Herman Melville
begin another White-Jacket or Typee, and become conscious, in the act
of writing, of this deepening of his insight, this integration of his
powers, and of the vast fable that was now at his command?
One cannot even make a reasonable conjecture about the matter. All one
knows are the actual conditions under which Moby-Dick was written,
the reactions of the writing itself upon Melville, and its final
result--the story of the White Whale.
Conceive of Melville in his new home, as he embarks upon the most
extensive of his spiritual voyages. The furniture has been removed
to his new house, the beds put up, the heavier articles shifted and
re-shifted, and, by a month’s work outdoors, the woodpile has grown
and the hay been stowed into the hayloft. For the moment, all his
relations are well poised: Barney is through the period of teething:
Elizabeth has help in her housework and the first tension of removal
is over; Mr. Duyckinck occasionally, with the most tactful sort of
generosity, sends up a case of champagne in a wicker cradle or a fine
bundle of cigars, or he suggests a review to be written. He even tries
to nourish Melville’s reputation by abetting some one who is writing
about him in the papers and who wishes to publish a photograph of the
famous author: here alone Melville’s pride rebuffs this rudimentary
effort at an art which has become a loathsome sore in our own time: he
refuses his picture. “The fact is,” he explains, “almost everybody is
having his ‘mug’ engraved nowadays, so that this test of distinction is
getting to be reversed; and therefore, to see one’s ‘mug’ in a magazine
is presumptive evidence that he’s a nobody.... I respectfully decline
to be _oblivionated_....” But when a journeyman painter made the rounds
of the neighbourhood Melville sat for him--and the portrait, which
slightly resembles Allan’s, remains a just punishment for his vanity.
Below the edge of Melville’s horizon is this new friend, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and, as he raises his eyes from the desk in his second-story
chamber and looks through the single small window that faces the north,
he sees the wide valley sweeping across to successive ridges of hills,
dominated by Mt. Greylock--otherwise called, from the double hump in
the ridge, Saddleback. The red clover that incarnadined the summer
fields is gone; or rather, its colour has mounted to the crown of
the landscape; the maples are a still more glorious red. The spirits
caper in the autumn air; there are glowing Byzantine days when the
heavens reflect the hues of the October apples, when the sky is so
ripe and ruddy it seems there must be harvest home for the angels
and that Charles’ Wain is heaped as high as Saddleback with autumn
sheaves. The sunrises and the sunsets glow side by side in the woods,
and momentarily moult in the falling leaves. Neither the Rhine nor the
Moselle produces anything as heady as the landscape of the Berkshires
in autumn. Now is the time to begin. When Melville writes his first
words, “Call me Ishmael,” he is writing out of his health and ecstasy:
he himself is not an outcast, nor is his spirit drooping with the
“hypos”: his first touch is a black one because his canvas demands
it. He is about to build up a vast pyramid of contrasts, between the
whiteness of external evil and the blackness of man’s inner doom; and
he faces this drama with his full powers.
The apples are gathered; the autumn ploughing is done; Melville is at
work. The mood of creation is upon him: he is ready not for one book
but for fifty books: if Mr. Duyckinck would only send him about fifty
fast-writing youths with an easy style, not averse to polishing their
letters, he might set them all to work. “It is not so much the paucity,
as the superabundance of material that seems to incapacitate modern
authors,” he had written that summer. In this autumn ferment, Melville
has scarcely enough time to think about his future books separately;
in lieu of using fifty youths, he must pack as much as possible into
one book. Melville scarcely breaks his way through a chapter or two
before he realizes that he has found his theme; and the only question
is how to quarry this marble, how to get it out. “Youth,” Melville said
in another place, “must wholly quit, then, the quarry for a while;
and not only go forth and get tools to use in the quarry, but must
go and thoroughly discover architecture. Now the quarry discoverer is
long before the stone-cutter; and the stone-cutter is long before the
architect; and the architect is long before the temple; for the temple
is the crown of the world.” His apprenticeship is at last definitely
over: he is at work on the temple itself--such a temple as Dante,
Shakespeare, Webster, Marlowe, Browne, might each in his way have
conceived and designed.
The days go by; the leaves fall; the candlelight comes early; the mice
creep into the cupboard and make nests for themselves in the woodpile;
the wide meadows become as bleak as a grey sea. In this most inland
scene, with only the Housatonic to connect him with the watery world,
Melville still dreams of the sea: his thought centres on the sea, its
creatures, its boats, its fish, its men, its deeper monsters. Oh!
for a dash of salt spray! he cries; and as substitute he draws upon
experience and memory for the savour. The days grow cold. Snow hems in
the roof and chimney of Arrowhead. Melville has a sea-feeling all the
more: when he looks out of his little window on rising, he feels as if
he were looking out of his port-hole in the midst of the Atlantic: his
room seems a ship’s cabin, and at nights, when he wakes up and hears
the wind shrieking, he can almost fancy there is too much sail on the
house, and he had better go up on the roof and rig in the chimney. On
a winter morning he rises at eight, helps his horse to his hay and the
cow to her pumpkin, stands around to take in the grateful complacency
of the cow, she moves her jaws so mildly and with such sanctity; then,
with his own breakfast over, he goes to his workroom and lights the
fire, runs rapidly through the MS. and starts to work. At half past two
a knock comes. He does not answer. Again the knock and again: till he
rises from his writing, almost mechanically, and resumes the external
round: feed for the horse and cow: then dinner: then he rigs up his
sleigh and goes off to the village for the mail, for supplies, for
a little friendly chaffer perhaps round the tavern bar. So one day
follows another on the surface; but within, there is change and tumult:
Melville, like Ahab, finds a creature tearing at his vitals, and that
creature the thing he has created.
“How then with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously, my
chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill!
Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand. Friends! hold my arms! For in
the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me,
and make me faint with the outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as
if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations
of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all
the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole
universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the
virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce
a mighty volume you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring
volume can ever be written upon the flea, though many there be who have
tried it.”
Such intensity of effort, so many hours of writing and reading, are as
exhausting as the direction of a battle: but there is no lying up in
winter quarters, no delegation of responsibility: the writer does not
live outside his book: the world, the familiar, homely world, becomes
a weak picture, and his imagination is the body and blood of reality.
Taking a book off the brain, Melville exclaims while in the midst of
it, “is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old
painting off a panel: you have to scrape off the whole brain in order
to get at it with due safety--and even then the painting may not be
worth the trouble.” Well, Moby-Dick is worth the trouble; the very
writing of it becomes a powerful instrument in his own development:
what absorbs so much of his time and life is not the book alone, “but
the primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which in the act of
attempting the book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books
are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the
bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for ... his
own private shelf. That it is whose unfathomable cravings drunk his
blood; the other only demands ink.”
Melville knows he must not let up on this work; he flogs himself to
get his uttermost into it; the application ruins his eyesight. This
small aperture and northern light are bad for his eyes: no matter: he
writes with one eye closed and the other blinking. By December, in
the evening, he is exhausted: he spends the aftermath of the day in
a sort of physical trance: but already his mind is anticipating the
developments of the next day, and he is up early, and goes back to his
task.
Spring comes; but it is no spring for Melville. He will not even be
bothered for dinner. Some days he sits at his desk till 4:30 without
writing a word; in the spring twilight, when the catkins of the maples
glow in the mild sunset and the bluebirds dart about the field like
unfettered flowers, he at last comes out and creeps about like an owl.
If Melville ploughs and plants, he does it mechanically; his heart is
not in it; and he is not nourished by it. In the midst of his writing,
his soul reaches a pitch of exaltation, as it does defiantly in a
terrible gale, when the hand is firmly on the wheel, and the dangerous
seas that wash the decks do not loosen the hold: the letters that he
writes to Hawthorne then are prophetic, and deep, and full of proud
mastery. In building up his vast symbol of the whale, he strips the
universe down to his own ego; like Ahab himself, he says no to all the
powers and dominions that lie beyond it. Does not Hawthorne do as much?
“There is a certain tragic phase of humanity,” he writes to Hawthorne,
“which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by
Hawthorne.... He says No in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot
make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say
No,--why, they are in the happy condition of judicious unencumbered
travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity, with
nothing but a carpet-bag,--that is to say, the Ego. Whereas, those
_yes_-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage and damn them! they
will never get through the Custom House.”
But the soft milky air of June gets the better of Melville’s humours:
every breath of the warm earth, the spicy perfume of wild strawberries,
the honeyed odour of the locust trees, the dank green fragrance of
ferns, the sight of buttercups making the fields sunny even on dull
days, or the daisies turning the high grass into the whitish green
colour of the ocean when the waves disperse on the beach, the warm
feeling of animal contentment that the sun itself pours into a man--all
these things renewed his energies and revived his spirits. Melville
relaxed and refreshed himself in the sunlight, building an addition
to the house, and ploughing and sowing, and watching the green shoots
rise. He does not doubt the reality of his black moments: for, as
he tells Hawthorne, in the boundless, trackless, but still glorious
wilderness of the universe, where he and Hawthorne are outposts, there
are savage Indians as well as mosquitoes; still, one does not go on
fighting them forever. As for the crotchety and overdoleful chimeras,