Wisdom and Woe

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A few months before his death in 1891, Melville privately published a 25-print run of poetry, titled Timoleon. The penultimate section, "Fruit of Travel Long Ago," consists of 18 poems inspired by his Grand Tour through Italy, Greece, and Egypt (presented in reverse chronological order from which he visited them). As the poems reach successively backwards through memory, they criss-cross time and space, reflecting on history, culture, and the meaning of art.

Significantly, Timoleon is dedicated "to my countryman, Elihu Vedder." Vedder, like Melville, was born in New York City. In 1857 (coincident with Melville's Grand Tour), he travelled to Italy to complete his training as a painter, where he was deeply influenced by the Macchiaioli: a movement of artist-revolutionaries who not only rebelled against Italy's established (foreign-dominated) political regime, but also against its academic (foreign-dominated) artistic conventions. Vedder returned to New York City to begin his artistic career, but by 1866 he resettled permanently in Rome.

Melville admired Vedder's paintings for decades, but the two--described as "kindred spirits" by Charles C. Eldredge--apparently never met. Seeing Melville's dedication, Vedder wrote his gratitude that "my art has gained me so many friends--even if unknown to me," but (like kindred spirits Clarel and Celio) the estrangement was unreconciled: Melville died before receiving the letter.

Whereas Timoleon's travel is "long ago" (and "far away"), its dedication defiantly declares the intimacy of a shared home near-at-heart. This, perhaps more than the poetry itself, is an Ishmael-wanderer's hoped-for "fruit." But the sense of repose anticipated in the collection's finale is held in suspense, for "Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? .... the secret of our paternity lies in [the] grave, and we must there to learn it." (Moby-Dick, 114)

For this meetup, we will read the last half of Melville's Timoleon: "Fruit of Travel Long Ago" and "L'Envoi."

Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.

Timoleon:

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Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (Herman Melville, 1876) is one of the longest poems in American literature: four parts, 150 cantos, and stretching to almost 18,000 lines. It has been called a contender for "The Great American Poem," a precursor of The Waste Land, and Melville's "obsessive, psycho-religious quest."

It tells the story of Clarel, an American divinity student experiencing a crisis of faith, as he follows a Biblical itinerary through the Holy Land. As he meets ancient landmarks and new acquaintances, he is haunted by theological questions and existential doubts.

One of the more enigmatic figures that Clarel encounters is Celio: a handsome but deformed young Italian, borne of his home's political climate, whose own crisis of faith has left him embittered and defiant. Without so much as speaking to one another, Clarel senses that Celio is "a second self" whose fate is somehow mysteriously related to his own.

According to Walter Bezanson, Celio represents "the cost of rebellion, the killing pain, and loneliness of dissent." Stan Goldman argues that Celio's "heretical outcries actually reflect a deep faith of the kind found in Old Testament types such as Job, whose questioning of God's ways, in particular the Deus absconditus, constitutes a kind of faith."

For this meetup, we will read selections from Clarel, Part 1:

• Cantos 11-16
• Cantos 18-20
• Canto 40

Important context: Canto 11 opens with Clarel (aka, "the student," "the pilgrim") and his earliest companion (Nehemiah, aka "the guide," "the meek one") when they first stumble upon Celio (aka, "the unknown one," "the stranger").

Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.

Clarel:

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The Leopard (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958) begins in 1860 in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. King Ferdinand II ("Bomba") has died, and Garibaldi's Redshirts have just landed on the Italian coast to initiate a military campaign known as the "Expedition of the Thousand." As Garibaldi's army inevitably presses inland, it portends the collapse of the existing feudal order and the emergence of a unified Italian state for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.

In the throes of this revolutionary upheaval is Prince Don Fabrizio--decadent patriarch of the aristocratic Salina dynasty with a pride befitting "the leopard" (actually a serval) of his family crest. Fabrizio is simultaneously a staunch Catholic and a consummate womanizer, with a sort of codependent relationship to both sin and confession. Even as the approaching army threatens his family, fortune, and fate with extinction, his favorite nephew, Tancredi, joins Garibaldi's forces, declaring paradoxically, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Controversial at its release, The Leopard soon became a best-seller and is today considered a masterpiece of world literature, often counted among the greatest novels of all time. E. M. Forster called it "one of the great lonely books," known for its depiction of human frailty and melancholy, its poetic "description of a civilization in decline," and its "comfortless and irrational" Sicilian landscape. In 1963, it was adapted into an award-winning film starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale, and as a Netflix series in 2025.

Schedule:

• Week 1: Ch. 1-3
• Week 2: Ch. 3-8

The Leopard: