The Writer as Reader: Melville and his Marginalia

William Giraldi on Herman Melville and Moby Dick

From the LA Review of Books (thanks to Matthew Feldman for the link):

In the General Rare Books Collection at Princeton University Library sits a stunning two-volume edition of John Milton that once belonged to Herman Melville. Melville's tremendous debt to Milton — and to Homer, Virgil, the Bible, and Shakespeare — might be evident to anyone who has wrestled with the moral and intellectual complexity that lends Moby Dick its immortal heft, but to see Melville's marginalia in his 1836 Poetical Works of John Milton is to understand just how intimately the author of the great American novel engaged with the author of the greatest poem in English. Checkmarks, underscores, annotations, and Xs reveal the passages in Paradise Lost and other poems that would have such a determining effect on Melville's own work.

Captain Ahab, that vengeful seeker puffed with "fatal pride," simply could not have been imagined without Milton's Satan, paragon of seditiousness and the heroic sublime. Both tragic heroes are solipsists and madmen who believe that God is an ill-mannered lunatic undeserving of his reign, and yet both evoke our best sympathy in their epic struggles. Ahab knows he is as "proud as Lucifer" and "damned in the midst of Paradise," and he shares Satan's mytho-maniacal poeticism: "I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass."

Like Shelley and Blake, Melville was charmed by the individualism and heroic striving of Milton's Satan, and he imbued Ahab with the same sense of outsized self-mythologizing. His rereading of Paradise Lost during the composition of Moby Dick significantly altered the novel's meaning and mythic scope. The extraordinary fact is that as late as 1849 (Moby Dick was published in 1851), Melville had yet to conceive of Captain Ahab and was focused instead on the non-epic bildungsroman of a shipmate called Ishmael. Take Milton’s Satan away from Melville and you can forget about the earthshaking achievement of Moby Dick.

In his biography of Melville, Andrew Delbanco contends that Melville's "immersion” in great writers at this time “lifted him to a new level of epic ambition." Delbanco gives particular attention not only to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein but to Dryden's seminal translation of Virgil's Aeneid, which Melville also reread during the writing of Moby Dick. After that "encounter" with the Aeneid, Delbanco writes, Melville "found himself recapitulating Virgil's story of a haunted mariner voyaging out to avenge a grievous loss." In other words: a vigorous rereading of epics vivified his creation of the most compelling quester in the American canon. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Samuel Beckett's Bookshelf
• Samuel Beckett's Reading List 1941-1956
• Samuel Beckett's Library
• Walter Benjamin's Library Card

W. H. Auden's University Syllabus

Over 6,000 words of required reading over one semester

W. H. Auden's course syllabus

From New York Daily News: ‘Poet W. H. Auden was a professor at the University of Michigan during the 1941-42 academic year, teaching "Fate and the Individual in European Literature." His syllabus required over 6,000 pages of reading including Dante's "The Divine Comedy," Dostoevsky's "The Brother's Karamazov" and Melville's "Moby-Dick."’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. H. Auden on Kafka

Gordon Ball: Beat Generation Photographs

Intimate portraits of Allen Ginsberg and other Beat luminaries

Allen Ginsberg autographs his Collected Poems for Daisy Ball, 31 May 1986, Jackson, Mississippi. Photograph: Gordon Ball

From Flavorwire: 'Gordon Ball spent 28 years taking candid photos of Beat legend Allen Ginsberg and his colorful circle of friends. The Howl scribe’s life is well documented in over one thousand images that Ball captured from 1969 — at Ginsberg’s Cherry Valley, New York farm that the photographer managed for a time — to the author’s funerals in New York City in 1997. Paging through Ball’s photos, you’ll find Beat fellows and other friends like Burroughs (in swimming trunks!), writer Herbert Huncke, poets Philip Whalen, Peter Orlovsky (also Ginsberg’s lifelong partner), Gregory Corso, and even Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. Shots of Ginsberg’s Lower East Side apartment, his desk, and other personal belongings have also been intimately captured.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: William S. Burroughs
• William S. Burroughs on Allen Ginsberg
• Carolyn Cassady on the Beat Generation
• Bringing Ginsberg's Howl to the screen
• Kerouac and Ginsberg Correspondence
• Jack Kerouac's On the Road as iPad app
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti on San Francisco

Patti Smith Photography Exhibition

Exhibition at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford from 21 Oct. 19 Feb.

Photographs by Patti Smith. Left: Roberto Bolaño’s chair. Right: Arthur Rimbaud’s utensils.

Photographs by Patti Smith. Left: Virginia Woolf’s bed. Right: Susan Sontag’s grave in Montparnasse Cemetery.

A. O. Scott of the New York Times interviews Patti Smith about her music, her award-winning memoir, Just Kids, and a forthcoming photography exhibition. It's well worth a look: 'Smith said she often organizes her tours around excursions in search of that kind of memorial beauty, seeking out places associated with the writers and artists she admires and with whom she feels a kinship that transcends mortality. The photographs in the Hartford show — black-and-white silver gelatin prints made from Polaroid negatives, small and square and in soft focus — are culled from a collection that documents hundreds of encounters with worldly effects transformed into sacred relics. A fork and a spoon that belonged to Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who has been one of Smith’s touchstones forever. Mapplethorpe’s bedroom slippers and the tambourine he made for Smith. A chair that belonged to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. William S. Burroughs’s bandanna. A replica of a life mask cast from the features of William Blake.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Patti Smith on Virginia Woolf