Herman Melville as "Hip" Icon for the Beat Generation

Herman Melville as “Hip” Icon for the Beat Generation MARK DUNPHY Lindsey Wilson College (how can you write when you haven’t yet read Bartleby the Scrivener? Etc.) Seymour Krim, The Beats (1960)1 We could dig Melville on his ship Confronting the huge white mad beast Speeding death cross the sea to we. But we whalers. We can kill whales. We could get on top of a whale And wail. Leroi Jones [Amiri Baraka] in “Wailers”2 I n her 1935 autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton, who was distantly related to Herman Melville, notes how she and those of her class largely ignored Melville’s works because he amounted to nothing more than what we might now call a mid-nineteenth century Beatnik: “As for Herman Melville, a cousin of the Van Rensslaers [sic] and qualified by birth to be in the best society, he was doubtless excluded from it by his deplorable Bohemianism.”3 And Melville’s literary executor Arthur Stedman in his 1892 “Introduction” to Typee cites a letter that Dr. Titus Coan had written to his mother after Coan (then a student at Williams College) made “my first literary pilgrimage, a call upon Herman Melville,” wherein Coan portrays Melville as if he were the America’s Ur-Beatnik: “But what a talk it was! Melville is transformed from a Marquesan to a gypsy student, the gypsy element still remaining strong within him [. . .]. With his liberal views, he is apparently C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 As qtd. in Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation: The Tumultuous ’50s Movement and Its Impact on Today (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 49. 2 As qtd. in Robert G. O’Meally, “Introduction,” Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales, by Herman Melville (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006), xiii. 3 As qtd. in Hennig Cohen and Donald Yannella, Herman Melville’s Malcolm Letter: “Man’s Final Lore” (New York: Fordham University Press & The New York Public Library, 1992), 74. 92 L E V I A T H A N 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 M E L V I L L E A S H I P I C O N considered by the good people of Pittsfield as little better than a cannibal or ‘beachcomber.’ His attitude seemed to me something like that of Ishmael.”4 Of course, Melville’s Hipster appearance is not as important as the Beat Generation’s affinity for Melville’s expression of what might be called a Beat attitude against the constraints of convention throughout his life and works. While he composed Moby-Dick, his distaste for conventional superficialities surfaced in a [11 June] 1851 letter to Hawthorne: “With no son of man do I stand upon any etiquette or ceremony, except the Christian ones of charity and honesty.”5 As Tim Hunt has put it: “[W]e are still, as John Clellon Holmes noted years ago, a bit like those 1850s folks who found Melville fascinating because he’d lived with the cannibals and peeped at Polynesian life,”6 Melville’s derision of convention is also duly noted in his November 1849 Journals, when after attending a pretentious dinner party given by his London publisher, John Murray, he comments: “At dinner the stiffness, formality , & coldness of the party was wonderful. I felt like knocking all their heads together. I managed to get thro’ with it, however, somehow [. . .] .7 After mocking all the guests except one, for that one was not “a thorough going Tory & fish-blooded Churchman & conservative,” Melville says with a sigh: “Such is a publisher’s dinner. A comical volume might be written upon it.—Oh Conventionality, what a ninny, thou art, to be sure” (NN Journals 26). Melville castigates “conventionality” in Moby-Dick. Ishmael notes, for instance, that a ship’s captain “with trembling fingers” might mistake a whale for “shoals, rocks, and breakers” and record the false information for others to mistakenly follow. “And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum; because their...