How little they ween of the Rudimental Quincunxes, and the Hecatic Spherula - such is Melville, such is Mardi

My invaluable commenters have made me feel not guilty - I feel guilty for inflicting more Mardi on everyone - but irresponsible. So a bit more on Mardi, and then a bit more tomorrow. The Jewish King Lear will have to wait.

Mardi (1849) is Herman Melville's third book, but first work of fiction. It's long - 654 Library of America pages. That's just slightly deceptive, because of the unusual amount of white space, the result of the book's 195 (!) chapters. Whenever I bogged down in Mardi, I sure did appreciate the short chapters.

For the first 159 pages and 51 chapters, Mardi is a seafaring tale (subgenre: boat), with a clear plot and an odd voice. Two sailors steal a ship's boat and desert a whaler on the open sea. The boat trip on the Pacific is completely unlike those of Captain Bligh or the Essex crew; it's almost an idyll. Since little happens, we get to know the narrator, an odd bird who gives us excurses like Chapter 13, "Of the Chondropterygii, and Other Uncouth Hordes Infesting the South Seas":

"It's famous botanizing, they say, in Arkansas' boundless prairies; I commend the student of Ichthyology to an open boat, and the ocean moors of the Pacific. As your craft glides along, what strange monsters float by. Elsewhere, was never seem their like. And nowhere are they found in the books of the naturalists."

The narrator proceeds, in this chapter, to mention Sir Thomas Browne, Buffon, Faust, the Essex, "the German naturalists Müller and Henle," Hagar and Ishmael, Samuel Johnson, Timon of Athens, and the cavalry painter Wouvermans. The descriptive writing is imaginative: the tiger shark is "a round, portly gourmand;" the white shark "steal[s] along like a spirit in the water, with horrific serenity of aspect." The chapter is four pages long.

Actually, any reader who can be bothered to pick up a Melville novel will be happy enough in the boat. There are even some events - a deserted ship, and the rescue of a blond-haired, blue-eyed sacrificial victim. And I think we're OK for another 36 pages, through Chapter 64 - we've reached the island chain of Mardi ("The World"), and have to spend some time getting acquainted with the locals. Then the fairy princess mysteriously vanishes, and Mardi takes a terrible turn.

The narrator begins a journey to find the missing woman, accompanied by the king of the island he's on, and three others - a poet, a historian, and a philosopher. All earlier characters are jettisoned, including, oddly, the narrator, who assumes a new identity and barely says a word for the rest of the book. It's kind of avant garde, actually. The tour, in which the narrator and the three new characters wander from island to island and debate a miscellany of abstruse issues, lasts 445 pages, leaving only 14 pages to return to and finish off whatever scrap of a story is still floating around. So that trip, really, is the book.

What do they visit? An island of gluttons, an island of thieves, an island of the Established Church, an island of True Religion. A miser; a book collector. There's an island of fossils, so Melville can bring us up to date on scientific matters. Between islands, the travelers debate life, death, free will, politics, poetry. If this sounds familiar, you may have read the equally tedious books 4 and 5 of Gargantua and Pantagruel.*

I had had plenty of this when, to my horror, I realized that the island they were visiting in Chapter 145, Dominora, was actually England. And then there's Zandinavia, Muzkovi, "the priest-king of Vatikanna." I think I might have audibly said "Oh no." The more general satire, thin enough, is replaced by topical satire. Absolutely deadly.

There's a revolution in "Franko." There are gold seekers in whatever Melville calls California - see, he's right up to date. Southern "Vivenza" has plantation slavery, and the overseer is Senator John C. Calhoun. Looking back now, it seems that the circumnavigation of the globe only took about 90 pages, but it felt like 200.

I'll end with a sample of the discussions or debates or whatever they are, just a taste, more than enough:

"'I mistrust thee, minstrel! that thou hast not yet been impregnated by the arcane mysteries; that thou dost not sufficiently ponder on the Adyta, the Monads, and the Hyparxes; the Dianoias, the Unical Hypostases, the Gnostic powers of the Psychical Essence, and the Supermindane and Plermoatic Triads; to say nothing of the Abstract Noumenons... Ah!' signed Babbalanja, turning; 'how little they ween of the Rudimental Quincunxes, and the Hecatic Spherula!'" (Ch. 170, p. 1218)

Yes, this is the worst of it, so in that sense I am cheating. But, man, is this ever Melville; unassimilated, unpalatable, but Melville. More of that tomorrow.

* Now I do feel guilty. Books 1 and 2 of Gargantua and Pantagruel are among the very greatest books ever written.

Herman Melville's Mardi was written by Herman Melville

Herman Melville's Mardi (1849) is sort of a catastrophe. I'm glad I read it, more or less; I doubt I'll ever return to it. But it has one interesting feature: although it's the third book by Melville, it's the first appearance of Melville, the author of Moby-Dick and "Bartleby the Scrivener" and whatever else we think of when we think of Melville. For the first time, I mean, Melville's book sounds like Melville. He had found his voice.

Typee, Melville's first book, is an excellent South Seas travel narrative, romanticized (a lot, I assume), well worth reading, easily recommended. The sequel, Omoo, is also pretty good, but does not have such a strong central story. This is a disadvantage of writing non-fiction - the one really strange thing that happened to Melville is covered in Typee. The style of these books is charming, humorous, and straightforward, and sounds only barely, in stray moments, like Herman Melville.

I recognized Melville from the first page of Mardi. One thing he had been doing while writing his first two books and perambulating about Manhattan was reading, just reading an enormous quantity of books, including all of those great 17th century prose stylists like Sir Thomas Browne who so strongly influenced his style. Ruined it, perhaps, in Mardi, a book stuffed with undigested fantasies and experiments and ravings. He's still charming, in small doses, and definitely humorous, but he is no longer straightforward. Sentences and thoughts are extended, and then extended again. The second half of the book, a journey from one nominally satirical setpiece to another, was a trial.

All of this reminded me of William Faulkner. Faulkner's first two novels, Soldiers' Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927), sound nothing like him. They're not bad, not at all, they just don't have the distinctive Faulkner voice. Then in his third novel, Sartoris aka Flags in the Dust (1929), there it is, fully developed, just like that. Sartoris is not any better than the earlier novels - it might be worse - but it's instantly recognizable as Faulkner.

Faulkner did not wait for the publication of Sartoris to start his next novel, The Sound and the Fury. Poor Melville took the other path, and waited, so he felt the full brunt of the uncomprehending response to Mardi. He seems to have retreated to more conventional seafaring novels for his next two books. I don't know what they sound like, how Melvillean they are.

After the exhausting Mardi, I'm not exactly excited to find out. Mardi has made me less eager to pursue middlin' Melville, but, oddly, more eager to reread Moby-Dick, where the biblical voice, the seventeenth century cadences, the arcane facts, and the technical realism of the earlier books are finally pulled together into a great work of art.

If you're planning to plagiarize some of this post for an assignment in your Novels of Melville and Faulkner course, you need to work in a lot of specific examples from the various books or you won't do very well. But for my purpose, I think this'll do.

Melville's evolving style - an experiment - I studied it every morning, like the multiplication table

Typee (1846), first sentence of Chapter 25:

"Although I had been unable during the late festival to obtain information on many interesting subjects which had much excited my curiosity, still that important event had not passed by without adding materially to my general knowledge of the islanders."

Omoo (1847), first sentence of Chapter 25:

"During the morning of the day which dawned upon the events just recounted, we remained a little to leeward of the harbour, waiting the appearance of the consul, who had promised the mate to come off in a shore boat for the purpose of seeing him."

Mardi (1849), ditto:

"A few days passed: the brigantine drifting hither and thither, and nothing in sight but the sea, when forth again on its stillness rung Annatoo's domestic alarum."

Redburn (1849), you get the idea:

"Though, for reasons hinted at above, they would not let me steer, I contented myself with learning the compass, a graphic facsimile of which I drew on a blank leaf of the "Wealth of Nations," and studied it every morning, like the multiplication table."

White Jacket, or the World on a Man-of-War (1850), first two sentences this time:

"Colder and colder; we are drawing nigh to the Cape. Now gregoes, pea jackets, monkey jackets reefing jackets, storm jackets, oiljackets, paint jackets, round jackets, short jackets, long jackets, and all manner of jackets, are the order of the day, not excepting the immortal white jacket, which begins to be sturdily buttoned up to the throat, and pulled down vigorously at the skirts, to bring them well over the loins."

Moby-Dick (1851), two sentences again, Chapter 25:

"In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause--such an advocate, would he not be blame-worthy?"

That's enough, and possibly too much. Note the publication dates - can't say Melville wasn't working hard, and there would be four more books in the next six years.

I have no doubt that picking a different chapter would give different results, but I think this choice (not quite random, but I didn't check them all ahead of time, and have never read Redburn or White Jacket) shows what I'm talking about.

The Typee and Omoo passages are relatively plain and dry (the Typee one too much so, much duller than most of the book). In Mardi, something has changed, even in a straightforward sentence like this one, free of Hecatic Spherula - "forth again on its stillness rung," the rhythm of the line has changed.

The line from Redburn is simply fantastic, and has me newly excited to read that book.

White Jacket features a list, a key tool for Melville and his descendents, the Pynchons and their kin. The lines from Moby-Dick don't seem that special, but they aren't plain, and they sound like Melville to me. The style, the voice, of Typee and Omoo sound much more generic.

Becca suggested in a comment that Virginia Woolf's voice followed a similar path, from not-Woolf to Woolf in a short period of time, and she has already convincingly explored the idea. Other nominees are welcome. Since one has to know a fair chunk of an author's work to play this game, it's a little tricky. I've come up with a few candidates only to think "How do you know?"

I feel that I have justified Mardi to myself more than I had expected. Whatever its problems, reading Mardi is a way to spend some time with an enormously creative and original artist while he thinks through some problems and plays with some ideas, even if his solutions are unworkable and his ideas are preposterous.

By coincidence, Anecdotal Kurp put up a post on Sir Thomas Browne this morning. If you want a taste of what Melville was reaching for, I recommend it. I recommend it, regardless.

Salamanders, unknown; Devils, ditto - Melville's Enchanted Islands

“The Encantadas” (1954) is a strange hybrid of fiction and travel writing, or strange for writers besides Herman Melville, who had been writing fictionalized memoiristic allegories for almost ten years at this point.

The Encantadas are better known as  the Galápagos Islands.  The symbolic attraction of the Spanish name is obvious.  Melville reinforces the enchantment by giving each chapter an epigram from The Fairie Queene, such as:

Most ugly shapes and horrible aspects,
Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see,

and so on before “Sketch Second,” which is all about giant tortoises.

“The Encantadas” has chapters, ten of them in fifty pages, telling multiple stories.  It really feels more like a tiny little book.  I don’t know what it is.

Melville’s fairy-land sounds suspiciously like hell (“A group of rather extinct volcanoes rather than of isles; looking much as the world at large might after a penal conflagration,” or “Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky”), or an abandoned cemetery, or a city in ruins,  or the Dead Sea.

Now that is curious.  Everything has been from “Sketch First,” by the way.  Melville’s massive 1876 poem Clarel is about a trip to the Holy Land, include a long visionary descent to the Dead Sea that is perhaps the highlight of the book.  Yet, here several years before Melville’s trip, we have:

Nothing can better suggest the aspect of once living things malignly crumbled from ruddiness into ashes.  Apples of Sodom, after touching, seem these isles.

So much of Melville’s writing comes from his own experience that it can be surprising how much comes from his reading, with his imagination stirring it all together.  Thus he describes a strange place he has actually visited with a strange place he has only read about, but will, in fact, someday visit.  I suppose this is no more strange than the way he constantly compares the Holy Land to the sea.

As “The Encantadas” progresses, Melville adds inhabitants, first tortoises, then birds, then, surprisingly, given his insistence on uninhabitability, people.  This point is borrowed from bibliographing nicole.   Also strange given this census, from “Sketch Fourth”:

Men,                         none
Ant-eaters,            unknown
Man-haters,          unknown
Lizards,                   500,000
Snakes,                    500,000
Spiders,                   10,000,000
Salamanders,        unknown
Devils,                      do.
                           _____________

Making a clean total of 11,000,000,

exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, ant-eaters, man-haters, and salamanders.

But this is just one island.  The men live elsewhere.  I have no idea what the joke about the ant-eaters is supposed to be.  I assume it is a joke.

The strangest thing of all is that “The Encantadas” is Melville’s second text that explores an archipelago.  The first was his massive, mad 1849 novel Mardi, Melville’s first attempt at an omnibook, where a group of travelers debate the meaning of everything while exploring an island chain representing the world and including everything – countries, religions, book collectors.  “The Encantadas” is the tame version of Mardi, with a “real” setting, “real” reptiles, and stories based on “real” events.  The result is another surprise, a small, clear, readable Melville masterpiece.  Just look at the tortoises.  Maybe tomorrow I will look at the wonderful tortoises.

I attempt to celebrate, or spoil, Herman Melville's birthday by describing him as a conceptual innovator

Happy birthday, Herman Melville.  I honestly thought I was going to spend most of this week writing about Melville, about The Piazza Tales (1856).

Melville was a kind of conceptual writer.  He was not concerned with the process of creativity like Alvin Lucier or Andy Warhol or César Aira (“nowadays, art that does not use a procedure is not truly art”).  Who at the time would have understood that kind of gibberish?  But he was a self-conscious innovator in fiction and verse.

The forms of the novel that were standard in the late 1840s were not a good fit for Melville, so he struggled to find a form for himself.  By his third book, the crazy Mardi (1849) he had assembled the pieces of his style:  short chapters (Mardi has 195!), a wild mix of realism and metaphor verging on allegory, a literally poetic diction, and a de-emphasis on novelistic character.  The latter especially was completely contrary to the contemporary emphasis of English (and French and Russian) fiction, where authors were creating amazingly lifelike, sympathetic characters.  This still drives unsuspecting readers of Moby-Dick crazy, doesn’t it?  Where are the people?

The Melville “novel” I am reading now, The Confidence Man (1857), is even more extreme, with all of the characters replaced by allegorical figures moving in a kind of a procession in a pointedly artificial setting.  It is like The Fairie Queen.  It is slow going.  Perhaps it is no longer a novel, but some other still unnamed form of prose fiction.

I think this wild allegorizing is fairly new, although it is partly borrowed from Nathaniel Hawthorne.  I believe the prose as poetry is new, too, something no one had done to the same extent.  I should keep an eye out for more examples of that.

Curiously, since I am knocking his characterization, two of Melville’s most significant creations are characters.  Even more curiously, they both can be thought of as conceptual innovations.  What I mean here is that some fundamental part of Captain Ahab and Bartleby the Scrivener can be understood without reading the original text.  Heck, without knowing that there is a text.  Ahab is the crazy guy who obsesses over a pointless goal; Bartleby is the office drone who prefers not to do anything.

Whether or not these descriptions match what is in the text is incidental.  They have turned out to be valuable concepts.  Useful shorthand descriptions.  They join Don Quixote, Don Juan, Ebenezer Scrooge, Faust, Sherlock Holmes, and that poor sap who turns into a bug as characters who have escaped their novels, however narrowly, as ideas more than as people.

I feel that movies have muddled this entire line of argument in some way I do not yet understand.

I also have this idea that the ingenious ways novelists have found to plump up the seeming reality of their characters prevents them from becoming free-floating concepts.  So we could call a well-meaning busybody Emma Woodhouse, but Jane Austen’s Emma is too complex or ambiguous, or just too much a part of her own novel to escape it.  I don’t know.  Please substitute your own example.  Imagine Maggie Tulliver independently of The Mill on the Floss, Anna Karenina outside of her book, Charles Kinbote at large.  It seems pointless, almost impossible, but who knows.  Reincarnations of Don Quixote and Captain Ahab show up all over the place.  I know, I know, Captain Ahab is himself a version of Don Quixote.

I wonder what I am going to ramble about tomorrow.

A South Seas book collection - like bologna, and Stilton

An antiquarian shows the island travellers his book collection:

"Upon gaining the vault, forth flew a score or two of bats, extinguishing the flambeau, and leaving us in darkness, like Belzoni deserted by his Arabs in the heart of a pyramid. The torch at last relumed, we entered a tomb-like excavation, at every step raising clouds of dust; and at last stood before long rows of musty, mummyish parcels, so dingy-red, and so rolled upon sticks, that they looked like stiff sausages of Bologna; but smelt like some fine old Stilton or Cheshire."

Mardi, Ch. 123

Much of what is wrong with Mardi is on display here ("relumed"), but I don't care. I want to look at those mummyish, sausagey, aromatic scrolls.

Some titles:

King Kroko, and the Fisher Girl
Sonnet on the Last Breath of an Ephemera
Grunts and Groans, by a Mad Boar
Pudding for the Pious
On the Best Gravy for Wild Boar's Meat
Three Recipes for Bottling New Arrack

Hmm, maybe I don't want to look at them. Maybe just those last two.

Herman Melville shows how to eat a cuttlefish with gusto.

A little setup: most of Herman Melville's Mardi is a journey from island to island, each with a different king, different society, different whatnot. It's satire, or something. Most of the kings are treated as divinities, but not the gourmand Borabolla, because he is too fat:

"Now, to the fact of his not being rated a demi-god, was perhaps ascribable the circumstance, that Borabolla comported himself with less dignity, than was the wont of their Mardian majesties. And truth to say, to have seen him regaling himself with one of his favorite cuttle-fish, its long snaky arms and feelers instinctively twining round his head as he ate; few intelligent observers would have opined that the individual before them was the sovereign lord of Mondoldo."

My only point, such as it is, is that I don't think this is the correct way to eat a cuttlefish. Is it? And it's being eaten alive, right - "instinctively twining"? So maybe that's the first problem. Anybody else picking up just a hint of H. P. Lovecraft here?

Last week was chaotic for me; this week will probably be the same. So all week on Wuthering Expectations: pointless chaos. Actually, I don't know if I have the energy for chaos. So strike "chaos," but keep "pointless."

The quotation can be found in Chapter XCV. That's right, chapter 95, of 195 total.

Among the most aesthetically pleasing of all insects - the prose style of naturalists

So if I were to take this idea seriously - when and how did poets and novelists start writing seriously about animals - I would have to look to their models, the naturalists and scientists and travelers, the Gilbert Whites and James Audubons and Charles Darwins and so on. Not that the direction of influence only had to go one way, or that a genius like John Clare needed their help, but that's where I think I'd start.

Herman Melville's Mardi (1849), for example, is full of nature writing. A bit overpacked and encyclopedic, even. Chapter 32 is titled "Xiphius Platypterus," and is entirely about the swordfish. An earlier chapter is about sharks and pilot fish. A later one describes whales playing in a medusa-illuminated sea. Often, this is directly pinched from other books. Much of the novel is built like a collage, upon which Melville founds his rhetorical flights (a bit on the swordfish):

"A right valiant and jaunty Chevalier is our hero; going about with his long Toledo perpetually drawn. Rely upon it, he will fight you to the hilt, for his bony blade has never a scabbard. He himself sprang from it at birth; yea, at the very moment he leaped into the Battle of Life; as we mortals ourselves spring all naked and scabbardless into the world."

Not what I'm looking for - I do not believe this tells us much about the swordfish.

Most of Melville's contemporaries are simply prosaic. I've read enough books about traveling in the American West to be tired of the repetitive descriptions of buffalo, grizzly bears, and prairie dog villages. Even John Kirk Townsend, an expert in birds, writes surprisingly flat descriptions of nature (the fun of his Narrative of a Journey across the Rocky Mountains (1839), I should say, is his irrepressible naivté). Here's Josiah Gregg, a merchant in the Santa Fé trail trade, with an unusually nice description of a buffalo charge:

"The buffalo never attacks, however, except when wounded... I have crouched in the tall grass in the direct route of a frighted gang, when, firing at them on their near approach. they would spread in consternation to either side. Still their advance is somewhat frightful - their thundering rumble over the dry plain - their lion-like fronts and dangling beards - their open mouths and hanging tongues - as they come on, puffing like a locomotive engine at every bound, does at first make the blood settle a little heavy about the heart." (Ch. 27 "Animals of the Prairie", p. 366)

That's from Commerce of the Prairies (1844). Gregg is trying to write a useful book, so most of his descriptions of wolves and mustangs and horned lizards are functional, designed to assist travelers. But there's good writing here, too.

I now realize that, today, we are awash in high quality nature writing. Maybe I take it for granted. The current issue of Smithsonian magazine has an article about geoduck clams and the people who work with them that is so well written that it's easy to ignore how good it really is:

"Its long, leathery neck can stretch to the length of a baseball bat or recoil to a wrinkled nub. The neck resembles an aardvark's snout, an elephant's trunk or a monstrous prehistoric earthworm emerging from a fist-size shell, among other things."

The author is Craig Welch; Smithsonian also published, a couple of months ago, a piece of his on the spotted owl of similar quality. Apropos of nothing, except that someone gave it to me, and it's interesting, I'm reading the memoir of entomologist E. O. Wilson (Naturalist, 1994). He begins by telling us about a memory from when he was seven, when he came upon a jellyfish:

"Its opalescent pink bell is divided by thin red lines that radiate from center to circular edge. A wall of tentacles falls from the rim to surround and partially veil a feeding tube and other organs, which fold in and out like the fabric of a drawn curtain. I can see only a little way into this lower tissue mass." (pp. 5-6)

This is not the child's view, but the adult scientist's, aware that the astonishing beast was a Chrysaora quinquecirrha, or sea nettle. I marvel at all of the metaphorical language Wilson needs to describe accurately the jellyfish, not just the "drawn curtain," but also "wall" and "veil" and "bell." Good metaphors are not simply flourishes - what easier way is there to communicate just how the mass of tentacles are folded?

Wilson's specialty is ants, so how about some ants:

"The dacetines are slender, ornately sculptured little ants with long, thin mandibles. Their body hairs are modified into little clubs, scales, and sinuous whips. In many species a white or yellow spongy collar surrounds their waists. Clean and decorative, they are under the microscope among the most aesthetically pleasing of all insects." (133)

Not a fancy passage. I am always skeptical when someone says that "not a word is wasted," but this comes close. As usual, the amount of fine writing, on whatever subject, turns out to be enormous, once I begin to look for it. I'm not convinced, though, that much of it, regarding animals, I mean, can be found in 19th century fiction!

I've run out of reviews, which is fine with me

Now I really have run out of reviewable books. I had some ideas, but none of them quite worked.

For example, I thought I might review Matthew Arnold's first book, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849), and really trash it; that was the joke, just dismiss Matthew Arnold as junk. These lines, from the title poem, would be central, somehow:

With large-leav'd, low-creeping melon-plants,
And the dark cucumber.

That still seems terrible. Read that second line aloud - is there any saving it? Maybe I'll do this later.

Or how about a review of Melville's Mardi (1849)? Since almost no one has read this, which is just how it should be, I really could review it. Meaning, describe its contents, put it in some context, make a recommendation, which is, unless you are particularly interested in Melville, stay away. Maybe you should be particularly interested in Melville, but that's a separate issue. The book is a disaster, although an instructive one that may also pop up again next week.

My best idea was to review either The Jewish Cowboy (1942) by Yitsik Rabon, or The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas (1910) by Alberto Gerchunoff. I haven’t read either of those books, and almost doubt that they exist. But the Argentinean setting of the latter led me to think of Borges, who wondered why someone would actually write a book, when he could just assume the book existed and proceed accordingly. Same goes for reviews, surely. I could just review the book that The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas should be. A wonderful, wonderful book.

Let me just check something. Huh. University of New Mexico Press, 1998. So it turns out that a person - say, me - could actually read The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, which does, in fact, exist. Says it's recommended for Jews and non-Jews alike. Hey, that’s me! Let me just - excuse me for a moment - just make a note here. OK. Review forthcoming. No promises about The Jewish Cowboy.

It never really occurred to me that I would want to review books, rather than just write about them in whatever way struck me as interesting. An image, a metaphor, a connection to another book, a quotation. All of this aside from the ludicrous aspect of a floor-to-ceiling review of, say, Wuthering Heights. Not that, per the evidence collected by the indefatigable Brontëblog, anyone cares much about that. Very few of the people I read on a regular basis do much reviewing as such. They just write about books.

When I first started poking around on litblogs, I was genuinely surprised that I found so much really high quality amateur book reviewing, as good or better than most newspaper reviewing. I'm thinking of blogs I don't even regularly look at, specialists in so-called Young Adult novels, or mysteries or what have you, mostly writing about books I'll never read. There's so much that's useful.

On the other hand, nobody in litblogland writes reviews of the quality of those that I regularly read in The New Republic or The New York Review of Books or The Hudson Review. But those folks are top experts paid the big bucks, right, $50 and a one year subscription or whatever the going rate is now. I'm looking at poet Alexander Nemser's review of Nabokov's Verses and Versions in The New Republic, March 4, 2009. It's a lot better than my review! Longer, more complete, more knowledgeable. More context, which is crucial - he recommends that I try the Alan Myers translations of 19th century Russian poetry, An Age Ago. Will do, sir. He digs into the Nabokov-Wilson feud. He compares a piece of Nabokov's Eugene Onegin to a Yahoo Babel Fish translation. Now that, I did not understand. Whaddayaknow, Nabokov ain't poetry, but the computerized translation is unreadable.

Do I still have a point? This week was an amusing experiment for me, an experiment that failed. I don't think I'm doing these reviews right. Frankly, though, this always happens. Every time I put up a post of any sort, it's not that I've finished it, but that I've given up - I think, try again next time, and hit Publish. I'm about to do it again ---

Pale ravener of horrible meat - poetic Melville

The response to bibliographing nicole’s readalong of Clarel, Herman Melville’s massive 1876 epic poem of faith-and-doubt, has been fantastic, far above my expectations.  As for the poem, having read just a bit, it is more or less as I expected, dense and complex.  The sheer amount of stuff in the poem is the primary complication, but I had thought it would also be obscure, perhaps bafflingly so, and I was, I am happy to say, wrong about that. Melville’s poetry is, it turns out, often clearer than his prose.  It’s often less poetic than his prose!

For example, this passage nicole found in Pierre (1852):

No Cornwall miner ever sunk so deep
A shaft beneath the sea, as Love will sink
Beneath the floatings of the eyes. Love sees
Ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by
The floor of pearls. The eye is Love’s own mag-
Ic glass, where all things that are not of earth,
Glide in supernatural light. There are
Not so many fishes in the sea,
As there are sweet images in lovers’ eyes.

And there’s more where this came from.  Pierre is a novel; this is prose.  I added the linebreaks and capitalization – but the first six lines really are perfect blank verse, although I am not so happy with the split in “magic”.  An extreme case, maybe, but Melville’s actual poetry is rarely like this.

Or maybe it is:

The Maldive Shark (1888)

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In triple white tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!

They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat –
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.

The poem is about the shark, as the title suggests, but from the odd point of view of the pilot-fish, which is why the shark is all mouth, why the mouth is metaphorically described six times in sixteen lines.  Or, really, the perspective is the poet watching the pilot-fish direct the shark.  I’ve read this before, in Chapter 18 of Mardi (1849), “My Lord Shark and His Pages,” where the “dotard lethargic and dull” is instead “[a] clumsy lethargic monster.”  I have no idea when Melville wrote the poem, but the publication dates are forty years apart.

Melville’s poetry is decidedly not beautiful.  I’ve become suspicious of literary beauty, actually, so I’m not to be trusted on this, but the effects of this poem surely come from something else.  Melville can be plenty clumsy, too.  I have my doubts about “charnel of maw,” for example, or the intrusion of the Fates.  But – “Pale ravener of horrible meat”!  That’s the stuff, or the poem is nothing.  Or “They are friends” – after all of those teeth, that’s a deeply weird line.  Friends!

Fun with the What Middleton Read Project

Let’s have one more day of lists.  Let’s mess around with the What Middletown Read Project.

Archivists punched in the surviving “circulation records of the Muncie (Indiana) Public Library from November 5, 1891 through December 3, 1902” (with “one gap from May 28, 1892 to November 5, 1894”), so they cover about ten years, handy for off the cuff math.  The database “documents every book that every library patron borrowed during that period.”

What can we do with it?  First, who was checked out the most?  I calculated the top 20.  I will at this point note that my results are likely full of errors.  The table has rank and total number of transactions – how many times a book by the author was checked out over the ten year period.

1	Horatio Alger	9,230
2	Charles Fosdick	7,394
3	William T. Adams	5,067
4	Martha Finley	4,731
5	Edward Sylvester Ellis	3,038
6	Edward Payson Roe	2,989
7	Louisa May Alcott	2,976
8	F. Marion Crawford	2,119
9	Rosa Carey	1,992
10	Eugenie John	1,821
11	G. A. Henty	1,814
12	Charles King	1,626
13	L. T. Meade	1,588
14	Mary Mapes Dodge	1,517
15	Francis Hodgson Burnett	1,444
16	Clara Burnham	1,418
17	Susan Coolidge	1,316
18	Augusta Evans	1,315
19	Kirk Munroe	1,237
20	Isabella Alden	1,229

The most popular author – by such a margin! – makes me cringe, but what can I do.  Ma femme suggested that people read Alger so avidly because they were trying to learn how to strike it rich and get out of Muncie.

Another caveat: I do not know how any of this correlates with book sales or library use anywhere else in the country. Still,  I did not realize that Alcott, just a few years after her death, was such a popular author, and not just with the Little Women series.  Her single most popular book here is An Old-fashioned Girl.

I looked up enough of the other writers, most of whom I had never heard of, to see that they were fiction writers.  Patrons mostly left the library with novels.  The first poet I found, James Whitcomb Riley, was way down the list at 326 transactions.

What about writers I might have heard of, or even read?

27	Mark Twain	877
39	Charles Dickens	691
40	J. M. Barrie	677
43	Walter Scott	651
52	J. Fenimore Cooper	587
58	W. D. Howells	538
58	Edward Bulwer-Lytton	538
63	Robert Louis Stevenson	516
67	Nathaniel Hawthorne	468
72	George Eliot	462
75	Rudyard Kipling	460
76	Arthur Conan Doyle	454

Note that Peter Pan does not yet exist, and the Muncie library did not own a Sherlock Holmes book.  Doyle’s winner is Rodney Stone.

Twain, Barrie, Howells, Stevenson, Kipling, and Doyle were all alive during the period covered.  Eliot had died only about a decade earlier.  Dickens twenty years, Hawthorne thirty, Scott sixty.  They are mostly contemporary writers, and all fairly recent.  There is nothing like our current Brontë or Jane Austen phenomenon.

Speaking of whom (I will abandon the rankings):  Charlotte Brontë (253), Jane Austen (179), Anne Brontë (28), Emily Brontë (23).  When I write about the decline of Scott and the rise of Austen, this 3.6:1 ratio of Scott to Austen, shows what I mean.

Were the bookish Muncians reading any foreign fiction? Yes.  What?

Jules Verne	392
Henryk Sienkiewicz	374
Ossip Schubin	361
Victor Hugo	318
Alexandre Dumas, Sr.	220
Adolph Streckfuss	185

Schubin wrote “O Thou, My Austria”, what a title; Streckfuss wrote the more promising Castle Hohenwald.  Half of the Dumas is The Count of Monte Cristo.  The library had only one Tolstoy book, Resurrection, his new one in 1899, in English in 1900, checked out 30 times before the data runs out, which is not bad.  Some other figures look peculiar because of timing, or because of the exact books available.  The Thomas Hardy (160) and Henry James (196) selections, for example, are a little odd.   The library apparently had just one book by Tennyson, checked out only 36 times, which feels like an error.

We all know that Herman Melville was an unjustly forgotten author.  The library owned four of his first five books, so no Moby-Dick; they were checked out 51 times.  Omoo alone left the library 38 times.  Melville was not forgotten.  He was remembered as a South Seas travel writer.

Five brave Muncians, though, took the avant-garde Mardi home with them.  Who were these lunatics?  Mary J. Luick, wife of a retired farmer; Norwood Carnes, florist; Lizzie Banks, wife of a night watchman; Catherine Kusick, bookkeeper; and Ohle Gill, nurse.  The patron records have all been linked to census and city directory data.  You can see their age, address, birthplace, and spouse.  And then you can see all of their other books.  Lizzie Banks also checked out 155 books including Felix Holt, Far from the Madding Crowd, Doctor Thorne, and Jane Eyre.

Just for example.  I am have been careful not to pursue this possibility.  This kind of fun should be accompanied by a fellowship.  Please, play with the database and report back.