Home-feelings, philosophy, and the magic of feminine logic on and off the prairie
DRAGOONED: Writing, talking, and rewriting like Herman Melville in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853). Number 5.
More writing like Herman Melville occurs in the December 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” than I could fit into Wolf howling, music and romance, the previous number of my ongoing study (working title: DRAGOONED). Besides the hyper-romantic monologue there on the “Music of Nature,” my focus was on two versions of the metafictional exchange between the narrator and “I. F.” his make-believe friend. Close inspection of the original magazine version alongside the 1857 book version revealed a raft of deleted expressions, some of which Melville had just used to great aesthetic effect in Moby-Dick (English edition first published in October, American edition in November 1851) or would use in his next book, Pierre (late July 1852).
Another, later exchange in the same dialogue also contains Melvillean words, phrases, and ideas, some that had recently appeared in Moby-Dick but would later be deleted in revision of the same dialogue for the book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army; or, Romance of Military Life (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857 and 1859). In the portion excerpted below, the conversation continues at the north bank of the Arkansas River on the old Santa Fe Trail. It’s early October, still, and the narrating “Captain of U. S. Dragoons” is supposed to be in Kansas, heading west for “the crossing” near present day Cimarron with three companies of U. S. Dragoons, reinforced by detachments from other companies. Their mission is to promote free trade by escorting a caravan of over-loaded wagons bound for Santa Fe, protecting mostly Mexican merchants and their valuable cargoes from attack by outlaws and Indians.
Below are images and texts showing the magazine and book versions of the continued dialogue. Both versions of the exchange begin with a comment by the narrator’s invented traveling companion ("I. F.” = Imaginary Friend in the magazine version; re-labeled “Friend” in the book version) on the narrator’s promise to forgo poetry and romance and “attempt a lower level” of discourse. First, the magazine version, as originally published in the December 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” (boldface text indicates content later revised or deleted):
I. F. “Where I fear you will scarcely be at home to-night. Only tell me then what you did near this hour—two nights ago—with those dark men who excluded me from your presence?”
“It was the Mexican and our merchants whom at last I got together; they insisted upon my going on — so I marched fifteen miles next day; and as I approached a camp ground on the river bank, a man ran out and told me that there was a Mexican escort, waiting a few miles above, at the crossing! This sudden and — of late — wholly unthought of news nearly took my breath. Joy and disappointment — of wild and dreamy adventures — had an agitating struggle in my breast, but home-feelings soon reconciled me to Destiny; the brain — “
I. F. “Can master every passion.”
“Cool and philosophical as a woman (of whom it may be true,); but the passions not only increase in force with the power of the brain but in a higher ratio.”
I. F. “A forfeit! Mathematics are infernal.”
—“ I assure you (it is a secret of mine) that nothing else known among men can cope with feminine logic; but that is magical; the d—l can as well resist holy water.”
I. F. “Brave man ! — when you know there is not a woman within 400 miles.”
“But that only makes us think of them the more. Well, at this news, it was remarkable and quite a study — speaking of ratios — that the faces of the married men were lengthened in proportion to the length of their married life.”
I. F. “Scoffer !”
“ Fairly hit! Return we then to ‘our sheep,’ — I should say our Mexican escort.
Below is the book version of the same dialogue:
Friend. — Where I fear you will scarce be at home tonight. But do give me the news?
“ Two nights ago, I at last got together the caravan merchants; they insisted upon my going on — so I marched fifteen miles next day; and as I approached a camp ground on the river bank, a man ran out and told me that there was a Mexican escort, waiting a few miles above, at the crossing! This sudden and — of late — wholly unthought of news nearly took my breath. Joy, and disappointment — of wild and dreamy adventures — had an agitating struggle in my breast; but home-feelings soon reconciled me to Destiny; the brain — “
Friend. — Can master every passion ?
“Cool and philosophical as a woman (of whom it may be true); but the passions not only increase in force with the power of the brain, but in a higher ratio.”
Friend. — No mathematics either, if you please, they are infernal.
“ I assure you (it is a secret of mine) that nothing else known among men can cope with feminine logic; but that is magical; the d — l can as well resist holy water. Well, at this news, it was remarkable and quite a study — speaking of ratios — that the faces of the married men were lengthened in proportion to the length of their married life.”
Friend, — Scoffer !
“ Fairly hit! Return we then to our sheep, — I should say our Mexican escort….
This section of the narrative displays something very like the “balloon method,” as Walter E. Bezanson wonderfully pictured it, that Melville would use when rewriting source material in Israel Potter (1854-5).1
Bezanson likened Melville’s invented scenes in Israel Potter, frequently rich in comic dialogue, to a hot-air balloon that rises above the earth for a spell while staying connected to the ground. As a prime example of the balloon method, Bezanson gave the playful, flirtatious conversation of John Paul Jones in dialogue with the Countess of Selkirk.
“The same kind of balloon method — free flight, but a strong cord back to the source — marks the St. Mary’s Isle episode.”
Figuratively speaking, Melville’s dialogic flight of fancy is the balloon, his source-text the solid ground, his borrowed words the tether connecting fantasy to reality.
Back on the prairie, a very Melvillean interplay of close borrowing and ballooning through invented dialogue occurs in both versions of the exchange quoted above. Demonstrably, certain factual details in the narrator’s part of the dialogue derive from the official report submitted on October 26, 1843 by Philip St. George Cooke.2 Text in bold indicates shared content.
Source (1843)
October 1st. I was twenty-five miles below the crossing…. I now assembled the principal traders and demanded of them if they desired escort beyond the boundary…they demanded escort to a point about 150 miles beyond the crossing; and said I would be welcome in Santa Fe. October 3d…. I marched to within 9 miles of the crossing; and learned as I was selecting my camp ground, that a Mexican force had arrived at the river the night before.
This was a great surprise to all.
Adopting Bezanson’s balloon metaphor, the following line of dialogue, ostensibly spoken by the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons to his imaginary friend, may be said to represent the “strong cord” or tether to the ghostwriter’s source:
Tether (1851)
“It was the Mexican and our merchants whom at last I got together; they insisted upon my going on — so I marched fifteen miles next day; and as I approached a camp ground on the river bank, a man ran out and told me that there was a Mexican escort, waiting a few miles above, at the crossing! This sudden and — of late — wholly unthought of news nearly took my breath.”
In the 1851 rewrite, the number of miles marched in the journey of “fifteen miles” west from the Caches to “the crossing” or Ford of the Arkansas River looks to be an approximation, calculated using two numbers supplied in the October 1843 report: the 25 recorded on October 1st minus the 9 recorded two days later = 16, rounded down to 15. In similar fashion, when composing Israel Potter, Herman Melville “treated quite freely” many of the numbers he found in his source-text, the Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel Potter.3 Direct borrowings (forming Bezanson’s “strong cord” to the source-text) include “I marched”; “camp ground”; “the crossing”; and “Mexican force,” rendered in the rewrite as “Mexican escort.” One change recalls Melville’s habit of concretizing and humanizing borrowed passages from other writers: a previously unmentioned relayer of big news has become, after revision, “a man” who actively “ran out and told” the narrator in person about the arrival of Mexican soldiers.
Balloon
Tethered to Captain Cooke’s official report of October 26, 1843, the balloon-dialogue rises above it, inflated with creative gas most likely supplied by a ghostwriter. Cooke admitted the new information came as “a great surprise to all”; the rewrite makes it “wholly unthought of” news, receipt of which physically staggered the speaker, leaving him nearly breathless. In the subsequent exchange between the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons and I. F., the talk will not fly quite so high as before, the chastened narrator having agreed to dial down the “double-refined poetry and romance” and “attempt a lower level.” Indeed, this portion of the conversation is notably domestic in content and jocular in tone. In his 1843 army report, the real Philip St. George Cooke duly credited the soldiers under his command for their endurance of all hardships “like men.” The 1851 retelling goes further in suggesting how the men, being men, might have reacted to the startling (breath-taking, even) news that crushed any hope of visiting Santa Fe. This attention to the feelings of ordinary soldiers is one of several new and different concerns imported from somewhere off the official army record. Fresh themes, comically developed through prairie banter in this latter part of the December 1851 dialogue include
Disclosure of emotional agitation resulting from conflicted feelings of “joy and disappointment” over the abrupt change of plans. With the unexpected arrival of a Mexican escort, Dragoon officers and men would now head east, homeward to Fort Leavenworth instead of farther west and south. Formerly New Mexico had beckoned with prospects “of wild and dreamy adventures.” Outside of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” no such romantic expectations were ever expressed in writing by the real Philip St. George Cooke. About the wild side of Santa Fe, Cooke did have something to say for the record. The Captain’s formal report of October 26, 1843 preserves his icy judgement of Santa Fe as “probably the most abandoned and dissolute community in North America.”4 As resolved by the narrator, “home-feelings” centered in domestic comforts and attachments at Fort Leavenworth would have to compensate for lost opportunities to, say, drink margaritas and dance fandangos, ideally in mixed company.
Woman as the emblem of calm, cool, rational, matter-of-fact philosophy which restrains or “masters” dangerous passions (i.e. curbs enthusiasm).
Mathematics of head v. heart, idiosyncratically expressed in terms of relative proportion, as a ratio. Likewise (though more as a gag) long faces of married men v. bachelors are also described mathematically as a ratio. Math as a discipline, however, is frankly conceded to be “infernal.” When the Captain starts to explain how he managed to reconcile himself to suddenly losing any chance of “wild and dreamy adventures” in New Mexico, he says “the brain—” but gets no further on his own.
Feminine logic = magic.
Every one of these new and different themes is exampled in known writings by Herman Melville, with remarkable parallels of thought as well as diction.
Emotions in conflict
Verbally and conceptually, the “agitating struggle in my breast” confessed by the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons recalls conflicts reported by Tommo, the sailor-narrator of Typee, as “distrust and anxiety in my bosom” and “apprehensions in my breast.” Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) will feature numerous instances of internal conflict, comparable to the Captain’s “agitating struggle” in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border”:
All the while, her preternatural calmness sometimes seems only made to cover the intensest struggle in her bosom. (Isabel when first sighted by Pierre)
He could now make no plausible stay, and smothering the agitation in him, he bowed a general and hurried adieu to the company, and went forth with his mother. (Pierre, after seeing Isabel)
some radiations from her, embodied in the vague conceits which agitated his own soul. (Isabel and her influence on Pierre)
as all that was in him stirred to and fro, intensely agitated by the ever-creative fire of enthusiastic earnestness. (Pierre, early in Book IX)
“… continue to do as thou hast done; so that I may ever continue to know all that agitatest thee, the airiest and most transient thought, that ever shall sweep into thee.” (Lucy instructing Pierre in Book II)
“Cool and philosophical as a woman”
Bantering in this portion of the prairie dialogue renews when I. F. interrupts by finishing the narrator’s sentence for him. The narrator, about to explain how domestic affections (“home-feelings”) helped him get over the disappointment of being summarily rerouted homeward by Fate or “Destiny,” only gets as far as the subject, “The brain—.” Hijacking whatever was the intended point, the Imaginary Friend completes the narrator’s sentence by supplying verb and object with, “Can master every passion.” Had I. F. not interrupted, the narrator might have expressed a different opinion concerning the familiar duality of Head versus Heart, a staple of romantic fiction. Nevertheless, I. F.’s claim for the capability of brainpower to regulate fluctuating human emotions—to curb your enthusiasm, one might say—impresses the narrator as admirably rational. With his intriguing comeback, “Cool and philosophical as a woman,” the narrator recognizes I. F.’s argument for the superiority of reason, head over heart, as both temperate and characteristically feminine. Woman in this view has been made the emblem of calm, rational thinking and acting. As Herman Melville would do in his 1856 short story The Apple-Tree Table, where the narrator’s “matter-of-fact” wife is explicitly and repeatedly associated with the Greek philosopher Democritus. In Melville’s tale, the example of Democritus as an advocate of dispassionate scientific inquiry, motivates the narrator (rattled first by weird ticking sounds coming from his antique table, later fascinated by two lustrous bugs that eventually crawled out of it) to “keep cool.” The weighty name Democritus occurs eleven times in Melville’s “Apple-Tree Table.” The narrator’s wife, herself a model of calm, cool philosophy, is specifically praised in two places as “a female Democritus” and “Mrs. Democritus” for demanding natural, scientific explanations of allegedly spiritual manifestations.5 Confidence in the brain’s ability to calm down and regulate strong feelings, a view regarded as “cool and philosophical” and particularly associated with women by the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” seems personified in Melville’s “female Democritus.”
Doing the math of head v. heart
Against I. F.’s claim for rightful mastery of the brain over emotions, of head over heart, the narrator advances one of Melville’s pet notions. Rejecting the usual representation of head and heart in opposition, as competitors fighting each other for size and dominance, the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons holds that
“the passions not only increase in force with the power of the brain, but in a higher ratio.”
Figured here in scientific and mathematical terms of force and ratio, the narrator’s conceit makes for a succinct paraphrase of Melville’s essential idea, expressed publicly and privately in connection with Nathaniel Hawthorne. In print, Melville closed his 1850 review essay Hawthorne and His Mosses by praising Nathaniel Hawthorne as
“the American, who up to the present day, has evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart” (emphasis in bold mine, here and throughout).
Writing to Hawthorne, Melville further expounded his theory of big heads and bigger hearts cohabiting in one and the same body, mixing metaphors drawn from anatomy, cookery, and watchmaking:
It is a frightful poetical creed that the cultivation of the brain eats out the heart. But it’s my prose opinion that in most cases, in those men who have fine brains and work them well, the heart extends down to hams. And though you smoke them with the fire of tribulation, yet, like veritable hams, the head only gives the richer and the better flavor. I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head. The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.6
In both versions of the prairie dialogue, the narrator’s formulation of head (“the brain”) and heart (“the passions”) power or “force” as a mathematical ratio triggers a strong objection from his imaginary companion. The magazine version has I.F. calling instantly for disqualification of the speaker’s argument. For some reason the Friend’s exclamation “A forfeit!” has been deleted in revision and does not appear in the 1857 book. Nevertheless, the book version keeps the Friend’s unexplained, but also uncontested objection to mathematics as infernal.
Deletion of the penalty call for “A forfeit!” by the narrator’s Imaginary Friend may have been deemed needful after cutting “from thy flight descend not lower” a bit earlier in the same conversation. That revision eliminated the first of two potentially confusing references to a “lower” world. The first (spoken by I. F.) references Hell, abode of “the D—” or Devil below earth; the second “lower,” delivered by the Captain-narrator, means planet earth, below the clouds, on the solid ground of plain factual narrative where the speaker has promised to return, swearing off poetry and romance. Calling “A forfeit!” when the narrator introduced mathematical terminology invoked the earlier sense of lower as Hell, and therefore had to be cut after deletion of the first lower. After revision there was no longer any understanding between narrator and Friend respecting Hell, so the narrator’s turn to mathematics, however “infernal” a subject, could not fairly be said to violate any terms of his prior agreement to “attempt a lower level.”7
Feminine logic = magic = holy water
“I assure you (it is a secret of mine) that nothing else known among men can cope with feminine logic; but that is magical; the d—l can as well resist holy water.”
Leading with conviction (“I assure you”) and framing his next proposition as a confession (“a secret of mine”) the narrator advances a masculine claim for mathematics, however demonic in theory or practice, as a useful weapon in the battle of the sexes. This confident way of introducing a potentially displeasing confession sounds quite like Herman Melville, echoing any one of the three I assure you’s in his 1848 letter to John Murray in London, in which the author of Typee and Omoo told his future ex-publisher how his work in progress had changed from a regular “narrative of fact” to romantic fiction.8
“My romance I assure you is no dish water.”
Herman Melville
Emphasis on the second “that,” italicized in the revised book version, clarifies which noun is modified by the adjective “magical.” What’s magical is feminine logic, so-called, hypothetically opposed in this construction to linear, numerically precise modes of reasoning. Mathematical calculations, vociferously banned by I. F. as “infernal” for being in some unexplained way associated with Hell, are humorously held up as the best resource men have for dealing with “feminine logic,” regarded for the sake of argument as irrational, impractical, and generally exasperating. Ultimately, however, even math is no match for feminine logic, since “the devil can as well resist holy water.”
Demonology was much on Herman Melville’s mind before, during, and just after the composition of Moby-Dick.9 Keen interest in sorcery and witchcraft is evidenced by handwritten notes Melville made in the back of a Shakespeare volume, especially the information he copied verbatim, as Geoffrey Sanborn discovered, from the unsigned essay on “Superstition and Knowledge” by Francis Palgrave in the July 1823 issue of the London Quarterly Review.10 For example, Melville closely read the passage on “Goetic magic” or “the Black Art” contrasted with “high and pure Theurgy which repels all converse with the evil demon.” At the top of page 453 Melville found the following elucidation which he copied out nearly word-for-word:
“Theurgical magic, the magic which seeks its converse with the Power, the Intelligence, and the Angel.” 11
Two pages on, Melville would have found belief in the magic power of holy water affirmed
“Holy water which chased away the demon, also assisted in consecrating the hallowed Lamen and the Periapt.” — Quarterly Review, July 1823, page 455.
And expanded (abusively and corruptly according to the author of “Superstition and Knowledge”) during the Middle Ages in priestly rituals that ranged from repelling devils to blessing amulets and necklaces to be worn as protective charms.
“Superstition and Knowledge” also provided the “secret” motto of Melville’s Whale book, borrowed from a satanic baptismal formula that Palgrave gave in Latin. In Chapter 113 The Forge, Melville made Ahab “deliriously howl” most of it while tempering his harpoon in the blood of his harpooneers.12 Writing privately to Nathaniel Hawthorne on June 29, 1851, Melville teased it as “the book’s motto (the secret one).” For many reasons it would be well to remember that Ahab’s blasphemous incantation derived from testimony assembled by literal witch hunters trying to justify mass murder. All such accusations, as Palgrave made sure to point out, “bear the stamp of raving madness.” The demonic subtext of Ahab’s fall made for “a wicked book,” as Melville called Moby-Dick (in November 1851, still apparently under the influence of “Superstition and Knowledge”) but somehow the writing of it left him feeling “spotless as the lamb.” 13
Palgrave’s essay explicitly referenced the use of holy water to repel demons as one of the traditional Roman rites being “secretly and silently blended” before the Reformation with “magical ceremonies” and “spells” imported from the East. Here again, as previously revealed in the use of John A. Carlyle’s prose translation of Dante’s Inferno during revision of the September 1851 installment, Melville’s reading is surprisingly germane to the content of a fictional prairie dialogue in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.”
Consideration of holy water, devils, and magic in the context of “Superstition and Knowledge” takes us back to the centerpiece of Melville’s 1856 short fiction, “just such a necromantic little old table as might have belonged to Friar Bacon.” The first sentence of “The Apple-Tree Table” thus invokes “Friar Bacon” as a legendary magician. Roger Bacon figured largely in “Superstition and Knowledge,” too, there represented as a pioneer of empirical study, more of a philosopher and scientist than medieval sorcerer. Recognizing the probable influence of '“Superstition and Knowledge” on “The Apple-Tree Table,” Sanborn comments that “Melville seems to consciously depart from Palgrave in order to characterize the narrator as a romantic connoisseur of fear.”14
Melville’s over-anxious narrator in The Apple-Tree Table might also be called a connoisseur of antithesis, or of psychological conflict, wavering as he does in a “contest between panic and philosophy.” His wife, characterized as “a female Democritus,” models a cool, philosophical approach to the study of mysterious phenomena, after the example of Democritus of Abdera in pursuit of natural, materialist explanations. Fittingly, the expert consulted by “Mrs. Democritus” is “the eminent naturalist, Professor Johnson” (emphasis mine). Not Madame Pazzi, “the conjuress” preferred by Julia, the narrator’s eldest daughter. Julia gets close to the last word, however, emerging near the end of the tale as a formidable wielder of feminine logic. Julia accepts the Professor’s myth-busting explanation for the mysterious ticking (even the dodgy math he used to compute the number of years the radiantly beautiful bug might have remained cloistered, before crawling out of the table) but draws from the natural event, triumphantly, “a spiritual lesson”:
“Say what you will,” said Julia, holding up, in the covered tumbler, the glorious, lustrous, flashing, live opal, “say what you will, if this beauteous creature be not a spirit, it yet teaches a spiritual lesson. For if, after one hundred and fifty years’ entombment, a mere insect comes forth at last into light, itself an effulgence, shall there be no glorified resurrection for the spirit of man? Spirits! spirits!” she exclaimed, with rapture, “I still believe in them with delight, when before I but thought of them with terror.”
A fair instance of feminine logic which the learned naturalist could not and wisely did not try to answer.
“Brave man!” censored
The very idea of “feminine logic” as a differently oriented and creative way of thinking, decidedly non-numerical and characteristic of women, with mysterious, even “magical” powers of persuasion over men, almost begs for censure as a sexist if not anti-feminist construction. When the speaker goes so far as to illustrate his conceit by comparing the charm or spell of feminine logic to the irresistible potency of holy water in repelling demons, his imaginary friend salutes his courage, jokingly:
I. F. “Brave man ! — when you know there is not a woman within 400 miles.”
Giving the overbold Captain a way out, which he gladly takes:
“But that only makes us think of them the more.
Both the sarcastic praise for the narrator’s bravery by “I. F.” and the narrator’s gallant reply (trying too hard, perhaps, to clean up his mess of sacred and profane imagery) were deleted in revision of the December 1851 episode. No trace of this exchange appears in the 1857 book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army. As with other deletions in revision of this installment (identified in the previous number of my investigation) the expression “brave man” occurs repeatedly in Moby-Dick, three times in Chapter 119 The Candles and once in Chapter 135 The Chase.—Third Day.
The expression brave man is originally Starbuck’s, uttered in unsuccessful challenges to Stubb and later, Ahab. Stubb, rejecting the application to himself, refuses to stop singing in a Typhoon: “But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits.” In the novel’s last numbered chapter, Starbuck tearfully implores Ahab to give up the hunt:
“Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it’s a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”
That captain would not be swayed. As for the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” this captain replies contritely and correctly enough to his friend’s humorous reproof. The narrator’s deleted reply, “But that only makes us think of them the more,” echoes a similarly engineered comment by the narrator of White-Jacket:
And it was at these times that I always endeavoured to draw out the oldest Tritons into narratives of the war-service they had seen. There were but few of them, it is true, who had been in action; but that only made their narratives the more valuable.15
Making a study of long faces
In jest, and despite his imaginary companion’s objection to math as emphatically an infernal subject of study, the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons offers another ratio, this time a mock-mathematical formula that would describe the facial expressions of married soldiers according to how long they have been married.
“Well, at this news, it was remarkable and quite a study — speaking of ratios — that the faces of the married men were lengthened in proportion to the length of their married life.”
The proposed ratio jokingly implies that long-married men exhibited long faces, expressive of their unhappiness at going home so soon. Still in play here are the mixed emotions of joy and disappointment confessed by the narrator. Who among 200 dragoons would be happiest about returning to their base at Fort Leavenworth? Newly wedded men, homesick and missing the romantic bliss they had enjoyed with their sweethearts. That group would presumably include “the raw recruit” imagined by Melville in Moby-Dick Chapter 48 The First Lowering, “marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle.” By contrast, according to the narrator’s comic conceit, hen-pecked veterans of “married life” might deeply regret missing perhaps their best chance for romantic exploits in New Mexico, and betray their disappointment by wearing the longest faces.
Herman Melville, as demonstrated in his writings, was kind of a student of long faces, particularly in connection with travel and thwarted quests. Sailing for England in a passenger ship, Melville made the following diary entry on November 4, 1849 after an unexpected calm at sea had delayed the planned arrival in Dover by one day: “Foggy, drizzly; long faces at dinner—no porter bottles.” Long faces figure meaningfully in three chapters of Moby-Dick, introduced each time in dialogue:
“But what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?” Moby-Dick Chapter 36 The Quarter-Deck
and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both [Ahab and Starbuck] with faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And all from looking at a piece of gold. Moby-Dick Chapter 99 The Doubloon
I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces?—have they no bowels for a laugh? Moby-Dick Chapter 119 The Candles
In dialogue, again, a “hard-hearted old gentleman” in the Confidence-Man Chapter 6 differentiates three kinds of “long faces” when confronting “the man in gray” as a suspected fraudster:
“… you, a fellow with a face as long as my arm…. but of long faces; there are three sorts; that of grief’s drudge, that of the lantern-jawed man, and that of the impostor. You know best which yours is.”
Spend the day with us
As previously shown in the first number of the present study, the opening installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” in June 1851 featured some arresting verbal and thematic parallels in Melville’s then-recent correspondence with Nathaniel Hawthorne. One of five adduced in
has a great match in the renewed invitation and hearty assurances of welcome Melville gave on January 29, 1851, luckily preserved for the historical record in his earliest surviving letter to Hawthorne. In the same invitation-welcome letter, two more verbal matches with “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” occur near the close of the December 1851 installment. In the first month of 1851 Melville, eager to host Hawthorne and his family at Arrowhead overnight, at least, vigorously protested Mrs. Hawthorne’s counter-offer to, as Melville emphatically put it, “spend the day only with us.”
You , Sir, I hold accountable, & the visit (in all its original integrity) must be made. — What! spend the day, only with us? — A Greenlander might as well talk of spending the day with a friend, when the day is only half an inch long.
As I said before, my best travelling chariot on runners, will be at your door, & provision made not only for the accommodation of all your family, but also for any quantity of baggage.16
In the last month of 1851, two expressions of welcome used by Melville in his earliest surviving letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “spend the day with us” and “my best _____” found their way into the rewrite of Philip St. George Cooke’s formal report of the second, fall expedition by U. S. Dragoons on the Santa Fe Trail.
Comparison to the 1843 source-text reveals that the phrases “spend the day with us” (virtually a 5-gram, dropping Melville’s qualifier “only”) and “in my best style” were both added, presumably by a ghostwriter, along with other highly imaginative revisions of Cooke’s manuscript report dated October 26, 1843, written at Fort Leavenworth.
1843
October 3d. … Early next morning I sent another express to Fort Leavenworth with this information, [about the unexpected arrival of a Mexican force that would escort the caravan from the Ford of the Arkansas River into New Mexico, and on to Santa Fe] and for corn to be sent to meet me as far as possible. Leaving the baggage under a guard, I marched with the caravan to the crossing; the Mexicans saddled and mounted at my approach, but as I drew up on the bank they were dismissed. I sent over my Adjutant with a polite invitation to their commander to march or come across. He declined, alleging that he had received positive orders not to cross the river, which he would disobey under no circumstances.17
DECEMBER 1851
Next morning, leaving the baggage, I marched to the crossing in my best style; on our approach we saw the Mexicans beyond the river saddle and mount, but on our dismounting they were dismissed. Our [1857: The] adjutant rode over to make inquiries and invite them to cross and spend the day with us. Their commander declined, with the pointed excuse that he was ordered on no account to cross “the boundary.” …
Retained words and phrases include
next morning
leaving the baggage
I marched
the crossing
“saddled and mounted” = “saddle and mount”
were dismissed
their commander
declined
Added phrases, not copied from the source-text
in my best style
spend the day with us
with the pointed excuse [compare “with the pointed intensity of purpose” assigned to Ahab’s javelin-like glance in Moby-Dick Chapter 99 The Doubloon]
on no account [occurs twice in Moby-Dick, Chapter 1 Loomings (“on no account can a monied man enter heaven”) and Chapter 31 Queen Mab (“on no account kick back”); and once in Pierre (“on no account show this to thy mistress—D’ye hear?”) near the end of Book XI, He Crosses the Rubicon.]
None of the four locutions deployed in the 1851 passage appears anywhere in the 1843 Journal of the Santa Fe Trail by Philip St. George Cooke. What makes the two parallels in Melville’s January 1851 letter extra compelling is their rhetorical context, occurring as they do in a message of invitation and welcome. The prospect of an enjoyable social visit clearly motivated Melville’s first known letter to Hawthorne and this part of the creative rewrite in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” The added expressions “my best_____” (military uniform, equipage, and/or horsemanship might be implied by the narrator’s unelaborated reference to “style” where Melville specified, “my best travelling chariot on runners”) and “spend the day with us” creatively embellish the “polite invitation'“ formally extended by the Adjutant, according to the source-text. Demonstrably then, the 1851 rewrite of Captain Cooke’s report has personalized and to some extent domesticated “a polite invitation” using Herman Melville’s words.
In closing down this number of DRAGOONED I should point out something else about the “polite invitation” generously extended in October 1843 to Mexican soldiers “saddled and mounted” on the other side of the Arkansas River. It was declined. So, too, were the terms of Melville’s first magnanimous invitation to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his whole family. In March 1851 the Hawthorne’s finally did make their anticipated visit to Arrowhead. In January and February, however, Nathaniel’s wife Sophia Hawthorne worked her considerable “charms” to reject or modify Melville’s original stipulations. Melville tried manfully to resist the “syrenisims” of Sophia Hawthorne, comparing her feminine powers of enchantment to the fabled songs of the Greek Sirens that lured sailors to their destruction. Her spells were evidently irresistible, however—not unlike the “magical” effect of feminine logic on men, according to a homeward-bound Captain of U. S. Dragoons.
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See the Historical Note by Walter E. Bezanson in Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1982) page 197.
Printed in “A Journal of the Santa Fe Trail (Concluded),” edited by William E. Connelley, Mississippi Valley Historical Review Volume 12 No. 2 (September 1925) pages 227-255 at 249-255. Accessible online via JSTOR and Google Books
https://books.google.com/books?id=R2gKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA251&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
Melville’s free treatment of numbers is noted in the Editorial Appendix to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Israel Potter at pages 248 and 256.
Journey of the Santa Fe Trail, edited by William E. Connelley, page 254.
First published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine for May 1856; reprinted in The Apple-Tree Table, and Other Sketches. With an introductory note by Henry Chapin (Princeton University Press, 1922) pages 9-51 where “female Democritus” appears on page 44 and “Bravo, Mrs. Democritus!” on page 48.
Here quoted from The Letters of Herman Melville, edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (Yale University Press, 1960) page 129. <https://archive.org/details/lettersofhermanm00melv/page/128/mode/2up>
The descriptor infernal is italicized for emphasis in both the magazine and book versions.
See the letter to John Murray dated March 25, 1848 in The Letters of Herman Melville, edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (Yale University Press, 1960) at pages 70-71. Also printed in Herman Melville, Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth (Northwestern University Press, 1993) at pages 105-108.
Helen P. Trimpi, “Melville’s Use of Demonology and Witchcraft in Moby-Dick” in Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 30, number 4, 1969, pages 543–62. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2708610.
Geoffrey Sanborn, “The Name of the Devil: Melville’s Other ‘Extracts’ for Moby-Dick.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 47, no. 2, 1992, pages 212–35. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2933637.
Digital images of Melville’s notes from Francis Palgrave’s “Superstition and Knowledge” (Sealts number 395a) in Volume VII of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1837) may be viewed courtesy of Melville’s Marginalia Online.
The original of Ahab’s unholy formula appeared in “Superstition and Knowledge,” Quarterly Review (June 1823) on page 447.
Hershel Parker observes the lingering influence of “Superstition and Knowledge” in Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 2, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) at pages 15-16. Melville made that now famous confession, “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb” in November 1851, writing to Nathaniel Hawthorne; see The Letters of Herman Melville, edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (Yale University Press, 1960) pages 141-144.
Sanborn, “The Name of the Devil,” pages 233-4 fn 37.
Here quoted from Chapter 74, “The Main-Top at Night” in Herman Melville, White-Jacket: or the World in a Man-of-War, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Northwestern University Press, 1970) page 311.
Letters of Herman Melville, edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (Yale University Press, 1960) page 118; full text of this letter is also printed in Herman Melville, Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth (Northwestern University Press, 1993) at pages 175-178.
Journey of the Santa Fe Trail, edited by William E. Connelley, page 252.