Jean Giono: Pour saluer Melville (1941)

Jean Giono published Pour saluer Melville at the same time as he published his (and Lucien Jacques's, with the assistance of Joan Smith) translation of Melville's Moby-Dick. It's a kind of introduction, a kind of biography, although fictionalised because Giono has access to Melville's thoughts.

The book begins in the right place, relating Melville's childhood, his decision to go to sea in a whaler, some of his travels, and his change of occupation by becoming a writer. But a little over halfway through things start to go weird. Certainly Melville visited a publisher during a stay in London in 1849, although what happened there according to Giono is pure fantasy.

Melville decides that while waiting for the next ship back home he has time to visit some of England, and so heads for the south-west in a horse-drawn coach. Initially his only travelling companion is a mysterious Adelina White, with whom Melville becomes obsessed and who in turn comes to love Melville platonically. She reveals that she is smuggling corn to the Irish during the famine, and they exchange addresses as they part.

What is evidently missing here is the fact – which the name 'White' gives away – that Adelina is a representation of Giono's lover Blanche Meyer. In the thirty-page chapter 'The creation of the Muse: Blanche, Adelina White and Pour saluer Melville' of her thesis 'Space of Passion: The Love Letters of Jean Giono to Blanche Meyer (2004), which is freely available online, Patricia A. Le Page analyses how Meyer deeply influenced Giono's writing. A fascinating little book.

My Jean Giono posts:
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Sylvie Giono: Jean Giono à Manosque
Jean Giono: L' Homme qui plantait des arbres
Jean Giono: Le Hussard sur le toit
Jean Giono: Colline | Hill of Destiny
Jean Giono: Un de Baumugnes | Lovers Are Never Losers
Jean Giono in Manosque
Jean Giono: Notes sur l'affaire Dominici
Jean Giono's grave, Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence
Pierre Citron: Jean Giono 1895–1970
Jean Giono: Regain | Second Harvest
Jean Giono: Que ma joie demeure
Jean Giono: Pour saluer Melville
Jean Giono et al, Le Contadour

NYC #21: Herman Melville, Woodlawn Cemetery (5), Bronx

'HERMAN MELVILLE

Born August 1, 1819.

Died September 28, 1891.'

 

This is certainly one of the most visited graves in Woodlawn Cemetery, perhaps especially in recent years during which Melville's importance as a writer  – and a remarkably modern one at that – is being increasingly recognised. It's not exactly easy to locate though.

 

(And I have to add that we didn't manage to find Countee Cullen's grave, in spite of the location being indicated on the cemetery map: a pity, as that would have tied in with my Zora Neale Hurston excursion in Florida. James Weldon Johnson's grave (in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn) is to come shortly though!)

NYC #8: Herman Melville, Lower Manhattan

'On this site, number 6 Pearl Street,

HERMAN MELVILLE

was born

August 1, 1819

 

Author of

Moby-Dick

'Bartleby the Scrivener'

Pierre

Billy Budd

and many other American classics'

 

Unfortunately the bust of Melville on the right-hand side was too misted up with condensation.

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in Pittsfield, MA

Herman Melville is big in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he lived with his family in their home Arrowhead a few miles south of Pittsfield itself. This is now an author's home museum dedicated to Melville, who was here from 1850 to 1863 and wrote many of his famous works, including Moby-Dick. But no photography is allowed inside, which can put many people off.

In downtown Pittsfield there are two public sculptures dedicated to the creature.

Donna Dodson's is outside the Berkshire Athenaeum, and titled Moby Dick.

And this non-abstract sculpture is on the lower corner of Maplewood Avenue and North Street.

By C. R. Grey, this work is called The Great White Whale.

Herman Melville in Pittsfield, Massachusetts: New England Tour #19

Herman Melville (1819—91) married Elizabeth Shaw in 1847, and in 1950 moved with his family to a farm in Pittsfield in the Berkshires, west Massachusetts, a town he was familar with through his uncle Thomas Melvill. He called it Arrowhead. He had had success with his novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which was very much inspired by his three-month stay on the Marquesas Islands after deserting the whaler Acushnet, on which he'd spent eighteen months in the early 1840s.

Melville began a brief friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he'd met on Monument Mountain* and who lived a few miles away in Lenox. Melville spent his most productive writing years at Arrowhead. Here he wrote Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), 'Bartleby the Scrivener' (1853), 'Benito Cereno' (1855), and The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). And of course Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), which he dedicated to Hawthorne. He told his friend Evert A. Duyckinck in December 1850 that life in the country was like being at sea, and that he felt his writing room was a ship's cabin. Arriving very shortly after the season, I was unable to see and photograph his desk.
 

Unfortunately, Melville's work at Pittsfield was unsuccessful and The Confidence-Man was his last novel. The family returned to New York in 1863. Throughout his life his writings only brought him $10,000. Now, of course, he is recognized as a great writer, and Moby-Dick is generally thought of as one of the greatest American novels.

*William Cullen Bryant wrote the poem 'Monument Mountain' about the legend of the name, concerning the love of an Indian maid for her cousin, which disgusted her elders because they considered it incestuous. She retreated into herself, shunned company and threw herself to her death from the rocks. They buried her on the southern slope and left a simple monument: a cairn to which anyone passing would silently add.

Famously, on 5 August 1850 a group of literary people went for a picnic on Monument Mountain, among them Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James T. Fields, Annie Fields, and Evert A. Duyckinck. After climbing to the top, there was a reading of Bryant's poem, they had lunch in the rocks, and they drank a great deal. The event is commemorated every year by a climb up the mountain.

Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street' (1853)

To me the central figure in Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street' represents the spirit of non-conformity in a conformist environment. I far prefer this interpretation to any other, but the story is of course open to other takes.

In Elizabeth Hardwick's Bartleby in Manhattan: And Other Essays (1983), the short essay on 'Bartleby' begins by mentioning some of those other interpretations: it has been seen as a story of schizophrenic deterioration; of Melville's expression of his rejection by the reading public; and of Wall Street '"walling in" the creative American spirit'.* Hardwick adopts a very different approach as she is more interested in analyzing the short sentences spoken by Bartleby himself, and finds that out of 16,000 words in total, the story contains just 37 short lines by Bartleby, one third of which are solely taken up by the famous 'I'd prefer not to' repetition. Interestingly, she sees him as a 'master of language, of perfect expressiveness. He is style.'

I'm grateful to a New York writer for informing me when the essay 'Bartleby in Manhattan' was first published, and for also providing me with a link to a review of the book itself from 1983 in The New York Times.

*First published in The New York Review of Books in 1981.