Excerpt from Dayswork by Chris Bachelder, Jennifer Habel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Pretty much everyone now agrees that he was writing about his own ambitions and resentments:
For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands.
There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.

And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers,—it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small.

According to the Biographer, "Melville had some food after writing all this."

As planned, he then drove one of his guests to the Housatonic Railroad depot to visit a vacationing acquaintance and the latter's new bride.

The act of writing about Hawthorne, according to the Biographer, had worked Melville into a "state of intense and undirected arousal"—
which is one way to explain why, as a lark, he abducted the young woman, whom he had just met.

He swept her into his buggy and drove away fast.

Melville always, at least until his serious accident in 1863, drove fast.

On mountain roads he was, according to one of his neighbors, "daring almost to the point of recklessness."

His family said he drove like Jehu—
2 Kings 9:20: And the watchman told, saying, He came even unto them, and cometh not again: and the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously.

Driving like Jehu, Melville absconded with the young woman, her angry husband giving chase in an old wagon.

Back at the boardinghouse, the husband was told his wife would be released on one condition: that they attend a masquerade ball that evening.

The condition refused, someone returned the newlyweds to town, where, I see, they ate muffins and waffles before departing for Springfield.

"There is no knowing Herman Melville"—as I at some point transcribed onto this yellow sticky noteb—ut we do know that he went to the masquerade that evening dressed as a Turk.

In a turban and robes.
With a sword, either real or pretend.
And of course his "luxuriant nut-brown beard."

Something of a connoisseur of beards, Melville was—in fact "The Bard of the Beards," according to GQ.

The narrator of his novel White-Jacket declares beards the token of manhood and the true badge of a warrior.

In a four-chapter run he mentions beards seventy-four times.

Not including myriad synonyms:

• fly-brushes
• muzzle-lashings
• homeward-bounders

Viny locks, rebellious bristles, carroty bunches, fine tassels, nodding harvests, inflexible yellow bamboos, moss hanging from the bough of some aged oak.

Such an array of beards! exclaims the narrator, spade-shaped, hammer-shaped, dagger-shaped, triangular, square, peaked, round, hemispherical, and forked.
With intuitive sympathy I feel of my own brown beard while I write.

After staying up late at the costume party, Melville the Turk rose early to write.

[C]harged more and more with love and admiration of Hawthorne, he added six pages to his review by 10 a.m.—
I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul.

This Hawthorne was forty-six; Melville had just turned thirty-one.

Hawthorne, he wrote, expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into me.

After Melville's wife made a fair copy of the twenty-six-page paean, Melville added a title, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," as well as a pseudonymous attribution: By a Virginian spending July in Vermont.

And a geographic amendment to his botanical metaphor:

Excerpted from Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. Copyright © 2023 by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.