“Melville Is Dwelling Somewhere in New York”
The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did survive the wreck.
MELVILLE, Moby-Dick, Epilogue
In the aftermath of the Civil War, when so many were seeking a fresh start, Herman Melville was appointed a district inspector of customs in New York Harbor. On December 5, 1866, he was assigned badge number 75 and began his nineteen years’ service at four dollars a day. (This was later reduced by forty cents.) Working out of an office at 470 West Street, off Gansevoort Street, now the wholesale meat district where nineteenth-century cobblestones can still be seen, Melville regularly inspected cargoes on ships tied up at piers all the way to Harlem.
Gansevoort Street was named after Melville’s grandfather, a hero of the Revolutionary War. One day in 1870 Melville visited the Gansevoort Hotel, corner of Little Twelfth Street and West Street, and asked the man at the desk who sold him a paper of tobacco: “Can you tell me what this word ‘Gansevoort’ means?” He was informed that “this hotel and the street of the same name are called after a very rich family who in old times owned a great deal of property hereabouts.” Reporting this to his proud embittered mother with the leaden irony that now marked his personal communications, Melville added:
The dense ignorance of this solemn gentleman—his knowing nothing of the hero of Fort Stanwix, aroused such an indignation in my breast, that disdaining to enlighten his benighted soul, I left the place without further colloquy. Repairing to the philosophic privacy of the District Office I then moralized upon the instability of human glory and the evanescence of—many other things.
He lived on East Twenty-sixth Street with his wife and four children. In the front hall there was a colored engraving of the Bay of Naples, its still blue dotted with tiny white sails. A large bust of Antinoüs, beloved to the emperor Hadrian, stood on a pedestal. In the evenings, “nerve-shredded” with fatigue, Melville worked at poetry that his relatives paid to publish. The last novel he was to publish in his lifetime, The Confidence Man (1857), had failed with critics and public even more disastrously than Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852). A brother-in-law reported Melville’s saying that “he is not going to write any more at present & wishes to get a place in the N.Y. Custom House.” He had failed to get the consulship in Florence from the Lincoln administration.
The district inspector of customs wrote in his bedroom. His granddaughter Eleanor Metcalf described “the great mahogany desk, heavily bearing up four shelves of dull gilt and leather books; the high dim book-case …; the small black iron bed, covered with dark cretonne; the narrow iron gate.” There were prints, bronzes, a Claude Lorrain—a painter whose primary subject was light drawing the eye into vast panoramas of land and sea. The room seemed dark and forbidding to his granddaughter. Grandmother Lizzie’s room was a very different place—“sunny, comfortable and familiar, with a sewing-machine and a white bed like other people’s.”
Melville’s eyes were weak: “like an owl I steal about by twilight, owing to the twilight of my eyes.” Even in his thirties he often wrote “keeping one eye shut & wink at the paper with the other.” His handwriting was regularly misread by printers. In Pierre he described a young author overwhelmed by all the errors in his proofs and finally “jeering” at them. The posthumously published Billy Budd had to be deciphered again and again. Writing “blindly,” his eyes turned away from the paper, symbolized to wretched Pierre Glendinning “the hostile necessity and distaste, the former whereof made of him the most unwilling states-prisoner of letters.”
Melville wore dark glasses in the street. In the evenings he walked up and down the Battery to rest his eyes; he refused all social engagements. His daughter Frances and later his granddaughter Eleanor were dutifully taken on walks in the new Central Park and to the tip of Manhattan in what is now Fort Tryon Park. Eleanor remembered her grandfather teasing her if she slowed up—“the cop will get you!” Melville as a customs inspector, feeling that he had somehow survived himself, was generally remembered as being silently grim. As a “romancer” exploiting his adventures in the South Seas, he had been exuberant and racy. Then, marrying the daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts and trying to keep his family afloat by knocking out book after book, sometimes two a year, he had become desperately humorous about himself. In 1850 he moved to Pittsfield in the Berkshires, where he wrote his greatest book and where, before he moved back to New York to make a living, his career somehow stopped. He was now known around his numerous clan—Melvilles, Gansevoorts, Shaws—for being “nervous” and for making his timidly loyal wife “nervous.” It was a troubled family.
Melville in New York was an oppressive presence. One son was to shoot himself in what may have been an accident; another disappeared into the West. His oppressiveness passed into family history. His great-grandson Paul Metcalf, who never knew him, wrote that to the family Melville was “a poison, potent and to be feared … a sepsis.… Most personally, because of my relation to him, Melville was the monkey on my back—I could never come to terms with myself until relieved of him.”
In May 1867 Elizabeth Shaw Melville tried unsuccessfully to separate from Melville. Although she was often afraid of her husband, her half-brother Samuel Shaw recognized that she was even more afraid of how a separation would look “in the eyes of the world, of which she has a most exaggerated dread.” Shaw wrote to the minister of the local Unitarian church to which both Melvilles belonged, asking that he assure Elizabeth of her good name. The minister had been so concerned for Elizabeth that he proposed a fake kidnapping to get her out of the house. Elizabeth never made the move.
While still in Pittsfield, Melville was already under such strain that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had an early interest in psychiatry, had been called in to examine him—an episode that Melville satirized in the story “I and My Chimney.” The Melvilles were always hard up, but money was found in the family circle—it usually was—to send him to Europe and the Holy Land. In one of the “gnostic” poems he was to write in New York after hours, Melville sufficiently noted:
Found a family, build a state,
The pledged event is still the same:
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.
The narrator of “I and My Chimney” is a contentedly slow and backward old man who says: “In a dream I go about my fields, a sort of lazy, happy-go-lucky, good-for-nothing, loafing, old Lear.” He is beset by an enterprising wife who wants him to demolish the celebrated but useless oversized chimney which dominates everything in the house: “From this habitual precedence of my chimney over me, some even think that I have got into a sad rearward way altogether; in short, from standing behind my old-fashioned chimney so much, I have got to be quite behind the age, too, as well as running behind-hand in everything else.” When a Mr. Scribe is called in to estimate the cost of removing the chimney, he discovers that there is a “secret chamber, or closet” in it. The more the wife insists on having the chimney “abolished,” the more the old man is determined to keep his old chimney just as it is:
It is now some seven years since I have stirred from home. My city friends all wonder why I don’t come to see them, as in former times. They think I am getting sour and unsocial. Some say that I have become a sort of mossy old misanthrope, while all the time the fact is, I am simply standing guard over my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender.
For all her fear of him, Elizabeth Melville was helplessly sensitive to her husband. His “nervousness” was a constant subject of her family correspondence. She may not have entered into all he wrote, but she felt the injustice of his life. Like his favorite “villain,” Ahab, he was “a valor-ruined man.” When Elizabeth reported his mental state around the family, it was clear that they had all been afraid for his sanity: “poor fellow he has so much mental suffering to undergo (and how all unnecessary). I am rejoiced when anything comes into his life to give a moment’s relief.”
“Herman has taken to writing poetry,” she wrote in a letter of 1859. “You need not tell any one, for you know how such things get around.” But if she had little clue to his “mental suffering,” neither did he. Vehement in thought, he had to go to the limit in book after book, pitting himself against “the fates.” His first and lasting image of the self was heroic, scornfully independent of the suffering that came with his sense of constant struggle. His life was as tumultuously up-and-down as his work. After his first best-selling adventure tales of the South Seas, Typee and Omoo, Mardi bewildered his public. Redburn and White-Jacket tried to get it back. Moby-Dick alarmed most who bothered to read it. Pierre disgusted the critics, The Piazza Tales went unregarded, The Confidence Man merely baffled. Melville was perpetually adrift; even his effort to write a potboiler based on the adventures in England of a Revolutionary War soldier captured by the British, Israel Potter, betrayed a superior talent and his subversive ability to put even Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones into comic relief.
Some uncanny drama seeped into his life, as if from his books. The drama was to mark his revival in the next century. All his terms became absolutes as he pushed some personal quest after an unnamable goal, pitted himself against this “wolfish world” with “my splintered heart and maddened hand.” At the peak of his life, the end of 1851, when the writer he most admired, his Berkshire neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, praised Moby-Dick in a “joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter,” Melville burst out to the elusive self-contained Hawthorne, the perfect Other he would never entirely reach, “Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby-Dick to our blessing, and stop from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;—I have heard of Krakens.”
Five years later, stopping off in England on his way to Egypt and Palestine, he told Hawthorne on a walk along the Irish Sea (Hawthorne was then American consul in Liverpool) that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated.” Hawthorne noted in his English notebooks:
But still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.
This is almost all we have from Hawthorne about Melville. Melville destroyed whatever Hawthorne may have replied to Melville’s rapturous letters when writing Moby-Dick. But Hawthorne’s quietly compassionate portrait sums up Melville’s “problem” as no one near him ever grasped it. The proud discoverer of his own talent who wrote in Moby-Dick, “I try all things; I achieve what I can,” was a wanderer who found himself adrift on all the oceans of thought. Life picked him up with one book and dropped him with another. He went where each new book took him but was always dogged by his early success, the best-selling Typee. “Let me be infamous; there is no patronage in that,” he grumbled to Hawthorne. “What reputation H. M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity is bad enough, anyway; but to go down as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals!’ ”
He had become a troublesome quantity with his third book, Mardi (1849), a thin-spun fantasy and political allegory that few people could read. (This is still the case.) The book is a quest round and round a world—of symbols. This was Melville’s tiresome intellectual habit in the few books he wrote (another is The Confidence Man, at the end of his public career as an author) without an external story to tell. His sense of being spiritually violated by a totally “white,” empty world often left him to brood on symbols. He was not modest about this, just frantic on occasion. Though he tried another crowd-pleaser with White-Jacket (1850), he became a “failure” for the rest of his life with Moby-Dick. Still, it was more his need of money than of reputation that troubled Melville. Discovering the full range of his powers in Moby-Dick, he laughingly described himself to Hawthorne as an aristocrat of the brain unable to make a living.
But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth—and go to the Soup Societies.
**In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my “Whale” while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now,—I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in on me,—I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
**What’s the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.
In the long silent evening of his life (he was so completely forgotten that his death in 1891 went unnoticed by the leading literary journal of the day; the New York Times took some days to learn that “Henry” Melville had died) Melville managed to endure and ride out his “decline.” The ill-fated Maurice de Guérin, who died at twenty-nine, had written that “There is more power and beauty in the well-kept secret of one’s self and one’s thoughts, than in the display of a whole heaven that one may have inside one.… The literary career seems to me unreal, both in its essence and in the rewards which one seeks from it, and therefore fatally marred by a secret absurdity.” Melville’s marginal comment: “This is the finest statement of a truth which everyone who thinks in these days must have felt.” By 1885 he was writing to an English admirer: “the further our civilization advances upon its present lines so much the cheaper sort of thing does ‘fame’ become, especially of the literary sort.”
Unlike Walt Whitman, for whom New York would always be the great world, Melville returned to his native city as to a brutal necessity—the “Babylonish brick-kiln” in which he might find “regular employment.” Back in New York, the end of all his outward voyaging, he was finished with it even as Grub Street. For him it was no longer the city of coldly predatory publishers he had lampooned in Pierre, but the wall blocking a writer’s window. It was the screen behind which Bartleby the Scrivener had entombed himself in his employer’s office. New York was immigrant “shiprats,” as he called them in his poem “The House-top,” who in 1863 protested the Draft Act by lynching blacks all over the city and created the worst insurrection in American history.
Melville had made a nightmare of the scene in which Pierre Glendinning arrives in New York with the most ridiculous expectations in the world, only to achieve the destruction of himself and the two women clinging to him. Since New York was already the city most expert and ruthless in destroying its past, Melville satirically endured the eclipse of his ancestral class, the Gansevoorts and the Melvilles. A captive to the commercial capital, he identified New York at its lowest with the Tombs, where Bartleby the Scrivener starved himself to death in ultimate protest against the prevailing condition of life. New York at its “best” was Grace Church on lower Broadway, consecrated to the rich and well-born. In another bitter sketch, “The Two Temples,” Melville was pursued by the beadle for daring to enter the church.
Melville’s New York long ago vanished from New York. Even as Melville was forced back into the city, his own New York was eroded as a physical landscape and as a society. New York’s aristocracy before the Gilded Age had consisted of solid old-fashioned merchants, preferably with some Dutch ancestry. It would soon be replaced by Society—the ostentatious new-rich of the Four Hundred. If Melville’s father, in the business on lower Broadway of importing fine French dry goods, had not failed and then died of the shock (his son was fourteen), Melville would never have gone to sea. Like his well-placed relatives and in-laws, like George Templeton Strong and the father of Theodore Roosevelt, he might have become another of those weighty New Yorkers whom Edith Wharton would portray in all their external wealth and private melancholy. Melville looked on his literary career as an accident—which did not lighten his grim humor at becoming a slave to it. He saw himself more pursued by chance than Moby-Dick was by Captain Ahab—into a world without precedents and rules.
New York’s top layer was disappearing, becoming what Melville’s fellow New Yorker Henry James would in horror call the “swarm.” This, along with the immigrant masses who found Tammany a benevolent despot, already meant the money-men. Wall Street came to represent New York just when Melville, by living in New York, vanished from sight. He ignored all external change in his native city. A minor sketch, “Jimmy Rose,” describes a bon vivant turned bankrupt. Melville’s own New York does not exist in his works. They are an allegory of his life in his most familiar roles: orphan, castaway, renegade from orthodox Christianity and the West, “isolato,” the white savage driven out by his society and contemptuous of it. With his old-fashioned merchant’s sense of honor, the bankrupt father had died of shame. The desperate son would find his positive ideal in men older and more harmonious than himself: the Englishman Jack Chase, captain of the maintop on the navy vessel that brought Melville home in 1844, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But like the lonely killer Ahab, Melville could not believe that anyone had authority over this world—or within it. Heroes were such through strength of will. They had no objective ideal, only the magnetism of being superior persons. There was no father in heaven and only the resentful memory of one on earth.
The bereaved family broke up. Maria Gansevoort Melville wrote to the jurist Lemuel Shaw, one day to be Melville’s father-in-law, that her husband’s family had “deserted” her eight children. The loans advanced to Allan Melville during his lifetime were charged against the children.
At sixteen Herman was a clerk in Albany; at seventeen, a teacher in a country school; nearing twenty, he shipped as a cabin boy to Liverpool. In Redburn (1849), the record of this voyage, he described a customs officer in Liverpool. “A man of fine feelings, altogether above his situation; a most inglorious one, indeed; worse than driving geese to water.” At twenty-one he shipped out in a New Bedford whaler, the Acushnet, for the South Seas. New Bedford whaling captains were the worst slave drivers on the seven seas.
Now began Melville’s grand initiation: the three-and-a-half-year voyage that never left him and became his imaginative life. To read Melville is to go round and round the earth in magnified and mythified versions of that voyage. It took him from New England round Cape Horn to the lunar-looking but “enchanted” Galápagos six years after Darwin, exploring them, had been struck by the subtle variations that led certain birds and animals to thrive when others did not and to develop into new species. Melville already knew all he needed to know about the struggle for existence at sea and in the horrible fo’c’sle of an American ship—a byword for hardship, oppression, and desperate characters from all nations who would not have been employed elsewhere. American ships were known as floating jails.
In the Marquesas Melville deserted, became the “white man who lived among the cannibals” (for a month), was taken off by an Australian whaler, went to Tahiti, mutinied with other hardbitten types, was briefly and farcically jailed. After further escapades in the company of deserters, drifters, drunks, castaways, “mongrel renegades … and cannibals,” he ended up in Honolulu as a clerk, as a pinboy in a bowling alley, before returning home on an American man-of-war, the United States. Melville’s record of the return voyage is White-Jacket, half documentary and half lampoon. His biting description of flogging is supposed to have ended the practice in the American navy. The captain is incompetent and a martinet, the surgeon a sadist, the midshipmen “terrible little boys.” The American navy provided “evils which, like the suppressed domestic drama of Horace Walpole, will neither bear representing, nor reading, and will hardly bear thinking of.” But in the captain of the maintop he found his ideal man—bluff, hearty, poetry-spouting Jack Chase.
Melville’s three-and-a-half-year voyage made him see Western man in confrontation (his favorite activity) with the primitive in society, the elemental in nature. His underlying antagonist was the conventional in white middle-class America and its Christianity. The great voyage furnished material for a lifetime. Billy Budd, Melville’s last work, written in the last years of his life and not discovered until 1919, was “Dedicated to Jack Chase, Englishman, Wherever that great heart may now be, here on Earth or harbored in Paradise, Captain of the Maintop in the year 1843 in the U.S. Frigate United States.”
So central and dominating for the rest of his life was Melville’s great voyage that his prototype became a wanderer, an exile, a sailor, while his work takes us on an endless journey. It leads to South Sea islands and prisons; to the gigantic tortoises and reptiles of “The Encantadas”; to Liverpool in Redburn, where in the desolate cellars off the docks the poor die under the eyes of the indifferent police; to the slums of London, where Israel Potter spends most of his life trying vainly to get home; to the waters off the coast of Chile where Benito Cereno is held prisoner by rebellious slaves who dupe the kindly American Captain Delano into thinking that Cereno still has authority; to the seamy streets of old New York in Pierre and the desolation of Wall Street on Sunday in “Bartleby the Scrivener”; to the Mississippi in The Confidence Man; to Egypt and Palestine in Melville’s extraordinary Journal up the Straits and his narrative poem Clarel; to ancient Italy in the virgin astronomer’s passionate lament over wasted womanhood in the monologue “After the Pleasure Party.”
This narrative journey, the most imaginative single span of the earth in American writing, ends in midocean with the sacramental crucifixion in Billy Budd of a son by his father.
“Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,” wrote the Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay. “Happy the man who, like Ulysses, made a good journey and then came home full of experience and wisdom to live out his life among his family!” No other significant writer of his time and place came anywhere near Melville’s absorption of the imperial midcentury world in which New England whalers and cargo ships made portions of the Pacific an American preserve. New England devised the clipper ships that traded with China and newly opened Japan. New England whalers stripped Japan’s seas of whales in the 1830s and 1840s. America first went to Japan in Commodore Matthew Perry’s “black ships” in 1852–54, opening a reluctant, fearful country to the outside world after centuries of seclusion. (Perry’s aim, Japanese scholars say, was to obtain water and coaling stations for American whalers.)
Melville had reason to become jeeringly sceptical of Western civilization and Protestant moralism; he had seen the missionaries at work.* Because young gentlemen sometimes developed trouble with their eyes and had to leave Harvard for a spell, Richard Henry Dana had gone to sea and produced that superbly healthy and objective record of life at sea and in California before it was American, Two Years Before the Mast. But Melville cannot be relied on to give us straight facts. Conrad, asked in 1907 to write a preface to Moby-Dick, refused. “It struck me as a rather strained rhapsody with whaling for a subject and not a single sincere line in the 3 vols of it.” Melville’s significant imagination captured well the highs and lows of manifest destiny in its time: the exuberance of discovering the “world” and the disgust of sharing in the imperial grab that made Melville’s great voyage possible. No other American writer served such an apprenticeship. Melville never forgot the human flotsam and jetsam around him. American literature was still captive to “high culture,” was self-consciously genteel, and, in the fading of authentic belief, was replacing religion with moralism. The literary class was still homogeneous and unaware that it lacked muscle. Social power was in other hands. Melville on reading Emerson: “To one who has weathered Cape Horn as a common sailor what stuff all this is.”
Melville’s experience before he was twenty-five not only gave him material for a lifetime, it created his basic image: the inconclusive nature of reality, man forever driven back on himself as he seeks a fixed point. Melville’s linked orphanage and “fall” from status, his sense of social injury and his maritime world of wonders, were urgent symbols to the ex-sailor who became a great reader only after discovering that he was a writer. He was never to write one of his semidocumentary novels without other men’s voyages at his side.
Of all the many surprises in his life, probably none was so startling to Melville as his need of books and his passion for ideas. He proudly said that he “swam through whole libraries” to write Moby-Dick. He borrowed other men’s narrative experiences in Typee, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick; this was necessary not only to his extensive imagination but to his need to parody other writers’ limitations. A corrosive humor became as important to his pride as his assertion of mental homelessness. And so did his sense of the ferocity of life at sea—“I have had to do with whales with these visible hands.” He was a Darwinian by intuition. As he was to say, “Luther’s day had expanded into Darwin’s year.” Original sin was behind natural selection. Predestination was in the genes as well as in the “soul.”
Melville was unlike the gentle Darwin, who resisted his own awareness of the killer instinct in nature and was often made ill by the conclusive evidence he piled up. A year before the Origin of Species appeared, Darwin wrote: “It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings going on in the peaceful woods and smiling fields.” “It is like confessing a murder,” Darwin wrote to the botanist Joseph Hooker, confiding his suspicion that species are not immutable. Ten miles outside Pittsfield, Melville was living in the Berkshires’ peaceful woods and smiling fields when he produced Ahab’s hymn to the killer instinct in nature. He was remembering his youth at sea. Killers cannot help themselves.
By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
Melville’s “Darwinism” brought to his books a complex sense that human beings were futile yet heroic. His career was an example. The man who wrote in Mardi, “Oh, believe me, God’s creatures fighting fin for fin a thousand miles from land, and with the round horizon for an arena, is no ignoble subject for a masterpiece,” jauntily wrote to Hawthorne: “Genius is full of trash.” A significant side of Melville is the scorn he developed for his early fame. Just before he landed in England in 1849, to sell White-Jacket, he derisively noted in his diary that ten years before he had sailed there as a common sailor; now he was “H. M., the author of Pee-Dee, Hullabaloo and Pog-Dog.”
Melville was “posthumous” by the time he finished Moby-Dick. He was thirty-two. The problem was his incessant development after leaving the sea—a wholly personal matter not to be correlated with worldly success. He confessed his premonitions to Hawthorne as he was completing Moby-Dick.
My development has been all within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.
The restlessness, the interminability of his personal quest, saw truth only in the sea’s maddening beat. “Poor Rover!” cries Pip the cabin boy when he jumps out of the boat in fright and goes mad, “will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where go ye now?” “Annihilation” for Herman Melville meant never to be done voyaging, searching; never to lose the heart’s dissatisfaction and the mind’s inconclusiveness. We hear this in Moby-Dick from the frantic preparations for the voyage: “all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.”
“Annihilation” appears in book after book. The killer instinct that is so strong in Moby-Dick is first of all annihilation of the known limits, of the land, of the familiar self. Waiting for the Pequod to get off and meet its destiny, Ishmael senses the design to which, like another Ulysses forever roaming the world, he is caught.
The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights against the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
Moby-Dick is the product of a powerfully crossed mind—imitating the bursting century, expanding America, the manifest destiny out of which it came. It is an epic of mixed motives, of unyielding contradictions. And it is always histrionic. Ahab’s dream of perfect freedom demands total mastership. Yet he admits himself subject to predestination in all things. It is “Nature’s decree.” Man and Nature must fight each other up and down the watery waste. Although Melville finds “linked analogies” in every observation—in this he is a good American of the transcendentalist church—Nature for Melville is not Emerson’s word for man’s moral nature. The great beasts of the sea—and the sea is the greatest beast—give the rule of things. They are the first and last of the earth. The antediluvian world is still with us, frightening, and in perpetual creation. The animal kingdom, the sea kingdom, is totally itself and aboriginal. It cares nothing for death. Nature was the killer from the beginning.
But now it is confronted by the ironic, weary, expectant mind of the nineteenth century. There are two principal voices in Moby-Dick: the excessively assertive Faust from Nantucket who pursues the sperm whale that bit his leg off and the passively contemplative, quietist, all-enduring survivor. He is the lost son and eternal wanderer Ishmael, whom his father Abraham ordered with his concubine mother Hagar into the wilderness—where, Genesis tells us, he became an archer.
Moby-Dick is the most memorable confrontation we have had in America between Nature—as it was in the beginning, without man, God’s world alone—and man, forever and uselessly dashing himself against it. It is a confrontation peculiarly American and of the nineteenth century, for it connects the still-present “wilderness,” the ferocity of brute creation, with the anxiously searching mind that has lost its father in heaven. Moby-Dick is full of symbols that unlike those of Emerson and Thoreau do not exhaust the natural facts from which they are extracted. The power of the book, the rolling, endlessly conjunctive style rushing to do justice to all this hunting, gashing, killing, devouring—and sexual cannibalism—gives us the full measure, brimming over in Melville’s prose, of what the narrator’s mind brings to the primordial scene.
The detachment essential to storytelling does not confine Melville’s style. He certainly lacked Emerson’s doubt of the final sufficiency of language. Melville luxuriates in language, looks to “Vesuvius for an inkwell,” a “condor’s wing” to write with. The extraordinary rhythm of the book is the wavelike pull, forward and back, between the expansive human will and the contraction of necessity. Freedom and necessity battle throughout the book. The mind naturally thinks itself free, but necessity is the deeper rhythm of things. Nature’s “tiger heart” is just beneath the surface while, at his ease in the masthead, Ishmael “takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature.”
Like Carlyle, Melville shows sexual abandon in fitting his language to his subject matter. His shipmates address whales with a harpoon, Ishmael with a pen. The “fiery hunt” of the mightiest beast demands a style that from the opening of Moby-Dick conveys a sense of abundance that is easy, full, peculiarly rich in suggestion of the universal fable in the background and the epic stretching the narrative line. If ever there was a style that belonged to America’s own age of discovery, a style innocently imperialist, romantic, visionary, drunk on symbols, full of the American brag, this is it. We come to feel that there is some shattering magnitude of theme before Melville as he writes. He has been called to a heroic destiny.
But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Postoffice is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this Leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. “Will he make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain!” But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try.
Moby-Dick is the greatest epic we have of the predatory thrill. Long before Americans completed their conquest of a continent and its aborigines, they had reached out to the Orient. But the savages the white man replaced entered into his soul—and they are all present on the Pequod. Power in every human guise is the norm in Moby-Dick. Ahab’s dream of absolute power wrecks everything and almost everyone. The book overpowers by an uncontainable force, an appropriation that is instinctive and unashamed. It is a hymn to the unequalled thrust that lifted America to the first rank, and it is equally a hymn to the contemplativeness that was left to its literary men, its sensitive consciences, its lonely metaphysicals and seekers after God. It is at once Ahab’s book, fiercely masculine, yet from the beginning rooted in Ishmael’s passive, wonder-struck gaze. The reader is caught up by these different sides of Melville—the androgyny that American writing suffers in respect to American power. Ishmael constantly reports Ahab but never seems to meet him. There is no confrontation between the daemonic father and the lost son. There will be none between Captain Vere and Billy in Billy Budd, where Isaac praises his father Abraham for loving the law more than he loves his son. If there is a father, he is a disaster to Melville; yet Melville’s despairing sense of “God” is that “God-like” minds are without a God. So his love and adoration for Hawthorne ended in the suspicion that he was writing to a father figure who was not really there.
Moby-Dick is the book of nineteenth-century American capitalism carried to the uttermost. Yet everything is encompassed by the dreaming mind of Ishmael, the last transcendentalist. Ishmael has no power whatever; but he thinks and thinks because he is the residue of a Calvinism that has emptied itself out into as much dread as wonder. It is not God who is absolute sovereign but the whale. “Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.”
No wonder that the missionary papers disliked the book, or that Melville never quite recovered from the effort his “mighty” theme required. His struggle was not with the “daemonic” elements in the book, Ahab’s “deliriously howling” as he baptized his harpoon “in nomine diaboli.” The devil stuff in the book is imitation Gothic, boring and melodramatic; the only significance of Fedellah and the Parsee crew is the “exotic” tinge they give to Melville’s determinism. The real struggle of the book was to create a great body of fact, learning, and humor around a theme ultimately nihilist. Melville admitted that his book “is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk—but it is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.” It is also a celebration of American enterprise and a grand joke on the ultimate futility of so much energy, will, and death-dealing bravado in the face of “eternal fates.” Between Ahab as the maddened Faust seeking to exert his will and the indifferent beast-God he chases around the world only to sting him into contemptuous retribution, lies the sea, even more indifferently waiting to receive us all. But if there were no beast or God to pursue, there would be nothing. The sea in itself to human eyes is nothing. And nothingness is the “fright” behind the book.
Without Nathaniel Hawthorne, Moby-Dick might have remained the whaling yarn Melville started out to write. Hawthorne became the greatest, most direct inspiration in Melville’s literary life; he was the only other man of genius in the neighborhood. Between the summer of 1850, when the Melvilles moved to Pittsfield, and November 1851, when the Hawthornes left Lenox, Melville rose to the height of his power as an artist, to all possible fervor as a man. But after the failure of the book coincided with the Hawthornes’ leaving, Melville could never be sure that there had been a Hawthorne in his life.
It was not Hawthorne’s fault that Melville came to think of him as being absent. Absence, vacancy, the “divine inert,” the nothingness which a human being must constantly assail in “the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill,” was forever in Melville’s mind. Ahab is his greatest character, despite the bombast crowding this wholly literary, all-too-willed characterization, because Ahab is not so much a person as an idea—pursuing an idea. The “fiery hunt” carries no hope that there is anything out there; it is just the essential human effort. The great beast is from the beginning a metaphor by which we challenge ourselves. Moby-Dick (to the great delight of twentieth-century readers brought up on symbolism) is a pretext for Ahab’s fanaticism. The “God-like” presence that finally emerges, in all his “Jove-like” beauty, is—like so many things in the book—unrelated to the abstraction Ahab first summons his crew to hunt: “Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.”
The Pequod is condemned by Ahab to sail up and down the world in search of a symbol. And everyone but the necessary narrator will die in the attempt; such is the burden on the mind seeking an Other in our narcissistic existence. The “world” seems to be easy to grasp but never is. Man continually mounts the world in its appearance as Nature but never really joins it. The failure is what torments us. It kills the illusion that we are part of what we see.
Hawthorne, just by being there for Melville at the crux of his life, gave Melville the bliss of meeting a genius. Hawthorne filled the vacancy that had been Melville’s residual image of the father, of the “divine inert”—and of the hopeless chase for fame and money that was the literary career in America. Melville could not believe his luck—his letters run over with jubilant surprise: “Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.”
Melville heartily joined himself to his century’s easy belief in genius. Like Carlyle, he advanced a high and mighty idea of the writer as hero. But where the secret nihilist Carlyle shouted at a world it was too late to redeem, Melville was overcome by the discovery of his own gifts. In the tumbling, rhapsodic letters he wrote to Hawthorne during their brief acquaintance, he constantly projects his own literary temperament. Melville to the conservative, resigned, decidedly nonthundering Hawthorne:
There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House. What’s the reason, Mr. Hawthorne, that in the last stages of metaphysics a fellow always falls to swearing so? I could rip an hour.
Hawthorne was not Melville. Melville’s response was to raise Hawthorne to royalty, out of everyone’s reach. Hawthorne’s own image of himself was that of a spy, a peeping Tom, lurking everywhere without being discovered. “The most desirable mode of existence,” he wrote in “Sights from a Steeple,” “might be that of a spiritualized Paul Pry, hovering invisible round man and woman, witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from their felicity, and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself.”
Julian Hawthorne said his father always reflected the person he was with, was a mixture of
a subtle sympathy … and a cold intellectual insight … the real man stood aloof and observant.… Seeing his congenial aspect towards their little rounds of habits and belief [other people] would leap to the conclusion that he was no more and no less than one of themselves; whereas they formed but a tiny arc in the great circle of his comprehension.
Sophia Hawthorne, who idolized her husband, probably reflected something of Hawthorne’s opinion of Melville as well as her own limitations when she wrote to her sister Elizabeth Peabody that Melville’s gushing tributes to Hawthorne on The House of the Seven Gables showed Melville
a boy in opinion—having settled nothing as yet—unformed—ingenue—& it would betray him to make public his confessions & efforts to grasp,—because they would be considered perhaps impious, if one did not take in the whole scope of the case. Nothing pleases me better than to sit & hear this growing man dash his tumultuous waves of thought up against Mr. Hawthorne’s great, genial, comprehending silences.… Yet such a love & reverence & admiration for Mr. Hawthorne as is really beautiful to witness—& without doing any thing on his own part, except merely doing, it is astonishing how people make him their innermost Father Confessor.
In 1883 Julian Hawthorne, in search of his father’s letters for the biography he was writing of his parents, called on Melville “in a quiet side street in New York, where he was living almost alone.” Melville said with a melancholy gesture that Hawthorne’s letters to him “had all been destroyed long since, as if implying that the less said or preserved, the better!… He said, with agitation, that he had kept nothing; if any such letters had existed, he had scrupulously destroyed them.… When I tried to revive memories in him of the red-cottage days—red-letter days too for him—he merely shook his head.”
Julian Hawthorne did not feel that he had learned much from the visit. He did give us a rare view of the “forgotten” Melville in New York:
He seemed nervous, and every few minutes would rise to open and then to shut again the window opening on the court yard.… He was convinced Hawthorne had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career … some secret in my father’s life which had never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in his books. It was characteristic in him to imagine so; there were many secrets untold in his own career.
Melville’s bitterness was to come out in his poem “Monody.”
To have known him, to have loved him
After loneness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal—
Ease me, a little ease, my song!
Melville probably considered this the final word—it was his only word—on his relation to Hawthorne. But the writer resurrected in the 1920s was in for a surprise. A great many people turned out to know so much about Melville’s “secret” that it also became Hawthorne’s “secret.” In a poem celebrating Melville, W. H. Auden explained that “Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish.”
In the late 1850s, as his wife revealed, Melville had “taken to writing poetry.” If, as one reviewer complained about Moby-Dick, its expansive prose was “so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature,” poetry was certainly Melville’s way of contracting his style by enclosing himself. But more than ever would he argue with himself. Even the prose fiction he wrote after Moby-Dick—the sometimes hysterical parody of the genteel style in Pierre, the stories and reveries he collected in The Piazza Tales, the shut-in terseness of The Confidence Man—show a restless waywardness of form, an exasperated need to try anything at hand, that finally came to rest in poetry privately published, poetry in which and for which he did not have to answer to anyone.
This was to be true of the posthumous Billy Budd, which Melville left unfinished, perhaps not wanting to see it finished and published. When it was discovered in 1919 by Raymond Weaver, who was tracking down Melville for the first biography, Mariner and Mystic, it was in a confusing state in Melville’s most crabbed hand. Concealed in a tin breadbox, says Melville’s great-grandson Paul Metcalf, it had to be “dug loose from the tight seaweed of Melville’s heirs and descendants.”
“Crabbed” is the word for Melville’s poetry—and for the peculiar syntactical complexity of style in Billy Budd, which for all its drama betrays an instrument long unused as well as the grave slowness and quizzicality into which Melville’s youthful force had subsided in “retirement.”
The poetry is in every sense occasional. Even his most unforced, his easiest poem, “Billy in the Darbies,” which concludes Billy Budd and in its humorous stoicism at the approach of death sums up Melville’s work (and life) with all his old grace, answers to a kind of occasion: April 19, 1891, the date Melville added to “End of Book.” “Billy in the Darbies” is a truly personal poem, “dramatic” in its monologue, since it is Billy speaking from his last night on earth. So many of Melville’s poems—about history, vaguely historic personages, “fruits of travel long ago,” Melville’s burrowing in historical myths—proceed from some grave meditative center. By contrast with “Billy in the Darbies,”
But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep …
most of Melville’s poems are altogether too “philosophic,” too far above the battles that composed Melville’s life and formed the strenuousness of his mind.
Reading Melville’s verse, one cannot help picturing him, evening after evening, wreathed in cigar smoke as he measures his way from line to line, rhyme to rhyme. In one of his Battle-Pieces, “Commemorative of a Naval Victory,” he was surely thinking of himself when he wrote:
But seldom the laurel wreath is seen
Unmixed with pensive pansies dark;
There’s a light and a shadow on every man
Who at last attains his lifted mark—
Nursing through night the ethereal spark.
Elate he never can be;
He feels that spirit which glad had hailed his worth,
Sleep in oblivion.—The shark
Glides white through the phosphorous sea.
“The shark / Glides white through the phosphorous sea” certainly breaks up the evening labor wreathed in cigar smoke; Melville is full of wonderful lines.
There are no outcries from this long-haunted man like the middle passages of baffled love in “After the Pleasure Party.” “Amor threatening,” he calls it in this remarkable piece about a woman astronomer in ancient Italy who suddenly awakens to the cost of her virginal existence. This is an unusually felt monologue. With the sudden brilliance that can flash across a Melville poem, his preoccupation with sexual ambiguity now asserts itself in urgent tones.
Could I remake me! or set free
This sexless bound in sex, then plunge
Deeper than Sappho, in a lunge
Piercing Pan’s paramount mystery!
For, Nature, in no shallow surge
Against thee either sex may urge,
Why hast thou made us but in halves—
Co-relatives? This makes us slaves.
If these co-relatives never meet
Self-hood itself seems incomplete.
And such the dicing of blind fate
Few matching halves here meet and mate.
What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder
The human integral clove asunder
And shied the fractions through life’s gate?
The weary, inexperienced poet was his old self, if not his once-Promethean self: he still took on big “historical” themes. But they were now occasions for reflection, not scenes of action. The requisite subject after 1865 was the Civil War, which stirred Melville to write Battle-Pieces out of a sense of national tragedy rather than patriotism. In “America”
Valor with Valor strove, and died:
Fierce was Despair, and cruel was Pride;
And the lorn Mother speechless stood,
Pale at the fury of her brood.
The end of slavery stirred him less than the deaths of “young collegians.” But even Melville’s serial portraits of America’s slaughtered youth, like many poems in Battle-Pieces commemorating battles and leaders of the Civil War, seem composed in a gray light. They lack the involvement (real or hoped) that Whitman brought to Drum-Taps. Melville’s noble compassion for both sides shows no strong political resolve in response to America’s finest hour and everlasting hurt.
The great exception is “The House-top,” Melville’s bitter response to the July 1863 anti-draft riots; it jolts the reader after so many shadowy genre paintings of war. Melville as Coriolanus, standing on the roof of his house in New York, describes with the most concentrated contempt for the mob its “Atheist roar of riot.” The poem voices an embittered Toryism that is not altogether surprising. In his early works Melville’s most obvious political reflex was a jeer at conventional Western values; missionary repressiveness and pettiness in the South Seas appalled him, as the natives certainly did not. He is disgusted by the city’s “new democracy,” its masses, and scornful of
… the Republic’s faith implied,
Which holds that Man is naturally good,
And—more—is Nature’s Roman, never to be scourged.
He says with gritted teeth that
The Town is taken by its rats—ship-rats
And rats of the wharves. All civil charms
And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe—
Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway
Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve,
And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.
In “The Conflict of Convictions,” a poem about the anxious “secession winter” of 1860–61, Melville obviously remembers his futile efforts, in sight of the unfinished Capitol dome, to obtain a consular appointment from the Lincoln administration. But the irrepressible conflict has turned his personal failure into political bleakness. His disenchantment, as in “The House-top,” laments the vanished dream of the Founders:
Power unanointed may come—
Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome,
Stronger for stress and strain,
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founders’ dream shall flee.
Age after age shall be
As age after age has been,
(From man’s changeless heart their way they win);
And death be busy with all who strive—
Death, with silent negative.
Why did Melville turn to poetry? It was not just because his novels had failed; or, as soft-minded critics once thought, because Melville’s “subjective” and “intellectual” side had become “excessive.” He had been willing to try any form, sometimes within a single “novel,” because his greatest literary need was to express contraries. As Hawthorne noticed, Melville never tired of “wandering to and fro” over “intellectual deserts.” The condensation of thought that poetry makes possible now appealed to a strenuous if no longer frantic thinker. He was aging, he was “retired,” in just that drop of American idealism after the Civil War that saw—nowhere more sharply than in Herman Melville—a reversal of the Enlightenment. Verse offered the increasingly conservative ex-novelist the possibility that life could be contained as epigram. He anticipated at the end of “The Conflict of Convictions” (and in capital letters) the kind of jeering little “lines” that Stephen Crane called poetry:
YEA AND NAY—
EACH HATH HIS SAY;
BUT GOD HE KEEPS THE MIDDLE WAY.
NONE WAS BY
WHEN HE SPREAD THE SKY;
WISDOM IS VAIN, AND PROPHESY.
Melville offered a riposte to Blake in a poem from Timoleon, “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century.”
Indolence is heaven’s ally here,
And energy the child of hell:
The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear,
But brims the poisoned well.
Melville in the long evening of his life needed such terseness as he came to the end of his roaming. His long search within himself and his need to elude the fate of Narcissus had ended in a reconciliation with certain fundamentals.†
What could not have changed was the need to storm “the axis of reality.” As an exuberant young author just in from the Pacific, Melville had sought to transcend limits, to escape confines, to find in the heroic age of his young country the last undiscovered place. As a fugitive from the great American marketplace, Melville then “reduced” himself to stories for magazines, to soliloquies in his travel notes on Egypt and Palestine, to the contemptuous “masquerade” of The Confidence Man, to octosyllabics in his long narrative poem Clarel. In his last three years he was to reduce himself to the anonymity of Billy Budd and its theme, the father’s compliance in the death of the son.
In the wild flight of writing Moby-Dick, Melville had praised himself (while praising Hawthorne) for embodying “a certain tragic phase of humanity.… We mean the tragedies of human thought in its own unbiassed, native, and profounder workings … the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him.”
Melville the great American agonist, forever trying to recapture his belief in the God-given unity of all things, was a thinker unmistakably in search of the elemental. In his first, romantic books, this quest made him go to the ends of the earth. In the triumphant moment of his life, when he was finishing Moby-Dick, he avowed to Hawthorne that his own deepest concern was with the beginning and end of things. As a sailor he had had the merest glimpse of the Galápagos, but in the marvellous sketches and tales of “The Encantadas” Melville recreated a biblical scene—the first days of creation. In his journal of Egypt and Palestine, the intensity of his lifelong association with the Bible led him to put his impressions into the starkest personal shorthand.
Pyramids still loom before me—something vast, indefinite, incomprehensible, and awful. Line of desert & verdure, plain as line between good and evil. A long billow of desert forever hovers as in act of breaking, upon the verdure of Egypt. Grass near the pyramids, but will not touch them. Desert more fearful to look at than ocean. Theory of design of pyramids. Defense against desert. A line of them. Absurd. Might have been created with the creation.
Ride over mouldy plaine to Dead Sea—Mountains on both sides—Lake George—all but verdure—-foam on beach & pebbles like slaver of mad dog—smarting bitter of the water,—carried the bitter in my mouth all day—bitterness of life—thought of all bitter things—Bitter is it to be poor & bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death, thought I—Old boughs tossed up by water—relics of pick-nick—nought to eat but bitumen & Ashes with desert of Sodom apples washed down with water of Dead Sea.—Must bring your own provisions, as well, too, for mind as body—for all is barren.
Melville had to make his way to the Holy Land after his nervous crisis of the 1850s, just as when a young man, “having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” Melville’s instinct made him sink the Pequod in the deepest waters of the Pacific. With like instinct he sought nature in its most savage aloofness from man. Yet even in the Holy Land, “the issues there but mind,” as he wrote at the end of Clarel, he betrayed his truly “metaphysical anguish,” his thirst for conclusiveness. The summing up, however, was in East Twenty-sixth Street, where this wanderer in thought was hidden by the frantic busyness of New York.
Melville retreating to New York regarded himself as a private thinker, nearly anonymous. The anonymity was parallel to the theme at the heart of all his work. Was there a home for thought, unavailing, unending thought, in this world of indifference? Ahab’s assault on the white whale was not more dogged than Melville’s on the looming nothingness that invades his style with endless play on words ending in “less”—homeless, landless, formless, speechless—on images of extreme personal will—furious—on different names for blockage—verge, wall, pyramid. The beast always in view is emptiness, the deception inherent in the mere appearance of things. The harpooner rising to “strike” gets caught from “behind,” is snagged and twisted in the rope whose coiled force catapults him into the sea. Dream and electric bitterness, strength and abjection, give us the polarities of Melville’s life and work. No other “isolato” (he made up the word) in American writing communicates so fervently a writer’s looking for a place to put his mind.
Emptiness! In the New York of the Gilded Age and the Brown Decades, the landlocked sailor was more than ever alone with himself. It was his nature to rebound on himself as the desperate quest. But his strangest association with New York was that living there did not matter.‡
Still, Melville did have his roots, and more besides, in this “Babylonish brick-kiln.” New York from the 1860s to Melville’s death in 1891 was the money city that the expatriate Edith Wharton would return to in her last, unfinished novel, The Buccaneers. It would soon be the city that another New Yorker, Henry James, would confront in 1904 as the most “extravagant” of international cities. To think of Melville back in New York is to remember Edith Wharton’s complaint that “he was qualified by birth to figure in the best society,” for he was a cousin of the Van Rensselaers. Alas, she “never heard his name mentioned.”
We can imagine what the rich and bossy Edith Wharton (Henry James complained that she regularly “swooped” down on him even when he welcomed the discovery of the world from her “motor”) would have made of a descendant of the best society working as a customs inspector at three dollars and sixty cents a day. Bright prophetic Britishers and Canadians wrote Melville of their admiration for him and their inability to procure all his books. They wanted to see him. Robert Buchanan in New York complained that “no one seemed to know anything of the one great imaginative writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on that continent.” All that the reigning literary mediocrity of the day, the stockbroker-poet Edmund Clarence Stedman, could tell him was that “Melville is dwelling somewhere in New York.”
Melville had no assurance of tenure in his “political” job. He was so much in danger of losing it that his brother-in-law John Hoadley wrote to the secretary of the treasury
to ask you, if you can, to do or say anything in the proper quarter to secure him permanently, or at present, the undisturbed enjoyment of his modest, hard-earned salary, as deputy inspector of the Customs in the City of New York,—Herman Melville. Proud, shy, sensitively honorable—he had much to overcome, and has much to endure; but he strives earnestly to so perform his duties as to make the slightest censure, reprimand, or even reminder,—impossible from any superior. Surrounded by low venality, he puts it all quietly aside, quietly returning money which has been thrust into his pockets behind his back, avoiding offence alike to the corrupting merchants and their clerks and runners, who think that all men can be bought, and to the corrupt swarms who shamelessly seek their price; quietly, steadfastly doing his duty, and happy in retaining his own self-respect.
This glimpse of Melville during the Iron Age (when New York became the great exchange place for money and money-making) can fascinate a New Yorker in search of Melville the New Yorker. He is still easy to imagine in old New York—the lower city. In the eighties, when he had retired from his nineteen years on the docks, he sometimes dropped in on John Anderson’s bookstore in Nassau Street—and he is rumored to have bought copies of his books in the financial district, where Bartleby did his scrivening. His genially uncomprehending employer was a Wall Street lawyer:
I placed his desk close up to a small side-window in that part of the room, a window which originally had afforded a lateral view of certain grimy backyards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all, though it gave some light. Within three feet of the panes was a wall, and the light came down from far above, between two lofty buildings, as from a very small opening in a dome. Still further to a satisfactory arrangement, I procured a high green folding screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight.
Melville himself flashes into animation when he can report “a ship on my district from Girgate—Where’s that? Why, in Sicily—the ancient Agrigentum.… I have not succeeded in seeing the captain yet—have only seen the mate—but hear that he has in possession some stones from these magnificent Grecian ruins, and I am going to try to get a fragment, however small, if possible.”
The altogether proper, nobly stoical resident on East Twenty-sixth Street returned each evening to the bust of Antinoüs on a stand in the hall, the little white sails in the Bay of Naples on the wall, the oversized desk in his bedroom. On Sundays he walked with his grandchildren in the park. “At my years, and with my disposition,” he wrote to John Hoadley, “one gets to care less and less for everything except downright good feeling.” Home he is and taken his wages. Surely his feelings were those he had confessed to Hawthorne in the exultation of finishing Moby-Dick—“Am I now not at peace? Is not my supper good?”
But if Melville was “peaceful” (the Melville family motto was Heaven at Last, and Melville may still have had longings in that direction), the resurrected Melville, the Melville who surfaced posthumously with Billy Budd (and much more besides), seemed anything but peaceful, was still endlessly dramatic. Melville may have been ditched by his own century; he became important to the next because he stood for the triumph of expression over the most cutting sense of disaster, negation, and even the most ferociously unfavorable view of modern society in classical American literature. Melville to many another “isolato” in the next century represented the triumph of a prisoner over his cell, of a desperado over his own philosophy. There is in Melville the peculiar bitterness of a man who has lost everything except the will to survive by writing—and who is acid yet clamorous in a style that reminds us more of Rimbaud and Beckett than of the stoic acceptances of Hardy and Conrad. Melville’s protagonist and hero is thematically the deserter, the shipwrecked sailor, the castaway, the tramp, the mad author, the criminal—and most centrally, the iconoclast who does not escape retribution from society by becoming a murderer.
On September 13, 1971, more than a thousand New York State troopers stormed the Attica State Correctional Facility, where 1,200 inmates held thirty-eight guards hostage, thereby ending a four-day rebellion in the maximum-security prison. Many of the troopers shouted “White Power!” as they broke into the prison yard. Nine hostages and twenty-eight convicts were killed. One of the dead was Sam Melville, known as the Mad Bomber, a leader of radical groups in the 1960s who had adopted his last name because of his total veneration of a writer he identified with revolution. Carl Oglesby, another radical leader in the sixties, said in an article on “Literature as Revolution”:
Our abiding contemporary Melville posed in effect the following question: “Given these historical origins and social sources, these current grounds of spirit and pathways of hope, how might we secure the faith that our imperial-minded republic, unlike its ancient homologues, will not commit its energies in immense genocidal gulps at the expense, one time or another, of all the major colors, types and varieties of mankind?”
Melville, eclipsing his idol Hawthorne, became a hero to all who found a mirror image in Melville’s expansiveness and “ambiguities.” “Call Me Ishmael,” said the poet Charles Olson in an excited little book most important for documenting Melville’s debt to Shakespeare. “Call me Billy Budd,” thought many a young man fascinated by the beauty and pathos of Melville’s last work. In the 1920s Melville fascinated Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford, Jean Giono; was soon to fascinate W. H. Auden, Cesare Pavese, E. M. Forster, Benjamin Britten. He became such an obsession for highbrow opinion that the best-selling novelist John Marquand jealously attacked him. In the postwar reaction against the Popular Front liberalism of the 1930s, Melville even became a totem to neoconservatives in academe. In death as in life, Melville was like no other American “classic”; he divided bitter political loyalties.
Which of his many books speaks for him now? Which had the last word? From Billy Budd, certainly his last work, the secret work of his old age, it is easy to assume that Melville had found a solution to his long search for truth past the chimera of this world. The solution is law, or authority. In the great debate over Billy Budd’s fate, between Captain Vere and the young officers of the court martial trying Billy for the “accidental” killing of Claggart, Vere drives them to hang someone who is possibly his own son.
“How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so?—Does that state it aright? You sign sad assent. Well, I too feel that, the full force of that. It is Nature. But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King. Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval, though this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King’s officers lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural? So little is that true, that in receiving our commissions we in the most important regards ceased to be natural free agents.… Our vowed responsibility is in this: That however pitilessly that law may operate in any instances, we nevertheless adhere to it and administer it.”
Perhaps it was not “resignation” to which Melville gave “assent” at the end; it may have been “authority.” This may have been his way out of the total anarchy of appearances in The Confidence Man, that nihilistic babel of voices from an unmoving ship on an unbelievable river. No one is going anywhere in that book. But in the ever-growing contempt for American professions of honesty, The Confidence Man became what one anxious scholar called “Melville as Scripture.” So the drama of his many changes went on, as it had for so long gone on within Melville himself, each book seeming to cancel the one before.
It was Melville’s capacious intellectual personality that drew so many people to the different images he now presents. But the tormented subjectivism behind all his work shows the same problem—to find truth that would not disappear from voyage to voyage, book to book.
Where is the foundling’s father hidden?
Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of man.
Melville’s “tales of terror told in words of mirth” were wonderful enough. But his assault on the “axis of reality,” driven by the most consummate doubt of where reality finally lay, pointed to lustful contradictions that only the future would relish. And that the future would not untangle or replace.
*Omoo, chapter 45: “In fact, there is, perhaps, no race upon earth, less disposed, by nature, to the monitions of Christianity, than the people of the South Seas.… ‘The Great Revival At The Sandwich Islands,’ about the year 1836 … [was] brought about by no sober moral convictions; as an almost instantaneous relapse into every kind of licentiousness soon afterward testified. It was the legitimate effect of a morbid feeling, engendered by the sense of severe physical wants, preying upon minds excessively prone to superstition; and, by fanatical preaching, inflamed into the belief, that the gods were taking vengeance upon the wickedness of the land.…
“Added to all this … [was] a quality inherent in Polynesians … more akin to hypocrisy than to anything else. It leads them to assume the most passionate interest in matters for which they really feel little or none whatever; but in which, those whose power they dread, or whose favor they court, they believe to be at all affected.”
Protestant “triumphalism”—the belief that the entire world would be Christianized as it was getting Westernized—would delude a president of the United States as being representative of solid middle-class American values. President McKinley justified the Spanish-American War because it would “Christianize the Philippines.” Fifty years earlier Melville saw that the missionaries themselves had an excessive sense of sin and, believing in the total depravity of the natives, mercilessly tried to uproot their society.
It was in the South Seas, as Raymond Weaver first pointed out, that Melville learned that the white man had the dubious honor of being “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” In Tahiti he learned to despise the missionaries, who returned the compliment in the abusive reviews of Moby-Dick in the missionary papers.
†“And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” (Moby-Dick, “Loomings”)
‡Melville had taken the measure of “society” in The Confidence Man (1857), unmistakably the work of an extraordinary mind obsessed with the falsity of appearances. As a satire on a tricksters society, it repeats itself claustrophobically—Melville’s depression is all over the book like fog. This ship of fools never takes off; is not intended to. Melville rings so many changes on his single idea that for all the intellectual ferocity of the book, the shifting appearances of the trickster in his “masquerade” make heavy going. There is no conflict, no crisis, no development. Man here is entirely static—not a comfortable stance for Melville’s natural energy.