Opening with a couple of rants, this week’s podcast is spicy and also tries to make sense of a few of the more perplexing parts of the book. There’s a wonderful interlude in this section from the narrator themselves, and, apparently, nine jokes? And a magic trick involving coins. You’ll have to listen to understand.

And here’s the “” t-shirt mentioned in this episode.

This week’s music is “” by Phantogram.

Next episode will cover all of of .ĢżYou can find the full reading schedule here.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on ourĢż and on , , etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

¹ó“Ē±ō±ō“Ē·ÉĢżĢż,Ģż , and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

The large image associated with this post is AI generated.

Chad and Kaija go it alone this week, talking about some of the more uncomfortable parts of the book to read in 2024, the Goneril story and the “evil touch,” how almost every beat in this novel has a counterpart, the wonderful authorial intrusion discussing the “consistency” of characters, and, with glee in their hearts, the Herb-Doctor.

This week’s music is “” by Jerome BlazĆ©.

Next episode will cover Chapters 20-26 of .ĢżYou can find the full reading schedule here.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on ourĢż and on , , etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

¹ó“Ē±ō±ō“Ē·ÉĢżĢż,Ģż , and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

The large image associated with this post is AI generated.

[This is not to be confused with the , which was the first one I launched and, although it has some broad philosophical overlap with the Three Percent one, it exclusively focuses on Dalkey Archive titles, history, and stories. But please subscribe to that as well! There are some really interesting essays in the offing . . .]

As you may have noticed, last week Two Month Review dropped its first one-off episode onĢżDear DickheadĢżby Virginie Despentes & Frank Wynne. This is something we had been talking about for quite some whileā€”a way to expand the number of books we’re covering (so as to include ones thatĢżaren’tĢż600 pages long) in a way that captures the spirit of TMR, but with a few wrinkles.

We’ll be experimenting with what works best over the coming months, and posting these as occasional bonus episodes along the way. We do have a few titles lined up, but the only one I want to announce now is that we’re doing Ģżnext week, so expect that soon. (Should be interesting to hear Brian leading us through his own book, discussing what he thinks works, or would change now, who influenced him, etc.) After that . . . well, wait and see!

Our next full season of Two Month Review has also been decided, and it’s a twofer: First up will be , followed byĢż. Full schedule detailed below.

It’s probably obvious why we decided to do these two books, but, for anyone who isn’t a long-time listener, we have dedicated almost three dozen episodes of TMR to FresĆ”n, specifically his “” (,,Ģż). And we’re always going to feature his new titles as they’re released!

But in contrast to his other books,ĢżĢżis “short,” clocking in at a tight 308 pages, so it makes sense to add on a related title. As much as I would love to rereadĢżMoby-Dick in this context, I think thatĢżĢżis actually a better fit. A Melville title that some people might not be familiar with, but one that FresĆ”n referred to as “Pynchon before Pynchon.”

Here’s the jacket copy from the Dalkey Archive edition (not currently available):

A scathing, razor-sharp satire set on a New Orleans-bound riverboat,ĢżThe Confidence-ManĢżexposes the fraudulent optimism of so many American idols and idealistsā€”Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and P. T. Barnum, in particularā€”and draws a dark vision of a country being swallowed by its illusions of progress.

It begins with a mute boarding a Mississippi boat and ends without a conclusion: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.” In between, the confidence man, so well disguised as to avoid clear identification even by the reader, meets and tricks a boatful of unusual characters. The culmination of Herman Melville’s brilliant career as a novelist, and the introduction of a particularly American brand of satire that is as caustic as it is funny,ĢżThe Confidence-ManĢżcreates an elaborate and beautiful masquerade that asks: who in this world is worth our confidence?

Why is Dalkey Archive doing yet another edition ofĢżThe Confidence-Man? And why is it doing Melville at all? First, this edition, originally published by Bobbs-Merrill over forty years ago, contains remarkable annotations by H. Bruce Franklin, intended for both the general reader and the scholar. It’s an edition we have long admired. More importantly, we believe thatĢżThe Confidence-ManĢżis America’s first postmodern novelā€”game-like, darkly comic, and completely inventive.

I read this for the first time before we published it at Dalkey and remember being wonderfully surprised by how lively, how fun, how playful it was. Not that Melville’s other books aren’t those things, but this seemed like a swerve compared to say, , or (but maybe not ).

As mentioned above, the Dalkey edition is between printings (using this podcast to prep the new files, actually), but there are many other editions out there. And the Dalkey one is easy to find used.

Teaser: Subscribe to the archive for a special treat related to this book . . .

Rodrigo FresĆ”n & Will Vanderhyden’sĢżMelvill may well be their best collaboration to date. That’s saying a lot after the “Part Trilogy,” but this book is remarkable. It’s one of the few books I’ve published in which multiple people have emailed to tell me it’s one of the “best books they’ve ever read.” It is, to put this in crass, commercial (a.k.a., publisher) terms: This novel is the best chance to date for FresĆ”n to breakout breakout among English readers. He’s had a lot of success, but given the subject matter (one of the Great American Novelists), its relatively short length, and the richness of the text itself (still replete with FresĆ”n’s games), and the stunning cover (designed by FresĆ”n’s son), this particular FresĆ”n book is “approachable” (again, apologies for the gross publisher term) and thus could reach a very wide audience.

Instead of quoting the , let’s just marvel at this STARREDĢż:

“Argentine writer Fresan (The Invented Part) focuses his visionary latest on the inner life of author Herman Melville and the exploits of his tormented father, Allan. In the first section, set in December 1831, 12-year-old Herman sits by Allanā€™s deathbed as the elder Melvill (the second ā€œeā€ was added later) recounts his illustrious revolutionary roots in Boston, promising marriage to the fetching Maria Gansevoort, ruinous career as a merchant, and mystical final adventure, in which he walks across the frozen Hudson River and hears ā€œmessages seeming to come from the Beyond.ā€ Herman faithfully records it allā€”but cannot resist scribbling copious footnotes that embellish, interrupt, and underscore Allanā€™s narrative. In the bookā€™s second part, Allan speaks for himself, describing his time in Venice, where he encountered NicolĆ”s Cueva, a ā€œpale young man with white hairā€ who claims to be undead and imparts forbidden knowledge, prefiguring the subject matter of Hermanā€™s novels. The magisterial final act returns to Herman, who narrates his adventures among sailors and cannibals, lambastes his critics, and reunites with his fatherā€™s ghost. The narrative gestures at the kind of ever-expanding realm of imagination that the great author himself incarnated, and the kind Fresanā€™s Herman prophesies: ā€œA book (a pure style of book, a book of pure style) where many things would end so many others could begin.ā€ This is a masterpiece.”

When I worked on Melvil, I saw it as a natural extension of the themes from the “Part Trilogy,” but also a sort of fresh start for anyone approaching FresĆ”n’s works for the first time. There’s something for everyone . . .

So buy bothā€”or download a public domain version of the Melville, but spend the money on ā€”and join us for 10 weeks of hijinks and ideas about how narratives are constructed and stories inherited.

Here’s the official schedule (all dates are for the week of the YouTube recording and podcast release; stay tuned for specifics):

Nov 4: Chapters 1-9 of The Confidence-ManĢż

Nov 11: Chapters 10-19 of The Confidence-ManĢż

Nov 18: Chapters 20-26 of The Confidence-ManĢż

Nov 25: Chapters 27-38 of The Confidence-ManĢż

Dec 2: Chapters 39-End of The Confidence-ManĢż

Dec 9: MelvillĢż(pgs 1-61)

Dec 16: MelvillĢż(pgs 62-123)

Dec 23: NO EPISODE

Dec 30: MelvillĢż(pgs 123-188)

Jan 6: MelvillĢż(pgs 189-245)

Jan 13: MelvillĢż(pgs 246-End)

See you on or in the podcast app (, ) of your choice!

Melville by Jean Giono
Translated from the French by Paul Eprile
108 pgs. | pb | 9781681371375 | $14.00

Review by Brendan Riley

In The Books in My Life (1952), Henry Miller, devoting an entire chapter to French writer Jean Giono (1895-1970), boasts about spending ā€œseveral years. . . . preaching the gospelā€“ā€“of Jean Giono. I do not say that my words have fallen upon deaf ears, I merely complain that I have made myself a nuisance at the Viking Press in New York, for I keep pestering them intermittently to speed up the translations of ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s works.ā€^[i]

Indefatigable gusher, self-mythologizer, and, among many other things, enthusiast of whatever struck his fancy at the moment, (including, in Black Spring, the joy of open-air urination behind the blind of a Parisian pissoir) Miller tenders this lugubrious caveat:

ā€œFortunately I am able to read Giono in his own tongue and, at the risk of sounding immodest, in his own idiom. But . . . I continue to think of the countless thousands in England and America who must wait until his books are translated. I feel that I could convey to the ranks of his ever-growing admirers innumerable readers whom his American publishers despair of reaching. I think I could even sway the hearts of those who have never heard of himā€“ā€“in England, Australia, New Zealand and other places where the English language is spoke. But I seem incapable of moving those few pivotal beings who hold . . . his destiny in their hands. Neither with logic nor passion, neither with statistics nor examples, can I budge the position of editors and publishers in this, my native land. I shall probably succeed in getting Giono translated into Arabic, Turkish and Chinese before I convince his American publishers to go forward with the task they so sincerely began.ā€ (Miller 100).

Whether or not Millerā€™s translation mission prodded Viking into action, a search of various online publication sources shows that some 16 of ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s 33 finished novels have, so far, been translated into English. Some notable examples include Hill (trans. Paul Eprile, NYRB, 2016), the third English-language translation of ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s Colline, which has also appeared in English as Hill of Destiny (translated by Jacques Le Clercq, published by Brentanoā€™s 1929), and again, in 1986, translated by Brian Nelson, bearing the French title Colline. ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s adventure novel The Horseman on the Roof was translated by Jonathan Griffin in 1982ā€”many people have seen the well-regarded 1995 film adaptation starring Juliette Binoche and Oliver Martinezā€”and a collection of essays, The Battle of Pavia, was translated by A.ĢżE. Merch in 1985. In 2017, nearly half a century since Millerā€™s effusion, and 76 years after its initial publication in 1941, NYRB issued the first English translation of ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s Melville, a splendid read, also translated by Paul Eprile. Henry Miller singled out Melville for high praise:

ā€œWhen [Giono] touches a man like our own Herman Melville, in the book called Pour Saluer Melville (which the Viking Press refuses to bring out, though it was translated for them), we come very close to the real Gionoā€“ā€“and, what is even more important, close to the real Melville. This Giono is a poet. His poetry is of the imagination and reveals itself just as forcibly in his prose. It is through this function that Giono reveals his power to captivate men and women everywhere, regardless of rank, class, status or pursuit.ā€ (Miller 102)

Miller also confesses that Herman Melville ā€œis not one of my favorites. Moby-Dick has always been a sort of bĆŖte noir for me,ā€ but says that ā€œAfter reading Pour Saluer Melville, which is a poetā€™s interpretation of a poet,ā€“ā€“ā€˜a pure invention,ā€™ as Giono himself says in a letterā€“ā€“I was literally beside myself. How often it is the ā€˜foreignerā€™ who teaches us to appreciate our own authors!ā€ (Miller 110-111).

In his introduction to this NYRB edition, Edmund White offers a different sort of appreciation: ā€œ[Pour Saluer Melville] began as the introduction to [³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s] translation of Moby-Dick (the first in French)ā€ and ā€œstill the standard translation into French.ā€ The short novel that evolved from that introduction, says White ā€œmust be one of the strangest homages from one major author to another.ā€^[ii]

A slender, captivating work, barely 100 pages, ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s Melville, is clear, colorful, lyrical, and light on its feet. A really fine short novel whose limpid concision feels instructional, and whose chromatic emotional depth feels inspirational. ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s propulsive story of a middle-aged Melville falling in love far from home is consistently lively, interesting, pleasant, surprising, and memorable. Strange, yes, but also beautiful, gentle, and humane.

³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s luminous, finely crafted prose, via Paul Eprileā€™s meticulous, elegant translation, has depth and affective resonance, whispering repeated invitations to revisit its simple, wonderfully human scenes.

Wrapping himself in a fictive nineteenth century Melvillian cocoon in which the famous writer connects with, captivates, and is captivated by all sorts of people, Giono frames his fantasia in broad swaths of biography: Melvilleā€™s early life in New England, then as an apprentice seaman and mate, his voyages inspiring his early bestsellers: Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and Redburn.

³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s memorable portrait of Melvilleā€™s motherā€”foreshadowing Melvilleā€™s later meeting with the fictional Adelina White, an Irish Nationalist who becomes his muse for Moby-Dickā€”mixes precise and varied detail, stinging satire, bookish allusions, and wry humor, attributes with which the novel as a whole is strongly and effectively imbued:

Now, in 1814, Hermanā€™s father ā€” or, shall we say, in order to become Hermanā€™s father ā€” Allan took Maria Gansevoort as his wife. Poor, dear Mama! To be able to think about her now, Herman would be forced to flush the sweet balm out of his head. The loveliest month of May could never have borne any sort of perfume for poor Maria. She was cold, thin, materialistic, dry, methodical, angular, and arrogant. This truly unique specimen, a perfect combination of these various emotional and physical elements, clothed in austere, two-bit fustian and fortified with whalebone stays, became Mistress Melville. She made immoderate use of these womanly restraints, which her son would later mention with such innocent humor. God might have intended her to use them to drape voluptuous fabric around her body! But since her ā€” one couldnā€™t really say tender ā€” youth, sheā€™d torn all the love poems out of her Bible and, though already a mother many times over, she still blushed at the sight of the names of Ruth, Esther, Judith . . . those women who, when you came down to it, had put their unmentionable female parts at the service of the glory of the Lord. (Giono 8-9)

Giono also creates effective, sometimes captivating working-class characters including a stable boy, a second-hand goods shopkeeper, and Captain Pearse, commander of the whaler Acushnet, where the young adventurous Melville signs on and becomes a man of the sea. Giono crafts some heady reminiscences about Melville cutting his sailorā€™s teeth under the rough command of Pearse, a model for Melvilleā€™s own ā€œgrand, ungodly, god-likeā€ Ahab^[iii]: ā€œHas he ever lashed you? Yes, I mean with a whiplash, on your bare skin? Has he ever stuffed you down in the hold, bound hand and foot, with only a drop of water to drink? . . . I tell you, he does do all these things!ā€ (Giono 18)

And on the hunt for whales, Pearse ā€œdoles out slaps and kicks in the rear. Thousands of times, in a sort of perfect, gigantic, arithmetical progression, heā€™ll blaspheme the name of God with curses that become more and more outrageous and originalā€ (Giono 20). This abuse and blasphemy effect Hermanā€™s own spiritual struggle:

ā€œFor fifteen months since he went to sea, heā€™s been wrestling with an angel. Like Jacob, heā€™s plunged in darkness, and now dawn comes. Wingsā€”unbearably rigidā€”beat him, raise him up above the earth, hurl him back down, snatch him up again, and smother him. He hasnā€™t had a momentā€™s respite from the fight. No matter if heā€™s reached his limit; no matter if heā€™s completely worn out; no matter if he sinks like a stone into his berth: He wrestles with the angel. If heā€™s leaping into the whaleboat; if heā€™s riding out an iron-gray tempest; if heā€™s staring into the sickening maw of one of the giant creatures of the abyss. At the very same time he wrestles with the angel.ā€ (Giono 21).

This wrestling becomes an extended metaphor throughout the novel, which is concerned naturally enough as much with Melville the sailor as Melville the writerā€”without the former there would have been no latter. When we see Melville sail to England to deliver his manuscript of White Jacket, Giono skips the voyage itself because Melville goes as a passenger, not a sailor, it would have been nothing like his Acushnet experiences.

In London, Hermanā€™s publishers surprise him by immediately agreeing to all of his contractual requests and conditions, leaving the handsome, robust adventurer flush with money and satisfaction and with two weeks to kill in England before his return ship sails. In a perfectly American impulse prescient of his restless, peripatetic Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Melville, who cannot abide a fortnightā€™s layover in London, and feels driven, wing-beaten, to seek some new adventure, follows his wanderlust and decides to quit the big city (Giono emphasizes Hermanā€™s Yankee pride amid stodgy, smoggy London) and light out for the Westā€”of England. He reaches this decision by asking a stable hand what he would do if he had five pounds and ā€œten days of freedom to do whatever you liked.ā€ The answer is heā€™d go to Woodcut, ā€œa little hamlet . . . out Berkeley way, over there above Bristol,ā€ adding ā€œif you do go there, drop by Joshuaā€™s placeā€”-that dirty swineā€”at the Sign of the Old Sea-Fish. Tell him to do you a rum the way he does one for Dick. The way he does one for Dick. You tell him that.

ā€œNow this is just the kind of adventure Herman likes best.ā€ (Giono 31)

The Melville whose course we then follow is a funny, resourceful, gregarious, and vulnerable confection. Before undertaking his land voyage by mail coach, Herman first decides to outfit himself in secondhand sailorā€™s clothes. There follows an excellent scene of him haggling for items in a shop in Limehouse, in East London: ā€œfine, blue homespun pants . . . a bargain for a striped sweater . . . made from the best quality Scottish wool . . . a splendid old pea coat: roomy, cozy, genuine, worn by rain, wind, and work, the color of night at sea, something worthy of veneration. A true shelter from the storm, a real ā€˜sailorā€™s house,ā€™ā€ along with ā€œChinese shoes made from elephant hide, as supple as gloves, the toes turned slightly upward in the Tibetan style; a greenish hideā€“ā€“never polished, never greasedā€“ā€“with all of its grain; an item both artistic and practical, something absolutely unusual, yet useful everywhere, a true piece of maritime equipment.ā€ (Giono 32-33).

Some of those phrases (supple as gloves; artistic and practical, absolutely unusual, yet useful everywhere) seem indicative of the overall quality of this resonant work whose perfect sentences and water-smooth transitions feel seamless as the segues in Ovidā€™s Metamorphoses. The usefulness, the practicality lie within the novelā€™s combination of smart storytelling, arresting imagery, and wise, spirited reflections on the human condition.

Melville meets a mysterious woman, Adelina Whiteā€”a very far cry from Mistress Melvilleā€”lawyerā€™s wife, mother, and Irish nationalist secretly fighting to save the starving Irish by using her social status, beauty, and style to help smuggle contraband wheat into famished Ireland. The passages devoted to Melvilleā€™s shy fascination with, and bumbling introduction to her are comical and tender. ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s homage is also an exploration of inspiration: Hermanā€™s attraction to and pursuit of her establish the novelā€™s dramatic wellspring, while the development and revelation of her character form the storyā€™s moral nexus.

³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s The Solitude of Compassion, translated by Edward Ford (2002) carried Millerā€™s chapter from The Books in My Life as a foreword. Miller noted that in ā€œIn ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s works we have the somberness of Hardyā€™s moorsā€ (Miller, 103); true enough, some moments during Hermanā€™s mad dash across England with Adelina are suffused with a gloom reminiscent of Hardy, Dickens, or Charlotte Bronte, especially when she asks the driver to make a stop so she can comfort some friends in need but the novelā€™s thrilling power comes from something else Miller noticed: ā€œWe no longer know, in reading his books, whether we are listening to Giono or to ourselves. We are not even aware that we are listening. We live through his words and in them, as naturally as if we were respiring at a comfortable altitude or floating on the bosom of the deep or swooping like a hawk with the downdraught of a canyon. The actions of his narratives are cushioned in the terrestrial effluvium; the machinery never grinds because it is perpetually laved by cosmic lubricants. Giono gives us men, beasts and godsā€“ā€“in their molecular constituency.ā€ (Miller 109)

A gorgeous scene of Herman and Adelina riding atop the coach, exemplary of numerous pastoral moments in the novel, offers a fine illustration of the sort of things Miller was seeing in the novel:

ā€œMorning was brushing the land the way green willow boughs brush the waterā€™s surface. Ripples of liquid light were spreading out across the meadows and the woods, and splashing back as gold dust against the grass stems and the branches. Because of the noise of the wheels, it wasnā€™t possible to talk. But from time to time, when a new range of sunlit hills emerged from the mist, the two of then looked at each other.ā€ (Giono 69)

Lyrical Giono becomes poet-magus Melville who imparts mystical Blakean visions to Adelinaā€™s eyes and mind. Herman ā€œstarted to talk about the world that lay before them,ā€ then in a series of power verbs, he ā€œrolled up the sky . . . rolled [it] open again.ā€ He places the forms of nature into her hand and eye, makes ā€œthe woods come closerā€; he names, fuses, summons, revolves, takes hold of, makes the world rise up, sustains it, turns it upside down and inside out, all to make ā€œher come to life,ā€ imagining ā€œa worldā€“ā€“unlike the real oneā€“ā€“where he wouldnā€™t lose her.ā€ (Giono 75)

If Melvilleā€™s powers of sight offer the aesthetic locus, Adelinaā€™s story of her early family life, marriage, and commitment to social justice offer Herman a moral lens. Their final moments together, a noble scene upon the broad rolling sweep of the downs overlooking the River Severn estuary and Bristol Bay, the places from which departing boats will smuggle food to Ireland, are the moral and intellectual apogee of the novel. Melvilleā€™s boast that ā€œTo be a poet is to stay a step ahead of human destiny. The poet doesnā€™t follow; he isnā€™t against anything; heā€™s a step ahead. And he doesnā€™t serveā€ (Giono, 98) is countered and tempered by the fact that Adelina has chosen, precisely, to serve those in need, to struggle against inhuman political degradation, risking prison or worse for defying British law. Thus, Herman finally admits to her that his wrestling angel is both ā€œguardianā€ and ā€œprison guardā€ (Giono, 98). Indeed, the novelā€™s message is that we must elevate one another, as Melville and Adelina White do for each other during their brief platonic romance. The loversā€™ spirits merge just as their paths diverge.

Melville, a novel about remaining true to oneā€™s own character amid the gnawing squall of mundanities, is a sleek, sometimes uncanny, amalgamation of biography and fantasy, a pared-down modernist echo and distillation of Melvilleā€™s best compositional traits: deep learning, a brilliant, droll, insouciant voiceā€”lusty adventurous narrator at odds with the worldā€”breezy, stichomythic conversations, and an enthusiasm for nature, and an ability to render it in broad, luminous strokes and fine details that are inspirational, celebratory, and sacred, for one of Melvilleā€™s achievements (like Shakespeareā€™s Lear on the Heath, Joseph Conradā€™s Marlowe and Kurtz in the Congolese rain forest, and, more recently, Peter Matthiessenā€™s Edgar Watson in the Florida everglades) is to test man on natureā€™s sacred stage.

Many of these traits that make Melville excellent and invigorating can also be found in Melvilleā€™s 1853 story ā€œCock-A-Doodle-Doo! or The Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano.ā€

In addition to his many novels, Giono, as mentioned, was also the first translator into French of Moby-Dick, which he dubbed his ā€œforeign companion.ā€ Itā€™s interesting to read ā€œCock-A-Doodle Doo!ā€ as a potent and conspicuous influence on Melville, and the latter as an inspired response to the former, a deliberate chromatic riff on the Melvillian satirical paradox. Melville wrote the story within the lengthening shadow of diminishing reputation and growing financial strain, after Moby-Dick, after Pierre; or The Ambiguities, in the same year that he composed the bleak, utterly pessimistic, gallows humor of ā€œBartleby, the Scrivener,ā€ a satire on transcendental solipsism, but also, probably, on his own absorption in composing his masterpiece; as Melville scholar David Dowling notes:

ā€œThere are many histories to this fine book, and Melvilleā€™s herculean effort to write Moby-Dick is certainly one of them. Like the whaling history that undergirds the tale, Melvilleā€™s personal history does not bespeak the ordinary. He often locked himself in his room without food, writing in a creative white heat until evening, when his wife and daughters would admonish him to return to the land of the living . . .ā€
^[iv]

In an excellent 1948 essay, Egbert S. Oliver analyzed ā€œCock-A-Doodle Doo!ā€ as ā€œa satire on the buoyant transcendental principles which Melville heard echoing and reechoing in the New England hills . . . particularly, a passage from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau,ā€ calling it ā€œa reductio ad absurdum of the transcendental disregard of materialism.ā€ ^[v] In a complementary analysis from 1970, Harold Beaver, (reader of American literature at the University of Warwick), deemed Melvilleā€™s story to be a satire of Wordsworthā€™s poem Resolution and Independence: ā€œThe whole of ā€˜Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!ā€™ is, in effect, a parody, or paradoxical commentary on Wordsworthā€™s poem: both open in the ā€˜plashyā€™ or ā€˜squitchyā€™ damp, but whereas in Wordsworth a bright sun is already rising, in Melville the air is raw, misty and disagreeable;ā€^[vi] That bright sun portends Wordsworthā€™s concluding revelation when he is able to behold, within the old leech gathererā€™s ā€œshape, and speech,ā€ a spirit his younger self does not possess:

And soon with this he other matter blended,
Cheerfully uttered, with demeanour kind,
But stately in the main; and, when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit Man so firm a mind.
“God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure;
I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!ā€^[vii]

 

Beaver continues: ā€œWordsworthā€™s opening mood is of joy, Melvilleā€™s of cynical depression; in Wordsworth joy turns to dejection, in Melville hypochondria to defiant bravado; Wordsworth ends with stoic resolution, Melville with a continual crow.ā€ (Melville 425) Continual, indeed; throughout the story, Beneventanoā€™s crowing is at first bracing and inspiring but then becomes incessant, absurdly irrepressible, oppressive, and deadly.

Itā€™s also possible to read Melville as a paradoxical parable about the spiritual richness of radical optimismā€”certainly appealing to an exuberant bon vivant like Henry Millerā€”and its practical danger in the face of illness and death. Though Wordsworth could, in his famous sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge, celebrate a quiet Friday dawn in London 1802 (significantly not a Sunday but one of the busiest days of the work week) he also, in ā€œTintern Abbey,ā€ famously despaired of the city

how oftā€”
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart)^[viii]

In ā€œCock-A-Doodle-Do!ā€ Melvilleā€™s narrator also rants against mid-nineteenth-century social conditions and ills: poverty, disease, financial worries, ā€œrascally despotisms,ā€ and ā€œmany dreadful casualties, by locomotive and steamerā€ (Melville 103). His avowed elixir is Beneventanoā€™s crowing, ā€œequal to hearing the great bell of St. Paulā€™s rung at a coronation! In fact, that bell ought to be taken down, and this Shanghai put in its place. Such a crow would jollify all London, from Mile-End (which is no end) to Primrose Hill (where there ainā€™t any primroses), and scatter the fog.ā€^[ix] And Hermanā€™s excursion in Melville is an extended and (temporarily) successful attempt to do just that, to quit the funk of London and head west. Giono has Melville, antsy as his Ishmael who wants to step into the street and knock mensā€™ hats off their heads, flee London and travel West across all of southern England, from the Thames to the Bay of Bristol, but in a sly undercutting of Melvilleā€™s disdain for trains and those who stoke them, celebrates his overland trip in rapid, rattling mail coach. Along the way, there is a thrilling and delightful near miss between the hurtling Bristol Mail and a farm cart bound for market; the scene brings to mind the wonderfully dramatic coach driving scenes in Dickensā€™ Tale of Two Cities.

And itā€™s significant that the west, overlooking Bristol Channel is where Giono leaves Melville in England. Once that scene there is concluded, we are suddenly back in New England, and newly inspired Herman is flush with the frenetic concatenative energy that he will channel into writing Moby-Dick.

If, as Beaver claims, ā€œCock-A-Doodle-Doo!ā€ is a satirical inversion of Resolution and Independence, we see this when Melvilleā€™s narrator describes himself as ā€œas good a fellow as ever lived – hospitable – open-hearted – generous to a fault: and the Fates forbid that I should possess the fortune to bless the country with my bounteousnessā€ (Melville 117). For him, Beneventano is a sort of celestial lightning rod, a vivifying clarion in effulgent plumage as Merrymusk, the roosterā€™s owner, confirms when asking the narrator about the cockā€™s majestic crowing:

ā€œAinā€™t it inspiring? Donā€™t it impart pluck? give stuff against despair?ā€ (Melville 124)

And the message he interprets from Beneventanoā€™s lusting crowing, described variously as ā€œcheerful,ā€ ā€œmagic,ā€ ā€œextraordinary,ā€ ā€œnoble,ā€ ā€œa jolly bolt of thunder with bells,ā€ ā€œall glorious and defiant,ā€ ā€œa perfect paean and laudamus,ā€ and ā€œa trumpet blast of triumphā€ is ā€œBe jolly!ā€

Melville is an empathetic amplification and tempered refinement of ā€œCock-A-Doodle-Doo!ā€ā€”instead of moping Melville hating the railroad and fearing his creditors who dog him even to church and tavern, ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s Melville, just as Henry Miller loved to be, is free and easy, away from wife and home responsibilities, flush with money, and in his independence, riding across the land (replicating American flight from London, later from New England and the East Coast), meets a woman of steadfast resolution.

Melville is about chaste, ideal, unobtainable, ultimately vanished love. Adelina enjoys Melvilleā€™s company, briefly sees the poetical wonders he conjures but the vision he receives from her is greater because he is young, flush with success, yet to be tried fully in social matters. Her craft is evading unjust laws, helping the oppressed which makes Hermanā€™s concerns, by comparison, seem solipsistic, the very solipsism he satirizes in ā€œCock-a-Doodle-Doo!ā€ because Melvilleā€™s strange story is also a satirical parable of sexual fancy: manā€™s urgent need and desire to remain hard, upright, and ejaculatory right up to the moment of deathā€”Merrymusk and his family, and trumpeting cock Beneventano smile and crow through their misfortunes, and all perish; the blithely, blindly optimistic narrator wants to believe that their spirits defy death: he pays for their burial, family and cock together all in the same plot, headstone inscribed with the immortal rhetorical questions from Corinthians: ā€œO death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?ā€ Deathā€™s victory is self-evident: the family dies of poverty, disease, and hunger, the very maladies Adelina pretends to fight against. But wagonloads of contraband wheat did not solve the Potato Famine, save millions, prevent mass exodus, or change English law. Adelina asks Herman:

ā€œDo you remember the famine of ā€™46?ā€
ā€œVery well. I saw the boats loaded with emigrants arriving in our country, and I brought them a good many kettles of soup myself.ā€
ā€œNothing has changed.ā€
ā€œI assumed so. An entire population doesnā€™t stop dying of hunger all at once.ā€
ā€œNo, but it stops faster if you think about the starving bellies and work to fill them, instead of spending your time philosophizing about the doctrines of Adam Smith and Ricardo. I know that thousands of English men and women were in agony because they knew what was happening in the Irish cottages. You saw the boatloads of emigrants; we saw the cartloads of corpses thrown into the pitsā€ (Giono 86-87).

Melvilleā€™s revelations with Adelina, Giono fancies, inspire a new kind of hallucinatory and amalgamative energy for him to compose Moby-Dick. Of course the novelā€™s epic genius and some strong reviews did not sustain Melvilleā€™s good fortunes or keep the hellhounds (literary and otherwise) off his trail. From there, Giono hastens Melville to his final endā€”somberly, soberly, but gently, too, and no less reflective. Melville keeps writing after Moby-Dick to ever-diminishing enthusiasm, including close friend Nathaniel Hawthorneā€™s embarrassment about Pierre. And though Harold Beaver affirms that ā€œMoby-Dick marks not the end but the middle of Melvilleā€™s miraculous spanā€ and ā€œastonishing creative outpouring,ā€ he also notes that the novelā€™s reception was ā€œdishearteningā€: ā€œTwo years after the publication of Moby-Dick, he was still in debt to Harpers for 700 dollars advance royalties,ā€ and that in 1855 ā€œafter the failure of Israel Potter, ±Ź³Ü³Ł²Ō²¹³¾ā€™s associate editor, G.W. Curtis had advised [±į²¹°ł±č±š°łā€™s] new publisher, J.ĢżA. Dix ā€˜to decline any novel from Melville which is not extremely goodā€™ā€ (Melville 10-12).

Ultimately, though, ³Ņ¾±“Ē²Ō“Ēā€™s Melville is fantasia, a confection, not biography. And perhaps what really elevated the novel for the supremely solipsistic Henry Miller, paradoxical misogynistic woman(izer) worshipper so anxious to get Giono into readersā€™ hands, perhaps what taught him to appreciate Melville was that the imaginary Hermanā€™s final concern is not so much his writing or his general reputation but whether ardent Adelina Whiteā€”who writes him a few precious letters from England, and then no moreā€”ever read and was ever captivated by Moby-Dick the way that he was captivated by her.

*

Works Cited

^[i] Miller, Henry. The Books in My Life. New Directions Publishing, 1952, via Internet Archive PDF (Digitized 2008).

^[ii] Giono, Jean. Melville – A Novel (Introduction by Edmund White), trans. Paul Eprile. New York Review Book, 2017.

^[iii] Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. W. W. Norton & Company, 1967, p.76

^[iv] Dowling, David. Chasing the White Whale – The Moby-Dick Marathon; or, What Melville Means Today. University of Iowa Press, 2010.

^[v] Oliver, Egbert S. ā€œCock-A-Doodle-Doo!ā€ and Transcendental Hocus-Pocus, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1948), pp. 204-216

^[vi]Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Beaver, Penguin English Library, 1970, p. 425.

^[vii] Wordsworth, William. ā€œResolution and Independence.ā€ English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1967, pp. 284-85.

^[viii] Wordsworth, William. ā€œLines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.ā€ English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1967, p. 209-211.

^[ix] Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Beaver, Penguin English Library, 1970.