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Hawthorne and Melvilleby David B. Kesterson
If one didn't know better, it would appear that on the surface Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville had little in common. Hawthorne was born a New Englander, in Salem, Mass., in 1804. Melville, though his family hailed from Boston, was born in 1819 in New York City and spent his youth there until he went to sea at age 20. Thus Hawthorne was some fifteen years Melville's senior. Further, until 1850 Hawthorne was known as a writer of short stories and sketches (a fact that by mid century he was somewhat apologetic for), whereas by 1850 Melville had already written four novels, three of which were quite popular. A closer look, however, shows a remarkable kinship between the two men in many ways. Both writers lost their fathers at an early age: Hawthorne at four, Melville at thirteen. (Hawthorne's father, a sea captain, was lost at sea; Melville's died of a devastating illness). Thus each was denied a father for a goodly part of his youth. Fortunately for Hawthorne, he had his Uncles, Robert and Richard Manning, as father surrogates; but Melville really had none, a fact that figures strongly in his ubiquitous search in life and fiction for a father figure and answers part of the riddle of his attraction to the elder Hawthorne when they later met when Melville was thirty-one, Hawthorne forty-six. Both men had a love for the sea. Melville, of course, went to sea as a young man; Hawthorne lived near it as often as he could, even longed to go to sea as a youth, and enjoyed trips to Martha's Vineyard and other coastal areas. As a young writer Hawthorne even projected a collection of sea stories, which however didn't materialize, although the sketch "The Wives of the Dead" is surely a representative survival of that plan. For some fifteen months in the prime of their authorhood, the two men lived some six miles apart in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, Hawthorne at Lenox, Melville at Pittsfield, and often visited (more later on this). Both men worked in customs houses at different times in their lives: Hawthorne at the Boston Custom House, where he was Measurer of Salt and Coal, and later of course at the Salem Custom House, from 1846-49, where he served as Surveyor. Melville, after his white heat period of novel writing ended, became District Inspector of Customs in New York in 1863, a post he would hold for nineteen years! The major writings of Hawthorne and Melville cohere around the year 1850, with the five greatest books-The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby-Dick, The Blithedale Romance, and Pierre-being written in the same two-year period, from 1850-1852. In fact, The Blithedale Romance and Pierre were written at the same time, while the two acknowledged masterpieces, The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick were published only a year apart, in 1850 and 1851 respectively. Further, as we know, Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne. Thus indeed we have two writers who, despite widely varying backgrounds, had much in common in a number of ways. While it might seem improbable that the reserved, somewhat reclusive Hawthorne, and the much bolder, out-going Melville would end up being friends, even confidants for a period, that is exactly what happened in one of the most fascinating personal interludes in American literary history. Let's look first at the facts of their relationship: Biographical Mosses and Loomings The two authors met for the first time on August 5, 1850, in the Berkshires, where Hawthorne was living in the "Little Red Farmhouse" at Lenox and Melville was staying at his aunt's house in nearby Pittsfield. A few days earlier Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, who were coming to visit Melville, met Dudley Field on the train and the group planned a picnic for August 5. In the meantime on August 4, Hawthorne and wife Sophia dined at Pittsfield with James T. Fields and his wife and also visited Oliver Wendell Holmes. What resulted from these gatherings of notables was a group excursion picnic to Monument Mountain at Stockbridge, Mass., on the 5th, followed by a dinner at Dudley Field's home. The climb up Monument Mountain was, to say the least, a colorful progression, as described by Evert Duyckinck: As we scrambled over the rocks at the summit . . . a black thunder cloud from the south dragged its ragged skirts towards us . . . They talked of shelter and shelter there proved to be though it looked unpromising . . .Dr. Holmes cut three branches for an umbrella and uncorked the champagne which was drunk from a silver mug . . . we scattered over the cliffs, Herman Melville to seat himself, the boldest of all, astride a projecting bow sprit of rock while little Dr. Holmes peeped about the cliffs and protested it affected him like ipecac. Hawthorne looked mildly about for the great Carbuncle . . . ." [Evert Duyckinck to his wife, Aug 6-Leyda, Melville Log, 384] James T. Fields described Melville sitting on the projecting rock and pulling and hauling "imaginary ropes for our delectation." Hawthorne, Fields says, "was among the most enterprising of the merrymakers; @. he ventured to call out lustily and pretend that certain destruction was inevitable to all of us." [James T. Fields, Yesterdays With Authors, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1886, 53]. After descending the mountain, the group moved to the nearby Ice Glen in the afternoon where they skidded about like children. This excursion was to prompt a series of meetings between Hawthorne and Melville in the Berkshires. In fact, two days later Melville, along with Mathews and Duyckinck, called at the little red house and Hawthorne gave them two bottles of champagne and walked to the lake with them (H. Am. NB, 295). On the same day, Hawthorne wrote his friend Horatio Bridge, "I met Melville, the other day, and liked him so much that I have asked him to spend a few days with me before leaving these parts." (H Letters, Aug 7, 1850, XVI, 355). We know that this visit took place from September 3-7, 1850. However much Hawthorne seemed to be enjoying his newly made acquaintance, the response at the other end was nothing short of jubilant! Melville was ecstatic over his growing friendship with Hawthorne, and there is no doubt but that Hawthorne's being in Lenox was the reason that Melville orchestrated a move from New York to Pittsfield, settling in the farmhouse that he was to name Arrowhead (which he purchased on September 14, 1850). As Arlin Turner has pointed out, Melville realized that, given Hawthorne's reticence and sometime cloistered mode of living, he, Melville, "was the suitor, and that he was the one who needed the other more and had more to gain." (Turner, NH, 2l5). What appeared in print in August 1851 was not only a further cementing of the Hawthorne-Melville relationship, but was one of the hallmark occurrences in American literature. For in two installments on August 17 and 24 in Duyckinck's Literary World appeared an exuberant, praiseful review of Hawthorne's book of stories and sketches, Mosses from an Old Manse, entitled "Hawthorne and His Mosses, By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont." We know, of course, that the author of the review was neither Virginian nor spending July in Vermont. The Virginian in disguise was Herman Melville, and he was writing a review of Hawthorne's collection of 1846 that had been in circulation for four years, but that Melville had only recently partaken of fully and with a renewed enthusiasm. [However, actually it was not Melville's first reading of Hawthorne. As Edwin Haviland Miller points out, in White Jacket-written in late spring and early summer 1849 and published in spring of 1850-- Melville alludes to the sketch "A Rill from the Town Pump": "And would that my fine countryman, Hawthorne of Salem, had but served on board a man-of-war in his time, that he might give us the reading of a 'rill' from the Scuttle-butt" (Miller, M, 174)]. The Hawthornes found out the identity of the "Virginian" in early September during Melville's above-mentioned visit. For a good year after August 1850 there were periodic visits and letters between Hawthorne and Melville. While Melville was obviously the more ardent catalyst in the friendship, Hawthorne was not without his liking for and admiration of the younger Melville. For example in a passage in his American Notebooks for August 1, 1851, Hawthorne writes of returning home from the post office with son Julian, and while they sit in a field by the roadside reading their letters, Melville rides by and salutes them in Spanish. Hawthorne is glad to see Melville as we can tell from his language: "... it's Melville!" [note exclamation mark]. "Julian and I hastened to the road, where ensued a greeting, and we all went homeward together, talking as we went" (Am NB, 447). Back at the Hawthornes' little red farmhouse, after supper and with Julian put to bed, Hawthorne writes that "Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night. . . (Am NB, 447). Some of the letters between Hawthorne and Melville are on more pedestrian matters, but they exhibit a genuine friendship between the two men. On March 27, 1851, for example, Hawthorne writes Melville to ask if he will inquire at the railroad depot or express office about a box that Hawthorne is expecting from Boston that is supposedly delayed at Pittsfield. He also wishes that Melville would buy the Hawthornes a kitchen clock, especially a wooden one "of Connecticut manufacture, and excellent time-keepers, at $1.50." He closes by saying that he and daughter Una have "delightful reminiscences of our visit to Melville Castle" and they wish Mrs. Melville and Herman's sisters well (H. Letters, March 27, 1851, XVI, 412). I will mention other letters that discuss specific literary works or topics in the next part of this paper. Suffice it to say for now that the letter writing and friendship continued throughout the first year and into early fall of 1851, although the ardor on Hawthorne's part eventually began to cool. As early as the spring of 1851, some of Sophia Hawthorne's letters indicate that "Melville's demands might be greater than Hawthorne would have time or inclination to meet" (Arlin Turner, NH, 217). Indeed, Melville's last visit to the Hawthornes while in the Berkshires was on August 30, 1851, the first visit since March. The zenith of their relationship was reached, however, when Moby-Dick was published in middle November of 1851 and was dedicated to Hawthorne. Hawthorne's letter to Melville, like most of those to his friend, has not been preserved, but Melville's answer on November 17 shows "the reverence and the affection he had for his older friend in 1850 and 1851" (Turner, NH, 220). Melville speaks of the effect Hawthorne's letter had upon him, in terms characteristic of his impassioned utterances: I felt pantheist then-your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. . . . Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips-lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. . . . [T]he very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! It's a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content and can be happy. I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality. As Turner says in analyzing this letter, "[Melville] was aware, it can be assumed, of the inclusiveness and interwoven imagery of his letter, and no less aware of the meaning behind the imagery. The same awareness can be assumed on the part of Hawthorne" (NH, 221). Edwin Haviland Miller, who interprets Melville's affection for Hawthorne as in part sexual, says that in this passage, "the most ardent and doubtlessly one of the most painful he was ever to write, he candidly and boldly laid bare his love" (M, 221). Miller goes on to say that "when Hawthorne retreated from Lenox, he retreated from Melville. How Hawthorne felt his reticences keep us from knowing, but his friend wrestled with the problems and nature of the relationship almost until the end of his life" (221). Turner says only that "there is evidence through the remaining forty years of Melville's life that he thought he had been rebuffed by Hawthorne, and that he felt a genuine regret for his loss." (NH, 221). Interesting, too, as Turner notes, "the intimately personal element is absent from Melville's subsequent letters" (221). Strangely, after November of 1851, just after the publication of Moby-Dick, the two men would meet only twice: a year later when Hawthorne was living at the Wayside in Concord, and five years after that in Liverpool when Hawthorne was U. S. Consul there. In 1853, however, Hawthorne did try in earnest to secure a consular appointment for his friend, but was unsuccessful, a fact that caused Hawthorne to feel somewhat awkward when Melville called upon him at the Consulate in Liverpool in November of 1856. However, as Hawthorne writes in his English Notebooks, ". . . we soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence" (Eng NB, 162). Hawthorne mentions that Melville had not been well lately, and that he looks "a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder" (162). Melville stayed with the Hawthornes at Southport for a few days (Hawthorne remarking that for luggage Melville had only a little bundle containing a night-shirt and toothbrush), and during the visit the two men took a long walk, sat, and smoked cigars among the sand hills on the coast. Hawthorne describes the famous ensuing conversation, as follows-confirming Merton Sealts' observation that "there was no observer who penetrated more deeply than Hawthorne into Melville's state of mind in the mid-1850's" ("Historical Note" to The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, p. 515). Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists-and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before-in wandering to-and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us (Eng NB, Vol II, 163). After that day the two men traveled to Chester together and explored one of Hawthorne's favorite towns in England. They parted that evening, but Hawthorne saw Melville again on Monday and noted that Melville was feeling "much better than in America" (169). Melville sailed for the Holy Land on Tuesday, "taking only a carpet-bag to hold all his travelling gear" instead of the customary trunk, Hawthorne humorously notes (Eng NB, Vol II, 1760). Interestingly, when Melville came back by Liverpool on May 4, 1857, and visited Hawthorne, Hawthorne does not record the one-day visit in his journal. Melville left for home May 5, and so far as we know, the two friends never saw each other again. Literary Interaction and Influences Melville 's Reviews of Hawthorne's Works As I said earlier, in that same seminal August of 1850 when Hawthorne and Melville first met on the trek up Monument Mountain and a slide through the Ice Glen, Melville published his two-part review of Mosses from an Old Manse in Evert Duyckinck's Literary World, the piece appearing in the August 17 and 24 issues. True, the book had been published four years earlier and Melville had been given a gift copy of it by his Aunt Mary Ann Melville on July 18, 1850 (Parker, HM, 736); but it appeared not too late to Melville to write the review. What emerged in his review was a major analysis of Hawthorne, of the state of American writing to date (with a hearty dose of American literary nationalism tossed in for measure) and of the talents of Melville himself. But our emphasis here is on Hawthorne. What did Melville think of Hawthorne as revealed in Mosses? Melville says in the review that "for four years the Mosses on the Old Manse never refreshed me with their perennial green. It may be, however, that all this while the book, like wine, was only improving in flavor and body" (240). As the so-called Southerner sojourning in Vermont begins the book "stretched on that new mown clover, the hill-side breeze blowing over me through the wide barn-door, and soothed by the hum of the bees in the meadows around, how magically stole over me this Mossy Man!. . . The soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams" (241). He extols Hawthorne's nature and spirit evinced in the tales, which "argue such a depth of tenderness, such a boundless sympathy with all forms of being, such an omnipresent love, that we must needs say that this Hawthorne is here almost alone in his generation" (242-notice he says "almost alone," leaving room for Mellville's own eminence too!). He says that Hawthorne has "a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plummet" (242). Then Melville moves to the subject that "so fixes and fascinates" him-the blackness in Hawthorne (244). "For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul, the other side-like the dark half of the physical sphere-is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black" (243). Pondering the source of this blackness, Melville postulates that "this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance" (243). It is this very blackness that "furnishes the infinite obscure of his back-ground,--that back-ground, against which Shakspeare plays his grandest conceits, the things that have made for Shakspeare his loftiest but most circumscribed renown, as the profoundest of thinkers" (244). Melville goes on to compare to Hawthorne to Shakespeare, saying, "Shakespeare has been approached." "Now, I do not say that Nathaniel of Salem is a greater than William of Avon, or as great. But the difference between the two men is by no means immeasurable. Not a very great deal more, and Nathaniel were verily William" (245). Fictionally taking an overnight break before finishing his review, he returns to it the next morning "charged more and more with love and admiration of Hawthorne" (250). Then in the famous and suggestive panegyric, Melville writes that "already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further, shoots his strong New England roots in the hot soil of my Southern soul" (250). A year and a half after writing the review of Mosses, Melville mentions in a letter to Evert Duyckinck (12 February 1851) that he has recently read Twice-Told Tales, having read "but a few of them before." Melville believes they "exceed the 'Mosses'-they are, I fancy, an earlier vintage from his vine. Some of those sketches are wonderfully subtle. Their deeper meanings are worthy of a Brahmin" (M Corresp, 18l). However, for the first time Melville finds some failing in Hawthorne's writing: "Still there is something lacking-a good deal lacking-to the plump sphericity of the man. What is that?-He does'nt [sic] patronize the butcher-he needs roast-beef, done rare. - Nevertheless, for one, I regard Hawthorne (in his books) as evincing a quality of genius, immensely loftier, & more profound, too, than any other American has shown hitherto in the printed form. Irving is a grasshopper to him-putting the souls of the two men together, I mean" (181). If Melville was supposedly introduced to the works of Hawthorne via Mosses (though we know that not to be the case), he was equally impressed with both The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance, published in 1851 and 1852 respectively, after Melville and Hawthorne had become acquainted. Hawthorne presented Melville with a personal copy of Seven Gables when Melville called at the red house in Lenox on April 11, 1851, and five days later Melville wrote Hawthorne a letter in the form of a book review. Melville finds that this novel, "for pleasantness of running interest, surpasses the other works of the author. The curtains are more drawn; the sun comes in more; genialities peep out more" (M Corresp, 185). He recognizes the power in Hawthorne and, again, the depth and ambiguity, comparing the book to a "fine old chamber, with comfortable furnishings and good wine and food, with a "dark little black-letter volume in golden clasps" in one corner "entitled 'Hawthorne: A Problem'" (185). He concludes that "There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes" (M Corresp, 186). As Turner has observed, these words "were struck from the same mind that at the time was creating Captain Ahab of the Pequod" (Turner, NH, 217). We shall look further at Hawthorne's influence on Moby-Dick momentarily. Of The Blithedale Romance , Melville wrote Hawthorne on July 17, 1852, that the "name of 'Hawthorne' seems to be ubiquitous," what with the new book appearing everywhere and of its being much talked of. To him this is natural: "Well, the Hawthorne is a sweet flower; may it flourish in every hedge" (M Corresp, 230). While Melville has only begun to read Blithedale, he deems it sufficient to find that Hawthorne has "most admirably employed materials which are richer than I had fancied them." And then, with a comment on the times, he concludes, "Especially at this day, the volume is welcome, as an antidote to the mooniness of some dreamers-who are merely dreamers--------Yet, who the devel aint a dreamer?" (M Corresp, 231). (Obviously, Melville's sentiments towards the novel were not the same as those eventually held by its publishers. James T. Fields, disenchanted with its lack of popularity, wrote to a friend, "I hope Hawthorne will give us no more Blithedales" (BR, Centenary Ed., III, xxii). Hawthorne's Commentary on Melville's Works When it comes to Hawthorne's commentary of Melville's works, the record is much sparser. The older writer's natural reticence, of course, would have prevented the kind of effusive remarks characteristic of Melville's responses to Hawthorne's writings. Further, Hawthorne was more formal and succinct in his written opinions. Nevertheless, there are a number of instances where Hawthorne did comment on Melville as writer. The first was in a review of Typee, published anonymously in the Salem Advertiser for March 25, 1846. Duyckinck had sent it to Hawthorne for review somewhat apologetically, referring to the book as "a Frenchy coloured picture"(Parker, HM, 412). However, Hawthorne liked the book, observing that it "is lightly but vigorously written; and we are acquainted with no work that gives a freer and more effective picture of barbarian life, in that unadulterated state of which there are now so few specimens remaining" (CE, XXIII, 235). Of the sensual depiction of Polynesian girls, Hawthorne admits that they are "voluptuously colored, yet not more so than the exigencies of the subject appear to require." Moreover, he points out that Melville has "that freedom of view-it would be too harsh to call it laxity of principle-which renders him tolerant of codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own; a spirit proper enough to a young and adventurous sailor, and which makes the book the more wholesome to our staid landsmen" (235-36). Hawthorne concludes that "the narrative is skillfully managed, and in a literary point of view, the execution of the work is worthy of the novelty and interest of its subject" (236). Hawthorne's references to Typee's immediate successors appear four years later in a letter to Evert Duyckinck on August 29, 1850, the month when the two men first met on the Monument Mountain excursion. Hawthorne tells Duyckinck that he has "read Melville's works with a progressive appreciation of the author. No writer ever put the reality before his reader more unflinchingly than he does in 'Redburn,' and 'White Jacket.' 'Mardi' is a rich book, with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life. It is so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it, so as to make it a great deal better" (which is a kind way of stating the shortcomings of Mardi) (H Letters, 29 Aug 1850, XVI, 362). When it came to the big book, Moby-Dick, Hawthorne did not write a review, but again commented on it in his letters. To Duyckinck, on December 1, 1851, just one month after its American publication (It was first published in England in October under the title The Whale), Hawthorne writes, "What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones. It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points" (H Letters, 508). [Duyckinck had written the review in Literary World (IX Nov. 15, 22, 1851; 381-83, 403-4. Rpt. In Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, eds., Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts (1851-1870) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 33-36, 49-52). "Melville was so offended by Duyckinck's sanctimonious view of 'the intense Captain Ahab' and the 'bilious,' 'self-torturing' Ishmael that on February 14, 1852, he canceled his subscription . . . and satirized Duyckinck in Pierre, Book XVII, chapter iii (H Letters, 508-09)]. Jay Leyda speculates that Hawthorne wrote Melville about November 15, 1851, giving his favorable impression of the book and offering to write a review (Melville Log, p. 434). Melville wrote back a few days later in a letter partially quoted above (the "pantheistic," "flagon of life" letter), admonishing, "Don't write a word about the book, That would be robbing me of my miserly delight. I am heartily sorry I ever wrote anything about you-it was paltry. Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;--I have heard of Krakens" (M Corresp, [17?] November, 1851, 213). Melville refers to Hawthorne's letter in correspondence to Sophia Hawthorne of January 8, 1852, saying that it was Hawthorne's letter that "first revealed to" him "the speciality of many of the particular subordinate allegories," and "intimated the part-&- parcel allegoricalness of the whole" (M Corresp, 219). In the same letter, by the way, Melville comments on a letter Sophia had written him on December 29, 1851, [a letter now lost] expressing her excitement over the novel. Melville writes, "It is true that some men have said they were pleased with it, but you are the only woman-for as a general thing, women have small taste for the sea" (2l9). He claims that her allusion to the "Spirit Spout" chapter "first showed to me that there was a subtile significance in that thing-but I did not, in that case, mean it. I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were. . ." (219). The Influence of Hawthorne on Melville's Works Hawthorne's influence on Melville as individual as well as writer was significant, far more so than any influence that in return Melville might have had on his Berkshire neighbor. That influence is seen not only in such letters of Melville's that we have looked at above, but in a number of Melville's writings, especially Moby-Dick, Pierre, the long narrative poem Clarel, the story "The Bell-Tower," most likely the short poem "Monody," and Billy Budd, Sailor. But first of all, the leviathan, Moby-Dick. To begin with, of course, there is the dedication of the book to Hawthorne, which reads, "To Nathaniel Hawthorne: In token of my admiration for his genius." We must remember that the novel was being written at the time when Hawthorne and Melville were neighbors in the Berkshires and Hawthorne's influence was so stongly felt by Melville. The facts and suppositions of the matter of Hawthorne's influence on the book are fascinating. And they go something like this: [I am in debt to Arlin Turner, NH; Edwin Haviland Miller, M; and especially Howard P. Vincent's The Trying-Out of Moby Dick for details of the compositional details of Moby-Dick). By the middle of July, 1850, --in other words, one month before meeting Hawthorne for the first time-Melville's book, which seemingly was primarily a whaling voyage, was "in sight of port" (Vincent, 35). Then Melville read Mosses from an Old Manse, wrote his famous essay on Hawthorne's book for Literary World, met Hawthorne on the Monument Mountain excursion, and-with Hawthorne as his "magnet" (179), as Miller defines the beckoning, moved to the Berkshires in early fall. Reading and writing the review of Mosses, afterward reading Twice-Told Tales, and becoming acquainted with Hawthorne provided "reinforcement," as Arlin Turner phrases it, "for his own sense of the 'blackness' in human nature" (217). We don't know just when Melville decided he had to recast his "whaling voyage," but apparently he began his revision in November, 1850, after he had bought Arrowhead in September and spent a month settling in. By December 12 he was hard at work on the revision. During mid winter, yes some four months after the "'whaling voyage' was 'mostly done,' Melville was working on his manuscript from five to six hours a day" (Vincent 41). He described his routine thusly: Do you want to know how I pass my time?-I rise at eight-thereabouts--& go to my barn-say good-morning to the horse, & give him his breakfast. (It goes to my heart to give him a cold one, but it can't be helped) Then, pay a visit to my cow-cut up a pumpkin or two for her, & stand by to see her eat it-for it's a pleasant sight to see a cow move her jaws-she does it so mildly & with such sanctity.-My own breakfast over, I go to my work-room & light my fire-then spread my M.S.S. on the table-take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will. At 2 ｽ P.M. I hear a preconcerted knock at my door, which (by request) continues till I rise & go to the door, which serves to wean me effectively from my writing, however interested I may be (Vincent, 42). Since there is no Ur-Moby-Dick manuscript in existence, we can only guess what the original narrative was like. And here, again, it is Howard Vincent who hazards the most convincing guess. The plot was likely that of conflict between two men, an officer and a common sailor-probably manifest in the "Town-Ho's Story" chapter about the two crewman Steelkilt and Radney. Between August 1850 and August 1851 Melville would have added the major elements of the whale, Ahab, and Ishmael and turned the plot from an adventure story to "mythos" (Vincent 46-47). Probably the great whale entered the manuscript in March or April 1851 because in March Hawthorne gave Melville four volumes of The Mariner's Chronicle that contains stories of tragedy at sea, some involving whales. As Vincent says, "The gift suggests that Melville had discussed his plot problems with his friend and that Hawthorne had given his old volumes . . . in a helping spirit" (47). In reviewing the famous sea tragedies in these volumes, Melville read of the whaleship Essex disaster that involved the ramming and sinking of a whale ship by huge sperm whale in the Pacific Ocean. Melville pushed on with his writing all spring and summer-long during 1851 and at last had a manuscript ready by September, in time for the English edition of October 18 and the American edition of 14 November (Vincent 49). The major occurrence in Melville's life, then, during the writing of Moby-Dick was the growing friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, "the one writer in America who had expressed the tragic point of view, which was deeply felt, but not hitherto declared, by Melville himself. Hawthorne was the catalyst speeding Melville's accumulated reflections into expression" (Vincent 50-51. We are reminded that throughout the fall and winter of 1850, and summer of 1851, Hawthorne and Melville were visiting and writing to each other. We recall Melville's letter to Hawthorne of June 29, 1851, when Melville invites Hawthorne to "Come and spend a day here, if you can and want to . . . . When I am quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together" (M Corresp, 196). And indeed that visit of Melville to the little red farm house took place on August 1, 1851, Hawthorne encapsulating their conversation by writing in his journal: "Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night . . . (Am NB, 448). Thus it seems more than clear, especially considering the dedication of the book, that Hawthorne the older friend left an indelible imprint on its composition. The influence of Hawthorne on Melville's next major novel, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1853) may not be as evident at first thought, but, as Richard Brodhead has astutely pointed out, this novel "is saturated with evidence of Melville's close study of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables" (Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel, 175). Brodhead's first observation is that Melville's use of the mode of the sentimental romance in Pierre-in itself a vast departure from the pattern of any of his previous novels-is "strikingly similar to Hawthorne's use of gothic romance in his major novels. His machinery of light and dark ladies has the same status as Hawthorne's machinery of family curses or magical letters. Both authors employ fictional means that they know at one level are ridiculous and shopworn but that they see at another level as providing them access to the treatment of certain sorts of psychic experience" (175). According to Brodhead, "However much Moby-Dick may have in common with Hawthorne's work, it is in Pierre that Melville sets himself to the school of Hawthorne's craft" (175). This "school" includes, in Pierre, Melville's use of the symbolic furnishing details in a house the same way Hawthorne employs them in Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. His use of two portraits of Pierre's father "to suggest the antithetical relation between his socially presented self and his secret character," is reminiscent of Hawthorne's portraits of the Pyncheon family (175); and there are many other examples of such techniques. The most important influence, however, is Hawthorne's impact on Melville's way of presenting the "interior lives of his characters. He has mastered Hawthorne's art of psychic close-up" (176). Brodhead concludes that Melville's creative imitations of Hawthorne in Pierre illustrate a permanent feature of his genius, the remarkable responsiveness with which he goes out to another's art, intuitively comprehends its procedures, and makes them his own. But he has not just mastered a body of techniques; he has internalized the vision of experience and the definition of fiction's subject matter implicit in those techniques. . . . He takes as his scene what Hawthorne calls the interior of the heart. . . . Hawthorne's study of the mind has afforded Melville a new possibility for his fiction. (176-77) Other signs of a direct Hawthornian influence on Melville's fiction are visible in at least two of the shorter fictions, the story "The Bell-Tower" and his last novel, Billy Budd, Sailor (1891). Various interpreters of "The Bell-Tower," (1855) see direct influences of Hawthorne's works on this story of the intensively focused artist-builder Bannadonna and his design and construction of the "noblest Bell-Tower in Italy" (M Writings, 9, 174). Gerald M. Sweeney, in "Melville's Hawthornian Bell-Tower: A Fairy Tale Source" (1973) sees among other influences on the story Hawthorne's use of "Talus, the Man of Brass," an obstacle encountered by Theseus in "The Minotaur" episode in Tanglewood Tales. More significantly, John Vernon, in his article "Melville's 'The Bell-Tower'" (1970), draws specific connections between Melville's tale and four of Hawthorne's prominent stories, "The Artist of the Beautiful," "The Prophetic Pictures," "Ethan Brand," and "The Birthmark" -all of which portray individuals obsessively dedicated to their callings, as is Bannadonna in the Melville piece. Hawthornian influence on Billy Budd has not received major consideration by scholars, but Miller in his biography of Melville draws some direct parallels between this novel and Hawthorne's story "The Birthmark." This story is one of the tales in Mosses from an Old Manse that Melville not only read just before he and Hawthorne met in 1850, but in which he also underlined a telling passage. In this case, Miller interprets Hawthorne's handling of the beauty versus destruction motif of "The Birthmark" as being continued by Melville in the handsome sailor versus malevolent Claggart dichotomy in Billy Budd. Miller concludes that "Melville recognized Hawthorne's identification with both Georgiana and Aylmer [of "The Birthmark"]; similarly in his last tale he identified with both Billy and [Captain]Vere" ( M, 367), who must punish Billy for his deed of killing Claggart, despite Claggart's representation of evil. It is sometimes forgotten that after the late 1850's (his last major novel, The Confidence Man was published in 1857), Melville turned his creativity largely from fiction to poetry. And he continued to write poetry during the nineteen years (from 1866 to 1885) that he was a clerk in the New York Custom House. He may not have been especially adept at poetry (In fact, Elizabeth Hardwick says in her new biography of Melville that "Meter and rhyme betrayed Melville in his poems and crippled the thrilling agility of the leaping adjectives and verbs that dazzle the poetic prose of Moby-Dick-HM, 152), but in typical Melvillian fashion he turned it out in abundance. One of the poems that he wrote either in 1864 or shortly afterwards was "Monody," which is most certainly an elegy on the death of Hawthorne (although there is no absolute proof of its subject; however, Robert Penn Warren points out that the poem was inscribed in Melville's copy of Our Old Home, Hawthorne's last book-Selected Poems of Herman Melville, 438). [Melville may have written it in 1864 when he heard of, and was crushed by, the death of Hawthorne, (Melville's wife Elizabeth wrote that Melville was "much shocked at hearing of Mr. Hawthorne's death," (Miller, M, 307); or, as Miller points out, he may have waited a year to write the poem when he was rereading Mosses from an Old Manse.] Whenever the poem was written, it was not published until 1891 when it appeared in his collection of poems Timoleon, a name taken in part from Plutarch's Lives, about an older brother who is killed by a younger brother because of jealously over their mother's attention-a parallel to the Melville sibling situation in which the first born son Gansvoort was favored by mother Maria Gansvoort Melville over the second son Herman (Miller, M, 355). I'll leave the matter of interpretation to you. The brief poem reads, To have known him, to have loved him After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life, And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal- Ease me, a little ease, my song! By wintry hills his hermit-mound The sheeted snow-drifts drape, And houseless there the snow-bird flits Beneath the fir-trees' crape: Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine That hid the shyest grape Timoleon (New York: Caxton Press, 1891, 34) Whether Hawthorne is the subject of this short poem-and it seems safe to say that he is-he is almost certainly one of the characters in Melville's long, ambitious verse novel Clarel (1876). This narrative poem of four major parts and some l50 cantos depicts a young theology student wandering through the Holy Land, first in Jerusalem, then in the Wilderness, then Mar Saba, and finally Bethlehem. Yes, the journey is reminiscent of Melville's own wanderings in the Holy Land in the middle 1850's when he stopped by to see Hawthorne in Liverpool both before and after his Middle Eastern junket. Of primary importance to the Hawthorne-Melville connection, Clarel is described by Edwin H. Miller as "Melville's poetic restatement of the subject matter of his prose. . . .an unformed youth in search of security in a world which has no security to offer" (M, 326). The character Clarel is, as Miller points out, the "brother of Tommo, Taji, Redburn, White-Jacket, Ishmael, and Pierre." As Clarel wanders around Jerusalem and nears the "Sepulchre of Kings" in Canto 28, "Tomb and Fountain" of Part I, he encounters a quiet, middle-aged man whose presence fascinates and challenges Clarel, both because of his attractiveness and his extreme reticence (in fact canto 29, in which he names the stranger, is entitled "The Recluse"). The narrator queries, But who is he uncovered seen, Profound in shadow of the tomb Reclined, with meditative mien Intent upon the tracery? A low wind waves his Lydian hair: A funeral man, yet richly fair- Fair as the sabled violets be. The frieze and this secluded one, Retaining each a separate tone, Beauty yet harmonized in grace And contrast to the barren place. But noting that he was discerned, Salute the stranger made, then turned And shy passed forth in obvious state Of one who would keep separate. (I: lns 37-51). The narrator names the newcomer "Vine" (and yes, we remember that the ending of the poem cited above, "Monody" ends with the subject described as "the shyest grape"). Clarel and Vine do not speak. As Miller says, the silence "is a brilliant touch. For Clarel is seeing the physical incarnation of his fantasy, and Melville is once more hymning the magnetic attraction of 'the shyest grape,' Nathaniel Hawthorne" (M, 329). "Whether Vine is an accurate portrait of Hawthorne," Miller posits, "is essentially beside the point: it is an accurate portrait of Melville's Hawthorne" (M, 336). In the journey to the Holy Land, Melville "superimposed upon reality a fantasy of a tour in the company of Nathaniel Hawthorne," Miller believes. And "[b]ehind the fantasy in the Holy Land were the experiences which had taken place in the Berkshires in 1850 and 1851" (M, 334-35). The Influence of Melville on Hawthorne's Works As we have seen, there is an abundance of biographical and textual evidence of Nathaniel Hawthorne's influence on the life and works of Herman Melville. From their meeting in the Berkshires in 1850 to the time of Melville's last publication in 1891 the presence of Hawthorne was seemingly felt by Melville, often in tangible ways. The perspective from the other side of the relationship, however, is quite different. Indeed we find no record of a sustained Melvillian influence on Hawthorne's life, art, and consciousness that in any way corresponds with that of the Hawthornian mark left on Melville. The record on this score is sparse indeed, but there are a couple of very interesting possibilities-one that has been disproven as an influence on Hawthorne, and another that, left in seminar form, never materialized. Are you curious? The first is Hawthorne's short story, "Ethan Brand," which was subtitled "A Chapter From an Abortive Romance." The story appeared first under the title "The Unpardonable Sin" on January 5, 1850, in the Boston Weekly Museum (II, 234-35) and again in the Dollar Magazine in May, 1851, before its inclusion as "Ethan Brand" in Hawthorne's volume of stories and sketches, The Snow-Image in 1852. The story of Brand, we recall, is that of the quest of a monomaniacal seeker for the "unpardonable sin." He sacrifices everybody and everything that stands in his way to attain his goal, as he searches far and wide to find that sin. That sin, of course is "The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man, and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!" (SI, 90). The deleterious effect of Brand's search, of course, is that "he had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity" (SI, 99). For years there was supposition that Brand and his obsessive quest were patterned on the life and character of Herman Melville. Two noted early twentieth-century critic/biographers, in fact, formalized this pattern of thought. In his biography of Hawthorne (1929), Newton Arvin wrote that "We have reasons to believe that in the figure of Ethan Brand, Hawthorne made a kind of portrait of his new friend: certainly the tradition that he did so is by no means hard to accept" (Hawthorne, 169). Arvin sees as the immediate catalyst for such a portrait as stemming from the fact that as Melville labored over the writing of Moby-Dick at Pittsfield, "he created a symbol of the lonely intellect as monumental as any of Hawthorne's" (169). Lewis Mumford's similar view was expressed in his biography of Melville written in the same year (1929). But he carries the subject further than Arvin, actually seeing the story "Ethan Brand" as playing a strategic role in the Hawthorne-Melville relationship. Mumford's thesis is that as Melville read this story, which Mumford thought was written during the "prime year" of Hawthorne and Melville's relation ship, 1850, he "discovered what in his heart of hearts Hawthorne felt about Melville's lofty pride and his extreme spiritual quests" (Mumford, HM, 145). Mumford even reads Brand's language as a parody of Ahab's in Moby-Dick and infers that what Hawthorne says about Brand "he meant to apply . . . possibly by way of warning, to Melville himself" (145). Mumford sums up by saying that for Melville discovering what Hawthorne really thought of him was "one of the tragedies of his life; and it was more than a minor one" (145) and also that in picturing his friend so, Hawthorne committed the "unpardonable sin of friendship; he had failed to understand Melville's development, or to touch by sympathy and faith that part of Melville that was beyond his external reach" (146). And so it goes. The problem is, this assumed influence of Melville on Hawthorne's short story is bogus because we have come to know since 1929 that Hawthorne's story was written before his meeting with Melville occurred. Randall Stewart, E. K. Brown, and Lea Newman all have proven almost beyond doubt that the story was written as early as December 1848 and that Hawthorne had had it in mind for many years (witness notebook entries containing the theme of the story as early as 1835 and 1836). [E. K. Brown's "Hawthorne, Melville, and 'Ethan Brand'," published in American Literature in 1931 is especially telling in unraveling this mistaken influence.] It is another interesting bit of counter evidence that Melville wrote Hawthorne on June 1, 1951 after reading "The Unpardonable Sin" in the Dollar Magazine: "He was a sad fellow, that Ethan Brand. . . . It is a frightful poetical creed that the cultivation of the brain eats out the heart. But it's my prose opinion that in most cases, in those men who have fine brains and work them well, the heart extends down to hams. . . . I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head!" (M Corresp, 192). The other literary event that came closest to being a Melvillian influence on Hawthorne is found in the "Agatha" story that Melville discovered and sent to Hawthorne in a letter of 13 August 1852 with encouragement to work it up, telling Hawthorne that "it has occurred to me that this thing lies very much in a vein, with which you are peculiarly familiar. To be plump, I think that in this matter you would make a better hand at it than I would.-Besides, the thing seems naturally to gravitate towards you. . . ." (M Corresp, 234). Perhaps, as Miller has pointed out, Melville felt it close in theme to Hawthorne's sketch "Wakefield," which appeared in Twice-Told Tales, and deals with a man who leaves his family for some twenty years (M, 254-55). The Agatha letter relays a recent experience that Melville had on Nantucket in which a lawyer acquaintance from New Bedford and he spent an evening discussing "the great patience, & endurance, & resignedness of the women of the island in submitting so uncomplainingly to the long, long abscences [sic] of their sailor husbands" (M Corresp, 232). The lawyer gave Melville part of a brief from a recent "professional experience" and followed up a few days later with a document about the life of one Agatha Hatch Robertson, a young woman who married and gave birth to a child, but then experienced the sudden and unexplained disappearance of her husband. The husband was gone for seventeen years, then suddenly reappeared without explanation, stayed briefly, left again, and finally invited the family to join him in moving to Missouri, which they declined (understandably!). In the letter to Hawthorne of August 13, 1852, along with enclosing the outline of the story, Melville adds, " . . . it seems to me that with your great power in these things, you can construct a story of remarkable interest out of this material. . . .(M Corresp, 237). From September 3 to 16, 1852, Hawthorne vacationed on the Isles of Shoals, southeast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; there he kept a journal and possibly had the Agatha story in mind while there. A little over a month later, on October 25, Melville wrote again to Hawthorne with some suggestions about how the Agatha story line might be developed. However, when Hawthorne and Melville next visited in Concord, Hawthorne seemed disinterested in developing the story and urged Melville to try it on his own. This turn of events prompted to Melville to write Hawthorne back in early December 1952, resignedly stating, that he has "decided to do so, and shall begin it immediately upon reaching home. . . . Will you therefore enclose the whole affair to me; and if anything of your own has occurred to you in your random thinking, won't you note it down for me on the same page with my memorandum?" (M Corresp, 242). However, if Melville wrote the account of Agatha, he never published it, and there is no known manuscript of the story. The significance of all this is, of course, that had the Agatha story been written by Hawthorne, especially since Melville sent him ideas for development, it could have come the closest to showing a specific Melvillian influence on a work by Hawthorne. But such was not to be the case. Conclusion Although it is impossible to tell, of course, what subtle and unknown influence Melville might have had on the life and artistry of Nathaniel Hawthorne, there simply appears to be no traceable direct influence of any significance. For a brief period while in the Berkshires, they were kindred souls, and for awhile Hawthorne was excited about his new friendship with Melville, though the ardor apparently wore thin rather quickly. While there were some similarities between their works, in the use of symbolism and allegory and their mutual acknowledgement of the "power of blackness," for example, there were some major differences ultimately between their philosophies and outlooks. As Arlin Turner has pointed out, Hawthorne saw the darker aspects of the human experience but still maintained "an optimistic, though sober, outlook." He took a more "pragmatic view" of life. Melville, however, came close in some of his works "to a self-annihilating war with the universe and its creator" (NH, 227-28). Both see man as imperfect, "with propensities for evil, and the victim of forces beyond; both see human beings as aspiring toward perfection and capable of nobility and heroism" (307-08). The two writers differed in their views of human kind's position in the universe, however: Hawthorne accepted that position; Melville does not, but instead questions that relationship and continually sought "answers that eluded him" (Turner 308). Further, as Hawthorne himself observed and wrote in his notebooks, Melville's later writings "indicated a morbid state of mind" (306). Thus, when we sum up the
Hawthorne-Melville relationship and attempt to assess influence of
one on the other, it is overwhelmingly clear that the major personal
and literary influence was that of Hawthorne on the younger man,
Melville. And I think that more than anything else, Hawthorne had a
sense of self-containment and artistic direction that transcended the
need for guidance, or specific influence by friends. As Turner
concludes, "Amply supplied through reading and observation with
ideas and materials for embodying them, he had required simply time
for musing, dreaming, and thinking" (215). If Hawthorne could
say "No, in thunder," as Melville observed admirably, it
was totally from inner resolve. Melville, "mariner and mystic,"
as he has been called [by Raymond Weaver in his critical study of
Melville by that title] was the more eclectic, reaching out for
guidance and companionship from his elusive friend.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Selected Sources on
Hawthorne and Melville Compiled by David B. Kesterson University of North Texas
Arvin, Newton. Hawthorne. New York: Russell & Russell, 1929, 1956. _____. Herman Melville. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950. Brodhead, Richard. Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1976. Brown, E. K. "Hawthorne, Melville, and 'Ethan Brand'." Notes and Queries 33 (1931): 72-75. Hardwick, Elizabeth. Herman Melville. New York: Viking (Penguin Putnam), 2000. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The American Notebooks. Ed. Claude M. Simpson. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat, et. al. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1972, vol. 8. _____. The English Notebooks. Eds. Thomas Woodson and Bill Ellis. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat, et. al. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1997, vols. 21,22. _____. The Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1843-1853. Eds. Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed., William Charvat, et. al. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1985, vol. 16. _____. Miscellaneous Prose and Verse. Eds. Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat, et. al. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1994, vol. 23. _____. The Snow-Image And Uncollected Tales. Eds. Fredson Bowers, L. Neal Smith, John Manning, and J. Donald Crowley. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat, et. al. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1974, vol. 11. Howard, Leon.
Herman Melville: A Biography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U
California P, 1967. Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951. 2 vols. Mansfield, Luther Stearns. "Melville and Hawthorne in the Berkshires." Melville & Hawthorne in the Berkshires: A Symposium. Ed. Howard P. Vincent. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP 1968, 4-21. Mellow, James R. Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Melville, Herman. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. The Writings of Herman Melville: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, ed. Harrison Hayford, et al. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP and the Newberry Library, 1991, vol. 12. _____. Correspondence. Ed. Lynn Horth. The Writings of Herman Melville: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, ed. Harrison Hayford, et. al. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP and the Newberry Library, 1993, vol.14. _____. Journals. Eds. Howard C. Horsford and Lynn Horth. The Writings of Herman Melville: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, ed. Harrison Hayford, et. al. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP and the Newberry Library, 1989, vol. 15. _____. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860. Eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle. The Writings of Herman Melville: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, ed. Harrison Hayford, et. al. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP and the Newberry Library, 1987, vol 9. _____. Timoleon. Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Literature House/Gregg P, 1970. Miller, Edwin Haviland. Melville. New York: George Braziller, 1975. _____. Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Iowa City: U Iowa P, 1991. Morseberger, Robert E. "Melville's 'The Bell-Tower' and Benvenuto Cellini." American Literature 44 (Nov. 1962): 459-62. Mumford, Lewis M. Herman Melville. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. Newman, Lea B. V. A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996, vol.1. Parkes, Henry Bamford. "Poe, Hawthorne, Melville: An Essay in Sociological Criticism." Partisan Review, 16 (Feb. 1949): 157-65. Sealts, Merton M., Jr. Pursuing Melville 1940-1980. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982. Stewart, Randall. "Melville and Hawthorne." South Atlantic Quarterly, 41 (July 1952): 436-46. _____. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New Haven: Yale UP: 1948. Sweeney, Gerard M. "Melville's Hawthornian Bell-Tower: A Fairy-Tale Source." American Literature, 45 (May 1973): 279-85. Turner, Arlin. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. Vernon, John. "Melville's Bell-Tower." Studies in Short Fiction, 7 (Spring 1970): 264-276. Vincent, Howard P. The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Warren, Robert Penn. Ed. Selected Poems of Herman Melville. New York: Random House, 1970. Watson, Charles N. Jr. "The Estrangement of Hawthorne and Melville." New England Quarterly, 46 (Sept. 1973): 380-402.
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