Herman Melville
“the like of you and me, and some others, forming a chain of God’s
outposts around the world, must be content to encounter now and then,
and fight them as best we can.”
Melville goes down to New York to see the first part of Moby-Dick
through the press; but the oppressive, humid days in that Babylonish
brick-kiln, and the long delays of the printers, disgust him; he
comes back to the country, and purposes to end the book, if possible,
reclining on the grass, or watching the clouds play on a summer
afternoon around old Greylock, from the newly built porch he has added
to the north side of the house, where the view lies. The tail of
Moby-Dick is not cooked yet; though the hell-fire in which the book was
broiled might not unreasonably have charred it before this. Melville’s
intention is sane enough, if only he had the leisure to cultivate
the calm, grass-growing mood; but no: he must keep on patching and
tinkering at his buildings: in July the hay waits for no author to
finish his chapter: there are a hundred chores to keep him away from
his book, still more from deep questions about the universe and its
meaning and evil and truth and all those aspects of reality that need a
Hawthorne for perfect communication. There is no help for it; he must
go back to New York to finish the book in a third-story room, where
there is no cow to milk, no horse to feed, no sister or wife or mother
to be a little hurt or concerned by his inattentiveness or moodiness.
These last straining days in New York were not unlike, one might guess,
those that Pierre experienced: the book that was begun in health and
exuberance in the keen, riotous air of October in the Berkshires
was finished in exacerbations and depression and desolation in the
humid dog days of a dirty, unkempt city, days of unrelieved sunlight,
followed by afternoon thunderstorms that leave the air even heavier
than before, the pavements steaming, the waves of warm, unpleasant air,
carrying slight odours of putrefaction, wafted upward into even the
third story.
“In the earlier progress of the book, he had found some relief in
making his regular evening walk through the greatest thoroughfares of
the city; and so the utter desolation of his soul might feel itself
more intensely against the bodies of the hurrying thousands. Then he
began to be sensible of more fancying stormy nights than pleasant
ones; for then the great thoroughfares were less thronged, and the
innumerable shop-awnings flapped and beat like schooners’ broad sails
in a gale, and the shutters banged like lashed bulwarks; and the slates
fell hurtling like displaced ship’s blocks from aloft. Stemming such
tempers through the deserted streets, Pierre felt a dark triumphant
joy; that while others had crawled in fear to their kennels, he
alone defied the storm-admiral, whose most vindictive pelting of
hailstones--striking his iron-framed fiery furnace of a body--melted
into soft dew, and so, harmlessly trickled off him. By-and-by, of such
howling, pelting nights, he began to bend his steps down the narrow
side streets, in quest of the more secluded and mysterious taprooms.
There he would feel a singular satisfaction, in sitting down all
dripping in a chair, ordering his half pint of ale before him, and
drawing over his cap to protect his eyes from the light, eye the varied
faces of the social castaways, who here had their haunts from bitterest
midnights. But at last he began to feel a distaste for even these; and
now nothing but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest warehousing
lanes would content him, or be at all sufferable to him.”
“Dollars damn me,” he wrote Hawthorne, “and the malicious devil is
forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a
presentiment is upon me.--I shall at last be worn out and perish,
like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition
of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write,
that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether write the _other_
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash; and all my books are
botches.... But I was talking about the ‘whale.’ As the fishermen say,
‘he was in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going
to take him up by his jaw, however, before long and finish him up in
some fashion or another. What’s the use of elaborating what, in its
very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the
Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter. What reputation H.
M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity as the man who
lived among the cannibals. When I speak of posterity in reference to
myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment
immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost.... I shall go down to
them in all likelihood.... I have come to regard this matter of Fame as
the most transparent of all vanities. I read Solomon more and more, and
every time see deeper and deeper and unspeakable meanings in him. I
did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now. My development has all
been within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of
the Egyptian pyramids which, after being three thousand years a seed,
and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed
itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was
twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I
date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between
then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I
am now come to the utmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower
must fall to the mould.”
If it was in a mood of confidence and creative delight that he sounded
his depths in Moby-Dick, it was in this other mood, chastened, almost
fearful, that his stripped ego rose to the surface after this extreme
plunge. He had looked into the abyss: he was dizzy, terrified,
appalled. His letters to Hawthorne have this mingled sense of awe and
exaltation: they are the mood of the last part of Moby-Dick. Melville’s
notes to Mr. Duyckinck are still jocular and robust; they might be
the words of the imperturbable Stubb or the jaunty Flask: but that
is because Melville gave Mr. Duyckinck only a part of himself, the
polite, free-and-easy, effervescent side, meant for appreciative eating
and solicitous drinking, the side he doubtless turned to his family
and housemates, when weariness did not bury him from their sight--the
last people who could share or understand his quest, his insight, his
triumph. There is no question of wearing a mask: both sides of Melville
are authentic, but the deeper part of him, which would under happier
circumstances have served as ballast and made him face the waves more
steadily, claimed too much of his inner space: he lost buoyancy: the
water crept above the waterline: the ship rode dangerously. Now,
however, we are speaking of the consequences of Melville’s writing
Moby-Dick. The book itself was published towards the end of 1851 by
Bentley, in England, and a little later in the same year by Harper’s in
New York.
Whether it was an angel or a devil that Melville had struggled with
this long year, he had wrestled magnificently, and the book was done.
Before we go further with Melville’s life, we must discuss this great
fragment of it--the most important of Melville’s books, and surely one
of the most important books of the century.
CHAPTER SEVEN: MOBY-DICK
Moby-Dick is a story of the sea, and the sea is life, “whose waters
of deep woe are brackish with the salt of human tears.” Moby-Dick is
the story of the eternal Narcissus in man, gazing into all rivers
and oceans to grasp the unfathomable phantom of life--perishing in
the illusive waters. Moby-Dick is a portrait of the whale and a
presentation of the demonic energies in the universe that harass and
frustrate and extinguish the spirit of man. We must gather our own
strength together if we are to penetrate Moby-Dick: no other fable,
except perhaps Dante’s, demands that we open so many doors and turn
so many secret keys; for, finally, Moby-Dick is a labyrinth, and that
labyrinth is the universe.
Call me Ishmael, says the teller of the story. Ishmael is lured to a
whaling voyage by the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself and
of the forbidden seas in which he rolls his inland bulk: when Ishmael
grows grim around the mouth and feels damp, drizzly November in his
soul, he goes to sea. With his carpet-bag he sets out for New Bedford,
and takes refuge in the shaggy comfort of Spouter Inn. His companion
and bedfellow in the crowded inn is another Ishmael, a cannibal named
Queequeg, who brings into the atmosphere of chowders and tarpaulins a
wild odour from another continent of the soul. His harpoon, his idol,
his sharp filed teeth, the human head he carries around in a bag, for
sale, are for Ishmael hints of that horror in the universe which he
is quick to perceive and be social with, since it is well to be on
friendly terms with the inmates of the place one lodges in.
When Ishmael takes refuge from the driving sleet and mist, on a Sunday
morning, in the Whalemen’s Chapel, he finds reminders of luckless
voyages on the memorial tablets around the hall, and Father Mapple,
who had been a sailor and harpooner in his youth, delivers a sermon
on Jonah! What a preacher, and what a sermon! After ascending to the
pulpit by a rope ladder, hand over hand, Father Mapple drags the
ladder up after him, to signify his spiritual withdrawal from all
outward ties and connections; from that pulpit, shaped like a ship’s
bow, he expounds the fable of Jonah, seeming, as he describes Jonah’s
sea-storm, to be beaten by a storm himself, his deep chest heaving as
with a ground-swell, his tossed arms like the warring elements at work,
thunders rolling away from his swarthy brow and light leaping from his
eye.
Father Mapple’s words and figures belong to the Bible; but their
meaning comes from that bottomless ocean of truth where Moby-Dick plies
back and forth. I must quote the words: one can give no proper hint of
this work, even in its smallest detail, without quoting the language
through which it is expressed: and this is particularly true of Father
Mapple’s noble tongue.
“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is sure
delight; and higher the top of that delight than the bottom of the woe
is deep. Is not the maintruck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is
to him--a far, far upward, and inward delight--who against the proud
gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his inexorable
self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the
ship of this base treacherous world goes down beneath him. Delight
is to him, who gives no quarter for the truth, and kills, burns,
and destroys all sin, though he pluck it out from under the robes
of Senators and Judges. Delight--top-gallant delight is to him, who
acknowledges no law or lord but the Lord his God, and is only patriot
to heaven. Delight is to him whom all the waves and billows of the seas
of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages.
And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay
him down, can say with his final breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me
by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine,
more than to be this world’s or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave
eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime
of his God?”
Humbly participating in Queequeg’s heathenish rites, sharing
confidences with him, Ishmael pledges friendship with the cannibal:
it is the first and almost the last touch of affection in the whole
story: a compact between two strays and outcasts! In Heaven, and