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Okay, so on principle, I want to encourage books like The Whale: A Love Story. It would have been very easy for Mark Beauregard to write the kind of nonfiction that drives me up a wall, involving a lot of unverifiable internal monologue and speculation, and instead he just went directly to publishing Nathaniel Hawthorne/Herman Melville slash fiction! In theory, I respect this!

In practice, I don't think any narrator in my recent memory has filled me with QUITE so much secondhand embarrassment as Beauregard's obsessively horny Herman Melville?

Hawthorne's features were so fine that they could have belonged to a woman: eyebrows that prettily framed his coffee brown eyes; a hawkish Roman nose; sensuous red lips, the bottom lip a wide devouring flare; and waving chestnut hair that fell in ringlets behind his ears.

Hawthorne was fifteen years Herman's senior, but his face seemed to Herman to defy the laws of earthly decay. So noble did Hawthorne seem that Herman conjectured that some unique mechanism had gradually been transferring his inner beauty touch by touch outward towards his external features with each passing day [...] that his face would become almost ethereal.

Here is an actual daguerrotype of Hawthorne, for context:

I mean he's a perfectly appealing-looking dude but I don't know if 'ethereal' and 'sensuous' are the words I'd use?

[Hawthorne]'s only concessions to the cold were his knee-high black boots and a black scarf that he had tied around his waist, but which now he unwound and wrapped dashingly around his neck - mostly but not completely covering the bare flesh of his exposed chest. He did it so self-consciously that Herman suspected for a moment that he might be flaunting himself: he was even more beautiful and sexual than Herman's wood-chopping fantasy had been.

While reading this, I could not help but think about those tumblr posts that attempt to slut-shame Alexander Hamilton ... let Nathaniel Hawthorne wear a scarf without being subject to the male gaze!

The book covers the period from 1851-52 when Hawthorne and Melville were literary neighbors and also, in occasional scholarly speculation and definitely in this text, literary gaybors. Their relationship largely consists of Melville showing up, wild-eyed and lustful, at Hawthorne's door and Hawthorne repeatedly explaining that it's not that he's not into Melville but also, he is happily married and does not want to cheat on his wife, sorry!

Meanwhile, Melville makes terrible decision after terrible decision, acts like more and more of a dick to his wife and family, and goes deeper and deeper into debt in order to hang onto the thin thread of hope that he might someday work his way into Hawthorne's heart and maybe also his pants. "It'll all be fine once Moby-Dick sells a million copies!" he tells himself, repeatedly. Buddy ..... I and history have bad news for you there .....

Some moments when I literally had to put my hands over my face so I didn't scream out loud at Melville's bad decision-making abilities:

- Melville flips out internally at Hawthorne giving him a book! in front of his WIFE! the tenderness with which he made this gesture seemed absolutely shameless to Herman
- Melville promises his wife that she can buy a house that will be hers, with her money, and then promptly goes and buys a house that she doesn't like because it's walking distance to Hawthorne's place
- Melville attempts to confess his crush to his EXTREMELY STRAIGHT, EXTREMELY STRESSED cousin: "I have the feeling that I have not yet begun to unfold the inner flower of myself, but I believe that I can do so now, with the help of this special person."
- Melville forgets that he is living in the 1850s and invites a random teenager with a crush on him upstairs to his study, and closes the door, with his entire family downstairs and 100% convinced he's having an affair
- Melville GETS CAUGHT SKULKING OUTSIDE HAWTHORNE'S WINDOW IN THE DARK, WHILE HE'S HAVING GUESTS OVER, LIKE A CREEPER

And, I mean, for all I know the events as provided by this text are a thousand percent factual; Herman Melville really does seem like a person who was indeed extra enough to make exactly these consistently bad decisions. But I think possibly he might also have had slightly more of a sense of humor and self-awareness about it? Or maybe not, I don't know, I've never actually read Moby-Dick. Anyway I spent a lot of this book with my hands over my face, but if you are less affected by this than I and have been longing to read novel-length Great American Author published slash fiction then here is for sure your chance!

This review courtesy of

obopolsk, who has been trying to hand me her copy of The Whale for YEARS and finally successfully ambushed me last week.

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I feel like this book would be better served if there were also other, different books, with different Melville slash pairings so that I could happily have an alternative Melville OTP. I mean, despite having read Moby Dick, I know next to nothing about Melville's personal life, so this very well might be the slash pairing that makes the most historic sense, but I find The Scarlet Letter so odious that my instinctive reaction to Melville/Hawthorne was "oh no, honey, you could do SO MUCH BETTER" despite also not knowing anything about Hawthorne's life. And, also, in general: if one is going to write slash books about Great American (White Male) Writers then I am not sold on Melville/Hawthorne being the most slashable? I mean, for one, F. Scott Fitzgerald exists and for two The Scarlet Letter is the woooooorst, which is an opinion I believe so strongly I would definitely start an ill-informed ship war over why Melville deserves someone better.

The real crime of this book is that, despite the fact that I didn't like the Hawthorne books I read in high school (although I remember very little of them now) and have enjoyed the snippets of Moby-Dick I've encountered throughout my life, Melville's characterization was so frustrating that I spent the whole book going "Hawthorne, you could do so much better!" (and in fact already have done, his wife seems perfectly lovely.) I am all in favor of the writing of alternate Melville slash pairings just so someone can give me a fictional Melville that I actually support! READY FOR THE SHIP WAR.

I just re-read this post and had a moment of panic because my therapist is ALSO named Mark Beauregard and I was not prepared to deal with him having written this. But they are in fact different people and now I'm not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed.

I mean he's a perfectly appealing-looking dude but I don't know if 'ethereal' and 'sensuous' are the words I'd use?

You would if you were in unrequited lust.

- Melville GETS CAUGHT SKULKING OUTSIDE HAWTHORNE'S WINDOW IN THE DARK, WHILE HE'S HAVING GUESTS OVER, LIKE A CREEPER

"Like" a creeper?

Like indeed the creeper that he is! IT'S SO UNCOMFORTABLE.

I have been having a shit day (cramps UGH) and this made me laugh so hard I felt so much better. :D

It's always so reassuring to know that someone is having a worse day than you, and that someone is LITERARY LION HERMAN MELVILLE.

Anyway I spent a lot of this book with my hands over my face, but if you are less affected have been longing to read novel-length Great American Author published slash fiction then here is for sure your chance!

I shall just leave this article here: "Herman Melville's Passionate, Beautiful, Heartbreaking Love Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne."

(My two cents' impression: Melville was absolutely that extra about his feelings for Hawthorne, but less embarrasment-squick-triggering creeperish about communicating them, which probably limits the scope for wacky litfic hijinks but makes for a better track record as a human being.)

Melville was absolutely that extra about his feelings for Hawthorne

That is also my sense of Melville. (Moby Dick is pretty f*ing extra.)

I laughed out loud at the quoted description vs. image of Hawthorne. Just mostly because of his 19th century Evening Cloud Hairsaucer.

I shall just leave this article here

(Puts books whence this comes on hold) - "the bittersweet beauty of asymmetrical and half-requited loves"? Hi, my whole life.

Man

(Moby Dick is pretty f*ing extra.)

This is true.

Just mostly because of his 19th century Evening Cloud Hairsaucer.

It's like he decided to grow his own cocked hat!

(Puts books whence this comes on hold)

Oh, good?

I *meant* to say I was putting the book (singular) on hold at the library, but typos carried me adrift. -- Maria Popova's Figuring, which I only discovered via your link, but which sounds dandy.

Maria Popova's Figuring, which I only discovered via your link, but which sounds dandy.

No, no, I could tell which book you were putting on hold—I just hoped it was a good thing that I was introducing you to more unequal affections. (We were speaking different dialects of elliptical.)

Oh, I see! I was transfixed by my own errors.

A lesson there someplace.

I have a lot of appreciation for Hawthorne's Actual Hairsaucer and in fact I'm a little affronted that Beauregard didn't give it its due. "Waving chestnut hair that fell in ringlets"? EXCUSE YOU. SHOW SOME RESPECT.

A lot of the Melville-to-Hawthorne letters are included in the book, along with Beauregard's attempts at pastiching additional letters and/or letters back which aren't ... terrible? But honestly if he'd wanted to just do the letters and skip the rest, that would have been extremely fine.

But honestly if he'd wanted to just do the letters and skip the rest, that would have been extremely fine.

Now that you mention it, the epistolary novel was a gimme for this pairing and I'm not sure why the author didn't go for it.

“A man of a deep and noble nature has seized me in this seclusion… His wild, witch voice rings through me,” Melville wrote of reading Hawthorne’s stories in a remote farmhouse nestled in the summer foliage of the New England countryside. “The soft ravishments of the man spun me round in a web of dreams.” Melville couldn’t have known that his allusions to witchcraft, intended as compliment, had disquieting connotations for Hawthorne.

AWK. WARD.

No man can read a fine author, and relish him to his very bones, while he reads, without subsequently fancying to himself some ideal image of the man and his mind…

I must be doing reading wrong

OH

MY

GOD

Were you there the first time

obopolsk described this book to me? I feel like it might have been that time we all went out to brunch together but I could be wrong ...

I'm not sure! If I was if totally forgotten, and this got to experience the, uh, glories of this review with fresh and baffled eyes.

Having read Moby-Dick I can say that Melville certainly comes across as extremely extra (and definitely not as extremely straight) as an author, but not in a way that sheds particular light on his likelihood of being a creeper under Nathaniel Hawthorne's window.

O M G

I HAVE FOUND A SPECIAL PERSON WHO WILL HELP ME UNFOLD THE INNER FLOWER OF MYSELF

That is...that is definitely something all right. *facepalm*

What's extra hilarious is that I could've sworn that flowers unfolding was always a vagina metaphor but I guess I was wrong?

It's not just you.

It's just so... so very, very uncomfortable.

But I think possibly he might also have had slightly more of a sense of humor and self-awareness about it?

The thing about Moby Dick is that MELVILLE NEVER BREAKS KAYFABE. I have no certainty about whether Moby Dick is the most ironic book ever or if Melville has absolutely zero self-awareness about how extra he is! There are literally passages where he spends pages developing the most obvious literary metaphors you've ever seen about whales and boats and then at the end he'll say explicitly "Nothing you just read was a metaphor. I meant it all literally." And I have no way of being sure if he's serious or clueless.

But after I wrote Ravel/Debussy slash, I read Jean Echenoz's novel Ravel and was very frustrated at Echenoz's refusal to declare an opinion about whether Ravel was gay or not, and so it sounds nice that at least Beauregard committed.

One of these days I will actually get around to reading the book! If only to form my own informed opinion on Melville's self-awareness or lack thereof.

Oh, Beauregard a thousand percent committed. Forget the whaleship Essex, this is the ship that Beauregard is going down with.

You do you, Beauregard.

Not sure if I'm cringing harder for Beauregard or for Melville.

nor I tbh but like

I mean

a man had a dream of publishing Melville/Hawthorne slashfic and he for sure lived that dream and is there not something worthy of recognition in that

he was even more beautiful and sexual than Herman's wood-chopping fantasy had been.

OH MY GOD WOODCHOPPING FANTASY actually I can 100% see Melville having one of those, that sounds extremely mid-nineteenth-century Concord all around.

"i'm just gonna casually come up on him in this BLIZZARD and he'll be CHOPPING WOOD, SHIRTLESS, like a real NEW ENGLAND MAN --"

REFRESHING

Hey,

metaquotes?

I just wanted to let you know that I keep coming back to this and reading it and trying not to laugh out loud at my desk.

THE INNER FLOWER OF MYSELF

Melville's poor cousin just like: what. I'm broke and have been feeding your entire family for weeks. I don't care about your inner flower. Please stop.

let Nathaniel Hawthorne wear a scarf without being subject to the male gaze!

HE'S A HUSSY

DESPERATE FOR ATTENTION

AND A VERY LONG BOOK ABOUT WHALEHUNTING

and boy howdy is he gonna receive both of those things!!!

I'm picturing this book arranged on the shelf or table in the gift shoppes of Olde Concord, next to Mosses from an Old Manse and Little Women or perhaps Walden. The opportunity for dashing sash-scarf sales should not be neglected!

You, too, could dress with the elusive, ethereal, tantalizing appeal of femme fatale Nathaniel Hawthorne!

I came home and immediately read this post and I am delighted. Thank you for letting me peer pressure you into reading this book and writing it up!

(And if anyone else would like to read this book, I would be happy to mail it off to you. Very happy. Truly, no need to return it.)

Thank you for ... providing me the opportunity ...... to share dreamy sensuous Nathaniel Hawthorne with the world??

(No, it was an experience I don't regret. Probably. Almost certainly.)

Nathaniel Hawthorne has been dead for one hundred and fifty-five slutty, slutty years.

Handing out books to all and sundry! LIKE A HUSSY. IN FRONT OF HIS WIFE.

OH.....GOD.......

As a casual reader of Moby-Dick who was able to simply peruse the book and then move on with my life and think about things other than whales........

actually i think the most unfortunate Melville fact is that after Moby-Dick he wrote a book called Pierre where the MC discovers he has an illegitimate half sister and decides the only way to save the family honour, not let his mother know of this, AND care for the sister, is to MARRY HER??? but then have a chaste marriage?? but then they increasingly fail at the latter part. Critical reception today: is this about Melville and Hawthorne? is the hot yet forbidden sister Hawthorne? IS IT AN UNFORTUNATE WAY OF MELVILLE EXPLORING HIS DISTRESS AT IRL FINDING OUT HE HAD AN ILLEGITIMATE HALF SISTER HE NEVER HIMSELF CONTACTED.

but yes! i think you need a sense of humour! to melvillify. ironise everyone's feelings; ironise society; ironise everything. if it's not ALSO a series of dril tweets what r u doing.

Edited 2019-03-30 08:42 (UTC)

the illegitimate half sister may not have existed, i should add! it could possibly just have been a lady who wanted to be paid for making hats.

"
"Smell I the flowers, or thee?" cried Pierre.

"See I lakes, or eyes?" cried Lucy, her own gazing down into his soul, as two stars gaze down into a tarn.

No Cornwall miner ever sunk so deep a shaft beneath the sea, as Love will sink beneath the floatings of the eyes. Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls. The eye is Love's own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light. There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers' eyes. In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover's cheek"

melville's attempt to write a normal romance novel.....

SO MANY NEW MELVILLE FACTS!! I -- I'm gonna need a minute to process all this. Melville. Melville, what are you doing. Melville. EYE-FISH WITH WINGS.

I cannot believe I finally, after all these years, have a chance to use this icon again. Other things I cannot believe: after diving into every other possible source of discomfort, Beauregard missed the opportunity to really explore 'Melville thinks of Hawthorne as his hot forbidden half-sister.'

Tht was a MAGNIFICENT use of that icon! My other favourite thing bout Pierre was that Melville finished it like: Moby-Dick was a critical and commercial failure but THIS is going to sell so many copies! it's what the public want! incest! An....an incredibly extra Gothic novel.

""Thy catching nobleness unsexes me, my brother; and now I know that in her most exalted moment, then woman no more feels the twin-born softness of her breasts, but feels chain-armor palpitating there!""

"Now indeed did all the fiery floods in the Inferno, and all the rolling gloom in Hamlet suffocate him at once in flame and smoke. The cheeks of his soul collapsed in him: he dashed himself in blind fury and swift madness against the wall, and fell dabbling in the vomit of his loathed identity."

"He stared about him with an idiot eye; staggered to the floor below, to dumbly quit the house; but as he crossed its threshold, his foot tripped upon its raised ledge; he pitched forward upon the stone portico, and fell. He seemed as jeeringly hurled from beneath his own ancestral roof."

"
"If the most exquisite, and fragile filagree of Genoa be carefully handled by its artisan; if sacred nature carefully folds, and warms, and by inconceivable attentivenesses eggs round and round her minute and marvelous embryoes; then, Isabel, do I most carefully and most tenderly egg thee, gentlest one, and the fate of thee! "

"
In their boyhood and earlier adolescence, Pierre and Glen had cherished a much more than cousinly attachment. At the age of ten, they had furnished an example of the truth, that the friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes.

---
""Hark thee to thy furthest inland soul"—thrilled Pierre in a steeled and quivering voice. "Call me brother no more! How knowest thou I am thy brother? Did thy mother tell thee? Did my father say so to me?—I am Pierre, and thou Isabel, wide brother and sister in the common humanity,—no more. For the rest, let the gods look after their own combustibles. If they have put powder-casks in me—let them look to it! let them look to it! Ah! now I catch glimpses, and seem to half-see, somehow, that the uttermost ideal of moral perfection in man is wide of the mark. The demigods trample on trash, and Virtue and Vice are trash! Isabel, I will write such things—I will gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!—I will write it, I will write it!""
--

" Thou shalt not strain thine eyes in the twilight."

"We will see about that," says Pierre, with an unobserved attempt at a very sad pun.

--
"Too nigh to me, Isabel? Sun or dew, thou fertilizest me! Can sunbeams or drops of dew come too nigh the thing they warm and water? Then sit down by me, Isabel, and sit close; wind in within my ribs,—if so thou canst,—that my one frame may be the continent of two."

--

Now he began to feel that in him, the thews of a Titan were forestallingly cut by the scissors of Fate. He felt as a moose, hamstrung.

--

He folded the right-hand letter, and put it beneath his right heel; then folding his two arms, stood upon both the letters.

"These are most small circumstances; but happening just now to me, become indices to all immensities. For now am I hate-shod! On these I will skate to my acquittal!

--

Edited 2019-03-31 00:45 (UTC)

HE FELT AS A MOOSE, HAMSTRUNG.

I'm sorry, I'm crying with laughter. What immortal words of Gothic romance! What AMAZINGLY EXTRA MELVILLIAN PROSE; I hate 99% of incest plots and I still kind of want to read this for the extraness and the sad puns and Melville's continual semi-straightfaced attempts to overtop his own OTTness.

The...thing is it's kind of Schrodinger's incest both in the sense that: Isabella and Pierre only share one cheek kiss and a LOT of emotionally confused scenes AND.....it's......she may not BE his half sister! she has a story that kind of relates to maybe his dad was her dad, and his dad said something about a daughter on his deathbed, but it's a repeated narrative point that Pierre wrecks his own life for his sister who is. maybe.....just......some rando........

"We will see about that," says Pierre, with an unobserved attempt at a very sad pun.

OH NO ... I'M CHARMED ............

Wait, what? And yet, somehow, Moby Dick is the book that's on the high school reading lists?

#1: nothing you say here is out of proportion or incorrect

#2: i love this book wholeheartedly, sweet jesus

I actually listened to the audiobook of this (which I highly recommend to anyone who likes audiobooks!) on a very long solo car trip from maryland to boston, and let me tell you, it was an EXPERIENCE. I actually think that the audiobook format while stuck in a car might have been the ideal way to consume this book- it felt so all encompassing, frenetic, unstoppable, and like I was trapped in this claustrophobic obsessive bubble of reality. By the time Shit Gets Real at the end of it, I was 8 hours into the drive and yelling at the book and crying uncontrollably because everything was TRAGIC AND D O O M E D. I was wholly enamored with it, and immediately after finishing it was VERY displeased that there isn't any fixit fic about it or about their lives in general.

God, Melville is just the most horny queer dumpsterfire I've ever seen and i love him even with his escalatingly terrible decisions. And DAMN but his wife needed to be married to literally anyone else, the poor woman.

oh man I am SO GLAD this book is loved the way it deserves to be loved; Mark Beauregard is out here putting his whole heart on the page, as indeed is epic gay disaster Herman Melville, and that deserves recognition and respect! 'claustrophobic obsessive bubble of reality' is such a good way to describe what's going on in the book and zooming through New England countryside in one's own tiny car-bubble truly does sound like the intensely ideal way to experience that.

(I'm astonished that there is no fic! None at all? Not even garden-variety not-based-on-this-book-specifically RPF?? What is Yuletide doing, where has everyone been?)

I WAS SO FRUSTRATED ON BEHALF OF MELVILLE'S WIFE AT ALL TIMES. he spent her entire inheritance on a tiny house! with NO CLOSETS!! HERMAN!!!!

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