A fan of Herman Melville must have patience. He must appreciate digression and the dissolution of pattern or plan. He must enjoy the sheer rush of words, a proper Biblical torrent of them. And he must be able to find pleasure in philosophical dialogue as much as in wild anecdote.

But must he read Clarel? Can I call myself a Melville fan–which I am inclined, most strenuously, to do–without having tackled that blocky bulk of a book? It’s about a group of pilgrims in the Middle East. It consists largely of philosophical dialogues. And it’s five hundred pages long. Many is the time I’ve reached my hand towards it . . . only to pull back and choose to re-read Moby-Dick of The Confidence-Man instead.

If you, too, have had these doubts, fear not! The Amateur Reader, author of the Wuthering Expectations blog, has come to our rescue! Along with Nicole of Bibliographing, she is reading Clarel and writing about the book–and the experience of reading it. In her first post, she highlights some of Melville’s striking imagery–the walking pilgrims leave a

. . . gluey track and streaky trail
Of some small slug or torpid snail.

–while noting how much of the poem remains frustratingly prosaic.

She also notes the book’s difficulty and density, writing,

I’m pretty well convinced that

Clarel

is a great book, although one that perhaps has just as many readers as it should.

The danger, of course, is that I may be one of those readers, and I’ve just been missing out. I will admit, for example, to being a sucker for the sort of fever-pitch rant that Amateur Reader quotes in today’s post. A character “sitting on a salt-encrusted camel skull on the shore of the Dead Sea” cries out about “Doom and Fate and Death and Mammon”:

Unfathomably shallow! – No!
Nearer the core than man can go
Or Science get – nearer the slime
Of nature’s rudiments and lime
In chyle before the bone. Thee, thee,
In thee the filmy cell is spun -

Nonetheless, I may have to wait a few more days before I let her convince me. Five hundred pages of verse is a lot of pages of verse.

Until then, I offer this to the Amateur Reader and Nicole: should they find their resolve flagging, the Page-400-of-Despond approaching, they can at least be grateful that they’re not members of Melville’s family, The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville tells that,

As it neared completion, _Clarel_ seemed to take over Melville’s life. His family thought so. Many years later, his daughter Frances recalled being “roused from sleep at two in the morning to read proof with her father of a long, obscure poem on the Holy Land.” Writing to a sympathetic correspondent while _Clarel_ was in press, Elizabeth Melville described her husband’s mood: “Herman, poor fellow, is in such a frightfully nervous state, and particularly now with such an added strain on his mind, that I am actually afraid to have anyone here for fear that he will be upset entirely, and not be able to go on with the printing. . . . If ever this dreadful _incubus_ of a _book_ (I call it so because it has undermined all our happiness) gets off Herman’s shoulders I do hope he may be in better mental health.”

If there’s one thing worse than a densely philosophical five-hundred-page poem, it’s a densely philosophical five-hundred-page poem that is wrecking your homelife!