Volume 43, Number 6 · April 4, 1996
Melville's Fever
By Andrew Delbanco
Pierre, or the Ambiguities
by Herman Melville, edited by Hershel Parker, pictures by Maurice Sendak
HarperCollins, 449 pp., $30.00
Pierre, or the Ambiguities. Historical Note by Leon Howard and Hershel Parker.
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, by Hershel Parker, by G. Thomas Tanselle, Historical Note by Leon Howard, by Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press, 435 pp., $14.95 (paper)
During the winter of 1850–1851, Herman Melville seemed, in the psychological terminology of his time, to have been seized by 'monomania.' With his wife, Elizabeth, their baby boy, and a rotating delegation of visiting sisters, he had moved into a newly purchased house near Pittsfield, where he worked 'at his desk all day,' as his wife later recalled, 'not eating anything til four or five o'clock.' As he put it in a letter to his New York literary patron, Evert Duyckinck, he would go after morning chores 'to my workroom & light my fire—then spread my M.S.S. on the table—take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will.' Around mid-afternoon, Elizabeth would knock by prearrangement at his study door to remind him to eat—then, forbidden to enter, she was to keep knocking until he rose and came to the door. Melville's widowed mother recalled a March visit that ended with his speeding her off to the Pittsfield train station, where, in his rush to get back to work, he insisted on 'dumping me & my trunks out so unceremoniously at the Depot—Altho we were there more than an hour before the time, [and] he hurried off as if his life had depended upon his speed.' Only when his eyes gave out under the strain of the oil lamps and candlelight did he pause until morning.
Review, 4941 words
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