Herman Melville
the problems of physical immortality; but Azzageddi says, thinking how
even the sublimest thoughts fade and are lost, “If the fogs of some
few years can make soul linked to matter naught, how can the unhoused
spirit hope to live when mildewed in the damps of death.” The sociable
townsman continues to correspond with Mr. Duyckinck and respect his
judgment; but Azzageddi says: “All round me, my fellow-men are new
grafting their vines and dwelling in flourishing arbors; while I am
forever pruning mine, till it becomes but a stump. Yet in this pruning
I will persist; I will not add, I will diminish; I will trim myself
down to the standard of what is unchangeably true. Day by day I drop
off my redundancies; ere long I shall have stripped my ribs; when I
die, they will but bury my spine. I may have come to the Penultimate
... but where is the Ultimate?”
From Azzageddi’s mouth the deepest perceptions of Melville’s spirit
came forth first, in the form of jests and demonic laughter.
Azzageddi was free in the only unqualified sense of freedom: he was
irresponsible. Nothing will daunt him, no opposition to his conscious
habits, statements, prejudices, conventions will prevent him from
declaring himself. He was Melville, shorn of everything that might
make him circumspect and limited, a skeleton facing the world with
its ultimate grin. Azzageddi brought Melville to his supreme triumph
in Moby-Dick, and plunged him into temporary disaster in Pierre; for
he worked out of the bottomless parts of Melville’s unconscious,
and when he was given free line, he might haul up anything out of
those depths--a chest of gold or a white whale or a green corpse.
His appearance in Mardi was the first sign of Melville’s maturity;
and the attempt of the world to rebuff and castigate and repress
Azzageddi was excellent proof that Melville had found within himself
something worth the saying. Mardi was Melville’s spiritual Omoo. It
gave him the courage to be an intellectual rover, and to scorn the easy
domesticities in which thought reposes, and snores.
“There are those who falter in the common tongue, because they think
in another; and these are accounted stutterers and stammerers,” wrote
Melville in Mardi. Melville was plainly aware of the fact that he
was now acquiring a new language, not a new set of weaknesses: his
inward eye was now keeping pace in its growth with his outward one: he
was at last achieving that genuine bi-focal vision wherein “matter”
and “spirit” united to give depth and perspective to the world which
only through joint effort do they effectually behold. Already, he
had eternity in his eye. The easy triumph was no longer for him.
Clay crumbled, marble chipped, wood rotted, granite eroded: all the
common materials out of which monuments and civilizations are made
lie under the doom of a fatal metamorphosis: Melville sought a truth,
no matter how infinitely small in quantity and precious, which, like
radium, would undergo time and change and emanate energy without losing
perceptibly its bulk or its quality. It was useless to tell him that
there were no ultimate truths; that itself was perhaps the ultimate
truth which he sought. If Mardi were not ready for this search, he
would go it alone--and be the unreturning one. No grey shroud of ocean,
with threat of storm and sleet, would keep him from setting out for
that ultimate destination.
6
“Had I not written and published Mardi,” wrote Melville to Mr. Evert
Duyckinck in 1849, “in all likelihood I would not be as wise as I
am now, or may be. For that thing was stabbed _at_ (I do not say
_through_) and therefore I am the wiser for it.”
The truth is that Mardi got a mixed reception; whereas except for the
missionaries and the unco guid his first two books had been hailed and
acclaimed with a heartiness that is rarely accorded to a new author
with no well-defined connections. Mardi was praised in the Revue des
Deux Mondes, and damned as a rubbishing parody in Blackwood’s; the
Democratic Review said that it compared to Typee and Omoo as a cartoon
of Raphael to a seven-by-nine sketch of a sylvan lake; but the Dublin
University Magazine found it one of the saddest, most melancholy, most
deplorable and humiliating perversions of genius of a high order in the
English language. So it went, hot and cold, huzzas and hisses.
A book that could evoke such different responses must either be a
highly original book or a many-sided one; and Mardi has, it seems to
me, both qualities. It was, there is reason to believe, the wealth,
the profusion, the diversity of ideas in Mardi that brought down on
Melville the irritation of contemporary critics: instead of retiring
into after-dinner lethargy with Melville’s smoking, calabash-drinking
philosopher and king and poet, they were stirred into unaccustomed
mental activity. They resented that: they resented above all the
fact that Melville played with ideas. One could not be sure whether
he was fooling with the ideas or fooling with the audience; besides,
respectable ideas should not be played with: there is a time and a
place for everything. In the South Seas one expects to fondle brown
maidens: in a library, one locks the door on maidens and wrestles with
ideas. Their lips were whetted for another Fayaway: she evaporated into
Yillah: and Yillah vanished, leaving only a gritty taste in the mouth,
criticism, criticism of Christianity, politics, morality, things that
gentlemen prefer to take, if at all, in medical capsules, not as food.
Am I wrong in thinking that Mardi has been damned for its virtues? The
idea is all the more plausible because for more than a generation,
during which Melville’s work almost disappeared from critical notice,
Melville was reprobated, when he was noticed at all, for becoming
interested in abstruse philosophy and for writing extravagantly. The
burden of this criticism was that a writer of South Sea romances had
better leave Plato and Spinoza alone, and get his opinion of the
universe from professional purveyors, or rather, not be troubled by
such foreign interests. This attempt to keep Melville in his place was
absurd enough in itself; but it led to further stupidities, far more
deplorable in character. “As early as 1848,” wrote an historian of
American literature in 1903, “the quasi-speculative romance entitled
Mardi gave premonition of aberration and of the eventual frustration of
a promising career.” This criticism is nonsense, and libellous nonsense
at that: the aberration it refers to did not exist in Melville but
in the historian himself. At the very outset of his career, Melville
found himself confronting a similar opaqueness, blank as a wall, in his
own contemporaries. One remembers Macaulay’s withering condescension
over Plato and the scholastic philosophers; and one realizes that
any view of life which did not immediately sanction the pragmatism
of the nineteenth century was bound to seem an aberration for those
who regarded the local values of the time as ultimates. Melville’s
“aberration” was his great intellectual distinction: none of his
contemporaries had such a broad base in the fundamental activities of
the time, and yet rose so loftily above them. He did not rebel against
his milieu; like Thoreau, he reached outside of it, and grew beyond it,
taking out of the very environment from which he escaped the necessary
materials for his own development.
The scene is now set: the struggle in which Melville is to participate
is defined. It is a struggle between a plastic, conventional self,
moulded in the fashion of his fellow citizens and fellow writers,
and a hard, defiant, adamantine self that springs out of his deepest
consciousness of life, and is ready to assault, not merely human
conventions, but the high gods themselves. In a conflict between his
career and his family duties, between pot-boiling and his maturest
literary aims, this drama externalizes itself: it is present in the
man, and it is present in his outward relationships. Let us make no
mistake about it: Melville was not a writer of romances: it was a mere
accident of history that turned the world’s attention to him through
the charm and tropical radiance of the South Sea adventures. Herman
Melville was a thinker, in the sense that Dante was a thinker, who
clothed his thoughts in poetic vision. That thought and vision was
one of the most important things the century produced. All honour,
then, to the few critics who appreciated Mardi when it appeared: for
Melville had a greater work in store; and it was out of the freedom and
intellectual audacity acquired in writing Mardi, out of the discovery
of his Azzageddi, that he achieved the strength to attack it.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE TARTARUS OF AUTHORS
We return to Herman Melville’s daily life. In January, 1849, Mrs.
Melville went up to Boston to live with her mother and await her
confinement. At the end of January the last proof-sheets of Mardi
were corrected; in the middle of February Malcolm was born. With the
coming of the baby, Melville must have felt a certain tightening of
responsibility. One knows very little about the economic conditions
under which Melville lived during the first years of his marriage, or
to what extent Allan may have carried a good part of the burden of the
household. But early in 1849 Melville must have begun to write Redburn,
which was a potboiler; and before Redburn was printed he wrote, with
greater strength and fuller powers, having probably recovered by that
time from the strain of writing Mardi, the masterful account of navy
life in White-Jacket.
We now have a chance to watch Melville at work under every
disadvantage: the distraction of a household with a young baby, the
necessity to make a living, and to do this promptly, the handicap of
having to produce something on the level of his audience. If there are
flaws in the man, they should come out under these conditions. If he
has no sense of reality, he will not know how to meet them; if anything
has lurked under the surface of his life, it will rise, like dead fish
in poisoned water.
2
In Redburn, Melville went back to his youth and traced his feelings
about life and his experiences up to his eighteenth year. The book
is autobiography, with only the faintest disguises: Bleecker Street
becomes Greenwich Street, and the other changes are of similar order.
Following Mr. Weaver, I have relied upon Melville’s account of himself
in Redburn in giving a picture of his life in the earlier chapters; for
it tallies with all the other independently known facts.
For the first time in Melville’s writings, the note of personal
disappointment and bitterness appeared. He had, it is true, said in
Mardi that the highest happiness known to Mardians was the absence
of sorrow, and he had said also, as if to explain his hilarity,
that woe is more merry than mirth and only shallow sorrows brought
tears. But these observations were not peculiar or original; and they
were biographical only in the sense that all a man’s thoughts are
autobiographical--whether they arise out of his experience or his
reading or a passing mood conditioned by the state of his digestion.
In Redburn, Melville discloses to us a disappointed boy, who had hopes
of education, cultivation, gentility, and who resented the fate that
tore these things from his grasp and made him fight for a living in
a fighting world. “Claret for boys, port for men,” he exclaimed in
White-Jacket, is a good rule for travel: Mrs. Glendinning uses the
same phrase in another application in Pierre: the words took hold of
Melville, and one suspects that in his youth he had had an overdose
of port, and had participated in experiences that required a stronger
stomach.
Now, for the first time, Melville is conscious of the black maggot