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144 6 COBBLING THE HARPER PIERRE: JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1852 i New Year’s Eve 1851 or New Year’s Day 1852, or a day or two either way, Melville took the train at Pittsfield for the eight-hour ride to New York City. His primary purpose was to arrange for Harper & Brothers to publish his new manuscript. The negotiations began soon after his arrival, not later than the first days of January. Melville and the Harpers agreed that the manuscript would make a book of about 360 pages—a short book compared to three of his last four. A scrap of a draft passage of the contract in the hand of his brother Allan, his lawyer, shows that Allan was concerned that the book might run shorter than 360 pages, for only as an afterthought did he caret-in phrasing to cover the possibility that it might run longer than that. (This draft passage and the contract itself, along with Allan’s letter to the Harpers on 21 January 1852, referred to below, are reproduced in facsimile in Parker, “Contract.”) On their skeptical look at the manuscript, the Harpers discovered not a crowd-pleasing loosely-strung-together story of knocking about in the South Seas (the sort of story that had gained Melville an instant high reputation), nor even (as they might have expected) a charming account of the several-month trip to England and the Continent that Melville had made late in 1849 (a trip touted in the papers as an opportunity for gathering literary material). Instead their sea-author had domesticated a prurient, far-fetched Gothic incest plot, setting it in an idealized version of the great upstate landholdings of the patroons, the Van Rensselaers. Melville had compounded the indecencies of plot with disturbing speculations about religion, for references to Christianity and even the name “Christ” occurred frequently in dubious contexts. Once again, as in his previous book, there were passages that many would regard as blasphemous. (“Ah, if man were wholly made in heaven, why catch we hellglimpses ?” the narrator exclaims near the end of Book V [107]. Later, in Book VII, referring to the “whole outspread Hand of God,” the narrator asks with seeming piety, “doth not Scripture intimate, that He holdeth all READING MELVILLE’S PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES 145 of us in the hollow of His hand?”—only to add “a Hollow, truly!” [139].) What the Harpers saw was very much the book readers of Melville are familiar with—with one enormous difference: there were no passages on Pierre as an author interspersed through the last third of the book. The Harpers were armed with their sales figures showing that MobyDick was doing much worse than Redburn and White-Jacket had done in their first weeks. A handful of reviewers had recognized extraordinary qualities in Moby-Dick, but it had been ruthlessly condemned by many critics, especially for its “flings at religion” and “vulgar immoralities” (in the words of the New York Methodist Quarterly Review). The reviewer for the influential new Congregationalist magazine, the New York Independent, acquainted with earlier works by Melville, had been reminded by Moby-Dick of a “primitive formation of profanity and indecency that is ever and anon shooting up through all the strata of his writings.” Not only Melville but his publishers were included in the reviewer’s final censures: “The Judgment day will hold him [Melville] liable for not turning his talents to better account, when, too, both authors and publishers of injurious books will be conjointly answerable for the influence of those books upon the wide circle of immortal minds on which they have written their mark. The book-maker and the bookpublisher had better do their work with a view to the trial it must undergo at the bar of God.” The upstanding Methodist Harpers’ reputation for publishing Christian books had been damaged by Moby-Dick, and now Melville was offering them a new work with a plot based on an incestuous attraction between a deluded would-be Christ-like idealist and a woman whom he thought was his illegitimate half-sister! The Harpers could afford to lose Melville, an author whose first book was still acknowledged as his best and had sold better than any of his subsequent books, as they knew, since Melville had bought the expurgated American plates from Wiley and Putnam in 1849 so the Harpers could reprint from them. They were reluctant to publish Pierre and reluctant to...

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