Writing for the Street, Writing in the Garret: Melville, Dickinson, and Private Publication (review)

Michael Kearns’s Writing for the Street, Writing in the Garret takes as its starting point a telling coincidental similarity between Dickinson and Melville: both writers politely refused to send a picture of themselves to a well established literary man who requested it at a key juncture in their careers. Dickinson’s fourth letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson famously begins: “Could you believe me - without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur - and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves - Would this do just as well?” (L268). Likewise, Melville responded to Evert Duyckinck’s request for a picture to publish with those of other contemporary authors: “As for the Daguerreotype . . . that’s what I can not send you, because I have none. And if I had, I would not send it for such a purpose, even to you.” Melville goes on to apologize for his “intensified vanity,” but sticks to his refusal, like Dickinson. Such a gesture of self-assertion, Kearns shows persuasively, is emblematic of their common attitude toward publication; both preferred eventually to write “within a field of restricted production” (9), in the garret but not for the street. Melville began his career as a successful travel writer and adventurer, “the man who lived among the cannibals,” but by 1851, the year of his letter to Duyckinck (and of the writing of Moby-Dick), he wanted to live down his early reputation and present himself as a “thought-diver” for other thought-divers. Both he and Dickinson held to a romantic conception of authorship in which the individual expresses his or her soul in writing and struggles mightily against having the work or the self commodified in the process of publication. As he developed, Melville hoped to live from his writing as well as express his genius, but after the failure of Moby-Dick and especially Pierre, he recognized increasingly that he was engaged in a losing enterprise. At the end of his life, much like Dickinson, he published his poems privately for a few friends. Both attempted to foster an art of intimate connection with a chosen reader.

Kearns argues that Dickinson sought publication more assiduously than is sometimes recognized. Especially, her enclosing poems in letters to friends was a form of publication. In addition, the publication of her poems in the Springfield Daily Republican, the Round Table, Drum Beat, and A Masque of Poets during her lifetime meant that her work was better known than she acknowledged. Kearns chooses not to attend to her temperamental idiosyncrasies (or Melville’s), and prefers to see both writers as representatives of a culture of letters seeking “symbolic capital” (prestige) even at the expense of economic capital.

Kearns’s focus on capital derives from Pierre Bourdieu, who supplies a conceptual framework for his study. Bourdieu has traced the struggle in nineteenth-century France for literary legitimacy: what writers, popular or elite, could legitimately call themselves writers in their contested culture. He brings to light the web of connections within which writers operate, with publishers, magazines, and other class-related organs that make them known to a public and allow them to acquire capital, whether symbolic, cultural, or economic. Kearns lays out the differences of the American situation from the French with careful nuance. I think he overdoes an emphasis on class in his treatment of his two authors. Melville’s attitudes toward class and his sense of his class position change repeatedly in his texts at least until the Civil War; and even Dickinson uses her class position to get eccentrically beyond it.

Kearns’s approach fosters an innovative application of social history to literature. He has an illuminating chapter on American copyright law and its relevance to Melville and Dickinson. He argues that when a writer like Dickinson “published” her poems in letters to friends, she kept ownership...