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Humanities Back Issues November/December 2012

FEATURE

The Image of a Writer

By Randall Fuller | HUMANITIES, November/December 2012 | Volume 33, Number 6

Early in 1851, Herman Melvilles friend and publisher Evert Duyckinck asked the author for a daguerreotype to

publish in his magazine, The Literary World. Melville, then in the midst of writing a massive, rumbustious novel

that would become Moby-Dick, protested that he had no such photograph, adding, And if I had, I would not send

it . . . even to you.

Eleven years later, the Atlantic Monthly editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, made a similar request to an

obscure, retiring poet named Emily Dickinson who had written a letter asking if her verses breathed. Her

response was much like Melvilles, if typically elliptical: Could you believe mewithout? I had no portrait, now,

but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Burand my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass,

that the Guest leavesWould this do just as well?

This pair of polite, but emphatic refusals begins Michael Kearnss Writing for the Street, Writing in the Garret:

Melville, Dickinson, and Private Publication, a meditation on the way both authors imagined themselves as

authors. Descr ibing the conditions of authorship in the years just before and after the Civil War, Kearnss book

might also be taken as a cautionary tale about the perils of being a writer in a nation defined and driven by the

twin engines of democracy and market capitalism. As the Melville scholar Robert Milder has observed, The

problem of establishing intellectual and aesthetic standards in an egalitarian society was and remains a difficult

and politically volatile one in American culture.

In some respects, Melville and Dickinson had the great misfortune of writing just as antebellum America was

creating a mass audience for its authors. With almost universal literacy among its nonslave population,

increasin l so histicated ublishin and trans ortation networks and a wides read earnin for a national

Emily Dickinson

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,

culture different from but equal to that of Europe, America had for the first time in its brief history a truly national

audience that seemed within reach to many writers. The proof of a poet, intoned Whitman in the introduction of

his 1855 Leaves of Grass, is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it. Whitman meant

that in a newfound democracy, an author sensitive to his or her audience could expect a widespread readership

that transcended class lines and geographical boundaries.

While Whitman would not receive the kind of audience acceptance he prophesied and craved for several more

decades, other writers of the period became the nations first literary superstars. Ralph Waldo Emerson and

Nathaniel Hawthorne were representatives of a new indigenous high culture during the 1850s, their images

photographed and painted, reproduced in newspapers, magazines, and the frontispieces of elegantly published

books. But it was Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (1852), which sold millions of copies in its first few

years, that initiated the era of the best-seller. Stowe and her titular hero became household names, cultural

emblems in the cause of abolitionand, in the South, figures of derision. Numerous other women writers,

including Fanny Fern and E.D.E.N. Southworth, similarly enjoyed immense readerships. It was these writers who

prompted Hawthorne to complain that America is now wholly given over to a dd mob of scribbling women.

Attaining such popularity invariably involved certain trade-offs. As Kearns notes, The work of authorship [then as

now] requires engaging in publicity, negotiating the best deal, shopping ones goods, reading and marking proof,

and other activities that may strike a writer as unpleasantly sordid. The correspondence of Hawthorne, Stowe,

and many other writers of the period is filled with responses to requests for autographs, speaking engagements,

and other chores that often took away from time spent writing.

More important, attaining a democratic audience sometimes entailed a diminishing of literary standards. For

years, Uncle Toms Cabin wasnt studied in the academy because it was believed to be too popular, toosentimental, too unconcerned with exceptional language use. Even Whitman, one of the most vocal

spokespersons for a broad-based national literature, expressed some reservations about mass audiences in his

Democratic Vistas. I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, he announced, until it founds and

luxuriantly grows its own forms of art. . . . The only problem, he continued, is that too often the tastes of the

crowd fail to encourage difficult ideas or rich and multilayered literary language. Publishers were therefore

motivated to appeal to vulgar sensibilities in order to maximize profit. It seems as if . . . there were some natural

repugnance between a literary . . . life, Whitman laments, and the rude rank spirit of the democracies.

As Kearns reveals in Writing for the Street, Writing in the Garret, Melville felt this particular conundrum with acuity.

In a famous letter to Hawthorne, written several months after his refusal to Duyckinck, he complained, What I

feel most moved to write, that is banned,it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the

product is a final hash, and all my books are botches. . . . Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should

die in the gutter. Melville was by no means alone in his alienation from the market and from mass opinion.Dickinson, too, struggled to imagine her authority as a writer, addressing the tyranny of democratic public

opinion in one of her most trenchant poetic observations.

Much Madness is divinest Sense

To a discerning Eye

Much Sensethe starkest Madness

Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail

Assentand you are sane

Demuryoure straightway dangerous

And handled with a Chain

According to Kearns, both Melville and Dickinson developed authorial strategies that allowed them to turn their

backs on antebellum Americas burgeoning mass audience and to imagine themselves as romantic artists

governed solely by inspiration. Instead of courting the crowd, they became garret writers whose artistic

prestige was bound up in the fact that they were not writing for the street. So dissimilar in so many ways, both

authors nevertheless were linked by a mutual desire to operate outside of the capitalist and mimetic markets

(especially opposing advertising). Suspicious of the tastes of a mass audience as well as the techniques by

which publishing houses transformed authors into marketable commodities for that audience, they desired to

publish in ways that preserved their total control and ownership of their work. By refusing to sell out, Kearns

argues, they were able to write works governed by their own autonomous aesthetic criteria, works that ignored

popular trends, that aspired to art for arts sake. To accomplish this, however, they had to content themselves

with small, private audiences capable of determining their respective works design and intentions.

The decision to write in this manner did not come easily for Melville. In 1850, he had all but declared his ambition

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to become the American Shakespeare. (This declaration was in an anonymous review of Hawthornes Mosses

from the Old Manse and printed in Duyckincks Literary World.) In 1851, he was busy attempting to secure that title

by writing Moby-Dick. But after the novels disappointing sales and mediocre critical reception, Melville began the

slow, painful process of recalibrating his aspirations. A string of increasingly inaccessible novels and

anonymously published short stories eventually gave way to an attempt to become a poet. In the decades

following the Civil War, he produced a series of privately printed books filled with difficult, knotty, complex

poems, including the longest poem in English, Clarel, which he admitted from the outset was eminently adapted

for unpopularity. These books he distributed with little fanfare to a small coterie of friends and devotees,

thereby hoping to reach a more discriminating audience.

Dickinson, on the other hand, seems never to have seriously considered courting a large audience. While it isoften difficult to locate her meaning behind the verbal acrobatics and the smoke screens of her various

personae, she made good on her claim to Higginson early in their correspondence. I smile, she wrote him,

when you suggest that I delay to publishthat being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.

Except for a few poems published either without her permission or in order to benefit the Union army, Dickinson

never published in the sense we understand it. Instead, she eschewed book and magazine publication and

distributed an utterly original poetry that dealt obliquely with her eras religious beliefs and sexual relations

through letters and manuscripts to friends, family, and a wide range of correspondents. According to Kearns, this

decision should not be regarded as a failure of nerve, an example of the gendered tyranny of the domestic

realm, or a clue to pathology. Rather it was a shrewd move by an artist intent on exerting the greatest power

within a field of extremely limited production, . . . a practice that conduces to the greatest possible autonomy.

Although Kearns focuses exclusively on Melville and Dickinson, his book is suggestive for the way in which both

authors serve as forerunners to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It was precisely their distaste for a

mass audiencewhich they viewed as degraded by the yellow journalism of daily newspapers and magazines

that impelled modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others to produce difficult

works meant to distance themselves from the democratic readers of their period. Their solution to the problem

of producing art in a democratic society has sent generations of students through the thickets of footnotes and

reference guides.

On the other hand, serious authors who courted larger audiences quickly found themselves victims of

overwhelming market forces, their lives commodified and branded by publishers and public relations. Twentieth-

century prose authors such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac are among the best-

known authors who became ensnared by their image. J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon reacted against the

literary PR machinery by recusing themselves from the public eye.

Ultimately, if paradoxically, it was Dickinson and Melvilles refusal to court and attain a mass audience while theylived that has resulted in their enduring canonical status. Early in the twentieth century, both artists were

rediscovered and appropriated by scholars and cultural opinion-makers. In classrooms and anthologies, and

later in film treatments and book clubs, the two iconoclasts were, in Kearnss words, shaped to fit the alienated-

artist, garret-dwelling, antimaterialistic narrative of early twentieth-century American literature. If our

understanding of Melville and Dickinson continues to change and develop, one interpretation continues to stand

out. Both authors, in the words of scholar Thomas Inge, represent the danger and tragedy of being an artist in a

democratic, capitalist society, where pleasing the tastes of the mob and making money counted for more than

producing a classic work of literature.

Randall Fuller is the Chapman Professor of English at the University of Tulsa. With the support of an NEH research

fellowship, he wrote From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature .

In 2007, Michael Kearns, a professor at the University of Southern Indiana, received a $5,000 grant from N EH to work

on Writing for the Street, Writing in the Garret, which was published by Ohio Sta te University Press in 2010.

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