Laudator Temporis Acti

Bruce Harkness, "Bibliography and the Novelistic Fallacy," Studies in Bibliography 12 (1959) 59-73 (at 62):

To turn to the errors of scholarship, take F.O. Matthiessen's lengthy appreciation of Melville's phrase "soiled fish of the sea" in White Jacket. Melville's narrator says of himself, after he had fallen into the sea, "I wondered whether I was yet dead or still dying. But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, soiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again tingled. . . ." This section Matthiessen acclaims as being imagery of the "sort that was to become peculiarly Melville's . . . hardly anyone but Melville could have created the shudder that results from calling this frightening vagueness some 'soiled fish of the sea'!" Then follows a discussion of the metaphysical conceit and its moral and psychological implications.

As has been pointed out, the genius in this shuddering case of imagery is not Melville, who wrote coiled fish, not soiled fish. "Coiled fish" stands in the first editions of White Jacket, and to an unknown Constable printer should go the laurels for soiling the page with a typographical error.⁷

7. See J.W. Nichol, "Melville's 'Soiled Fish of the Sea'," AL, XXI (1949), 338-339.

The reference is to F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 392ff.