Introduction to Melville's Marginalia in Edward FitzGerald's Translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

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Angela Little-Gott
Boise State University and Whitworth University

Herman Melville owned three copies of Edward FitzGerald's translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, but the only one known to contain his marginalia is the "red-line" edition first issued in 1878 by the Boston firm of James R. Osgood and Company (Sealts No.391). The red-line edition, aptly named for the red line bordering the text, was the first edition published in America, though the volume was in its third publication in England. In addition to The Rubáiyát, Melville also owned a copy of FitzGerald's Polonius, which he autographed on 14 January 1875 and recorded on the title page: "by Edward Fiztgerald ('Omar Khayyam')" (Sealts No. 218). As Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein observes, Melville's interest in FitzGerald's career would carry through until his death (103), for among books charged to Melville by the New York Society Library in 1890 is The Works of Edward FitzGerald (Sealts No. 217), which reprints The Rubáiyát. We can imagine that The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám appealed to Melville in his later years because it addressed questions of mortality, destiny, divinity, and the meaning of life, without imposing concrete answers. The book was written for "deep-diving doubters," in the words of William B. Dillingham (157), and it offered strategies for coping with philosophical and religious problems that had figured in Melville's writings throughout his career as a writer. He found a kindred spirit in Omar Khayyám and garnered significant inspiration from The Rubáiyát for his "Rose Poems," collected in the unpublished "Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: With a Rose or Two," and dedicated by Melville to his wife Elizabeth Shaw Melville. Moreover, as a man who famously could neither follow nor denounce his own Christian background, Melville found Omar Khayyám's philosophical stance and emotional barometer akin to his own amidst the deaths of family members, friends, and acquaintances.

The exact date and circumstances surrounding Melville's acquisition of the red-line edition cannot be established on the basis of recovered evidence, but Melville's correspondence suggests a period of less than a decade in which to place the acquisition. In a letter dated 2 April 1886 to his friend James Billson, Melville thanked Billson for sending him a "semi-manuscript" copy of The Rubáiyát (Sealts No. 393), stating that "the text, coming in that unique form to me, imparted yet added significance to that sublime old infidel" (Correspondence 497). As recognized by Finkelstein, Billson's gift "evidently contributed to an interest that was already there," and the source of that interest was likely the 1878 red-line edition, read and marked by Melville sometime between its publication and his 1886 letter to Billson (103).

Melville's Rubáiyat Marginalia

In his copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám Melville marked five passages in FitzGerald's introduction and twelve of Omar's one hundred and one rubaiyat. The markings in the introduction deal with Omar's neglect by his contemporary Persian readership and the mutilation and scarcity of his original manuscripts, and with Omar's stylistic and philosophical leanings. The marked rubaiyat display two major themes, which are death (with seven of the marked rubaiyat containing overt references) and the unknowable or unseen deity (with three of the marked rubaiyat addressing the subject). The one other marking is an editorial alteration by Melville. The markings consist of checkmarks, marginal scores, and underlines. With the exception of his front flyleaf inscription, "Edward Fitzgerald Indian Service, Translator," Melville wrote no words in the copy.

In FitzGerald's introduction, a special metaphor used for Omar Khayyám's rubaiya structure caught Melville's eye. He checkmarked FitzGerald's description of the rubaiyat resembling "something as in the Greek Alcaic, where the penultimate line seems to lift and suspend the Wave that falls over in the last" (18.14-15). In marking FitzGerald's description of the four-line stanza originated by Alcaeus and popularized by Horace, Melville was likely interested primarily in the nautical description of its properties. As Marden Clark observes, the rhythm and structure of certain passages in Moby-Dick are likewise "wavelike…the sentences break against each other or against the rocks or against a gentle sloping shore to roll up the sands" (Clark 159).

The largest passage Melville marked in his copy of The Rubáiyát is also the earliest instance of marginalia in the book, occurring on page 14 of FitzGerald's introduction. Melville's interest in the congruent fates of Omar's native reputation and of his manuscripts seems to explain the marginal scores he applied to beginning and middle portions of this passage:

For whatever Reason, however, Omar, as before said, has never been popular in his own country, and therefore has been scantily transmitted abroad. The M.S.S. of his Poems, mutilated beyond the average Causalities of Oriental Transcription, are so rare in the East as scarce to have reacht Westward at all, in spite of all the acquisitions of Arms and Science. There is no copy at the India House, none at the Bibliotheque Imperiale of Paris. We know but of one in England: No. 140 of Ouseley MSS. At the Bodleian, written at Shiraz, A.D. 1460. This contains but 158 Rubaiyat. One in the Asiatic Society's Library at Calcutta (of which we have a copy) contains (and yet incomplete) 516, though swelled to that by all kinds of Repetition and Corruption (14.1-8, 11-20).

Imagery of bibliographical deterioration appears in Melville's own writings from as early as Mardi (1849), where in Chapter 123 an assortment of "crumbling, illegible, black-letter sheets" are said to form "parts of a work, whose title only remained" (385). Following the publication of Mardi,Melville joked in a 5 April 1849 letter to Evert A. Duyckinck: "Who in the name of the trunk-makers would think of reading Old Burton were his book published for the first to day?—All ambitious authors should have ghosts capable of revisiting the world, to snuff up the steam of adulation, which begins to rise straightway as the Sexton throws his last shovel full on him" (Correspondence 128).Melville himself was largely forgotten by readers when he read and marked FitzGerald's introduction, and his late interest in the history of Omar's reception would seem to spring from notions of literary authorship that spanned his life as a writer. He drew "implicit parallelism" between Omar's and "his own fate" (Finkelstein 105),and the mutilation of Omar's manuscripts following his conflicts with the Persian Empire that accused him of "irreligion" certainly resonated with the man who said to Hawthorne after writing Moby-Dick:"I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb" (Correspondence 212).

The irreligious leanings shared by both Melville and Omar Khayyám led to literary obscurity during their lifetimes, and it must largely have been the prevalence of irreligious ideas and metaphysical questions in the Rubáiyát that endeared Omar to Melville. He scored FitzGerald's assertion that "Doctrines of Pantheism" influencing the Rubáiyát were

probably the very original Irreligion of Thinking men from the first; and very likely to be the spontaneous growth of a Philosopher living in an Age of social and political barbarism, under the shadow of one of the Two and Seventy Religions supposed to divide the world (22.15-17).

In also underlining the term "Irreligion of Thinking men from the first" in this sentence, Melville expresses a respect for freethinkers, a respect that would find additional expression in his marginalia to the "Bonhomme" identified in Omar by FitzGerald. In a diary entry dated 1 October 1856, Melville's friend Duyckink recorded that

Herman Melville passed the evening with me—fresh from his mountain charged to the muzzle with his sailor metaphysics and jargon of things unknowable. But a good stirring evening—ploughing deep and bringing to the surface some rich fruits of thought and experience—Melville instanced old Burton as atheistical—in the exquisite irony of his passages on some sacred matters (Leyda 523)

Again oriented around the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, Melville's delight in intellectual give-and-take and discussion of "things unknowable," often over a bottle of wine or brandy, seem to encompass his ideal of comaraderie. Later in FitzGerald's introduction, at the end of a paragraph extolling Omar Khayyám's unique voice and character, Melville made a checkmark by the observation that in his rubaiyat Omar seems "as frankly before us as if we were really at Table with him, after the Wine had gone round" (25.15-16).

As Dillingham observes, the marked passage on wine and companionship conveys FitzGerald's insistence that "Omar's outlook was not of a mystic" (166). This is another important characteristic for Melville, who was drawn more to philosophy than mysticism. In the section from "The Burgundy Club" entitled "The Marquis De Grandvin,"Melville might have had the above descriptions of Omar in mind when he wrote: "In the casual outcome of such a character gay fancies, and suggestions without stint, sallies of wit and bon-homme, all sharing more or less a certain lyrical glow; herein the spiritual bounty to us would seem to be an unconsciousness in the almoner" (Melville, Tales, Poems, and Other Writings 412). The observation parallels FitzGerald's conviction that in Omar's Rubáiyát "we seem to have the Man—the Bonhomme—Omar himself, with all his Humors and Passions" (FitzGerald, Rubáiyát 25). Both FitzGerald's introduction and "The Marquis De Grandvin" describe a man the narrators knew of but did not know personally, involving a kinship with a façade, a relationship with an idea of a friend. The idea must have appealed to Melville, who was "increasingly reclusive" in his later years (Parker 663). This imaginary table of friends allowed him to live a "hidden life," armoring himself against disappointments in himself and his family and his fears (710).

In his reading of The Rubáiyát,Melville primarily inscribed checkmarks in the margins alongside passages that interested him, though some marginal scores are also present in his copy. The most prevalent pattern of marking appears by rubaiyat that discuss the subject of death, including Poems XIX, XXII,XLIII, XLIV, LXIV, and LXIII. The passages Melville marked soberly assess mortality and present images of life's time running out or of a deity writing the temporal manuscript of one's life. That unknowable deity also piqued Melville's interest, and appears in marked Poems LXV,LXX, LXXI, XCVI, and XCVII.

Influence of The Rubáiyát on "Weeds and Wildings" and "Under the Rose"

The impact The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyámhad upon Melville's writing appears most evident in the poetry of Melville's unpublished manuscript works "Weeds and Wildings" and "Under the Rose." According to Finkelstein, "Under the Rose" illustrates the "most significant impact" Khayyam's Rubáiyát had upon Melville's work, as the imagery of roses and themes of mortality and the nature of divinity permeate both works (105). In "Under the Rose," the narrator is a servant to an ambassador in Persia and, according to Finkelstein, the work's allegorical meaning draws "from the imagery of Persian poetry and the philosophy of Omar Khayyam" (106). The strongest tie between Melville's imagery and its influence by Omar is held in the image of two angels described in the opening pages of the story. Melville describes

an angel with a spade under arm like a vineyarder, bearing roses in a pot; and a like angel-figure clad like a cellerer, with a wine-jar on his shoulder; these two angels side by side pacing towards a meager wight very doleful and Job-like, squatted hard by a sepulcher, as meditating thereon; all done very lively in small. (Melville, Tales, Poems, and Other Writings 441-2)

These angels parallel two found in The Rubáiyát. In Poem XLIII, Omar writes of the "Angel of the darker Drink / At last shall find you by the river-brink, / And, offering you his Cup, invite your Soul" (45.6-11). He also writes of a gardener angel in XIX: "The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled; /That every Hyacinth the Gardner wears / Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head" (37.8-12). Both authors' angels share ties to death and mortality; Melville's use is more overt, while Khayyam's is subtler. Additionally, and most importantly, there is no panic or desire to escape in either author's description. For his part, the servant to the ambassador in Melville's "Under the Rose" admired the sculpture with detached curiosity. He found the vases to be "mystical" and admits to not knowing "what to make of them…Yet for the grace of it, if not the import whichever that might be, was I pleased with the round device of sculpture" (Melville, Tales, Poems, and Other Writings441). Khayyam's narrator encourages the drinker invited by the Angel to "not shrink" (45). Each poem seems to council their readers to accept the offering of the rose gardener angel, rather than to respond with fear.

The sharing of wine as a form of camaraderie in "Under the Rose" bears unmistakable tokens of Khayyam's influence. The ambassador quaffs wine in the company of his court and hears a recitation of verse rendered into English, like The Rubáiyátitself, that includes the lines "Death's open secret.—Well, we are; /And here the jolly angel with the jar!" (Melville, Tales, Poems, and Other Writings 444-445). The "black grape" makes the ambassador anxious, as it symbolizes death and annihilation, his fear of death apparent after he retires to his chamber (Finkelstein116). His assistant, the narrator, explains the fear the ambassador wrestles with is due to "a certain malady whereof his father and grandfather before him had died about that age" (Melville, Tales, Poems, and Other Writings 445). Biographically, Melville could relate to his character as he approached the age at which Nathaniel Hawthorne died after slowly losing control of his mental faculties. According to Hershel Parker, during this period of his life, Melville "was puttering with unambitious literary endeavors, aware of a very natural physical weakening and aware also that mental decline might soon manifest itself" (Parker 834). Rather than experiencing the calm detachment the narrator does, the ambassador's anxiousness rules his reaction. At least part of the reason that the ambassador cannot accept the Angel of Death is that he does not accept the Angel of the Rose, which offers a way of coping with the dread of death (Dillingham 164).

Melville’s use of the imagery and ostensible adaptation of the ideas addressed in The Rubáiyátoffer a sober assessment of mortality and impending death. Rather than the Zen-like calm espoused by Khayyam, Melville’s ambassador has much trepidation towards meeting the end of his life, a trepidation with which Melville could identify. One occasion that brought this fear to the forefront, as recollected by J. E. A. Smith, was a horse and wagon accident on 31 October 1862. Both Smith and Melville were injured:

He had before been on mountain excursions a driver daring to the point of recklessness; but he always brought his ride to a safe conclusion . . . After this accident he not only abandoned the rides of which he had been so fond, but for a time shrank from entering a carriage. It was long before the shock which his system had received was overcome; and it is doubtful whether it ever was completely. (qtd. in Parker 1:523)

Over a month later, Melville's own testimony in a letter to Sam Shaw of 10 December 1862 conveys the same alteration in outlook noted by Smith:

I once, like other spoonies, cherished a loose sort of notion that I did not care to live very long. But I will frankly own that now I have no serious, no insuperable objections to a respectable longevity. I dont like the idea of being left out night after night in a cold church-yard.—In warm and genial countries, death is much less of a bugbear than in our frozen latitudes. A native of Hindostan takes easily and kindly to his latter end. It is but a stepping round the corner to him. He knows he will sleep warm. (Correspondence 381)

Unlike Khayyam, Melville’s story and letter to Shaw do not offer advice as to how the ambassador or Melville himself can alleviate his fears or how the fear plays out, but, like Khayyam, Melville and the ambassador do not let their fear govern them. Melville, tongue in cheek, found humor to alleviate some of the anxiety and joked to Shaw about death being better suited for warmer climates, where the ground allows for a "warm" sleep.

Another work by Melville that seems influenced by Omar is "Under the Ground." In this poem, the narrator, walking in a garden by a tomb, encounters a young gardener clipping roses from the tomb to make chaplets for his master. Here, as in his other rose poems, roses are "used as a symbol for exploring a variety of topics: immortality, death, first love, physical beauty, mutability" (Shurr 367). This poem also introduces the new symbol of chaplets, which provide the young gardener's purpose for the master. Chaplets have two meanings, the secular one being a circular flower arrangement and the religious being Roman Catholic prayers that use prayer beads, though not necessarily the Rosary. Melville would have relished the dual meaning of such innocuous imagery. If one considers the imagery of chaplets with their secular meaning, the master mentioned can be anyone. Conversely, if one reads the religious meaning, "master" could be an unseen deity, an image fitting with Melville's marginalia. In Omar's poem XIX, the "Rose" is the subject: "I sometimes think that never blows so red / The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled; / That every Hyacinth the Garden wears / Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head" (37.8-12). The Rose itself could be the monument, rather than a physical structure, for the fame of the "buried Caesar." However, according to Christopher Decker, this rubaiya allows "for the possibility of life after death" and its "version of the body's new life is unmisgivingly unmetaphorical. The body lives on, not like a seed that germinates and grows into a stalk, but as and in it" (220).Though parallels between the rubaiya and Melville's poem in setting, the theme of death, and the employment of roses as symbol are obvious, their execution is opposite. Where Omar's poem is a monument for the life of the person buried in the tomb, commemorating it, Melville's is one of death. The roses are "inhume[d]" and "entombed" (Melville,Tales, Poems, and Other Writings 567). William Bysshe Stein believes "if the entombed rose is taken as symbol of Christ,[Melville] also disavows belief in eternal resurrection" (205).Melville has departed from Omar's philosophy of living on after death in this poem and focuses on the death and act of dying instead.

Melville's poem "Hearth-Roses" is more in line with Omar's rubaiya that provided its influence. "Hearth-Roses" draws from Omar's verse "Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! / That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should Close!" (63.1-8). Melville seems to have appropriated imagery and diction from this rubaiya for a love poem to his wife Elizabeth. The poem ends curiously, with the final stanza reading "Ah, Love, when life closes, / Dying the death of the just, / May we vie with Hearth-Roses, / Smelling sweet in our dust" (Melville, Tales, Poems, and Other Writings 569). This love poem makes no guarantee of their love living on after their respective and respectable deaths. Yet Melville may be invoking the traditional Catholic belief that a saint’s corpse smells sweet, illustrating the transcendent quality of a just life. "Hearth-Roses" can thus be seen to demonstrate a position Robert Milder finds elsewhere in Melville's late verse, involving "an intensity of inward life that is itself a vindication of 'the spirit above the dust' (C[larel], 35:II), whether or not immortality proves to be a fact" (88).

The Fraternity of the Pen: Omar Khayyam and Herman Melville's Philosophy in Action

As William Dillingham observes of the power Melville found in The Rubáiyát, "Omar recommends wine, not writing or painting, but while doing that, he is in the very act of artistic creation: his poem as poem, not as philosophy, is Omar's ultimate answer to the stark and terrible realities of human existence" (172). Melville, for his part, does the same, offering a distraction from the fear and pain of death by creating characters and situations that address this uncertainty. Milder comments that "Weeds and Wildings" raises issues of "not so much what to believe—about God or nature or society—as how to conduct oneself amidst the uncertainties of belief" (84). The difference, the genius of Melville, is that he recognized "some nameless struggles of the soul cannot be painted, and some woes will not be told" and, as Melville demonstrated, some fears cannot be soothed (Sealts, Pursuing Melville 7). This knowledge did not dissuade him from trying and, like Camus' Sisyphus, he kept his pen to paper, persevering until he faced the mystery himself in 1891, leaving his readers with his own sweet-scented manuscripts.

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