What
Happened When I Tried to Write a Book as Fast as Melville Wrote WHITE-JACKET
On a train out of Strasbourg for Luxembourg I plotted on a
manila envelope what I would do when I got home to Wilmington, DE. I had promised
to write a book on BILLY BUDD by September and had worked on the
Northwestern-Newberry MOBY-DICK instead. I knew Melville had written
WHITE-JACKET in 2 months, maximum, and wondered if later on he remembered much
about it. I decided as an experiment that I would write the BB book in what
time I had in July and all of August. But I had to go to New Orleans first, and
there I found a great cache of letters from Oakey Hall, in one of which he
casually announced that Melville had written WHITE-JACKET in a score of
sittings. I took that to mean that Melville worked for 20 days out of the 2
months--read sources and planned for a day or two and wrote like hell the third
day. Well, the weather did not cooperate. It got hot and we had no air
conditioning. For 19 days in a row [I am pretty sure it was 19] it was in the
mid 90s. People all over the East died. My computer got gummy.
I finished early and sent it off and the publisher (Bobbs
Merrill) refused it because it was too long. Northwestern took it as it was. A
lot of people liked it. Paul Seydor quotes it in his new book on PAT GARRETT
AND BILLY THE KID.
Mike—this is hard to read. I
wrote the book between 13 July and 24 August 1988. My computer really did stick
in the heat and humidity. And my test proved that in my case, at least, I would
not remember a word of what I wrote, whether Melville remembered anything about
WHITE-JACKET or not.
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