Magic Hours (2 page)

Of course, that
any
good book sees publication is a miracle on par with the loaves and fishes. New books are, by their nature, subject to the cruelest happenstance. A novelist can be
hit by a bus, manuscript under arm, on her way to the mailbox. But
rediscovering
a work creates an altogether different quandary. Smuggling forgotten titles back into print is more difficult than ever. When such an opportunity presents itself, the majordomos of modern publishing will reliably issue a stark mandate on one of several themes: It is money poorly spent. It is effort wrongly exerted. It is throwing away a spot on the list better reserved for short story collections detailing the adventures of young women and their diaphragms.

Publishing is a business with little consolation but the books themselves. Republishing
Desperate Characters
made me wonder if this was a most fleeting solace. Is greatness, in the end, no purer guarantee for survival than awfulness is for swift dispatch?

 

 

Art, Wallace Stevens wrote, “lives uncertainly and not for long.” Nothing illustrates how uncertainly better than what remains of ancient literature. The first performance of Aristophanes's
The Clouds
was held at a festival in 423 BCE. Judged today by many critics to be Aristophanes's greatest satire—it is almost certainly his funniest—it disappointed its author's hopes by placing third in the festival's competition. It was defeated by Kratinos's
The Wineflask
and Ameipsias's
Konnos
. It must have particularly galled Aristophanes to place second to Ameipsias. Among other things,
The Clouds
attacks the sophistic movement then sweeping Greece, satirizing its leader, Socrates, with such glee that Plato believed it helped create the atmosphere that led to Socrates's death. “Konnos” was the name of Socrates's music teacher, and thus it is likely that Ameipsias's play mounted a similar assault. We must rely on such phrases as “likely” because Ameipsias's play, like a number of Aristophanes's, no longer survives. Whether these works were abandoned by copyists, incinerated in a doomed library, or carried
off by plundering Ostrogoths, we can never know. All we can know is that individual excellence is a virtually useless consideration when pondering their disappearance.

For obvious reasons, religious literature has been better safeguarded against the obliterating levers of time. But one event in particular demonstrates the precarious stewardship to which all ancient literature is subject. In 1945 an Egyptian peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman discovered in caves near the town of Nag Hammadi one of the most significant caches of religious manuscripts in history. They would come to be known as the Gnostic Gospels. Contrary to the workings of popular imagination, the Gnostics were heterodox groups of Christians of highly varying beliefs. Prior to Muhammad Ali's discovery, all scholars had to piece together Gnosticism was the denunciation of church fathers like Irenaeus and Tertullian and the odd recovered fragment from works like the
Gospel of Thomas
. Texts in hand, and completely ignorant of what they contained, Muhammad Ali took them home and dumped them in a pile near the oven. Over the next few days, his mother burned an unknown number of manuscripts for the noble cause of preparing dinner for her family.

As Nazism demonstrates, censorship and genocide are part of the same continuum of eradication. As monstrous as intentional book-burning is, something more troubling flickers along the margins of the Muhammad Ali episode. For work that has survived nearly two thousand years to find itself sacrificed to the domestic pyre clearly reveals that literature is less vulnerable to concentrated efforts to destroy it than blind, innocent accident.

 

 

Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson form American literature's most influential troika. Their appearances are unprecedented; their innovations immeasurable. Mark Twain,
Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, great nineteenth-century writers of equal if less profound influence, would have left unfazed one early judge of American literature. In 1840,Alexander de Tocqueville could write, to general agreement, that “Americans have not yet, properly speaking, got any literature.” By that, he meant no American writer had yet kicked over the traces of European influence. James and Hawthorne never really would. As for Twain, Tocqueville's comment, “Only the journalists strike me as truly American,” seems instantly, if unhappily, applicable.

Melville and Whitman share both a birth year (1819) and a death year (1891). Dickinson, a decade younger than either, died in 1886. But for post-mortem developments that had, at best, oblique connections to their work, it is possible that Melville would be familiar only to a small group of antebellum scholars, Whitman remembered only as the author of the Lincoln eulogy “Oh Captain! My Captain!,” and Emily Dickinson enduring only in the whispers of Dickinson descendants as the unmarried shut-in who wrote abstruse verse.

Of the three, Whitman's survival is least perilous. Before embarking on his career as a poet, Whitman failed at everything he attempted. He was a newspaper editor (publicly fired, on one occasion, for laziness), a hack journalist, and the author of a forgettable temperance novel. He became a poet, at least initially, to amuse himself. Trained as a printer, he set
Leaves of Grass
's first edition on his own. (The printer's term for experimental writing then was “grass,” a larky job to be done during downtime.) In Whitman's day, poets were freighted with tripartite names like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Whitman was America's first literary bohemian, and for that crime endured many stripes by its reigning establishment gentlemen—all but Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom Whitman sent a first edition of
Leaves of Grass
. Emerson's 1855 response is probably the most celebrated blurb in literary
history. One of its less famous sections reads: “I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits.” Whitman, to Emerson's undying annoyance, promptly printed Emerson's words in gold print on the cover of the second edition, which still sold no better than the first.

But he soldiered on, writing new poems and endlessly tinkering with
Leaves of Grass
. Little by little, thanks to relentless self—promotion and a somewhat shameless exploitation of his Civil War experiences, he became the Maya Angelou of his day, filling commissions for commemorative poems and sought after by magazine editors for his views. He often concluded his packed lectures with a reading of the hoary chestnut “Oh Captain! My Captain!,” now regarded by Whitman scholars as his silliest. Although it was the favorite of the poet's unliterary brother George, Whitman himself once complained, “I'm almost sorry I ever wrote it.” It would be this slight Civil War curio, in the uncertain years following Whitman's death, that kept him fixed in prominent anthologies of post-war American literature.

Whitman was subject to nearly universal critical condemnation during his lifetime, his poems regarded as egomaniacal and obscene. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the premier tastemaker of his time and by all counts a dashing, valiant man who led one of the first black regiments into battle during the Civil War, attacked Whitman repeatedly. He claimed that
Leaves of Grass
made him “seasick,” and several scathing pieces in prominent magazines assured that Whitman would never be highly regarded in East Coast publishing cozies. Of his foes, Whitman once said they “wanted for nothing better or more than simply, without remorse, to crush me, to brush me, without compunction or mercy, out of sight.”

One of the only critical boosts Whitman received in his lifetime came from abroad. When the esteemed English critic William
Michael Rossetti received, as a gift, a remaindered copy of
Leaves of Grass
, bought from a London book-peddler in 1856, he wrote Whitman a letter of praise. When the 1867 edition appeared, Rossetti wrote publicly that
Leaves
was “the largest poetic work of our period.” This chance accolade ensured that, for many years, Whitman's reputation in Europe would be much higher than in the States. It would allow Ezra Pound, in 1909, the paternalistic complaint that American criticism had not yet come to appreciate Whitman's artistry.

Whitman's first American champion was William O'Connor, who became a devoted disciple after Whitman was fired by the Department of Interior for being a “dirty poet.” (O'Connor would later ascend to the bone-headed constellation of literary conspiracy theorists by trying to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays.) In the aftermath of Whitman's sacking, O'Connor churned out, with Whitman's help,
The Good Gray Poet
in 1866—a pure chunk of hagiography. The book did much to enlarge Whitman's fame (if not reputation; it was largely savaged), leading the good gray poet himself to reflect, “I wonder what
Leaves of Grass
would have been if I ... had never met William O'Connor?”

Whitman's true champion, though, the man without whom one can say there might be no Walt Whitman, was the bisexual socialist Horace Traubel. When the two met after a Philadelphia lecture in 1886,Whitman had probably never been more famous. Four years earlier, the most recent edition of
Leaves of Grass
had been banned in Boston, and though its first two printings sold out instantly, support from fringe elements like the New England Free Love League did little to change Whitman's critical reputation. Before long, Traubel would be serving as Whitman's amanuensis. Traubel's greatest accomplishment was
Walt Whitman in Camden
, a day-to-day compendium of his thirty-minute conversations with the aging poet. His other contribution to Whitman's
survival was his founding, in 1890, of
The Conservator
, which served as the
Pravda
of Whitman worship until Traubel's death in 1919. Rebuking anyone who dared impugn Whitman's name, it attempted single-handedly to beat back the onslaught from the literary establishment's broadswords.

But even all this was not enough. One of Whitman's last poems, “To the Sun-Set Breeze,” was rejected by
Harper's
, and appeared in a less prestigious magazine in 1890.
The New York Times
said in its final review of
Leaves of Grass
that Whitman could not be called “a great poet unless we deny poetry to be an art.” The same day, the paper printed his obituary. A decade after his death, Walt Whitman's works were out of print, his worst poem the one trace he left. Only Traubel's agitation, and a few scolding voices from abroad, gradually forced American criticism to look again at Whitman. If Traubel's great faith had faltered, Longfellow (or Holmes, or any number of others) might today be regarded as the preeminent American poet of his time.

 

 

No writer's critical woes are more famous than Herman Melville's. “Melville took an awful licking,” Charles Olson wrote. “He was bound to. He was an original, aboriginal. It happens that way to the dreaming man it takes to discover America.” Any novelist smarting from a vicious review is inevitably reminded of the disdain to which
Moby-Dick
first appeared. The story is used to illustrate the Potemkin village in which criticism is permanently decamped. Full knowledge of the story reveals just the opposite. The critics succeeded beyond their pettiest dreams of killing
Moby-Dick.

Melville seems to have anticipated the troubles he would face. When he finished writing
Moby-Dick,
he wrote to Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb,”
suggesting he was aware of the inherently conservative notions of novelistic form his book then defied. “When big hearts strike together,” he went on to Hawthorne, “the concussion is a little stunning.”

He had some reason to feel buoyant. His first books,
Typee
and
Omoo,
were critical and popular successes.
Typee,
in particular, thanks to its frank descriptions of native sexual practices, made Melville, for a time, a most unlikely literary heartthrob. His early success was harpooned by the failure of
Mardi
in 1849.When he offered
Mardi
to a friend, he wrote in an accompanying letter: “[It] may possibly—by some miracle, that is—flower like aloe, a hundred years hence—or not flower at all, which is more likely by far, for some aloes never flower.” In dire need of money, Melville cranked out the novels
Redburn,
about his cabin-boy experiences, and
White-Jacket,
a reformist fiction concerning, of all things, naval flogging. His reputation as a reliable sea-story spinner restored, he turned his freed-up intellect toward writing
Moby-Dick.

Moby-Dick
is the first true American novel, an affront to every retiring habit of mind that prevailed in the nineteenth century. As Melville's first biographer, Lewis Mumford, noted: “[
Moby-Dick
] is not Victorian; it is not Elizabethan; it is, rather, prophetic of another quality of life.” Despite the unwieldiness of the novel (it first appeared in three volumes), Melville's publisher was hopeful about the book's success.
Moby-Dick
had appeared a few months earlier in England, and Melville and his publisher waited with glistening expectation for the one review that truly mattered, that of the London
Athenaeum,
a journal read avidly in Boston and New York publishing cliques. It is either immensely heartening or unbearably distressing to know that publishers in Melville's day were also helpless before the judgment of a single, inexplicably important critical organ. Today of course, that monolithic power belongs to the
New York Times Book Review
. When
Athenaeum
's
review appeared, it proved fatal to
Moby-Dick
's success. “Our author,” it read, “must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who... summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessness, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise.” Blood was in the surf, and American critics fell over one another to carve off a piece of
Moby-Dick
's beached carcass. While very few of the reviews were as scathing as
Athenaeum
's, some even grudgingly acknowledging Melville's odd brilliance, the book was a disaster. It went out of print, 36 years later, with a total of 3,180 copies sold.