By Stuart Mitchner
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul….
—Herman Melville, from Moby-Dick
There are many earthly languages. There are many heavenly languages. There are many blazing, blinding tomorrows. But they all lead to the same glorious tomorrow at last.
—Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)
This week begins with the birth of the poet Vachel Lindsay, November 10, 1879. The “glorious tomorrow” he envisons comes from his utopian work, The Golden Book of Springfield, numerous chapters of which are futuristically dated in the spring and summer of 2018. First published in 1920, the book was reprinted in 1999, with an introduction hailing Lindsay as “the most intensely romantic U.S. poet of his generation,” as well as “a radical critic of the white supremacy, greed, misery, brutality, ugliness and emptiness inherent in U.S. capitalist culture.” No less timely in November 2025 is a reference to “this radically nonconformist dream of the future” as an “all-out assault on the stupidity and bigotry of Main Street USA.” In The Golden Book, the coffee houses, movie theaters, streets, and parks of Springfield, Illinois, “in the ‘Mystic Year’ 2018 are the setting for a valiant struggle to transform a village dominated by shady politicians, lynch-mobs, commercialism, and cocaine into a new paradise.”
Ultimately brought down by a private life “rife with disappointments,” including his doomed love for the poet Sara Teasdale, the prophet of glorious tomorrows committed suicide on December 5, 1931, by drinking a bottle of lye. His last words were: “They tried to get me; I got them first!”
Dostoevsky and Veterans Day
Fyodor Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in a Moscow hospital for the poor where his father was a physician. On Veteran’s Day 2020, at a time when Donald Trump had refused to concede the election to Joe Biden, I quoted from Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground (1864): And if man “does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse.”
One of the glories of Dostoevsky for a columnist is that he can be quoted on virtually any topic, the most recent for me being Matthew Macfadyen’s vivid, intensely animated depiction of President Garfield’s deranged assassin Charles Guiteau (1841-1882) in the Netflix series Death By Lightning. There are anticipations of Guiteau in unhinged, word-drunk civil servants, frustrated philosophers, and misguided psychopaths throughout Dostoevsky’s work. Consider the “vengeance-driven narcissist” the Underground Man imagines as a rodent coming “at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge,” while “creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions,” adding “so many unsettled questions, that there inevitably works up … a sort of fatal brew … made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators laughing at it till their healthy sides ache.”
November 12
A Book of Days for the Literary Year notes that on November 12, 1935, the poet Theodore Roethke “is hospitalized after spending the night in the Michigan woods, where he shares a mystical experience with a tree and learns the secret of Nijinsky.” Roethke’s poem “The Waking” begins, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. / I learn by going where I have to go….We think by feeling. What is there to know?” And what can I say to the Dostoevskian coincidence that Roethke’s strange adventure and the 1934 birth of Charles Manson is the combination I come up with for today, November 12, 2025?
November 13
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was talked into being by Coleridge and William Wordsworth “as they walked through the Valley of Stones near Lynmouth” on November 13, 1797, or so says A Book of Days. In fact, it was the rocky beach at Watchet, near Coleridge’s home at Nether Stowey, where I walked with my friend Roger on S.T.C.’s birthday, October 21, 2013. After that, we paid our respects to the statue of the Mariner on Watchet’s esplanade. Roethke’s line “We think by feeling” captures what happened to me when first reading, at 17, on the same gloomy Novemberish afternoon, both the Rime and Coleridge’s opium dream “Kubla Khan.”
Holding Moby-Dick
Imagine yourself opening a copy of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick on the day it was published, November 14, 1851, and coming to the fourth sentence of the first paragraph: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul …. I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
I got to Princeton, where one day in the summer of 1986 I held a copy of the American first edition that had just been handed me by Logan Fox in his store Micawber Books, Labyrinth’s predecessor on Nassau Street. Because the spine was slightly tattered, Logan gave me a good deal and the book was mine until I sold it for the down payment on a 2000 Honda CRV, which is still running almost 26 years later, with its MOBY1ED license plate.
Players
The first Hollywood Captain Ahab was played by John Barrymore in the silent film The Sea Beast (1926). Barrymore reprised the role of “Ahab Ceely” four years later in Moby Dick (Warner Bros. had no time for Melville’s hyphen). Flash forward a few decades to 1956, and Ahab (with the dignity of his last name restored) is played by Gregory Peck.
Bob Dylan begins his great, rambling road song “Brownsville Girl,” with reference to a younger Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter (1950): “Well, there was this movie I seen one time about a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck.” Many miles later, Dylan comes back to Peck: “Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head…. All I remember about it was Gregory Peck.”
I have the same feeling about Matthew Macfadyen’s unforgettable Guiteau in Death By Lightning, not to mention Michael Shannon’s Garfield. One of the pleasures of the series had to do with the reunion of favorite characters from the Golden Age of series television, especially Trixie from Deadwood (Paula Malcomson as Guiteau’s steadfast sister). Shannon’s muted power brought back memories of his forceful performance as Van Alden in Boardwalk Empire, while Macfadyen first came our way as Tom Quinn in MI5/Spooks, and more recently of course as Tom Wambsgans in Succession.
The Player Poet
I have to come back to Vachel Lindsay, who rhapsodized on my birth state in “The Santa Fe Trail”: “Ho for Kansas, land that restores us when houses choke us, and great books bore us!” Though Springfield was his home, he had a special place in his heart for the Sunflower State. Early in “Walking into Kansas,” the third chapter of Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914), he writes: “I have crossed the mystic border. I have left Earth. I have entered Wonderland. Though I am still east of the geographical center of the United States, in every spiritual sense I am in the West. This morning I passed the stone mile-post that marks the beginning of Kansas.”
Lindsay dates his crossing June 14, 1912, a little over a decade after L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900. Now, what can I say, again, but “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”