Melville, BENITO CERENO: “. . . when at sunrise, the deponent coming on deck, the negro Babo showed him a skeleton, which had been substituted for the ship’s proper figure-head . . .”
. . . the proper and original figurehead having been that of the discoverer, Christopher Columbus.
Thus Melville, after MOBY-DICK, after the sinking of the Pequod—sucked into the whirlpool, at the very bottom—yields the overwater discoverer . . . and
“Seguid vuestro jefe” . . . the leader, in this case, a skeleton . . .
My left leg—lying straight from the edge of the chair to the floor beneath the desk—seems to enlarge, the flesh prickly and fat . . . then it goes numb: all sensation vanishes . . .
and it occurs to me that, whereas in MOBY-DICK Melville fought his way upstream, like the Pacific salmon, to the original sources—in PIERRE, there was no need to return, no stream to ascend . . . the fight gone out of him, he remained still, and the past overwhelmed him . . . sinking, drowning, he pulled the world, his family, in over himself . . .
. . . the amniotic waters, closing over the eye of the vortex, over Melville’s wreck . . .
Although in MOBY-DICK Melville reached deep into “the invisible spheres . . . formed in fright,” he yet maintained freeboard, working from above the surface—if safe by only the few perilous inches of a whaleboat . . . but in PIERRE, the author, the story, the people of whom he wrote, all are one—gelatinous, subaquatic—the verbs become blobs of sound . . .
The absence of sensation in my left leg has become something positive, and yet I can’t put words to it . . . the leg having passed into a condition remote from the rest of my body, untranslatable . . . I am aware only of its motionlessness, of its arrest not only in space but in time . . . being stopped itself, the leg stops the rest of me: my body stiffens, tenses, for or against what, I cannot tell
. . . a thought floats in, however, that I am struggling, by physical force, to prevent Melville from writing PIERRE . . .
“For while still dreading your doom, you foreknow it. Yet how foreknow and dread in one breath . . . ?”
Thus, PIERRE. And Melville—as Ahab, barely before the sinking of the Pequod—foreknew his doom: “. . . from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life . . . !”
I remember Carl, in St. Louis, after the war, after he had come back from nineteen months in a Japanese Prisoner-Of-War Camp: we were afraid of what had happened to his mind, and, for want of a better answer, I was trying to get him to a psychiatrist, to help him go over his experiences, untangle something of what he was, what had happened to him . . . I recall the look on his face when I made the suggestion: the features withdrawing, not from me, but from one another, shifting their arrangement, becoming without form; and the smile, part of his mouth spreading, as he said, “I ain’t drowning, Mike boy . . .”
My leg is now dead, passed into a condition from which there is no recall. I become aware of the hip joint, the part that is still me. I cherish the separation, the feeling of identity going no further than the hip . . .
Ahab: “. . . it was Moby-Dick that dismasted me . . .
Moby-Dick . . . a great white monster, with “a hump like a snow-hill . . .”
not Leucothea, not a white and winged goddess, protectress, who gave Ulysses an enchanted veil . . .
but moving out from this, from the closed and friendly Mediterranean, from the near ocean shores,
moving out, as Columbus, across the Atlantic, and, through Melville, into the Pacific:
the white gull become a white whale, cast in monstrous, malignant revenge . . .
Melville, in the Pacific—the western extreme of American force—untethered, fatherless, the paternity blasted—turning—as Ahab—with vengeance and malice to match the monster’s: turning and thrusting back to his own beginnings: to
Moby-Dick, the white monster: to Maria Gansevoort Melville . . .
(Lizzie’s account of Herman: “A severe attack of what he called crick in the back laid him up at his Mothers in Gansevoort in March 1858—and he never regained his former vigor & strength.”
The snow-hill hump, rumbling in the interior caverns of the sea book, bursts forth as the ultimate image in the book of the drowned—all of PIERRE perhaps being written as an excuse to expose it:
“‘. . . in thy breasts, life for infants lodgeth not, but death-milk for thee and me!—The drug!’ and tearing her bosom loose, he seized the secret vial nestling there.”
Carl, some years ago, on one of his rare and random splurges of reading—invading the library, chewing his way through stacks of books—came up with a volume of Indian legends: there was one about a woman with a toothed vagina, who had killed many men by having intercourse with them—but the hero inserted sticks too hard for her to masticate, and thus knocked out the teeth . . . and there was another about the first woman in the world, whose vagina contained a carnivorous fish . . .
(Columbus, in the Boca de la Sierpe—mouth of the serpent—observed that the tides were much greater than anywhere else in the Indies, the current roaring like surf . . .
Dead-legged, helpless and unwilling, I feel my body dragged down . . .
Melville, blubbering from beneath the ocean, announces PIERRE to a Hawthorne—not Nathaniel, but Sophia: “My Dear Lady, I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk.”
From a contemporary review of PIERRE: “The sooner this author is put in a ward the better.”