Melville's New York Life

Abstract

Melville's New York Life John Rocco Click for larger view View full resolution John Rocco. Photo courtesy of John Rocco. But that was so far distant, that it seemed it could never be.No, never, never more would I see New York again. —Wellingborough Redburn in Melville's Redburn Herman Melville had a complicated relationship with New York City. New York was Redburn's dream return and Bartleby's Tombs. It was Melville's birthplace on Pearl Street and his family's home on 26th Street, today called Herman Melville Square. [End Page 176] New York was the city his father fled in terror and fever. It was the greatest port in the country when he sailed from it as a "boy" aboard the St. Lawrence in 1839. It was the city he served with professional dedication as a Customs Inspector for nineteen years. Melville spent much of his later life in New York in obscurity. When Julian Hawthorne met him in the city in 1884, he described the old family friend as "pale, sombre, nervous, but little touched by age." After having grown up with Melville's presence, he observed, "There was a vivid genius in this man, and he was the strangest being that ever came into our circle" (Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, in Melville in His Own Time, ed. Steven Olsen-Smith [Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2015], 134). New York City is Melville's city. New York was where Melville published all his poetry from Battle-Pieces to Timoleon. It is the city where he created Billy Budd from "Billy in the Darbies." And it is where Melville is buried: Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The Twelfth International Melville Society Conference at New York University (June 17–20, 2019) brought home the importance of New York City to Melville in one of the largest and most diverse conferences ever sponsored by The Melville Society. The conference was four days long and packed with interesting panels, talks, and trips around the city to locations with important Melville and maritime connections. It was also the 200th anniversary of Melville's birth and it was a return to origins, roots, family, city streets, and Ishmael's "Old Manhatto." Wyn Kelley began it all with a fascinating keynote on the Brazilian writer Adolfo Caminha and the question: "Is there a Brazilian Billy Budd?" Her talk brought us back to Melville's New York of 1886 when Caminha visited as a member of the Brazilian navy. Melville was then probably at work on Billy Budd. Melville's post-Moby-Dick career was also invoked in Rodrigo Lazo's keynote "Israel Potter Deported" as were issues such as immigration and cultural identity. Other topics raised throughout the four days included "Digital Melville," "Mapping Melville and Martí in Manhattan," and "Melville and Spanish America." Two wonderful Melville-inspired films were also shown: David Shaerf's Call Us Ishmael and Daniel Emond's Kill the Whale. New York City itself became the background to the conference with trips to the New York Public Library for a viewing of their extensive collection of Melville books, manuscripts, and letters. A poetry reading was held in the Rare Books Room at Strand Books, during which John Bryant also read from his forthcoming biography, Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life. The final day ended with a tour of South Street Seaport Museum and a reception aboard the [End Page 177] Wavertree, a nineteenth-century merchant ship similar to Melville's St. Lawrence (the Highlander in Redburn). Melville dedicated Redburn to his youngest brother Thomas, "Now a Sailor on a Voyage to China." It is the only novel of Melville's where he mentions a famous old sailor home on Staten Island: "I do not know what has become of Donald now, but I hope he is safe and snug with a handsome pension in the 'Sailors'-Snug-Harbor' on Staten Island" (NN Redburn 116). Thomas Melville became Governor of Sailors' Snug Harbor in 1867, eighteen years after the publication of Redburn and arguably the worst year in Herman Melville's New York life, when his oldest son Malcolm shot and killed himself. Tom ran...