I received some awful news today. Writing would be therapeutic to some, but not I. This entry serves only to memorialize that fact, not the details that would substantiate it. For now.
Some time in the future I may add some annotations.
For now I’ll just paraphrase (or directly quote) from Updike’s Three Talks On American Masters – specifically, the section on Melville which I found to be particularly heartfelt, wherein his “withdrawal” from writing is discussed.
The “hypothesis” I derive from it (I do not think Updike intended to hypothesize much): simply put, Melville’s successes (Typee, Moby), then subsequent failures (Pierre), complicated his interest in writing.
Pierre was an attempt at “popular” literature. It was not popular; it was lampooned. My impression is, in the course of things, he lost interest. Or he wanted to lose interest, in writing.
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.
Was Pierre really what he “[felt] most moved to write”? Or, was it some sort of compromise-because he knew what he most wanted to write would be banned, or wouldn’t pay? In any case, the public received Pierre badly-but instead of consider Pierre bad, Melville considered the public out of touch.
Based on the Updike piece-and here it makes sense to say, explicitly, I have not read all of the Melville titles I mention-it sounds like Pierre is, among all of Melville’s works, least like Melville’s works. (For one, it features female roles!)
(Or, maybe this is me projecting.)
Updike says this of his reflection on Melville:
[it] left me with a sense the Melville was right to withdraw, when he did, from a battle that had become a losing battle. His rapport had been broken with an audience that cared about him chiefly as “the man who had lived among the cannibals.”
(A man who no longer seemed to be that same man, he implies.)
Skimming over this post (should I post, should I leave as draft?), I notice my use of quotation marks here and there where they may not be entirely necessary, although i think they serve to convey things a certain way I intend (see “hypothesis” and “withdrawal”). It reminds me of another short piece in Hugging the Shore called A Mild ‘Complaint’ wherein Updike lambastes a subset of commentators on Henry James (you know, that subset) for their overuse of quotation marks.
Very “amusing.”