“Melvill” by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden [Excerpt]

From Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden’s Melvill, which releases on Tuesday, October 8th, and which Publishers Weekly—in a Starred Review, no less—referred to as a “masterpiece.” And yes, it is about that Melville:

A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin,and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River.Hisson,still a child,sitsat the foot of the bed, attentively collectingthesefinal,hallucinated words.

Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time,and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—haveasits source this ultimate paternal legacy?

Questioning the intricacies of fiction, which constantly oscillatesbetween reality and imagination, Rodrigo Fresán’sapproaches the enigma of the literary vocation in a new light. An invented biography, a gothic novel populated by ghosts,and an evocation of a filial love, Melvill contains all the talent, humor, and immense culture found in the other great works from one of Spanish literature’s most ambitious writers.

If you enjoy what you read below, you can get 30% off from now until midnight PT on October 31st. (U.S. residents only, discount applied automatically at checkout.)

*

Now he knows he’s surrounded by everyone and everything, but he feels more alone than ever. Here, the perfect solitude of one outside but with no way out. Freezing but soon to burn, the fire of a fever already rising inside him. Speaking in smoldering, scorching tongues: sparking words that flame and name, far away and foreign to any warmth of home, to that home he’s dying—and where he’ll die—to return to.

Ready to be one more among so many memories. Wanting to be remembered like this. Epic in defeat. Broken but stronger than ever because there’s nothing left to break inside of him. Nothing to hide, all’s been revealed. All of him to everyone. Exposed to all and after all.

His name pronounced (mispronounced, emphasis on the ultimate syllable, foreignizing, Frenchifying it, making it more removed and, perhaps in that way, worthier of greater rejection) with a combination of shame and condemnation.

His name before a jury that would never dare find for him and, prejudging, would reach a unanimous verdict: “Young Wastrel of a Patrician Family,” and that’s the way—all-caps when written and italics when spoken—people write about him in letters and speak about him at balls and banquets and masses.

Thus, his sentence to be served posthaste with no possibility of appeal or pardon. But here he is, still begging for someone to at least testify on his behalf and to write his story and to put him into words and, in a way, if not justify him then at least give him a modicum of redemption, a modicum of significance and purpose and reason to exist.

To be written.[1]

To be a being written (him being someone who more than once wished and dreamed he could write it all down and is already ready to transfer the acquittal of such a sentence) on empty and frozen pages like the waters he’s walking across now, barely keeping warm with the breathless breathing of dead supplications and unheard prayers. Messianic and miraculous, yes; but not like the Omnipotent and triumphant Creator on high but like a deity plummeting from higher still, in free fall, prisoner and fallen in his disgrace. His once divine voice no longer commanding, deafening, proof of love and respect but, trembling and weak, dwindling until it becomes a silent and flashing sacrifice he makes to himself. And, meanwhile, as he prepares his own execution ceremony, asking himself, without an answer, why (wasn’t this a distinctive trait of mortals? that almost last and willful gift of your whole life summarized in seconds and in reverse so you could understand it better or not bother? wasn’t that the explanation of the mystery of why so many people died with a Momma, Mommy, Ma on their lips?) all the people and things of this world that he loves or that don’t love him, the whole history of his story, now seemed to converge in this white darkness. Darkness he advances through, previously opaque and obscure and so late, suddenly without time and as if untethered from time, forever and ever, implacable and clean and transparent.

*

Record and file it, even if you prefer not to:

It’s the night of Saturday, December 10th, 1831, and Allan Melvill walks across the frozen waters of the Hudson River.

*

And, oh, when you walk on ice, on water in suspended animation, moods shift and thoughts are thought differently, Allan Melvill thinks. He thinks about how thoughts are thought with the most burning coolness. He thinks about how you think of anything other than that which, once deemed unthinkable, is, as such, impossible not to think about: about how that ice could break and about how, then, sinking to never again rise back up to that surface of superficialities to be ignored or attended to, you would cease to think forever. He thinks about the cold that freezes into crystals that bind together and break apart to separate and rise into the sky to then fall on the living and the dead in always different shapes.[2] With that cold that forces you to close your eyes to discover that, like certain lizards, you can see through your eyelids: his now almost sliced off by the freezing blade of the wild wind that whips his hair into disarray.

The same thing would happen (Allan Melvill thinks now, like he’s never thought before, thinking about what would be thought about or about what one would never dare to think about again but that, in the act refusing, one thinks about, thinking about how he once thought, afloat in a damning floating city of the damned) when we find a way to remain aloft, airborne and truly and joyfully displaced. When man can fly aboard marvelous machines (not just aerostatic balloons) whose sound will be like that of thousands of men clearing their throats after the morning’s first pipe. And with and in those machines, battles will be waged among the stars, and they’ll even make it to that fleeting moon, which, at this very moment, the clouds cover and uncover only to cover it again, and hurl down almost merciful white flakes of snow on Allan Melvill, as if they were soldiers laying siege to that defeated and humiliated deserter of the crucifying crusade of his own life.

But we’ve got a long way to go before that. Now, beneath his feet, that ice is the only solid thing left to hold him up, while around him and above him everything is thin ice in suspense, and the important thing is not to fly but to keep from falling or sinking or drowning.

Thus, in the dark, Allan Melvill remembers first; but then it’s as if he were dreaming, as if he were dreaming himself, or seeing himself from above. And he’d read somewhere that people who lived and wandered through landscapes of endless ices often felt that someone, their doppelgänger, was walking beside them (like that vanquished and enslaved memento-mori walking beside a triumphant Caesar or other victorious generals) and whispering in their ear the more than fifty names snow can be given, but not the names for each and every one of the infinite and always-different flakes that make up that snow and that, first, give the shape of snow to whatever they happen to come to rest upon and, then, to all the shapes they take after giving shape to the snow.

Then, suddenly, to the surprise and wonder of Allan Melvill, his whole life (his life as a father) is lived and relived, it melts away only to resolidify, like an invention invented by the boy who, though he would never theretofore have imagined it, has turned out to be the most inventive and imaginative of his children.[3]

[1] But no, not yet. It will be years before that happens: the sad masquerade of my father (there’s no need for me to wait for the revelations of a future yet-to-be-revealed science that will be dedicated to the interpretation of dreams and daydreams) rewritten wearing different masks like that of a riverway conman or that of a delusional captain or that of an incestuous decadent or that of a by-product of the Revolution or that of a more confusing than confused pale-gray colored scrivener, among many others. And it will be even longer before I comment on it from here: from the marine and oceanic depths of these pages en route to the last and final shore. Me holding and losing my breath; because nothing is more exhausting than swimming upstream, taking in air, in pursuit of the always forgetful founts of memory.

[2] Imagine a book always at high sea. A book adrift and drifting in swirling digressions and dodging not icebergs of small tips and massive bottoms but compact glaciers that have as much to show as to hide. A book that is nothing but a perpetual draft, because every book is never-ending. A book that is the draft of a sketch; because the smallest constructions can be completed by their original architects; while the largest, the truest, always leave the conclusion on the tallest rooftops to fix and secure there the posterity of whoever reads them beyond the one who wrote it.

My case, without looking any further.

[3] His light casts my shadow. The one is the eclipse of the other. I, at his feet, will tell what he, lying there, tells me. He is bound and I’m bound to him; and I trust that all the information that I’ll offer has, moreover, some literary and dramatic value, beyond the tragedy and sorrow of the events that keep that man prostrate here. Thus, I shall send my indefinable imagination (truly the most exact of sciences) off to hunt and track and catch the facts. And then, flay and eviscerate them, as once upon a time I did whales. To those whales that, as the years pass, seem to me more and more the product of youth’s liquid dream. Always taking care to keep their stomach gasses from bursting and covering me with guts and blood and excrement. And to keep from spilling that illuminating sperm of the truth that, once processed, will be irreconcilable as something that happened but, at the same time, will be read (will be read by the light of candles and oil derived from that same whale sperm) as something even truer than it ever was. Reality only becomes really real after crossing the stormy sea of art and arriving safe and sound to the other shore. Not while we live it or write it, but later, when we read it; and only then does everything become logical and inevitable and we ask ourselves how we failed to see it or see it coming.

Thus, everything that one invents ends up (or starts out) being true and, taking place, ends up having taken place to thereby begin to take place.

Melvill by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden is available in better bookstores everywhere on October 8, 2024, and available at 30% off (until 11/1/2024) on the Open Letter webiste.