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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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
obopolsk, who has been trying to hand me her copy of The Whale for YEARS and finally successfully ambushed me last week.
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 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.'
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""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!
--
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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.
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OH NO ... I'M CHARMED ............