Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds (review)

R E V I E W WILLIAM POTTER Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004. Cloth $34.00; 264 pp. Let fools count on faith’s closing knell— Time, God, are inexhaustible. Rolfe in Clarel (1.31.264-5) D espite the eighteen thousand lines of orthodox verse that Melville himself acknowledged had rendered his poem “eminently adapted for unpopularity,” scholars have come to realize that no sustained inquiry into Melville’s literary art can exclude a grappling with Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876).1 Melville’s original consignment of the work to oblivion seemed prophetic when in March 1879, less than three years after the 350 copies of the two-volume poem in green covers was published , he gave permission to his publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, to pulp the remaining 224 copies at “the paper-mill.”2 Calling it a “buried book,” Melville employed the metaphor of disinterment when he sent a personal copy to British reader James Billson in 1885 (NN Corres 486). The artistic achievement of Clarel was not fully resurrected until Walter Bezanson’s 1942 Yale dissertation produced the research which later became the basis for editions of the poem by Hendricks House in 1960 and Northwestern-Newberry in 1991. Many scholars have since claimed that coming to terms with Clarel is central to understanding Melville’s career as an artist. After acknowledging the poem as “the great white elephant, the great unread . . . among all the major works of all the canonical nineteenth-century English-language authors,” Lawrence Buell called Clarel “the second most learned, intricate, and profoundly intellectual C
2007 The Authors Journal compilation C
2007 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 1 Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), 483; hereafter cited as NN Corres. 2 Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1991), 638, 659; hereafter cited as NN Clarel. See also NN Corres 472. 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 61 R E V I E W work that Melville wrote.”3 Newton Arvin celebrated Clarel’s “crowdedness of social landscape,” claiming that “[n]owhere else, not even in Moby-Dick does Melville fill the stage more populously, . . . or succeed more brilliantly in giving vitality to secondary and even to incidental figures.”4 Robert Penn Warren perhaps showed the deepest appreciation when he declared Clarel to be “a fundamentally necessary document of our human experience.”5 As William Potter reminds us in this book, Melville’s composition of this long poem “demanded more time and effort than any of his other works” (xiii). Indeed nineteen years passed between his own journey to Palestine (as well as the appearance of his last work of fiction) and the publication of his poetic pilgrimage in 1876, the year midway between Moby-Dick and his death in 1891, when he was still working on assembling poems and revising Billy Budd. Thanks to the continual commitment of the Kent State University Press to bringing new monographs on Melville into print, we now have the first new critical work devoted to Clarel in over a decade. Much of the scholarly study of Melville’s engagement with religion in general and Clarel in particular emphasizes a Judeo-Christian perspective that focuses on the Bible or on central Christian themes such as sin and redemption . William Braswell’s Melville’s Religious Thought (1943), Nathalia Wright’s Melville’s Use of the Bible (1949), T. Walter Herbert’s Melville and Calvinism (1977), and more recently Walter Donald Kring’s Melville’s Religious Journey (1997) primarily document and emphasize Melville’s agonistic struggles with Christian theology and practice. The last full-length work devoted to the poem, Stan Goldman’s Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel (1993) claims that the poem is “overwhelmingly biblical” and argues that “Melvillean protest...