Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel

This morning I was once again denied access to "Some Psychological Reflections on the Death of Malcolm Melville" in the Winter 1976 issue of Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, so I stared out the window for a while.

So I reread the so-called "Malcolm Letter," written by an exuberant Melville on the occasion of Malcolm's birth--
I think of calling him Barbarossa--Adolphus--Ferdinand--Otho--Grandissimo Hercules--Sampson--Bonaparte--Lambert.

So I electronically consented to my child's remote participation in Freedom from Chemical Dependency Week.

So I ordered more masks, more disinfectant wipes, more birdseed.

So I ordered more dog food and more coffee filters.

So I went to the basemant to move the laundry and watched my husband affix a piece of wood to another piece of wood with screws and glue and the appearance of deep contentment.

So I took out the recycling and then the compost.

So I threw the ball for the dog.

So I compared various translations of a haiku about the cold voice of the autumn wind speaking through a crack in the door.

So I regarded a yellow sticky note on which I had at some point written the name of Melville's brother's clipper ship, Meteor.

So I noticed an anagram--remote.

And another--emoter.

A woman is researching the life of Herman Melville, perhaps to write a biography of him. It is deep within Covid's quarantine, and the work fills up a life that has been in other ways put on pause. She reads articles and blog posts about Melville's life to her husband, who helps her to speculate about the nature of Melville's relationship with his children, his wife, his job. Melville's life seems to have been a difficult one, especially the later years, after the bulk of his literary output. The narrator's life has not been exactly easy; she alludes to a moment in their marriage known only as "The Bad Time." Still, the house seems stable enough, though from time to time she goes looking for him--to share another scrap of what she's learned about Melville--and not found him. Later, he gets sick, and we perhaps expect the worst, but this is not that kind of book; the drama that was visited upon Melville--the death of two sons, the stormy marriage--is enough.

I've never read another book like Dayswork. First off, there's the fact that it's a collaboration between two writers, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, whom I assume are a married couple. The husband is at one point called "Chris," and so I presume, too, that something of the book is autobiographical (though how interesting to choose the point of view of the wife only). Beyond that, there's the ambiguity of genre and form: is it a poem? A biography? A history? A novel? A memoir? Bachelder and Habel weave all these threads together in a way that is virtually seamless. The reader moves, French door-like, from literary analysis Melville's life to the research process to the life of the narrator. From there it expands to  encompass other genres, other historical details; much of the research is actually dedicated to the life of another pair of Melville's admires, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell and Hardwick had a famously tempestuous marriage, as did the Melvilles; research seems to show that Melville was physically abusive to his own wife Elizabeth, as Lowell was cruel to his. Are we meant to read between the lines about the narrator's marriage, too? No, that would be too much, but I think anyone can recognize the way that the grand dramas of the page put the smaller dramas of one's own life into relief.

The climax of Dayswork is stunning in its touching smallness. The husband has been exiled to a downstairs room with Covid. Over the phone from the upstairs room, the wife reads to him from a letter that Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville gushes; he was famously besotted with Hawthorne, in a way that many modern critics have read as romantic, and a few as requited. The text is Melville's, but it's punctuated by small asides from the sick husband, some as minor as interested grunts or sighs. It's a scene that's made up of so little, yet its power is tremendous. Two partners, speaking across the physical divide of sickness and technology, speaking someone else's words, but together. It works especially well because we haven't been sure whether or not the "Bad Time" is over, or the marriage is really healthy or whole, but this scene removes any doubt that these two have reconciled and grown closer together. I was really in awe of it.

And I was in awe of this book. Though I'm not aware of anyone who's ever written anything like it, I have seen many attempts to weave together literary history and the personal in a way that feels similar (Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers comes to mind). And yet, this one works because Bachelder and Habel never force the comparisons. Largely, they get out of the way of the material, and let us make the connections ourselves, though the deliberate and careful structure of the novel clearly guides our understanding. Truly, I learned a great deal about Herman Melville. But more than this, I felt the way that great works of literature radiate through time, ennobling our ordinary lives for a brief time.

Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick

Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country's ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.

I got to visit the Seamen's Bethel in New Bedford, Massachusetts this week, a church where young Herman Melville attended services before shipping out on his own round-the-world voyage, and which appears as a slightly fictionalized version of itself in Moby-Dick. The walls of the Seamen's Bethel are covered in marble plaques that memorialize those who were lost at sea; Melville must have looked around from his pew in the back--marked today with a much smaller, humbler plaque--and known what a risk he was taking on. As Nathaniel Philbrick notes in his book Why Read Moby-Dick?, New Bedford had surpassed Nantucket as the American capital of the whaling industry by the time Melville wrote his novel, but Melville still Ishmael travel to Nantucket to see the old icons of the whaling industry. Melville had never been to Nantucket when he wrote Moby-Dick, so it might be said that the New Bedford chapel in Moby-Dick is where Ishmael leaves the real world behind, launching off into the world of Melville's rich imagination.

Why Read Moby-Dick? is a series of short essays about what Philbrick, a writer otherwise known for books about sailing like In the Heart of the Sea, finds valuable in Moby-Dick. These essays more or less follow the novel's chronology, beginning in New Bedford and Nantucket, moving through the introduction of Ahab to the grand voyage, and finishing with the dramatic conclusion when the Pequod is destroyed by the infamous White Whale. The essays have brief, explanatory titles like "Queequeg" and "Chowder," and they spend a fair amount of time summarizing the essential points of the novel. As the title suggests, the book might be seen as pitched to people who have not read Moby-Dick, although I can't imagine someone reading a book like this in order to decide whether or not they want the undertaking. More properly, the audience is probably people like me, who have a fondness for the novel but aren't going to re-read it any time soon. Along the way, Philbrick provides a little bit of historical information, about whaling, about Melville's relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc., but for the most part it's a straightforward and not particularly revealing exegesis of the novel.

It's a little funny, I think, the way in which Why Read Moby-Dick? is so opposite to the novel it's about. It's a tiny little book, in form as well as spirit; almost universally I thought the essays were a little short and seemed to stop before they were through. If the spirit of Moby-Dick is to delve into long, digressive passages like "Cetology" that overflow the banks of narrative efficiency; Why Read Moby-Dick? is a no-nonsense operation with little interest in luxuriating alongside the novel's richness--only briefly describing the luxury. The enthusiasm comes through, but the exegesis can be a little stale; I didn't come away with what felt like any new insights. Philbrick's central contention, that the novel contains the seeds of all American history, and that it is in some deep sense about the national pre-Civil War conflict over the slave trade, seemed to me very thinly supported. And it was funny to hear Philbrick, after insisting that the novel points to these ideals and conflicts, say at the end that "The White Whale is not a symbol. He is as real as you or I."

I hold to the opposite reading, which I think is probably Harold Bloom's: the whale is a symbol, but it's a symbol who points toward too many things, and ends up a kind of maddening blankness--white, the color of all colors. That's the brilliance of Moby-Dick; it points every way you want to look. Presumably, even toward the Fugitive Slave Law, if you were willing to make the case. As for Why Read Moby-Dick?, I think the answer to the question is obvious: because the Cliffs Notes version isn't going to cut it.

Melville: A Novel by Jean Giono

He made her come to life, no longer as a woman sitting beside a man on the top deck of the Bristol mail but as an absolute ruler of the weather; he made her come alive in her own domain. She could plainly feel that he was granting her his own world. She realized that when he was mute and unable to move (as he was yesterday), when he was apart from her (yesterday, for example, when she didn't know him yet, when he was keeping quiet up there, and she was all alone down below in the coupe), when he wasn't in touch with anyone else, he still saw the world in the same way he was seeing it and naming it now. He could summon the rain for himself alone.

Now he'd summoned the rain for himself and for her. He was enabling her to share his private world, which, in a completely natural way, became her world. Her own world, so private to her that she often blushed at everything this man seemed to know about her: the whole of her secret life. She remembered rash impulses, from her girlhood, that had never escaped the confines of her heart, and here, he--a man unknown to her yesterday--was talking to her about them.

While working on the first French translation of Moby-Dick, the writer Jean Giono wrote a fictional narrative of Melville's life. Intended at first to be an introduction to the translation, Melville: A Novel seems to have taken on a life of its own: Giono imagines the the writer in London, dropping off the proofs for his novel White Jacket, and cripplingly bored. On a whim, he hops on a mail coach to the country, which he turns out to share with an Irish revolutionary named Adelina White. They fall in love, if that's a sufficient term for it; their brief meeting illuminates both of their lives.

Giono's account of Melville seeks to answer the question: how did a writer of middlebrow seafaring adventures end up writing what might be the 19th century's greatest novel? The first half of Melville finds its protagonist wrestling with a literal angel, a constant companion who is urging Melville to take on the greater challenge of writing Moby-Dick: "While he's been hunched over his manuscript, alone in his writing room, the angel has often leapt onto his shoulders from behind and grabbed hold of him. Grabbed hold of him with the terrible kind of grip that suddenly twists your neck with a merciless sort of cruelty."

But it's Adelina that gives this Melville a reason to actually write the novel. During their few days together, Melville shows her the English countryside in a way she's never seen. He shows her a break in the clouds the shape and color of a bay leaf, and then the leaf itself, and with his words he shows her what 19th century thinkers would have called the sublime, a recognition of the size and grandeur in the natural world that expands the ego that is capable of seeing it. Adelina's work is opposite of Melville's: radicalized by the Irish famine, manufactured by the English, she must live her life in praxis. But through her Melville comes to understand that his purpose is to continue illuminating the world for others; it's for her that he writes Moby-Dick.

This whole story is completely invented, of course. It's funny; Melville is almost like fan fiction: Giono was clearly so enamored with the Melville he'd invented while reading Moby-Dick that he had to put him on the page. The real Melville, as far as I understand, was more Bartleby than Billy Budd; the swaggering, barrel-chested Melville of this novel captures the spirit of his writing more than it does the man. And even that version reads to me more like Whitman--obsessed with the intersection of the soul and the natural world, ecumenical and dogmatically democratic--than it does the Melville of Moby-Dick. On top of that, situating Melville in the undramatic landscape of the English countryside clearly reflects Giono's perspective on the natural world and not Melville's. But it's hard not to feel enamored with Giono's lively and spirited Melville, accurate or not. Like the best fan fiction, Melville stands alone.

The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville

"Can I be so changed?  Look at me.  Or is it I who am mistaken?--Are you not, sir, Henry Roberts, forwarding merchant of Wheeling, Pennsylvania?  Pray, now, if you use the advertisement of business cards, and happen to have one with you, just look at it, and see whether you are not the man whom I take you for."

"Why," a bit chafed, perhaps, "I hope I know myself."

"And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy.  Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else?  Stranger things have happened."

A crippled black man begs for alms on a Mississippi Riverboat.  Among the crowd there are skeptics--those who say not only is the man not crippled, he's not even black!  The man, called the Black Guinea, exclaims that there are a number of men aboard who will vouch for him, each easily identified by their clothing: a gray suit, a hat with a weed.  And sure enough, one by one, these men appear, but are they the same as the man who was pretending to be the Black Guinea?

The Confidence Man's proponents--like our own Brent--like to think of it as a proto-modernist novel.  Are the various huckster figures, who are always trying to get one over on the ship's innocents, several confidence men, or one confidence man in various disguises?  The impenetrability of this question, and the inscrutability of the Confidence Man, or Men's, purposes, make it very modernist indeed.  Certainly he can't only want money, because he's not terribly successful in getting it, either as Black Guinea, or a charity representative, or a man with a once-in-a-lifetime investment, or a quack doctor.  No, there's something about him that wants only the trust, here called confidence, of his fellow men.  I especially liked a very modernist moment where the Confidence Man is abandoned by one companion, and then forces another one to enact the very same dialogue with another companion, using the same "hypothetical" name as the last guy.  It's weird.

It's certainly an interesting premise.  But as a book, The Confidence-Man is almost impossible to read.  It's almost entirely dialogue, and not just dialogue but Melvillean dialogue: stilted, philosophical, interminable.  For a reader with infinite reserves of patience, The Confidence-Man may have something interesting or valuable to say about the nature of trust.  I admit I wanted some of the rollicking sea-adventures of Typee and Moby Dick to temper all that dialogue.  Without it, The Confidence-Man is never as beguiling or seductive as its main character--or characters.

Typee by Herman Melville

During the time I lived among the Typees, no one was ever put upon his trial for any offence against the public.  To all appearances there were no courts of law or equity.  There was no municipal police for the purpose of apprehending vagrants and disorderly characters.  In short, there were no legal provisions whatever for the well-being and conservation of society, the enlightened end of civilized legislation.  And yet everything went on in the valley with a harmony and smoothness unparalleled, I will venture to assert, in the most select, refined, and pious associations of mortals in Christendom.  How are we to explain this enigma?  These islanders were heathens! savages! ay, cannibals! and how came they, without the aid of established law, to exhibit, in so eminent a degree, that social order which is the greatest blessing and highest pride of the social state!

Brent expressed to me the other day the opinion that Melville gets something of a bad rap based on Moby Dick.  Truthfully, Melville was better known in his day for adventure novels like Typee, which details the life of a man who has abandoned his service in a whaling boat, only to fall captive to a native group of Polynesian islanders.  You can see that in Moby Dick, of course, which is an adventure novel that became something else entirely.  Typee doesn't have the explosive virtuosity of Moby Dick, but it does have the special benefit of being kind of true--Melville himself spent months marooned among the Typee, renowned for their vicious cannibalism.

For the narrator, Tommo, the Typee islanders fail to live up to their bloodthirsty reputation.  To the contrary, what he finds in the Typee valley is a utopian paradise with abundant food, natural beauty, no crime, and a life marked by leisure and camaraderie.  The Typee adopt him as, if not one of their own, something more sacred, marked by the mysterious "Taboo" that structures their religion and habits.  Tommo even has a gal Friday, a beautiful native named Fayaway who is devoted to him.

The Typees are your typical "noble savages," and Melville goes out of his way to point out that they lack institutions of law, as well as Christian theology.  What good is civilization, if the most prosperous places lack it?  He compares the Typees to the native Hawaiians, suffering under the introduction of white colonialism, disease, and social unrest.  Yet Tommo is unable to devote himself completely to the Typee lifestyle--he refuses, for instance, to let his face be tattooed in a scene that approaches slapstick comedy.  He schemes to get away, despite his ready admission that Typee society is far superior to his own.  Tommo's inability to relinquish his European life is another facet of Melville's criticism; why, he asks, can we not let go of what we know does us no good?

But the noble savage hypothesis is stupid, and it does the complexity of pre-colonial civilizations no real favors.  Typee is awesome not because of its politics but because it's a rousing adventure story, and a comedy of manners, although the manners are unfamiliar ones.  If you can go for the ride--unlike Tommo--it's a lot of fun.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Here then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals…

Moby Dick is the book that this blog followed into a black hole. I started it months ago, and finished it weeks ago, but hadn’t the time or energy to write about it. Other things intervened, I suppose, like the advent of the school year—I’m not sure what made me think I could start and finish it in the last two weeks of summer—but I’ll admit that to review such a monster was a daunting prospect.

Weeks later, then, the strongest impression I retain is the Moby Dick’s sheer immensity. Not its length—though it is long—but its size, its capaciousness. The narrative which everyone knows, the story of Ahab chasing the white whale around the world for his revenge, comprises perhaps less than half the novel, nearly crowded out by the narrator Ishmael’s encyclopedic treatises on whales and whale hunting. There are chapters on eating whales, painting whales, whale anatomy (in fact, the sperm whale’s head gets six pages of its own), the historicity of the story of Jonah, and many chapters painstakingly detailing why whalers deserve your reverence. The best of these, I think, are the chapters where Ishmael expounds on the meaning of whiteness:

Is it by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?... And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

The effect of Ishmael/Melville’s towering erudition and knowledge, then, is more than merely to impress. Like the whiteness of the whale, which is made of all colors and therefore seems like none, the great conglomeration of information that is Moby Dick teeters toward meaninglessness. The whale is loaded with so much symbolism that it ceases to symbolize anything.

Moby Dick is an “inscrutable malice” and an “intangible malignity,” not because he is so mysterious but because he is so well-known. In its capaciousness the whale manages to be both the “colourless, all-colour of atheism” and a stand-in for God. In his way Ahab comes to represent man’s vengeance for the fall, to lash out against his maker:

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Ahab is the other lingering impression: Monomaniacal, blood-lusting, and unwavering. He’s named for a Biblical king, and it’s only through him that the novel’s overblown, King-James-cribbed language works, with its “thees” and “thous” and ponderous, circuitous sentences. The back of my copy calls Moby Dick a “hymn to democracy” because it is the “image of a co-operative community at work,” but one might say the same thing of the Peoples Temple. One of my favorite episodes is when the Pequod meets a ship that has been effectively commandeered by a sailor with pretensions as a prophet, but he pales in comparison to Ahab’s religious intensity:

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with theee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!”

As great as that is, I found that I didn’t love Moby Dick as much as I hoped it would. I expected it to be life-changing, but the long discursive chapters, serviceable to the themes as they were, never faded away to make room for the heightened intensity to the plot. It overwhelmed me and awed me, but did not—completely—endear itself to me. Mostly, I found myself impatient to get back to Ahab. Is that a criticism of Moby Dick, or a praise of it?

The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville

"Can I be so changed ? Look at me. Or is it I who am mistaken? -- Are you not, sir, Henry Roberts, forwarding merchant, of Wheeling, Pennsylvania ? Pray, now, if you use the advertisement of business cards, and happen to have one with you, just look at it, and see whether you are not the man I take you for."

"Why," a bit chafed, perhaps, "I hope I know myself."

"And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened."

Last year, I decided to tackle Moby-Dick, the quintessential huge American novel. Despite its reputation for being difficult and frequently dull, I didn't find it to be either, particularly. Sure, there were diversions aplenty, but when it came down to it, Moby-Dick could read as a great adventure story, albeit one of intentional ambiguity at points. I loved the book but knew next to nothing about Melville's other work, so when I saw a rather handsome edition of The Confidence-Man, I knew I had to give it a shot.

The story takes place on a riverboat populated by a wide variety of people, from clergymen and beggars, to carpenters and misers. In their midst, however, there are con-men of all shapes and sizes, willing to use any deceit or means necessary to relieve the innocents of their hard-earned cash. And that's it. The plot basically begins and ends there.

Of course, in practice, it isn't so simple. Far from being Melville's version of that Simpsons episode where Bart and Homer become grifters, The Confidence-Man is written like a track meet—that is, with plenty of baton-passing. Most chapters focus on the interaction of two or three people, and, at the end of each, the omniscient narrator follows one of the participants as he moves to another part of the ship and interacts with another of the passengers. Most of the characters are unnamed, and are referenced primarily by a visible attribute, i.e. the lame beggar, the man with the yellow hat, the student with the book. Using this device, Melville pulls a confidence game of his own, keeping the reader off balance and not sure exactly who is who. Is there a compelling reason that the man with the yellow hat cannot also be the lame beggar or the student with the book in another guise? In reading about The Confidence-Man after finishing it, I learned that there is really no consensus on just how many confidence men are on the boat.

That brings us to the idea of confidence, which is itself both an explicit and implicit theme of the novel. The plot itself necessitates the theme to some extent, but throughout, characters grapple with questions of identity and trust. Can a man be both good and evil? Can he hate Indians and yet love his fellow man? And can anyone really be trusted at all? Over and over, the marks themselves are assailed with pleas to simply place their confidence in the man before them, to give money to some cause or time to some effort they know little to nothing about, but Melville steadfastly refuses to give any real closure. Are the men who give to grifter for a seemingly good cause better off than those who refuse to trust anyone, or are they fools who would have done well to have a little more skepticism?

On the front cover, The Confidence-Man is touted as “the great metaphysical comedy” but you'd be forgiven for missing that. There are some humorous bits, but the overall picture is dark and confusing. The Confidence-Man resisted my attempts to draw any solid conclusions from it, but then again, maybe that's the point.