Catch a case of Melville

The married authors of Dayswork manage to make pandemic writing fun

Photo by Iswanto Arif on the appropriately named website, Unsplash.

Hi, how is everyone doing?

This week I read Dayswork, a book that falls into one of my favorite reading categories: “resists categorization.” Several bookselling websites refer to Dayswork as a novel, to which I say: Sure, fine. The novel is an expansive category, and calling a book a novel is a better way to sell it than calling it a hybrid of biography, memoir, and literary scholarship. But this book isn’t really a novel.

In Dayswork, our narrator, a female writer, is stuck at home with her husband, also a writer, and their two children when the world shuts down due to COVID-19. Spending a lot of time at a computer screen—like so many of us did in the spring of 2020—she contracts what her husband calls “a case of Melville.” Dayswork is a chronicle of her malady. Through our narrator, we learn about Moby Dick, its many passionate readers, and Herman Melville and his family, especially his wife Elizabeth Shaw Melville, who once bought herself a kitten as a reward for transcribing her husband’s epic poem, Clarel. We also read about Melville’s biographers, writers he influenced, and the obsessive zeal that his work seems to inspire in literary scholars. It seems that cases of Melville are highly contagious.

While all of this is going on in Dayswork, so are the vicissitudes of COVID-19 on marital and family life. This book invoked in me a visceral memory of that everything-is-happening-everywhere-all-at-once kind of early pandemic delirium.

“The book club of Melville completists has moved online due to the pandemic.

And due to the pandemic the windows in my office rattle as my daughter participates in remote P.E.

And due to the pandemic all of my library books about Melville are not due.

So many, for some reason, are navy blue.”

Reliving the spring of 2020 might not sound pleasant, but Dayswork is actually a very funny book. I laughed out loud in several places, and throughout the book I was fascinated with how elegantly the narrative steered my thoughts from one subject to another through clever juxtaposition and judicious use of white space. (Obviously, Jennifer Habel is a poet.) The overall feeling this book conveys is something like a cinematic montage, but with words.

In one scene, the narrator’s family is gathered in the kitchen. The narrator tells her husband what she’s learned about Sarah Josepha Hale, a 19th century writer who supported her five children with her literary career after her husband died and also wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” This reminds the daughters of their handwashing songs. The narrator’s husband says he thought “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was the first thing recorded by Thomas Edison on his phonograph. He asks the daughters to come look at how they’d loaded the dishwasher. The daughters discuss a field trip to see Edison’s last breath in a test tube, and the younger one sings “Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.”

And now we are reading about the white dome of the whale in Moby Dick, and D.H. Lawrence and Toni Morrison on the theme of whiteness.

“What I am suggesting,” Toni Morrison said of Melville in a lecture, “is that he was overwhelmed by the philosophical and metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in his own country, and that that idea was the successful assertion of whiteness of ideology.”

And now we are reading that Melville’s writing day “ended at 2:30, when, as instructed, one of the women in the house knocked on his study door until he rose from his desk.”

This scene achieves the remarkable feat of mirroring how human thoughts overlap in real time: a woman with her family, doing family things, while also thinking of reading and writing. I don’t know about you, but I can relate.

Dayswork falls into another rare category: it is a book by a married couple. Jennifer Habel and her husband, novelist Chris Bacheldor, apparently wrote this book together as a pandemic project. In this interview, Habel said that the couple collaborated on each sentence at the kitchen table. According to Bacheldor, working on the book was a marital “hack.” The writers actually got along better when they weren’t competing for time away from family duties to work on separate projects.

In certain parts of Dayswork (a title that comes from a letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Melville), we read oblique references to a bad time in the narrator’s marriage, when she and her husband had a disagreement about a major decision. We never learn all the details, but there is no need. We read about the Melvilles’ marriage and the fate of their children. We also read about Robert Lowell’s marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick, one of Melville’s biographers. The idea of marriage—and, more specifically, marriage to a great male artist—permeates the narrative and provides a shape that in another kind of novel might be called plot.

We might call this kind of writing memoir by sublimation: the author is not writing directly about her life but is processing and expressing elements of her life through the biographies of other people. (See also, H Is for Hawk by Helen McDonald, The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose.)

Dayswork made me wonder, which books or writers would I write about if I were going to write a memoir like this? What comes to mind for you?

Other interesting things

• Please read the Jill Lepore essay that set off Jennifer Habel’s case of Melville: “He wrote about women as if he’d never met one.”

• Are you married or in a relationship, and do you have thoughts about such things? I promise you will find much to love in “A Good First Marriage Is Luck,” a dialogue in Granta between Canadian writer Sheila Heti and Phyllis Rose, author of the 1983 group biography, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriage, a new edition of which was published in 2020 with an introduction by Heti. (Just in time for the pandemic!) Reading this made me feel good about all my relationships. “Life is so difficult. It may take more than one creature to sustain one life. Even a cat helps. Certainly a dog.”

• Before we get too far into 2024, I need you all to know that my childhood favorite, Need a House, Call Ms. Mouse, was one of Slate’s 2023 literary discoveries.

• RIP Anne Edwards “queen of biography,” who wrote a biography of Sonya Tolstoy, a sister to Lizzie Melville and Elizabeth Hardwick in the pantheon of noble and long-suffering literary wives. “There comes a time, and I am at that age, when you have to take your life in your arms and hold it to you to keep it breathing,” said Edwards in 2013. “It was a necessity.”

• The other day, I watched a scene in Gilmore Girls with my 12-year-old daughter that perfectly encapsulated the gendered subtext of “the great American novel.” H/t to Woman in Revolt for transcribing this dialogue between Rory Gilmore’s current and ex-boyfriends:

  Logan: Oh, you penned the great American novel, Jess?
  Jess: Wasn't quite that ambitious.
  Logan: So, what are we talking here? Short novel? Kafka length or longer? Dos Passos, Tolstoy? Or longer? Robert Musil? Proust? I'm not throwing you with these names, am I?
  Jess: You seem very obsessed with length.

  It reminded me of “Why Bother with the White-Guy Novel?,” in which Slate book critic Laura Miller unpacks what we mean when we talk about “the Great American Novel.” She may also have convinced me to pick up Wellness on my next trip to the bookstore. I, too would like to read more “novels that boldly attempt to make sense of our ever more fractured and absurd everyday lives, and that treat this subject as something important.”

Bye for now!

xo, S.