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The Writings of Herman Melville, Vol. 15: Journals
This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of his days and thoughts; each of his three journals records his actions and observations on trips far from home. In this edition's Historical Note, Howard C. Horsford places each of the journals in the context of Melville's career, discusses its general character, and points out the later literary uses he made of it, notably in Moby-Dick, Clarel, and his magazine pieces.
The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and terse entries and an exhaustive index makes available the range of his acquaintance with people, places, and works of art. Also included are related documents, illustrations, maps, and many pages and passages reproduced from the journals. This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting permits. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and terse entries and an exhaustive index makes available the range of his acquaintance with people, places, and works of art. Also included are related documents, illustrations, maps, and many pages and passages reproduced from the journals. This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting permits. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
683 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
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About the author
Herman Melville
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Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family.
Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The Confidence-Man (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as a United States customs inspector.
From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family.
Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The Confidence-Man (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as a United States customs inspector.
From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.
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March 26, 2022
Not much of interest in the journals, but the essays and footnotes are great. Footnote 7 to Melville's notes in his copy of Hawthorne's Mosses:
7. See p. 187 above, and the notes reproduced in Moby-Dick, p. 969, lines 16, 18, 20, and 21b. Melville's reading and thoughts betokened by these Masonic notes may have found outlet in Moby-Dick. It was well under way when he got the Mosses volume in July, 1850, and nearing its end in April of 1851 when he told Hawthorne in a letter that he was inclined "to think that the Problem of the Universe is like the Freemason's might secret, so terrible to all children. It turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron, --nothing more!" (Letters, p. 125). Without knowing about the notes in Mosses, Harold Beaver, in his annotations to Moby-Dick (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1972), pointed out "a whole underworld of Masonic allusions" in it. Beaver pressed, no doubt too far, his "decoding" of "this rogue masterpiece" as an "elaborate hoax" using Masonic rituals to celebrate the homosexual brotherhood or "order" of whalemen. (See especially his notes to his pp. 99, 212, 226. 472, 487, 559-62, 576, 616.) Among other allusions Beaver picked up Stubb's sentence about the Order of the Garter ("In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of," chap. 31, NN p. 132). Quoting from Masonic ritual he associated this Garter ritual with "The mason's investiture with his apron 'more honourable than the Garter or any other Order in existence, being the badge of innocence and the bond of friendship'" (Beaver's note to his p. 226), and also with Ishmael's argument that "we harpooners of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George" (chap. 82, NN p. 362). Stubb's allusion to "garter-knights" may indeed point to a link between Melville's note at the top of the page on Shenstone's Schoolmistress and those below on Freemasonry. Although it was not the "Countess of Salisbury's garter" in Hawthorne's sentence that Melville noted, he presumably caught and perhaps held in mind this reference to her legendary loss of a garter as the occasion for the founding of the Order of the Garter (by Edward III in the mid-fourteenth century). Stubb's allusion to ceremonial slaps by the queen (Victoria) shows an out-of-character knowledge more likely for Ishmael (see the NN discussion at 103.39). Melville's familiar use of passages from the Chronicles of "my glorious old gossiping ancestor, Froissart" in Mardi (chap. 24, p. 78), White-Jacket (chap. 68, p. 284, lines 19-20), and Moby-Dick (chap. 42, p. 191, and chap. 60, p. 280, lines 28-29) suggests his familiarity also with Froissart's account of the unrequited love of Edward III for the persistently virtuous Countess and of his instituting the Order, though not because of her lost garter (bk. I, chaps. 77, 89, 100 in either the Berners or the Johnes translation; no copy used by Melville is known).
7. See p. 187 above, and the notes reproduced in Moby-Dick, p. 969, lines 16, 18, 20, and 21b. Melville's reading and thoughts betokened by these Masonic notes may have found outlet in Moby-Dick. It was well under way when he got the Mosses volume in July, 1850, and nearing its end in April of 1851 when he told Hawthorne in a letter that he was inclined "to think that the Problem of the Universe is like the Freemason's might secret, so terrible to all children. It turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron, --nothing more!" (Letters, p. 125). Without knowing about the notes in Mosses, Harold Beaver, in his annotations to Moby-Dick (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1972), pointed out "a whole underworld of Masonic allusions" in it. Beaver pressed, no doubt too far, his "decoding" of "this rogue masterpiece" as an "elaborate hoax" using Masonic rituals to celebrate the homosexual brotherhood or "order" of whalemen. (See especially his notes to his pp. 99, 212, 226. 472, 487, 559-62, 576, 616.) Among other allusions Beaver picked up Stubb's sentence about the Order of the Garter ("In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of," chap. 31, NN p. 132). Quoting from Masonic ritual he associated this Garter ritual with "The mason's investiture with his apron 'more honourable than the Garter or any other Order in existence, being the badge of innocence and the bond of friendship'" (Beaver's note to his p. 226), and also with Ishmael's argument that "we harpooners of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George" (chap. 82, NN p. 362). Stubb's allusion to "garter-knights" may indeed point to a link between Melville's note at the top of the page on Shenstone's Schoolmistress and those below on Freemasonry. Although it was not the "Countess of Salisbury's garter" in Hawthorne's sentence that Melville noted, he presumably caught and perhaps held in mind this reference to her legendary loss of a garter as the occasion for the founding of the Order of the Garter (by Edward III in the mid-fourteenth century). Stubb's allusion to ceremonial slaps by the queen (Victoria) shows an out-of-character knowledge more likely for Ishmael (see the NN discussion at 103.39). Melville's familiar use of passages from the Chronicles of "my glorious old gossiping ancestor, Froissart" in Mardi (chap. 24, p. 78), White-Jacket (chap. 68, p. 284, lines 19-20), and Moby-Dick (chap. 42, p. 191, and chap. 60, p. 280, lines 28-29) suggests his familiarity also with Froissart's account of the unrequited love of Edward III for the persistently virtuous Countess and of his instituting the Order, though not because of her lost garter (bk. I, chaps. 77, 89, 100 in either the Berners or the Johnes translation; no copy used by Melville is known).
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