Gansevoort Melville

 

Gansevoort Melville From @nypl digital collections. https://t.co/j335m89l14

— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) April 23, 2024

The Cuban Pirate

Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

From the manuscript collection "Weeds and Wildings," posthumously published in The Works of Herman Melville Volume 16 (Constable and Company, 1924) on page 320. Melville's poem "The Cuban Pirate" is also available in the 2017 Northwestern-Newberry Edition Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings, edited by G. Thomas Tanselle, Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, Robert Sandberg and Alma MacDougall Reising at page 101; and Herman Melville: Complete Poems (Library of America, 2019) edited by Hershel Parker at page 758.

THE CUBAN PIRATE

(Some of the more scintillant West Indian humming-birds are in frame hardly bigger than a beetle or bee.)

BUCCANEER in gemmed attire —
Ruby, amber, emerald, jet —
Darkling, sparkling dot of fire,
Still on plunder are you set? 

Summer is your sea, and there
The flowers afloat you board and ravage,
Yourself a thing more dazzling fair —
Tiny, plummed, bejewelled Savage! 

Midget! yet in passion fell
Furioso, Creoles tell.
Wing'd are you Cupid in disguise
Now flying spark of Paradise?

Northwestern-Newberry and LOA editions have "plumed" instead of "plummed" and both supply the comma after "Wing'd" in the penultimate line. Both these editions give "You" for "Now" in the last, making it "You flying spark of Paradise?" Regarding Now vs. You, you might like to examine the manuscript version of "The Cuban Pirate" at Houghton Library, Harvard University and decide for yourself. On the Harvard Mirador Viewer it looks to me like it could be You. Or Thou. Or how about "Mon," as in Mon petit chou-chou. 

Citation

• Persistent Link https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:fhcl.hough:16083258?n=291
• Description Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. Unpublished poems : autograph manuscript, undated. Herman Melville papers, 1761-1964. MS Am 188 (369.1). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.Folder 5. Weeds & wildings with a rose or two.
• Page sheet 67 (seq. 291)
• Repository Houghton Library
• Institution Harvard University
• Accessed 23 April 2024

Odile Gannier on Melville’s MARDI as Astronomical Metaphor in MIRANDA

 

Fine article by Odile Gannier in Miranda, 2022 issue on "Melville's Measures." Full text via Open Edition! https://t.co/pu20KvRy7Q via @OpenEditionActu

— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) April 21, 2024

MESSIN' WITH THE KID - Junior Wells

Doolittle "the Lenox expressman" in Leyda's postscript to THE MELVILLE LOG

In 1850 George Doolittle (1808-1894) operated Doolittle's Express with service from Lee to Pittsfield, MA via Lenox. This Doolittle I take it was the "Mr. Doolittle" named by Herman Melville in connection with a near collision between Doolittle's sleigh and an oncoming train that… pic.twitter.com/fHQRDc3ppn

— Scott Norsworthy 🇺🇸 (@Melvilliana) April 6, 2024

Portrait of the late private Malcolm Melville, given to Company B by his father on February 11, 1868

We knew that Herman Melville gave a framed picture of Malcolm (called "Macky" or "Mackie" by family members) to the New York State Militia unit his deceased son had proudly served in. And we knew all about the mission to get it back a few years later, which Herman eventually accomplished in the summer of 1872 under the direction of his wife Elizabeth aka "Lizzie." Both events, the donation and complicated retrieval, are documented by Jay Leyda in The Melville Log volume 2 (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951; Gordian Press, 1969) at pages 691 and 726; and judiciously narrated by Hershel Parker in Herman Melville: A Biography volume 2, 1851-1891 at pages 646-7, 742-3 and 746.

Something we did not know is revealed herein, the exact date of the original gift. Parker timed it shortly after the tragedy of Malcolm's death on September 11, 1867, figuring the image of their son might have been too painful for the distraught parents to bear in their bereavement, and therefore was

"too hastily given away during their first grief."

However, as recorded in the New York Dispatch on February 16, 1868 the "beautiful portrait of the late private Melville" in uniform was not presented to Malcolm's comrades-in-arms until five months after his death, in February of the following year. According to this previously unknown announcement, transcribed below, the portrait of Malcolm Melville was bestowed on Tuesday, February 11, 1868 "at the regimental armory" by "a well-known author," namely his father Herman. Misspelled "Hermann" with two "n's" in the published newspaper account. As indicated elsewhere (New York Dispatch, April 26, 1868, for example) the regimental armory was then located on the corner of Hall Place and Seventh street. Activities of the "SECOND REGIMENT" are detailed under the broad heading, "The National Guard / The Coming Anniversary of Washington's Birthday."

New York Dispatch - Sunday, February 16, 1868
via genealogybank.com

SECOND REGIMENT.

On Wednesday evening last, Company C, of the Second Regiment, gave their second annual ball at the regimental armory, in Seventh street, corner of Hall place. The large drill-room was elegantly decorated with flags and bunting, while above and in front of the orchestra on the north side of the room was a large gas jet in the form of an eagle, and the inscription "Company C." A large company was assembled, prominent among whom were many of the officers and members of the First, Second, Third, Eighth, Twelfth, and other regiments. Capt. Irving, who officiated as Floor Manager, Sergeants Duffy, Parker, Wall work, Judson, and others of the committees were assiduous in their attentions to the guests. The ball was one of the best ever given in the armory. Company B, of the Second, on Tuesday evening last held an election at the regimental armory. Lieut. Col. De Courcy presided. The following was the result of the election: Second Lieutenant, George O. Starr was elected Captain; First-Lieut. John Hennessey having declined the position. Sergeant Joseph H. Carter was elected Second Lieutenant vice Starr promoted. Private Samuel P. Weir was elected a Sergeant. Lieut. Carter served as a Lieutenant in a volunteer regiment during the late war, and was several times severely wounded. On the same evening a beautiful portrait of the late private Melville, recently deceased, was presented to the Company by Mr. Hermann Melville, father of the deceased, and a well-known author."

Here deemed "a beautiful portrait," the picture of Malcolm is variously referenced in extant family correspondence as a tintype or enlargement thereof, "a colored photograph of the full length figure" (his mother's words in a letter to Catherine "Kate" Gansevoort) and (again in the words of his mother) "the much wished for picture of our dear boy." In Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Harvard University Press, 1953) page 222, Eleanor Melville Metcalf described the item as 

"a hand-colored photograph of him [Malcolm] in uniform, which Herman had presented to his National Guard company."

Presumably the picture of Malcolm Melville (1849-1867) that Company B received from Herman Melville at the regimental armory on Tuesday, February 11, 1868 was or looked very like the watercolor portrait reproduced by Hennig Cohen and Donald Yanella as the frontispiece in Herman Melville's Malcolm Letter (Fordham University Press and The New York Public Library, 1992). Then (as now?) at the Berkshire Athenaeum, the portrait in Herman Melville's Malcolm Letter shows Malcolm Melville wearing his regimental uniform. As explained in the caption,

"The date and artist are unknown, but the watercolor may be posthumous, after a tintype of Malcolm in uniform." 

Malcolm, first child of Elizabeth and Herman Melville, died at the age of 18 on September 11, 1867 when he shot himself in bed with a revolving pistol that he kept under his pillow. Newspapers called it suicide, following the coroner's determination after a formal inquest. People closest to the deceased objected to the charge of "insanity," however "temporary," in the earliest pronouncements. Certain that Malcolm's death must have been accidental, grieving family members and influential advocates rebutted the imputation of any serious emotional or mental disturbance. In the 20th century, influential commentators revived the suicide theory, sometimes mixing dubious or inappropriately applied methods of psychoanalysis with large doses of mind-reading and projection. 

26 Sep 1867, Thu The Pittsfield Sun (Pittsfield, Massachusetts) Newspapers.com

Heading the list of jurors for the coroner's inquest was a neighbor and highly regarded dentist named Alfred Starr, the father of Malcolm's friend and fellow soldier in the National Guard, George Starr. In NYC both sons of Elizabeth and Herman Melville became friends with sons of their neighbor Alfred Starr. Born in 1849, George Starr was exactly Malcolm Melville's age and a leader in their volunteer infantry unit, Company B of the Second Regiment, National Guard of the State of New York. Frederick James Starr (1853-1902) was almost two years younger than Stanwix Melville (1851-1886). When Fred Starr took over his father's business he offered to re-hire Stanwix (aka "Stanny" or "Stannie") who had previously worked for Alfred. As things turned out Stanwix very briefly apprenticed with another dentist, Dr. Read, before heading west to Kansas and beyond. 

Malcolm's friend and then Second Lieutenant George Oscar Starr (1849-1915) got elected to Captain (replacing William D. Marsh) on the same evening that Company B received the "beautiful portrait of the late private Melville" presented by Herman Melville. George reportedly had warned Malcolm not to be so careless with guns before Malcolm shot himself. 

One fact not down in Jay Leyda's Melville Log or any Melville biography, yet nonetheless true: Malcolm's good friend George O. Starr would later become world-famous as the managing director of Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth.

New York Evening Post - September 10, 1915

Footnote on pelican-beach

'Tis barren as a pelican-beach.* 

* barren as a pelican-beach. The simile in the third line of In the Prison Pen compares the locale of a Southern prison to a remote hellscape or wasteland, figuring its forlorn captives as a penal colony of sorrowful-looking and probably starving pelicans. Evoking the biblical "pelican in the wilderness," as the afflicted, physically emaciated supplicant calls himself in Psalm 102.6, the imagery here draws also from a cluster of pelican associations in other writings by Melville, especially Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852) and "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" (1854). Typically Melville regards the appearance of pelicans as lugubrious = mournfully sad. To his eye their angular forms and frequently empty pouches make them look eternally lean and hungry. In Pierre Melville's narrator likens poor, miserably undernourished philosophers and social reformers (lined up on the curb outside a diner) to "lean rows of broken-hearted pelicans on a beach; their pockets loose, hanging down and flabby, like the pelican’s pouches when fish are hard to be caught." Pelicans in "The Encantadas" are depicted as sad, "penitential," oddly immobile and ghostly endurers of Job-like suffering in the Galápagos Islands:

But look, what are yon wobegone regiments drawn up on the next shelf above? what rank and file of large strange fowl? what sea Friars of Orders Gray? Pelicans. Their elongated bills, and heavy leathern pouches suspended thereto, give them the most lugubrious expression. A pensive race, they stand for hours together without motion. Their dull, ashy plumage imparts an aspect as if they had been powdered over with cinders. A penitential bird indeed, fitly haunting the shores of the clinkered Encantadas, whereon tormented Job himself might have well sat down and scraped himself with potsherds. -- The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles - Sketch Third, Rock Rodondo in Putnam's Monthly for March 1854; reprinted in The Piazza Tales (1856) at page 309.

Thus represented in military and monastic metaphors as "wobegone regiments" of pitifully sad and abandoned creatures arranged in "rank and file," Melville's battle-worn and scourged penitents of pelicans seem the very emblem of suffering in captivity. Suggestive analogues can be found in published works by other writers, notably The Pelican Island (1827) by James Montgomery and Thomas Beale's The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839), both quoted (for different reasons, not directly connected with pelicans) in the Extracts section of Moby-Dick. 

Closer to home, geographically, lurks a possible local allusion. The depiction of Virginia's Belle Isle Prison in the James river across from Richmond as "a low, sandy, barren waste, exposed in summer to a burning sun, without the shadow of a single tree" in the 1864 report by the U. S. Sanitary Commission, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers while Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Rebel Authorities, may have reminded Melville of "Barren Island," mostly "a sand-bank known as Pelican beach." So described in multiple editions of Appleton's Dictionary of New York and Its Vicinity. 

Whatever else it may suggest, Melville's pelican imagery as adapted to "In the Prison Pen (1864)" figuratively represents the maltreated prisoner in his place of confinement. Through allusion to the "pelican of the wilderness" in Psalm 102, Melville's pelican-beach simile links the emaciated body of the psalmist to the emaciated bodies of Union soldiers released from Belle Isle and other Southern prisons, pictured in words and engraved images as "living skeletons" in the 1864 Narrative of Privations and Sufferings.

For Carol Rumens.

Related post:

• Meagerness on a pelican-beach
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/03/meagerness-on-pelican-beach.html