mardi has been cut into by the London Atheneum, and also burnt by the common hangman in the Boston Post,” editor Charles Greene. In order to restore Shaw’s shaken faith in his son‐in‐law’s faltering career as a professional author, Melville assured him that “These attacks were all matters of course, and are essential to the building up of any permanent reputation – if such should ever prove to be mine.” By normalizing the devastation as a kind of required ritual of initiation all major authors must endure over the arc of a career that eventually cements a “permanent reputation,” Melville attempted to minimize the obvious damage of the disastrous critical response. His conclusion that “There’s nothing in it!” dismissed the very real destruction that would only worsen his relationship with the antebellum reading public over time. “But time,” he persuaded Shaw, “which is the solver of all riddles, will solve ‘Mardi’” (Melville 1993: 130). Shaw never withdrew his long‐term support of Melville.
Shaw and Melville are not likely to have noticed a rare positive review of Mardi. Serving the vast and ever‐expanding sea of female readers in a story‐paper format featuring serial fiction and fashion plates, the massive audience of Peterson’s numbered in the hundreds of thousands when most journals circulated in the tens of thousands (Mott 1957, vol. 3: 306–311). Editor Ann S. Stephens touted Mardi as a “California” in the sense that it represented uncharted territory readers would be feverish to explore. Melville would have been heartened by her characterization of the novel as appropriate for both the popular mass audience and the educated elite. Appealing to the Peterson’s reader of plot‐driven sensational tales of the sort it serialized, the review promised “Mardi will be found by the skimmer a book of interest, of novelty and peculiar imagination.” But for more serious readers, “He who ploughs deeper” will encounter “gems of thought, delicate sarcasms, and sly allusions, to say nothing of quaint words and oddly termed expressions” (Stephens 1849: 219).
The Reception of Moby‐Dick
Like Mardi, Moby‐Dick faced stiff resistance. Peterson’s praised the novel, but with the qualification that “Had the story been compressed one half, and all the transcendental chapters omitted, it would have been decidedly the best sea‐novel in the English language,” a demerit “only comparative” in the final assessment. True to her editorial service to character‐driven high‐interest narrative, the reviewer lauded “the chase and capture of a whale, or any other stirring incident of Ocean life,” which she argued “the author displays even more than his usual powers” (Melville 1995: 412). This desire for a conventional whaling narrative featuring action scenes and chases typifies the popular antebellum readership’s preference for plot‐driven unilinear tales, preferably told in a series of scenes strung together in a causal chain. Moby‐Dick had fared far worse in the daily press, once again taking a serious beating in the Boston Post at the hands of Greene. This “crazy sort of affair” Greene condemned on economic grounds, alleging, “‘The Whale’ is not worth the money asked for it, either as a literary work or as a mass of printed paper,” a comment that was among the most damning estimations of the value – here economically rendered – of his writing Melville would endure.
Melville’s bizarre dance with the antebellum reading public sparked by the publication of Moby‐Dick is perhaps best captured in his own fictional scenarios that metaphorically interrogate the process of courting a mass audience in popular print culture. One particularly apt scene occurs in Typee, when the main character, Tommo, manufactures a pop‐gun out of bamboo to amuse a small native boy only to discover himself surrounded by tribesmen demanding that he make more. The boy “scampered away with it, half delirious with ecstasy, and in twenty minutes afterwards I might have been surrounded by a noisy crowd,” the analogue to the antebellum reading public’s representation of American society in its diversity and insistence on its immediate entertainment, consisting of “venerable old greybeards – responsible fathers of families – valiant warriors – matrons – young men – girls and children – all holding in their hand bits of bamboo, and each clamoring to be served first.” He is astonished that so simple a device for diversion – essentially a toy, but an extremely novel one nonetheless – would produce such a sensation, quipping that “I should certainly have taken out a patent for its invention.” Mock skirmishes broke out as “Pop, Pop, Pop, Pop, now resounded all over the valley.” Writing in the mid‐1840s, Melville’s next comment proved uncanny in prophesying his own authorial career, and specifically, the reception of Moby‐Dick: “I was half afraid that, like the man and the brazen bull, I would fall victim to my own ingenuity.” As with Typee, “the excitement gradually wore away, though ever after occasional pop guns might be heard,” like those popular novels that resounded through the antebellum reading public, “at all hours of the day” (Melville 1968: 145).
The closeness to the physical experience of whaling, Melville knew, was not for the faint of heart, and was potentially at odds with the objective of drawing a broad audience. But he never abandoned that objective, nor was he above sensationalizing the appeal of his work to the average reader by packaging it as highly volatile and dangerous, like the whaling industry itself. Through the voice of his narrator, Ishmael, Melville (1988) even embeds this appeal within the pages of Moby‐Dick, warning the reader to stay on their “insular Tahiti,” for diving deeper would inevitably mean facing “horrors of the half‐known life” (274). The innuendo appears roughly two‐thirds of the way through the lengthy novel, functioning as a temptation to continue to dive deeper to encounter the clash between Ahab and Moby Dick in narrative’s denouement. “God keep thee!” Ishmael cries. “Push not from that isle, thou canst never return!” But consideration of the vast reaches of the sea, like the unknown portion of his novel that lies ahead, propels rather than deters the reader whom Melville draws with the harrowing “devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes” and “the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks” that make up the appalling “universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creature prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.” But like Ishmael, the reader too, so Melville hoped, would “love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts” (Melville 1988: 274, 7).
Melville’s trouble was not that readers were uniformly averse to paradoxical invitations to explore forbidden worlds. The jarring reality Melville faced in various forms with all his published work was that the antebellum reading public would want verisimilitude and dramatic unity of the sort commonly found in Victorian realism that dominated the literary market. The genre of sea adventure, furthermore, was vexed with the demands of non‐fiction, an issue he grappled with mightily, beginning with controversies surrounding the authenticity of events depicted in Typee. Melville struggled with the expectations set by popular non‐fiction sea narrative such as Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840 just prior to the composition of his first novel. The perilous business of writing novels inevitably meant readers would enter his work with the false expectation that his portraits would present a totalizing view of his subject. “True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another,” he observed through Ishmael in Moby‐Dick, “but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness” (Melville 1988: 264).
Melville wrote Moby‐Dick with the hope of winning simultaneous success with popular and critical audiences. He had written the novel in a white heat, locking himself in his room for all hours of the day, and refusing to come out for meals despite the entreaties of his wife and daughters. He was driven by the belief that, as he said of Hawthorne’s work, his novel would be “sold in the hundred thousand and read by the million” (Melville 1987: 253). His colossal ambition was to achieve nothing less than spontaneous universal recognition of the genius of Moby‐Dick. However, he had tragically underestimated the complexity of its reception in the literary market. In response to the lingering confinement of writing according to commonly recognizable genre conventions, he sought to break free in one giant flourish. His great novel, he believed, would shatter generic confines like “that explosive sort of stuff [that] will expand though screwed up in a vice” of such constraints, and “burst it, though it be triple steel” (Melville 1987: 247). In the novel itself, he imagines his own magnificent creative process with manic gargantuan ambition, glorying in his immersion in producing the most ambitious novel in the history of American literature. “Give me a condor’s quill!” he demands through the voice of Ishmael at one point in Moby‐Dick. “Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!” Committed to producing “a mighty book,” he reveled in the “outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep” of his “mighty theme” (Melville 1988: 456).
After completing his magnum opus, he confided in Hawthorne that he had written a novel in the name of the devil, one broiled in hell fire: “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb” (Melville 1993: 196). As with his salvo to Sarah Morewood, he sensed that the more delicate and pious of his audience might take offense at his dark tale that refuses easy moralistic answers to timeless existential questions such as the problem of evil in the universe. Anticipating a straightforward whaling narrative, readers were perplexed by the novel. Buried by crushing reviews, he complained to Hawthorne, refusing to compromise his creative process for the popular market’s demands for the literary equivalent of pop guns. The few positive reviews that surfaced tended to praise Moby‐Dick for its information delivered about the whaling industry and the nature of life at sea, but were utterly blind to the elemental profound narrative he believed he had woven. The negative reviews blasted the book, claiming, “Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of bedlam literature,” a work that shows an unwillingness and disdain for “learning the craft of an artist” (Melville 1995: 378). Perhaps what would have been his greatest published review, from Hawthorne, he naively preempted. He claimed he would rather delight in Hawthorne’s private “joy‐giving and exultation breeding letter” than have him publish a word on behalf of the novel (Melville 1993: 212). Melville’s (1993) double ambition to earn a substantial profit and write “the Gospels in this century” exceeded his grasp (192). His fear was that both his literary reputation and financial future had been sacrificed in the process.
The reception of Pierre: or, The Ambiguities in 1852, the year following Moby‐Dick’s appearance, marked the nadir of Melville’s relationship with the antebellum reading public. The novel, with its experimental French sensationalism featuring dark psychological intrigue popularized by Poe and Hawthorne, bewildered and enraged audiences. The Southern Quarterly Review proclaimed “That Herman Melville has gone ‘clean daft,’” because “he has given us a very mad book.” Graham’s Magazine could only speculate, “the most friendly reader is obliged at the end to protest against such a provoking perversion of talent and waste of power.” Others mocked Melville, not missing the opportunity for humor at his expense. The New York Lantern, for example, ran the headline “Fatal Occurrence,” insinuating that this diseased domestic narrative spelled the demise of an “intelligent young man” who had not been accounted for since he was observed “deliberately purchasing Herman Melville’s last work.” The common trope of disease among critics surfaced in Duyckinck’s longing for the old Melville of sea adventures featuring “sturdy sailors […] strengthened by the wholesome air of the outside world.” Greene held nothing back, charging “the amount of utter trash in the volume is almost infinite” (Melville 1995: 439, 441, 419–420).
The announcement, halfway through the novel, that Pierre is an author was a direct response to Melville’s poor treatment at the hands of critics. Among other things, Pierre stands as his hate letter to antebellum readers and the publishing industry that serves them with its legions of superficial agents and editors functioning to mitigate the forces of literary supply and demand. Reviews diminish in the wake of Pierre to a mere paragraph. Critics described his last novels as interesting and at best charming, terms that hardly plumbed the depths of his satirical historical novel, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), or his final and perhaps most enigmatic novel, The Confidence‐Man: His Masquerade (1857).
Melville’s Magazine Audience
In transitioning from novels to magazine fiction, Melville made use of an old ally in George Palmer Putnam, who had accepted Typee for publication in the Library of America series after it had been rejected by the firm of Harper & Brothers. Putnam provided Melville access to Putnam’s Monthly, a ready outlet for the publication of his tales. Graham Thompson (2014) aptly observes that after Melville “pushed the form of the novel to the point of collapse in Moby‐Dick and Pierre, magazine fiction required that [he] adopt a much more pragmatic approach” (103–104). Unlike today’s readers of the celebrated “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), the antebellum audience would have seen this story as rather ordinary, given its anonymous publication in installments at the back of the magazine and conformity to other serial fiction of the day such as James Maitland’s The Lawyer’s Story (1853). Maitland’s tale, the first chapter of which had earlier appeared in the Tribune, proceeds from the same plot premise as “Bartleby,” except that the lawyer easily removes the industrious yet morbid clerk from the office and successfully intervenes into his private life to rid him of the source of his despair. Tales of lawyers and clerks abounded in periodical print culture, furthermore, including the serialization of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House in Harper’s Monthly, a journal that featured stories reprising the theme of the inner life of legal assistants, who made up the demographic of rising urban gentry that readers were eager to discover. Placing a human face on the future of Wall Street and the legal industry, stories in Harper’s examined life in the liminal space between destitution and the elite classes with titles such as “The Gentleman Beggar: An Attorney’s Story,” “Jane Eccles; or, Confessions of an Attorney,” and “Reminiscences of an Attorney” (Thompson 2014: 105).
Harper’s was certainly more politically conservative and sentimental by comparison, as evidenced by Melville’s stories that appeared there, including “The Happy Failure,” “The Fiddler,” and “Cock‐A‐Doodle‐Doo!” The lightness of the Harper’s fiction is attributable to its wider circulation at over 100 000, compared to Putnam’s narrower and more sophisticated audience of 35 000, according to Thompson’s (2014) estimation of the figures for summer 1853 when Melville began publishing there. As Post‐Lauria (1996) points out, magazine practice stimulated rather than dissuaded Melville’s literary creativity, ironically, to employ forms expected by readers “to revolt with rather than against them” (166). Whereas Pierre encoded Melville’s resistance to the antebellum reading public, his magazine fiction represented his embrace of it, yet one creatively employed to extend his critique of mass culture and the expanding publishing industry’s impact on literature. Writing the other way with more deliberate pitches for mass appeal in the mid‐1850s did not depoliticize his work. His literary journalism instead sharply criticizes gender and economic inequality in “The Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus and Maids,” for example, and highlights his own professional anxieties and skepticism about the industrialization of literature, as in “The Happy Failure” and “Bartleby,” subtitled “A Story of Wall Street.”
Melville proved quite effective at the challenge of consciously adhering to the dictum of Harper’s for a sentimental structure – economically successful, socially respectable narrators who chronicle and distance themselves from their tales that end on sentimental notes while creatively employing his own richer messages with sexual, political, and social innuendoes (Post‐Lauria 1996: 170). Although their editorial policies and content showed differences accountable to audience size, Putnam’s and Harper’s still shared similar aesthetic values that Melville cooperated with effectively, despite his obvious misgivings about such creative concessions, reservations that took on their most shrill tenor in Pierre. Ironically, it was this broad immediate audience his books had failed to bring him that Melville so actively courted during the 1850s. The mass of book readers was tiny by comparison to the periodical audience, which meant that the vast majority of the reading public knew of him only through the frequently vicious reviews of his work. Magazines afforded Melville an opportunity to regain control of his public image that he had lost in exactly these periodicals. In effect, he transformed the periodical press from a critical battleground on which he suffered profound losses into a canvas for his creative work to preempt his own reception and thereby condition the terms of his public consumption. No better measure was available to Melville for cleaning up his reputation in the periodical press and saving face to such significant onlookers as his father‐in‐law. Unlike the opaque book audience, which left Melville guessing at their precise profile, given what were then amorphous publishers’ lists of titles, the magazine readers he courted represented a clear and visible demographic readily discerned from each journal’s editorial policy and content. As James Machor (2007) notes, “short stories would appear in venues Melville may have believed would provide him with a sense of the audience he would be addressing, since the contents of an individual periodical might serve as an index to the interests and tastes of its readers” (88).
Melville sought magazine work not to kowtow to conventional standards for the sake of mass exposure as an end in itself, but as a new, more powerful platform to exorcise the demons of his critical crucifixion. He also forwarded his progressive politics in certain stories, the more radical of which he submitted to Putnam’s. His story “The Two Temples,” in which he took up his old rivalry by firing a fresh volley against religious hegemony, for example, was too radical even for Putnam, who rejected it for fear of retribution from New York’s Grace Church, Melville’s thinly veiled target (Thompson 2014: 107). Melville’s novel production did not vanish so quietly in the 1850s after Pierre but persisted with the publication of his first full serial novel, Israel Potter, and The Confidence‐Man. “Don’t you read it!” was Melville’s dare to Morewood and the general antebellum audience to read his genre blending audacious reinvention of novelistic convention. By diversifying his offerings, Melville found new forms and audiences without the badgering interference of the critical community. Through serial fiction – beginning with “Bartleby” and including “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles,” a series of sketches of the Galápagos Islands; “Benito Cereno,” a novella inspired by a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship in 1799; and now Israel Potter, loosely based on a brief autobiography of a soldier who had fought in the Revolutionary War – Melville could reach his readers directly in his attempt to minimize the impact of book reviewers on his popular reception. But reviews were unavoidable given Melville’s publication of his tales in book form as The Piazza Tales (1856). Critics showed general relief that Melville had regained his wits after Pierre. The brevity and scarcity of the reviews, however, indicates that his relevance was dwindling. Although Charles Greene, Melville’s nemesis at the Boston Post, found “all of them readable and forcible tales,” for example, his review consisted of a scant two sentences (Melville 1995: 473).
After the Civil War, Melville’s withdrawal from critical attention was nearly complete, as he would turn to yet a final genre and audience: poetry, mainly for his intimates, a readership like the friends and family who first eagerly hung on every word of his adventures on the high seas. Melville’s quiet retirement belied the two decades of turbulent and troubled courtship with the reading public that preceded it, especially the impressive array of promotional tactics he wielded to escape his memory as the “man who lived among the cannibals.” Melville’s tiny yet loyal band of readers persisted even through his darkest decades of literary obscurity after the Civil War. Inspired by Moby‐Dick, Archibald MacMechan wrote Melville in 1889, two years before the author’s death, “anxious to set the merits of your books before the public and to that end, I beg the honor of correspondence with you” (Melville 1993: 752). The aging Melville, however, had long abandoned his hot pursuit of the reading public. His reply at this late stage reflects his desire to win the audience he never had, but his lack of the vigor to do so. “What little of it left I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete, and which indeed may never be completed.” Such was life “After twenty years nearly, as an outdoor Custom House officer” (Melville 1993: 752, 519).
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 1 (THE TRANSFORMATION OF LITERARY PRODUCTION, 1820–1865).