Introduction to Melville's Marginalia in James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems
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Matthew Giordano
Villa Maria College
Herman Melville received a copy of James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (1880) in January, 1885, as a gift from James Billson, a young admirer who was part of a self-described circle of "Melville readers" that had formed in Leicester, England (Correspondence 724). Thomson, a Scottish poet, had himself long been an enthusiastic proponent of Melville's writing, having praised Melville's work in the London National Reformer in 1865 and 1874 (Hayes and Parker 54, 125). In 1881, Thomson became friends with J. W. Barrs and, either directly or indirectly through Barrs, introduced Melville's novels to Billson (Parker, "Historical Note" 737). Billson began corresponding with Melville with a letter dated 21 August 1884, thanking Melville for "an immense deal of good" Billson enjoyed by reading his books (Correspondence 724). He went on to write Melville at least seven more letters over the next several years, all of which are unlocated, including the one of January, 1885, that accompanied the presentation of The City of Dreadful Night.
Thomson died in 1882 after a long bout with alcoholism and depression. Though he published many poems, it is the title piece to The City of Dreadful Night that has proven to be his signature and enduring poetic work. He is also respected for his collections of literary criticism, which, in the 1880s, Melville read, marked abundantly, and commented on both in his marginalia and in his letters. Thomson is a Victorian writer whose work is striking for its rebelliousness and premodernist sensibility—two qualities that he unquestionably shares with Melville.
Marginalia in Melville's copy of The City of Dreadful Night are minimal, with five instances of marked passages (three of which are erased) and three editorial corrections, all in the side margins. However, in his correspondence with Billson he articulates his thoughts about the book more specifically, making several concise but illuminating endorsements. The combination of the marginalia and the letters helps to explain why Melville and Thomson were mutual supporters and offers rare insight into Melville's thoughts on the poetic culture of the 1880s.
Melville's "City of Dreadful Night" Marginalia
Although "The City of Dreadful Night" runs 193 stanzas long, Melville only marked two passages of the poem. As William D. Schaefer demonstrates, the poem is part personal narrative and part allegorical quest, both an autobiographical expression of Thomson's state of mind and a philosophical commentary on modern society (610). A literary precursor to The Waste Land, the poem describes the modern city, presumably London, as a place where the citizens are purposeless zombies and "Where Death-in-Life is the eternal king" (11).[1] This city is enveloped in eternal night; its inhabitants are insane, hopeless, lost, and suicidal; God is dead; and all sense of hope, love, and faith has been abandoned.
Melville's only substantive markings of the poem come in the form of marginal scorings at the end of the first section (from "Can put off" to "nothing can bereave" in the following excerpt). In an obvious allusion to Dante's Inferno, these ending lines explain that everyone who enters the City of Dreadful Night abandons hope and finds comfort in only one thing:
One anodyne for torture and despair;
The certitude of Death, which no reprieve
Can put off long; and which, divinely tender,
But waits the outstretched hand to promptly render
That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave. (7:10-14)[2]
If Melville marked this passage in 1885, when he received the book and presumably read the poem for the first time, he was 65 years old, nearing retirement, in declining physical health, having suffered personal tragedy with the loss of his sons Malcolm and Stanwix, and dealing with being a forgotten writer. As Hershel Parker documents, Melville was an introverted and mostly asocial figure during his last years (Parker, Herman Melville 2:905-923). It is therefore tempting to read Melville's marking of these lines biographically, as expressing his disappointment with life and his desire for death.
While there may be truth to this reading, other facts of Melville's biography contest it, for Melville did not spend his last decade simply biding time until his death. As Parker observes, he continued to read voluminously and write productively, caring enough about his poetry to pay out of pocket for the publication of two books of poems, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon (1891). If Melville identified somberly with the lines of resignation he marked in "The City of Dreadful Night," this identification seems to represent only part of his perspective in his old age. Paradoxically, indeed, his perspective on death inspired much of his late literary activity; for many of the poems in John Marr and Timoleon, as well as the novella Billy Budd (left unfinished at his death), meditate on old age and mortality. Melville was always interested in exploring how characters respond to the inevitability of death (one thinks of the contrasting death wishes of Ahab and Bartleby, the latter of which seems most resonant with Thomson's lines), and this subject lost none of its poignancy or immediacy in his work as he advanced in years.
Indeed, the stridency of Melville's personal and literary reaction to Thomson's sentiments in "The City of Dreadful Night" can be measured by the double scoring he used to mark Thomson's footnote to the lines discussed above. Apparently Thomson felt that he had more to say on the subject of death as a welcome escape from life, and so he inserted his own footnote on the bottom of the page that reads: "Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when it will" (7.20-23). The notion that life is a withered and barren garden finds its way into much of Melville's late writing, from "John Marr" and "Bridegroom Dick," with their passionate laments for the friendships of their lost youth, to Billy Budd and its implication that our utilitarian society spoils and destroys those who embody life in all its innocence and vitality. Melville perhaps explores this theme most specifically in "C——'s Lament" from Timoleon, particularly as it pertains to old age. In its entirety, the poem reads:
How lovely was the light of heaven,
What angels leaned from out the sky
In years when youth was more than wine
And man and nature seemed divine
Ere yet I felt that youth must die.
Ere yet I felt that youth must die
How insubstantial looked the earth,
Alladin-land! in each advance,
Or here or there, a new romance;
I never dreamed would come a dearth.
And nothing then but had its worth,
Even pain. Yes, pleasure still and pain
In quick reaction made of life
A lovers' quarrel, happy strife
In youth that never comes again.
But will youth never come again?
Even to his grave-bed has he gone,
And left me lone to wake by night
With heavy heart that erst was light?
O, lay it at his head—a stone! (Poems 322-23)
Melville's decision to mark Thomson's lines about the enviableness of death and the meaninglessness of life becomes far more understandable when considered in relation to a poem like "C——'s Lament."
"The City of Dreadful Night" in Melville's Correspondence
Although Melville's marginalia on "The City of Dreadful Night" is, aside from two textual corrections based on an errata slip in the front of the volume, limited to his scoring of lines on death, he did make several insightful comments about the poem in his correspondence. In a letter to Billson dated 31 December 1888, Melville writes "But 'The City of Dreadful Night', one can hardly overestimate it, massive and mighty as it is,—its gloom is its sublimity. The confronting Sphinx and Angel, where shall we go to match them?" (Correspondence 514). Just over one year later, in a 12 January 1890 letter to H. S. Salt, Thomson's biographer and friend of J. W. Barrs, Melville states, "The 'City of Dreadful Night' is the modern Book of Job, under an original poem duskily looming with the same aboriginal verities. Much more might be said; but enough" (Correspondence 522). Certainly these two comments reveal the depth of Melville's esteem for Thomson and his poem. The latter is particularly interesting because it provides some access into what it was Melville valued in poetry: on its surface the poem is "modern" and "original," but embedded within it is timeless and universal truth. This statement recalls Melville's analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne thirty-eight years earlier in "Hawthorne and His Mosses," which lauds Hawthorne's ability to entertain the "superficial skimmer of pages" who is only concerned with the surface narrative, while at the same time engaging the "eagle-eyed reader" who penetrates into the depths of the story to find truth (251). In his final years, then, Melville remained committed to the notion that great art must be layered and multidimensional, and his refusal to continue his commentary perhaps suggests that, as great art, the poem articulates its "aboriginal verities" better than any exegesis he could provide.
Melville's comparison of "The City of Dreadful Night" to the Book of Job points to a theme that he and Thomson shared—the burden humans must carry when faced with an indifferent and even antagonistic universe. John Marr confronts the burden of life without family and society, overwhelmed by memory, loss, and isolation, and facing a hopeless death. Similarly, Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Confidence-Man, and "Bartleby" all take up existential questions about the human struggle for meaning in a world that continually withholds truth and in which the only certainty is death. The ultimate indecipherability of nature and human life is precisely what Melville found so eloquently expressed in the confrontation of the "Sphinx" and the "Angel" to which he refers in the 31 December 1888 letter. In "The City of Dreadful Night," the speaking character documents the confrontation he witnessed between an angel, strong and "vigilant," and a sphinx, "placidly unquelled" (50). Brandishing a sword to kill the sphinx, the angel is instead easily vanquished by the sphinx's powerful indifference and his "grand front changeless as life's laws": "The angel's wings had fallen, stone on stone, / And lay there shattered; / . . . . / The sphinx unchanged looked forthright, as aware / Of nothing in the vast abyss of air" (51, 50). The sphinx's victory leaves the speaker confused, while concluding, "I pondered long that cold majestic face / Whose vision seemed of infinite void space" (51). Clearly Thomson's message is that religion, faith, and the notion of a benign God are human inventions, self-defeating myths that crumble when they confront the cold reality of the limits of human knowledge. The connections to Melville's writing are obvious, from the whiteness of the whale in Moby-Dick to Bartleby staring blankly at the brick wall, and to the poem "The Berg" in John Marr, in which a ship sinks after crashing into a "hard," "cold," and "vast" iceberg with its "dead indifference" (Poems 297).
In their pervasive and inexorable skepticism, then, Melville and Thomson were compatriots of sorts, a thesis that William B. Dillingham explores in great detail in Melville and His Circle: The Last Years. Dillingham deftly traces the thematic and philosophical consanguinities in Melville's and Thomson's writings, ranging over the full spectrum of Melville's works more specifically than I can here. Yet Dillingham ultimately concludes that while Melville and Thomson were both pessimists, they differed in degree. Thomson was a proponent of the actual school of Pessimism that developed in the late nineteenth century, committed to the belief that the world is illusory, that our wills are nefarious, and that there is no Creator who can free us from despair and affliction (Dillingham 43). Melville, as Dillingham argues, was too skeptical and individualistic to belong to any creed or school, maintaining a pessimism that did not foreclose other possible theories or modes of knowledge. It is this inherent attraction to, but not complete comfort with, pessimism that explains another of Melville's major comments—the first chronologically—about "The City of Dreadful Night" found in his letters. In his 22 January 1885 letter to Billson, Melville writes:
I am grateful for the last volume you kindly sent me, received yesterday.—"Sunday up the River," contrasting with the "City of Dreadful Night", is like a Cuban humming-bird, beautiful in faery tints, flying against a tropic thunder-cloud. Your friend was a sterling poet, if ever one sang. As to his pessimism, altho' neither pessimist nor optomist [sic] myself, nevertheless I relish it in the verse if for nothing else than as a counterpoise to the exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a bluster in these days—at least, in some quarters. (Correspondence 485-86)
Maintaining a moderately approving tone, Melville admires Thomson's pessimism, but refuses to identify with or fully support it. It is in keeping with this restraint that he praises "Sunday Up the River" before remarking on "The City of Dreadful Night." "Sunday Up the River" is a touching romantic love poem, the collection's conspicuous foil to Thomson's title piece. Melville's comments in this letter reinforce Dillingham's thesis that while Melville may have felt a general affinity for Thomson's brand of pessimism, he was not, as was Thomson, a philosophical Pessimist.
Brothers in "Art"
Melville's comparison of Thomson's pessimism to the overblown optimism of much other poetry in his day connects directly to the other instances of marginalia in his copy of The City of Dreadful Night. In Thomson's poem entitled "Art," Melville scored the following couplets with a vertical line in the right margin: "Who gives the fine report of the feast? / He who got it none and enjoyed it least. / Were the wine really slipping down his throat / Would his song of the wine advance a note?" (133.12-15). He left the succeeding couplet unmarked before marking the following: "Who shall the great battle story write? / Not the hero down in the thick of fight" (133.18-19). In addition to appreciating his pessimism, Melville certainly valued Thomson's serious interrogation of the artistic process and the writer's social position. Here Thomson suggests that writing is a kind of default occupation, a task left to those who are not directly involved in living. Again, Melville's decision to mark these stanzas corresponds to the facts of his biography: working a prosaic job, nearing retirement, and far removed from his sea-faring adventures and his brief stint of literary fame, Melville might readily have related to the notion that the writer is an outsider to life, living on the margins observing rather than doing (perhaps he left unmarked the intervening couplet—"Will you puff out the music that sways the whirl, / Or dance and make love with a pretty girl?"—because it does not substantively advance this point). Melville depicts the artist in exactly these terms in "The Weaver" from Timoleon:
For years within a mud-built room
For Arva's shrine he weaves the shawl,
Lone wight, and at a lonely loom,
His busy shadow on the wall.
The face is pinched, the form is bent,
No pastime knows he nor the wine,
Recluse he lives and abstinent
Who weaves for Arva's shrine. (Poems 318-19)
Pierre, the most salient writer figure in Melville's fiction, conforms to this representation: Pierre removes himself from joviality and sociability to assume the physically and emotionally excruciating task of writing. Similarly, John Marr and Bridegroom Dick articulate their touching and, in the latter case, lively memories from the position of old men retired from the business of life. John Marr, Bridegroom Dick, and Pierre might have assented to Thomson's conclusion in "Art": "Statues and pictures and verse may be grand. / But they are not the Life for which they stand" (133).
Thomson's "Art" does bear a tangential relationship to Melville's poem of the same name, which he included in Timoleon. Melville, too, depicts the artist as a solitary figure who thinks about rather than directly experiences life: "In placid hours well-pleased we dream / Of many a brave unbodied scheme" (322). The difference here is that Melville represents the artist's imagining as a kind of bucolic pleasure, whereas Thomson portrayed it as an angst-ridden and ineffectual withdrawal from life. Yet Melville then explains that the artistic process of lending form to thought becomes much more complicated and arduous, requiring the wrestling together of opposites and the melding of contradictions to create beautiful art: "But form to lend, pulsed life create, / What unlike things must meet and mate" (322). Thomson also emphasizes the artist's struggle, declaring earlier in the poem that there is a tension between form and content that threatens to implode his poems: "But in vain, in vain, would I make it fast / With countless subtle twines; / For ever its fire breaks out at last, / And shrivels all the lines" (132).
It surely must have been Thomson's self-consciousness about the artistic process, and specifically his continued assertions that true art is dynamic, abstruse, and, in his case, almost unwaveringly pessimistic, that fueled much of Melville's admiration for Thomson and that led Melville to judge his verse favorably when compared to the majority of poetry in his day. It is impossible to know exactly who Melville had in mind when he made the statement in the 22 January 1885 letter about "the exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a bluster in these days." Critics often have charged postbellum American poetry with being stale and derivative, full of romantic and sentimental platitudes and trite expressions of beauty. Roy Harvey Pearce's The Continuity of American Poetry claims that by the 1880s "American poetry had relapsed into a half-life" (253). Like Pearce, many readers have looked at the broad swath of mid-to-late-nineteenth-century American poetry and found it too simple, innocuous, and consolatory. While currently this assessment is undergoing revision, it is easy to find prominent examples of poems and poets that seem to fit this description: one can think of Longfellow's "Psalm of Life," for instance; virtually all of the poems of James Whitcomb Riley, who was, to use Melville's words, just beginning to make "such a bluster" in the 1880s; as well as the overly wrought verse of Melville's literary acquaintance, Edmund Clarence Stedman.[3]
When Melville surveyed his contemporary poetic landscape, he found too much popular poetry that failed to express life in its complexity, that eschewed philosophical profundity in favor of formulaic banality, and that did not seriously "wrestle with the angel—Art." Melville's letters and marginalia suggest that he considered Thomson an exception, as a companion in honest and original literary pursuits. Elizabeth Renker has argued that Melville's poetry rejects what was in his day conventionally seen as beautiful and instead opts for a poetic that is formally and thematically wrenched, that fulfills his project of trying to "record what Melville believes to be the truths of human existence and at the same time to embody the epistemological opacity that he believed any truth-seeker would, by definition, have to confront" (13). This kind of artistic and visionary sincerity is precisely what Melville's comments about Thomson indicate he valued in his work.
Seeing Thomson and himself as literary outsiders, Melville marked one more passage in his copy of The City of Dreadful Night. With a vertical line in the right margin, he scored this passage in a poem titled "In the Room":
The table answered, Not quite all;
He saved and folded up one sheet,
And sealed it fast, and let it fall;
And here it lies now white and neat.
Whereon the letter's whisper came,
My writing is closed up too well;
Outside there's not a single name,
And who should read me I can't tell. (71.1-9)
A playful if characteristically despondent Thomson poem in which pieces of furniture take turns discussing the house's occupant, "In the Room" self-reflexively registers Thomson's anxiety that despite all of his efforts, the writer does not know to whom he is writing and risks having no readers whatsoever. Dillingham devotes much of his comparison of Melville and Thomson to their similar skepticism about the merits of achieving literary fame in their day and their hope of being seen as something more than a popular trend. Yet with such desire comes profound unease, for the artist will never know if he achieves a more lasting reputation and, meanwhile, spends his life in relative obscurity. Melville and Thomson both experienced this obscurity throughout the majorities of their careers, and, most acutely for Melville, during the years that he was reading Thomson's poetry and essays. However, it is as a product of this reading, in the form of Melville's marginalia, that these two poets are being studied together by the type of serious, learned audience for which both aspired.
[1] For a detailed comparison of "The City of Dreadful Night" and The Waste Land, see Culleton.
[2] *AC85.M4977.Zz880t. by permission of Houghton Library; Sealts No. 517. Parenthetical page references to marked and annotated passages refer to pagination in "Herman Melville's Marginalia in James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems," with line numbers following pagination, where applicable. For instance, the citation "7.10-14" refers to page 7, lines 10 to 14 of the PDF edition linked at the top of this page, and may include the mouse-over critical comment linked to the passage in question.
[3] For other assessments of mid-to-late nineteenth-century poetry that concur with Pearce's, see Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); Roland Hagenbuchle's introduction to American Poetry Between Tradition and Modernism, 1865-1914 (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1984); and Carlin T. Kindilien's American Poetry in the Eighteen Nineties (Providence: Brown University Press, 1956). Nineteenth-century American poetry currently is experiencing a resurgence of critical study and evaluation. See, for example, Paula Bennett's Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Mary Loeffelholz's From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Angela Sorby's Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917 (Durham, NH: U of New Hampshire P, 2005); and Matthew Giordano's dissertation, "Dramatic Poetics and American Poetic Culture, 1865-1904" (The Ohio State U, 2004).
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