From the Mast-Head

From the Mast-Head S ome years ago, around 2004, Gordon Poole in Naples and Basem Ra’ad in Jerusalem involved me in a conversation I could not resist. They wanted to hold an international Melville conference on Clarel in Jerusalem. Of course, I was petrified. Beginning in 1997 and up until these friends wrote to me, the Society had held its international conferences in such irenic places as Volos (Greece), Mystic (CT), Hempstead (NY), and Maui (HI): not exactly sites of violent unrest, ancient and modern. But, of course, I did what little I could in my role as interlocutor to facilitate this idea. Jerusalem, despite all of the political ramifications, was an inevitability. The three of us talked, and Poole and Ra’ad came up with a proposal. Clarel—also an inevitability—would be a central text but not the exclusive focus of the conference. Who, we had to ponder in sadness, would come to one of the world’s most contested areas to discuss a single poem, no matter how brilliant the work, no matter how ancient the town. Our topic had to be larger if only to follow our conference precedent of embracing Melville’s broad reach, so the conference would be called Melville and the Mediterranean to include not just the environs of one city but also an entire world of travel, art, and politics. And rising above the dust throughout those early discussions was one implicit understanding: our sub-text would be Peace. Basem Ra’ad began planning the logistics, and in time Timothy Marr and Hilton Obenzinger joined him on the organizing committee for The Melville Society’s seventh international conference, in Jerusalem. Eager, anxious, and hopeful, society members watched as the political climate waxed and waned in the Mid-East during the year or so of planning as the conference approached. On June 17–21, 2009, we gathered in good cheer on the grounds of the Ecole Biblique, in East Jerusalem. Professors Amy Kaplan and William Thompson gave remarkable keynote addresses; over sixty participants delivered papers consecutively—there were no concurrent sessions—and groups of attendees took walking tours of Jerusalem and bus tours to the Dead Sea, Jericho, even Mar Saba (though closed to women by monastic rule) and Bethlehem. Some also took the post-conference tour to Galilee and Petra. The experiences we had were unforgettable. And the conference, like each of our international conferences, was transformative. Some hint of the transformations is evident in the essays assembled in this special double issue of Leviathan, guest-edited by Hilton Obenzinger c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 3 J O H N B R Y A N T and Basem Ra’ad. The collection demonstrates the remarkable applicability of Melville: from Plato to the telegraph. They address sources of Melville’s inspiration in such diverse instances as the dragoman, the American Centennial, travel books, and Melville’s own journal. They explore the drama of Melville’s writing process and the nature of his ephemeral texts. They seek out Clarel’s stony landscape as it is projected into its clusters of characters, its politics, and inimitable verse. They expose the contemporaneousness of Melville’s critique of total institutions, the Holy Land, and “holy lands.” Many of the essays in this special issue focus largely or solely on Clarel, a work that was little known in its day, even our day. For modern critics, well into the mid-twentieth century, it remained something of a rumor you might say, until Walter E. Bezanson published his edition and commentary on the poem in 1960, making a reliable text available at a remarkably cheap price. (I paid $10 for it in 1973.) Well into his nineties at the time of the Melville and Mediterranean conference in Jerusalem, Walter had to miss the festive occasion. He passed away on February 5, 2011 as we were preparing this special issue. With funding from Gail Coffler, a fellowship in his name...