Herman Melville
station in life, to which her maiden name, at least, entitled her; she
valued good food, low voices, courteous servants, correct manners.
An only girl in a family of boys, preening herself with a sense of
her family’s importance, does not profit by sufficient chastenings of
pride: Maria, unfortunately, was such a girl; and to the last she wore
her pride in station like a crest.
Maria had stooped a little to marry a mere trader like Allan, although
he, too, came of good English stock which sided with the colonies
in the Revolutionary War; still, she stooped; and she never quite
recovered from the painful crick in her back. She must have attributed
the misfortunes that followed in her middle age to this original
mistake; at all events, one cannot imagine a woman with such traits
as she left behind in the memory of her contemporaries, taking any
disaster to her station in life or her income with resignation or
becoming meekness. Christianity, for a Gansevoort, meant a prominent
pew in church, not an equal place in heaven; and to deprive her of the
world’s goods was to deprive her of everything she valued.
Both Melville’s father and his mother were monsters; but it took him a
long time to discover this, because they were correct and meritorious
members of society, and it is difficult to believe that the image
of God can err, if it be repeated often enough. In the New York of
the early nineteenth century, Mr. and Mrs. Allan Melville can be
duplicated many times over. Their correctness, their pettiness, their
shallowness, were the correctness and shallowness of a venial society
whose pretensions to culture and civilization were, on the whole,
pretty thin. It was an agreeable society, make no doubt, and Mr. and
Mrs. Melville were just the sort of people to persuade one to accept
its conventions as the very acme of human desire. One visited: one left
one’s card; one entertained at dinner; occasionally one went to the
theatre, or to one of those miscellaneous exhibitions of forgeries and
bad copies and minor masterpieces that served to introduce art into
America: one might even descend a little to that prodigious educational
spectacle, the Cosmorama, or Picture of the World, at Scudder’s Museum.
It was not London or Paris, of course. Allan had seen the paintings in
the Louvre and doubtless knew better than some of his contemporaries:
but it was the outward activity of a great city, with none of the inner
effort that sustained it in Europe. No one in New York, up to 1819, had
dedicated himself to the creative life; and whether one is conscious
of it or not, a great poem, an original thought, an effective piece
of scientific investigation, subtly affect the spirit and tempo of a
place. New York was the counterfeit of a great metropolis, just as the
pictures it looked at were the counterfeits of great painting, just as
the exhibition of a Cosmorama was a counterfeit of a voyage around the
world. Pigs snouted in the gutters; the waterfront had become a jumble
of shipping; the old docks had begun to splinter up and decay; the
Collect Pond was being filled up to make real estate for the growing
city, and later a site for the Tombs; in the vacant fields on the
outskirts of the town, squatters settled in little hovels that reminded
one of a misery and want not yet wholly native to America: in short,
over a vast welter of miscellaneous activities there was only the most
transparent film of a civilized life.
As long as one remained on the surface one could manage one’s time
agreeably; and the refined, fastidious people who constituted
Melville’s social class were unaware of the fact that their provincial
shell was becoming more and more hollow, as the organism within it
died part by part and shrivelled up. The Erie Canal and the general
starvation and impoverishment of Europe after the Napoleonic wars would
draw vast masses of needy men across the Atlantic: the city itself
would lose its waterfronts and pleasances: the trees would make way for
cobblestones and hitching-posts: the area around its little villages
would be broken up into building lots, and it would have to convert its
Potter’s Fields into parks in order to recapture a little open space:
by 1835, dingy-looking tenements, newly built, and made-over “tenant
houses,” abandoned by the original merchants, would spread around and
engulf the neat provincial city. In the twenties, from the overcrowded
slums and the insanitary backyard wells, fever came forth, year after
year: a little later, a wave of cholera caused almost a general exodus.
Eventually, the noses of the respectable would detect the change and
tilt upward in pained appreciation of it; but that the ugliness and
misery and disease were in any way connected with the sources of their
incomes, they would of course indignantly have denied.
3
Allan Melville was not a rich man; but when Herman Melville was born,
on August 1, 1819, Allan Melville was doing well in a modest way: the
family lived at Number Six, Pearl Street, and Herman was the second son
and the third child of this agreeable union. When Herman was a year
old, Allan noted in a letter that he had hired a cook and a nurse, and
wanted only a waiter; and one may take for granted, I think, that such
a household already has its complement of maids, linen, silver, sherry,
port, brocades, and books.
To awake in a home surrounded by the decencies of life must mollify
an infant’s indignation at having to enter the world at all; and in
Herman Melville’s earliest years, nothing ever conveyed a sense of
danger or physical stress. In the even decorum of the days, meals ebbed
and flowed like the tides; the sheets were as white as the tops of
wind-whipt waves off the Battery; clothes sprang into existence out of
the sewing-room as naturally as feathers cover a robin’s back: little
boys had handkerchiefs to blow their noses in and pillows to cuddle
into when they fell asleep in their cribs; in the obscure world that
crowded around little Herman, there were convivial discussions between
his father and strange gentlemen in the library, when he might do no
more than linger in the shadows of the hall or hush his breath at a
crack in the partly opened door; there were visits to relatives and a
few select friends that were as sociable as a regimental inspection
in the army, when he might not get his pinafore mussed, nor bunk up
against the furniture, nor tease his older sister, nor rub shyly into
his mother’s neatly disposed dress, visits with every one sitting
upright, stiff, the spine imitating the rigid line of the chairs, just
blossoming “deportment.”
On the whole, in spite of its high-chokered formalities, it was a kind
world that Melville found himself in: shallow men are not obstacles
to little boys, and as for Mrs. Melville, she had all the affection
for her children that natural instinct and the graces of society
prompted her to have, not a great deal, one suspects, for children,
like servants, are only subordinate ministers to the ego--and one
cannot take pride in satisfying society’s minimal requirements. She
was, however, an intelligent and capable mother: all her eight children
grew to maturity, and that was no little feat, even for an upper-class
family, in the early nineteenth century. Herman must have been a little
starved of affection, I think; for in Pierre he gives his hero no
sisters or brothers, so that Pierre may absorb all his mother’s warmth
for himself; and his hungry claims for sympathy and caresses were no
doubt put off by Mrs. Melville’s aloof rectitude, her concern to keep
part of her energy and sweetness for her husband, and her manifest
partiality to the younger children, when they arrived. Herman stood as
in a cold room before an open fire: one side of him was toasted, and
another side was chilled. That chilliness remained; and in the parts
of his emotional frame that were affected, circulation was never quite
restored.
When Herman was five the family moved two miles uptown, to a house in
Bleecker Street which combined the advantages of town and country. It
was good for Herman that the change was made. He had been ill and had
not regained his health fully: he looked, his father reported then,
pale, thin, and dejected; but the new house had a vacant lot where
children could play; and not far away the farms began to stretch on
each side of the Albany turnpike: despite the activity of the City
Planning Commissioners in laying out rectangular blocks over the hills
and dales and streams and swamps and ponds of the island, the farms
themselves were retreating slowly. Life, for little Herman, was no
longer a matter of sitting and staring at the furniture: he went to
school: he found that c-a-t and d-o-g were a new way of playing with
a dog and a cat: when he was bored he could always practise tricks
on Gansevoort, who was older and more considerate and could not
legitimately hit back.
Still, Herman did not thrive quite as well as he should have. Winter
drew a black curtain between him and all the pleasant things one could
see or find or do in the country: darkness fell much too soon after
school: November’s rains confined him to the house and March’s snows
and slush did the same: as the winter progressed his cheeks would grow
paler and his small blue eyes more wan. His father shook his head
doubtfully and grieved over little Herman’s melancholy situation. As
a result of these stops and gaps in his life Herman “is backward in
speech and somewhat slow in comprehension, but”--so Allan reports to
the Albany Gansevoorts, when Herman in the summer of 1826 is sent
to them on a visit--“you will find him, as far as he understands
men and things, both solid and profound and of a docile and amiable
disposition.”
One is grateful to Allan for using such unusual words as “solid” and
“profound” to describe a child of six: there must have been something
in Herman’s attitude or attack that warranted them: one cannot
altogether lay those adjectives to pompous speech or parental pride.
Is one going back too far if one finds the beginnings of Melville’s
reflective turn in these juvenile illnesses and confinements? The
periods of solitude in bed, the lassitude of recovery, the slow,
patient hours undistracted by physical activity, the rehearsing in the
mind of things done and things seen--these limitations make content
and docile little boys. John Ruskin amused himself, in an enforced
confinement without toys, by tracing minutely the patterns of the
parlour carpet: in such dull, quiet states is the beginning of a
meditative life.
A year later Herman was sent to his Great Uncle Thomas Melville at
Broadhall, near Pittsfield. Uncle Peter, at Albany, was still something
of a countryman: Uncle Thomas was a different sort, more fine, more
polished, with a touch of the old beau about him perhaps and no little
of the courtliness of aristocratic Paris: he had brought home a French
wife, and the undercurrent of French between the old fellow and his
spouse, when Herman was present and not supposed to understand, must
have teased him like a glimpse of a foreign port. Uncle Thomas had
nothing of the boor about him; his manners were mild and kindly, “with
a faded brocade of old French breeding” and a certain daintiness of
gesture, as when he would drop his rake and pause for a pinch of snuff,
that brought the reminder of a society less angular and impetuous than
that which jostled little boys in the streets of Manhattan. It was a
little pathetic, too, to see this fine old gentleman handling a rake or
patiently feeding a cow: he was so manifestly cut out for more urbane
companionship.
In the galaxy of uncles and grandparents and aunts, the patrician
element was dominant: every one of them knew what it was to be well