From Downtown Manhattan to the Bronx: Feliz cumpleaños, Herman!

Pilar Martínez Benedí.

Photo courtesy of Pilar Martínez Benedí.

I had been in New York City before. Like any pilgrim worth her salt, I found my way to Melville's birthplace in Pearl Street during my first stay, where I saw the commemorative plaque and bronze bust that, as Jennifer Baker reminded us during a storm-defying walking tour of Melville's lower Manhattan, mysteriously disappeared overnight a couple of years ago. But I must confess, I had never visited Melville's resting place in Woodlawn Cemetery. This visit, when I was in New York to attend the Twelfth International Melville Conference held in his hometown during the bicentennial year of his birth, seemed the ideal occasion to pay my overdue respects.

So up to the Bronx I went on a warm morning in late June. I was talking on the phone in Italian when I entered the cemetery to be welcomed by a friendly concierge willing to show me around. "I'm looking for Herman Melville's tomb," I said. "Herman Melville!"—he seemed genuinely taken aback—"Why, two people came earlier this morning looking for him—foreigners too! What's up with that fellow lately?" I told him about the bicentennial and the Melville conference, to which he responded with a look of disbelief. "You Italian, right? You came all the way from Italy to New York City only for Herman Melville?"

Of course he couldn't imagine the extent to which his inference was accurate. My acquaintance with the Melville Society started indeed in my hometown, Rome, Italy, back in 2011, when I helped Giorgio Mariani run the Eighth International Melville Conference as an MA student. Little could have I imagined at the time that those days of hard work and informal conviviality were the beginning of a fertile journey that would take me from Washington, DC, to Tokyo, London, and finally (for now!) New York City. I wanted to tell my incredulous concierge, Mani, that, like me, several others came all the way "from all the isles of the sea, all the ends of the earth" (from Germany to Japan, from France to New Zealand, from Spain to Uruguay, Argentina, Ecuador, and Nigeria): a veritable Anacharsis Clootz deputation assembled in the insular city of the Manhattoes, not to lay the world's grievances before any bar, but "only" to talk Melville.

Instead, I simply nodded in assent. He then looked at me—inspected me really: "Well, Melville . . . it's a walk," his finger indicating the exact point on a map he'd produced from his pocket, "around a mile." "That's fine," I said nonchalantly. But he frowned, evidently judging me too frail for the hike: "Just let me see what I can do." Next thing I knew I was in a car with Mani's colleague, Julian, who kindly agreed to give me a lift. Julian is of Colombian descent, he told me as soon as he learned that I'm actually from Spain, so we naturally switched to our common language as we walked together from the car to the grave, Julian making sure I didn't get lost.

Julian was as baffled as Mani at the idea of a Melville conference and he of course asked me a version of the question every Melvillean is used to hearing: "What do you guys talk about for four days?"—meaning (as we defensively imagine) something like: "Can there possibly be anything new to say about that old white man?" With a smug smile, I mentally scanned through the array of innovative angles from which my fellow presenters had looked at Melville texts during the previous week at New York University, and I reflected that this conference has proven, once again, how easy it would be to disabuse him, or any disbeliever, of any notion of exhaustion in Melville studies. I had attended a terrific panel on ecocriticism, heard Timothy Marr's passionate argument for Melville's "earthy," organic creativity, learned about the journalistic roots of his...