Herman Melville
within him, deposited as a mere egg in his youth, and growing
day by day, nourished by his later disappointments and sorrows
and frustrations. Things have begun to go badly: he thinks back
without difficulty to times when they were even worse. The physical
misery of those early years, the patched clothes, the bad food, the
rough treatment of the sailors, the feeling of homelessness, the
consciousness of being an Ishmael--all these experiences tallied
point by point with the world outside, its cruelty, its misery,
its sordidness and vice. These events and sights poisoned life for
Melville: he had not realized it at the time, he had certainly not
realized it while browsing through his father’s books in Lansingburgh,
or tramping to school through the wide valleys of the Berkshires or
brooding over the calm Pacific seas--but the poison had been slowly
working in his bones. Life was not kind. All its hints of kindness,
its proffers, its affected politenesses were shams. He had married a
divine creature--and she was nearest him when she mended his stockings.
The books that he wrote fared best when they revealed least of the
author and his deepest thoughts. He wanted something central and solid
in life, a house, a family, a sense of continuity and security for his
future work--and the baby was an expense, the future was a blank, and
instead of being able to plan another Mardi, he must hastily improvise
a salable article. “It is not with a hollow purse as with a hollow
balloon--for a hollow purse makes the poet _sink_--witness ‘Mardi.’”
“When a poor devil writes with duns all around him, and looking over
the back of his chair, and perching on his pen, and dancing in his
inkstand--like the Devils about St. Anthony--what can you expect of
that poor devil? What but a beggarly Redburn?” So Melville wrote to Mr.
Duyckinck in December, 1849. Those were the words of a harassed man.
Redburn, recalling the cruel memories of his youth, was also the first
bitter cry of his maturity.
We must not, however, take Melville’s disappointment at its face
value. On its level, Redburn is a sound, well-written book. Mr. John
Masefield has singled it out among Melville’s books, after Moby-Dick;
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has seconded his judgment: with this praise in
mind, one cannot dismiss Redburn as contemptuously as Melville himself
did. At his lowest stage of strength and confidence, he could not
write anything that did not have his signature on every page. The
marks of haste in Redburn are in its simplicity and its reliance upon
memory: the reflective and critical passages, which are so copious in
Melville’s other books, scarcely appear in Redburn. He wrote about a
boy’s consciousness of the world, with a boy’s amazement at its cruelty
and hard-heartedness, even as he recalled a boy’s confusion when he was
placed in the midst of a strange institution like a gambling-house,
something outside book, memory or dream. The captain of the ship
will not chat with Redburn: Redburn thinks him no gentleman! Redburn
is summarily booted out of a Liverpool club when he intrudes: these
English, thinks Redburn, have no manners!
These reflections are just and true; but they are true and just by the
criterion of a boy’s world, which has not yet learned the pragmatic
justification of lies, cheats, hypocrisies, and hard-heartedness.
“Unless ye be as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of
Heaven.” The kingdom of heaven is this naïve world, where lies are
lies, even if they save one’s face; where cruelty is cruelty, even if
it be the custom of the club. To treat human beings as human beings,
and not as counters, tools, conveniences, is one of the ultimate
efforts of morality; but half the practices of society are, from this
point of view, definitely immoral. In Redburn, Melville found himself
treated, not with respect to his character and needs and spiritual
wants: he found himself treated like any other pauper: put to work
and told to keep out of sight. He never forgot that lesson; for, in
more subtle and various ways, society kept on dinning it into him.
If, when he was a sailor-boy, he was not supposed to converse freely
with the captain, after he had written Typee he was not supposed to
hold conversations with Plato or Sir Thomas Browne. But he was a
man! Society denied it; a sailor, yes, a South Sea adventurer, yes,
that too: but a boy, a sailor, a South Sea adventurer always, not
a brooding, pondering, philosophic, imaginative man, whose further
developments lay in seas unvisited by whalers or Captain Cooks.
“We have had vast developments of parts of men,” wrote Melville in
Mardi, in words that anticipated Thoreau and Whitman, and show his
kinship with them, “not of any wholes. Before a full-developed man,
Mardi would fall down and worship.” It was the consciousness of being
clipped, deformed, degraded, that made Melville bitter: circumstances
had done this to him as a boy, and now, with duns standing over him, it
was doing the same trick in his manhood. Better be a full Polynesian,
as large as a native can grow, than be the deformed creature who
accommodates himself to success in business or letters.
But Redburn is not primarily a book written about a grievance: it is
a narrative of a boy’s trip to sea, an honest narrative, with none
of the mildewed rainbows and lily-livered romanticism that usually
characterize such efforts. As so often happens with mere decent
veracity, Redburn, too, was denounced by one of its contemporary
critics as “outrageously improbable,” and though the brutality, vice,
and misery it pictured were certainly outrageous, there was nothing
at all improbable about it. The book, for all its boyish directness,
has the wry humour of the grown man, reflecting on his callowness, and
the characters it presents are surprisingly realized--surprisingly
because one doubts if Melville spent much pains on them. When one
compares Redburn to a much more elaborate work, like Two Years Before
the Mast, one discovers at once where Melville’s specific talents lay.
While Dana wrote directly and straightforwardly, he was not a creator
of character, and he had no gift of selection: in order to realize the
sea, he scatters tackle, blocks, mainsails, booms, compasses, bulwarks,
bulkheads on every page of the narrative: one is perpetually stumbling
over some recondite nautical term which Dana had mastered, and, like a
true landsman, hastened to exhibit. Two Years Before the Mast sounds
like a Bluejacket’s Manual.
Now, Melville, when he wrote Redburn, had seen far more of the sea than
Dana had; and since it was impossible to work a sailing-ship without
naming every article of its gear and tackle, he knew the names and uses
of these things quite as well as Dana did. But in Melville’s work the
lingo enters incidentally; and one encounters, not the physical ship of
the shipwright, but the ship in action, the ship that is part of the
sailor’s consciousness--in brief, the living ship as contrasted with an
abstract compendium of names and relationships. The same is true of the
characters. Dana describes his shipmates accurately enough: Melville
embodies them. The difference is the difference between a commonplace
photograph and a significant portrait. One does not forget Harry or
Jackson or Captain Riga or the Negro cook: they live as authentically,
within their narrow compass, as Colonel Newcome or Samuel Weller. That
is art; and even in his minor passages, Melville was an artist.
Redburn, in sum, showed only a portion of Melville; but he had no
reason to be ashamed of it, except for the reason that it fell short
of the higher standard he had now set himself, and the maturer art
he was now capable of creating. By 1850 twice as many copies of
Redburn as of Mardi had been sold, a difference accounted for partly
by the difference in bulk and price, but even more, I think, by the
preferences of Melville’s public. He had accomplished what he set out
to do: he had faced his immediate situation and improved it. That
Melville was forced to write such a potboiler was bad luck, and nothing
to be proud of: but that he met the situation squarely was a mark of
his resolution and balance. As long as Melville could fall back upon
his adventurous past, he had something to support him, something that
was viable in the marketplace. It was only when he had exhausted his
accumulated capital, and was forced to mine his ore and smelt it and
cast it, all under pressure of financial necessity, that he drew too
heavily on his resources. But we must not read back into these earlier
years his later difficulties. Redburn was a victory.
3
On the heels of Redburn came White-Jacket, or, the World in a
Man-of-War. White-Jacket was the sort of book that Melville could
hardly have attempted until he was sure of his capacities as a writer.
Although there is more than one adventurous passage in White-Jacket, it
is full of sober description and realistic criticism; and it depends
for its interest on Melville’s own strength of character, his shrewd,
quick insight, and his easy, seamanlike way of taking the world, rather
than on the glamour of his adventures.
The young writer casts about for interesting materials; the experienced
writer knows that no materials are uninteresting if they are capable
of being absorbed in the blood, and pumped through all the organs
and chambers of a man’s being: the more command a writer has of his
own resources, the more confident is he of his ability to turn any
experience to account. White-Jacket shows, I think, a greater art
and control over the material than any of Melville’s earlier books:
in Typee the art is gracefully unconscious: in White-Jacket it is
deliberate. Melville’s personal distinction and his own peculiar
adventures were subsumed under the jacket itself: he announced the
theme in the first chapter, recurred to it from time to time, when he
sought to waterproof the jacket, when he rounded the Horn in it, when
he tried to dispose of it at auction, and finally when he was blinded
by it and lost his hold on the yard-arm. The white jacket gave the
narrative a unity without introducing the extraneous mechanism of a
plot: it also symbolized his position as a white sheep in the black
flock of a man-of-war. Omoo was more fitful and inconsecutive for lack
of such a thread; Mardi did not open, like White-Jacket, on the theme
with which it closed. Like Redburn, White-Jacket was written under
pressure; but by now Melville knew his business. At thirty he had
mastery: he could take the dull routine of the man-of-war and make
every part of it live, from the maintop to the hold: he could take a
hundred dispersed facts and weave them into a solid pattern.
White-Jacket is a great portrait gallery. From the Commodore to the
rascally Master-at-arms, from Jack Chase of the maintop to Mad Jack,
the sea-going lieutenant, who, like Jermin, knew his business so well
he commanded Melville’s deep respect, from Mr. Pert the Midshipman
to Surgeon Cuticle--Melville typified, and yet individualized, every
character. The Neversink is an old-fashioned frigate of the line, now
long out of date, and it is all warships, down to the latest airplane
carrier. Mad Jack is an actual person; and he is all the officers
who exercise command by knowledge and capacity, none the less liked
for being a strict disciplinarian. Surgeon Cuticle is a man; and he
is all professional men who become specialized by their skill into
a brief-case or a textbook or an operating knife. Melville, who had
found that the world was something of a man-of-war discovered also
that a man-of-war’s crew was a pretty good representation of the
world. “Wrecked on a desert, a man of war’s crew could quickly found