Books from Melville's library keep surfacing,
especially since the late 1970s ; literary artifact though his introduction
was, Bezanson could not resist working in a bit from Melville's recently
discovered Dante. We know more all the
time, and for a report the truly insatiable reader can go to Parker's Melville: The Making of the Poet
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), which shows Melville the autodidact copying from and arguing with
a world-class teaching staff--Dante, Vasari, Cowley, Wordsworth, Jeffrey,
Hazlitt, Arnold, Ruskin. Then to be
genuinely up-to-date you can read Samuel Rogers with Scott Norsworthy and Moses
Mendelssohn with Gus Cohen. Listening to Melville in his marginalia, you love
the man, and seeing how he grew beyond his great course of study in aesthetics
(in 1862), you may catch the Clarel
fever as strongly as I have.
You will know you have the fever if you begin
to feel edgy, vaguely dodgy and sore, as you move into Part 4. Then you realize that you are coming to the
end and pretty soon there won't be any more.
Whatever Vine and Clarel had to say, whatever Rolfe and Mortmain or
Rolfe and Ungar had to say, that's going to be all there is. Having listened for hours as Melville and
Oliver Wendell Holmes discussed East India religions and mythologies "with
the most amazing skill and brilliancy on both sides," the diplomat
Maunsell Fields declared, "I never chanced to hear better talking in my
life." Remember that one of the
visiting students in 1859, having been lectured too long on Plato and
Aristotle, nevertheless exclaimed, "what a talk it was!" You can overhear great talk throughout Clarel, even before the journey is quite
underway. Reading Clarel, you echo Maunsell Fields.
Whoever you are, you may never chance to hear better talking in your
life.
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