All Astir

All Astir We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim, And break on the lips while meeting. Stubb’s song, Moby-Dick, Ch. 39 W ith the recent publication of the Northwestern-Newberry’s longawaited and eagerly received volume of Published Poems, with news in our last issue from an international conference focused largely on Clarel, with Douglas Robillard’s forthcoming collection of essays on Melville and poetry, and with NEH-funded work going forward on digital editions of “Art” and Battle-Pieces in the Melville Electronic Library (MEL), Stubb’s song fitly captures the exuberance of new studies of Melville’s poetry. We know that Melville’s works can be dark and melancholy. Yet in song after song throughout his oeuvre, Melville’s words sparkle with convivial animation. It seems a good moment to summon that celebratory spirit and toast the turn toward poetry in current Melville scholarship and publishing. And so, too, with summer upon us, it seems a festive time to review and celebrate the Melville Society’s achievements of the last year. Peter Norberg, chair of the Melville Society’s MLA panel, “Herman Melville: A Writer and His Books,” presents here the abstracts from a splendid array of papers delivered at December’s meeting in Philadelphia. Our untiring officers, Executive Secretary Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Treasurer Tony McGowan, with help from former treasurer John Matteson, offer up their reports of the Society’s doings in 2009. We also feature reports from roving correspondents: one from Cambridge , England, as Peter Riley, Archive Fellow in January 2010, serves up his impressions of two weeks of research, chowder, and New England explorations centered in and emanating from the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s library; and one from America’s heartland, as Robert K. Wallace takes us on a tour of art exhibits and events inspired by Moby-Dick. In her official summary, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards highlights exciting new developments in the Melville Society’s Archive. One acquisition of particular note came via Robert K. Wallace, who arranged for the purchase of The Whiteness, in which engravings by Claire Illouz are juxtaposed with passages from “The Whiteness of the Whale.” This beautiful book is printed by JeanJacques Sergeant in a limited edition of twenty-five copies. Wallace describes it in greater detail: Embossed in white on white, each letter [on the cover] is an un-inked dent in the white paper whose only color is a shallow shadow along its C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 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 91 A L L A S T I R edge. . . . The first opening after the title page is a mezzotint whose “blackness, ten times black” surrounds the negative shape of a white whale made by scrapings and scratchings. [On the next] page, embossed words on the left (“. . . Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness . . .”) face a blank page on the right. At the next turn, deeply cut stalks of grass, printed without ink in a strongly bitten aquatint, face the declaration that “in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors.” At the next opening, a leafy growth, ghostly gray in a reverse embossing, stands across from the declaration that “all other earthly hues . . . are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without.” After these subtle, elusive probings, a full double-page aquatint shocks the eye with a flood of color amidst a riot of vegetative life, garish saturation of red, green, purple, and gold embodying the previously embossed declaration that “all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot.” The next turn brings Melville’s declaration that “the great principle of light . . . if operating without medium upon nature, would touch all objects, even tulips or roses, with its...