Magic Hours (3 page)

Melville's critical standing was not helped by the publication of
Pierre
the following year. The reviews it received were so damning Melville gave into a depression from which he never fully recovered. When he died of heartbreak in 1891, the ever-obliging
New York Times
got his name wrong in its obituary, though Melville's death did stir a brief flurry of reappraisals that kept
Moby-Dick
barely afloat in the American literary underground.

As with Whitman, Melville was more prized as an artist in England, thanks largely to the efforts of Henry S. Salt, virtually the only person to write critically about Melville between 1890 and World War I. Salt was a member of a luminous British literary circle that included George Bernard Shaw and J. M. Barrie, and apparently his passion for Melville infected them. Shaw's letters from the period mention
Moby-Dick
in furtive tones normally reserved for samizdat, and Barrie modeled
Peter Pan
's Captain Hook on Melville's Ahab. In 1907, Oxford University Press issued an edition of
Moby-Dick
in its “World Classics” line. The press's editors had invited Joseph Conrad to write an introduction, but he was not convinced of the book's (then) status as a minor classic. “A rather strained rhapsody with whaling for a subject,” Conrad said, “and not a single sincere line in the 3 volumes of it.” The edition did not sell well, and soon went out of print.

It is commonly thought that the centenary of Melville's birth in 1919 laid the red carpet for
Moby-Dick
's new American appreciation. While this is partly true, that rug would have remained obdurately furled without one breathtakingly random incident. The influential critic Carl Van Doren happened upon an ancient copy of
Moby-Dick
in a used bookstore sometime in 1916. He subsequently wrote an essay on
Moby-Dick
that deemed it “one of the greatest sea romances in the whole literature of the world.” The essay caught the eye of D. H. Lawrence, then in the midst of writing
Studies in Classic American Literature
, his still-seminal attempt to rip away American literature from the smothering Velcro of European critical prejudice. He too included an essay on Melville's masterpiece in his overview, and it remains one of the most entertaining pieces of criticism ever produced: “Nobody can be more clownish, clumsy and senticiously in bad taste than Herman Melville, even in a great book like
Moby-Dick....
So unrelieved, the solemn ass even in humor. So hopelessly
au grand serieux,
you feel like saying: Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care? Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink.” Lawrence's essay was the first indication that, much like the doubloon Ahab nails to the
Pequod
's mast,
Moby-Dick
is prismatically appropriated by each generation of readers. When first published it was viewed as an insane grab bag of religious allegory. In Lawrence's time, it was the first novel to show Europe where the hands stood on the clock. Later it would be a source text for the New Critics, then the litter box for post-colonial theorists. In 1927,
Moby-Dick
's status all but assured, E. M. Forster devoted to it a long, cautious appraisal in
Aspects of the Novel,
and Melville's greatest work, as we today know it, was born 76 years after its initial publication.

Emily Dickinson achieved critical and popular acclaim much earlier than Whitman or Melville, though final validation did not occur until well into the twentieth century. “Just how good is she?” one critic demanded, with growing frustration, long after the appearance of the groundbreaking 1955 edition of Dickinson's poems. Despite the relatively sudden acceptance of her work after her death, Dickinson's survival is the least likely of all, subject to family quarrels and fortuitous breaks.

Dickinson's life is the stuff of biographers' night terrors: so many relationships, and so much shadowy speculation concerning them. Dickinson's brilliant letters, less than a tenth of which survive, are often as nebulous as scripture. Dickinson's brother Austin is probably the most significant figure in her Amherst home life. Most similar of all the Dickinsons to Emily in temperament (though least similar in taste and intellect), Austin's adulterous personal life would form the unlikely impetus that gradually forced Dickinson's poems into public prominence.

Dickinson's invincibly sedentary love of home is, from our modern standpoint, rather pathetic. Her letters from Mount Holyoke (which she left after three terms) ache with sonorous longing for Amherst. When she arrived back home, she wrote: “Never did Amherst look more lovely to me & gratitude rose in my heart to God, for granting me such a safe return.” (Mount Holyoke is ten miles from Amherst.) Within a few years of Dickinson's homecoming, Austin would begin a relationship with Susan Gilbert, whom he would eventually marry. Recently, scholarly eyebrows have raised at Susan and Emily's relationship. Susan exchanged with Dickinson many letters, some of which are strikingly erotic. But like much of Dickinson's life, these are speculative matters. For the next several decades, Dickinson did little but write letters and poems, very occasionally traveling, with her younger sister, Lavinia, to Washington and Philadelphia, among other far-flung locales. Vinnie, as Lavinia
was known, was utterly unlike her sister. Dickinson called Vinnie her “Soldier & Angel,” and Vinnie responded with a devotion that would not abate in the coming unpleasantness.

In 1881, a brilliant young woman named Mabel Todd moved to Amherst with her professor husband. Austin and Susan immediately welcomed the Todds into their Amherst salon, and an open-secret affair between Austin and Todd began. Despite her great intellectual gifts, Todd came to Amherst very much untouched clay. Her literary aspirations to become a novelist made her uniquely susceptible to the legends already shrouding Austin's increasingly sequestered sister. Two months after arriving in Amherst, she wrote: “I must tell you about the
character
of Amherst ... a lady whom the people call the
Myth
.” Within a year, Todd and Dickinson would be exchanging lengthy missives, flowers, and gifts. Sometimes Todd would sing in the Dickinson house for Emily, who listened upstairs, composing poems on the spot. Thus Dickinson and the woman who eventually edited the first volume of her work never met face-to-face. An odder relationship in the history of American letters would be hard to fathom.

After Dickinson died in 1886,Vinnie pressured anyone possessing an ounce of literary acumen to do something about her sister's orphaned poems. Susan initially agreed to edit them, then backed out, claiming the poems would never sell. Vinnie turned, among others, to the same Thomas Wentworth Higginson who had assailed Walt Whitman. As Vinnie was aware, her sister's correspondence with Higginson began in 1862, after the appearance of a Higginson essay in
The Atlantic
called “Letter to a Young Contributor,” which assured that editors are “always hungering and thirsting after novelties.” Dickinson was thirty-one when she sent along a short letter and four poems, asking Higginson, famously, if her “Verse is alive.” Although he offered Dickinson some guarded praise, Higginson said to
The Atlantic
's editor, “I
foresee that ‘Young Contributors' [sic] will send me worse things than ever now.” In the following epistolary exchanges, a strange friendship formed. In time, Higginson came to see Dickinson as a remarkable, if not publishable, talent, and despite occasional reluctance served her as a valuable friend. Although he spoke at Dickinson's funeral, Higginson declined Vinnie's plea to edit her poetry.

In desperation, Vinnie approached Mabel Todd. Todd had many reasons for turning Vinnie down, her own literary ambitions among them. But she was deeply depressed with Amherst and her battles with Susan. Dickinson's troubled, eerie poems seemed, as she later wrote, “to open the door into a wider universe than the little sphere surrounding me.” Actually faced with transcribing the poems—sheer illegibility and Dickinson's grammatical peculiarities making it immensely difficult—soon convinced her she could not manage the job alone. She contacted Higginson herself, who told Todd that, while he admired Dickinson's verse, he deplored its undisciplined form. Only after listening to Todd read some poems aloud did Higginson, at long last, assent to involvement. The growing toxicity between Austin, Susan, Vinnie, and Todd complicated the editing process, as did Higginson's stuffy insistence on titling Dickinson's poems. “Because I could not stop for Death” appeared in 1890's Poems under the Higginsonian title of “The Chariot.”

Their task completed, Higginson sent the poems to Houghton Mifflin, where they were quickly rejected as “queer.” Humiliated, Higginson more or less bowed out from the publishing process, and after months of failure and negotiation, the firm Roberts and Brothers agreed to publish Dickinson's poems, requiring that Vinnie pay for the printer's plates. After an ordeal whose vicissitudes could have derailed the project any number of times, the poems were published in 1890. Public reception was immediate.
Poems
would go through eleven printings within the next two years.

What, then, do we have to thank for the survival of American literature's three greatest figures? Remaindered copies bought from book peddlers. A man, sitting at his desk, an oxidized copy of a forgotten novel beside him, cobbling together an essay with no idea of what it would accomplish. The lovely devotion of solitary women and men. Essays published at the right time, in the right journals or books, noticed by the right people. Clearly, these are not the props of fate. They are, rather, the stagecraft of chance.

The comfort we take in these writers' survival is undercut by some quietly nagging questions: How many novels did Carl Van Doren's hand pass over to find
Moby-Dick
? How many poets' work sits moldering in New England attic trunks, no one having lobbied on its behalf? What of a novel like Helen Hunt Jackson's
Ramona,
a beautifully searing reproach to federal treatment of Native Americans?
Ramona
actively changed American history, something neither Melville, Whitman, nor Dickinson's work can claim.
Ramona
was praised when it first appeared, not the least by Jackson's friend Emily Dickinson, who wrote, “Pity me, I have finished Ramona.”
Ramona
lives on, of course, much in the way of
Moby-Dick
before 1917—a minor classic attended by the tepid enthusiasm of a few. We may laugh at Thomas Wentworth Higginson's antique taste today, but that taste once belonged to everyone. Is it impossible to imagine what unpredictable events might allow us a shocked recognition of that taste again?

 

 

For many months after
Desperate Characters
reappeared, writer friends, agents, and strangers sent to me numerous works of fiction and poetry they maintained never met with proper acclaim. The books came in, one after another, accompanied by nth-generation Xeroxes of effulgent reviews from
Publishers Weekly
and stamped with enthusiastic blurbs from James Baldwin, Stanley Elkin, and
Rita Mae Brown. Brokenhearted postscripts revealed the miserable delicacy of our literary machinery: “Although it sold well, the publisher let it go out of print....” “The
Times
review came out eleven months after its publication....” “There was no paperback sale....” I soon felt as though I were deep in the peaty bowels of some awful literary purgatory, where hundreds of books are lashed with their own obscurity, many no worse than those considered—in an irritating oxymoron—“contemporary classics.” I floated one or two of these projects before Norton's board, but failed to convince anyone of the fiduciary soundness of further revivals. It did not auger well that Graywolf Press's ambitious Rediscovery series, which republished, among other books, Larry Woiwode's
Beyond the Bedroom Wall
, one of the greatest American novels I have ever read, had been recently discontinued.

With all this in mind, I don't know if I could have read a less comforting book than Joseph Blotner's landmark biography
Faulkner.
Even Faulkner was forced to sneak past checkpoints into demilitarized literary immortality. Here again, in this century, were all the hard-luck accouterments of ill-starred nineteenth-century scriveners. With every book but
Sanctuary
out of print, Faulkner was living in Hollywood, drinking too much, reduced to reworking screenplays for films like
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse.
(Of course, he also scripted
To Have and Have Not
and
The Big Sleep
.) While many writers and critics revered him, Faulkner's popular status was so obscure that Faulkner was asked by the actor Clark Gable who Faulkner felt were the best living writers. Faulkner replied, “Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, and myself.” A surprised Gable asked Faulkner if he wrote fiction. “Yes, Mr. Gable,” Faulkner said. “What do you do?”