On June 18, 1855, George William Curtis sent one of his near-daily letters to the magazine’s new publisher and co-owner, Joshua Dix. At that point coeditor of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, Curtis wrote from his home in Providence, Rhode Island, to which he had retreated at the beginning of June to rest his aching eyes after a busy spring in New York City conducting various writing and editorial tasks. Like a latter-day telecommuter, Curtis maintained his obligations no less vigorously from Providence. The June 18 letter recommended that the magazine reject Melville’s “The Bell-Tower.” Curtis’s summary judgment was that the story had “not passed muster.” Overnight, however, he changed his mind, much like the reader of Curtis’s own Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851), who, the author boasted in a letter to his father, “thought it dull & wasn’t interested when he began,” but then “read it aloud to his family & never changed his mind about a book so much & so suddenly, in his life.” Writing again to Dix on June 19, Curtis claimed Melville’s story, “is, after all, too good to lose.—It is picturesque & of a profound morality” and has about it “the touch of genius.”1
The exact reasons for his change of heart will forever remain a mystery, but Curtis’s letters to Dix open a window on the business of magazine editing. Central to this business were Curtis and his peers at Putnam’s, Charles Frederick Briggs, Frederick Beecher Perkins, Parke Godwin, and those at Harper’s, Fletcher Harper and Henry Raymond. Virtually forgotten, their names take up little ink in the writing about Melville and need no blotting in works of literary history. This chapter emphasizes the role of Briggs and Curtis in the story of Melville’s magazine writing for three reasons. First, through them we can better understand the nature of two magazines set up in the wake of cultural dogfights about a national literature in the 1840s. Second, the collective and personal judgments Curtis and his fellow editors exercised articulate the aesthetic distinctions of antebellum literary culture in which Melville’s writing was embedded. Finally, we can see how decisions of editorial judgment took place in micro-contexts not always in harmony with the ideological macro-contexts critics use to read Melville’s magazine pieces. Closer observation of the rest of the two letters Curtis sent to Dix in June 1855 allows an initial glimpse into this world.
Curtis’s main concern in the letter of June 18 was not Melville at all but an article Putnam’s was considering on James Gordon Bennett, owner and editor of the New York Herald since the 1830s. Curtis is “decidedly opposed” to the article, he says, because the newspaperman “is not an important man or a representative man.” Curtis then turns his attention to the proposed publication of a collection of stories by his close friend William Douglas O’Connor, cautioning that “collections of tales rarely sell well. Hawthorne’s did not—nor Poe’s.” When he then asks Dix, “What is it you are to publish for Godwin?” he means Parke Godwin, one of Curtis’s friends and a colleague at Putnam’s and Harper’s Monthly, for which Curtis also wrote continuously from the early 1850s through his death in 1892. Only after all this, in a postscript below his signature, and almost as an afterthought, does Curtis inform Dix that “The Bell-Tower” and a story by Frederick Cozzens have “not passed muster.”2
This letter shows the entanglement and prioritization of various elements in the business of magazine editing. That Putnam’s is considering an article about Bennett, the infamous proprietor of a daily newspaper against which Putnam’s wished to distinguish itself, shows the stratification of intellectual ambitions and audiences. The reference to O’Connor’s collection of tales indicates that the publisher of Putnam’s, by this point Dix & Edwards, is also trying to compete in the world of book publishing. It would later publish The Piazza Tales and The Confidence-Man. Curtis’s inquiry about Godwin evidences the social network of writers and editors on which regional and national print cultures relied and in whose matrix Melville was just one node. His subordination to a postscript enacts the priorities of that matrix: once a headline act during his early career, Melville is now American literature’s undercard at the bottom of a hastily written business letter.
When he was reading Melville’s story in June 1855, Curtis had more reason than previously to give the business of Putnam’s greater priority. He had returned to the magazine a couple of months earlier after an absence of nearly a year, during which time George Palmer Putnam took over editing responsibilities to save money; when Putnam could no longer continue, he sold the magazine to his former clerk, Joshua Dix, and Dix’s associate Arthur Edwards. Offered sole editorship of the magazine—a position Putnam also offered him in May 1854—Curtis chose instead to maintain the variety of his writing and lecturing commitments; he agreed to become coeditor, with more control over content than he previously enjoyed while working under the editorship of Charles Briggs, who stepped down in mid-1854 and left the magazine completely by the end of that year. Curtis’s only proviso was that his identity and that of his coeditor—now known to be Charles A. Dana, who passed behind the pseudonym of Mr. Law—remain secret.3 His desire for anonymity and refusal to commit his full-time energies to Putnam’s show Curtis’s discomfort with translating the cultural capital he possessed as a man of letters into the economic capital that would define him as a professional magazine man. For Putnam’s, the consequence of this situation was that decisions over content were not deterministically economic; literary and aesthetic decisions were made that had unpredictable financial consequences for the magazine. A conscientious enough editor to make Melville submit to the strictures of his literary judgment, Curtis operated as a mediator of economic and cultural imperatives.
The interaction of these elements in a text’s coming to publication is not always well understood, but the letter of June 19 indicates how Curtis could move between the roles of businesslike editor and literary critic. In deciding whether or not Putnam’s should pay Melville for “The Bell-Tower” Curtis offers a fuller literary and aesthetic justification than he provided in his terse dismissal of the story the day before. Now he considers “The Bell-Tower” to be “rich in treatment, not unlike the quaint carving of the bell” that appears in the story. “I meant to say no,” he goes on, “and so wrote you; but looking again, I am converted, and, making some erasures, we cannot afford to lose it. To many the style will seem painfully artificial and pompously self-conscious. But it seems to me well united to the theme. The story has the touch of genius in it—and so—in spite of the style—it should be accepted. . . . In reading ‘The Bell Tower’ you must remember that the style is consistently picturesque. It isn’t Addisonian nor is it Johnsonese—neither is Malmsey wine, Springwater.”
There is more to say later about the story’s picturesque style, the comparisons to Addison and Johnson, and the liquid metaphors; for now, what bears noting is the other reason Curtis is writing to Dix on June 19. Shifting abruptly from his assessment of Melville’s story, Curtis tells Dix: “I send with this some verses I wrote 7 years ago in Naples. Margaret Fuller used to like them very much. They are different from ‘Putnam’ poetry in general! And if Mr Law likes them—but only if he likes them, for I haven’t the slightest pride about them—let them go in.”4 The connection between the Italian setting of “The Bell-Tower” and the composition of Curtis’s own poems in that same country does not appear to be a coincidence. A day after his initial rejection of the story, Curtis is not only “converted” but moved enough by a picturesque evocation of Italy to resurrect his own seven-year-old poetry. There is much here that is intangible—the linking of reading to memory, affection, and writing—but Curtis is clearly performing a different role than that shown in his letter of the day before.
The letters of June 18 and 19 display very different aspects of Curtis’s character and decision-making roles. To dismiss “The Bell-Tower” for not having “passed muster” is to subject it to the inspection of an organizational eye; to emphasize the picturesque and forgive stylistic idiosyncrasy is to apply an aesthetic judgment of a wholly different order, even as that judgment is bound up with the economic success of a magazine that “cannot afford to lose it.” Into this alignment of priorities Melville dispatched his writing. To put Curtis’s role into context, I want to stir up the waters of magazine culture and show how Putnam’s and Harper’s, ostensibly rivals in the magazine market, organized economic and cultural priorities in ways that challenge later assumptions about their status and identity. I then move on to examine more closely the fate suffered by “The Two Temples” at Putnam’s in May 1854, the only occasion during his magazine-writing career when Melville met with rejection. Finally, I return to Curtis’s relationship with Melville’s writing through 1855 and 1856, when Curtis was aesthetic gatekeeper at Putnam’s and saw into print all Melville’s later pieces for the magazine: “Benito Cereno,” “The Bell-Tower,” “I and My Chimney,” and “The Apple-Tree Table.”
Putnam’s and Harper’s both helped advertise the larger publishing houses out of which they emerged. They set about establishing their priorities, however, by taking different approaches and demarcating themselves as different types of magazines. Harper’s was populist and popular; it reprinted material from British and Irish magazines, serialized best-selling British novelists, and incorporated many expensive woodcut illustrations. Once up and running, average circulation reached over one hundred thousand. The circulation of Putnam’s peaked at thirty-five thousand in the summer of 1853 before sinking back to the low teens by 1857.5 The dedication to American content and quality writing, however, earned the magazine a reputation for originality and intellectual distinction. In March 1857, an article in Putnam’s described Harper’s as “a repository of pleasant, various reading, of sprightly chit-chat, and safe, vague, and dull disquisitions upon a few public questions.”6 Putnam’s addressed public questions more frequently and less insipidly, especially in Parke Godwin’s political essays, which appeared with greater frequency toward the end of the magazine’s first incarnation in the autumn of 1857.
Competition between the owners meant relationships between the two publishing houses were never more than cordial, although Putnam made efforts to cool hostility after the fire that destroyed the Harper premises in December 1853: “This may be a time,” he wrote to the Harpers, “when all these things may be properly and easily buried and forgotten if you feel so disposed—and from this time if such be your disposition it may surely be easy to avoid all grounds for complaint on either side.”7 Nevertheless, Putnam’s and Harper’s continued to see themselves as different kinds of literary animal.
They certainly had very different management histories during their coexistence. Throughout the 1850s, Harper’s remained stable under the guidance of Fletcher Harper. But of all the magazines that made a name for themselves in the 1850s, Putnam’s was the one that most lacked continuity of identity in ownership, production, and leadership. Not one member of the original editorial or ownership team stayed with the magazine during the entirety of its five-year lifespan. There were clearly tensions in the editorial office. Curtis wrote of Briggs that “he has crotchets, & sometimes things get done, which I don’t love at all.”8 Briggs was no longer editor by the middle of 1854. Frederick Beecher Perkins was brought on board, but when Putnam sold the magazine to Dix & Edwards in March 1855, Frederick Law Olmsted invested and became a managing editor. Curtis and Godwin returned, and Dana worked in the managing office. In April 1857 the firm of Dix & Edwards was dissolved and new owners—Curtis, Olmsted, and the magazine’s printer, John Miller, who was keen to protect money owed to him—bought the company for one dollar. In August, the company failed and Curtis’s father-in-law was left with debts of seventy thousand dollars.
Harper’s and Putnam’s shared formal similarities as magazines, but distinctions between their physical makeup and content are evident when one compares what these magazines looked like just before Melville entered their pages. Take the July 1853 issues of both magazines: Harper’s, in white wrappers, ran to 144 pages; Putnam’s, in pea-green wrappers, ran slightly shorter at 120 pages. Both sold for twenty-five cents. Putnam’s described itself as a “Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art,” but there was little to indicate this on its understated cover. Stalks of corn and sugarcane flanked the formal serif font of the magazine’s title. The cover of Harper’s declared its educational and intellectual intent in more traditional ways and was altogether louder and more striking. Atop a stone plinth stood two garlanded classical columns surrounded at their bases by objects of learning: books, scrolls, and pen and ink. Inside, both magazines used a double-column layout typical of many nineteenth-century magazines.
By this point, Harper’s had established a rhythm out of the cacophonous clatter of its early issues. The first, in June 1850, contained sixty-four separate items of mostly reprinted poetry, popular science, fiction, travelogues, history, literary criticism, and essays. The second issue still contained fifty-two pieces; the only features continued from the previous issue were the “Literary Notices” section and illustrations of the latest fashion for women. By July 1853 there were only twenty-four items, less reliance on reprinting, and a degree of continuity. At the rear of the magazine now appeared the regular editorial features: the “Monthly Record of Current Events,” the “Editor’s Table,” the “Editor’s Easy Chair,” the “Editor’s Drawer,” “Literary Notices,” “Comicalities, Original and Selected,” and “Fashions” of the month. Although some of these features fell by the wayside, the “Monthly Record of Current Events,” “Editor’s Table,” and “Editor’s Drawer” remained regular features at the end of the century. These final sections amounted to about one-sixth of the magazine in July 1853.
The first pages of the July 1853 issue of Putnam’s and Harper’s were remarkably similar. Beneath the magazine title and issue information appeared a large engraved image illustrating the lead article. In Putnam’s this was a sober account of New York’s educational institutions and their buildings; in Harper’s, a reverent account of a trip to Jefferson’s Monticello. In what follows, there is some crossover between the magazines. Both contain travelogues of different sorts: in Harper’s an account of a trip to Lake George, New York, and “Sketches on the Upper Mississippi,” both of which mix history and natural history; in Putnam’s “Life in Hawaii” and “A Few Days in Venice” take a similar approach, while “Sketches in a Parisian Café” is a lighter, gossipy travelogue. Harper’s was partway through the yearlong serialization of John Abbott’s history of Napoleon, while Putnam’s offered a natural history of “Fish Hawks and Falcons” and Arthur Clough’s philosophical musings in “Letters of Parapidemus.”
Both magazines also contained several pieces of fiction. Harper’s lead with “Love Snuffed Out” by J. Smytthe Jr., a comic story of the romances of Don Bobtail Fandango, a Spanish ambassador. Next came “Extracts from the Portfolio of an Excitement-Seeker,” a serial by G. P. R. James, the prolific English novelist and diplomat who settled in the United States and was British consul in Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, from 1852 to 1856; “Hester,” a sentimental fictional tale of a woman’s reunion with her father; and for a final populist flourish, an installment of Bleak House, which Harper’s serialized from April 1852 to October 1853. In Putnam’s, the reader could enjoy “Dinner Time,” an episode about gentlemanly dining from what would become George William Curtis’s Prue and I (1856); the final installment of “Miss Peck’s Friend”; and “A Story without a Moral,” an installment of Edmund Quincy’s romance, Wensley (1854).
There were certainly differences in the style and tone of these common features. Wensley, for instance, Quincy’s only novel, is a historical romance of New England; in Bleak House, Dickens was at the height of his realist powers. But significant differences in the content are also obvious. While Putnam’s continued to publish poetry, there was no poetry in the July issue of Harper’s. The fifteen-page reviews section of Putnam’s was serious and cosmopolitan, with sections on American literature, English literature, and French and German literature as well as a section on the fine arts and music. In Harper’s, the “Literary Notices” ran for only five pages; the section covered American and European literature, poetry, and history, and the format mixed reviews with snippets of information about writers, other literary discoveries, and auctions of old books. Of the first eight books reviewed, Harper & Brothers were the publishers of six. There was less nepotism in Putnam’s.9 The most obvious visual distinction between the two magazines was the attribution of articles and the number of illustrations. Harper’s gave the names of authors for seven of its longer pieces; Putnam’s gave no attributions, and would never do so for anything it published during the five years it existed. Harper’s contained sixty-nine illustrations of varying sizes all through the magazine; Putnam’s illustrated just the first two articles and the whole issue contained only twenty images.
In conception and approach, then, clear distinctions between the ethos of each magazine are obvious. Consequently, Sheila Post-Lauria argues, Melville adapted the style of his stories for each magazine, sending those with more complex political, social, and aesthetic themes to Putnam’s—to match that magazine’s ideological progressiveness—and his more sentimental and lightweight pieces to match the less serious Harper’s.10 But Melville’s example is actually a good indicator of the incestuousness of magazine production in the 1850s: the heat haze of the monthly composition cycle and culture of anonymity could blur the discrete identity a magazine acquires for both contemporary and retrospective readers. I mentioned in the previous chapter Melville’s duplicitousness over the Tortoise Hunting material that turned up in Putnam’s as “The Encantadas.” Melville was certainly not averse to sending the same material to both magazines. He also sent Israel Potter first to Harper’s. When they did not reply to his request to consider the first sixty pages as the first installment of a serial, he immediately sent the manuscript to Putnam’s. Melville sent “The Apple-Tree Table” to Harper’s in the autumn of 1855 but did not receive a quick reply. He followed up with an inquiry about the article’s fate on December 10; Putnam’s published the tale in May 1856.
Writing of the rivalry with Harper’s, Ezra Greenspan notes that “it was never Putnam’s intent or expectation to match them but simply to set up operations on their flank.” Rather than opposites, either ideologically or aesthetically, it is more useful to think of Harper’s and Putnam’s as subsets of a common core. Meredith McGill argues that if Putnam’s was the avant-garde of a “sea-change in publishers’ and readers’ estimations of the value of American writing,” the Harper organization was not far behind.11 Their reprint ethos gave way to faith in American authors, and this influenced the content of Harper’s Monthly, which also started to publish American writers like Melville. And it was not only writers who were mobile and moved between magazines. Different in ideological design, Putnam’s and Harper’s were not always so easily distinguished at the level of contributors, editors, and regular feature writers who set the tone for the magazines. As a case in point, Curtis worked for both magazines—at the same time. For him, the priorities of economics and culture met at a personal and institutional level.
Curtis’s relationship with Harper’s began when his travel books Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851) and The Howadji in Syria (1852) were both excerpted in the magazine, which also published his story “All Baggage at the Risk of the Owner” in September 1852. Most notably, however, Curtis wrote the popular “Editor’s Easy Chair” column for Harper’s. Fletcher Harper, who took company responsibility for magazine affairs and acted as de facto editor, approached Curtis about this job while he was employed at Putnam’s. Curtis bargained hard: “Probably I shall ask you to pay me more than you will think reasonable,” he said, but Harper was not deterred.12 Curtis’s regard for his supplementary employer is evident in his own letter to Fletcher Harper after the fire of December 1853: “Let me say to you how sincerely I sympathize with you and your firm in this sudden and tremendous blow—from which you will show us all how American enterprise can recover without a visible scar.”13 After sharing duties for six months, starting in October 1853, with Donald G. Mitchell, author of Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) and Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons (1851) under the pen name Ik Marvel, Curtis took sole responsibility for the “Editor’s Easy Chair” from April 1854 until his death in 1892. The point to emphasize here is that Curtis’s column was not just a magazine tidbit but “the best of the early departments,” according to the magazine historian Frank Luther Mott, who writes that “for forty years Curtis made this section of Harper’s the most delightful department in an American periodical.”14 Partly on Curtis’s writing did Harper’s establish its credentials.
As evidence of incestuousness, Mitchell was in turn the subject of an article in the first issue of Putnam’s. “Our Young Authors” was a series that lasted only two months—Melville was the second and final subject—and the review of Mitchell’s career, attributed to Fitz-James O’Brien, damns with faint praise and then snarls. Dipping into Reveries of a Bachelor as relief following a day’s work, “your heart will be no longer arid,” O’Brien writes; spending any length of time in this world—“the champaign lands of sentiment”—will induce “terrible lassitude, and mental depression.” Mitchell’s repetitive, minor-key ramblings leave the reader “sighing for some dark unfathomable pool into which we might gaze and wonder, hour upon hour.”15 Parts of Reveries were serialized in Harper’s, and when Harper & Brothers published the book the review in the company magazine was gushing: “one of the most remarkable and delightful books of the present season,” the reviewer claimed; “Mr. Ik. Marvel has opened a new vein of gold in the literature of his country.”16 As a statement of the different requirements Putnam’s expected of literature compared to Harper’s, O’Brien’s assessment is suggestive. But that differentiation is not clear-cut. The same Harper’s serializing, praising, and employing Mitchell was also employing Curtis, one of the editors of Putnam’s whose ethos O’Brien propounded in writing so witheringly about Mitchell. And none of this stopped O’Brien from also writing for Harper’s in the 1850s.17
Neither did Curtis always support Putnam’s. He was furious with “The Editor at Large” column in the magazine’s September 1854 issue: “It is flippant, pointless, coarse and ambitious. . . . And the anti-H. quotation is impolite, and unnecessary. People say ‘Why does P. throw mud at H.—which has never dirtied it?’”18 “H.” and “P.” here stand for Harper’s and Putnam’s. Curtis’s evenhandedness and his work for and influence at the two magazines does not overturn the real differences that separated them. But the ease with which he moves between the magazines should caution against exaggerating those differences, particularly in the area over which Curtis came to exercise greatest influence: literature and the arts.
One further example demonstrates Curtis’s bipartisan position in the Putnam’s-Harper’s matrix. William Douglas O’Connor, to whom Curtis refers in his June 18 letter to Dix, is best known now as author of The Good Gray Poet (1866), his defense of Walt Whitman after the poet’s dismissal from a clerking job at the Indian Affairs Bureau of the Department of Interior in 1865. O’Connor and Curtis became friends in the 1850s. O’Connor was responsible for the first, but not the last, time Curtis and Melville were mentioned in the same breath. Reviewing Nile Notes of a Howadji for the Providence Journal, O’Connor wrote: “We can point with pride to Longfellow and Bryant, to Poe and Melville, to Emerson, Curtis and Hawthorne, to them as representatives only of many that are, of more that are to be.”19 It was Curtis who placed O’Connor’s pamphlet on Whitman with the publisher Bunce & Harrington. But O’Connor and Curtis also corresponded regularly throughout 1855 about O’Connor’s magazine writing.
It is to O’Connor that Curtis, in a letter of March 9, 1855, confesses the “secrets, which will come out by & by” about Putnam’s sale of his magazine to Dix and Edwards; he also relates the offer to become sole editor made to him by the new owners. In the same letter Curtis maps out his role at the two magazines and the benefits of each to his friend:
Now the “improvement” of these facts for you is this, that [Fletcher] Harper wants immensely the story of yours that I have, and will pay very generously, that is, he will pay you $100 probably, if I tell him he can not have it for a less sum. . . . But it is hard to make a literary reputation in their mag. because it is read by a class that do not make such reputation. Putnam, under the new regime will pay better, nearly twice as well as before. It would probably give you $65 or 75 for the article; and such a story would have better literary success in P. than in any other periodical. But that would alienate Harpers which is not so well worth while at present.
Curtis then apologizes for not taking sole editorship at Putnam’s, a position from which “I should have tried to make such arrangements with you that you would write only for Putnam, as would have satisfied you.” O’Connor must decide which way to jump, but Curtis can help either way: “But now, you must determine. And will you let me know as soon as possible to which magazine, considering all the circumstances & prospects[,] I shall give your story.”20 Even if not formally an editor at Harper’s, Curtis clearly carried sufficient influence with Fletcher Harper to place material.
Curtis also acted as O’Connor’s literary agent and editor for pieces that appeared in both magazines. In a letter sent later in the month, he advises O’Connor to “send me the ‘What Cheer’ to dispose of for you, & probably to Putnam under the new regime, which, I hope, is to be better than the old.” Early in April, Curtis takes the blue pencil to “What Cheer?” and makes changes that remain in the published version: “It seems to me to end properly within the departure of the Dark Student, upon page 82. . . . I have therefore cut out from page 82 to page 93.” The postscript of this letter refers to another of O’Connor’s pieces, on which Curtis advises about the title: “I have gone over the first story for the Harper’s. It is hard to name it. I should say ‘The Knocker’. . . . It will be published in the July no.—So Mr. Fletcher Harper tell me.”21 By July, Curtis has ready a check for eighty-five dollars in payment for “What Cheer?” after it appears in that month’s issue of Putnam’s; by September, presumably in response to O’Connor’s inquiry about the payment for “The Knocker,” Curtis writes: “‘The Knocker’ I know nothing about, except that in June I altered the title with my own hand in Harper’s counting room. They always delay as much as possible.”22 “The Knocker” eventually appeared in Harper’s in December 1855.
The image Curtis presents here is a compelling one: the newly appointed coeditor of Putnam’s standing in the counting room of Harper & Brothers amending accounting records for their magazine. Alfred Guernsey, managing editor of Harper’s from February 1856, described the counting room and the adjacent proprietors’ area as “the brains of the establishment.”23 At the very least this compromises the idea that Putnam’s and Harper’s were diametrically opposed magazines. Curtis, O’Connor, Melville, and O’Brien are examples of how cross-pollination rather than separate development shaped magazine culture during this period. Writers produced work for different magazines; editors, often with long careers, moved regularly from one newspaper and magazine to another, between whose audiences and agendas it is not always possible to draw natural links. Magazines were more portable and flexible than often supposed: portable in the sense that a magazine could move between owners and change editors; flexible in the sense that the monthly cycle of production compromised the quest for coherency. Curtis wrote that “it is terrible to feel the periodically recurring necessity of literary labor, if you cannot easily toss it off.”24 Where these magazines stood in relation to the nation they wanted to represent and entertain, and how Melville fitted into their vision, is the next part of the story.
Briggs was one of the most mobile figures working in magazines during the 1840s and 1850s. He was a veteran contributor to the Knickerbocker (1840–46), founder and editor of the Broadway Journal (1845) before Poe forced him out, editor of Holden’s Dollar Magazine (1848–50), and, after his time at Putnam’s, a newspaper journalist and editor, serving on the New York Times, the Independent, and the Brooklyn Union. His early Knickerbocker pseudonym he took from the protagonist in his first novel, The Adventures of Harry Franco (1839). Other novels followed, most notably The Haunted Merchant (1843), Working a Passage (1844), and The Trippings of Tom Pepper (1847).
This background as writer and magazinist is important to bear in mind when thinking about two other things for which Briggs was responsible and on which I concentrate here: rejecting Melville’s “The Two Temples” in May 1854 and writing the opening “Introductory” that delivered Putnam’s to its public in January 1853. “It is because we are confident,” Briggs wrote anonymously in the first pages of the new magazine, “that neither Greece nor Guinea can offer the American reader a richer variety of instruction and amusement in every kind, than the country whose pulses throb with his, and whose every interest is his own, that this Magazine presents itself to-day.” Neither the author of this elegant statement—ostensibly evidence of the magazine’s national intent—nor the rest of the founding editorial in which it sits, align themselves straightforwardly with the nationalist project of Putnam’s, as the rejection of “The Two Temples” demonstrates.
The source of the problem with Melville’s diptych, according to Briggs, was “Temple First,” in which a corruptible sexton, described as a “great, fat-paunched, beadle-faced man,” refuses the narrator entry to a church service (PT 303). After finding a side door to the church tower, the narrator instead observes the service from on high, only then to find himself locked inside the church. His discovery by the beadle-faced man leads to a fine and a reprimand from the city justices. Though the tower the narrator ascends is reminiscent of Trinity Church on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the story is usually understood to represent Grace Church, further up on Broadway and not far from Melville’s residence at 103 Fourth Avenue. The sexton of this church, Isaac Brown, lived at 107 Fourth Avenue and is thinly disguised as the “beadle-faced man”; according to Matthew Hale Smith he was “immensely popular with the elite of New York.”25
Briggs wrote to Melville on May 12, 1854, congratulating him on “some exquisitely fine description, and some pungent satire” but telling him the diptych was unacceptable, because “the moral of the Two Temples would array against us the whole power of the pulpit, to say nothing of Brown, and the congregation of Grace Church” (C 636). This was exactly the kind of New York audience Briggs did not want to alienate, especially after ructions caused by an article leading off the September 1853 issue. “New-York Church Architecture,” part of the “New-York Daguerreotyped” series, included several disparaging comments about the use of gothic ornamentation in church architecture and about church benefactors: “There are two causes for the incorrect and unimposing architecture of the greater number of churches in New-York; the one is the incapacity of the architects who design them—the other is the ignorance of the people who pay for them.”26 In cheerleading for the city, Putnam’s also took on the role of critic. Where “Bartleby” fit the magazine’s aim of telling the life of the city and offered no slights against an identifiable lawyer, the location and the characters in “The Two Temples” were all too recognizable. Satisfying a local constituency rather than a national audience is sufficient to explain why Putnam’s rejected “The Two Temples.” But Briggs also exemplifies the tension between these aims as they developed during the 1850s.
Briggs considered his time at Putnam’s the highlight of his working life, but he took the earlier parts of his career with him into the new job. Through the 1840s he navigated a route between influential cultural elites; allied to none of them, he instead made a living from undermining the principles on which their identities rested. Briggs was an independent New Yorker. Though born on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, he despised the Boston-centric philosophizing of thinkers and writers like Bronson Alcott—burlesqued mercilessly in the figure of Dobbins in The Haunted Merchant—to the extent, Perry Miller argues, that through all his early writing “runs a hostility to New England transcendentalism more than in keeping with the New York attitude.”27 When he edited the Broadway Journal Briggs aimed this hostility more visibly in the direction of Margaret Fuller, whom he (unlike Curtis) loathed.
In three issues of the Broadway Journal during March 1845, Briggs lays out his objections to Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). An unflattering engraving of Fuller also appeared, calculated to offend in image as Briggs’s review offended in words. The caption accompanying the engraving, presumably written by Briggs, faults the illustrator because “the nose is a little—a very little too Grecian” and because “the ‘fine phrenzy’ of the eyes has not been preserved so decidedly as it should be.”28 Briggs’s views on women make difficult reading for a contemporary reader. Though his barbs often resolve to attacks on Fuller’s class privilege, his rebuke that “no unmarried woman has any right to say any thing on the subject” of women’s lives and roles is particularly cringe-worthy. But the attack achieved its intended effect: to outrage Boston abolitionists and suffragists with whom he disagreed. The result backfired on Briggs, however. Garrison’s Liberator withdrew support for the Broadway Journal—vital to ensure sales and circulation in Boston—and Briggs’s co-owner, John Bisco, sold his shares in the magazine to Poe rather than to Briggs as originally intended. Briggs had to leave his own journal after just three months.
In politics, Briggs was idiosyncratic. His disagreements with abolitionists and transcendentalists did not stop, although they often interfered with, his long and close friendship with James Russell Lowell. Briggs opposed slavery and abolition simultaneously, believing industrialization would make the slave system obsolete but objecting to the extension of slaveholding and the annexation of Texas. In the 1844 election he backed Henry Clay over James Polk and blamed Polk’s narrow victory on supporters of the Liberty Party candidate, James Birney, whose success in New York he thought cost Clay the presidency: “To think of it! A junta of slaveholders entrusted with the destinies of this country by the efforts of a band of misjudging men who have the enormous effrontery to style themselves abolitionists. My stomach sours at the name of them.”29 Briggs’s conservative Whig tendencies did not stop him from rejecting Zachary Taylor in the 1848 election, though this in turn did not stop him from taking a clerkship in the Debenture room of the New York Custom House when Hiram Fuller recommended him after Taylor’s election.
Neither was Briggs a great friend of the Democratic Party and its New York cultural wing, the Young America of Duyckinck and Mathews. Briggs considered Mathews a talentless egotist, and the group’s connections with southerner William Gilmore Simms, who disparaged the kind of American humor close to Briggs’s heart, did not help their cause. Briggs gave Mathews and Duyckinck the same treatment he meted out to Bronson Alcott, lampooning them as Mr. Ferocious and Tibbings in The Trippings of Tom Pepper, a novel that more generally satirizes the hypocrisies of New York literary and business life. Although a regular contributor to the Whig Knickerbocker, Curtis also despised the New York elites in whose shadows poverty blighted the lives of New York City’s lower classes. When they are not turning a comic eye to life, Briggs’s novels turn to this theme—on which he drew from personal experience—in proto-realist style, though his magazine writing was always sharp and witty enough to please an editor like Lewis Gaylord Clark at the Knickerbocker.
What Briggs objected to most about Young America, as with the transcendentalists, abolitionists, and single-cause reformers more generally, was their doctrinaire factionalism. “I see so much of the belittling influences of sectarianism,” he wrote to Lowell, “that I am almost persuaded it is dangerous to belong to a clique of even such enlightened philanthropists as the Garrisonians. The moment you call Garrison a leader you begin to establish a spiritual despotism.”30 For Briggs, factionalism manifested itself in different ways: in the overembellished romantic attachment to nature; in evangelical political crusades; and in Young America’s deafening and repetitive demands for a national literature. When Tom Pepper goes to study law with Mr. Ferocious, Briggs makes fun of this obsession. Ferocious even describes Tom’s name as “individual, national, indigenous, capital, and spicy too.” He asks, “Do you read, Mr. Pepper, imaginative literature, the home article, or foreign trash, in pink covers?” Tom is understandably bemused when Ferocious gives him a book on which he must pass judgment: “Young, unsophisticated, a real, true American, your opinion must be fresh, home-born, and congenial with the better life of the country.”31 The special pleading of factional causes Briggs found objectionable and counterproductive. As a writer, however, he needed to earn a living from chastising individuals belonging to factional groups. In doing so, he perfected the art of engaged satire while himself remaining aloof.
Briggs’s distrust of encomiums to national literature, and his chameleon-like ability to shift between different guises as a humorist and satirist, should make us look again at his “Introductory.” I wrote in the previous chapter of the ambivalence in this founding statement, where having “no less faith in the opulence” of American resources hardly suggests the superiority of these resources. The “Introductory” also trades in an odd combination of hyperbole and the same kind of rhetoric that elsewhere Briggs uses to satirize the transcendentalists: “Astronomers assert,” the “Introductory” begins, “that the nebulous mist with which the ether is charged is perpetually taking form—that the regions of space are but a celestial dairy, in which the milky way is for ever churned into stars. . . . Taking the reader, therefore, by the hand, or rather by the eye, here at the portal, we invite a moment’s conversation before he passes within.” In his earlier novel The Haunted Merchant, the object of Briggs’s satire, Dobbins, says, “Nature is every where, she is every thing . . . ; listen to her; she speaks to you in the cataract; in the noiseless dews; the stars, the sun, the moon, all speak to you.”32 The juxtaposition of this earlier piece of astronomical rhetoric against the Putnam’s “Introductory” makes it difficult to treat the latter as straightforwardly affirmative or unironic; rather than a defense of the visionary impulse we have the hocus-pocus of transcendentalist optics.
The role of a founding statement is to affirm aims and objectives for an audience to which a magazine aspires. Briggs’s experience at the Broadway Journal taught him that Boston was an important audience to a magazine with literary and artistic ambition, one to whom star-struck rhetoric might appeal. Briggs had little time for such readers, as his earlier writing showed; Curtis, a former resident at Brook Farm, was much better disposed to this audience, and his acquaintance with leading Boston writers and intellectuals played a key role in Putnam’s appointing him. In November 1854, the publisher James T. Fields wrote to Putnam, “I will do all that in me lies to inform our Boston world that Putnam’s Magazine is the great literary flame.”33 As editor, and for the larger good of the magazine, it is quite possible Briggs projected a position to which he was not necessarily wedded. His long writing and editing career at various magazines and newspapers, together with his ability to exist in the gaps between group allegiances, shows his capacity for this role.
Equally, that he moved in quick succession between posts also indicates the editorial guise was not always sustainable in the long run. In A Fable for Critics (1848) Lowell wrote of his friend in a way that makes it difficult to take at face value anything Briggs writes: “There comes Harry Franco, and, as he draws near, / You find that’s a smile which you took for a sneer; . . . He’s in joke half the time when he seems to be sternest, / When he seems to be joking, be sure he’s in earnest.”34 When the “Introductory” claims Putnam’s is inevitable—just as “Columbus believed in his Cathay of the West—and discovered it” so “our Magazine is a foregone conclusion”—one hears the echoes of Briggs lampooning the nationalist stridency of Duyckinck and Mathews. The “Introductory” may project a magazine identity, but it is rhetoric of the sort wherein what is said and its inverse can both appear true.
When the “Introductory” projects the importance of “an American eye” it is equally clear this eye is not nationally universal. Only the “man who sees through ‘American spectacles’” will look with such an eye, not “every man whose birth chanced to fall in America.” Making a division between those who do and do not wear “American spectacles” separates the nation in the process of gesturing toward it. Briggs had little time for important sectional groups in America; his was a nation split along several fault lines and his version of what America or the rest of the world looked like did not necessarily correspond to the version Putnam or Curtis saw. The owner and editors breathed the same air of ambition for the magazine, but it was not put together each month in Briggs’s image or the image of the “Introductory.” Briggs was not a controlling force after the first eighteen months. But neither was the magazine Putnam’s project after early 1855, when Curtis came to the fore. To call Putnam’s a national magazine is to confuse the intention to produce a high-quality magazine containing original American contributions with a coherent project. The number of owners and editors the magazine went through did not encourage coherency; judgments about quality did not readily resolve to any manifesto of nationalism.
There is also more than one way to be a national magazine, and Harper’s could claim this status for one very good reason: the geographic reach of its circulation. For the Harper organization the expansion of literacy for the national good trumped the promotion of indigenous resources. That Harper’s for its first twenty years, until 1870, advertised only books published by the magazine’s holding company mitigates against any altruism here; Harper & Brothers wanted to clean up where it could. But, as John Dowgray argues, “the Harpers appeared to realize very early the possibilities of a national magazine, a true miscellany with stories and articles designed to appeal to many areas rather than limiting its appeal to one.”35 They did not wait for the appearance of Putnam’s to put this strategy in place and to replace eclecticism with organization.
The second volume of Harper’s was bound for sale in book form in May 1851. In the opening pages an advertisement thanked readers and promised that the owners would spare “no effort to insure the succeeding volumes of the Magazine a still wider and more favorable reception among all classes of readers.” Then, eighteen months before Putnam’s saw the light of day, Harper’s declared that the owners “intend it to be a strictly national work” and to be “devoted to no local interests, pledged to no religious sect or political party, connected with no favorite movement of the day, except the diffusion of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism.” Furthermore, “original matter” would enrich the “utility and attractiveness” of the magazine.36
For this reason, Harper’s began publishing American writers like Melville along with Jacob Abbott, Curtis, Benson J. Lossing’s popular history articles, Caroline Chesebrough, Fitz-James O’Brien, and David Strother (Porte Crayon). Neither was the magazine in thrall to sentimentalism. Dickens and Thackeray appeared regularly enough that they moderated any sentimental excess. As Jennifer Phegley argues, “Harper’s supported a melding of the forms of realism and sentimentalism rather than a strict division between the two literary modes.”37 The promotion and defense of Dickens’s brand of realism offered Americans a template for adapting sentimentalism to national purpose; the aim was to help Americans produce what the magazine considered better literature. The development of the magazine’s idiosyncratic departments—“The Editor’s Drawer” began in July 1851, “The Editor’s Table” and “The Editor’s Easy Chair” in October 1851—also formally located an Americanized perspective in the magazine’s structure rather than just the content.
The imperfect implementation of a didactic mandate, especially in the early years, makes the miscellany of Harper’s look more like an abstract mosaic than a realist still life, where dissonance rather than harmony resulted from the mixing of non-American and American voices. But one principle underlying the work-in-progress of the magazine was, as Thomas Lilly observes, “a strong sense of civic duty, which defined the value of anything worth reading in terms of its utility and availability, not its origin.”38 By 1859, this sense of civic duty meant Harper’s published Stephen A. Douglas’s “The Dividing Line between Federal and Local Authority; Popular Sovereignty in the Territories” (September 1859) but none of the letters objecting to the views Douglas expressed.39
Allied to this civic-mindedness, Harper’s created a national presence by refusing to rely on a subscription model. According to Alfred Guernsey, a longtime Harper employee who worked his way up from compositor to managing editor of the magazine under Fletcher Harper’s guidance in 1856, subscriptions accounted for only a quarter of sales. “The remainder,” he wrote in 1865, were “sold to booksellers and dealers, who supply their own customers, and usually receive their supply by express.” The benefit of this model was threefold: it defrayed distribution costs, because it was much better and cheaper to send a batch of magazines to one bookseller than to individuals; it streamlined cash flow, as larger receipts came from fewer intermediaries; and it helped establish stronger regional outposts compared to magazines that relied more heavily on advance subscriptions. Staggered distribution—copies are sent first to California, next to New Orleans and St. Louis, then Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago, before “working toward home by way of Boston and Philadelphia”—ensured that “the Magazine shall come out as nearly as possible at the same time in every part of the country.”40 Harper’s was a magazine whose national aspirations first manifested themselves pragmatically. Over the course of the 1850s it showed that magazines might be national in more than one way and that native content was not always king.
Under Briggs’s editorial guidance, New York City rather than the nation quickly became the focal point for Putnam’s. The magazine subjected New York to the kind of scrutiny offered of no other American city, primarily in a series of articles commencing in February 1853 called “New-York Daguerreotyped.” Built around a collection of specially commissioned engravings, the series promised to provide “a rapid glance, at the progress of New York and its architecture.” It began with the business district; later articles were promised on “Hotels and Restaurants; the Churches; the Colleges and Schools; the Benevolent Institutions; the places of Amusement, and the Public Buildings generally; and also the private houses and the domestic life of the commercial metropolis.” Some of these duly followed. But Putnam’s also promised “similar papers on Boston, Philadelphia, and other places” that never materialized, while it continued to publish fictionalized and nonfictional accounts of life in America’s world city.41 Curtis’s writing for the magazine, later published as The Potiphar Papers (1853) and Prue and I (1856), tells stories about New York City life, and Curtis himself wrote a column for the magazine beginning in January 1856 called “The World of New York.” If the initial ambition of Putnam’s was to represent America’s cities and build a picture of national urban development, in practice the magazine felt most at home in New York City.
The local interests that Putnam’s magazine weighed against the national also needed to compete with more cosmopolitan events and activities from further afield. Putnam himself contacted Melville the day after Briggs sent his letter rejecting “The Two Temples.” Supporting his editor, the owner wrote that “some of our Church readers might be disturbed by the point of your sketch” (C 636–37). While Melville’s point was to satirize Brown, Putnam perhaps also takes aim at the larger meaning of “The Two Temples” and the more benevolent depiction in “Temple Second” of the narrator’s experience at a London theater, where he watches Charles Macready perform in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Richelieu; Or, the Conspiracy. Dennis Berthold argues that such valorization of Macready did not fit the agenda of literary nationalism that Putnam’s promoted; “Temple Second” instead “challenged nationalist aesthetics with a vital cosmopolitanism that men like Briggs and Putnam preferred to avoid,” and that ideological reasons rather than religious ones account for Briggs rejecting “The Two Temples.”42 There are several problems with this proposition.
First, Briggs was far from the latter-day Young American Berthold suggests him to be. Briggs’s antipathy to the factionalism of Young Americanism is evident in his satirical treatments of figures like Mathews and Duyckinck. Perry Miller’s assessment that “Briggs is no strident isolationist, he simply enjoys this country” is nearer the mark.43 Second, what literary nationalism Putnam’s promoted was certainly able to contain dissenting opinions or appreciations of non-American culture. A eulogy for London’s Crystal Palace, described as “the first original piece of architecture of modern times” and a “cosmopolitan castle of industry,” appeared in August 1853. If Berthold is right and Putnam’s suppressed references to the Astor Place riot in order to sanitize cultural history, the more likely reason for doing so is that raising the specter of class conflict was hardly likely to appeal to the magazine’s readership. Those who had most to lose from the eruption of class conflict were the New York City elites who read Putnam’s and liked Isaac Brown. And the magazine’s praise of the Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, whose brilliance put to shame lesser acts appearing at the Astor Place Opera House before its closure, surely makes visible what Berthold suggests Briggs and Putnam do not want to see: the promotion of cosmopolitan aesthetic values over nationalist ones.
Putnam’s was actually a much more cosmopolitan magazine than writers credit. Putnam made sure that he published the magazine with Sampson & Low in London as well as in New York to guarantee international circulation. Neither is it true that Putnam’s published exclusively American writers. Arthur Clough, the English poet, published “Letters of Parapidemus” in the July and August issues of 1853.44 In the same July 1853 issue, there appeared an article on “Life in Hawaii,” a poem titled “Ode to Southern Italy,” and other pieces of non-American focus: “A Few Days in Vienna” and “Sketches in a Parisian Café,” along with six pages of reviews of English and European literature. While the writers of these pieces were American, the reader they were leading by the eye was one for whom quality and nation were not synonymous. Far from being out of sync with the nationalism of Putnam’s, Melville’s “The Two Temples” was decidedly in tune with the magazine’s own cosmopolitanism.
The evidence suggests Briggs and Putnam together rejected “The Two Temples” not for religious or ideological reasons but because of potential offense to a well-known New Yorker in a position of some respect and prominence. If this explanation seems more prosaic than some of the alternatives, then so sometimes is the business of magazine editing. Putnam’s could ill afford to antagonize readers, having already offended churchgoers with the article on architecture and with magazine sales dwindling after the high-water mark of the first year. Economics took priority over the cultural capital of satire in this instance. In the same way that Putnam’s rejected hopeful contributors, so the magazine rejected Melville, who so far had only written “Bartleby” and “The Lightning-Rod Man” (published in August 1854). He was not a magazine mainstay. That economics should take priority is not surprising. Putnam knew he must make changes to maintain the magazine’s viability; the changes would see Briggs step back, Curtis and Godwin relinquish editing duties, and Putnam take up a greater control that itself proved unsustainable. To make one cultural sacrifice in the cause of longer-term stability is an understandable, if not entirely virtuous, local piece of decision making.
The sinews that attached Melville to the magazine culture of the 1850s were knotty and tough; the fibrous tissue embedded Melville in decisions of quality as well as appropriateness that he did not or could not always anticipate. The fate of “The Two Temples” gives the lie to any argument that Melville was capable of fitting his pieces to the requirements of Putnam’s. A writer does not always understand as well as owners, editors, and office managers the turbulences of magazine politics and priorities. What Melville found himself up against was a magazine for whom, in this instance, local reputation outweighed the qualities of “pungent satire” or cosmopolitan aesthetics. At other times, that Putnam’s was both a local and cosmopolitan magazine suited Melville; because the lawyer in “Bartleby” plies his trade on Wall Street rather than State Street in Boston or Broad Street in Philadelphia is one reason why the story fit so well in the pages of Putnam’s and why readers and editors, and Curtis in particular, liked it so much.
Melville himself did not protest the rejection of “The Two Temples,” nor did he send the piece for publication elsewhere, even though Harper’s published his two other diptychs. He acknowledged the letters from both Briggs and Putnam. His response to Briggs is lost. Putnam’s letter, perhaps to keep the author warm after rejection, asked Melville to supply a daguerreotype: “We wish very much to have your head as one of our series of portraits. Curtis will be in the July No.” (C 637). Once more Curtis and Melville are mentioned in the same breath. But Melville refused Putnam’s request matter-of-factly. While he told Duyckinck he respectfully declined “being oblivionated,” Melville told Putnam: “I don’t know a good artist in this rural neighborhood.” One daguerreotypist regularly advertised in the Pittsfield Sun beginning in August 1853; his studio was near the post office Melville visited regularly. With only a hint of sarcasm, Melville ends the letter: “Ere long I will send down some other things, to which, I think, no objections will be made on the score of tender consciences of the public” (C 261). Melville moved on.
After the rejection of “The Two Temples” and the serialization of Israel Potter between July 1854 and March 1855, Melville next sent “Benito Cereno” to Putnam’s. I deal with Israel Potter in more detail in chapter 5, but in the time it took for the novel to reach its conclusion in the magazine, Melville found himself dealing with different owners and editors. Joshua A. Dix and Arthur T. Edwards signed an article of partnership on March 1, 1855. Edwards agreed to invest five thousand dollars before May 1, 1856. The division of responsibilities put Dix in charge of manufacturing and contracts with editors and contributors; Edwards looked after financial matters. A further memorandum of agreement, signed on April 2, 1855, brought Olmsted into the company as joint partner. Edwards now agreed to put in five hundred dollars by May 1, 1855, in addition to the money due by March 1 the following year. Olmsted agreed to the same terms.45 In this form, the ship of Putnam’s sailed on for over a year. Neither Dix nor Edwards had much pedigree in the magazine world. Dix worked for Putnam from at least May 1853 and left to publish Dickens’s Household Words, for which he bought American rights; Edwards was a clerk. But their ascension meant that Melville’s long relationship with Putnam, publisher of his first novel in 1846, ended with the March publication of Israel Potter in book form.
No longer now was Briggs or Putnam casting the first eye over Melville’s writing. Curtis joined Dix, Edwards, and Olmsted as an equal partner only in May 1856, at which point he invested ten thousand dollars in cash and signed over to Dix & Edwards the copyright to his earlier books. In return, the firm agreed that Curtis “shall have charge of and conduct the literary department of said business.”46 This formalized the role Curtis took up on his return to the magazine a year earlier. If the financial investment signaled his faith in the Putnam’s project, it was a faith badly misplaced, although the full horrors of the magazine’s financial mismanagement only became clear several months after Melville published his seventh and final story, “The Apple-Tree Table,” in the May 1856 issue that marked Curtis’s coming out of hiding and formal appointment to the masthead. In the end, Curtis showed himself a better reader of literature than of balance sheets when evaluating cultural and economic matters; when he needed to stop digging the financial hole in which he found himself in 1857 he only made matters worse, for both himself and his wife’s family, by persuading his father-in-law to put his finger in the breached dam. Curtis spent the rest of his life paying off debts accruing from the flood that washed away Putnam’s. But from April 1855 on, his was the eye Melville’s writing needed to engage.
The initial signs were promising. On April 17, 1855, Curtis expressed relish to Dix at the prospect of something new from Melville: “I am anxious to see Melville’s story, which is in his best style of subject.” Presumably Dix told him that in “Benito Cereno” Melville was once more writing about the sea. Curtis’s first reaction on writing to Dix two days later was more positive than his first reading of “The Bell-Tower,” though still not without criticism: “Melville’s story is very good. It is a great pity he did not work it up as a connected tale instead of putting in the dreary documents at the end.—They should have made part of the substance of the story. It’s a little spun out but it is very striking & well done. And I agree with Mr Law that it ought not to be lost.” The next day, April 20, Curtis’s initial enthusiasm begins to wane: “I return Melville’s story today. I wrote you yesterday what I thought of it. He does everything too hurriedly now.” By July, in advice about what to place in future issues, Curtis’s view spirals to a new low and he seems more concerned with value for money. He tells Dix to “take up Benito Cereno of Melville. You have paid for it. . . . why can’t Americans write good stories. They tell good lies enough, & plenty of ’em.”47
The change of heart about “The Bell-Tower” comes in June. And then in January 1856 Curtis cautions Dix about the planned collection of Melville stories in The Piazza Tales while expressing his pleasure about certain of the stories: “I don’t think Melville’s book will sell a great deal but he is a good name upon your list. He has lost his prestige,—and I don’t believe the Putnam stories will bring it up.” In the absence of any evidence about “The Apple-Tree Table,” Curtis accepted only one of Melville’s pieces for Putnam’s without question during this period. “I and My Chimney,” he wrote Dix in September 1855, is “a capital, genial, humorous sketch . . . thoroughly magazinish.”48 The terms of his acceptance indicate the criteria on which he judged Melville’s stories. “I and My Chimney” did not appear in The Piazza Tales, which suggests Melville’s view of its value did not coincide with Curtis’s.
What to make, then, of this new editorial eye passing judgment on Melville’s magazine writing? I answer this question by looking at “The Bell-Tower,” and secondarily at “Benito Cereno” and “I and My Chimney,” but without charging them with the task of mediating the complexities of American politics and history. As I mentioned in the introduction, this method is a consistent feature of critical analyses of Melville’s magazine writing, as the original magazine publication of the stories is forgotten in the urgency to deliver symptomatic readings of their narratives. The most compelling reading of “The Bell-Tower” is Russ Castronovo’s analysis of the story’s “ironic construction of national history.” Through sophisticated contextualization—of the cracked bell in which is read the history of Philadelphia’s similarly flawed Liberty Bell, and of the suggestions of revolt when Bannadonna is killed by his mechanical slave—Castronovo emphasizes the “allusive import” of a story allegorically engaging the founding moments of U.S. national history and their legacy in the mid-nineteenth century. The ironic historiography of “The Bell-Tower” works by insisting “on the continuity of political history even at the cost of uncovering atrocities within sacred origins” and by reminding readers—as the murder of the artisan, Bannadonna’s death, and the slave revolt are quickly brushed aside in the recasting of the bell—that “only forgetting can fashion a narrative stable or coherent enough to support the accumulated layers of history from the origins to the present.”49 Castronovo’s reading is exemplary in revealing what he argues Melville reveals allusively in “The Bell-Tower.”
That “The Bell-Tower” was magazine fiction is not important in Castronovo’s reading. But when Curtis revised his judgment in his second letter to Dix, on June 19, 1855, and decided that the story was too good to lose, there is no sense in which he saw the story’s “ironic historiography.” Curtis is more interested in how the story measures up to his judgment of literary value, his understanding of the picturesque, the unity of style and theme, and whether or not the story deserves a place in Putnam’s. In the context of such aesthetic judgments and distinctions shaping the magazine world Curtis and Melville emerge as figures very closely entwined, yet fundamentally different; they radically coexist in the 1850s in a way that is no longer the case and hardly recognized in considerations of Melville’s magazine writing.
Curtis was the son of a banker but, after a disastrous year spent working in a German importing house, he chose to go to Brook Farm rather than following his father into the world of business. As a boy in the 1830s Curtis heard lectures by Emerson, Richard Henry Dana, John Neal, and Margaret Fuller in Providence, and with his brother, Burrill, he enrolled at West Roxbury as a boarder rather than a member of the Brook Farm Association. He stayed for a year, leaving partly because he disagreed with the Fourierist shift, and moved to Concord in 1844, immersing himself in a social network that would prove invaluable to a future journalist and editor. He befriended Emerson, Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, helped Thoreau build his cabin at Walden Pond, and developed an interest in politics that would later dominate his life. After five years traveling through Europe and the Middle East, Curtis returned to the United States and turned his experiences into Nile Notes of a Howadji and The Howadji in Syria.
So popular were these books that “Howadji” became Curtis’s sobriquet. In his preface to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne expressed his hope that “the brilliant Howadji might find as rich a theme in his youthful reminiscences of BROOK FARM, and a more novel one—close at hand as it lies—than those which he has since made so distant a pilgrimage to seek, in Syria, and along the current of the Nile.”50 Curtis began working as a journalist from his home in Staten Island. He first took a position with the New York Tribune, under the editorship of Horace Greeley, to whom he had written letters during his travels in Europe; Harper & Brothers published the letters as Lotus-Eating (1852). Curtis soon got out of the unfulfilling world of newspapers. He complained to William Douglas O’Connor that “a Newspaper life is unmitigated slavery. I would rather be a clerk in a shop, with some leisure than be forever tantalized by the neighborhood of things I loved & could not enjoy,—as a literary man is, in a Newspaper.”51 He turned instead to magazines and lecturing. Family money sponsored Curtis’s peripatetic adult life, but by the age of twenty-five he was a veteran intern with contacts in all the right places in a cultural milieu where thinking, writing, and publishing were closely connected activities.
It was in this world, where writers turned intellectual labor into modest economic currency, that Curtis and Melville met. While a long evolutionary history is responsible for Melville’s assuming his place at the tip of the tree of American letters and for making Curtis extinct, in the primordial soup of the mid-nineteenth century their careers showed many similarities. Both writers based their early work on foreign travel and immersion in non-Western cultures; both made part of their living through the burgeoning magazine culture of the 1850s; both turned to the lecture circuit after the collapse of Putnam’s in 1857, Curtis successfully, Melville much less so; in later life both made their living through government service, Melville as a customs officer and Curtis as a civil service reformer; and both were poets.
In the sketches that became Prue and I, Curtis even enmeshes himself in Melville’s magazine fiction by directly engaging it in his own work. One of the recurring figures in Curtis’s sketches is the character of Titbottom, a dowdy accountant to the sketches’ narrator. In one sketch the narrator notes of Titbottom: “Before I knew him, I used sometimes to meet him with a man whom I was afterwards told was Bartleby, the scrivener. . . . Recently I have not seen Bartleby; but Titbottom seems no more solitary because he is alone.”52 After the failure of Putnam’s in the autumn of 1857, Curtis and Melville also occupied the same venues and towns during their respective lecture tours, as Curtis helped Melville secure appointments. In correspondence about the sale of the stereotypes of The Piazza Tales and The Confidence-Man, Melville told Curtis, “I have received two or three invitations to lecture,—invitations prompted by you—and have promptly accepted. I am ready for as many more as may come on” (C 316). A business relationship forced them to occupy the same cultural networks.
At another level, however, they were incompatible figures with very different ideas about literature. In noting the “consistently picturesque” qualities of “The Bell-Tower” in his letter of June 19, Curtis betrays his allegiance to what George Santayana would later call the genteel tradition. When he coined this phrase at the beginning of the twentieth century, Santayana’s description could easily have had Curtis and Melville in mind. “America,” he wrote, “is not simply a young country with an old mentality: it is a country with two mentalities. . . . The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.”53 While Melville was deploying his literary aggressions in Moby-Dick and Pierre in the early 1850s, Curtis was publishing his Howadji books. Unlike Melville’s genre-busting travel narratives of the exotic in Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, Curtis’s books swerve toward, without being the worst examples of, Wilfred McClay’s description of this genteel mode: “odious formalism, superficial sentimentality, elitism, disingenuous optimism, vapid idealism, and Victorian moral sensibility.”54 What we know about Melville’s opinion of Curtis’s work is limited to one piece of evidence: F. O. Matthiessen pointed out that Melville annotated the initials “G. W. C.” alongside Matthew Arnold’s observation that “it is comparatively a small matter to express oneself well, if one will be content with not expressing much, with expressing only trite ideas.”55 This damning judgment marks out Melville’s disapproval of the intellectual qualities of the literary generation to which he was connected by the necessity of money.
The diametrically opposed methods and styles of Melville and Curtis were also well explored in the pages of Putnam’s itself. Under Curtis’s editorship, Fitz-James O’Brien published “Our Authors and Authorship: Melville and Curtis” in the April 1857 issue, weaving his discussion around the premise, paraphrased from Goethe, that “to praise is easy, to judge is hard—to suit our praise to our judgment troublesome.” Melville is upbraided in the essay “for hiding his light under such an impervious bushel” and for being “a man born to create, who resolves to anatomize; a man born to see, who insists upon speculating,” one who has “turned away . . . to cultivate his speculative faculties in a strange, loose way.” In a manner that sounds odd to contemporary ears, Curtis is described as “Mr. Melville’s younger brother in letters.” He is too superficial for O’Brien’s tastes. Whereas Melville “throws himself off his balance by an over-eagerness to be prophetic and impressive, Mr. Curtis loses his through an over-anxiety to be moderate, judicious, and experienced.” Having seen Curtis lecture in support of the Republican Party, O’Brien suggests that Curtis “emancipate himself from the mistaken direction which he took in the Potiphar Papers” by throwing himself “back resolutely upon himself” to “study the positive qualities of his own mind, and learn afresh how clear and fine a field there is for him to till,” not in fictional satire but in essays.56
That Curtis allowed such a critical assessment of his writing to appear in Putnam’s says something positive about his lack of writerly preciousness. Either that or he just thought O’Brien wrong. The one novel he published subsequently—Trumps (1861), serialized in Harper’s between April 1859 and January 1861—certainly showed no signs he took the criticism on board. The same genteel and sentimental horizon noticeable in his earlier work hangs heavily on his last attempt to fictionalize New York City life. But as O’Brien suggests, Curtis was by no means uninterested in issues of substance. Parke Godwin was charged with writing many of the most effective political articles, but Curtis also built a reputation as one of the leading antislavery lecturers of the period.
Opposition to slavery was part of Curtis’s upbringing. In one of his final speeches as senator for Rhode Island, Curtis’s grandfather James Burrill set out his objections to the Missouri Compromise; in 1856 Curtis married Anna Shaw, the daughter of the abolitionist Francis George Shaw. Curtis also followed Godwin’s and Olmsted’s lead as Putnam’s became more partisan in its support of the Republican Party during 1856.57 And while Curtis lectured on sober literary topics such as Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, Kingsley, and Dickens, during the election campaign of 1856 he spoke for John Fremont on several occasions. After Fremont’s defeat and following the Dred Scott decision, his lectures turned increasingly to the issue of slavery. Delivering a lecture titled “The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question” in Philadelphia, Curtis continued as hecklers in the audience tried to shout him down while thousands of protesters massed outside the hall, throwing bricks through the windows and attempting to set fire to the building.58
Curtis emerges from this juxtaposition with Melville as a figure whose efforts to translate between economic and cultural capital are marked by a desire to clearly demarcate literature and the arts from history and politics. While Melville was speculating in “a strange, loose way,” Curtis was exercising his propensity “to be moderate, judicious, and experienced” both in his editorial activities, which he fitted around his lecturing and literary commitments to Harper’s, and in his gentle satires of metropolitan socialites, which themselves maintained this distinction as they fell far short, as O’Brien also pointed out, of the “faithful anatomization of a corrupted social order” one found in the work of Curtis’s close friend Thackeray.59
This distinction between different domains of intellectual activity and writing are important when thinking about Curtis’s acceptance of “The Bell-Tower” and Melville’s other stories published in Putnam’s. The thrust of Castronovo’s reading, of course, is precisely the way in which Melville’s narrative manages to conjoin the literary with American history and the politics of slavery in “The Bell-Tower.” Indeed, critics admire Melville’s writing more generally now because it resonates so vibrantly with those issues defining American history in the 1840s and ’50s—race, empire, capitalism—and because he fuses a literary with a philosophical and political consciousness. What marks out Curtis as a writer, editor, and lecturer is the almost mechanical separation of these domains.
In all of his literary judgments Curtis shies away from invoking the discourse of politics that so dominated his lecturing and whose engagement, in one of his addresses, he describes as the scholar’s main responsibility. Curtis delivered “The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times” at Wesleyan University in 1856; a published version appeared shortly thereafter with Dix & Edwards. Pivoting on the crisis over Kansas, and the divisive question of whether the newly created state should allow slavery, Curtis summons the imagery of race as he argues that “drifting across a continent, and blighting the harvests that gild it with plenty from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, a black cloud obscures the page that records an old crime.” He goes on to suggest that “every scholar degrades his order, and courts the pity of all generous men, who can see a just liberty threatened, without deserting every other cause to defend liberty.” Without this defense, he asks, “of what use are your books? Of what use is your scholarship?” In the main an extended history lesson that continually attacks “the Slave Power” of the southern states, Curtis concludes by claiming that “while we read history, we make history.” He cites Milton as an exemplar, someone whose “sublime scholarship . . . began in literature and ended in life” and who pursued truth while others pursued what was expedient. The blending of literature, history, and what Curtis calls “the eternal law of justice” in Milton is what distinguishes him.60
Curtis is a conundrum. The views expressed in this address isolate qualities in Milton similar to those found by contemporary critics in Melville. When added to the views about slavery and abolition Curtis propounded in his lectures, why then is he not more positive in his assessment of “Benito Cereno”? Why does he seem to prefer the qualities of “I and My Chimney,” a piece of writing Melville had no desire to republish in The Piazza Tales? Curtis discusses his conception of scholarship through English dramatic and poetic literary figures—Jonson, Addison, Swift, Pope, and Gray, for instance—but there is no sense in the address that Melville, nor any other writer Curtis could call a contemporary, should be part of this calling. Contemporary literature and contemporary politics are ruptured in Curtis’s imagination; American writers play no role in his discussion. The editor reading and assessing “Benito Cereno” for a magazine whose ideological stance was hardening in support of abolition and Republicanism was an editor who favored the literature of gentility and sentimentality removed from issues of substance. This must modify any existing sense of how “Benito Cereno” does cultural work for Putnam’s.
One straightforward explanation of “Benito Cereno” would see its politics matching the politics of Putnam’s. It is certainly hard to imagine “Benito Cereno” appearing in Harper’s. But there are problems with having a magazine context determine the meaning of the story. First of all, Putnam’s may well have followed an editorial policy—though the editors were rarely in the same room together—when it came to political commentary, but this policy did not overlap with the acceptance or rejection of tales, sketches, and poetry. Second, Putnam’s was not a single entity. This point is worth reiterating. Ownership and editorial changes fractured unity; monthly publication in the midst of such changes made coherency difficult; different editors performed different roles. Curtis and Godwin shared views, but their views also differed. Godwin’s Fourierist roots lingered on after the 1840s, while Curtis never had much time for this strand of liberal thought. And Godwin had nothing to do with Melville’s submissions to Putnam’s. Finally, there is the problem of Curtis: an editor for whom the politics of race, or the politics of anything for that matter, blew hardly at all on the weathervane of his literary judgments.
Curtis’s ambivalent reaction to “Benito Cereno” is more telling about Putnam’s than the politics of Putnam’s is telling about Melville’s ambivalent representation of race. What Curtis first anticipated in “Benito Cereno” was Melville’s “best style of subject.” This subject was the sea, but also a particular approach to the sea: one that makes the reader hesitate about the balance between fiction and reality. In rewriting part of Amasa Delano’s narrative of his voyages Melville gave Putnam’s a piece of writing grounded in a nonfictional form he then brings to life. Melville’s original title for The Piazza Tales—Benito Cereno & Other Sketches—suggests what Curtis was anticipating. “Benito Cereno” would be a sea sketch just as “The Encantadas” were sea sketches. Curtis was right to prepare himself for Melville’s “best style,” and such a sketch would have fit comfortably in the pages of Putnam’s given its enjoyment of travel sketches.
Where Curtis balks is when he sees the “dreary documents.” This is a structural problem. The balance of fictive imagination and nonfiction crashes too heavily on the latter side. While sketches sometimes cede narrative responsibilities to third persons—the story within the story—what kind of sketch cedes responsibility toward the end of its work to such documentary evidence? Geoffrey Crayon recycles the papers of Diedrich Knickerbocker, but Knickerbocker is left to speak for himself through Crayon; in “Benito Cereno” the reader is distracted and disoriented by what is “compiled from certain recovered documents of Aranda’s, and also from recollections of the deponent, from which portions only are extracted” (PT 104). The wonder is that Curtis did not suggest edits and ask Melville to either drop or rework the documents into the “connected tale” he thought “should have made part of the substance of the story.” Curtis was keen enough to help his friend William Douglas O’Connor chop off the end of his story “What Cheer?” But he is impatient with Melville for not taking the time to properly carry out the working up of these documents that we can understand now as another iteration of the sketch’s examination of perspective and reliability, and one intimately connected with the representation of race. Curtis’s advice to Dix to “attenuate the dreadful statistic of the end” went unheeded.61
Curtis’s fading enjoyment of “Benito Cereno” hardly suggests that the story nestled snugly in the mutual conviction of magazine and author against racism and slavery. Instead, Curtis comes to question “Benito Cereno” because the narrative breaks the decorum of the sketch frame he thinks would make it “connected” and ready, presumably, to fulfill the anticipation he expressed to Dix. What Curtis demands of literature is what makes him a figure forgotten by literature. Not for him the bold experiments of “Benito Cereno,” in which there are “too many allusions, too many references, to surely determine political analogs” and where meaning “is as much sunk in silent depths as drowned in a deluge of discourse.”62 “Benito Cereno” appears in the pages of Putnam’s despite, not because of, its representation of the politics of slavery. Curtis is forgiving enough and satisfied enough by a mixture of anticipation and partial fulfillment to wave the story through.
Much more to Curtis’s liking was “I and My Chimney,” a sketch at the opposite end of the spectrum of narrative experiment from “Benito Cereno.” Nothing more is known of Curtis’s reaction to “I and My Chimney” other than that he found it “thoroughly magazinish,” but the emphasis on domestic matters and the gently humorous tone are similar to Curtis’s own preoccupations in his genteel satires of family life in the city. As plot gives way to characterization, so “I and My Chimney” leans firmly toward the sketch tradition. The narrator is stubbornly attached to his chimney, the more so as his wife tries to persuade him to demolish it. Even the possibility that within the chimney lies a secret closet put there by the previous occupant, a sea captain, that might contain money is not enough to make the narrator knock the chimney down. Defiantly, he says at the end of the sketch, “I and my chimney will never surrender” (PT 377). The chief appeal of the sketch is the humorous defamiliarization of the chimney and the subordination of the narrator to its charms: “in everything” but the phrase “I and My Chimney,” the narrator says, is “my chimney taking precedence of me” (PT 352). Curtis held “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Encantadas” in high esteem; that he found “I and My Chimney” so suited to Putnam’s suggests his struggles over “Benito Cereno” and “The Bell-Tower” resulted from their unsuitability for, not their fit with, the magazine’s literary aim. What fit best was the lightest, the most insubstantial of Melville’s magazine writing; Curtis the Putnam’s man, it turns out, was always a Harper’s man.
The Curtis who withstood the bricks and fire-starters in Philadelphia to talk about slavery, who issued a call to arms to the literary societies of Wesleyan University, appears incompatible with the figure who enthuses over “I and My Chimney.” This latter Curtis is the man who expressed himself so well and yet on such “trite” subjects as found in the “Editor’s Easy Chair” columns he wrote for Harper’s. Writing in a consistently erudite and conversational style, Curtis assumed the persona in these pieces of the educated and genteel man about town. The politically engaged, principled abolitionist is absent, just as American writers were absent in Curtis’s Wesleyan address. In the pages of Harper’s, in his own magazine writing, and in his editorial judgments, Curtis drew on a mode that followed more obviously from his earliest published work.
Curtis inherited a picturesque tradition that in the United States went back at least as far as Charles Brockden Brown and came to underscore the imagination of other romantic writers, including Hawthorne and Thoreau, with whom Curtis was well acquainted.63 Curtis’s own travel writing in his Howadji books fashioned a quiescently picturesque version of the landscape of North Africa, and Putnam’s became a ready publisher of similar travelogues. While the imperialist and ideologically containing nature of this picturesque aesthetic is now well understood, much of the work on Melville and the picturesque has emphasized the ways in which he circumvents this tradition and offers a critique of the picturesque mode from within its clichés and figures.64 That Curtis found enough to admire in the picturesque qualities of “The Bell-Tower” to commit to publication therefore raises questions about the extent to which Melville’s critique of the picturesque was visible to Curtis.
The critique is visible to Castronovo, of course, who locates in the narrator’s surveying of the ruined landscape of the Italian setting “a founding contaminated by murder, fraud, and slavery” and “a genealogical investigation bearing him back to the origins.”65 Much more visible to Curtis, as the submission of his own poems written in Italy during the period of his reacquaintance with Margaret Fuller suggests, is the picturesque Italian setting of Melville’s story rather than its undermining. In comparison with Castronovo’s view, watching Curtis reading “The Bell-Tower” is like watching someone content to wander through a terrain with which he is familiar and in which he feels at home; to watch, that is, a reader who reads not for deep meaning through an act of unveiling, but a reader for whom “profound morality” is etched into the surface of a style whose picturesque qualities—pomposity and self-consciousness notwithstanding—simultaneously enact a judgment on a story’s central character.
From the justification he offers in his letter of June 19, it appears that Curtis changes his mind about “The Bell-Tower” because he now better understands the connection between style and theme and is willing to forgive the stylistic flaws that presumably he could not on first reading the story. The flaws are similar to those identified by O’Brien. In cultivating “his speculative faculties in a strange, loose way” Melville produces prose that is, in Curtis’s words, “painfully artificial and pompously self-conscious.” O’Brien was following up an opinion about Melville that he first expressed in Putnam’s in 1853 in the second of a soon-to-be-dropped series called “Our Young Authors.” A mainly hostile account of the “interregnum of nonsense” from Mardi onward, O’Brien’s review criticizes Melville for language that is “drunken and reeling” and a style that is “antipodical, and marches on its head.” Preferring the plainer style of Typee and White-Jacket, O’Brien concludes by counseling Melville: “Let him diet himself for a year or two on Addison, and avoid Sir Thomas Browne.”66 Wayne R. Kime suggests that “The Bell-Tower” is Melville’s defiant response to O’Brien’s review.67 Curtis’s judgment is likewise that Melville has made no Addisonian concessions in his style. And yet despite the importance to Curtis’s culture of gentility of an Augustan tradition in which the clarity and wit of periodical writing were important constituents, Curtis forgives Melville his stylistic excesses. He does so not because Melville is undermining the picturesque but because he is strengthening it: “In reading ‘The Bell Tower’ you must remember that the style is consistently picturesque. It isn’t Addisonian nor is it Johnsonese—neither is Malmsey wine, Springwater.” Addison may provide the clarity and purity of springwater, but Melville gives the substance and heady effects of fortified wine.
Curtis’s willingness to make compromises in his editorial judgment should modify any polarizing argument about Melville’s stylistic defiance in “The Bell-Tower” and the genteel quality of Putnam’s. For Kime, the story is willfully obscure. The historical setting, the extensive use of classical allusion, and the ostentatious style all contribute to the refusal of the story to fulfill O’Brien’s advice. At the same time, Putnam’s is characterized as a magazine with popular aspirations, readers of limited literary awareness, and an editor in Curtis “who is not remembered for his penetration as a reader of Melville.”68 And yet this defiant story was still published in this genteel and popular magazine. Curtis was a perceptive enough reader to see Melville’s stylistic defiance but a sympathetic enough reader to recognize the story’s qualities.
Neither would the Italian setting of the story have been odd to a reader of magazines in the 1850s. There were numerous pieces about Europe, including Italy, in Harper’s, because it reprinted, and in Putnam’s, because it was cosmopolitan.69 And Melville’s style is not all defiance. Elements of the lush and poetic syntax are similar to Curtis’s own prose style. This is the second paragraph of “The Bell-Tower”: “As all along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy mound—last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable and true gauge which cometh by prostration—so westward from what seems the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain” (PT 174). The use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance bears some resemblance to this paragraph from the opening of Curtis’s Nile Notes of a Howadji: “In a gold and purple December sunset, the Pacha and I walked down to the boat at Boulak, the port of Cairo. The Pacha was my friend, and it does not concern you, gracious reader, to know if he were Sicilian, or Syrian; whether he wore coat or kaftan, had a hareem, or was a baleful bachelor. The air was warm, like a May evening in Italy. Behind us, the slim minarets of Cairo spired shiningly in the brilliance, like the towers of a fairy city, under the sunset sea.”70 Melville and Curtis were obviously very different writers, but their differences did not separate them completely. There were points of intersection; Curtis’s change of heart about “The Bell-Tower” and his coming to the conclusion that the story does pass muster is one example.
The uneasy presence of the experimental and rebellious Melville in the pages of magazines like Putnam’s and Harper’s is usually explained by crediting Melville with the capacity to fit his expansive literary preoccupations to magazine forms. He was certainly expert at adapting the genre of the story of working life in the city, the sea narrative, and the travelogue in, respectively, “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and “The Encantadas.” Even if “The Bell-Tower” did not pass initial scrutiny there was enough in it for Curtis to eventually publish. It is tempting, then, to characterize Melville as a writer capable of anticipating a reader like Curtis who would simply misread the “The Bell-Tower.” At the moment of judging, his reading eye would see only the textual surface and miss the substantial meanings Castronovo and later critics identify. Melville knew well enough that it was Curtis whose professional eye he needed to satisfy; the fact that he published regularly suggests he was successful. So the Italian setting would be key to this distraction rather than an obscurity, something that would draw Curtis’s attention and prompt his sympathy. The issue in which “The Bell-Tower” appeared was the first to have a reviews section, albeit brief, devoted specifically to Italian writing.
For further evidence of this technique of distraction one might also turn to “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” published anonymously in The Literary World in August 1850, in which Melville addresses the relationship between surface and depth in outlining a theory of Hawthorne’s method. In Hawthorne’s stories, the essay argues, “bright gildings but fringe, and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds” (PT 243), while the sublimity of Hawthorne’s writing is “lost in his sweetness” (PT 252); genius appears in the stories “by cunning glimpses” like the “sacred white doe in the woodlands” (PT 244). If one sees this essay as a blueprint for his own method in his short fiction, then Melville smuggles complex ideas past superficial readers like Curtis.
This argument does not stand up to scrutiny. First of all, Curtis was ambivalent enough about “Benito Cereno” to suggest that Melville could not easily steal things past him. His doubts about the style of “The Bell-Tower” are evidence of this too, and his editorial decisions were necessarily compromises given the problems of filling space and meeting copy deadlines. The acceptance and valuing of Melville’s stories was not straightforward, and we can draw no easy conclusions about distracting surface and deeper meaning. The example of “The Two Temples” shows both that Melville’s stories did not align so easily with the requirements of Putnam’s and that editors, in that instance Briggs, were not easy to hoodwink.
A second reason to be cautious about relying on a narrative that sees Melville smuggling deeper meanings past magazine editors is that “Hawthorne and His Mosses” does not provide unmediated access to Melville’s thoughts. Also well known for its disquisition on literary nationalism, the essay voices opinions that seem to align with the project of a magazine like Putnam’s where a nationalist agenda sat alongside exercises in literary distinction. The narrator of “Mosses” who writes that “we want no American Goldsmiths; nay, we want no American Miltons” appears to anticipate Curtis’s judgment of “The Bell-Tower” as Malmsey wine in comparison to the springwater of Addison and Johnson (PT 248). Yet Ida Rothschild argues that “Mosses” is notable not for affirming the ideas about literary nationalism often claimed of it but for undermining such ideas as it displaces them onto the persona of the essay’s narrator, the “Virginian Spending July in Vermont.”71 The Virginian also extends his discussion to literary evaluation. He suggests that “you cannot know greatness by inspecting it” and “there is no glimpse to be caught of it, except by intuition; you need not ring it, you but touch it, and you find it is gold” (PT 244). If the opinions on literary nationalism in “Mosses” cannot be trusted, then the narrator’s judgment of Hawthorne’s method of writing short stories and methods of literary evaluation also begin to look less secure. Indeed, the Virginian may be an early example of those partial narrators who figure so prominently in “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and “The Bell-Tower.” To read “Mosses” ironically means treating with skepticism not only the opinions about literary nationalism but also the Virginian’s claims about the separation of light and dark, gilding and thunderclouds, and inspection and intuition.
In this context, Curtis’s letters of June 18 and 19 look much less like misreading. The paradox of the letter of June 19 is that even given more time to read and think about “The Bell-Tower” Curtis’s aim is neither to read contextually nor more deeply but to read more superficially; that is, he shows no evidence of reading for dark thunderclouds. Instead he comes to more concrete and satisfying conclusions about the story’s “unity” and sees the gilding in “The Bell-Tower”—an ornateness that he likens to the “quaint carving of the bell” in the story—but does not reach for the metaphorical “gold” of substance that lurks in the thunderclouds Castronovo identifies beyond the gilded fringes.
In trying to carry out what O’Brien calls “the troublesome office of suiting praise to judgment,” Curtis shows no appetite for the kind of political engagement he advocated in his lectures.72 I am clearly not suggesting that Curtis’s aesthetic judgments were made outside of ideology, but I do want to distinguish between modes of critical speculation that—in Castronovo’s case, and in symptomatic reading more generally—work to prioritize the inevitability of connections between the political and the aesthetic, and cases like Curtis’s where the two domains were demarcated because of different aesthetic and political priorities. Curtis is a dissociative reader. He is an interesting figure not because he lacked political affiliation or purpose but precisely because he believed in political change and the abolition of slavery. When Curtis read “The Bell-Tower” he did not consider it vital to make the connection between literature and formal politics or history. Melville’s stories had to pass through a different orientation of criticism to political commitment when they reached Curtis, one where dissociative rather than symptomatic reading held sway. If one follows Castronovo’s reading of “The Bell-Tower,” Melville is offering Putnam’s a radicalized version of U.S. history. What made “The Bell-Tower” magazine writing, however, was its picturesque style rather than its radical allegory or the unity of this style with a theme Curtis identified but did not, or could not, articulate.
Even so, it would be a mistake to equate Curtis’s dissociative reading style and his criteria for publishing literature with either superficiality or social disengagement. That Curtis finds himself “converted” by “The Bell-Tower” suggests the heightened effect the story creates in him overnight and his understanding of literature as a cultural form with the capacity to change minds. His differentiation between the “many” who will find the style problematic and his own more forgiving judgment is clearly full of social as well as cultural distinction. At the same time, it is a judgment that what best changes minds is a literature whose point is made not just by transparency or force of argument but by a subtlety of persuasion that is contained in some correspondence between theme and style.
We better know now the thunderclouds rather than the gildings of “The Bell-Tower” because of the prevalence of symptomatic criticism that opens up Melville’s magazine writing to new analysis. But at what cost? In creating “The Bell-Tower” as so stable a narrative that it does the work he claims for it, Castronovo has to perpetrate his own forgetting. Of what kinds of experience, for instance, are those “accumulated layers of history” constituted? And, if it is impossible to incorporate them all, on what basis does selection occur? There is also rigidity in the critical language by which these readings proceed. If it does not quite construct a monumental narrative out of an “ironic historiography” that Castronovo argues cripples such narratives, then there is certainly little room for any deviation: Melville’s narrative “insists”; “a generation cannot inherit a coherent legacy”; “only forgetting can fashion” a stable narrative. But if the terms in which Curtis first read the story no longer resonate or make sense, then what does that say about the capacity of symptomatic criticism to contextualize? Curtis’s reading of the story now looks odd, or misaligned with the story as it has become known, and this is because symptomatic criticism tends better to contextualize the time of a narrative’s interpretation than the time of a narrative’s composition and publication. But “The Bell-Tower” was a magazine story and a material object embedded in the contingencies of publication.
Watching Curtis pass judgment on Melville is, from one perspective, like looking at a world turned upside down. When Fitz-James O’Brien identifies Melville’s insistence on being “prophetic” he anticipates later critics who make much of Melville’s prescience as a writer and the proleptic capacity of his fiction. Under these circumstances, a world in which so ephemeral and forgotten a writer as Curtis is in a position to exercise literary judgment is difficult to conceive. Even more unlikely is that his judgment is worth taking seriously. One of the problems of symptomatic reading is that such an inversion is dealt with in only one way: restore order by asserting the power of Melville’s narratives while forgetting Curtis and how “The Bell-Tower” stumbled into print. That Curtis wavered over “The Bell-Tower,” however, and that his judgment turned the story into magazine writing, are important considerations if one wants to understand the history that shapes literary judgment and the texture of literary history itself.
The Curtis who emerges at the intersection of his various occupations, judgments, and interests is someone who could appeal, as he did during his lectures, to the most serious of causes and the most exacting standards of ethical and political commitment while also being able to deal in the trivia of urban social satire and conversational gossip. His ability to regularly fulfill his writing, editing, and lecturing duties at the same time showed he was capable of spontaneous acts of writing and of speaking in front of different audiences during his lecture tours. A man of letters and a man of business, he played off these roles as he mediated the demands of, and his investment in, the economic and cultural capital of writing and intellectual life. Perspiration rather than inspiration generated his multifaceted and often mundane work, and there is nothing in him of the romantic artist; nevertheless, we should not undervalue his role in the literary culture of the mid-nineteenth century.
To factor out Curtis is to underestimate the capacity of literary cultures and cultures of criticism to be different than our own. In the 1850s the literary differences between Melville and Curtis were well enough understood but were part and parcel of the machinations of a literary network that hindsight is not always careful enough to observe. If the balance of cultural taste in the 1850s favored Curtis, neither he nor Melville had careers in the writing of fiction beyond the end of that decade. With the benefit of hindsight, the superiority of Melville’s vision might seem obvious. But the reason Melville’s magazine writing appeared at all is because it did not do in the 1850s what it does now for readers and critics. According to Castronovo, “the political message” of “The Bell-Tower” is “that once authority effaces its past it can only be subject to the debilitating mistrust of all citizens.”73 Juxtaposing Curtis’s reading of “The Bell-Tower” and “Benito Cereno” against such a claim helps to show that the stories were, and still might, be read otherwise, even by someone like Curtis who was expert at holding and expressing political opinions. The urge to make such large claims for stories that originally passed almost unnoticed, or in the case of “The Bell-Tower” almost unpublished, risks lifting Melville out of his context into our own. What then gets lost is the contingent chain of events that shaped Curtis’s dissociative reading of Melville’s story on those two days in June 1855.