Herman Melville
he had never witnessed the slightest passage of affection between his
father and his mother. It may be that Elizabeth, patient as a wife,
was timid and irresponsive as a lover: in short, there are a dozen
possible circumstances occurring long after childhood, which may have
contributed to Melville’s regression: and the incest-attachment, so far
from being the cause of this, may in Pierre only serve as its emotional
equivalent. Wherever sex is mentioned in other passages in Melville’s
books, it is referred to in a mood of disillusion. In Clarel, for
example, he says:
May love’s nice balance, finely slight,
Take tremor from fulfilled delight?
Can nature such a doom dispense
As, after ardor’s tender glow,
To make the rapture more than pall
With evil secrets in the sense,
And guile whose bud is innocence--
Sweet blossom of the flower of gall?
And in one of the few passages in Moby-Dick where sex is referred to,
the Sicilian sailor implies that sexual joy is in swayings, touchings,
cozenings, and that when one tastes it directly, satiety comes. That,
I submit, is not the experience of a healthy and well-mated man, or of
a mature erotic state: to long for the pre-nuptial condition, to wish
for fixation in courtship, is the mark of an immature, or at least an
incomplete, attachment.
When one says that Melville longed for the pre-nuptial state one
does not merely imply that he found his sexual relations difficult
or unsatisfactory: this earlier condition meant something more: it
meant irresponsibility, freedom to roam, carelessness about health
and daily bread, the opportunity to do his work without foreboding
and anxiety. Sex had brought disillusion not merely because the first
ardour and glow had vanished suddenly with the first physical contact:
it had increased all his burdens and threatened to curtail that inner
development which he had come to prize above all things--even more
than the robust outer experience that had produced Typee. Sex meant
marriage; marriage meant a household and a tired wife and children
and debts. No wonder he retreated: no wonder his fantasy attached him
to a mother who could not surrender, to a half-sister who could not
bear children! The ardent impulse remained; he sought only to make it
innocuous to his own spiritual life.
In view of the terrific pressure upon Melville, one can sympathize
with his retreat; but one sees that, so far from aiding his spiritual
development, it halted a good part of it at a critical point: for he
did not carry over into his thought and his work the experiences of
a husband and a father and a happy lover. He does not speak about
these experiences as a mature man: he speaks as an adolescent. At this
point, his self did not grow and expand; rather, it became ingrown
and withdrawn; and the symbol of incest is perhaps the symbol of
this shrinkage, this defeat, and the ultimate blackness of mood that
resulted from it. He associated his career with the deep well of
adolescent purity, instead of with the running stream of maturity,
turbid perhaps, but open to the sunlight, and swift. Doing so, he
blocked his own development instead of releasing it: towards later
experience he said No: No: and again No. For almost a decade after
this, Melville’s principal characters are tired, defeated, harassed,
tormented, lonely men; and to the end of his days children, the
last symbol of maturity, do not, directly or indirectly, enter his
imaginative life.
So closely were Melville’s sexual impulses and his intellectual career
bound up that I am tempted to reverse the more obvious analysis of
Pierre, and to see in its sexual symbols the unconscious revelation of
his dilemmas as a writer. Lucy, then, may signify the naïve writings
of his youth, which promised him happiness, and Isabel, the mysterious
child of a foreign mother, lost in an obscure youth, may stand for
that darker consciousness in himself that goads him to all his most
heroic efforts, that goads him and baffles him, leaving him balked
and sterile, incapable of going further in literature, and yet unable
to retreat to the older and safer relations with Lucy--the Lucy of
Typee and Omoo. We must recall that in writing Moby-Dick Melville had
premonitions of his own final flowering and of his sudden falling into
mould; and if this prospect haunted him, the relationship with Isabel
would be a perfect symbol of it, since it showed him making an effort
to go on with his literary career, living under the form of marriage
with Isabel, but unable, through the very nature of their relationship,
to enjoy the fruits of marriage. In spite of his confidence in
Moby-Dick, a doubt might still lurk: suppose Isabel were an impostor!
He had given up everything for her: he had abandoned the prospects
of a happy literary career, such a career as his family, Elizabeth’s
family, all his friends and relatives, and the reviewers and society
generally would approve of--abandoned it for a mad, chivalrous espousal
of his inner life. He had defied the world for this dark mysterious
girl; and what she was ready to give him in return the world regarded
as an abominable sin. Very well: so much the worse for virtue, if
virtue meant Mrs. Glendinning’s pride or Lucy’s lovely shallowness.
Melville was not without hopes that success might join the unsanctified
household, that Lucy and Isabel might live side by side; but when the
reviewers told him, upon his publishing Mardi and Moby-Dick, that he
had espoused a girl of the streets and seduced a virtuous maiden,
he saw that there was no way out, except to shoot them and take the
consequences.
Pierre itself, then, was a blow, aimed at his family with their cold
pride, and at the critics, with their low standards, their failure to
see where Melville’s true vocation lay, and their hearty recommendation
of “virtuous” courses that promised so little. Melville anticipated
defeat: Lucy dies of shock, and Pierre and Isabel make away with
themselves by poison; for he saw no way to go on with his deepest
self, and still continue obedient to the conventions of society and
the responsibilities of a married man. His failure to mature with his
actual marriage contributed, I think, to his failure to go further with
his spiritual union; but how much it contributed, and by what means the
injury was done, we can still only speculate. There is no doubt about
the final result. The mood of Pierre, the work of art, became the mood
of Herman Melville, the man, for almost a decade. Before another year
was over, he recovered his grip in writing, and his art became whole
and sufficient once more: but his life suffered, and his vision as a
whole suffered: Pierre disclosed a lesion that never entirely healed.
CHAPTER NINE: TIMONISM
We now draw near the Cape Horn of Melville’s life; and I would remind
the reader of Melville’s own prophetic words in White-Jacket: “Sailor
or landsman, there is some sort of Cape Horn for all. Boys! beware of
it; prepare for it in time. Graybeards! thank God it is passed. And
ye lucky livers, to whom, by some rare fatality, your Cape Horns are
as placid as Lake Lemans, flatter not yourselves that good luck is
judgment and discretion; for all the yolk in your eggs, you might have
foundered and gone down had the Spirit of the Cape said the word.”
The evidence for this part of Melville’s history is incomplete and
ambiguous: the testimony of his contemporaries is obscure, and what
has been handed on to living people has been stated in a fragmentary
way by witnesses whose limitations of knowledge and whose emotional
bias vitiate their judgment, and rob their testimony of any pretence
of impartiality. I do not overlook the value of family tradition in
dealing with this part of Melville’s life; but I prefer to use it as
I shall use Melville’s own expression in literature, not as recording
objective events, but as indicating a certain tendency and direction.
The witness of Melville’s own literary works is far more objective
evidence than more personal stories which can neither be substantiated
nor refuted. “The data which life furnishes towards a true estimate of
any being,” Melville himself reminds us, “are as insufficient to that
end as in geometry one side given would be to determine a triangle.”
During this period the nearest one can come to truth is by avoiding the
grosser forms of error.
The last forty years of Melville’s life have been thoroughly
misinterpreted, for the reason that after Moby-Dick Melville ceased
to be a popular author. This period has been referred to as the long
quietus, and even such a just critic as Mr. Percy Boynton could say:
“Pierre was Melville’s last real and audible word, and even Pierre was
an epilogue.” Such a complete halt in a writer’s life would indeed give
reason for grave suspicions; and popular rumour has filled up this
dismal gap with tales of Melville’s insanity. That there is a spark
of fact beneath this suffocating cloud of conjecture, I am prepared
to show: but the spark was magnified into a bonfire by Melville’s own
contemporaries, absurdly, maliciously enlarged; and later critics have
even been obtuse enough to read back into Mardi the signs of Melville’s
mental disruption. As a matter of fact, Melville’s silence was a very
audible one; and what is usually looked upon as the dark period of his
intellectual quietus is in fact the bleak period of his contemporaries’
neglect. One cannot call silence the reduced but steady output of short
stories, novels, poems, which marked the next forty years of Melville’s
life.
2
Let us separate the romantic overlay of rumour from the actual facts,
and see what is left of the silence and the mystery. The first tangible
bit of testimony as to Herman Melville’s condition in the year that
followed the publication of Pierre is a note that Elizabeth Melville
left in her annotation of his papers: “We all felt anxious about the
strain on his health in the spring of 1853.” By now the direct cause of
this strain should be fairly plain: Melville had exhausted himself in
writing Moby-Dick, and without waiting to recuperate, he had embarked
upon another long work: the effort of writing two such books in two
successive years was a terrific one. In Pierre, Melville has left
more than one picture of his condition. Pierre, writing of his own
hero-author, Vivia, says: “Cast the eye in there on Vivia; tell me
why those four limbs should be clapt in a dismal jail,--day out, day
in--week out, week in--month out, month in--and himself a voluntary
jailer! Is this the end of philosophy? This the larger and spiritual
life? This your boasted empyrean? Is it for this man should grow wise,
and leave off his most excellent and calumniated folly?”
When one pushes the organism so hard, all its latent weaknesses tend
to come out. Presently, the long and terrible exposure he had suffered
rounding the Horn on his return from the South Seas, came back to
exact its physical penalty. As early as 1849, Melville alluded to that
experience and its aftermath; and in 1855 he suffered a severe attack
of rheumatism, and in June an attack of sciatica. Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes attended him, and it is a pity that he did not leave a record
of the case: one could have spared a few autocratic conversations for
this precious evidence. These attacks continued to undermine Melville:
in 1858, he was laid up with a severe attack of “crick in the back” at
his mother’s home in Gansevoort. It is difficult, of course, to draw a
line between the physical and the psychical aspects of an organism; but
the tangible evidence of a drain on Melville’s strength is sufficient
to justify us in calling these disabilities primarily physical ones.
His perfect health deserted him. He was to know pain, confinement,