Herman Melville
and who wrote to the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, when Typee was
published, verifying Melville’s story and asking Melville to get in
touch with him. Melville got from Toby an account of his adventures,
and embodied them in a sequel to Typee called The Story of Toby.
As for the missionaries, Melville’s instinct in controversy served
him well: in his next book, he returned to the misdemeanours of
the pious and hit harder in the same place. He had observed that
all the eulogistic reports of the missionaries were written by the
missionaries themselves: their zeal to propagate Christianity was not
unmixed with their concern to get money which would further that fine
enterprise: against these glowing reports of conversion and grace and
the introduction of shame and sin into the South Seas, Melville pitted
his own acrid memories. No animus against Christianity led him to do
this; for he had a strong initial bias in its favour: what spurred him
was mere honesty of record, and the desire to see the Polynesians left
alone in a happier state.
There is one further confirmation of Typee’s verity: one cannot neglect
it, though it comes at third hand. M. Philarète Chasles, in his
Anglo-American Literature and Mariners, translated and published in
New York in 1852, quotes a “well-informed American who reported that
a cousin of Melville had said: ‘My cousin writes very well, except
when he reproduces exactly what he has felt.... He could not invent
the scenes which he describes. Charmed by his improvised reputation,
he would be vexed, I think, to lose his reputation as an inventor.
The reappearance of his companion, Toby or Richard Greene, a real
personage, annoyed him to some degree. It made him descend from the
pedestal of romance to the level of mere narrator. For me, who know
Melville, his wild disposition, and the history of his youth--who have
actually read his rough notes, now in the hands of his father-in-law,
and who have talked twenty times with Richard Greene, his fidus
Achates, I laugh at the preoccupation of a public accustomed to see a
lie where no lie is.’”
A strain of malice lies in this description of Melville’s own reception
of praise as an inventor which does not altogether lessen one’s belief
in its authenticity. In Redburn, Melville resented his cousins, and in
Pierre he made one of his hero’s cousins play the part of a callous
betrayer of trust and friendship; one has reason to suspect a little
bitterness on Melville’s side, and a little condescension and concealed
envy on the other. If the public’s mistake made Melville find more
easily his path as an imaginative writer, let us thank the incredulous
but forever gullible public: their mistake did him service.
4
The fuss that was raised over Typee was not merely on account of its
supposed lack of fidelity. It was also because it had displayed loose
and immoral scenes. If people could find looseness and immorality in
Melville’s description of sexual customs in the South Seas, or in his
anecdote of the proud South Sea queen examining with naïve pleasure the
tattooing on a French sailor, and, in all innocence, raising her skirts
so as to disclose her own to such a connoisseur of the art, or in the
incident of the beautiful yellow-haired wife of a missionary, who was
worshipped by the natives as a mysterious goddess until they stripped
her of her clothes and discovered that she was even as they--if the
public could feel a titillation of wickedness over these things, it
must have been in a state of pathological sensitiveness; and no doubt
it was, for the exposure of more than the lower part of the female
ankle in society was then the mark of a wicked and abandoned woman.
This did not make it any easier for a candid fellow like Melville; and
when a new edition was projected in America, the officious and correct
Mr. Duyckinck must have suggested, as adviser to Wiley and Putnam,
that a little judicious editing would reduce the offence and increase
Melville’s audience. The young must be protected; the clergy must be
conciliated; just a little pruning here and there would give the book
a place on every library table. Melville should not have listened to
this nonsense; sooner or later a man with anything worth saying must
face the world of Pimminee and be prepared to stuff its prejudices and
its gentlemanly objections down its throat: if a young author does not
make this stand in his first book, he will increase his difficulties
with his fourth or fifth. But in 1846 Melville was still uncertain of
himself: a novice in his vocation, he was not aware of all the snares
that beset a man of letters: the pressure toward amiable compliance
with the all too amiable Mr. Duyckinck must have been pretty stiff; all
the more, perhaps, because a Duyckinck might almost be a Gansevoort,
and family pressure may have played a part, too. At all events, he
consented to let Typee be bowdlerized.
“The _Revised_ (Expurgated?--odious word!) Edition of ‘Typee’ ought
to be duly announced--and as the matter (in one respect) is a little
delicate, I am happy that the literary tact of Mr. Duyckinck will
be exerted on this occasion.” So Melville wrote in the middle of
1846 to Mr. Evert Duyckinck. He grimaced a little at the dose; but
unfortunately swallowed it. The anecdote about Queen Pomaree went:
the anecdote about the missionary’s wife went; and various other
passages were underscored by elimination. What Melville said about the
missionaries of the Dollar and the Cross is worth remembering, before
Mr. Duyckinck runs his blue pencil through it:
“Look at Honolulu, the metropolis of the Sandwich Islands!--a community
of disinterested merchants, and devoted self-exiled heralds of the
Cross, located on the very spot that twenty years ago was defiled by
the presence of idolatry. What a subject for an eloquent Bible-meeting
orator!... But when these philanthropists send us such glowing accounts
of one-half of their labors, why does modesty restrain them from
publishing the other half of the good they have wrought?--Not until
I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of
the natives had been civilized into draught horses and evangelized
into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken
into the traces and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual
instructors like so many dumb brutes.”
I would not say that this bowdlerization ruins the book, or that it
materially takes away from its value: that is not the point. Small and
“immaterial” suppressions may have no effect upon the literary value
of a work: but they cannot help having a subtly corrosive effect upon
the man who has created it. As A. E. once pointed out, in discussing
the matter of censorship, the spirit of the artist is a sensitive one,
and in many cases it works only with great difficulty. If its wings are
clipped by so much as a feather-tip, its capacity for flight may be
ruined. It is perhaps impossible to say how far Melville was harmed by
Mr. Duyckinck’s tactful exertions, or by the hysterical denunciations
that prompted them. For objective evidence, we have only the fact
that sex, except in remote allusions to debauchery in Redburn or to
sodomy in White-Jacket, did not enter into any of Melville’s stories,
until it suddenly erupted in 1852 in Pierre with the violence of long
repression. Mark Twain was burdened by a similar censorship; and he
took refuge in the flat obscenity of “1601.” Melville’s own development
as a man and a writer might have been a happier one, had not sex become
in his day a sanctimonious ritual, with no middle term between the
licence of the brothel and the waxen purity of the home. The censorship
which operated on Melville’s books bore equally on his spirit: his
libido turned back upon itself, and got lost for a time in the mazes
of an infantile life. To take sex easily, naturally, rationally, is to
subject it to the refining elements in life: to take it with a sense
of unholy attraction and holy repulsion is to dissociate it completely
from the normal influence of knowledge and convention and taste: in
this dissociated, fragmental state, sex rages irresponsibly like a bolt
of lightning in an open field: it may disappear into the ground, it may
shatter a tree, it may kill a human being.
Melville had carried back from the South Seas the simplicity of an
essentially chaste, but, we must suppose, not altogether inexperienced
young man. This simplicity had something valuable in it for Melville’s
contemporaries, just as his appreciation of savage society must have
warned them about the absurd extravagance of acquiring dyspepsia
and hard faces and an incapacity for the arts of living by their
concentration upon money-making--and the censorship of Typee kept
this part of Melville, I think, from maturing with reflection and
experience. Sex was taboo. That element in his growth knew no middle
state between greenness and blight. One part of life was locked for him
in a dark chamber; one part will die by asphyxiation.
5
Typee was a success, and Melville soon had the consciousness of being
an author. He could scarcely mention his book, in passing, without
pausing to realize how strange it sounded. All his dispersed interests
and his random purposes were suddenly concentrated: his life had the
spiritual momentum that a genuine career gives it: he was no longer
an outcast Olympian, but one of the great circle, now treated by his
elders as an equal, respected, deferred to, genially slapped on the
back, welcomed when a group of literary men met for conversation: if
an English author came to America, as Thackeray did a little later,
Melville was bound to be the most promising younger man in the circle
that dined him and gave him welcome.
In Pierre, Melville gives his hero’s sensations at suddenly finding
himself quoted in the public press, and urged by various grave
societies to lecture before them--little gratuities of attention that
afflicted him with a sense of his own insignificance, no matter how
inflated he might seem to the world outside: and Pierre’s humility was
doubtless Melville’s. He had grown a beard; but he did not need that
symbol of years and experience to wear his new honours easily: with
his reading and his miscellaneous adventure and the deep or brilliant
conversation that might unexpectedly escape from him, he must have been
a ready companion in any of the current literary circles: indeed, the
difficulty was that, in the particular group where he moved, it was
hard to single out any minds that came up to his level: the Manhattan
literati of Melville’s heyday were a slick and shallow parcel of
journalists, with a few scholars like the learned author of the Lives
of the Presidents, as makeweight.
Melville’s quick entry into the literary world was partly furthered
by two men who once wielded power in American letters, Messrs. George
and Evert Duyckinck; George, a little thin and abstemious and given
to pious reflections, Evert, more full-blooded, shrewd, worldly, an
energetic hack who accumulated more than a modest competence as an
editor and a compiler of ostentatious books of reference. They were
busy little moles, these Duyckincks; one can scarcely utter their
names or recount their ephemeral glories without smiling a little; but
they gave Melville support and sympathy at a time early enough for him
to profit by it; and if Melville found Evert Duyckinck worthy of his
friendship there was something in the man’s geniality that merited it,
and it is not for us to withhold what Melville himself freely gave.
Evert Duyckinck had, according to Richard Lathers, one of the choicest
libraries in the state: he was literary adviser to Messrs. Wiley and
Putnam, and after Charles Fenno Hoffman’s brief editorship, he assumed