Melville and Hawthorne
In
his review of the anthology The Glorious American Essay (January
28), Benjamin Markovits grades Melville’s “Hawthorne and his Mosses” as a
“dud”, worth mentioning just because of how bad it is. He concludes: “What’s
interesting is the psychological need that made one great writer, at a tricky
point in his career (he was working on Moby-Dick), roll over for
another”. Melville was not “rolling over” for Hawthorne. After writing a good
deal of Moby-Dick, Melville believed he might be almost as great as
Shakespeare – not the sort of thing he could say to anyone else. However, if in
his essay he could celebrate Hawthorne as comparable to Shakespeare, then
another American writer might be recognized as equally great. As I said in the first
volume of my biography of Melville (1996), “Under the pretext of writing on
Hawthorne, Melville spent hours expressing the deepest hopes for his own book”.
In
1996, I was relying on the standard 1930s transcription of Evert Duyckinck’s
letter of August 6, 1850 to his wife. There he says that soon after meeting
Melville on the excursion to Monument Mountain, Hawthorne “looked mildly about
for the great Carbuncle”, the jewel of one of his stories. Later I consulted
the manuscript. What Duyckinck wrote was “wildly”, not “mildly”. Much excited
by meeting Melville, Hawthorne was hamming it up. This makes a difference. Neither man
was rolling over for the other.
Hershel Parker
Morro Bay CA
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