Herman Melville
greatest and purest written thoughts. Like knavish cards, the leaves
of all great books were covertly packed.” Melville did his best to
avoid playing a foul hand: he dealt his cards as they slipped from the
fingers of Fate, Chance, Necessity, Truth; and in this grave honesty
of his the greatest of thinkers seemed little better than fictioneers.
“Plato, Spinoza, and Goethe, and many more belong to this guild of
self-impostors, with a preposterous rabble of muggletonian Scots and
Yankees whose vile brogue still the more bestreaks the stripedness
of their Greek or German Neoplatonic originals.” Not exactly a kind
criticism; but, in Melville’s exacerbated state, he went even further:
not merely did the “compensationists” or the “optimists” seem shallow:
literature itself was a hollow business, too. The ultimate, the
final truth was inexpressible, and even the mere hinting of it was
inadequate: the intensest light of reason did not shed such blazonings
upon the deeper truths in man as the profoundest gloom. Utter darkness
is the wise man’s light; silence his highest utterance. Catlike,
one sees in the dark distinctly objects that are erased by blatant
sunshine; indeed, one calls to one’s aid senses and instincts that are
dormant when one can move and see. “Not to know Gloom and Grief,” said
Melville, in the midst of this illumination, “is not to know aught that
an heroic man should learn.”
But if the gold of the transcendentalists was pewter and brass,
Melville was equally honest about his own treasures. “By vast pains
we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gaspings we come to the central
room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid--and
nobody is there!--appallingly vacant, as vast as the soul of man.”
One threw away literature and philosophy, yes, language itself, only
to find oneself without visible support. One eliminated not merely the
debris and muck: one got rid of the miner, and the very purpose of his
occupation. “In those hyperborean regions to which enthusiastic Truth
and Earnestness and Independence will invariably lead a mind fitted
by nature for profound and fearless thoughts all objects are seen in
a dubious uncertain and refracting light. Viewed through the rarefied
atmosphere, the most immemorially admitted maxims of men begin to slide
and fluctuate and finally become wholly inverted.... But the example
of many minds forever lost, like undiscoverable Arctic explorers,
amid those treacherous regions, warns us entirely away from them and
we learn that it is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far,
since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind,
for, arrived at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points, there,
the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike.”
Within the heap of fragments in Pierre that mark the thrust and power
of Melville’s mind, there is one fragment, fallen at random in the
mass, that remains embedded in the memory. It is the message of the
pamphlet that comes by accident into Pierre’s hand when he is making
his escape to New York: in his overwrought state, the words have a
peculiar significance for his own purposes; and they are remarkable
enough, in their enigmatic quality, to consider by themselves. The
title of the pamphlet is Chronometricals and Horologicals: in it the
fictitious lecturer purports to set forth his own heretical philosophy.
The moral is embroidered in a single trope: the notion that there are
two kinds of time in the world, that which is established at Greenwich
and kept by chronometers, and that which prevails in other longitudes,
recorded by the local watches. It is a parallel of the philosophic and
practical aspects of life, or rather, of ideal and working morality;
and I know no better exposure of the identity, yet dualism, of thought
and action, ideal and practice.
The philosophic or religious minds are always correcting their watches
by Greenwich time; and, by continuous observation of the heavens, they
are always trying to make Greenwich time itself more correct. They know
that the compromises and conveniences of society are useful: but they
also know that these things have no ultimate reason for existence, and
that one’s employment of them must always be modified by reference
to a scale of values alongside which they are false or meaningless.
Shallow people never make such a correction: they believe in “dress”
or “family” or “prestige” or “success” as if these were the vestments
of eternity. Melville’s error, at least Pierre’s error, was just the
opposite of this: he did not see that watches and local time are
necessary, too, that there is no truth so cruelly meaningless as to
give a person Greenwich time without telling him his longitude and
enabling him to make his correction: that way lies disaster, confusion,
shipwreck. A belief in ideal standards and values with no _via media_
is scarcely better than a superficial life with no standards or
insights at all.
The passage from the universal perception to the common life is
difficult to make: it is the point at which religions and philosophies
perpetually flounder. Melville saw this paradox; and he was plagued
and puzzled by it; he even attributes it to Plotinus Plinlimmon, the
leader of the transcendentalist sect, who drinks wine he forbids to
his disciples, and, following supernal ideas, seems to prize cigars
and food far more; Plinlimmon, whose non-benevolent stare seems to
tell Pierre that all that he does is done in vain; Plinlimmon, the
very embodiment of these ambiguities. Melville tended, with Pierre, to
regard horologicals as a dubious frailty instead of what it actually
is--the way that Greenwich time is universalized and incorporated in
local practice. Human ideals are, as Melville saw, like the points of
the compass: one does not seek the north by going northward: one seeks
to reach a humanly important part of the earth, like Pekin or Paris;
and ideals are the means by which a life that more fully satisfies our
human potentialities can be lived. To observe this paradox without
falling into the rôle of Mr. Worldly Wiseman is the essence of an
active morality. Melville confronted the paradox; but the point of it
eluded him. He idealized ideals as he idealized sexual passion: he
wished both to remain for him in that adolescent state in which they
are pure, remote, untouchable--forgetting that life is impossible in
that sterile and clarified medium. Though Melville had anatomized many
human impulses and probed in many sore and hidden places, one part
of the personality remained sacred to him in Pierre: the sanctum of
adolescence. All the values in the book are distorted, its very purpose
is deflected, by Melville’s unconscious assumption that the romantic
purity of adolescence, the purity that arises not through experience
and fulfilment, that is, through continuous purification, but through
an ignorance and stagnation within sealed vials--that this purity is
central to all the other values. That chronometer was correct enough
at nineteen: at thirty-three it was no longer accurate, for a single
reason--it had stopped. That, we shall see, was the chief ambiguity of
Melville’s personal life.
Melville was not alone in parading these fundamental ambiguities.
In the dissociation of society in America, the American writer was
able to examine all the premises and established truths which a
European ordinarily takes so much for granted that he is not aware of
taking them at all; and he could separate the essence of our human
institutions from their conventional overlayers. Emerson, in Uriel,
gives pithy expression to the same insidious ideas one finds in
Pierre: but in Melville’s novel they are on every page. His mother’s
love for her son is self-love and her admiration for him is vanity.
His father’s rectitude leads to a cold marriage, where an unclerked
love had shown him a little radiant and a little finer at the core.
Pierre’s purest love is a disguised incest; his nobility is a worldly
crime--while a lack of generous impulses would have led to wealth
and honour. Melville’s whole life, indeed, had taught him these
ambiguities: Jack Chase was the real captain of the ship, not Captain
Claret: the surgeon who amputated a living man, Surgeon Cuticle, with
his glass eye, his false teeth, his wig, was more dead than the flesh
he carved into: the cannibals of the South Seas were civilized, and the
civilization of the New York slums was lower than cannibal gluttony:
the missionary of Christ inflicted servitude, and the chief goods
introduced by the trader were diseases: finally, the one civilization
which thoroughly disregards the precepts of Christian morality is that
of the Western world, which professes it.
These paradoxes were disturbing enough; but the fundamental ones were
even worse. “The uttermost ideal of moral perfection in man is wide
of the mark. The demi-gods trample on trash, and Virtue and Vice
are trash!” Vice might lead to virtue; virtue might beget vice: the
prostitute may teach purity and the holy man blasphemy! Where is one
left when Melville and Emerson are through? One is left amid a debris
of institutions and habits. Nothing is safe; nothing is secure: one no
longer looks for the outer label, or believes in it. If north be the
direction of one’s ideal, the virtuous captain may have to tack back
and forth from east to west in order to reach that destination: for
no chart or compass ever enabled a ship to steer blindly for its port
without paying close attention to wind and weather.
Had Pierre, as an imaginative work, been a more sufficient
demonstration of these ambiguities, the book would have had a high
destiny. But although the ideas are clear enough, they remain a
potentiality in Pierre, since the story itself lacks integrity of form.
The book is a precious crystal smashed out of its natural geometrical
shape. Only by a chemical analysis of its elements do we discover what
its primal character might have been.
7
The failure of Pierre as a work of art gives us a certain licence to
deal with it as biography, all the more because Melville identified
himself with the hero, giving him the initials and the Christian
name of his beloved grandfather, Peter Gansevoort, and attaching
him to objects like the portrait of his father which correspond to
things about whose existence there is no doubt. If, as a work of art,
Pierre was whole, we should have no good reason to suspect Melville’s
wholeness. It is the failure of Pierre as literature that draws our
attention to Melville’s predicament as a man; for in this particular
way, he had not erred before. The young Melville who wrote Typee is not
in Pierre; instead, a much younger self is there, a self erotically
immature, expressing itself in unconscious incest fantasies, and
capable of extravagant rationalizations in its effort to sustain them.
Pierre is not a demonstration because it is a betrayal--and the person
it betrays is Melville. In Pierre, he was an Iago, driven by his own
frustration to betray the Othello who had been such a valiant captain
in all his previous battles.
The significant question for us is what event, or series of
occurrences, caused a hiatus in Melville’s emotional and sexual
development; and this question cannot be lightly answered by pointing
to the obvious symbols in Pierre--for a symbol describes a tendency,
rather than an objective event. We know that Melville’s earliest
associations of sex had been with vice and sexual disease; and in a
sensitive lad, this introduction to passion may place bit and bridle on
his own development. We know, too, that sexual relations in the United
States among respectable people in the fifties were in a starved and
stunted state: Stanley Hall, a boy in this very decade, recalled that