Cambridge Contributor: Thomas Augst

With the The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York on the verge of appearing in bookstores around the town and online, we begin our series of profiles of contributors to the volume. Today we profile Thomas Augst, the author of the chapter entitled “Melville, at Sea in the City.”

Tom is Associate Professor of English at New York University. He received his doctorate in the History of American Civilization in 1996 from Harvard University. He also holds a masters in History from Harvard (1992) and did his undergraduate work at Yale, where he majored in Literature and History.

He is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2003), which was a finalist for the Modern Language Association’s Prize for a First Book. The originality of the book arises from its treatment of the figure of the “clerk” as the focal point for an interdisciplinary history of U.S. antebellum literary culture. Tom uses unpublished manuscript sources — primarily young men’s diaries and letters — to recover a world of marginal and ephemeral literary production, thereby revealing the emergence of a new gender- and class-based sub-group of literate culture, a group with a distinct and sometimes abrasive relation to the higher literary culture emanating from the more elite schools and universities. Tom shows how these young men use reading and writing as the tools of self-making, not in order to achieve the kind of abstract “self-reliance” that Ralph Waldo Emerson extols in the first half of his career, but rather to find their way into the networks of commerce and social life that marked the antebellum U.S.

Tom has also co-edited the collections Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (University of Massachusetts, 2007) and Libraries as Agencies of Culture (University of Wisconsin, 2002). Taken as a whole, his scholarship explores the historical and social contexts of reading, writing, and speaking, seeking to interpret how literary institutions and practices have shaped the moral life of liberalism. His essay “Temperance, Mass Culture, and the Romance of Experience,” culled from his current manuscript-in-progress, appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of the journal American Literary History.

Here is the opening of Tom’s piece for the Companion:

Like a stranger suddenly sidling up as you walk down Broadway, or perhaps some young eccentric sitting alone at a bar determined to bend your ear a little, Herman Melville’s novel of 1851, Moby-Dick, introduces itself to readers in an abrupt but engaging manner. Through a narrator named Ishmael, Melville gives voice to a modern consciousness as original as any in American literature. It is a voice as startling and unselfconscious as the manner in which people sometimes talk to themselves as they walk crowded streets of modern cities, or wander crowded thoughts of modern life.

Though Melville will devote most of his novel’s great length to a whaling enterprise and shipboard life, the first chapter of Moby-Dick remains anchored in a brief tour of lower Manhattan (see Figure 5 ). Before returning to sea to be cured of his melancholy – “the drizzly November in my soul” — Ishmael insists we see where he is coming from: “Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, Northward.” Taking us from the Battery to the seaport, along a part of what is now FDR Drive, past the financial district toward the west-side piers, Ishmael points out peculiar sights: “What do you see? – Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the piles: some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster – tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.”We never learn where Ishmael was born and raised, but as his walk downtown makes clear, he is familiar not only with the geography of Manhattan but with the anomie of modern life it seems to harbor. He walks anonymous streets, amongst the seaward-gazing masses that he points out along the way: “Look at the crowds of water-gazers there”: “But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water.” Ishmael speaks with a peculiar attitude, at once rude and sophisticated, sarcastic and sincere -– with the boisterous savvy of someone who long ago learned never to become “pent up in lath and plaster,” spiritually and physically immobilized by the routines and cares of work. Wherever he came from, and wherever he will go, Ishmael is a New Yorker.

Tomorrow: Robin Bernstein.