Sewanee Review

“Bon voyage,” my husband said last night as he turned out his light.

It’s something he says to me, an edict inside a valediction.

“I wish you luck,” he says, and said last night, I think.

Earlier he said, “Is it recycling night?”

“It is, isn’t it?” he said.

“Shit,” he said.

“You know how to do this,” he told our younger daughter as they sat in the kitchen at what he calls the island, though it is in fact a peninsula. [End Page 390]

(He’s generally so careful with his words.)

“Combine your like terms,” he said to her, I remember.

He asked our dog, rhetorically, if she were hungry.

He asked me, rhetorically, how much longer we would be disinfecting boxes of frozen waffles.

He said SCUBA is an acronym, and RADAR, too.

When I found him at a window and asked him what he was looking at, he said, “A big groundhog.”

Even a quiet person says a lot in a day, almost all of which is forgotten.

Not forgotten, I suppose, but unremembered.

Some mornings I revisit a 2015 blog post titled “Words Herman Melville is Reported to have Spoken.”

The list is long, and surprisingly short.

Melville said, “I do” at his wedding, reportedly.

He asked a barmaid in Liverpool, “How much?”

“Man overboard!” he shouted in 1849 on a packet ship, the Southampton. [End Page 391]

This morning I see that Melville nearly missed his voyage on the Southampton, having waited so long to apply for his passport.

And that seven years later he nearly missed his voyage on the Glasgow for the same reason.

(Melville’s older brother, Gansevoort, once lamented Herman’s habit of procrastination, “that disinclination to perform the special duty of the hour.”)

Curiously, Melville’s delinquent passport applications indicate that he shrunk nearly an inch and a half in seven years—
He was 5' 10 ⅛" at age thirty, but 5' 8 ¾" at age thirty-seven.

According to ships’ crew lists, he was 5' 8 ½" at age nineteen, but 5' 9 ½" at age twenty-one.

If you had less evidence, my husband said, you’d know how tall Herman Melville was.

Or if I had more, I said.

My husband says that I seem to have contracted Melville, and it’s true that some mornings we find one of my crumpled sticky notes in the sheets like a used tissue.

This blue one says, “tall and imposing,” quoting Melville’s granddaughter Frances.

And this green one, quoting Frances’s sister, says, “Many who knew him would have said he was six feet tall, whereas he was two to three inches short of that.” [End Page 392]

Melville scholars offer commonsense explanations for the discrepancies in his recorded height—errors in measurement, exaggerations in self-reporting—but a medical doctor suggests that Melville’s apparent loss of height may have coincided with a loss of lumbar lordosis caused by ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease.

That doesn’t make sense, my husband said—
He said lordosis is curvature of the spine, so a loss of lordosis would have made Melville taller, not shorter.

It’s true that Melville’s acquaintances noted his erect bearing, I conceded.

That sounds right, said my husband, whose knowledge of the spine, it turns out, derives from a poster in his physical therapist’s office.

This morning I see that John J. Ross, MD, hypothesizes that Melville’s loss of lordosis was likely accompanied by compensatory hip flexion contractures, which when chronic lead to height loss.

Through my office window I see my husband reading in the backyard, and elect not to send the text I’ve written about Melville’s hip flexion.

Dr. Ross’s larger point in “The many ailments of Herman Melville (1819–91)” is that ankylosing spondylitis offers an “attractive unifying diagnosis” for Melville’s numerous maladies, which included not only loss of lordosis, but rheumatism, sciatica, arthritis, and persistent eye pain. [End Page 393]

[T]ender as young sparrows, Melville described his eyes at age twenty-nine.

Which Charles Olson in his book Call Me Ishmael misquoted, perhaps mistranscribed...