'Kneels at The Altar of Literature'

Herman Melville, neck and neck with Nabokov, is the most bookish and allusive of American writers. You can’t imagine Ahab without his forebear Lear. Once I recognized a silent allusion to “The Deserted Village” in one of Melville’s stories only because I had recently read Goldsmith’s poem. Those who have never read Goldsmith are missing very little in Melville’s story. Their enjoyment and understanding is not impaired, but for readers with a taste for such things, “Melville’s Marginalia Online” is a candy store. The elegantly designed site makes available a digital edition and online catalog of Melville’s private library, the books he owned and borrowed. It’s a wonderful place to get lost.

Back in 2013, I wrote about Melville’s father selling an abridged copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Seventeen years later, in 1847, his son purchased the same volume, signed by his father, from a dealer in New York City. The editor of “Melville’s Marginalia Online,” Steven Olsen-Smith of Boise State University, writes:

“Burton’s sophisticated prose, lush rhetorical excesses, digressive tendencies, innovative use of recondite information, and 19th-century standing as a favorite of the erudite and the intellectually curious, all point to artistic and philosophical inclinations that would soon begin to shape Melville’s own literary efforts and complicate his reputation and marketability as a writer.”

Melville owned a well-marked copy of the New Testament and Psalms, given to him by his paternal aunt in 1846 (five years before publication of Moby-Dick). Choose a page at random: Matthew 10:34, for instance: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”

[Go here to read a 2013 post about William Giraldi’s essay on Melville, “who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.”]