Did Herman Melville have a dog?
Sooner than I expected to — although I’ve been dipping into it ever since I first finished in summer 2020; I cannot resist it — I’m embarked on a full read of Moby-Dick again. I noticed that I could make Chapter 22, ‘Merry Christmas’, fall on Christmas Day, if I read one chapter a day, and started… whenever it was. Five or six days ago. Silly alignments like that appeal to me. This re-read was not with any intent to write about it; but, reading something this slowly, making occasional notes, sometimes, those notes have inevitably become longer. Plus, recently I quit academia for good and it’s an opportunity, if I am able to take it, to try to re-learn what I actually loved in the first place, about reading and writing.
There’s something very wayward, which I may or may not try to write, about the first section, ETYMOLOGY; and after reading Chapter 4 the other day I’m now posting this, honestly no more than a sketch, with some moments that I cannot make gel; it is what it is. Maybe one day I will come back to it. Woof.
1.
Toward the end of the first chapter, ‘Whaling’, of Elizabeth Hardwick’s biography of Herman Melville, she offers — as a comparison for the social circumstance of Melville’s writing — this memorable quotation from Macaulay [Thomas Babington, presumably?]; his description
… of “the writing game”, at the time of Doctor Johnson:
“Even an author whose works were established, and whose works were popular [...] was sometimes glad to obtain by pawning his best coat, the means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, where he could wipe his hands, after a greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland dog.”
(For me it’s that very last detail which earns it the adjective ‘memorable’.)
Hardwick continues:
And Melville himself, although slaving away in a respectable house in Manhattan and in the luxuriant meadows of a pleasant town in western Massachusetts, might, in his obscure and never quite assimilated nature, have preferred life in the underground cookshop with the Newfoundland dog.
Might he? It’s a fun speculation. It does seem to suit him, even if it did strike me, and still does, as a strange way to end the opening chapter of a biography. Besides, Melville might well have had a Newfoundland dog: Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel, published a memoir in 1903 in which he remembers:
We did not keep a dog, but Herman Melville, who often came over from Pittsfield, had a large Newfoundland which he sometimes brought with him…
However, Sara Smollett finds this a little unlikely, and points out that Julian was very young at the time, as well as perhaps being an unreliable raconteur in general:
Julian Hawthorne is the one who refers to Melville's dog. Julian remembers a large Newfoundland dog, whose back he rides on once. But Melville never mentions this dog, so it doesn't seem likely that Melville had a dog. One of Hawthorne’s other friends had a Newfoundland dog and Melville did let Julian ride on his horse. Thus, I am entirely convinced that Julian, who would have been only four and five years old when Melville frequented the Hawthorne's home, is an entirely unreliable source who made up stories where his memory failed.
Presumably ‘never mentions’ is the result of a trawl through letters, or journals, for references to Melville’s own actual dog which he may or may not have had.
In his fiction, though, Melville definitely refers to Newfoundlands; Harold Beaver, in his characterful Commentary to the 1994 Penguin Moby-Dick, remarks that this specific dog is ‘a favourite image’, and suggests a look at Benito Cereno. The simile appears twice in that story, first here, connected with a kind of cosy domesticity and trustworthiness:
The less distant sight of that well-known boat — showing it, not as before, half blended with the haze, but with outline defined, so that its individuality, like a man's, was manifest; that boat, Rover by name, which, though now in strange seas, had often pressed the beach of Captain Delano's home, and, brought to its threshold for repairs, had familiarly lain there, as a Newfoundland dog; the sight of that household boat evoked a thousand trustful associations, which, contrasted with previous suspicions, filled him not only with lightsome confidence, but somehow with half humorous self-reproaches at his former lack of it.
And later in the same work here, in a more complicated passage:
But if there be that in the negro which exempts him from the inflicted sourness of the morbid or cynical mind, how, in his most prepossessing aspects, must he appear to a benevolent one? When at ease with respect to exterior things, Captain Delano's nature was not only benign, but familiarly and humorously so. At home, he had often taken rare satisfaction in sitting in his door, watching some free man of color at his work or play. If on a voyage he chanced to have a black sailor, invariably he was on chatty and half-gamesome terms with him. In fact, like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs.
These dogs always appear as images, not as dogs, present in the narrative. Again in The Piazza, the only mention I’ve found of Newfoundlands which seems less-than-warm:
“You mean this shaggy shadow — the nigh one? And, yes, now that I mark it, it is not unlike a large, black Newfoundland dog…”
2.
In Chapter 4 of Moby-Dick, Ishmael wakes with the full heft of Queequeg’s enormous arm around him, hugging him tight — ‘thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.’
Quite a remark to make, given they’ve only met, what, much less than twelve hours ago; and the reference to marital life is by no means isolated. In his gentle struggles under the counterpane to get free of this ‘pagan arm’, Ishmael also calls this hug a ‘bridegroom clasp’; and he yammers at Queequeg, to try to wake him, complaining of ‘the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style’ — and just at this point, he feels a sharp blade in the bed. Realising that Queequeg’s tomahawk is under the covers with them sets Ishmael even more on edge; its dangerous axe-end for the moment is the prominent presence, rather than the docile tobacco-pipe end. Later (in fact, soon) it is significant that they smoke together: but for now, this is a weapon, and Ishmael is vulnerable and unsettled.
Seconds later, roused at last, Queequeg is probably, for a beautiful and brief moment, even more vulnerable; perhaps more vulnerable than we ever again see him. Ishmael may well do — I certainly hope so — but never again do we meet Queequeg in those bewildering split-seconds immediately after waking:
A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! “Queequeg! — in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!” At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt…
— and it is at this moment, when Queequeg wakes up, that those glancing, slightly surprising evocations of a specifically human domesticity and a specifically heterosexual affection (man and wife; a coded reference to ‘till death do us part’) abruptly cease, to be supplanted by, guess what:
... and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him.
Gabrielle Bellot describes Moby-Dick as ‘... a template for Melville’s, and our, America: a world populated as much with gestures towards racial equality as with casual racist assumptions.’ — and, for sure, that specifically racialized usage of the simile which we read in Benito Cereno is uncomfortable. Yet this instance in Moby-Dick — and it’s the only appearance of a Newfoundland dog, by which I mean the image of one, in the whole book — does not wholly feel like a reduplication of that deployment; if it may do in part, it feels like it is more significantly doing other things too, not least, I wonder if it’s there by strategy as a sort of cosy avatar, for a manner of loving and trusting and affection which seems, compared to other forms of affection, unburdened.
If this begins to read like a mad claim that Melville was ‘gay for dogs’, well, no, not that; it’s more that this moment feels like a queer sleight, with the homoerotics kept in (not exactly subtle) code while the narrative presence of heterosexuality is abruptly erased, by that excess of affection based on trust and friendship with which Melville’s references to a big Newfoundland dog all seem to be freighted. Man’s best friend. What if the true kelson of the simile, the reason that Queequeg reminds Ishmael of a Newfoundland dog shaking itself dry — Ishmael having, for sure, ‘a good, blithe heart’ — is to present it as obvious that not trusting him and even not loving him would just be completely absurd. And this just at the moment Ishmael and Queequeg are at their most vulnerable to each other, at the very tinder spark of their beautiful unfolding intimacy.
The shift away from the language of traditional matrimony occurs exactly when Queequeg wakes up, when Ishmael looks into his glassy, confused eyes, and watches him become once again who he is; the attention he pays him no longer speaks (with, or in) the anxious language of heterosexual life — that stops immediately — but it does not stop ostentatiously, since the self-evidently adorable presence (in simile) of a Newfoundland dog, bounding about a riverbank, is such a dominating surrogate, or even a camouflage, for the truer queer life of this scene. This is why I call it a sleight.
Maybe Melville had a dog. It doesn’t really matter, does it? (And I’d still have a crush on him if he did, even though I am really a cat person.) I actually still am not entirely clear on why Elizabeth Hardwick quoted Macaulay’s anecdote, the one about writers wiping their greasy hands on a Newfoundland. However, I have enjoyed going looking for these dogs; and we do have Harold Beaver’s assurance that ‘nothing in Moby-Dick is fortuitous’. It’s an absolute cosmos of a book, and I love it, and great big shaggy dogs are just as worthy of attention as anything else in a cosmos.