Dawn Coleman, Tennessee professor, & Modern Erasing of Scholarship

I am not dead yet, and not all of my books have been burned yet.

I am still reeling from the new LEVIATHAN in which Dawn Coleman announces that "Unitarianism has received scant notice" in work on Melville. As I said yesterday, not only did I put a long passage about Unitarianism in the preface to he 2006 Norton Critical Edition of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN, I included a lengthy section in that book on Melville's responses to Unitarianism.

I looked at my computer files for the second volume of my biography of Melville (2002) and find that indeed Unitarianism receives ample attention. Here are two passages which one might have hoped that even a young modern professor might have stumbled upon, and might even have cited:

            Melville began his book 4, “Retrospective,” with this disclaimer: “In their precise tracings‑out and subtile causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.” Nothing daunted, he proceeds there and elsewhere to attempt just such precise tracings out, and later in “Retrospective,” announces the supersubtle complexity of psychological motivations and indeed of all psychological processes. After this book, as Higgins and I said, “treatment of Pierre’s inward development is inseparable from the theme of the shadowiness of all human motivation,” impulses which lurk in what Melville called the “ever‑elastic regions of evanescent invention” through which the mind roams up and down. By the end of book 4, Melville had “gone beyond the supersubtlety of all human psychology to assert the autonomy of those subtler elements of man,” including what he referred to as those “ineffable hints and ambiguities, and undefined half‑suggestions, which now and then people the soul’s atmosphere, as thickly as in a soft, steady snow‑storm, the snow‑flakes people the air.” The imagery “suggests an evanescence of thought which the individual no more controls than he does the snow‑storm, and Melville distinguished these ‘reveries and trances’ from the ‘assured element of consciously bidden and self‑propelled thought.’” As he traces the processes of Pierre’s mental growth, Melville makes the reader privy to the seemingly “boundless expansion” of Pierre’s life. In one of the most complex passages of book 5, “Misgivings and Preparatives,” Melville portrays a rapidly expanded mental terrain glimpsed by his hero, but still a chaotic and uncontrollable one. Thus even before Pierre encounters the girl who claims to be his half‑sister (in bk. 6, “Isabel, and the First Part of the Story of Isabel”), the reader understands that Isabel is identified either as Pierre’s unconscious or a product of it. Nourished on tainted idealisms which coexist with an unworldly Christian absolutism, Pierre is just the youth to mistake an intense expansion of consciousness for the attainment of true wisdom, just the youth, suffused with acknowledged idealism and ambiguously unacknowledged sexual desires, to dare to apply Jesus’ words to actual earthly life. Melville had converted the clichés of gothic sensationalism into profound psychological exploration.

            Everything about this new book was dangerous to its author, particularly the pattern of dubious, falsified family relationships. Melville had observed at close range a falsity in family relationship when Gansevoort was forced to become the man of the family; now he could be grateful that Gansevoort had borne the brunt of any excessive emotional demands of his widowed mother. At midcentury, readers of popular fiction knew their Typee, knew that for Melville the two greatest words in the English language, the very words any worthy young man would first teach to a beautiful naked woman at the ends of the earth, were “home” and “Mother.” Now Melville’s joking about every good boy’s sentimental love for his mother had caught up with him just as he was enduring very strong doses of his mother’s religiosity at home. In Pierre mother and son in play call each other brother and sister, and a young man and woman who might be half‑ brother and sister enter into a pretense of marriage which may involve sexual intercourse. Melville’s sister Helen copied all this, day by day, confiding or choosing not to confide the content of the book to her mother.

            Just as his mother’s recent phase of religious fervor emerged in the themes of Pierre, so did Melville’s fresh saturation with human pettiness in a majestic natural setting. In the Berkshires an avid appetite for vicious gossip was coupled with extreme religious intolerance. Among his poorer neighbors Melville was capable of identifying, now and then, some “gem” of a character, but he had ample reason to think of many of them as ignorant but arrogantly opinionated yokels, irredeemably malicious. He may have encountered members of the subhuman Yankee family he had boarded with in 1837 (“they all burrow together in the woods‑‑like so many foxes,” he had written his Uncle Peter), perhaps passing on the roads the hulking louts who had tried to drive him from the school. Nor did he idealize the long‑established Berkshire families with famous names, Sedgwick, Dewey, Field, some of whose members had made great careers for themselves in Boston or New York. Successful, these people treated themselves to prolonged visits to their Berkshire homes, and brought back their friends, as Catharine Sedgwick, by then a famous novelist, had brought the English actress Fanny Kemble in the mid‑1830s. Encouraged by the miraculous improvements in transportation, the returning natives and their friends, then friends of friends, and at last mere acquaintances and strangers, beginning in the late 1830s and accelerating in the late 1840s, had made the Berkshires a summer resort. As the local squireocracy was augmented by city relations and associates, the chasm widened between the wealthier families and their poorer neighbors, who, especially in hard times, might feel like peasants, or feel treated like peasants.

            Melville knew these better families, especially the Sedgwicks. His mother, along with his Uncle Thomas’s wife, had called on Elizabeth Sedgwick in the 1830s, and Helen had been granted the privilege of attending Mrs. Sedgwick’s school for one year‑‑a privilege she cherished all her life. Elizabeth’s husband was Charles Sedgwick, Judge Shaw’s clerk when he held court at Lenox, and it was Charles and Elizabeth who had summoned the Melvilles to a party early in November so they could say good‑bye to the Hawthornes and meet the Jameses. At such gatherings Melville witnessed from close up the views of the novelist Catharine Sedgwick and other Sedgwicks on the issues of the day. Miss Sedgwick, a daughter of Federalism, protected by her inheritances and by the prosperity of her brothers, never had to do battle in the literary marketplace. Her career owed much to her religion, for her first novel, A New‑England Tale (1822), began as a Unitarian tract. Inspired, like James Fenimore Cooper, by the new novels not yet acknowledged as written by Sir Walter Scott, she determined to add to “the scanty stock of native American literature,” as she said in the preface. Miss Sedgwick as a Unitarian was not required to make any embarrassing profession of personal salvation. Repelled by the emphasis on eternal damnation in the frontier Calvinism of the lower classes, disgusted by the vulgarity of camp meetings during periods of revivalism in the Berkshires, she distanced herself from reform movements, preferring to address the aspirations and insecurities of the rising middle class in such bestselling didactic books as Home: Scenes and Character Illustrating Christian Truth (1835) and The Poor Rich Man, and the Rich Poor Man (1836), where she suggested that despite some legitimate complaints about “the low rates of women’s wages,” most women were “paid according to their capacity.” She was certain that in New England, and even in New York City, poverty was almost always the result of vice or disease. A woman competent as a seamstress could always support herself and live decently, if frugally. In Pierre Melville introduced his Isabel with a needle in her hand, sewing.

            The Sedgwicks’ views on poverty were repugnant to Melville, but, perhaps dating from his youthful months in the Berkshires, he nursed still stronger moral grievances against his older Berkshire neighbor, Orville Dewey, the Sheffield‑born Unitarian, close friend of Lemuel Shaw and the Sedgwicks. In Boston, on his return from the South Seas, Melville may have seen William Lloyd Garrison’s “Spasmodic Philanthropy” in the 11 October 1844 Liberator, an attack on Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, and Orville Dewey, all intimates of Judge Shaw: “It would be amusing, were it not for the meanness and hollowness of the trick, to see how eager certain time‑serving politicians and pseudo ministers of Christ are to make an anti‑slavery reputation for themselves, and to hide their odious pro‑slavery position and conduct, by affecting to be overwhelmed with indignation and horror at the proposal to annex Texas to the United States.” Garrison singled out Dewey: “Among the anti‑abolition clergy, who are trying to retrieve their character by the same ruse, is ‘Orville Dewey, pastor of the Church of the Messiah in New‑York’‑ ‑who has recently preached and printed ‘A Discourse on Slavery and the Annexation of Texas,’ the perusal of which has, if possible, increased my abhorrence of the moral philosophy of its author, and deepened my displeasure at his lack of manly courage.” In 1844 and thereafter Melville, emotionally an absolutist, was more akin to Garrison the abolitionist than to Dewey, whatever either Melville or Dewey thought about practical ways of ending slavery.

            Melville had had ample opportunity to learn more about this “pseudo minister of Christ,” Orville Dewey, who was preaching at the Church of the Messiah in New York City during Melville’s early career, until the spring of 1848, when he retired to Sheffield, occasionally going back to the city to preach or lecture. That was only two years before Melville enrolled with his Unitarian wife in the other Unitarian church, All Souls, in February 1850, just after returning from London. (In volume 1 this was misdated 1849, following Walter Kring’s 1975 essay rather than his 1981 revision, which has the correct date, 1850.) It was common knowledge that Dewey hated the beggary he witnessed in New York City and held that great evil and mischief lay in indiscriminate charity to the almost invariably undeserving poor. Melville could have encountered these ideas of Dewey’s in an occasional visit to his church, or elsewhere, as in the 1846 Discourses on Human Nature, Human Life, and the Nature of Religion, especially the third part, “On the Nature of Religion,” in chapter 24, “Spiritual Interests, Real and Supreme”: “What is it that distresses the poor man, and makes poverty, in the ordinary condition of it, the burden that it is? It is not, in this country,‑‑it is not, usually, hunger, nor cold, nor nakedness. It is some artificial want, created by the wrong state of society. It is something nearer yet to us, and yet more unnecessary. It is mortification, discontent, peevish complaining, or envy of a better condition; and all these are evils of the mind.” This denial of evil and suffering in prosperous America, this intellectualizing about charity, this smug aloofness from real suffering, outraged Melville, who in Pierre (bk. 2, ch. 2) called attention to those in “the humbler walks of life” who were physically deformed by “unequal toil and poverty,” and he went out of his way (bk. 6, ch. 1) to say that “in other climes many a pauper was that moment perishing” from cold, and rued “the wretched rush‑lights of poverty and woe.” The novel analyzed the luxurious self‑delusions of the rich, scrutinizing attitudes toward poverty, particularly un‑Christlike ways of dealing with Jesus’ words on what he would have his would‑be followers do, either sell all they had and give it to the poor and follow him, or, a sophist could argue, put other exigencies first, like your own comfort, since the poor would always be with you. Unlike Orville Dewey, Jesus had not said that the poor really lacked only artificial wants, not real necessities.

            Dewey had delivered a notable oration at Pittsfield on 27 December 1850, two and a half months after Melville had moved there. The occasion was the North American Union meeting which John C. Hoadley had helped organize, and the point of the speech might have been that slavery was regrettable but disunion was deplorable. It was quoted at length in the Pittsfield Sun on 2 January 1851, the day after Elizabeth Shaw Melville returned from her long visit to Boston, so the words are known, if not the meaning. Later Dewey claimed that his speech had been misunderstood, though being misunderstood was all but inevitable, since he always tried to see everything from every possible angle so as to offend no possible listener. In this he habitually left his own position in question, blurred by a mass of judicious, noncommittal, excruciatingly inoffensive verbiage. Dewey complained: “I did not discuss the present fugitive slave law, though I was immediately represented as a violent advocate for it, but rather addressed myself to the question whether we at the North could, in conscience, yield our assent to any such bill‑‑to any bill that should give the Southern master the power to reclaim one of his slaves that had fled to us for refuge.” This seemingly soulless minister, this cold‑hearted mealy‑mouthed pontificator on “human nature” and “human life,” pushed Melville into insisting in Pierre that some poor people were hungry and cold. Later, in January 1852, Melville exploded at the fatuous pomposity and impious arrogance of Dewey’s lecture series in the fall of 1851 at the Lowell Institute in Boston, “The Problem of Human Destiny, considered in its bearings on Human Life and Welfare,” and wrote the lecture title “Human Destiny” into his book as the ne plus ultra of fatuousness.

            The figure Melville first created as Christian minister with un‑Christlike deference to the opinions of the rich and un‑Christlike concern for the poor was Mrs. Glendinning’s minister, Mr. Falsgrave, a name Bunyan or Hawthorne might have invented. As he heightened his examination of absolutism versus expediency, Melville required a more intellectual embodiment of nominal Christianity than Falsgrave‑‑Plotinus Plinlimmon, whose lecture on the “Chronometricals and Horologicals” (preserved however imperfectly in a pamphlet that Pierre finds but does not wholly read and does not understand) Melville made the centerpiece of the novel (bk. 14, ch. 3). Pierre takes shelter in the city at the Church of the Apostles, a collection of hand‑to‑mouth “artists of various sorts; painters, or sculptors, or indigent students, or teachers of languages, or poets, or fugitive French politicians, or German philosophers” (bk. 19, ch. 1), a range of crackpot reformers, all idealistic, all ill equipped to live in the real world. This structure is a deconsecrated church, suggested to Melville by the fate of buildings like the old Grace Church at Broadway and Rector, sold in 1845 to be converted into stores below and, in the upper part, a museum of Chinese curiosities‑‑fit emblem of the fate of Christianity in a commercial society where the better people were retreating farther and farther uptown. Abiding at the Church of the Apostles is Plotinus Plinlimmon, the worldly philosopher crowding in wherever New Testament Christianity is expelled. In the pamphlet (bk. 14, ch. 3) Plinlimmon advocates “virtuous expediency” as “the highest desirable or attainable earthly excellence for the mass of men.” In coolly rational arguments Plinlimmon demonstrates to his satisfaction that while Jesus may have lived on earth by heavenly rules, keeping God’s perfect chronometrical time, anyone who attempts to imitate Jesus’ example will fail, since the horological will creep in, despite all attempts to live absolutely. The man who attempts to obey Jesus will find that the experiment has terrible consequences: “in his despair, he is too apt to run clean away into all manner of moral abandonment, self‑deceit, and hypocrisy (cloaked, however, mostly under an aspect of the most respectable devotion); or else he openly runs, like a mad dog, into atheism.” Just as well the rich young man had gone sorrowfully away after hearing Jesus’ words: “almost invariably, with inferior beings, the absolute effort to live in this world according to the strict letter of the chronometricals is, somehow, apt to involve those inferior beings eventually in strange, unique follies and sins, unimagined before.”

            Persistently aggrieved at the Boston and New York Unitarians, Melville had long nursed a similar disgust toward English Utilitarians, judging them by Jesus’ standards for what one had to do to become one of his followers. He had taken an extract in Moby‑Dick from Natural Theology (1802) by William Paley, the man who systematized the arguments of the early Utilitarian Abraham Tucker. Years later in Germany, by Madame de Staël‑Holstein (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859), he marked a passage on one man, “regarded in a religious light,” being “as much as the entire human race”; then he commented: “This was an early and innate conviction of mine, suggested by my revulsion from the counting‑room philosophy of Paley.” Early and innate was his revulsion against the Utilitarians. Now he had at hand William Hazlitt’s lengthy condensation of the diffuse, redundant work by Tucker, the 1807 edition entitled An Abridgement of “The Light of Nature Pursued,” a coolly rational textbook on human psychology, including the psychology of social behavior and the psychology of religion. In “Benevolence,” Tucker had satisfied himself it was not necessarily selfish to act out of sensible self‑interest: “What, if a man agreeable and obliging in company, should happen to desire another lump of sugar in his tea to please his own palate, would they pronounce him a whit the more selfish upon that account? So that selfishness is not having a regard for oneself, but having no regard for anything else. Therefore, the moralist may exhort men to a prudent concern for their own interests, and at the same time dissuade them from selfishness, without inconsistency.” That example of the lump of sugar in “Benevolence” lies behind Plinlimmon’s smooth way of counteracting the impractical and impracticable advice of Jesus (bk. 14, ch. 3):

<EXT>To turn the left cheek if the right be smitten, is chronometrical; hence, no average son of man ever did such a thing. To give all that thou hast to the poor, this too is chronometrical; hence no average son of man ever did such a thing. Nevertheless, if a man gives with a certain self‑considerate generosity to the poor; abstains from doing downright ill to any man; does his convenient best in a general way to do good to his whole race; takes watchful loving care of his wife and children, relatives, and friends; is perfectly tolerant to all other men’s opinions, whatever they may be; is an honest dealer, an honest citizen, and all that; and more especially if he believe that there is a God for infidels, as well as for believers, and acts upon that belief; then, though such a man falls infinitely short of the chronometrical standard, though all his actions are entirely horologic;‑‑yet such a man need never lastingly despond, because he is sometimes guilty of some minor offense:‑‑hasty words, impulsively returning a blow, fits of domestic petulance, selfish enjoyment of a glass of wine while he knows there are those around him who lack a loaf of bread.</EXT>

“Benevolence” to Melville was a finely ironic title. In book 21 Plinlimmon rejects, unopened, a gift of books, among which is a handsome edition of Abraham Tucker. Why open it? Plinlimmon has already learned all there is to learn from Tucker.

            British Utilitarianism and American Unitarianism, sound‑alike philosophy and religious denomination, overlapped in Melville’s mind because of their similar countinghouse mentality toward all things moral. Very likely he knew that all the famous British Utilitarians were, in fact, leading Unitarians. “Utilitarians,‑‑the every‑day world’s people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims,” Melville declared (Pierre, bk. 18, ch. 2). Transcendentalists, being “theoretic and inactive,” were harmless, while Utilitarians put their selfish morality into practice in “living deeds.” Yet American Transcendentalists could not be trusted to remain theoretic and inactive, for some innocent reader or auditor might take seriously their heartless views on human relationships: Melville, reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Friendship” in the Hawthornes’ boudoir in 1850, remembered that the essayist and lecturer had been a Unitarian minister and still retained essentially Unitarian attitudes. In a further twist, American Unitarian attitudes toward slavery, poverty, and charity coalesced in Melville’s mind with Shakespeare’s time‑servers, from the nurse in Romeo and Juliet (whose advice Juliet meets with the cool “thou has comforted me marvelous much”) to Polonius in Hamlet. What Melville wrote, during that trancelike period of concentration in November and December 1851, was the tragic story of a youthful idealist who tried to put Christian principles into practice and came to the tragic knowledge that Christianity as Jesus taught it was, however alluring, also impracticable. The reader would learn along the way, if he did not know already, that what passed for Christianity in midcentury America, especially among socially prominent and wealthy Unitarians, was very far from Christlike.

*          *          *          *

Melville apparently wrote “Bartleby, the Scrivener” between mid‑August and the week of Kate’s wedding in mid‑September. Augusta recorded no letters written between 6 and 24 August, a possible indication that she was copying furiously as well as making her preparations for the festivities. Melville elaborated his story from the February advertisements for The Lawyer’s Story, which included that suggestive opening of the first chapter about the hiring of a temporary copying clerk. Other newspaper reading, from far back, may still have been in Melville’s head, such as the anonymous item in the Broadway Journal of 2 August 1845, “The Business Man,” which had this epigram: “Method is the soul of business.‑‑Old Saying.” The story began: “I am a business man. I am a methodical man. Method is the thing, after all.” If Melville missed this in the paper in 1845, he could have seen it, on his return from England in 1850, in the new posthumous edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. The tone of voice of the narrator in “Bartleby” (whose grand points John Jacob Astor had declared to be first “prudence” and next “method”) was an accumulation of influences, not least that of the lamented Gansevoort. Here he lectures Allan, from Galway, New York, 25 September 1840: “You have acquired habits of attention to business, & have already passed nearly half the requisite legal time of preparation, in the study of a profession in which I feel confident that you will succeed.” Melville did not have to go far to find the stuffy pomposity he gave his lawyer in “Bartleby,” the man of rich experiences whose avocations had brought him into more than ordinary contact with law‑copyists or scriveners (“avocation” in Melville’s time still being used where we would say “vocation”).

            Melville was not finished with his critique of his Unitarian acquaintances. In his empty office, after comprehending something of Bartleby’s isolation, the narrator experiences “a not‑unpleasing sadness.” During these feelings a “fraternal melancholy” arises to link him with the woeful scrivener: “Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.” The lawyer dismisses these thoughts as “sad fancyings–chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brain” and the next moment is rifling Bartleby’s desk. What he finds leads him not to profound, disturbing melancholy, not to a tragic sense of the world, but to prudential feelings:

<EXT>My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does now. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it.</EXT>

Somehow, the narrator feels “disqualified” for church‑going, and abandons his intention of going to Trinity Church‑‑not a place to bring deep sorrows to.

            The rationality is akin to that of Plinlimmon, and derives from the same source, the public controversy in the 1840s in New York City over Unitarian attitudes toward the sufferings of the poor. At some point Melville learned at least the gist of the argument the Unitarian Joseph Curtis and the Pantheist gadfly Horace Greeley had waged in the columns of the Tribune and elsewhere, and understood just how firmly the family friend Orville Dewey stood on Curtis’s side. This is Dewey long afterward, in his Autobiography:

<EXT>The upshot was, that, in his [Curtis’s] opinion, the miseries of the poor in New York were not owing to the rich, but mainly to themselves; that there was ordinarily remunerative labor enough for them; and that, but in exceptional cases of sickness and especial misfortune, those who fell into utter destitution and beggary came to that pass through their idleness, their recklessness, or their vices. That was always my opinion. They besieged our door from morning till night, and I was obliged to help them, to look after them, to go to their houses; my family was worn out with these offices. But I looked upon beggary as, in all ordinary cases, prima facie evidence that there was something wrong behind it.</EXT>

Dewey’s own father “never could bear the sight of sickness or distress: it made him faint.” Dewey, sharing that sensibility, lamented that clergymen were expected to go to their parishioners and express sympathy with affliction: “to take into one’s heart, more or less, the personal and domestic sorrows of two or three hundred families, is a burden which no man who has not borne it can conceive of.” Besides, respectable parishioners would not want a clergyman intruding in their house of mourning; better he should wait to make his consolatory call, after the “suffering of sickness or of bereavement” has passed. Melville knew enough of this sticking‑point for Unitarians, first hand and second hand, to embody New York Unitarian prudentialness in his respectable narrator. The lawyer even finds a fine utility in Jesus’ commandment that men love one another: “charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle‑‑a great safeguard to its possessor.” Jesus is the ideal against whom the narrator is judged, but any superiority the reader feels is undercut by the narrator’s willingness to go very far indeed to accommodate himself to Bartleby–farther than most readers would go.