Herman Melville
Melville had found in the Marquesas the simplicity and directness of
livelihood that Thoreau sought nearer at hand; and as for Thoreau, he
treated the oak tree as if it were breadfruit, and was glad to find
sweet acorns fit to eat, because they diminished the number of enemies
in the universe. Both Melville and Thoreau had found out what it meant
to throw off the impedimenta of civilization; and though both of
them returned to the society of their own kind, they carried back to
everyday American life a little contempt. Life at the core was a much
simpler matter than the civilizee would admit: for civilization, which
creates enjoyable forms for human activity, also creates grotesque
ones, which grow up alongside the shapely forms and tend to supplant
them: the accumulation of capital comes to mean more than the provision
of food and shelter, and the regalia of the book of etiquette means
more than friendly intercourse. The Philistines that surrounded
Melville knew no more about the great forms of civilization, about
the art of Shakespeare or Rembrandt or the philosophy of Spinoza and
Goethe, than the naked savages: they were just as destitute in these
higher essentials, and, on top of these disabilities, they lacked the
savage’s animal health, charm, and good nature. Melville did not set
out to test these things, as Thoreau did; but unconsciously, on the
mere weight of evidence, he came to the same conclusion.
Writing is not merely a process of explicating what one already knows:
it is also a matter of discovering what one is not aware of: it brings
to light the hidden loot in that storehouse which psychologists call
the Unconscious. In the very act of writing Typee, Melville must have
become conscious of his specific equipment and his gifts as a writer;
for, though he had been able to make no notes of his adventures while
he was undergoing them, they had sorted themselves out and formed
a pattern of their own. In his first book, Melville went about his
work with a sure instinct. He read up every account of the South Seas
he could lay hands on, Captain Cook’s voyages, missionary reports,
travellers’ descriptions: he discovered, what some writers find out
far too late, that if one trusts to one’s own experience alone, one
gets something less than one’s own experience, while, if the background
is filled out and enriched, one’s own contribution comes out more
copiously. This habit of reference became characteristic of Melville
in almost all his later works: Moby-Dick is full of citations, and
even in a series of short sketches, like The Encantadas, he mentions
as authorities Cowley, The Buccaneer, 1684; Colnet, The Whaling Ground
Explorer, 1798, and Porter, The Post Captain, 1813.
It would have been hard to spoil such adventures as Melville’s:
he could only have done it by a weak memory or a poor gift of
visualization, or, more fatal perhaps than these, a tendency to touch
every event with a sentimental gloss. Melville’s Typee was free from
these sins. He trusted his eyes completely; he told what he saw. Did
he understand everything? By no means; the taboo was a mystery, the
religious observances obscure, the exact status of cannibalism hard
to define: in his very failure to interpret these data, he gave an
account which is still valuable to the anthropologist as a description
of the South Sea Islanders in an entirely primitive and untainted
state. If Melville had trusted his eyes less and his wits more he might
perhaps have disclosed facts which were sealed to him: he might also
have muddled and misinterpreted everything. The very limitations of
Melville’s descriptions give one confidence in their authenticity:
this is not unvarnished truth, perhaps, because unvarnished truth with
no inaccuracies and distortions and running together of separate events
is impossible without a written record, promptly made; but it is still
truth.
Does one want a further guarantee of Melville’s accuracy in Typee?
The answer is to be found in the rest of his work. While his powers
of invention were not small, it was only with difficulty that he
could escape the actual world and create a world sustained by his own
fantasy. He tried to do this in Mardi, and he was forced back upon
history and fact; by the time he reached the end of the book, he lost
his grip entirely and converted his fabulous Mardians into out-and-out
Europeans. He tried again in Pierre, and as we shall see, he fell back
upon the stereotyped figures of conventional melodrama: he succeeded
completely, in fact, only once, and he did this by an heroic effort,
for which he had to pay a severe physical penalty. Like Defoe, Melville
was closely chained to the document, the fact, the experience; he could
endow these things with imaginative life, for all the other instruments
of creative writing were at his command; but he was not given to
inventive elaboration. Do we not perhaps exaggerate the possibilities
of the pure imagination? The recent studies of Poe’s and Coleridge’s
fantasies should warn us. Even in the dream, where the imagination
works without any obligation to be understood or communicated, the
most bizarre effects are a blowing up into a vast bubble, through
the mechanism of dream-work, of some tiny drop of actual soapy
water. Indeed, the highest imaginations, those of an Aeschylus or a
Shakespeare or a Goethe, work upon themes already given in myth and
history: they do not waste their energies upon the skeleton of fact,
but take whatever lies at hand, cover it with flesh, breathe upon it,
and give it life.
In Typee, then, Melville made no attempt to write a pure idyll,
compounded of butterfly wings and spiderwebs and rainbows. Fayaway was
interesting to him; but so, on reflection, were the misdemeanours of
the missionaries in the Marquesas. The dangers of being eaten were
horrid: so were the brutalities that whaling captains inflicted on the
natives: so was the military overlordship of the French. Everything was
told in its place, as far as everything could be told to an already
Victorian public. The wonder is that Melville, in the first edition of
Typee, was as frank as he was: when Dickens’ Oliver Twist was published
in America it was attacked for its immoral picture of Bill Sykes and
Nancy, by one of the shrinkingly pure American newspapers of the time,
which no doubt carried in the neighbouring columns advertisements of
quack doctors, books on “sexology,” and patent medicines to be used
as abortifacients. Melville, who was fresh from four years of travel,
wrote with easy freedom and candour, forgetting that his audience was
Thackeray’s, not Smollett’s.
Typee belongs to the morning of the imagination--like Pickwick Papers.
It is direct, fresh, free from self-consciousness, like the healthy
youth who experienced these adventures and sat down to write about
them. That quality is precious and irretrievable. Dickens lived a
whole lifetime without again creating anything so sanative and comic
as Pickwick Papers; and though Melville fared farther and pondered
more deeply on life, this book and the one that followed, alone had
the full bloom of youth upon them. Such books are written without a
formula; their essential quality is almost beyond formulation. When
one has said youth one has said almost everything. Typee is a book to
make one go visiting tropical islands, a book to make one question
the well-arranged career, the carefully ironed routine, the dull
inevitability of the days one has chosen to lead. A scholarly boy reads
Typee, and engages a berth for himself on a ship bound for Madagascar;
a young architect reads the book and leaves his drawing-board for
a trader’s post in the Marquesas, where he becomes a specialist in
Polynesian dialects; another young man reads Typee and decides to
bind his Fayaway to him by the tie of marriage. One reads Typee, and
life suddenly shows a new vista. Adventure is possible: Eden is real:
life need not include time-tables and bank accounts and exercises in
physical culture. And unlike romantic fantasies Typee is not itself a
narcotic, a form of escape: it suggests appropriate actions and deeds.
If one person becomes a philologist through reading it, another takes
to anthropology; another buys himself a sailboat; and another suddenly
decides to carry out some difficult course he had resolved on and put
aside again and again.
Like Pickwick Papers--but how differently!--Typee communicates
its own simple health and manly confidence: its keenness, its
straightforwardness, its hearty appetite for life. It is written with
that skill which disarms skill, with the clarity beside which a more
deliberate artifice would be clumsy. The colour of such romantic
episodes may be artificially imitated: Kaloolah was such an imitation,
and in a very bad light one may not at once detect the difference: but
there is no imitating the down on the cheek and the clear eye--the
stigmata of unspotted youth. I do not underestimate the charm of his
subject; but Melville imparted to it his own candid and buoyant nature,
watching this strange delicious world with intent, water-blue eyes. The
subject was made for a young man to tell about--and happily the young
man appeared. It was matched to this adventurous young American as the
England of comfortable inns and Christmas jollity was matched to young
Dickens. Melville varied the formula of wishy-washy romance by treating
all romantic facts realistically, as he treated brutality and danger,
and both the romance and the hard adventures profited by it.
What a contrast Typee is to Robinson Crusoe! Defoe’s prose was a far
richer instrument than that Melville used in Typee; but after the
first few chapters of Robinson Crusoe one’s mind refuses to follow
that plaguy Philistine: nobody but a classical economist would pursue
his tedious moralizings and his adept contrivances on his desert
island. Defoe set out to teach a lesson, and before Crusoe has his
last boatload of wares stowed away, long before he has re-established
himself in that middle estate in life from which he originally fled,
we are asleep. Melville sets out to teach us nothing: but at every
step we follow eagerly and find ourselves making notes, instituting
comparisons, seeing the world in fresh perspective. Typee is a magic
mirror. In Typee we hold the secret of youth, and hold the world up to
its clear surface: for the first time, perhaps, we note its unhealthy
complexion, its fat paunch, its jaded smile, its fatuous anxieties, its
lack of even animal repose.
3
Typee, which was published in London by John Murray, in his Colonial
and Home Library, quickly won a name for itself as a piece of
picaresque fiction. The London Times could not believe that a common
American seaman could have the style of an educated literary man;
and even a friend of the family, Mr. Evert Duyckinck, could hint
politely that Melville had manufactured some of his adventures; Typee,
literally, seemed too good to be true. The only people who took Typee
for what it was were the missionary promoters: they damned the whole
account heartily as unfair to the missionaries, and a perversion
of Christian teaching, since this impudent and ribald young man
pictured evangelical zeal as making no particular improvement in
Polynesian morality, and since he even went out of his way to comment
sarcastically upon the missionaries in Honolulu, who published a
journal in which the doings of the “converted” king were recorded with
the unction of an official English court gazette.
Against the charge of untruth and the imputation of fiction, Melville
had two answers. One was happily furnished by Richard Tobias Greene,
the Toby of Typee, a resident of Buffalo, who had in fact escaped
from the Marquesas without being able to effect Melville’s rescue,