Herman Melville Among the Magazines by Graham Thompson (review)

In a 2008 article in American Periodicals on Charles Gordon Greene's Boston Post, I analyzed that influential Democratic daily's treatment of the three most prominent contemporary American novelists: Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Although the Post was staunchly anti-abolitionist, it wrote positively of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, so emotionally gripping did the reviewer find the novel. It also regularly praised Hawthorne's fiction and even went out of its way to boost his fortunes. For instance, in June 1849 it publicized his dramatic "beheading," when he lost his position as Custom House Surveyor in Salem following the ascension of the Whig administration. Melville, however, the paper attacked with unparalleled bitterness and gratuitous cruelty in a series of extensive reviews almost certainly written by Greene himself. Greene could not abide Melville's idiosyncratic style, his refusal to conform to the conventions of fiction as Greene understood them. He urged readers not to waste their money on Moby-Dick and condemned Pierre as "perhaps the craziest fiction extant," a work that "might be supposed to emanate from a lunatic hospital rather than from the quiet retreats of Berkshire. We say it with grief—it is too bad for Mr. Melville to abuse his really fine talents as he does."

Melville was undaunted. Remarkably, as Graham Thompson shows in Herman Melville Among the Magazines, Melville followed the commercial failure of Pierre in 1852 by wisely turning to the expanding New York periodical marketplace. Beginning with the appearance of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in November and December 1853, he published some fourteen tales and sketches in periodicals over the next several years. Here Melville found a large and appreciative readership, much larger than for his novels, and earned not-insignificant sums. In May 1856, he gathered six tales in a volume released by Dix and Edwards under the title The Piazza Tales. With the exception of the title piece, "The Piazza," written especially for the volume, all the stories had appeared in Putnam's, including such masterpieces as "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno," and "The Encantadas."

Although the periodical marketplace had enabled Melville to resume his literary career, he withdrew from that marketplace after the appearance of The Piazza Tales, a critical but not a commercial success. "In financial terms," Thompson argues, "Melville would have benefitted from more, not less, magazine writing" (207). We do not know why Melville elected to cease writing for the magazines but, thanks to Herman Melville Among the Magazines, we can understand just how important the magazine culture of the 1850s was in shaping him as a writer who transformed the tropes and conventions of periodical publishing with "dazzling displays of innovation" (xi).

Thompson argues that Melville's "embedding" in the periodical culture of New York became a necessary condition for the creation of his short fiction: "We can ask how our understanding of Melville's authorship changes when we press his writing back between the leaves of the magazines in which it was published. And we can do so without allowing magazine publication to delimit the possible answers" (19). Thompson's book raises a number of important questions, including just how we should understand the interaction between a periodical's editorial direction and the meaning of particular works that appear in its pages.

The first chapter, "The Plain Facts of Paper," recounts Melville's visit to a paper mill in Dalton, Massachusetts, that gave rise to, among other works, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids." Eschewing what he calls an "allegorical reading" of this and other stories where paper figures prominently, Thompson emphasizes Melville's representation of the material reality of paper itself (39). He claims that in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," the title character's series of refusals to participate in the work of the law office "can be seen as an aversion not to the reading and writing that is the stuff of authorship but an aversion to interacting with paper itself" (41...