The Burgundy Club Sketches
Details
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Melville moved to New York in 1863, when prestigious gentlemen's clubs flourished along Fifth Avenue. The city boasted a club for "every conceivable social, political, religious, professional and business interest," but (conspicuously) Melville was one of those "few men of New York" without any memberships. By that time, too, the revolutionary ebbs and flows of the Risorgimento had provoked thousands of Italian refugees to flee their homeland. Many came to New York, transforming it into "a hotbed of Risorgimento sympathies."
The so-called "Burgundy Club Sketches" comingles the two societies--just as it comingles poetry and prose. It is thought that Melville began writing the Sketches around the time of his trip to Europe and the Levant (c. 1876-1877), leaving them unfinished at the time of his death (1891) and subject to various editorial reconstructions since.
The principal characters are the gregarious Marquis de Grandvin--a French socialite (dubbed "a personification and apotheosis of wine")--and the aristocratic Jack Gentian: the Marquis' disciple and Dean of the fictional Burgundy Club. An anonymous editor chronicles their fraternity through a series of biographies, correspondences, and dialogues.
The metaphorical front porch of the collection is "The House of the Tragic Poet," titled after a famous archeological site buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The site--layered with ash, art, time, and mystery--frames the imaginative, geopolitical, and aesthetic scene.
The two most substantial Sketches are "At the Hostelry" and "Naples in the Time of Bomba," comprising a symposium in which the topic digresses from Italian history to the nature of the picturesque. The discussion is dense with references to legendary persons and painters from centuries past, including Bourbon king Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies (1810-1859)--nicknamed "Bomba" ("The Bomb King") for his brutal bombardment of civilians--and the revolts of Masaniello and Garibaldi ("Savoy's red-shirt Perseus").
The "Burgundy Club Sketches" serve a cocktail of red wine and Redshirts, where distinctions of class, time, place, and philosophy are mixed and remixed by editors real and imaginary--past, present, and future--in their more-or-less permanently impermanent form. The version provided for this meetup is based on Sandberg's "reading edition."
Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.
The Burgundy Club Sketches:
Supplemental:
This meetup is part of the series The Risorgimento.