Reading Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

241 Pages·2007·1.943 MB·English

by  Brian Higgins, Hershel Parker

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and explore the consequences of his belated deci- LLIITTEERRAARRYY SSTTUUDDIIEESS HIGGINS
sion to expand his work, showing in detail how his and
PARKER
hastily written and awkwardly inserted additions
READING MELVILLE’S
marred much of what he had brilliantly achieved
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
in the shorter version. They demonstrate that to R E A D I N G
understand Pierre, and Melville himself at this cri-
BRIAN HIGGINS
sis, one must first understand the compositional
“The achievement of Reading Melville’s ‘Pierre; or, The and
history that resulted in the book as published.
HERSHEL PARKER
Ambiguities’ cannot be ignored. With impeccable
M E L V I L L E’S
scholarly precision and with far more critical acuity P
Setting Pierre in the context of Melville’s literary
than anyone has managed to bring to a discussion Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities has
life, Higgins and Parker’s study is an illuminating i
of the social and literary contexts informing Pierre’s eR a storied place in the history of American pub-
demonstration of biographical and textual schol-
r
composition, Higgins and Parker provide a fascinat- lishing. Melville began writing this follow-up to
arship by two of the field’s finest practitioners. rE
ing account of geographical, familial, philosophical, eA Moby-Dick in October 1851, thinking that it might
Pierre; or,
religious, and literary forces that inform the creation ; prove even more significant than its predecessor.
BRIAN HIGGINS is Professor Emeritus of Eng- D
of the fiction.” o The 1852 publication of Pierre was catastrophic,
lish at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the I
r
author of Herman Melville: An Annotated Bibliography, —John Wenke, author of Melville’s Muse: Literary ,N however. Melville lost his English publisher, and

1846–1930, and Herman Melville: A Reference Guide, Creation and the Forms of Philosophical Fiction TG American reviewers derided the book and called
the author mad. In Reading Melville’s “Pierre; or, The
1930–1960. He is also coeditor, with Hershel h The Ambiguities
Parker, of Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews. “A fascinating and persuasive piece of literary arche- M Ambiguities,” noted Melville authorities Brian Hig-
e
ology. Higgins and Parker have produced the best E gins and Hershel Parker probe the daunting story
A
behind a deeply flawed but revealing work, one
HERSHEL PARKER, H. Fletcher Brown Pro- psychological reading of Pierre since Henry Murray’s, L
fessor Emeritus of American Romanticism at the and the best chapter-by-chapter close-reading ever.” V that directly reflects the major crisis of Melville’s
m
authorial life.
University of Delaware, is Associate General Edi- —R. D. Madison, Professor of English, I
tor of The Writings of Herman Melville and author U.S. Naval Academy bL
iL Weighed down by huge debts, Melville took the
of the two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography. His g
E manuscript of Pierre to his New York publisher,
other books include Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons u
and Reading “Billy Budd,” and he is coeditor, with LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS i’S Harper and Brothers, desperately needing the
Brian Higgins, of Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s BATON ROUGE 70803 ti new work to be a financial success. The Harpers
e balked at publishing such a dangerous psychologi-
“Moby-Dick.”
s
cal novel (incest was a theme) and offered him less
than half the royalties they had paid for his previ-
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS ous books. The anguished Melville accepted the
BATON ROUGE 70803 contract but subsequently added new passages to
BRI A N H IGGI NS
www.lsu.edu/lsupress his manuscript—passages that disparage the pub-
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RECTO RUNNING HEAD
Reading Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
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READING MELVILLE’S PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES
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ii
RECTO RUNNING HEAD
R E A D I N G
M E LV I L L E’S
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Pierre; or,
The Ambiguities
BRIAN HIGGINS
and
HERSHEL PARKER
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BATON ROUGE
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READING MELVILLE’S PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2006 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing
Designer: Michelle A. Neustrom
Typeface: Baskerville
Printer and binder: Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Higgins, Brian, 1943–
Reading Melville’s Pierre; or, The ambiguities / Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-3226-5 (alk. paper)
1. Melville, Herman, 1819–1891. Pierre. I. Parker, Hershel. II. Title.
PS2384.P53H54 2006
813'.3—dc22
2006021947
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. ∞
iv
RECTO RUNNING HEAD
Contents
Preface vii
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1. Toward a Kraken Book 1
2. “This dream-house of the earth”:
Books I and II 32
3. “The flowing river in the cave of man”:
Books III–V 57
4. “The manly enthusiast cause”:
Books VI–XII 81
5. The Pamphlet and the City:
The Kraken Ending 112
6. Cobbling the Harper Pierre:
January–February 1852 144
7. Aftermath 175
8. Faltering Recognition 188
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Works Cited 213
Index 219
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READING MELVILLE’S PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES
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Preface
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville’s seventh book, was catastrophic
for him. It lost him his English publisher, and reviewers of the American
edition (1852) accused the book and the author of being mad. In the re-
mainder of the nineteenth century, Pierre was dismissed as Melville’s “late
miserable abortion” and characterized as repulsive, insane, and unread-
able. Even after the book was rediscovered during the Melville Revival of
the 1920s, it has persistently evoked critical uneasiness and often outright
disdain. Nonetheless, Pierre is now generally recognized as one of Melville’s
most significant works, the book nearest to Moby-Dick not only in time but
also in the ambitiousness of its aims and in the power of at least some of
its passages. Melville scholars and critics have yet to recognize, however, the
events in Melville’s life that brought about the publication of the book they
know as Pierre, the version published in 1852. Knowledge of the composi-
tional history and the multiple, contradictory impulses that produced this
version is essential to comprehending the book that had such a devastating
effect on Melville’s career yet seemed to its author, in the early stages of its
composition, as likely to be greater even than Moby-Dick.
In “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville’s Pierre” (1978), we argued that
Melville’s belated decision, in January 1852, to turn the hero of his new
manuscript into an author seriously damaged the work because many parts
of the extensive interpolated passages were inconsistent with his original in-
tentions. Further study of the documentary evidence indicated that Melville
completed the book in a short form about the end of 1851, before receiving
a contract from the Harpers for it. Intrigued by the Melville-loving Maurice
Sendak’s fascination with Pierre, Parker seized the opportunity to let him
illustrate something unique, a radical text as close as possible to Melville’s
original version of the novel, one which omitted all the late-added sections
on Pierre as author. This Kraken edition of Pierre (HarperCollins, 1995)
was, of course, designed as a nonce text, intended only to complement, cer-
tainly not to replace, the standard Northwestern-Newberry edition (1971).
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PREFACE
“Having this short version of Pierre in print,” Parker argued, “will at last
make it feasible for lovers of Melville to comprehend his original design
for the book and his original achievements in it” (xii). The edition, Parker
hoped, would spur readers to take account of evidence that would let them
think sequentially about Melville’s life and works in the months following
the publication of Moby-Dick. In this book, we ourselves attempt to compre-
hend Melville’s original design for Pierre and his original achievements. We
attempt, that is, to describe the experience of reading the Pierre that Melville
first completed.
In the course of the book we tell the story of a crucial period of Mel-
ville’s creative life, from the fall of 1851 to the spring of 1853; proper un-
derstanding of Pierre, we argue, demands that this biographical evidence
be taken into account. In chapter 1, we focus on Melville’s composition of
the first version of Pierre in late 1851, setting the book in the context of his
life and literary career. In chapters 2–5, we analyze what we can plausibly
reconstruct of this original version (the version represented in the Kraken
edition). In our 1978 essay we gave a sequential reading of the published
1852 version of the novel, even though we argued that Melville’s belated
decision to turn Pierre into an author had introduced major inconsisten-
cies into the work. Here, in chapters 2–5 we read the same Pierre that stu-
dents of Melville are all familiar with, with the big exception that we read
nothing about Pierre as an author. In the process, we demonstrate both
the cohesion and the eventual discontinuities of this original version of
the novel. Then, in chapter 6, we briefly set forth the circumstances of
Melville’s abrupt decision to declare that Pierre had been a juvenile author
and his further decision to portray Pierre as an author still young but forced
too early into would-be maturity. More thoroughly than we did in 1978, we
next analyze these added passages on Pierre as an author, demonstrating
that, while some of them are powerfully written, they frequently contradict
or obscure Melville’s original intentions and achievements. Chapter 7 gives
a brief account of the publication and reception of the book in 1852 and
their effect on Melville’s subsequent career. In chapter 8 we focus on criti-
cal assessments of Pierre since the late nineteenth century and document
the accumulation of factual information about the book’s composition and
publication since the Melville Revival—information that has generally been
slighted by critics.
viii
PREFACE
In places we draw on material previously published in Higgins and
Parker 1978, 1983, 1986, and 1995, and in Parker 1976, 1977, 1996, and
2002. Ways in which our thinking about Pierre has evolved over the last
thirty years are noted in chapter 8. Unless otherwise stated, in our refer-
ences to and quotations from Melville’s works we cite the Northwestern-
Newberry edition of The Writings of Herman Melville.
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