From the Mast-Head

From the Mast-Head ometimes a particular issue of Leviathan comes about through long planning. Take our last number focusingon “TeachingMelville.”Or our projected issuefor next fall: S“Melvilleand Milton.”These Special Issues involve guest editors, much e-mailing, not to mention vision, and coordination.They comeboldly announced well in advanceof their arrival.But some issues sneak up on you and leap into your lap, like a child needing a hug. No special planning; no warning;just an embrace of varied thoughts. Such is the case with the number in your hand. The pieces collected here were not contrived to fit together in seamless fashion. Indeed, a journal is where one rightly expects,perhaps desires to find, a bit of grab-bagging .Journal is just a fancy name for “magazine,”and magazine is just French for storehouse , which is American for “aplace to put a lot of stuff.”A goodjournal -and most editors know it - should not be overly indulgent with its Special Issues because such issuesare quite simplytoo nicelydone;they have a coherentfocus and are coherently constructed .Do not get me wrong. I aspire to coherencyas best I can. I recall achievingit one startling day in late August of 1975,but that is not my point. My point is that a journal should be a little messy sometimes if only to reflect the storehousenature of scholarship, which likes to grab things from various worlds and throw them all together.That was my plan for this issue. The plan was simply to have an issue. But when I first pulled the pieces printed here out of the file cabinet, intending I swear it, only to compile them into a loose and very magazinish gathering,I found them snapping together like magnets.And the electricaffinities that make them snap has something to do with America,creation,and multiculturalism. Timothy Marr starts us out w i t h a bracing overview of Melville’s creative process and how it is ineffably linked to his unusually prescient sense of multi-ethnicity.To think, to write,to make books: these are human functionsMelville never tired of and consistently equated with the diversityof human life as though creativityand thought itself were a necessary commingling of races. Elizabeth Schultz approachesmulticulturalismfrom the perspective of the Illustrated Melville,and more specificallyhow generationsof artistshave rendered the racial characters of Moby-Dick with varylng degrees -and more often than not dishearteninglyso -of cultural iconographyDespiteMelville’srefreshingcandor and respect for human diversity, artists have over the years countered the writer’s liberalism with crude stereotyping.And despite notable artistic exceptions which depict with visual subtlety the humanity of Melville’s racial characters, the bulk of Moby-Dick illustration, even today, reflects the worst of that “peculiarinstitution”:America. In the not sojumbledjumble of pieces assembledfor thisissue of Leviathan, we find two shorter essayswhich also resonate with those by Marr and Schultz.Randall Cluff supplies solid evidence that identifies the until-now unknown author of the review of Typee found in the pages of the New York Evangelist. It was this review that excoriated Melville 2 L E V I A T H A N F R O M T H E M A S T - H E A D for his treatment of the missionaries and which led to the eventual expurgation of Qpee. Cluff‘sidentificationof Henry Cheever, friend of Melville’spublisherJohn Wiley and himself the author o f a source on whaling used by Melville later on, will startle and delight Melville scholars. The connection to Marr and Schultz is not necessarily thematically direct, but the link is clear. Melville’s colonial encounter with ethnicitywas never acceptable to the bulk of American readers, and Cluffs essay reminds us that reviewers, like the illustrators who followed well after in their wake, had considerable power in shaping Melville’stext to fit their own ideologies.A second note signals the resurrection of a recurring featurein Leviathan we call Melville’sHand,which focuses on Melville in manuscript or in revision.Douglas Robillard’scontribution inspects the revisions Melville made to his poem “MagianWine,”a tough, mystic, and little-discussedlittle piece from Timoleon that bears closerinspection.Can we find in the concrete evidence of Melville’screative process any...