Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
when _Typee_ is seen against the background of _A Missionary Voyage to
the Southern Pacific Ocean performed in the years 1796, 1797, 1798 in
the Ship Duff_ (1799) and Mariner’s _Tonga_ (1816) (fittingly dedicated
to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, and companion of
Captain Cook in the South Seas) can Melville’s originality begin to
transpire.
This originality lies partly, of course, in the novelty of Melville’s
experience, partly in the temperament through which this experience
was refracted. Melville himself believed his only originality was his
loyalty to fact. He bows himself out of the Preface “trusting that
his anxious desire to speak the ungarnished truth will gain him the
confidence of his readers.”
When Melville’s brother Gansevoort offered _Typee_ for publication
in England, it was accepted not as fiction but as ethnology, and was
published as _Melville’s Marquesas_ only after Melville had vouched for
its entire veracity.
Though Melville published _Typee_ upright in the conviction that he had
in its composition been loyal both to veracity and truth, his critics
were not prone to take him at his word. And he was to learn, too, that
veracity and truth are not interchangeable terms. Men do, in fact,
believe pretty much what they find it most advantageous to believe. We
live by prejudices, not by syllogisms. In _Typee_, Melville undertook
to show from first-hand observation the obvious fact that there are two
sides both to civilisation and to savagery. He was among the earliest
of literary travellers to see in barbarians anything but queer folk.
He intuitively understood them, caught their point of view, respected
and often admired it. He measured the life of the Marquesans against
that of civilisation, and wrote: “The term ‘savage’ is, I conceive,
often misapplied, and indeed when I consider the vices, cruelties,
and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere
of a feverish civilisation, I am inclined to think that so far as the
relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan
Islanders sent to the United States as missionaries, might be quite as
useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the Islands in a
similar capacity.” Civilisation is so inured to anathema,--so reassured
by it,--indeed, that Melville could write a vague and sentimental
attack upon its obvious imperfections with the cool assurance that each
of his readers, applying the charges to some neighbour, would approve
in self-righteousness. But one ventures the “ungarnished truth” about
any of the vested interests of civilisation at the peril of his peace
in this world and the next. It was when Melville focussed his charge
and wrote “a few passages which may be thought to bear rather hard
upon a reverend order of men” with incidental reflections upon “that
glorious cause which has not always been served by the proceedings of
some of its advocates,” that all the musketry of the soldiers of the
Prince of Peace was aimed at his head. Melville himself was a man whose
tolerance provoked those who sat in jealous monopoly upon warring
sureties to accuse him of license. He specifies his delight in finding
in the valley of Typee that “an unbounded liberty of conscience seemed
to prevail. Those who were pleased to do so were allowed to repose
implicit faith in an ill-favoured god with a large bottle-nose and fat
shapeless arms crossed upon his breast; whilst others worshipped an
image which, having no likeness either in heaven or on earth, could
hardly be called an idol. As the islanders always maintained a discrete
reserve with regard to my own peculiar views on religion, I thought it
would be excessively ill-bred in me to pry into theirs.” This boast
of delicacy did not pass unnoticed by “a reverend order of men.” The
vitriolic rejoinder of the London Missionary Society would seem to
indicate that there may be two versions of “the ungarnished truth.” It
should be stated, however, that the English editions of _Typee_ contain
strictures against the Missionaries that were omitted in the American
editions. But even Melville’s unsanctified critics showed an anxiety
to repudiate him. Both _Typee_ and _Omoo_ were scouted as impertinent
inventions, defying belief in their “cool sneering wit and perfect want
of heart.” Melville’s name was suspiciously examined as being a _nom
de plume_ used to cover a cowardly and supercilious libel. A gentleman
signing himself G. W. P. and writing in the _American Review_ (1847,
Vol. IV, pp. 36-46) was scandalised by Melville’s habit of presenting
“voluptuous pictures, and with cool deliberate art breaking off always
at the right point, so as without offending decency, he may excite
unchaste desire.” After discovering in Melville’s writing a boastful
lechery, this gentleman undertakes to discountenance Melville on three
scores: (1) only the impotent make amorous boasts; (2) Melville had
none of Sir Epicure Mammon’s wished-for elixir; (3) the beauty of
Polynesian women is all myth.
Unshaken in the conviction of his loyalty to fact, Melville discovered
that the essence of originality lies in reporting “the ungarnished
truth.”
On the subject of “originality” in literature, Melville says in
_Pierre_: “In the inferior instances of an immediate literary success,
in very young writers, it would be almost invariably observable, that
for that instant success they were chiefly indebted to some rich and
peculiar experience in life, embodied in a book, which because, for
that cause, containing original matter, the author himself, forsooth,
is to be considered original; in this way, many very original books
being the product of very unoriginal minds.” It is none the less true,
however, that though Melville and Toby both lived among the cannibals,
it was Melville, not Toby, who wrote _Typee_.
For four months Melville was held in friendly captivity by the Typees.
His swollen leg was healed by native doctors--but not without prolonged
pain and anxiety--he was fed, he was amused, he was lionised by
the valley. His hosts were savages; they were idolaters, they were
inhuman beasts who licked their lips over the roasted thighs of their
enemies; and at the same time they were crowned with flowers, sometimes
exquisite in beauty, courteous in manners, and engaged all day long in
doing not only what they enjoyed doing, but what, so far as Melville
could judge, they had every right to enjoy doing. With Toby, Melville
was consigned to the household of Kory-Kory. Kory-Kory, though a tried
servitor and faithful valet, was, Melville admits, in his shavings and
tattoos, a hideous object to look upon--covered all over with fish,
fowl, and monster, like an illustrated copy of Goldsmith’s _Animated
Nature_. Kory-Kory’s father, Marheyo, a retired gentleman of gigantic
frame, was an eccentric old fellow, who seems to have been governed
by no fixed principles whatever. He employed the greater part of his
time in throwing up a little shed just outside the house, tinkering
away at it endlessly, without ever appearing to make any perceptible
advance. He would eat, sleep, potter about, with fine contempt for
the proprieties of time or place. “Frequently he might have been
seen taking a nap in the sun at noonday, or a bath in the stream at
midnight. Once I beheld him eighty feet from the ground, in the tuft of
a cocoanut tree, smoking, and often I saw him standing up to the waist
in water, engaged in plucking out the stray hairs of his beard, using
a piece of mussel-shell for tweezers. I remember in particular his
having a choice pair of ear-ornaments, fabricated from the teeth of
some sea-monster. These he would alternately wear and take off at least
fifty times in the course of a day, going and coming from his little
hut on each occasion with all the tranquillity imaginable. Sometimes
slipping them through the slits in his ears, he would seize his spear
and go stalking beneath the shadows of the neighbouring groves, as if
about to give a hostile meeting to some cannibal knight. But he would
soon return again, and hiding his weapon under the projecting eaves
of the house, and rolling his clumsy trinkets carefully in a piece of
tappa, would resume his more pacific operations as quietly as if he had
never interrupted them.”
Kory-Kory’s mother was, so Melville reports, the only industrious
person in all the valley of Typee: “bustling about the house like a
country landlady at an unexpected arrival: forever giving the young
girls tasks to perform, which the little huzzies as often neglected;
poking into every corner, and rummaging over bundles of old tappa,
or making a prodigious clatter among the calabashes. She could not
have employed herself more actively had she been left an exceedingly
muscular and destitute widow, with an inordinate supply of young
children, in the bleakest part of the civilised world.” Yet was hers
withal the kindliest heart imaginable. “Warm indeed,” Melville says,
“are my remembrances of the dear, good, affectionate old Tinor!”
There also belonged to the household, three young men, “dissipated,
good-for-nothing, roystering blades of savages,” and several girls. Of
these, Melville has immortalised Fayaway, his most constant companion.
He has anatomised her charms in the manner of his first _Fragment from
a Writing-Desk_. But it is Fayaway in action, not Fayaway in still
life, that survives in the imagination. At Melville’s intercession, the
taboo against women entering a boat was lifted. Many hours they spent
together swimming, or floating in the canoe: diversions heightened in
their heinousness by the fact that Fayaway for the most part clung to
the primitive and summer garb of Eden--and the costume became her.
Nor did Melville’s depravity cease with his unblushing approval of
nakedness. “Strange as it may seem,” Melville writes in the ’40’s,
“there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more
advantage than in the act of smoking.” Fayaway not only smoked,--but
she smoked a pipe, as they drifted in the canoe. One day, as they were
gliding along, Fayaway “seemed all at once to be struck with a happy
idea. With a wild exclamation of delight, she disengaged from her
person the ample robe of tappa which was knotted over her shoulder (for
the purpose of shielding her from the sun), and spreading it out like
a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the canoe. We
American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars, but a
prettier mast than Fayaway made was never shipped aboard of any craft.”
John La Farge has painted Fayaway in this attitude.
And the occupation of Toby during all this? Soon after their arrival,
Toby had been despatched to Nukuheva under pretence of procuring relief
for Melville’s swollen leg, actually to facilitate his and Melville’s
escape. Toby never again returned to Typee. He had been treacherously
beguiled on board a whaler, unable to escape until he left his vessel
at New Zealand. “After some further adventures,” says Melville in
_The Story of Toby_, written in July, 1846, ten days after the two
men discovered each other’s existence through the instrumentality of
_Typee_, and published as a “sequel” to that novel, “Toby arrived home
in less than two years after leaving the Marquesas.”
While Melville had the companionship of Toby in Typee, he was even then
eager to get back to civilisation. That savagery was good for savages
he never wearied of contending. But despite the idyllic delights of
Typee--an idyll with a sombre background, however--Melville was never
tempted to resign himself to its vacant animal felicity. Melville,
unlike Baudelaire and Whitman, was not stirred by the advantages of
“living with the animals.” While among them, he evinced a desire