Delmonico's in "At the Hostelry" and on East 26th Street

Perhaps the most “unlike things that meet and mate” in Melville’s “At the Hostelry” are the European Old Master painters from the 16th and 17th centuries and Delmonico’s, the 19th-century New York City restaurant at which Melville stages their imaginary debate. Delmonico’s was founded as a small café and pastry shop on William Street in lower Manhattan in 1827. In 1837 it became a full-scale restaurant at South William and Beaver Streets, two blocks north of the Pearl Street address at which Melville was born in 1819 and two blocks south of the Wall Street law office at which Bartleby worked as a scrivener in Melville’s 1853 story. Domenico’s Restaurant remained a fixture of the Wall Street area throughout the rest of Melville’s lifetime, but in 1863, when Herman and his family moved from their Arrowhead farm in Pittsfield to their new home on East 26th Street in New York City, Domenico’s had recently established a very successful second restaurant at East 14th Street and Fifth Avenue. In 1876, when Melville was publishing Clarel, Dominico’s moved its 14th Street restaurant directly up Fifth Avenue to the corner of East 26th Street, two blocks west of Melville’s house on that same street (fig. 2). This was the Delmonico’s restaurant at which Melville located the imaginary conversation among Old Master painters that Melville was revising at the time of his death fifteen years later.

CAT 209 after delmonicos 1893 001 from Melvilliana.jpg

Figure 2. Delmonico’s at the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 26th Street, c. 1893, two blocks west of Melville’s house at 106 East 26th Street.

Melville would have been very familiar with this building when he made it the site of the colloquy among Old Master painters in “At the Hostelry.” After extensive study of the extremely miscellaneous manuscripts Melville had left behind, the editors of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of “At the Hostelry” determined in 2017 that Melville had been writing and revising this poem in six stages, from the time of his return from Europe in 1857 until his death in 1891 (see the complexity and persistence of his revisions in the “Notes” to the NN edition (691-714). The proposed title of the poem had gone through a comparable sequence of revisions. The last title in Melville’s hand, “A Symposium of Old Masters at Delmonico’s,” had been superseded by “At the Hostelry” in his wife Elizabeth’s hand. The occasion for the imagined “Symposium” was a meeting of the fictional Burgundy Club in one of many intimate dining rooms at the 26th Street Delmonico’s (NN BBO 212-13).

The “Preface” to “At the Hostelry” presents the sophisticated colloquy among Old Master painters as the conversational brainchild of the Marquis de Grandvin, de facto “Dean of the Burgundy Club.” This invented discussion was adapted for the printed page by the unnamed “editor” and club member resembling Melville himself. This narrative fiction enabled Melville to present directly to the reader a living crystallization of all he had learned about Old Master painters during his long life as a reader, traveler, and gallery goer who eventually built up a very impressive collection Old Master prints and books about art only a few blocks away from Delmonico’s. Writing and revising “At the Hostelry” the course of 34 years enabled Melville not only to convey, but to discover, what Old Master artists meant to him. We have seen in previous catalog entries Melville's attention to the personalities as well as the paintings of Old Master artists he brings to life in "At the Hostelry." In his editorial “Preface” to the poem, Melville identifies himself as “an acolyte member” of “the brethren of the guild of St. Luke” (to which most of the Dutch and Flemish Old Masters in his print collection belonged, as he knew from The Works of Eminent Masters and other source materials in his library) (NN BBO 146, 207).

The prose sketches that accompanied evolving manuscript of “At the Hostelry” contain many references to the East 26th Street neighborhood in which Melville lived while revising the poem. The sketch dedicated “To Major Jack Gentian” (the fictional Burgundy Club member to whom Melville attributes the companion poem “Naples in the Time of Bomba”) alludes to “General Worth’s monument you and I pass every day,” that monument being the obelisk that rises just to the left of line of buildings facing Fifth Avenue in the above photograph of Delmonico’s at East 26th Street. On the Fourth of July members of the Burgundy Club customarily watched the annual parade from “the club’s bay-window” overlooking Fifth Avenue. Directly across Fifth Avenue was Madison Square, the park Melville habitually visited with his granddaughters Francis and Eleanor when he took one or both out for a walk in the city during the last few years of his life in which he was still revising the poem (NN BBO 171, 215).

Delmonico’s had moved its 14th Street restaurant up Fifth Avenue to 26th Street in 1876 because the area surrounding Madison Square was becoming a new social and cultural hub for wealthy and influential New Yorkers. It was natural for the Marquis de Grandvin to preside over the Burgandy Club at Delmonico’s because he was “an honorary member of most of the Fifth Avenue clubs.” The restaurant in its new location featured a grand ballroom on the second floor at which it served its famous “premeditated banquets” while also providing more intimate dining spaces for meetings of smaller groups or clubs (NN BBO 203). One such group was the Saturday Night Club of “literary gentlemen” who invited Melville to attend its “dinner for authors” on an April evening in 1888. Melville did not attend this literary dinner only two blocks from his own home (other absentees included Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson) but he did select one of the meeting rooms at Delmonico’s as the social site at which to stage his poetic Symposium among Old Master painters (Norsworthy). In 1882, Melville had apparently accepted an invitation to become a founding member of the Author’s Club of New York, but had then declined, “saying his nerves could no longer stand large gatherings” (Dillingman, 12-14).

In Melville and his Circle, William Dillingham examines the tension between social isolation and intellectual vitality during Melville’s “last years.” He use of the word "circle" refers to those persons with whom Melville associated only intellectually and imaginatively at a time when he had few if any actual friends. . . . This is a book about his reading of certain authors” during the last years of his life” (xi). In Dilllingham emphasized how that reading enabled Melville to crystallize his own evolving aesthetic of artistic thought and expression. In the process, Melville adopted "the picturesque," a “concept from the visual arts, to represent his own aesthetic as a writer.” Melville's conversations among the Old Masters in “At the Hostelry,” dealt “primarily with the perception of the picturesque.” “An Afternoon in Naples in the Time of Bomba,” by contrast, exemplified the picturesque, "as Melville conceived it” (8-9).

After continuing his investigation of Melville’s circle by examining the prose sketches of the Marquis de Grandvin and Jack Gentian in the context of the club culture at Delmonico’s, Dillingham reiterates his belief that that circle “was formed largely from his reading,” from “a group of artistic and philosophical compatriots with whom he communicated only through the intellect and imagination” (30).” Writing in 1996, when the quality and scope of Melville's print collection was not yet widely known, Dillingham does not consider how Melville’s reading about aesthetic perception had been enhanced and personalized by the hundreds of engravings after Old Master paintings that Melville had acquired for his own enrichment in his own home on East 26th Street. Nor does he consider how that visual enrichment of his mind and eye in his own home had been supplemented by the increasingly impressive collection of Old Master paintings that Metropolitan Museum acquired and exhibited since 1872, a collection that had increased dramatically in both quality and quality after Melville had retired from the Custom House in 1885 and the Museum doubled its exhibition space in 1888-89. The primary goal of this site has been to establish Melville’s pictorial vision of the prints he collected and the paintings he saw as an essential component of the vitality of mind and imagination he retained until the day he died.