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PARTISAN REVIEW
What is wrong with all this? What is wrong with all this is that it
is so appealingly obvious.
If
one is an adult heterosexual, happily
married, sane, an emotionally balanced, outgoing and tolerant extro–
vert, or just an adequate husband and tolerable father, this is precisely
the view to hold of Whitman's and Melville's strangled life. They are
not the peers of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, questioners of "health"
and "normality," thinkers who think through the commotion of their
desire, but instead the precocious sons of Rip Van Winkle. A healthier
Hawthorne flinches from Melville's sickness, from the narcissism that
hisses in Melville's poignant overtures, the stickiness of the adhesive
embrace. By far the best section in
Melville,
and the most disappoint–
ing, is Miller's juxtaposition of
Pierre
and
The Blithedale Romance.
Through the coupling of Hollingsworth / Coverdale, Pierre/ Plinlim–
mon, Melville and Hawthorne rethink the troubled course of their
friendship. But Miller adamantly deals with the exteriority of these
characters. He focuses, for example, on the similarity of Hawthorne's
and Plinlimmon's contemplative gaze, on Pierre's oedipal trepidation,
and on the bearlike monstrosity of Hollingsworth. Using
Pierre
and
then
Clarel
against
The Blithedale Romance,
Miller "reconstructs"
what happened between Melville and Hawthorne. Not surprisingly he
concludes that Melville sought lasciviously to come between Haw–
thorne and Sophia. Conversation is melodramatically supplied from
The Blithedale Romance.
Like Hollingsworth, Melville at last im–
plores: "be my friend of friends forever." Like Coverdale, Hawthorne
replies: "I have never found it possible to suffer a bearded priest so near
my heart and conscience as to do me any spiritual good .... The task
belongs to woman. God meant it for her." So the slap is given. In this
crucial chapter, interestingly enough, Miller relies almost exclusively
on Hawthorne's ostensible telling. What he overlooks is that Plinlim–
mon is also given words in
Pierre,
a discourse.
If
we maintain the logic
of Miller's conflation of texts, this discourse must then constitute
Melville's ironic, cool, thoroughly dispassionate judgment of Haw–
thorne. Miller does not discuss Plinlimmon's text. This aspect of the
Melville/ Hawthorne friendship, the side wherein ideas are exchanged,
is generally ignored. Miller's eye is fixed on Melville's hand and
Hawthorne's knee.
In fact, Plinlimmon is a philosopher of time, an intellectual tease
who preaches the doctrine of "virtuous expediency." He is a smug,
suave, blue-eyed abomination. History is Maule's Curse, the inexorable
transmission of hurts, so one adjusts to it, the way of the world. One
trims his metaphors carefully. "In short," says Plinlimmon, "this
