BOOKS
QUEER LOVE, FORBIDDEN LOVE
MELVILLE. By Edwin Haviland Miller.
Pursea Books. $7.95.
DOUBLING AND INCEST/REPETITION AND REVENGE, A
SPECULATIVE READING OF FAULKNER. By John T. Irwin.
Johns
Hopkins University Press. $11.50.
The Jacksonian term for
homoerotic
is
adhesive.
When the
phrenologist who did Walt Whitman clenched and calipered the bardic
head, he discovered a large and unblushing bump that signified
adhesive, adhesive, adhesive.
Years later, when D. H. Lawrence read
Leaves of Grass,
there was the bump in the poetry, the stickiness of the
adhesive embrace. "And the motion of merging," Lawrence wrote,
"becomes at last a vice, a nasty degeneration, as when tissue breaks
down into a mucuous slime. " No wonder Hawthorne dropped his veil
when Melville adhesively demanded a show of the naked breast.
Melville spoke to Hawthorne straight from the center of "Song of
Myself." "But I felt pantheistic then-your heart beat in my ribs and
mine in yours, and both in God's." One can easily imagine the pensive
frown that crossed Hawthorne's face when he discerned this ardent
embrace and saw the doubling at work in it.
Edwin Haviland Miller's biography of Melville is certainly the
boldest account of the old tar's life to date. After Melville meets
Hawthorne in 1850, Miller argues, everything Melville writes is about
Hawthorne, for Hawthorne,
to
Hawthorne. At once the beloved figure
of Isaac and the cherished icon of Apollo, the Preferred Brother, the
Handsome Sailor, Hawthorne tentatively permits an intimacy. Mel–
ville writes
Moby Dick
in its fostering glow. But as Melville's affection
thrives, as he writes cheerfully about Socratic hugs and ineffable
felicities, Hawthorne gradually disengages himself, and soon the door
is shut. Plainly speaking, Hawthorne breaks Melville's heart. Or–
phaned, outcast again, Melville is left
to
tell the tale. And such is the
story told in this biography, a tale of unrequited love.
There are hazards in reading Melville's fiction beneath this torch:
Pierre
is so construed that Hawthorne becomes the shadow of Lucy,
Falsgrave, Isabel, Glen Stanly, and Plotinus Plinlimmon. Yet Melville
did appreciate the force in Ahab's monomania. And he did examine
early and late the lineaments of ungratified desire in Billy Budd's
