Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
Dibdin’s sea-poetry. And as he lay in his bunk, with the aid of this
antiquated volume he used to take “pleasant afternoon rambles through
the town, down St. James street and up Great George’s, stopping at
various places of interest and attraction” so familiar seemed the
features of the map. But in this vagabondage of reverie he was but
preparing for himself a poignant disillusionment. Lying in the dim,
reeking forecastle, with his head full of deceitful day-dreams, he
was being tossed by the creaking ship towards a bitter awakening. The
Liverpool of the guide-book purported to be the Liverpool of 1808. The
Liverpool of which Melville dreamed was, of course, without date and
local habitation. When Melville found himself face to face with the
solid reality of the Liverpool of 1837, he was offered an object-lesson
in mutability. As the brute facts smote in the face of his cherished
sentimentalisings, he sat his concrete self down on a particular shop
step in a certain street in Liverpool, reflected on guide-books and
luxuriated in disenchantment. “Guide-books,” he then came to see, “are
the least reliable books in all literature: and nearly all literature,
in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our
fathers went; but how few of those former places can their posterity
trace.” In the end he sealed his moralising by the pious reflection
that “there is one Holy Guide-Book that will never lead you astray if
you but follow it aright.” There can be no doubt that the ghost of
Allan, retracing its mundane haunts at that moment trailed its shadowy
substance through the offspring of its discarded flesh.
If this same paternal ghost, recognising its kinship with this
obstruction of blood and bone, tracked in futile affection at
Melville’s heels through Liverpool, only a posthumous survival of its
terrestrial Calvinism could have spared it an agonised six weeks; only
the sardonic optimism of a faith in predestination could have saved
Allan’s shade from consternation and fear at the chances of Melville’s
flesh. Or it may be that Allan was sent as a disembodied spectator
to haunt Melville’s wake, by way of penance for his pre-ghostly
theological errors. In any event, Melville, on occasion, took Allan
through the most hideous parts of Liverpool. Of evenings they strolled
through the narrow streets where the sailors’ boarding-houses were.
“Hand-organs, fiddlers, and cymbals, plied by strolling musicians,
mixed with the songs of seamen, the babble of women and children, and
groaning and whining of beggars. From the various boarding-houses
proceeded the noise of revelry and dancing: and from the open
casements leaned young girls and old women chattering and laughing
with the crowds in the middle of the street.” In the vicinity were
“notorious Corinthian haunts which in depravity are not to be matched
by anything this side of the pit that is bottomless.” Along Rotten-row,
Gibraltar-place and Boodle-alley Melville surveyed the “sooty and
begrimed bricks” of haunts of abomination which to Melville’s boyish
eyes (seen through the protecting lens of Allan’s ghost) had a
“reeking, Sodom-like and murderous look.” Melville excuses himself in
the name of propriety from particularising the vices of the residents
of this quarter; “but kidnappers and resurrectionists,” he declares,
“are almost saints and angels to them.”
Melville satirically pictures himself as pathetically innocent to the
iniquities of the flesh and the Devil when he left home to view the
world. He was, he says, a member both of a Juvenile Total Abstinence
Association and of an Anti-Smoking Society organised by the Principal
of his Sunday School. With dire compunctions of conscience--which had
been considerably weakened by sea-sickness--Melville had his first
swig of spirits--administered medicinally to him by a paternal old
tar,--before they were many hours out upon the Atlantic. But neither
on the high seas nor in England does he seem to have been prematurely
tempted by the bottle. And this, for the adequate reason that united
to his innocence of years, his very limited finances spared him the
solicitations of toping companions as well as the luxury of precocious
solitary tippling. Though at the beginning of the voyage he refused the
friendly offer of a cigar, he less austerely eschewed tobacco by the
time he again struck land. Melville did not, throughout his life, hold
so strictly to the puritanical prohibitions of his boyhood.
The youthful member of the Anti-Smoking Society came in later years to
be a heroic consumer of tobacco, and the happiest hours of his life
were haloed with brooding blue haze. “Nothing so beguiling,” he wrote
in 1849, “as the fumes of tobacco, whether inhaled through hookah,
narghil, chibouque, Dutch porcelain, pure Principe, or Regalia.”
On another occasion he expressed a desire to “sit cross-legged and
smoke out eternity.” And the youthful pillar of the Juvenile Total
Abstinence Association, growing in wisdom as he took on years, lived to
do regal penance for his unholy childhood pledge. His avowed refusal to
believe in a Temperance Heaven would seem to imply a conviction that it
is only the damned who never drink. In his amazing novel _Mardi_--which
won him acclaim in France as “_un Rabelais Americain_”--wine flows
in ruddy and golden rivers. And the most brilliantly fantastic
philosophising, the keenest wit of the demi-gods that lounge through
this wild novel, are concomitant upon the heroic draining of beaded
bumpers. In _Mardi_, Melville celebrates the civilising influences of
wine with the same devout and urbane affection to be found in Horace
and Meredith. On occasion, however, he seems to share Baudelaire’s
conviction that “one should be drunk always”--and drunk on wine in
the manner of the best period. He quotes with approval the epitaph
of Cyrus the Great: “I could drink a great deal of wine, and it did
me a great deal of good.” In _Clarel_ he asks: “At Cana, who renewed
the wine?” In the riotous chapter wherein “Taji sits down to Dinner
with five-and-twenty Kings, and a royal Time they have,” there is an
exuberant tilting of calabashes that would have won the esteem even of
Socrates and Pantagruel. One wonders if Rabelais, in his youth, did not
belong to some Juvenile Total Abstinence Society, or if Socrates, who
both lived and died over a cup, had not as a boy committed an equally
heinous sacrilege to Dionysus.
On board the _Highlander_ Melville was too young yet to have come to
a sense of the iniquity of the deadly virtues. He was not thereby,
however, tempted to the optimism of despair that preaches that because
God is isolated in His Heaven, all is right with the world. Even
at seventeen Melville had keenly felt that much in the world needs
mending. And at seventeen--more than at any other period--he felt
moved to exert himself to set the world aright. Ashipboard, the field
of his operations being very limited, he cast a missionary eye upon
the rum-soaked profanity and lechery of his ship-mates. “I called to
mind a sermon I had once heard in a church in behalf of sailors,”
says Melville, “when the preacher called them strayed lambs from the
fold, and compared them to poor lost children, babes in the wood, or
orphans without fathers or mothers.” Overflowing with the milk of human
kindness at the sad condition of these amiable outcasts, Melville,
during his first watch, made bold to ask one of them if he was in the
habit of going to church. The sailor answered that “he had been in
a church once, some ten or twelve years before, in London, and on a
week-day had helped to move the Floating Chapel round the Battery from
North River.” This first and last effort of Melville’s to evangelise a
shipmate ended in winning Melville hearty ridicule. “If I had not felt
so terribly angry,” he says, “I should certainly have felt very much
like a fool. But my being so angry prevented me from feeling foolish,
which is very lucky for people in a passion.” Though Melville made no
further effort to save the souls of his shipmates, his own seems not
to have been jeopardised by any hankering after the instruments of
damnation.
As has been said, he was without friends, both ashipboard and later
ashore; a complete absence of companionship that on occasion inspired
him with a parched desire for some friend to whom to say “how sweet
is solitude.” He craved in his isolation, he says, “to give his whole
soul to another; in its loneliness it was yearning to throw itself
into the unbounded bosom of some immaculate friend.” In _Redburn_,
Melville spends a generous number of pages in celebrating his encounter
with a good-for-nothing but courtly youth whom he calls Harry Bolton.
“He was one of those small, but perfectly formed beings with curling
hair, and silken muscles, who seem to have been born in cocoons. His
complexion was a mantling brunette, feminine as a girl’s; his feet
were small; his hands were white; and his eyes were large, black and
womanly: and, poetry aside, his voice was as the sound of a harp.” How
much of Harry Bolton is fact, how much fiction, is impossible to tell.
The most significant thing about him is Melville’s evident affection
for him, no matter who made him. In _Redburn_, this engaging dandy
kidnaps Melville, and takes him for a mysterious night up to London:
a night spent, to Melville’s consternation, in a gambling palace of
the sort that exists only in the febrile and envious imagination of
vitriolic puritans. In his description of this escapade, Melville owes
more, perhaps, to his early spiritual guides than to any first-hand
observation. This flight to London in _Redburn_, its abrupt reversal,
and the escape to America of Harry Bolton, may, of course, all be
founded on sober fact. But there is a lack of verisimilitude in the
recounting that prompts to the suspicion that in this part of the
narrative, Melville is making brave and unconvincing concessions to
romance. Not, of course, that Melville in his youth was incapable of
the wild impetuosity of suddenly leaving his ship and running up to
London with an engagingly romantic stranger: he did more impulsive and
far more surprising things than that before he died. But his account
of this adventure in _Redburn_ reads hollow and false. Harry Bolton
must be discounted as myth until he is more cogently substantiated as
history.
In Liverpool Melville seems to have spent his leisure in company with
his thoughts, wandering along the docks and about the city. Each
Sunday morning he went regularly to church; Sunday afternoons he spent
walking in the neighbouring country. His most vivid impressions of
Liverpool were of the terrible poverty he saw, and it is doubtful if
there is a more ruthless piece of realism in the language than his
account in _Redburn_ of the slow death through starvation of the mother
and children that Melville found lying in a cellar, and whose lives
he tried in vain to save. The green cold bodies in the morgue, the
ragpickers, the variety of criminals that haunt the shadows of the
docks: these too came in for characterisation.
The noblest sight that Melville found in England, it would seem,
was the truck-horses he saw round the docks. “So grave, dignified,
gentlemanly and courteous did these fine truck horses look--so full
of calm intelligence and sagacity, that often I endeavoured to get
into conversation with them as they stood in contemplative attitudes
while their loads were preparing.” And Melville admired the truckmen
also. “Their spending so much of their valuable lives in the high-bred
company of their horses seems to have mended their manners and improved
their taste; but it has also given to them a sort of refined and