Moi et ma cheminee

"Wellingborough, as you are going to sea, suppose you take this shooting-jacket of mine along; it's just the thing-take it, it will save the expense of another. You see, it's quite warm; fine long skirts, stout horn buttons, and plenty of pockets." Out of the goodness and simplicity of his heart, thus spoke my elder brother to me, upon the eve of my departure for the seaport. "And, Wellingborough, " he added, "since we are both short of money, and you want an outfit, and I Have none to give, you may as well take my fowling-piece along, and sell it in New York for what you can get.-Nay, take it; it's of no use to me now; I can't find it in powder any more." I was then but a boy. Some time previous my mother had removed from New York to a pleasant village on the Hudson River, where we lived in a small house, in a quiet way. Sad disappointments in several plans which I had sketched for my future life; the necessity of doing something for myself, united to a naturally roving disposition, had now conspired within me, to send me to sea as a sailor.

Redburn

Herman Melville wrote White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War during two months of intense work in the summer of 1849. He drew upon his memories of naval life, having spent fourteen months as an ordinary seaman aboard a frigate as it sailed the Pacific and made the homeward voyage around Cape Horn.Already that same summer Melville had written Redburn, and he regarded the books as "two jobs, which I have done for money--being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood." The reviewers were not as hard on White-Jacket as Melville himself was. The English liked its praise of British seamen. The Americans were more interested in Melville's attack on naval abuses, particularly flogging, and his advocacy of humanitarian causes. Soon Melville was acclaimed the best sea writer of the day.Part autobiography, part epic fiction, White-Jacket remains a brilliantly imaginative social novel by one of the great writers of the sea. This text of the novel is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

La vareuse blanche

Bartleby

Wall Street, dans les années 1850. Un juriste mène avec ses deux copistes Dindon et La Pince, et son garçon de courses Gingembre, une vie de bureau morne et régulière. Il engage un jour un étrange jeune homme aux allures de spectre qui, très vite, refuse de travailler - sans pour autant quitter les lieux. "J'aimerais mieux ne pas" , ne cesse-t-il d'opposer pour tout argument au narrateur tantôt estomaqué, tantôt furieux, suppliant, en proie à la mauvaise conscience... Comment chasser de ses bureaux - et surtout de ses pensées - cet être apparemment faible et démuni, mais dont la résistance se révèle aussi implacable qu'incompréhensible ?

Bartleby le scribe

" La phrase de Melville est à la fois un torrent, une montagne, une mer (...)Mais comme la montagne, le torrent ou la mer, cette phrase roule, s'étire et retombe avec tout son mystère. Elle emporte ; elle noie. Elle ouvre le pays des images dans les profondeurs glauques où le lecteur n'a plus que des mouvements sirupeux, comme une algue.(...)Toujours elle propose une beauté qui échappe à l'analyse mais frappe avec violence ".

Moby Dick

"Conceive him now in a man-of-war;

with his letters of mart, well armed,

victualed, and appointed,

and see how he acquits himself."

FULLER'S "Good Sea-Captain."

In the year 1843 I shipped as "ordinary seaman" on board of a United States frigate then lying in a harbor of the Pacific Ocean. After remaining in this frigate for more than a year, I was discharged from the service upon the vessel's arrival home. My man-of-war experiences and observations have been incorporated in the present volume.

White Jacket

Derniers poèmes

At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.

His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger.

Moi et ma cheminee

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