280 book reviews

Niemeyer, Mark (ed.) The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville’s Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Foreword Paul Harding. Asheville nc: Orison Books, 2016. Pp. 105. $18.00, paper.

The literary works of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne are renowned for—among other things—their narrative complexity and ambiguous symbol- ism. Those who have studied their lives know that a similar sense of mystery characterizes the friendship the two writers shared. Only a handful of their let- ters to each other remain—one remarkably pedestrian letter that Hawthorne wrote to Melville asking him to purchase a kitchen clock for the Hawthorne residence, and ten letters that Melville wrote to his dear friend Hawthorne. This epistolary paucity and the resulting biographical lacunae have produced an array of speculation about the brief, but intense, flashes of insight the few letters provide into the friendship. Certainly it was a relationship character- ized by intellectual fraternity and artistic influence. But some scholars find deeper layers of significance buried within the epistles, including an unre- quited romantic desire that Melville might have felt for Hawthorne and a prolonged estrangement that possibly began while the two corresponded. Of course, as James C. Wilson pointed out years ago, interpreting the friendship by analyzing the Melville-Hawthorne letters is akin to the Pequod’s sailors attempting to analyze the markings on the doubloon nailed to the mast in Moby-Dick—an empirical exercise, but one widely “open to subjective inter- pretation” (24). Nevertheless, Melville’s letters to Hawthorne remain a rich source of infor- mation and possess a literary and philosophical quality on par with their great fiction, all of which Mark Niemeyer highlights in his recent collection, The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville’s Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, which includes all ten letters Melville wrote to Hawthorne between January 1851 and December 1852 (he understandably leaves out Hawthorne’s letter to Melville about the clock). Though it is a rather brief period, it was a particularly trans- formative one for both writers—and, ultimately, for the course of American literature. Hawthorne had recently published the Scarlet Letter and was fin- ishing The House of the Seven Gables while Melville, having already published five novels, was in the midst of an ambitious project that he referred to as his “Whale.” The letters offer a vivid sampling of the experiences the two even- tual literary giants shared as they attended to the duties of familial life in rural Massachusetts while pondering the lofty ideas and heavy themes of their art. We see, for instance, that Melville’s ardor for Hawthorne to visit him (“Your bed is already made, & the wood marked for your fire”) seems to match his fear that the public will not be receptive to his literary endeavors (“What I feel

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/15685292-02101015 book reviews 281 most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the produce is a final hash, and all my books are botches”). But most striking are Melville’s ambitiously metaphysical speculations, which, as in the pages of his fiction, are always woven into his observations about daily life. Remarking upon Hawthorne’s recently published The House of the Seven Gables, Melville slips into a digression on “the Problem of the Uni- verse”:

We incline to think that the Problem of the Universe is like the Freema- son’s mighty secret, so terrible to all children. It turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron,—nothing more! We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a lit- tle information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us.

Such moments suggest why Melville called the late-night conversations he and Hawthorne shared “ontological heroics” (50)—discussions which inspired and informed Melville’s undertakings in Moby-Dick and which appear to have had a similar impact on Hawthorne. “The divine magnet is in you,” Melville wrote to his friend shortly after Moby-Dick was published, “and my magnet response. Which is the biggest? A foolish question—they are One.” To benefit those who might be new to the study of Melville and his relation- ship with Hawthorne, Niemeyer includes his own brief introduction and three of Melville’s literary texts that speak either explicitly or figuratively about that relationship: his famous review essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” and two poetic works that scholars believe to be about Hawthorne—an excerpt from his epic poem Clarel, and the short poem “Monody.” But another highlight of the collection is the foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Paul Harding. Its illuminating prose is evocative of Melville’s and captures the essence of how Melville’s style grew organically out of the lofty subject matter he explored. “Stab your finger at any sentence,” writes Harding, “and you will find the uni- verse stretched across God and the devil, grace and cursedness, hope and despair, humanity spiraling and striving in between, and Melville in the midst, applying his genius to rescue the most hapless souls within from oblivion.” In other words, on every page of Melville’s one finds “the Problem of the Universe,” and in reminding the reader of this, Harding offers a stern rebuke to “the lat- est purveyors of re-treaded positivism,” whose lack of engagement with “the sacred” or “grace” indicates “an unsettling intellectual passivity in our thinkers and artists.” The result is an echo of the criticism Melville himself often leveled

Religion and the Arts 21 (2017) 271–289