My recollection is that he wrote to Hawthorne that he felt spotless as a lamb in the aftermath of having written a wicked book. It's up to us to determine what he meant by wicked. I've suspected it's for godlessness more than anything else. I think, too, his statement about the Declaration of Independence and its…

I think Sonia compares the old Melville in the context of the new pop culture in a very serious (and properly ironic) and respectful way. If he wasn't sunk in depression about how the public rejected, or at least didn't accept, his work, he would have laughed right along with her. He wrote elsewhere that the…