“Much remains unknown,” writes one of Melville’s biographies, “and always will.”
quoted in Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
What a delightful journey this novel took me on!
It was like a room with many doors, the doors leading to more rooms with more doors, and yet taking one back to where one started. The narrative segues into asides, sharing the stories of Melville admirers and biographers. One such tangent is about Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, which is also a story about marriage.
Hardwick wrote that Melville was “given to violence in the household,” based on family stories and letters. After his death, his wife promoted his work and pressed for reissuing of the books, which fed a consequent “Melville Revival.”
We realize how elusive Melville is–can we really know him? Even his New York Times death notice called him “Hiram Melville,” and he was “Norman Melville” on a crew list.
His Moby Dick is extolled as an eloquent masterpiece, inspirational, life-changing. “How much that man makes you love him!” (Hart Crane) “Herman Melville is a god.” (Maurice Sendak) And by others, particularly high school students, as a big snooze.
The story is set during the pandemic, with a woman researching Melville and discussing her findings with her husband.
There is much about Melville’s love for Nathaniel Hawthorne, famed for his beauty, his visits documented by Sarah Peabody Hawthorne, who noted his linen was dirty, and their son Julian, who loved Melville.
Melville’s early novels sold well, but his long poem Clarel and Moby Dick were failures. He worked for nineteen years as a customs inspector.
The first Melville I read was a volume that included Typee and Omoo that I found on my father’s bookshelf when I was a teen. I read Moby Dick as a young woman–skipping the Cetacea and whaling chapters, and then finally read it in whole it in middle age when our son read it in high school. In between, I read Billy Bud and The Confidence Man and Bartleby the Scrivener.
I was charmed when the narrator describes reading an old paperback of Howard’s End–the exact edition I discovered and read and fell in love with. I recalled reading Lowell’s Life Studies and Day by Day and Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, sad that my copies were sacrificed in one of my dozen moves. But I have Moby Dick still, and this has inspired me to revisit it, to see how I experience it in my senior years.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book.
Dayswork
by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
Pub Date September 5, 2023
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9781324065401
from the publisher
A startlingly original, incantatory novel about marriage, mortality, and making art.
In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville’s impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days’ work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers—among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell—whose lives resonate with Melville’s. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.
Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.
About the Authors: Chris Bachelder is the author of four novels, including The Throwback Special, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Terry Southern Prize for Humor. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Jennifer Habel is the author of the poetry collections Good Reason and The Book of Jane, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize.
The Literate Quilter 
This one’s for us – and we would likely have missed it if not for you. Jerome is a Melville scholar and devotee, and I’ve always been interested in his story: famous/forgotten then immortal. I quote Jerome here: “Melville rose out of the underground, was forgotten while he was still alive, and I‘m drawn to that great sadness in him and that sense of injustice about America and all its thieves on land and on sea. I inherited Ishmael’s depression and Melville’s personal sense of invisibility. He was the writer who was there and not there.
I feel that same sense of invisibility and I’ve always felt drawn to that great white whale. Moby is mine, an enemy and a friend who is larger and grander than anything I will ever write. He is what I strive to discover – that great white whale of language.”
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