Melville

Jean Giono

JEAN GIONO (1895–1970) was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Largely self-educated, he started working as a bank clerk at the age of sixteen and reported for military service when World War I broke out. He saw action in several battles, including Verdun, and was one of only two members of his company to survive. After the war, he returned to his job and family in Manosque and became a vocal, lifelong pacifist. After the success of Hill, which won the Prix Brentano, he left the bank and began to publish prolifically. During World War II Giono’s outspoken pacifism led some to accuse him, unjustly, of defeatism and of collaboration with the Nazis; after France’s liberation in 1944, he was imprisoned and held without charges. Despite being blacklisted after his release, Giono continued writing and achieved renewed success. He was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954.

PAUL EPRILE is a longtime publisher (Between the Lines, Toronto), as well as a poet and translator. He is currently at work on the translation of Jean Giono’s 1951 novel, The Open Road (forthcoming from NYRB), and lives on the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario, Canada.

EDMUND WHITE is the author of twenty-five books, including The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading, which will be published in the spring of 2018.

MELVILLE

A Novel

JEAN GIONO

Translated from the French by

PAUL EPRILE

Introduction by

EDMUND WHITE

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

London

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Giono, Jean, 1895–1970, author. | White, Edmund, 1940– writer of introduction. | Eprile, Paul, translator.

Title: Melville : a novel / by Jean Giono ; introduction by Edmund White ; translated by Paul Eprile.

Other titles: Pour saluer Melville. English

Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

Identifiers: LCCN 2017008613 (print) | LCCN 2017008639 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681371375 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681371382 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Melville, Herman, 1819–1891—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Biographical. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Psychological.

Classification: LCC PQ2613.I57 P6513 2017 (print) | LCC PQ2613.I57 (ebook) | DDC 843/.912—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008613

ISBN 978-1-68137-138-2
v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

MELVILLE

Translator’s Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

MELVILLE was a turning point for Jean Giono, the great French novelist, as he made a transition between his Pan Cycle (including the recently translated Hill), works of an almost folkloric quality that highlighted his native Provençal landscape, and his Hussard Cycle, in which he invested his extraordinary energies into fashioning unforgettable characters. As he said in a later interview, “In the preceding novels, nature was in the foreground, the character in the background . . . I called ‘chronicles’ the whole series of novels which put humanity before nature.” The most famous of these chronicles is The Horseman on the Roof, which in 1995 the French turned into one of their best historical films, starring Juliette Binoche and Olivier Martinez.

Of course literary things are never that simple. The two cycles overlap; for instance, the characters in the early books are already very strong and the Provençal landscape plays a major role in his chronicles as well. In the foreground of Horseman on the Roof may be Giono’s very Stendhalian young Italian hero, Angelo, but directly behind him is the flourishing landscape of Giono’s province, never more lush than as a background for the devastating cholera pandemic of 1832.

It’s very fitting that Giono made his transition during the composition of Melville. It must be one of the strangest homages from one major author to another. It began as the introduction to his translation of Moby-Dick (the first in French). He worked on the translation with a French friend, Lucien Jacques, and an English antiques dealer, Joan Smith (whom he paid), between 1936 and 1939, though he’d been reading it for years before that. He would take it as his “foreign companion” on his hikes and then sit against a tree trunk and read it in the fields when he had a free moment . . . imagining the branches in the wind were rolling waves. Melville and the translation of Moby-Dick were published separately in book form in 1941. Giono’s is still the standard translation into French. Smith had provided a word-for-word translation, though she quickly became irritated by Melville’s style. Letters reveal that Jacques did most of the work, but he admired Giono’s revisions and additions.

Melville is sometimes called a “literary essay,” but in fact it is a short, lyrical novel about Herman Melville, his trip to London in the autumn of 1849 to present his novel White-Jacket to his publishers, and his chance encounter with an Irish nationalist called Adelina White (she is purely fictitious). Although, at the beginning, the book sounds biographical, it quickly blossoms into a poetic self-portrait. Giono’s Melville is a womanizer, well-recognized, successful, a big, burly man who sleeps in the nude and has a hairy chest. He wears secondhand sailor’s clothes, which he much prefers to a top hat and cutaway, his London uniform. An angel challenges him to write a big, important book. Melville resists, exhausted in advance by the prospect, but finally, back in America, he throws himself into the massive undertaking of Moby-Dick, which he writes for the beguiling Adelina. Unfortunately, she must have died before she could read it; even on his own deathbed Melville is still hoping to hear from her. She has become his angel. According to Giono, Melville is so depressed after Adelina fails to respond to him, he enters a thirty-year period of silence. (In fact, he immediately wrote Pierre, or the Ambiguities after Moby-Dick, and then another novel, many stories, the novella Billy Budd, poems about the sea, and an epic poem about Jerusalem.)

There were some similarities between Melville and Giono. Melville, as a fierce egalitarian, was against the flogging and severe penalties (Billy Budd is executed) so prevalent on the high seas; Giono was a pacifist, ever since witnessing the horrors of World War I, in which he’d served. When he wrote Melville he’d just emerged from prison for the crime of pacifism, which the French state condemned as “defeatism.” He would be briefly imprisoned later, during World War II, for “collaboration” with the Fascists. Actually, his biggest “collaboration” was the reprinting of an old photo, without his permission, in a collaborationist magazine. The real problem was that in the mid-1930s he’d broken definitively with the Stalinists; a Moscow-directed French Communist writers’ union kept Giono from being published in France from right after the war until 1947.

Both Giono and Melville had overbearing mothers. Both were precocious boys. Both had to drop out of school when their fathers died and both, oddly enough, had to go to work in a bank. Giono had written several folkloric novels, which he felt he could manufacture like little buns, just as Melville had written his maritime adventure stories (Typee, Redburn, Omoo, White-Jacket), which seemed to him almost formulaic (Mardi is an exception). Shortly after the war Giono began his Angelo Cycle and wrote an unrelated book, his enigmatic, granitic Un roi sans divertissement (A King Without Diversion, to be published soon by New York Review Books). It was certainly a more ambitious novel than anything he’d penned previously.

Giono had also at this point in his life fallen in love with a married woman, Blanche Meyer, with whom he had an affair for the next thirty-five years. She was Blanche, as her literary double was White (Adelina). Giono and Blanche had a voluminous correspondence. Though they both lived in the same Provençal town of Manosque, they had to be extremely careful about seeing each other. Between 1939 and 1969 he wrote her more than a thousand letters and cards; they are now mostly housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale, but many of them are sealed until a future date. Her letters were burned. She went on to write a tell-nothing memoir about him. Somewhat like F. Scott Fitzgerald with Zelda’s letters, Giono apparently ascribed many passages from Blanche’s letters to Adelina.

Melville, it seems, was quite different from Giono’s portrait. He was infatuated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was fifteen years older. For nearly two years the authors saw each other often and talked deep into the night. Hawthorne’s wife remarked that Melville wanted more from Hawthorne than he could give. Nevertheless, it was an inspiring period for both men, who felt that the conventional novel of the day had become too narrow a form. During that period Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter and Melville wrote Moby-Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne. When Hawthorne wrote Melville a letter praising Moby-Dick (which, in the eyes of many critics, may be the greatest American novel ever written), Melville said, “Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.”

Melville, far from the expansive, self-confident man Giono portrays, was in fact touchy, taciturn, and shy—and bisexual. Giono was the one with the big personality, and the character “Melville” is his alter ego. In point of fact, Giono wasn’t much interested in the historic Melville. He was interested in the text and the big, manly Whitmanian figures of the New World. Like many Europeans, after the war Giono was fed up with the timidity of much Continental prose—or its erudition. He turned to Faulkner, Dos Passos, Melville, and to Whitman himself.

Translating Moby-Dick was no easy task; rendering Melville’s thundering, biblical-Shakespearian prose into French was like translating Macbeth into Alexandrines: “La plus petite chose peut avoir une signification” doesn’t really capture the diction of “the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings,” anymore than “la joie démoniaque des vagues” renders the “madness and gladness of the demoniac waves.” But the translation is certainly faithful and spirited. The two languages remain essentially different—English with its enormous vocabulary, its Celtic fancifulness, its polyglot origins, and French with its limited vocabulary and strict Academy rules.

Lest we forget, Melville was not just typically Anglo-Saxon. He was one of the strangest, most fanciful of visionaries. Hawthorne noted how restlessly his friend wore himself out going back and forth from being a believer to being an atheist; we could say he was a “mystical atheist.” The whalers look into the sea:

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born sight.

Later, a black whaler named Pip drowns because his mates fail to save him in their haste to harpoon a whale. Or, they save his body, but his oxygen-starved brain has been destroyed:

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense. . . .

A page later Ishmael is rubbing the knots out of big vats of whale sperm:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings. . . . Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!

If Melville can invoke both the female and the male principles through the guise of whales, Giono’s Melville summons up the whole universe, out riding in a carriage and discoursing with Adelina, in the book’s most stunning passages, so poetically and resourcefully translated by Paul Eprile, who has studied the French so carefully and, as an outstanding poet in his own right, has found the exact nuanced wording needed:

So now Herman started to talk about the world that lay before them. He rolled up the sky, from one edge to the other, as though it were made out of colored silk. And, for a brief moment, there was no more sky. Then, after an interval of four hoofbeats at a gallop, he rolled the sky open again, but now it had turned into a huge skin, tightly enclosing earth’s arteries and veins.

Herman is able to take a bay leaf and make Adelina fully grasp it, until it is transplanted in her heart:

He made the woods come closer. Had she ever seen a wood the way he was making her see it?

“No.”

He revolved it for her, turned it upside down, turned it inside out: the eastern edge, the western edge, the mysteries of the north and the south, the moss, the fungus, the scent, the color.

“Had you seen it?”

“No.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Yes.”

He sent the woods back to where they’d come from. They retreated, shrank, lay down again at the rim of the horizon. Had she really noticed the birches with their horsehide bark?

“No.”

He summoned the birches. And the birches came. She felt them, not just right next to her, as if she was in an ordinary field and had leaned against one; she felt them in her heart.

When he invokes the smell of rain, “He sustained everything else, only he lowered its register, as if he were lifting off, ever so slightly, the pressure from the pedal of a big cathedral organ.” Giono’s Melville has the power to summon all of nature—like Prospero. It’s a strange, erotico-mystic-botanical form of courtship. Prospero? No, like God. Giono, who lost his faith at the end of his childhood, does not hesitate to deify himself (“She could plainly feel that he was granting her his own world”). Even though their romance is chaste (in the book), we can feel her body; when she removes her hoops and gathers up the excess silk around her childlike hips, we can see and touch her.

Melville

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

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