The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville’s Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne ed. by Mark Niemeyer (review)

Herman Melville’s literary standing is deeply en-twined with interest in the man—the liberal adventurer, the astonishing autodidact, the aging poet writing in solitude, quietly vanishing from the public eye. Ever at odds with the common practice of searching for authors within the pages of their books, he affixed a curious preface to a late collection of poems and prose pieces. Cast as a private letter done up in literary fashion, the “Inscription Epistolary” for John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) includes this caveat: “For personal feeling—the printed page is hardly the place for reiterating that.” Orison Books transgresses this sentiment, but their new edition of Melville’s letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne provides a timely service to literature. Packaged for a broader audience of readers, writers, and lovers of books, this slim volume of ten letters and accompanying pieces invites a new generation to go in quest of Melville’s fiction and poetry while sending an older generation back for more.

Melville’s letters to Hawthorne hold a notable place in literary history—notable too the absence of Hawthorne’s letters to Melville, with one brief exception not known to survive. The extant letters, dated early 1851 to late 1852, were mostly written from Melville’s Pittsfield farmhouse in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, when Hawthorne was living in nearby Lenox and later West Newton and then Concord, Massachusetts. Scholars have mined them for evidence of Melville’s yearning for deep and reciprocating literary companionship, for his growing vexations with the literary marketplace, and for his growing self-awareness of literary greatness during the period when he was writing Moby-Dick. In frequently cited passages, Melville writes of writing and fame and truth, talks about his “Whale,” praises Hawthorne’s books, pens notes for a story concerning a deserted bride and twice-bigamist sailor that he unsuccessfully pressed Hawthorne to write. Coming to the letters fresh, readers will also discover them filled with genial and amiable touches, jocularity, humor, and references to domestic chores and life’s daily duties: “I keep the word ‘Welcome’ all the time in my mouth, so as to be ready on the instant when you cross the threshold.” “Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together.” “I thank you for your easy-flowing long letter…which flowed through me, and refreshed all my meadows.” “Well, the Hawthorne is a sweet flower; may it flourish in every hedge.”

The letters also offer morsels of philosophy and idiosyncratic opinions, and they display irreverence for commonplace presumptions: “Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses,—for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it.” “We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself.” Throughout they evince a writer’s love for turning out words: “I feel cheerfully disposed, and therefore I write a little bluely.” “If you find any sand in this letter, regard it as so many sands of my life, which run out as I was writing it.” Melville writes freely and whimsically, without staging, revision, or polishing. He supposes that in people with “fine brains” who “work them well,” “the heart extends down to the 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!” Reflecting upon Hawthorne’s now lost response to Moby-Dick, he writes: “I was lord of a little vale in the solitary Crimea; but you have now given me the crown of India. But on trying it on my head, I found it fell down on my ears, notwithstanding their asinine length—for it’s only such ears that sustain such crowns.” Following the spontaneous...