BY
WARNER BERTHOFF
BRIMMING over with the creative confidence and ambition he was pouring into the writing of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, in the summer of 1850, published an enthusiastic appreciation of the stories and sketches of his fellow countryman, Nathaniel Hawthorne. This article, the memorable “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” is on the whole more revealing of Melville himself at this high point in his hurried public career than of the precise character of Hawthorne’s fiction. But it is not superficial; nowhere does it allow us to think that its author has not read deeply into his subject’s work, or that the encounter between reader and storyteller has not been extremely direct and full. Melville simply chose to describe his own free part, as well as Hawthorne’s, in this literary encounter. He tells about Hawthorne by way of telling about his own participating excitement, and about certain high-flying thoughts—mainly of what it signifies that Hawthorne is an American of the present day and hour—which this response has led him on to. What he has to say, under the licensing disguise of “a Virginian Spending July in Vermont,” is not the kind of thing usually met with in critical writing:
…already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further, shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil in my Southern soul.
In the era of Romanticism and, in the United States, of New England transcendentalism, it was everybody’s custom to appraise works of literature in, broadly speaking, biographical terms. The value of the work was one with the spiritual or existential virtue of the man who had written it, and its function was to give voice to that particular quantum or reserve of virtue, to make it accessible as a source of common good. But Melville as usual overflowed the ideological convention he appropriated. The encounter of reader and author that he describes is not presented as simply a generally edifying or constructive social transaction. It is, in the metaphor used, that one particular transaction whereby life itself is generated and the existence of the race is continued in passion into the future. (Hawthorne, we remember, may have intimated something of the same understanding of the consecrations of the storyteller’s calling in a preface written the next year for a new edition of his Twice-Told Tales when he described his stories and sketches as “attempts…to open an intercourse with the world.”) To Melville it was not only the more solemn and profound of Hawthorne’s tales or those touched with his peculiar “blackness” that reached out in this way. Pieces like “Buds and Bird Voices” or “The Old Apple Dealer,” having their own subtle element of outgoing compassion and melancholy, rose, Melville declared, from “such a depth of tenderness, such a boundless sympathy with all forms of being, such an omnipresent love,” that they too had power to open a direct passage from “the intricate, profound heart where they originated.”
About storytelling as a social rite, procreative or otherwise, there is more to be said than Melville ventured to say in the Hawthorne article or anywhere else (though a few passing remarks in The Confidence-Man on the nature of fiction have gradually been recognized as extraordinarily discerning and comprehensive). What that more may be, however, is implicit in his own best practice. His work remains important as much for the ingratiating freedom and inventiveness of its formation, in particular its alertness to the job of beguiling concrete audiences, as for the exemplary humanity of its themes. Indeed the quick responsiveness of compositional arrangement to, at once, the progressive extension of the story and the advance of the reader’s expectation is what particularly fixes assent. Quite regularly, these stories shift focus at some key point and momentarily put their emphasis on the storyteller’s own resolute efforts to work his way through the narrative occasion and to do it justice, to get it right—or else his willingness to fall silent where the event transcends casual understanding (as in Chapter 22 of Billy Budd) rather than falsify its profoundest truth.1 As much as any ultimate weightiness of theme, with Melville it is this active sense of engagement and risk in the business of getting through his story that gives it plausibility as it goes forward and in the process assists in opening it out until it becomes capable of bearing just that particular weightiness.
A story well told, so that it has the power to enter permanently into the imagination of those who hear it, always tells us two things. It says, “here is what happened”—and it has its say clearly enough in this respect whether or not (as Melville’s stories mostly do) it takes on the character of parable or even allegory or, at the least, leads to certain meditative formulations that can stand as autonomous truths. But it will also say something further. It says, “this is what it is like to have knowledge of such happenings, to see in consciousness that they can happen, to undertake the task of opening such knowledge and vision to others.” Anyone who passes an ordinary amount of time in the sociable exchange of gossip and anecdote knows how much depends—for interest and for belief, too—on how things get said. The more so when the matter is serious: stories that ought to be important and consequential can be so poorly told (or really not “told” at all) that they quite lose currency. The most momentous events reduce to pointless fantasy or rumor in the management of someone who has too little feeling or care for the sequences of reality as they are actually absorbed into consciousness and who merely blurts out their bare substance and result. Melville seems to have understood from the beginning (as well he might, given the strangeness of his first materials) that to tell a tale is to gamble or wager for the reader’s, the listener’s, continuing acceptance—continuing, that is, beyond the initial “suspension of disbelief” which is the reader’s undertaking in the covenant of literature. It is a wager precisely for confidence; an offering of testimony that, by forthrightly embracing the pragmatic burden of verification, becomes the better able to persuade others that the game itself is decidedly worth playing, on both sides and for its own sake.
It thus looks, systematically or not, beyond each immediate narrative occasion. Its motives are, in a formal sense, ceremonial and confederating. For the storyteller conspires to draw his hearer into becoming not simply a believer in the one particular tale he is telling but a devotee of tales in general, a true aficionado. In some measure he conceives of transforming his casual reader into a reader-by-vocation, the necessary partner for his own elected service. (“The demand that I make of my reader,” Joyce remarked, “is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”) But in this task the storyteller serves not only himself but the common fortune. That is, he engages his readers actively, deliberately, into that vast unending civil process which men and women are bound to by their character as, willy-nilly, historical and imaginative beings: the process of exorcizing the immeasurable entail of past events and making imaginative provision, so far as can be done, for the uncontrollable onset of present and future. In a word he fills time, covenanting with his readers to compel time’s successions closer to that ideal “fullness” in which the life we inherit and the life we imagine are not hopelessly out of joint.2
The aim of the storyteller’s wager is also, of course, to give pleasure (and share more or less promptly in the pleasure-giver’s agreeable rewards). As with any art the covenant of fiction promises enjoyment here and now as well as provision of the kind described against past and future. (That, after all, would be the common truth in Melville’s sexual metaphor for his encounter with Hawthorne’s tales—and one can find a further parallel with sexual logistics in the sense communicated in certain of Melville’s own narratives that to enter fully into the engagements of storytelling can be, temporarily at least, transporting and exhausting.) Except perhaps in a few special forms—like the solemn deposition offered in the “inside narrative” of Billy Budd—the whole vast genre of prose fiction is primarily intended to entertain. It is hard to think of a major novelist or storyteller who is not also a first-rate entertainer, in the vulgar sense; a master, according to choice, of high comedy, of one or another robust species of expressive humor, or of some special variety of the preposterous, the grotesque, the absurd. And Melville, certainly, is no exception. A kind of vigorous supervisory humor is his natural idiom as a writer, and one particular attraction of his shorter work is the fresh further display it offers of this prime element in his literary character.
A version of the “contemplative humor” that Melville celebrated in Hawthorne’s work is one component in Melville’s prose comedy. But its major instrument is something broader and freer, something that on any given page is an end in itself. It is an antic humor, carried by physical gesture as well as meditative fancifulness. What chiefly propels it is, first, a sense of the special interest of those moments in life when, though the self-approving consciousness gives us one set of directions, the creaturely totality of our being mysteriously issues us an altogether different set that abruptly takes command and bends us this way and that, quite against our apparent will; and, second, the corollary sense that these are the moments when our moral history and destiny are really determined. Some of the liveliest sequences in Melville’s fiction occur when characters normally at ease with themselves and their attitude to life (like the fine old lawyer of “Bartleby”) are overborne by some strange new phenomenon of behavior and carried quite out of themselves by sudden excitement. A passage in Moby-Dick nicely summarizes the dialectic of feeling that plays through such sequences:
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke…[breeding in him] this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy…. (Chapter XLIX, “The Hyena”)
The passage gives us in epitome both the character of the fictional world that we can find projected in most of Melville’s shorter pieces, and one of the main ways suggested, though not the only one, of looking at this world and surviving what is seen. Also, as a piece of writing it effectively illustrates its own point. The thing to be said is said with a lively humor which convinces by piling up a quick abundance of expressive detail. But it is also said in a manner that presses beyond the conventional limits of comic ingratiation. We feel at once that the “hard things” spoken of are somehow no joke, for all the slapstick of the accompanying image; that waywardness and desperation, though not necessarily incompatible with a “philosophy” which is genially “free and easy,” are more in this case than mere figures of speech. Melville’s humor is inseparable from the imaginative intelligence supporting his gravest undertakings in fiction. The impressions of life and destiny it delivers are not materially different from what emerges in those works of his, like “Benito Cereno” and Billy Budd, where comic extravagance is subordinated almost completely to wit of another kind, the wit of moral and psychological understanding and of joined narrative sequence which tragic action even more exactingly requires of the writer who attempts it. It is on this ground, among the intense images of spiritual passion and change given to us in Melville’s most purely original tales, that we most feel his greatness as a writer, and that his work seems finally to surpass in power and truth even so masterful a humorist as Dickens, from whom in the 1840’s and ’50’s Melville (like Dostoievsky) learned many excellent lessons.
The themes and actions of Melville’s shorter tales and the truths they predicate are very likely as profound as interpretive criticism has persistently assumed them to be. He, too, in his broad American way, was a Victorian “sage,” who may be read for the wisdom in him. For the most part these themes and actions are clear and explicit in presentation. Melville liked to get things properly explained as well as build up symbolic hints and portents, and when he speaks figuratively, the figures drawn are agreeably circumstantial and definite.
Particularly in the tales of 1853-56 there appears to be, first of all, a fairly constant burden of autobiographical statement. Nearly all remind us somewhere that they are the work of a writer whose literary career seemed by 1853 to have fallen on evil days and who himself, towards the end of his work on Moby-Dick, had prophesied that his life had come “to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould” (letter to Hawthorne, June, 1851). One after another presents an action of withdrawal, resignation, defeat; of stoic endurance and passive suffering; of isolated and constricted spirits living on, though sometimes with a strange cheerfulness, after wrenching disasters; of measures taken—usually too eccentric to be generally serviceable—against hardly avoidable catastrophe.
The whole frame of action has become less splendid and spacious. Only occasionally are glimpses still given of the kind of “far-off, soft, azure world” (“The Piazza”) that figures so largely in the early Polynesian books and Moby-Dick. Instead these stories offer, as settings, a series of houses and habitations—the walled law-office and the Tombs in “Bartleby”; the shadowy, decaying slave ship in “Benito Cereno”; the queer misshapen houses of “I and My Chimney” and “Jimmy Rose”; the grimly secluded paper factory which is the “Tartarus of Maids”—that are closed in and oppressive in the extreme. (So the earth itself is presented, in “The Encantadas,” as a “great general monastery” and “Potters Field.”) The lives of the main characters correspond. Instead of heroic “knights and squires” and figures of “immaculate manliness” of the kind liberally provided in Moby-Dick, we find figures of “desperate fortune” (“The Encantadas”) who are “afraid of everyone” (“Jimmy Rose”), men who appear “flayed alive,” wracked by trouble as if by “the ague” (“Benito Cereno”). Characters may imagine themselves happy and secure, yet be in reality “like the man who, pipe in mouth, was killed one cloudless afternoon long ago in Virginia, by summer lightning; at his own warm open window he was killed, and remained leaning out there upon the dreamy afternoon, till some one touched him, when he fell” (“Bartleby”). “Nature’s pride”—the irreducible force of life that is the last inward resort of human dignity—is identified only as a perverse counterforce to “nature’s torture” (“The Encantadas: Sketch the Eighth”); it persists as a source of treacherous hope, “a hope which is but mad,” depriving its victim even of the consolation of “a sane despair.”
As in his earlier books, Melville’s statement of these themes is typically reflective as well as figurative and dramatic. In the stories he wrote after 1853 there is still enough of the obstinate seeker after truth and a “definite belief” (as Hawthorne reported of him at their meeting in England in 1856) to supply texts for all manner of philosophical debate. Melville continues to frame his narratives as, among other things, tests of the validity of various great received propositions of religious and moral knowledge. The central New Testament commandment to “charity,” for example, is as directly questioned in “Bartleby,” the first work published in the 1853-56 period, as it notoriously is in The Confidence-Man, the last in this run. But what now becomes equally prominent is the resigned or dryly humorous suggestion that the one sure thing in life is the overturning of received propositions. “Somehow, too,” the narrator in “The Apple-Tree Table” remarks, “certain reasonable opinions of mine seemed not so reasonable as before.” When the stuff of new awareness materializes, it is not necessarily clarifying. “Truth comes in with darkness,” is the concluding strophe (as it may be called) of “The Piazza”; and it comes there with the haunting expression of a particular face, the recollection of one or another puzzling old story. An increasing reserve and restraint are to be felt in these tales with regard to philosophic assessments, and are felt moreover as a positive resource. So, too, certain high dramatic moments are deliberately left undescribed, becoming in fact the more impressive through the narrator’s pointed refusal to take them up in his regular fashion. A profounder tact, a more intense respect for persons and what is ultimately required of them, seem responsible for this change of manner, rather than any doctrinaire skepticism or ironic derogation of traditional understanding. “The half shall here remain untold,” Melville writes at the darkest point in his narrative of the Chola widow, Hunilla. “Those two unnamed events which befell Hunilla on this isle, let them abide between her and her God. In nature, as in law, it may be libelous to speak some truths.” The greatest fiction, perhaps, cannot withdraw into silence in this way. But it is possible to feel a singular humanity, and civility, in writing that chooses to do so out of its own measured strength of intimation.
From 1856 to 1885 Melville gave up prose fiction, as he gave up, in time, the thought of any further public career in literature.3 But in various renewed experiments during his final years, made possible by his retirement at the end of 1885 from the drudgery of a routine job in the New York Customs House, the tact and forbearance of judgment he had come round to in the middle 1850’s are resumed almost as if there had been no interruption. In his last major effort—the long narrative of the handsome sailor, Billy Budd, and what befell him and one or two other “phenomenal men” in the year of the British fleet’s Great Mutiny—these qualities become sources of exceptional power. The philosophical restlessness of earlier times seems quite gone, though not the curiosity. Melville’s old interest as a storyteller in framing experience into meditative axioms and queries is still a prime motive (so that one way of grasping the general form of Billy Budd, the poet Eugenio Montale recognized, is to see that it moves forward not only as, in Montale’s terms, a tale of adventure crystallizing into a mystery play but also as a critical essay and Platonic dialogue). But the narrative voice is no longer that of a man who can imagine himself either gaining or losing by the outcome of his inquiry. Rather, the various propositions about life which the events of the story yield up are valuable as they help to specify more precisely the quality of manhood celebrated in its main characters: the rare beauty and nobleness of spirit in Billy Budd, the trapped “peacemaker,” and the austere personal rectitude of the fatherly Captain who under the rigidities of the martial law must be Billy’s executioner.
With these last remarkable figures (and the malignant yet finally pitiful Claggart, for a time their formidable antagonist) the table of personalities and life histories constituted by Melville’s later fiction is complete. Ever since Billy Budd was first published, readers have felt strongly its unity with Melville’s earlier work. In occupying the ground of tragedy it resumes the ambiance approached in “Bartleby,” “The Encantadas,” “Benito Cereno,” and in the dramatic climaxes of Moby-Dick. Yet the last word in this moving story is not tragic in accent, though it comes to us as a death-song. It is, instead, Billy’s gentle, absolving plea to be allowed as much of beauty and ease in death as he was blessed with in life, and no reader who follows Melville through the full circuit of his life and work can be other than grateful that there could be this music at the close:
I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank,
And his cheek it was like the budding pink.
But me they’ll lash me in hammock, drop me deep,
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair,
I am sleepy and the oozy weeds about me twist.