All Astir
Portrait of Melville by Jos Sances created for the 2024 Moby-Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The caption at the bottom reads: “Herman Melville, based on a portrait by Asa Twitchell * Whaleship Acushnet by Ansel Weeks * Bay of Naples by Samuel Read/The Melville Society Cultural Project * The Moby-Dick Marathon 2024 * The New Bedford Whaling Museum.” Image courtesy of Jos Sances.
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The next two years are busy ones for the Melville Society. June and July 2024 will see the K-12 Teachers’ Institute, “Moby-Dick and the World of Whaling in the Digital Age,” a joint project of the Melville Society Cultural Project and the New Bedford Whaling Museum funded with a $196,290 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. “Moby-Dick and the World of Whaling in the Digital Age” was one of 19 K-12 Institute awards selected from 54 applications. The Institute is a hybrid: online June 23–28 and in New Bedford, Massachusetts, July 7–19, 2024. More information can be found at <https://www.teachingmelville.org/> and a full report will appear in “All Astir” after the Institute.
A year later, June 16–19, 2025, Oceanic Melville, the Fourteenth International Melville Conference, will take place in southeastern Connecticut, at the maritime campus of the University of Connecticut and Mystic Seaport Museum, home of the 1841 whaleship Charles W. Morgan. The CFP is posted on the Melville Society website. Steve Mentz, St. John’s University, will give the opening plenary on Monday, June 16, and Lenora Warren, Cornell University, will give the closing plenary on Juneteenth, Thursday, June 19. There will be an optional trip to New Bedford on Friday, June 20. It promises to be a rich and rewarding conference, with papers, panels, roundtables, book talks, the chance to mingle with scholars from around the world in this lovely oceanic corner of Connecticut, and many hands-on opportunities so that you, too, like Billy Budd, can have “a hand telling alike of the halyards and tar-bucket” (NN Billy Budd 9).
The year 2024 began quite wondrously with the Moby-Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The weekend commenced with the Friday night talk on January 5, 2024, given by Jos Sances and Jeffrey Peterson. Sances is the artist who created Or, The Whale (2019–2020), a 51-foot by 14-foot scratchboard mural of a sperm whale, “a monumental and environmentally urgent work of visual art suffused with Melvillean energies,” in the words of Peterson (“Or, The Whale by Jos Sances: Ark of the Anthropocene,” Leviathan, 25.3 [October 2023]: 10; see also, “All Astir,” Leviathan, 25.2 [June 2023]: 123). Or, The Whale will be exhibited at Mystic Seaport Museum beginning in November 2024.
Saturday morning saw a rousing rendition of Stump the Scholars. The members of the Melville Society Cultural Project divided into two teams: “Flames” consisting of Jennifer Baker, Wyn Kelley, and Timothy Marr and “Flukes” consisting of Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Christopher Sten, and Robert K. Wallace. The audience was invited to ask questions about Moby-Dick or Melville. The first inquiry asked the scholars to identify the occurrences of the term “ring-bolts” in Moby-Dick, which the Flukes answered with ease, [End Page 98] and it went from there. Marina Wells, who served as moderator, began to fear that no “I Stumped the Scholars” buttons would be distributed until Dylan Cuellar from the podcast Unburied Books asked what word Queequeg said when he was lifted into his coffin. The Flukes could not answer and so earned Dylan a button—but Tim Marr of the Flames could and did: “‘Rarmai’ (it will do; it is easy)” (NN Moby-Dick 479). It was a lively moment. Very few buttons were handed out, as the scholars are hard to stump, but great fun was had by all.
The Marathon itself began with the reading of “Extracts” by the members of the Melville Society Cultural Project at 11:25 a.m. followed by “Loomings” at 12 noon. Later that afternoon, Jos Sances screen-printed copies of his “Portrait of Melville” (see Image #1) based on the c. 1847 painting of Melville by Asa Weston Twitchell. The lower background is a drawing of the whaleship Acushnet from the journal of Ansel Weeks, who sailed on the second voyage of the Acushnet (1845–1847); Melville sailed on the first voyage in 1841. The upper background is “The Bay of Naples” by Samuel Read (1860) from a print owned by Melville (<http://melvillesprintcollection.org/items/show/328>).
During the Marathon, there were two “Chats with Melville Scholars.” Those in attendance were invited to ask questions, discuss conundrums, and share interpretations. A spectacular moment occurred when two Moby-Dick fans seated across the room from each other realized that they had conversed on Discord during the first year of Covid but had never met until that moment in that room. The young man, Jeff Cochran, posed a question regarding Moby- Dick and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Following a profound discussion of the similarities between Ahab and Lucifer, a young woman in the back stood up, cleared her throat, and began nervously, “Ummm . . . I have a question for the man who was just talking with the scholars . . . Ummmmm . . . were you by any chance part of a group on Discord that read big books during Covid?” The young man answered, “Yes, I’m Jeff,” then asked wonderingly, “Were you?” She replied, “I’m Sherbert Wells [her Discord name].” Sophonisba Franecki then went on to tell Jeff that she was 16 at the time of Covid-related closures and trying to figure out college applications and what to read and how to think and that the group reading Moby-Dick really helped her stay grounded during such a crazy and confusing time. She is now studying Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College and remains so grateful for the advice that Jeff gave her about literature and studying. By this point, everyone in the room was wide-eyed and slightly in shock. It was an unforgettable moment. As Wyn Kelley notes, it gives new meaning to the word “anagnorisis” (the point in a play, novel, or short story when a principal character recognizes or discovers another character’s true identity). [End Page 99]
The moment when Sophonisba Franecki (at left) and Jeff Cochran (at right) realized that they had met anonymously on Discord several years ago in a discussion of Moby-Dick. New Bedford, MA, January 7, 2024. Photographs courtesy of Robert K. Wallace.
The participation of the Melville scholars in the Marathon culminated when Tim Marr and Wyn Kelley were interviewed by Dylan Cuellar and Kassia Oset for a live podcast of Unburied Books (<https://unburied-books.castos.com/episodes/melville-live-at-the-moby-dick-marathon>). Cuellar and Oset’s podcast is billed as a “podcast reading its way through the N[ew] Y[ork] R[eview of] B[ooks] Classics, a series that resurrects fiction and nonfiction works worth remembering.” Marr and Kelley spoke about Melville: A Novel written by Jean Giono and translated from French by Paul Eprile. Giono’s “novel” was originally conceived as a preface to his French translation of Moby-Dick. Their conversation covered Giono’s imagined vision of Melville, the struggle to create art, and the role of an ideal reader. [End Page 100]
Jeff Cochran and Sophonisba Franecki now Moby-Dick friends in person after having become anonymous Moby-Dick friends on Discord. New Bedford, MA, January 7, 2024. Photograph courtesy of Robert K. Wallace.
Melville discussions have been vibrant across the country. Another Look—the Stanford University book club founded in 2012 by professor Tobias Wolff that “shines a spotlight on books that are forgotten or merit more attention, some plucked from obscurity, others read decades ago, that are short . . . and in print” (<https://www.nextavenue.org/university-book-clubsyears-after-college/>)—chose “Bartleby” for its January 8, 2024, discussion. [End Page 101] Panelists included Stanford professors Robert Pogue Harrison and Tobias Wolff; Harrison’s brother, UCLA professor Thomas Harrison; and poet Katie Peterson. The choice of “Bartleby” was inspired by the words of novelist Sophie Hannah, who called Melville’s short story “a flawless and ambiguous work of art. . . . Bartleby, blank in character, tests the characters of others. . . . Bartleby is pure enigma” (“A gripping, puzzling novella,” Independent [August 14, 2014]). The podcast can be found on the Another Look website: <http://anotherlook.stanford.edu/>.
And yet a third podcast came from the Midwest. In September 2023, Jeffrey Insko, Professor of English at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and a plenary speaker at the Thirteenth International Melville Conference in Paris in 2022, was featured on the Norton Library Podcast “Call Me Ishmael, But Don’t Call Moby-Dick ‘Boring.’” The podcast was advertised with the line: “Scramble up the crow’s nest and watch your preconceived notions about Moby-Dick swim out to sea!”
The Hennig Cohen Prize for 2023, which is awarded in the year following publication, went to Justina Torrance for her essay, “Melville’s Milton: Of the Devil’s Party and Knows It,” published in A New Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge (Wiley Blackwell, 2022): 236–247. The award was founded in 1998 in honor of Hennig Cohen (1919–1996), an early member of the Melville Society and a dedicated teacher, scholar, and modern editor of Melville’s works. The awards committee offered these remarks on the winning essay:
The committee was unanimous in our decision to name Justina Torrance the winner of the Hennig Cohen Prize for best essay published in 2022. Her essay, “Melville’s Milton: Of the Devil’s Party and Knows It,” focuses on what, at first glance, may seem to be known territory, Melville’s avid reading of John Milton. Yet while Torrance returns to an often-examined topic, she draws out an incredibly subtle analysis of Melville’s reading of Milton. The committee members were equally impressed with her use of recent digital and biographical findings to alter our long-standing interpretations. In all, this article stood out for its detailed attention to Melville’s reading practices and its elegant presentation of the argument.
The Melville Society wishes to thank all those who nominated and submitted essays and the award committee members for their careful deliberations.
Dayswork: A Novel (2023) has created much excitement among lovers of Melville. Written by the husband-and-wife team Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel during the pandemic, the novel explores a woman’s quarantine quest and growing obsession with Melville and the “blurry lines between life and literature.” The authors include real-life figures: not only Melville, Elizabeth Shaw [End Page 102] Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but also poet Robert Lowell, biographer Elizabeth Hardwick, and—for me personally the most delightful of all—professor Harrison Hayford. I was lucky enough to be one of Hayford’s students. In the following passage, I was the student advised to study Melville, not Henry James.
Harrison Hayford carrying with him a photocopy of Melville’s handwriting; Harrison Hayford writing in the margins of library books with his characteristic brown pencil; Harrison Hayford picking up pennies on the street, his eyes, he said, sharpened by his work as a textual editor; . . . Harrison Hayford advising a student to study Melville, not Henry James; . . . Harrison Hayford collaborating with graduate students but refusing to include his name; Harrison Hayford needing a ride to the bookstore because he didn’t have a driver’s license; Harrison Hayford “bookstoring” in Chicago on Sunday nights; . . . Harrison Hayford looking through the Hinman Collator for the first time, seeing a y wagging its tail.
The section on Hayford ends: “No one, said one scholar, did more ‘basic work’ on Melville than Hayford—‘If there is an afterlife, I’d like to think Melville would be waiting there to shake his hand and thank him,’ the director of the Northwestern University Press said upon his death” (191). I well remember the Sunday night “bookstoring,” when Hayford, knowing how few indulgences we could afford with our pittances of graduate student stipends, treated us to cheesecake. My first publication as an undergraduate (“Fanny Trollope’s Nephew Edits Typee,” Melville Society Extracts, 39 [1979]: 15) was a collaboration with Hayford, but he refused to include his name as he felt he was already long established and wanted instead to help his students. I do not know from whom Bachelder and Habel received their information on Hayford, but it certainly rings true. For an interview with the authors on their joint writing of the book, see <https://observer.com/2023/09/dayswork-author-interview-bachelder-habel/>.
The November 11, 2023, Berkshire Writers series featured Jana Laiz in a talk entitled “Inspired by Melville.” And yet another writer inspired by Melville was poet Wilda Morris, who published Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby- Dick in 2019, but who was prevented from a scheduled series of book talks by the pandemic. Pequod Poems includes poems narrated by Ishmael, Queequeg, Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, Pip, the Maltese sailor, and the wives of Ahab and Starbuck. Morris experiments with poetic form, including the sonnet, the sestina, the rondeau, the Golden Shovel (a poetic form that takes a word from each line of an existing poem and uses them as the last word of each line in a new poem), the erasure poem, and the lipogram.
An interesting and unexpected sighting of Moby-Dick occurs in Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water (2023), an Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club pick that Andrew Solomon of the New York Times calls “grand, spectacular, sweeping [End Page 103]
Cover of Wilda Morris’s Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick (2019). Image courtesy of Wilda Morris.
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and utterly absorbing” (May 2, 2023). The novel follows three generations of a close-knit and haunted family in southwestern India. Chapter 28 in particular makes reference to Melville’s work. Tom Piazza’s The Auburn Conference, also published in May 2023, imagines Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and other notable figures appearing at a fictionalized tiny upstate New York college in 1883. Jonathan Morse invites readers to peruse his free ebook at <https://issuu.com/jonathan-morse/docs/pierside_3.docx> about language in extreme circumstances, which features “Herman Melville getting indignant with the possible help of a botanist who wrote in a language he couldn’t read.”
All Moby-Dick references are not written. At the Whaling Museum (Hvalfangsmuseet) in Sandefjord, Norway, each case of scrimshaw contains multiple examples of whale teeth or pieces of bone upon which twentieth-century Norwegian whalers have carved “Moby Dick” or something evoking Melville’s tale. One artist inscribed “Kall meg Ismael.”
Scrimshaw inscribed “Kall meg Ismael” in the Whaling Museum (Hvalfangsmuseet) in Sandefjord, Norway. Photograph courtesy of Helen M. Rozwadowski.
In further international news, the Institute of Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge in England will hold a weekend course, “Moby [End Page 105] Dick an introduction to a great American novel,” in May, 2024. The Summary of Content for the course notes that Moby-Dick is much more than a revenge tragedy; it is “as Bob Dylan puts it, a novel in which ‘everything is mixed in.’ This course will guide students through the expansive oceans of this encyclopaedic novel and discover how Melville’s tale of obsession, fate, and the search for the impossible remains frighteningly relevant to our own times” (<https://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/course/moby-dick-introduction-great-american-novel-2>).
The Berkshire County Historical Society at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead continues to honor Melville in multiple ways. In the Summer of 2023, Melville’s great-great-granddaughter Cathe Kobacker donated a dressing table that had belonged to Melville’s mother Maria Melville (1791–1872) and been passed down through Kobacker’s family. The mahogany table, which is currently on view in the bedroom at Arrowhead, dates to the early nineteenth century and is similar to other pieces in the collection that belonged to Maria. In more practical matters, the BCHS repaired Arrowhead’s interior chimney, at risk of failure due to excessive moisture, and worked on Arrowhead’s historic landscape. In 2022, they began re-planting Arrowhead’s gardens with historically appropriate plantings that the Melville family would have had in the nineteenth century. The gardens should be complete and quite beautiful by this summer.
This issue of “Extracts” includes Arturo Corujo’s Bezanson Fellowship report. [End Page 106]
