[In the following essay, Parker examines documentary evidence such as Melville's correspondence with his publishers and reviews of Moby-Dick to suggest reasons why the author's focus on Pierre's psyche was diverted to self-analysis of his own literary career.]

Melville's intentions in writing Pierre have been debated with intermittent energy for several decades, but many basic questions remain unanswered.¹ When and in what mood did Melville conceive it and write it? Did he conceive and begin it in one mood and finish it in another? Did he intend it to be a popular romance and only inadvertently or recklessly alter its course so that it was foredoomed to failure? Did he intend all along that it be simultaneously a profounder book than Moby-Dick and a book most readers could appreciate at a superficial level? How much had he written when he broke off work at the end of 1851 to make a two-or-three-week trip to New York City? Why did he make that trip, anyway? When did Melville first know that the Harpers would insist on less generous terms for Pierre than for any of his earlier books they had published? Did the negotiations for the contract take place early enough to have affected the composition of Pierre? What effect, if any, did the reviews of Moby-Dick have upon the composition of Pierre, and when did any such effects occur? If Melville was angered by his friend Evert Duyckinck's review in November 1851, why did he apparently wait until February 1852 before breaking the friendship? How can one explain the discrepancy between the low page-estimate in the contract, signed 20 February 1852, and the much longer manuscript which may well have been handed over to the publishers that day? The answers to some of these questions depend partly on aesthetic judgments and are beyond the scope of this paper, but the answers to others lie in documentary evidence, some of it overlooked until now or not previously sorted out in meaningful ways.

We do not know precisely when Melville began planning Pierre. Leon Howard suspected that he had it in mind as early as September 1851, when he wrote his Pittsfield neighbor, Sarah Morewood, that the Fates had plunged him “into certain silly thoughts and wayward speculations” which would keep him for a time from reading two books she had sent him. Whether Melville was thinking about Pierre that soon or not, Mrs. Morewood very likely figured more largely in the conception of Pierre than we can now establish. The archness of Melville's special language in his letters to her is so clearly related to the diction of certain passages early in his book that one suspects they were partly written with her in mind as one potential reader, just as passages in Typee were obviously written as a way of teasing his household of sisters. Demonstrably, Mrs. Morewood's inveterate socializing is related to the composition of Pierre.² Reclusive as Melville later seemed to many people, he at this time sought occasions for “vagabondism” (as he wrote Hawthorne on 22 July 1851). After a notably sociable August, when Evert and George Duyckinck, the joint editors of the New York Literary World, were exhilarated but exhausted guests, Melville took several outings with members of the Morewood and Melville families into the Berkshire hills during Elizabeth Melville's confinement before the birth of Stanwix on October 22. Many scenes in the first half of Pierre record the hero's perambulations about a landscape obviously based on the stretch of the Berkshires from Mount Greylock to Lenox. There is no need to imagine that Melville took field notes during these excursions, but the fictional scenes do derive from his immediate experiences: in dedicating Pierre to “Greylock's Most Excellent Majesty,” he declared that he had received from that sovereign “most bounteous and unstinted fertilizations.” One such fertilization was soon clear to many in the Berkshire area. Some time in 1851 (more likely during the August feting of city friends than during the family excursions of the fall), Melville and his party had picnicked at the local curiosity, the Balanced Rock, where Mrs. Morewood had placed a music box far under the overhanging stone, so as to make it breathe “mysterious and enchanting music.” Melville himself thereupon inscribed “Memnon” on the rock, and J. E. A. Smith coyly hinted that this act was linked to the abandonment of a broken champagne bottle at its foot.³ It certainly was linked to the creation of the “Memnon Stone” in Pierre. Such verifiable use of the Berkshire scenery, while gossip-worthy to Melville's acquaintances, is insignificant compared to the profounder fertilizations manifested in the interior landscape of the hero's mind early in the book, as well as in the later vision of Enceladus.⁴

Probably some weeks elapsed between the fertilizing excursions and their springing forth in Melville's new manuscript. On 6 November, two weeks after Stanwix's birth, Melville received from Duyckinck a clipping about the sinking of the Ann Alexander by a whale. In his reply on the seventh Melville wrote: “For some days past being engaged in the woods with axe, wedge, & beetle, the Whale had almost completely slipped me for the time (& I was the merrier for it) when Crash! comes Moby Dick himself (as you justly say) & reminds me of what I have been about for part of the last year or two.” Melville's 17(?) November letter in response to Hawthorne's praise of Moby-Dick speaks anticipatorially about the next book, but not in terms of specific work already underway: “Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;—I have heard of Krakens.” All in all, these two letters offer only negative evidence: Melville did not take advantage of two conspicuous opportunities to make casual mention of a new work in progress. However, any new book was to be more ambitious than Moby-Dick: “I have heard of Krakens.”⁵

The actual book as he began it was remarkably well-plotted, the story of Pierre Glendinning, the young master of the great country estate of Saddle Meadows (evidently in the patroon region of New York)—a high-minded American enthusiast in search of a cause to champion. The cause, when it patly came, involved him in extraordinary mental, moral, and sexual ambiguities and allowed Melville the chance to demonstrate his mastery of many novelistic techniques even while subtly training his readers to be discontent with the superficial perplexities the “brisk novelist” regularly served up. It was the most objective and tightly controlled piece of writing Melville had yet achieved: for the first time his hero (whether putatively himself as in Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket, or plainly a fictional character as in Mardi, Redburn, or Moby-Dick) was not telling his own story in the first person, and for the first time in one of his novels (Mardi, Redburn, and Moby-Dick) the voice of the narrator-hero was not dissolving at times into that of the author. The writing went steadily and intensely, as we know from a letter Mrs. Morewood wrote George Duyckinck three days after the Melvilles had eaten Christmas dinner at her house. This is the first definite mention of Pierre:⁶

I hear that he is now so engaged in a new work as frequently not to leave his room till dark in the evening when he for the first time during the whole day partakes of solid food—he must therefore write under a state of morbid excitement which will soon injure his health.—I laughed at him somewhat and told him that the recluse life he was leading made his city friends think he was slightly insane—he replied that long ago he came to the same conclusion himself but that if he left home to look after Hungary the cause in hungery would suffer.

Certain facts stand out, though the claims in this letter must be weighed against other evidence. By the end of 1851 Melville was deeply engaged on the manuscript of Pierre, not merely entertaining silly thoughts and wayward speculations of one sort or another, for this rehearsal of his working habits implies a considerable duration. Mrs. Morewood could hardly have described him as so engaged that he “frequently” worked through till dark if he had just begun the routine a week or two earlier. The routine had gone on long enough for her to think he would “soon” injure his health if he continued in it, not the sort of thing one says about a healthy farmer-writer of thirty-two when he has only briefly been laboring under extreme conditions. Melville had been working on Pierre for at least several weeks, from about the time of the American publication of Moby-Dick in mid-November, if not still earlier, establishing a pattern of incessant application from which he was not deflected by any farm or household obligations or any reviews of Moby-Dick which he inevitably saw (such as the two-part review in the Duyckincks' Literary World, to which he subscribed) or any which his friends and relatives passed on to him.

Mrs. Morewood's account forms the basis for speculation about how much of the book was written by the end of 1851. When working at top speed, as he had done in the summer of 1849, Melville could write the equivalent of fifty Harper pages a week. If he began Pierre as late as mid-November, he could have written 250 pages, more or less, before he interrupted his schedule for the trip to New York. This guess gains some support from the letter he wrote Mrs. Hawthorne from New York on 8 January 1852. Although mainly concerned with her earlier praise of Moby-Dick, it contains Melville's first reference to the work in progress: “But, My Dear Lady, I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk.” Melville was having wry fun in echoing that fellow Scotch nobleman, Macbeth, and being archly condescending to an intellectual woman, but a question suggests itself: why did he not say, “a rural bowl of milk and a city vial of hebenon”? One reason is that he was setting up an ironically cheery and familiar contrast to his whaling book, but another may simply be that he had not yet written any or very many of the city scenes. Internal evidence makes it certain that he had planned from the outset to have Pierre and Isabel come to the city, but if he had already drafted many of the city chapters it is unlikely he would have written to Mrs. Hawthorne just as he did, even allowing for playfulness: actual bulky and messy manuscript pages have a reality which scenes yet to be written rarely have. As evidence about the composition, this reference to “a rural bowl of milk” is far from conclusive, but it interlocks with Mrs. Morewood's description of Melville's pre-Christmas labor and with later evidence, internal and external. A reasonable assumption is that when Melville interrupted his work on the manuscript at Christmas time in order to go to New York City he had reached or nearly reached the end of the Saddle Meadows section but had not gotten very far, if at all, into the city section, which he then thought would consist of about a hundred pages, at most.⁷

This trip has been puzzling to biographers, especially since it seems to have been hastily arranged (otherwise Sarah Morewood would have had no reason for writing George Duyckinck as she did on 4 January 1852: “Were you not surprised to see Herman Melville in Town?”)⁸ and since it lasted so long (from the last days of December through the second week of January or into the third). Leon Howard handled the dates and the motive in gingerly fashion, assuming that Melville's rural household routine was upset because Elizabeth had decided that “she needed to go ‘home’ in order fully to recuperate from her confinement,” but that before seeing her off to Boston Melville had “escorted her to New York” and “spent a few days” with Allan Melville, his brother and his lawyer. Howard continued: “He was too busy to see as much of Duyckinck as he usually did on his visits; but he probably took time to check up on a few city scenes he planned to use in Pierre and certainly talked over his literary business with Allan.”⁹ This is educated guessing. What drew Melville to New York, almost certainly, was the fact that he thought himself nearly enough finished with the manuscript of Pierre to negotiate a contract with the Harpers for a book of 360 pages and perhaps even get an advance on it. The evidence is in the letter Allan wrote to the Harpers on 21 January 1852, presumably several days after Melville had left for home:¹⁰

My brother would like to have his account with your house to the 1st Feby made up and ready to render to me, as near that date as will be convenient to you[.]

Respecting ‘Pierre’ the contract provides that if the book exceeded 360 pages a corresponding addition should be made to the number of copies required to liquidate the cost of the stereotype plates &c for a book of that size[.] As the book exceeds that number of pages it will of course be necessary to ascertain how many more copies are to be allowed than provided by the contract for a book of 360 pages. The retail price of the book has been also raised beyond the price fixed by the agreement, which was one dollar & of course a corresponding increase per copy should be made to the author.

This letter, hitherto known only in the portion of the first paragraph printed in the Log, has complex ramifications, and requires going backwards before going forwards.

The previous April, the Harpers had refused Melville an advance on Moby-Dick, alleging two reasons, first “an extensive and expensive addition to our establishment” and, second, the fact that Melville already owed them “nearly seven hundred dollars” ($695.65, to be precise). Late in the summer Melville had come to terms with Richard Bentley on The Whale, receiving less of an advance against half-profits than he had been given for Mardi and White-Jacket, though more than for Redburn. The Harper contract for Moby-Dick signed on 12 September contained no provision for an advance, unlike those for the three previous books, and when the 25 November 1851 statement reached Melville it showed that he still owed the Harpers $422.82, despite the sale of 1,535 copies of Moby-Dick and fewer copies of the older books.¹¹ The contract for Pierre which Herman and Allan worked out with the publishers during the early days of the post-Christmas trip could not have pleased the brothers, since the Harpers had been more cautious than ever before, stipulating that for the first 1,190 copies sold, the number required to pay for the plates of the projected 360-page book, the author was to receive no royalties. During the interval between the drawing up of the contract and his return to Pittsfield (that is, apparently between early and mid-January), Melville reconceived the unwritten part of Pierre and saw that 360 would be too low an estimate to accommodate the new material he would introduce. Allan's letter either means that Melville had already written enough new pages (presumably while in New York City) to drive the book beyond the initial estimate, or, less likely, that Melville had made up his mind to write passages which he knew would undoubtedly drive the book well beyond that length. The letter gives no clue as to why Melville's intentions had altered so suddenly and drastically, but it makes plain his unusual concern to know the precise status of his account. Despite this concern there was no money forthcoming until 20 February 1852, the day the contract was signed, when the Harpers paid him $500, of which just over $200 was already earned (mainly from Moby-Dick), while only $298.71 was technically an advance. On or soon after the day the contract was signed, the Harpers were given the manuscript, which proved to contain not the 360 pages which the final contract still called for but 495 pages of text, exclusive of the preliminary pages in roman numerals. There was no sudden, inexplicable composition of roughly 150 pages of unplanned material after the contract was signed: the additions not in the original plan had probably all been completed by 20 February. At that time the 360 estimate was some six or seven weeks old and already more than a month out of date, but there was no legal necessity for altering it since the contract provided for adjusting the number of copies that had to be sold before Melville's royalties began, depending on the length of the book.¹²

Although Allan's letter removes the problem of how Melville managed to write 150 pages after the contract was signed, a major question remains, for the disappointing negotiations with the Harpers do not fully account for the drastic differences in subject matter and authorial attitude between the parts of Pierre presumably written before Melville's trip to New York and those surely written either during the trip or after he arrived home. Melville's experiences in New York had profoundly altered his feelings about his career as a whole as well as the manuscript at hand. For months he had been talking aloofly about fame, saying calmly that if he wrote the Gospels in his century he would die in the gutter. Hawthorne's approval of Moby-Dick had confirmed him in that mood, as Melville's response shows:

People think that if a man has undergone any hardship, he should have a reward. … My peace and my supper are my reward, my dear Hawthorne. So your joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter is not my reward for my ditcher's work with that book, but is the good goddess's bonus over and above what was stipulated for—for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory—the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended. I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity. In my proud, humble way,—a shepherd-king,—I was lord of a little vale in the solitary Crimea; but you have now given me the crown of India.

Judging from Books 17 and 18 of Pierre, what broke Melville's exalted mood was the sudden exposure to a large number of reviews of Moby-Dick before, during, and after his disappointing negotiations with the Harpers. At Christmas he may have focused for the first time on reviews which had been accumulating around the house, but more likely he gained access to a number of earlier reviews once he reached New York, at just the time of month when the January magazines were appearing with reviews, including some of the most scathing of all. In the aftermath of his abnormal work pattern, which must have left him psychologically and physically vulnerable, and with his hazardously ambitious literary experiment still incomplete, Melville was in no position to content himself with the lavish praise which he must also have seen, especially not after his dealings with the Harpers enforced upon him the realization that he might have to abandon the hope of earning a living as a writer just when he had become a great one.

Melville's reaction to the contract discussions and to the reviews soon found a convenient outlet in the manuscript, which he surely had at hand in New York for showing to the Harpers. Instead of pursuing the consequences of Pierre's unprecedented resolution, Melville struck out in Book 17 against the reviewers who had offered him perfunctory and irrelevant praise as well as those who had condemned him or grudgingly praised him for what he knew should have entitled him to profoundest homage. In his new mood Melville began writing passages which could have relevance only to himself, not to the Pierre he had so consistently characterized in the Saddle Meadows section: “And in the inferior instances of an immediate literary success, in very young writers, it will be almost invariably observable, that for that instant success they were chiefly indebted to some rich and peculiar experience in life, embodied in a book, which because, for that cause, containing original matter, the author himself, forsooth, is to be considered original; in this way, many very original books, being the product of very unoriginal minds.” This section from the end of Book 18 is extraordinary as self-analysis, as Melville's own objective understanding of why Typee had become so popular and what its ultimate worth was, but it is wholly irrelevant to Pierre, who had had no such rich and peculiar experience in life and who (we are belatedly and distractingly told) had embodied whatever experiences he had had in magazines, not in a book. Whether or not Melville had intended all along to make Pierre turn writer once he reached the city cannot be established, but he surely had not intended to make Pierre's career distortedly mirror whatever the reviewers would be saying about Moby-Dick through the year's end and the start of 1852.¹³ Planning and writing Books 17 and 18 disturbed Melville's judicious narrative distance from his hero so thoroughly that he never fully regained it, and destroyed the intended proportion of longer rural section to shorter city section.

The evidence, which is mainly in Book 17, has been read with an imperfect sense of the chronology of Melville's work on Pierre. One of the commonest (and obviously correct) assumptions about the book is that in portraying the asinine critics of young Pierre, Melville was taking satirical revenge on his own critics. (Since the 1930s it has been known that Evert Duyckinck himself was the model for the impudently aggressive joint editor of the Captain Kidd Monthly.) Aware that Melville was recalling aspects of his own literary career in this Book and the next, many critics, myself among them, have taken for granted that what the reviewers say of Pierre is either very like or else patently the opposite of what real reviewers had said of Melville's Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick. That turns out not to be altogether accurate. When the phrases attributed to Pierre's critics are compared with the known reviews of Melville's first six books, it becomes obvious that in Book 17 Melville was not reacting generally to the reviews of all six of these books (or to a certain segment of them, such as those in religious periodicals).¹⁴ Rather, he was reacting specifically to the reviews of his latest book, Moby-Dick. Lewis Mumford's impression in 1929 was partly right: it was the reviews of Moby-Dick which Melville was reacting to, but not at the time he conceived and began Pierre; rather, his reaction came only during or after his trip to New York, when at least half and probably more of the book was already completed. One cannot safely point to particular reviews which Melville must have read before he wrote Book 17, but among the most conspicuous American reviews of Moby-Dick and those British reviews of The Whale most likely to have reached New York by early January, Melville could have seen many examples of the phrases which he satirizes in Pierre. He twists them one way or another for his immediate satirical ends, but the words are readily found in the reviews of Moby-Dick as they are not found in reviews of his earlier books.¹⁵

When Pierre was complimented for his surprising command of language, Melville had just been praised for his “mastery over language and its resources” (the London Examiner), condemned for ravings “meant for eloquent declamation” (the Charleston Southern Quarterly Review), and denounced for his “rhetorical artifice,” “bad rhetoric,” and “incoherent English” (the New York Democratic Review). Where Pierre was commended for his euphonious construction of sentences, a reviewer had just condemned Melville for his “involved syntax” (the Democratic Review). Where Pierre was praised for the pervading symmetry of his general style, Melville had just been praised for his “bold and impulsive style” (the New York Harper's New Monthly Magazine), tolerated for his “happy carelessness of style” (the Hartford Daily Courant) and his “quaint though interesting style” (the Springfield Republican), blamed for a style “disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English” (the London Athenaeum), for his “unbridled extravagance” (the London Atlas), and for his “eccentricity” in style (the London Britannia). There is a bare possibility that by mid-January Melville might have seen a reproach for his not adhering to “the unchanging principles of the truthful and the symmetrical” (the London Morning Chronicle). While Pierre's writings were praised for highly judicious smoothness and genteelness of the sentiments and fancies, Melville had just been condemned for his “forced,” “inflated,” and “stilted” sentiment (the Democratic Review) and for allowing his fancy “not only to run riot, but absolutely to run amuck” (the London Atlas). Where Pierre was characterized throughout by Perfect Taste, Melville had just been condemned for “harassing manifestations of bad taste” (the Athenaeum) and for “many violations of good taste and delicacy” (the New York Churchman), and called (by Evert Duyckinck) “reckless at times of taste and propriety” (the New York Literary World) and called also the author of scenes which neither “good taste nor good morals can approve” (the Washington National Intelligencer). A reviewer said that Pierre never permits himself to astonish; is never betrayed into any thing coarse or new; as assured that whatever astonishes is vulgar, and whatever is new must be crude. Reviewers had just praised Melville himself for his “original genius” and “wildness of conception” (the London Atlas), for “genuine” evidence of “originality” (the London Leader), and for his “lawless flights, which put all regular criticism at defiance” (the New York Daily Tribute). A critic had just found Melville's materials “uncouth” and the Americanisms of The Whale charming, although the book might not fall within “the ordinary canons of beauty” (the London John Bull). A reviewer also had found that Melville evinced “originality and freshness in his matter” (the Worcester Palladium). A critic declared that vulgarity and vigor—two inseparable adjuncts—were equally removed from Pierre. Reviewers had just condemned Melville for “‘a too much vigour,’ as Dryden has it” in the earlier books but unsurpassed “vigour, originality, and interest” in The Whale (the London Morning Herald), or praised him for “vigor of style” (the National Intelligencer), even while condemning him for “vulgar immoralities” (the New York Methodist Quarterly Review). A clerical reviewer declared that Pierre was blameless in morals, and harmless throughout, while real critics had just condemned Melville's “irreverence” (the Albany Argus), his “irreverence and profane jesting” (the Worcester Palladium), his frequent “profaneness” and occasional “indelicacies” (the Boston Daily Evening Traveller), and his “insinuating licentiousness” (the Democratic Review), or else deplored his “primitive formation of profanity and indecency” (the New York Independent). A religious critic declared that the predominant end and aim of Pierre was evangelical piety. Melville had just been denounced by clerical critics or pious lay reviewers for his “heathenish talk” and “occasional thrusts against revealed religion” (John Bull), for “sneering at the truths of revealed religion” (New York Commercial Advertiser), for “a number of flings at religion” (the Methodist Quarterly Review), and for “irreligion and profanity” and “sneers at revealed religion and the burlesquing of sacred passages of Holy Writ” (the Churchman).¹⁶ Similar parallels abound: these are offered as readily available comments from the reviews and not necessarily the particular comments which Melville read, though he certainly read some of them.

This theory that Melville lost his once-superb control over his manuscript and began farcing it out with disastrously inappropriate scenes goes far toward explaining one of the most baffling aspects of the period of composition, the contradiction between Melville's apparent amity with Evert Duyckinck while in New York¹⁷ and his cold letter on 14 February 1852 to the “Editors of the Literary World”:¹⁸

You will please discontinue the two copies of your paper sent to J. M. Fly at Battleboro’ (or Greenbush), and to H. Melville at Pittsfield.

Whatever charges there may be outstanding for either or both copies, please send them to me, & they will receive attention.

Nothing in the recent issues of the magazine seems adequate to account for Melville's extraordinary rudeness, and no private communication between Melville and the Duyckincks at this time has been preserved, aside from Melville's hasty note while he was in town. We have tended to look for some public cause, as in Leon Howard's proposal that the February letter was “a delayed petulant reaction against parts of his friend Evert A. Duyckinck's review of Moby-Dick in the Literary World.”¹⁹ Even the hedging “delayed” and “parts of” (after all, the review implicitly compared him to Shakespeare) do not account for the timing and the abruptness of Melville's simultaneous cancellation of subscription and friendship. Melville's action may have been caused by an event much more recent than the review, but discussing it requires another look backward.

Melville's resentment against the Duyckincks might never have surfaced so plainly without the combination of events in late 1851 and early 1852, but it had long been building. In a late (and presumably late-written) section of Mardi (chap. 180), Melville had first declared his independence of the Duyckinck circle, implying in the process just how much he must have resented Duyckinck's treating him not as potentially a great writer but as a sailor-author always on call to review nautical books or books of inland travel. On 12 February 1851, almost precisely a year before he cancelled his subscription to the Literary World, Melville had (not for the first time) refused a request from Evert:

How shall a man go about refusing a man?—Best be roundabout, or plumb on the mark?—I can not write the thing you want. I am in the humor to lend a hand to a friend, if I can;—but I am not in the humor to write the kind of thing you need—and I am not in the humor to write for Holden's Magazine. If I were to go on to give you all my reasons—you would pronounce me a bore, so I will not do that. You must be content to beleive that I have reasons, or else I would not refuse so small a thing.—As for the Daguerreotype (I spell the word right from your sheet) that’s what I can not send you, because I have none. And if I had, I would not send it for such a purpose, even to you.—Pshaw! you cry—& so cry I.—“This is intensified vanity, not true modesty or anything of that sort!”—Again, I say so too. But if it be so, how can I help it. The fact is, almost everybody is having his “mug” engraved nowadays; so that this test of distinction is getting to be reversed; and therefore, to see one's “mug” in a magazine, is presumptive evidence that he’s a nobody. So being as vain a man as ever lived; & beleiving that my illustrious name is famous throughout the world—I respectfully decline being oblivionated by a Daguerretype (what a devel of an unspellable word!)

Then Melville had gone on to say, “I trust you take me aright. If you dont’ I shall be sorry—that’s all.” Knowing in early 1852 that he still could not and would not scramble for attention in the magazines, Melville foresaw that literary tit-men like Duyckinck could destroy his career. Their olympian criticisms had retarded sales of Moby-Dick, and Melville must have had irrepressible inklings that his new manuscript contained passages more explosive than any in his earlier books, for all his desire to persuade himself that it would pass for “a regular romance.” But the event which impelled his Valentine's Day letter may have been less a reaction to the review of Moby-Dick in the Literary World than to Melville's own act of writing Duyckinck into Book 17 as the joint editor of the Captain Kidd Monthly, out to pirate Pierre's daguerreotype. Having written (or even come to the point of writing) the passage ridiculing Duyckinck, Melville may have felt that honesty demanded that he break the friendship. However, if this happened with no further explanation than a cancelled pair of subscriptions, the Duyckincks must have remained puzzled until they read Pierre. (They reviewed it with horror, especially at the hints of incest and the apparently atheistic moral of the Plinlimmon pamphlet, but wrote not a word of Books 17 and 18.) Although some mystery still remains, in our speculations we should remember that the event which caused Melville to break the friendship need not have been a new action of Evert Duyckinck's or even a delayed reaction on Melville's part to the November review: the planning, the writing, and the aftermath of writing Books 17 and 18 were momentous psychological events to Melville.

The aesthetic implications of this arraying of old and new evidence are analyzed in the collaborative Higgins-Parker study. For now, suffice it to say that by Christmas of 1851 Melville thought himself at least two-thirds through his dramatic analysis of the way an explosive tragic revelation may impel an exceptional human being into sudden and ambiguous mental growth; and he had pretty much convinced himself that the book would pass as sensational fiction even while embodying tragic profundities forbidden in the marketplace.²⁰ Had he continued in the same vein, Pierre would have been one of the world's masterpieces, although it would probably have been scorned by the critics and readers of 1852. But during an interruption of his intense labor at least two demoralizing events occurred to compound the disruption of his work schedule: the Harpers refused to grant him a contract on terms as good as those for his earlier books, and Melville in his wrought-up state read many of the reviews of Moby-Dick, including some of the most hostile. Stung by the reviews and by the realization of his impotence against them, and very likely stung by the suspicion that, after all, his book could not succeed on the two levels as he had hoped, Melville was diverted from the exploration of Pierre's psyche into a psychological analysis of his own literary career. What he wrote either in New York or after his return to Pittsfield was often superb of its kind (Books 17 and 18 are masterpieces of literary satire, for instance) but disastrous for the book he had first conceived and had brought far on the way to completion in one sustained period of composition. The book as finished was much longer and much less unified than it would have been if Melville had retained his initial purpose and intensity of concentration.

Earlier critics and scholars have often been very near the truth. Lewis Mumford was wrong in saying that Pierre was both “conceived and written” in a “mood of defeat, foreboding, defiant candour”;²¹ in fact, only certain parts among those composed after early January are products of such a mood. Leon Howard is right in believing that Melville “conceived” the book in “unusually good spirits,”²² although he may be wrong in suspecting that Melville was seriously planning or writing it as early as September and October 1851. Howard was almost right in thinking that Melville's plans altered after (“during and after” is the safe formulation) his return from New York, but in my judgment wrong in thinking that the new mood led to more powerful writing than that before the trip. Howard was misled into thinking that Melville gave Allan instructions for the contract about Valentine's Day: in fact, Melville had discussed the contract with Allan and the Harpers well over a month before that. Howard was also misled into thinking that the unanticipated pages were added after the contract was signed: most of them, if not all, were written by then; but he was right in thinking that most of these pages had to do with Pierre as an author. The conjunction of old but inadequately-studied evidence (such as the relation of the reviews of Moby-Dick to Pierre) and new evidence (especially Allan Melville's letter of 21 January 1852) allows the story to be told with much greater accuracy than ever before. As an account of a writer at work, this is a poignant story enough, but its full significance cannot be comprehended until Melville's achievement in the first half of the book receives the sort of criticism it deserves. After Higgins and I have converted all skeptics to our sense of the novel's literary stature there will be ample time to claim that the greatest single tragedy in American literature is that Melville broke off work on his manuscript when he did in order to make a routine business trip to New York City.

Notes

1. For a review of the controversy (in which Raymond Weaver, Lewis Mumford, Robert S. Forsythe, William Braswell, Harrison Hayford, and Leon Howard were the main participants) see my part of the “Historical Note” in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Pierre, eds., Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1971), pp. 396-403. The only serious recent contribution to the debate is Robert Milder, “Melville's ‘Intentions’ in Pierre,” Studies in the Novel, 6 (1974), 186-99. I disagree with most of Milder's conclusions, but we start with several of the same questions.

   For freedom to work out this new telling of an often-told story, I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., generously criticized an early draft. Over the last seven years Brian Higgins and I have been teaching Pierre to each other, and now we are writing a book about where and why it is good and where and how it fails. Our demonstration proceeds mainly by close reading of the text, but the aesthetic judgments from internal evidence are supported by the external evidence adduced in this article.

2. There are good accounts of what Evert Duyckinck called Mrs. Morewood's maelstrom of hospitality. See especially Luther S. Mansfield, “Glimpses of Herman Melville's Life in Pittsfield, 1850-1851,” American Literature, 9 (1937), 26-48; Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1951), chaps. 7 and 8; and Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville, Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), chap. 8. Good coverage of Melville's socializing in October and November 1851, before and after the birth of his son Stanwix, is in Metcalf, pp. 125-26.

3. Godfrey Greylock [J. E. A. Smith], Taghconic; or Letters and Legends about Our Summer Home (Boston, 1852), as printed in Merton M. Sealts, Jr., The Early Lives of Melville (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1974), p. 195. Published about the end of September, 1852, Smith's account was written before he read Pierre; otherwise having mentioned Melville's use of the Pittsfield Elm in Moby-Dick he would surely have mentioned the use of the Balanced Rock in Book 7, as he did in the short biography he wrote for the Pittsfield Sun after Melville's death. See Early Lives, 145-47.

4. A striking instance of the fusion of outer and inner landscape is the start of Book 6, “Isabel, and the First Part of the Story of Isabel.”

5. The Letters of Herman Melville, eds., Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 139 (7 November) and p. 143 (17[?] November). Hereafter letters are quoted from this edition but normally cited only by their dates. Caution requires the reminder that Melville had expressed a very similar ambitiousness between the publication of Mardi and the decision to write the unambitious Redburn. See Letters, p. 83, especially the image of putting one leg forward ten miles, then having the other distance it.

   Several weeks later, on 8 January 1852, Melville claimed that Hawthorne's letter, by revealing to him “the part-&-part allegoricalness of the whole,” had altered the way he thought about Moby-Dick. As Harrison Hayford pointed out in “The Significance of Melville's ‘Agatha’ Letters,” ELH, 13 (1946), 299-310, Melville had already developed a theory that great works of literature could be simultaneously popular and profound, appealing to the masses while being truly understood only by a select few. Still, Hawthorne's special insight into Moby-Dick may have affected Melville's attitude toward Pierre: the book would—this time by conscious design—work on dual levels, being comprehensible and salable as a regular romance with stirring passions awork yet susceptible of profounder interpretation by readers such as Hawthorne, whose understanding of Moby-Dick had given Melville a “sense of unspeakable security.”

6. This letter is in Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951; rpt. with a Supplement, New York: Gordian Press, 1969), p. 441, and in Metcalf, Herman Melville, p. 133. The passage is quoted here from Metcalf, since the Log wrongly omits “so” before “engaged.” Later Melville might fairly have been described as a recluse, but the raillery in this letter can be comprehended only if one keeps in mind Sarah Morewood's compulsive socializing. As for the pun, involved as he had been with the manuscript, Melville had not escaped the triumphal progress through the country made by the Hungarian patriot Kossuth, an event which had all but monopolized space in American newspapers that month.

   Earlier in this letter is a passage which ominously parallels the response many reviewers had had and were to have toward Moby-Dick and which suggests that the climate of opinion in the Berkshires may have triggered Melville's aggressiveness toward conventional Christianity in Pierre: “Mr. Herman was more quiet than usual—still he is a pleasant companion at all times and I like him very much—Mr. Morewood now that he knows him better likes him the more—still he dislikes many of Mr. Hermans opinions and religious views—It is a pity that Mr. Melville so often in conversation uses irreverent language—he will not be popular in society here on that account—but this will not trouble him—I think he cares very little as to what others may think of him or his books so long as they sell well—”

7. For proof of how short Melville then thought the city section would be, see the following paragraph. In visualizing the proportions of Pierre it helps to recall that in the Harper edition “The Journey and the Pamphlet” starts on p. 277 and the last page of the text is p. 495, with preliminary pages, including the preface, in roman numerals. I am assuming that the Saddle Meadows section was composed pretty much in the final order, or at least that Melville made few or no additions to it during the last weeks of his work on the book. In our longer study Higgins and I will examine the evidence for thinking that some of the sections set in the city may well have been juggled about before attaining their final positions.

8. Metcalf, p. 134. The Log, p. 443, erroneously prints “Were you surprised. …” For checking this variant and the one mentioned in footnote 6, I am much indebted to Paul R. Rugen, Keeper of Manuscripts, the New York Public Library.

9. Howard, p. 186. The best attempt to trace Melville's movements in late December 1851 and January 1852 is in the Letters, pp. 347-48, the note to Melville's letter to Evert Duyckinck conjecturally dated 9 January 1852. Normally precise, Davis and Gilman were not proof against the complexities of this period in Melville's life. The Morewoods did not return to New York on 29 December, as the editors say; they stayed on at Pittsfield for the New Year and returned on Monday, 5 January. (Mr. Rugen pointed out to me that Mrs. Morewood altered the date of her letter to George Duyckinck from 4 to 5 January. Perhaps she began it in Pittsfield and completed it in New York.) Mrs. Morewood did not expect to see Elizabeth Melville in New York on 5 January, as Davis and Gilman say. Knowing Mrs. Morewood's need for company, one can guess that her mention of remaining “quietly indoors” ever since her arrival might have taken her to midweek: probably the following “evening” she hoped to pass with Elizabeth was the eighth or ninth, which would still allow Elizabeth time to reach Boston by the tenth. Also, it is not Elizabeth's brother who recorded her presence with her children in Boston, but her sister-in-law. Furthermore, Melville's saying to Duyckinck that he was “engaged to go out of town tomorrow” does not mean he left for Pittsfield at the same time his wife went to Boston: the note specifies that he was going out of town only for the day. (Maybe he accompanied her and the boys to Boston, then returned immediately to New York.) Finally, “9 December” is a typo for “9 January,” and 21 January 1852 fell on a Wednesday, not a Friday! Although its terseness is appealing, one had better scrap the account in the Letters and make do with the less concise version offered here.

   We still know very little of what Melville did in town aside from the crucial business dealings discussed below. He gave a copy of Moby-Dick to his friend Dr. Robert Tomes on the fifth (see the Supplement to the revised edition of the Log, p. 930), wrote Mrs. Hawthorne on the eighth, and wrote Evert Duyckinck on the ninth, apparently, to say that he would be out of town all the next day: “I will be glad to call though at some other time—not very remote in the future, either.” It is quite possible that Melville ensconced himself to work on Pierre in the same third-story room (presumably at Allan's) where he had labored on Moby-Dick a few months before.

10. Leyda describes this letter in Log, p. 445, as Allan Melville's “adjusting the details of the contract for Pierre,” and quotes the opening words about rendering an account as of 1 February. Leyda may not fully have realized the letter's significance in dating the composition of Pierre, and Howard and I in preparing the “Historical Note” neglected to question Leyda's description of it or to obtain a copy. The letter is quoted with the kind permission of the Harvard College Library. I am indebted to Carolyn Jakeman for help in obtaining and transcribing the letter and to W. H. Bond for permission to quote it here.

11. The April statement is in Log, p. 410; the November statement in Log, p. 438. For details of the earlier contracts see the various “Historical Notes” in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition as well as Harrison Hayford, “Contract: Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville,” Proof, 1 (1971), iii-vi, 1-7. For a detailed analysis of the contract for Pierre (including the surviving draft passages) see Hershel Parker, “Contract: Pierre, by Herman Melville,” forthcoming in Proof, 5 (1976); the draft indicates that Allan's first impression was that the book was more likely to run shorter than 360 pages rather than longer.

12. Of course, it is misleading to speak of 150 unexpected pages. Melville did not simply write the amount he had planned from the first, then write 150 pages more for insertion at various points. He must have failed to write certain scenes he had projected—and had prepared the reader to expect—and have failed to elaborate certain scenes as fully as he had intended. Therefore along with the parts not planned from the outset, the book, or the second half of it, also contains the condensed presentation of some scenes which had been in Melville's mind all along.

    Melville's compulsion to work his new preoccupations into the manuscript at the cost of lengthening it was at war with his best pecuniary interests. He had reason for thinking that every few pages he added beyond 360 would cause the Harpers to add several copies to the number they had to sell before he began accruing royalties. If the Harpers were to hold him to the letter of the contract, Melville probably realized, the more he wrote the more he would lose. As it turned out, they did not do so. In Pierre, the “Historical Note,” p. 378, Leon Howard explains: “Although the contract provided for an increase or decrease in the number of copies required to pay the cost of stereotyping if the book was not of the estimated length, and although a large number of copies (150) were given away, the publishers only claimed the first 1,190 for costs. It was probably a just claim in view of the increased retail price, but, within the terms of the contract, they could have claimed the proceeds from 400 more. …”

13. There is some internal evidence that Books 17 and 18 (possibly even the whole plan to have Pierre become an author) were not part of the original plan for the book but were added under the new, autobiographical impulse. Certain passages in “Young America in Literature” and elsewhere indicate that Melville had been away from his manuscript (physically or psychologically or both) long enough simply to have forgotten what he had earlier written, a distressing sort of lapse in what had begun as his most thoroughly plotted book. Higgins and I will elaborate on these internal contradictions; Higgins's forthcoming study of “The Author and Hero in Melville's Pierre” painstakingly considers that judicious distance and what happened to narrow it.

    One more point: I do not mean to imply that Books 17 and 18 were necessarily written before all the subsequent Books. They probably were not, but their inclusion led Melville to damage the unity of passages which were already drafted.

14. Melville might seem to be recalling the Protestant clerical and lay attacks on Typee and Omoo in satirizing the clerical compliments paid to Pierre's effusions, and perhaps he is; but even here the language attributed to the fictional reviewers is best seen as precisely the reverse of what was being said of Moby-Dick.

    For quotations from the reviews of Melville's first five books we are still dependent on the Log and, especially, Hugh W. Hetherington's unreliable Melville's Reviewers (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1961), though certain reviews have been reprinted in my Recognition of Herman Melville (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1967) and still more in Watson G. Branch's Melville: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). Melville's contemporary reception is also discussed in each of the Northwestern-Newberry “Historical Notes.” Before this article appears the Melville Society will have published a booklet by Steven Mailloux and Hershel Parker, Checklist of Melville Reviews, which is based on new research as well as dozens of older reports of reviews.

15. The quotations in the next paragraph are representative of many that Melville could have seen during his stay in New York City. They do not constitute a representative sampling of the range of commentary on Moby-Dick, however; Melville was ignoring many points the reviewers were making, especially anything said in praise. The quotations may readily be located in Moby-Dick as Doubloon, eds., Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), or (in the case of the quotations from the New York Independent and New York Churchman) in Hershel Parker, “Five Reviews not in Moby-Dick as Doubloon,” ELN [English Language Notes], 9 (1972), 182-85. The quotation from Harper's New Monthly Magazine is not from the review in the December issue but the commentary on the British reception in the January issue. A melancholy addendum: The reviews in the Athenaeum and the Spectator were probably the two British reviews most widely distributed in this country (mainly through reprintings). As bad luck had it, they were among the most hostile, and in a final ironic twist their justifiable complaints about the bungled catastrophe influenced opinion in the United States, where they did not apply at all to the text being sold and read. (No one knows why there was no “Epilogue” in The Whale, but I am convinced that its absence was not deliberate. Maybe the American proof stuck to the wrapping paper, being at the bottom of the bundle sent to England, and got lost.)

16. These accusations, however well grounded, would probably have caused anguish in any household in the country. The anguish in the Melville household may have been intensified by the memory that Elizabeth's father, Lemuel Shaw, the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, had become the last judge to sentence a man to jail for blasphemy in that state. At the sentencing of Abner Kneeland in 1836 Shaw had offered this as the legal definition of blasphemy: “speaking evil of the Deity with an impious purpose to derogate from the divine majesty, and to alienate the minds of others from the love and reverence of God. It is purposely using words concerning God, calculated and designed to impair and destroy the reverence, respect, and confidence due to him. … It is a wilful and malicious attempt to lessen men's reverence of God” (See Leonard W. Levy, The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957], p. 52).

17. As long as we thought the unexpected pages (including Books 17 and 18) were added after 20 February, we were not wholly free to look for any motive for the Valentine's Day letter other than the much earlier (and basically laudatory) review.

18. See Letters, pp. 122-23, for why Melville should have been uncertain of the address of his old friend Fly.

19. Pierre, “Historical Note,” p. 376.

20. Melville probably did not admit to himself until late in the composition that he might fail in making the book both popular and profound, but in Book 26 the accusatory letter from Pierre's publishers, Steel, Flint, & Asbestos, can hardly be construed as anything but Melville's self-accusation: “Sir:—You are a swindler. Upon the pretense of writing a popular novel for us, you have been receiving cash advances from us, while passing through our press the sheets of a blasphemous rhapsody, filched from the vile Atheists, Lucian and Voltaire.”

    It is important to remember that Melville's mood of “lamentable rearward aggressiveness” (his own term in Book 9 for Pierre's behavior toward Falsgrave) may have lasted a relatively short time. He may have passed out of that particular mood well before he finished the book, though the damage had been done. In the months between the completion of the book and its publication nothing in his recorded behavior suggests that he was weighed down by a sense of guilt and trepidation. Both his reckless behavior and his self-accusatory mood may have been brief indeed, so brief that he all but forgot that he had anything to feel guilty about.

21. Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 200.

22. Ibid., p. 183.