Herman Melville
lassitude; and instead of tanned cheeks and hard muscles, pallor and
debility.
In any appraisal of his condition and his fate, this new element of
physical weakness must play a part; for Melville, like Whitman, wrote
out of his health, and just as the paralysis of Whitman, after the
Civil War, resulted in the diminishment of his writing, and a certain
curtailment of his creative effort, without any sign of mental decay,
so Melville was deprived of his immense physical buoyancy and power.
That power had counted for much in his own work. “Real strength,” he
wrote in Moby-Dick, “never impairs beauty or harmony, but often bestows
it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do
with magic.... As devout Eckermann lifted the linen sheet away from the
naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed by the massive chest of the
man, that seemed a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God
the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever
they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled,
hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most
successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute are they of all
brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative feminine
ones of submission and endurance....” Melville did not easily submit
and endure; but without health he was a shorn giant. His shortened
breath would not sustain the long periods of Moby-Dick, nor would his
frame suffer that “downright infatuation, and no less [which is] both
unavoidable and indispensable in any great deep book, or even any
wholly unsuccessful attempt at a great deep book.”
Such an explanation is sound as far as it goes; but one must not
ignore the psychological accompaniments of this debility, or all the
spiritual obstacles that burked Melville and made him doubly anxious,
strained, desperate. Chief among the external obstacles was the chorus
of disapproval that had greeted Moby-Dick and grew louder and more
universal with Pierre. One London paper denounced it as an “unhealthy,
mystic romance,” the Literary World called it “an eccentricity of the
imagination,” and Fitz-James O’Brien, writing in Putnam’s Monthly in
February, 1853, fresh from a bout with Pierre, described it in the
following terms: “Thought staggers through each page like one poisoned.
Language is drunken and reeling.... Let Mr. Melville stay his step
in time. He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his
hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached
to it.”
The worst of it was that the critics were not altogether wrong in their
judgment of Pierre alone: what was at fault was their failure to see
that the author of Moby-Dick could not be scolded like a child who had
mixed up his declensions: he was entitled to the critic’s most patient,
sympathetic understanding. To pretend that such a mistake might forfeit
Melville’s whole claim to recognition showed that neither O’Brien nor
any one else at the time realized what a strong claim Melville had, or
what a profound mark he had made on the literature of the world. I have
looked in vain through the collected works and biographies of Emerson,
Whitman, Thoreau, Lowell, Holmes, and even Conway and Sanborn, to see
if these writers recognized a fellow in Melville, as Emerson had so
generously done with Whitman: but except for a brief note on Omoo by
Whitman, written in his Brooklyn Eagle days, and a comment in a chance
letter by Lowell--exaggerated praise followed by complete indifference
to Melville’s worth--there is no sign that the contemporaries he might
have respected even knew of his existence.
Melville stood alone, alone in a desert. “Who shall tell all the
thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room,
when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and profounder he
should grow, the more and more he lessened his chances for bread;
that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall on
some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at longest,
then could he reasonably hope for appreciation and cash. But the
devouring profundities now opened upon him, consuming all his vigor;
would he, he could not now be entertainingly and profitably shallow
in some pellucid and merry romance.” This conviction, borne in on
him perhaps while writing Moby-Dick, now haunted him when Pierre met
its disastrous reception. “The brightest success,” he says again in
Pierre, “now seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that
the brightest success could not be the sole offspring of Merit, but of
Merit for the one-thousandth part, and nine-hundred and ninety-nine
combining and dovetailing accidents for the rest.... So beforehand he
felt the unrevealable sting of receiving either plaudits or censures,
equally unsought for, and equally loathed ere given. So, beforehand,
he felt the pyramidical scorn of the genuine loftiness for the whole
infinitesimal company of critics.... In that lonely little closet of
his, Pierre foretasted all that this world hath either of praise or
dispraise; and thus foretasting both goblets, anticipatingly hurled
them both in its teeth. All panegyric, all denunciation, all criticism
of any sort would come too late for Pierre.”
Needless to say, Melville’s pyramidical scorn did not disarm the
critics, nor did it, one suspects, counteract the effect of the
salt that they poured, with such fine antiseptic intentions, into
his wounds. He was greeted with the embarrassed shamefulness which
sometimes appears upon the faces of sophisticated people when a fresh
young girl confesses impulses or desires that her elders are forever
discreetly hiding. Melville had revealed too much. His contemporaries,
with a feeling of guilty repression, denied that any one had the right
to take off his clothes, and they equally denied that such harassed,
crippled souls could be found beneath the shapely costumes provided
by society. Nervous, these respectable people will be on the watch
for any similar performance; more than that, they will read back into
Melville’s earlier books the same dangerous, unhealthy innocence and
exposure.
One and all, the critics agreed with an English writer whose diatribe
on the American psychological writers was reprinted, somewhat
pointedly, in the Literary World for August 28, 1852. “It is a
melancholy sign for the prospects of a rising American literature
that some of its most hopeful professors should have, in recent works
of fiction, been evidently laying themselves out for that species of
subtle psychological romance, first introduced to the reading world
by such authors as Balzac and Sand.... To pass from Scott and Dickens
to Sand and Balzac is like giving up the smiling landscape glowing in
its freshness and beauty, for the loathly atmosphere, the wretched
sights and smells of a dissecting room, or abandoning the busy street
or the pleasant social circle for charnels and catacombs. And yet
this is what Young America seems bent upon. Instead of sketching the
really representative men of their country--instead of conveying to us
on this side of the Atlantic a true idea of American society--society
in the great seaboard city or in the far west settlement--instead of
presenting us with stories racy of the soil and instinct with its
vigorous and aggressive theories, the misguided party in question
selects some half dozen morbid phases of mind, brings before us some
three or four intellectual cripples or moral monsters ... and instead
of laying before us a wholesome story of natural character and motive,
he lets us into the secret turns and tidings of unhealthy and abnormal
mental power and promptings.”
No one saw even dimly then that these psychological novels and short
stories, William Wilson, The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet
Letter, Pierre, were signs of the broken American psyche, alienated by
its removal from the solid tissue of Europe, and seeking, by further
analysis, to establish a more primitive and elementary state, from
which a new integration, more satisfactory and complete, could emerge.
These relentless psychologists were far more deeply immersed in the
American scene than any of the writers who succeeded them in the next
generation, however closely Bret Harte and Howells and Mark Twain met
the English prescription for natural character and robust health.
If anything could have infuriated Melville, it must have been the
suggestion that he could write in another fashion than he had done: “In
tremendous extremes,” he said in Pierre, “human souls are like drowning
men: well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know
the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea and these
drowning men do drown.”
Baffled by his dilemmas, rebuffed by his contemporaries, harassed
by financial anxiety, curbed by ill health, kept from the solace of
reading by poor eyesight, made doubly desperate by the cold mysteries
he had explored--what was there to sustain Herman Melville and bring
him back to health? The divided tenderness of a wife who was still
bearing children, or the obtuse concern of a mother, a sister, or
brother--so far from relieving him, these things only quickened his
exasperation and his sense of helplessness.
When harassed by external circumstances, one wants to attack the
universe: but, like Ahab, one finds that the universe will not get in
one’s way: so one takes revenge on the first creature that crosses
one’s path. Too likely it will be a creature one holds dear: the
animus is not directed against that one, but it strikes as if it were.
An explosion: a blow: a raised hand: an uncontrollable outburst of
vituperation--then drink, remorse, repentance, the ugly vanity of it
all. The universe is unharmed; one’s own condition is unimproved: there
is just one more blight to stand in the way of amelioration. Whatever
the outward events that mark Melville’s passage through these frantic
waters, there is no doubt of his inward state. In a word he himself
coined for Pierre, he became Timonized. In that awful solitude within,
the very touch of his fellow creatures became defilement. “He could
not bring himself to confront any face or house; a plowed field, any
sign of tillage, the rotted stump of a long-felled pine, the slightest
passing trace of man was uncongenial and repelling to him. Likewise,
in his own mind all remembrances and imaginings, that had to do with
the common and general humanity had become, for the first time, in the
most singular manner distasteful to him. Still, while thus loathing
all that was common in the two different worlds--that without and that
within--nevertheless, even in the most withdrawn and subtlest region
of his own essential spirit, Pierre could not now find one single
agreeable twig of thought whereon to perch his weary soul.”
There was Melville’s own state, I believe, during and after the
writing of Pierre, in its uttermost anguish and desolation. His
family became apprehensive: his friends dropped away from him, first
Hawthorne, then the Duyckincks: and in his sensitive condition, small
indifferences became signs of enmity, heartlessness, and alienation.
In doubling this inner Cape Horn, Herman Melville may have skirted
the jagged rocks of an even deeper disruption: there were moments,
perhaps days and months, between 1852 and 1858 when the outcome of his
physical and mental condition may well have been in doubt. But with
utmost allowance for the horror and collapse of his illness, it was
of limited duration, and it could not have been a continuous state,
since, throughout this period, he continued to write, to write with
clarity, with distinction, and without a visible touch of disorder.
Not the least of his literary achievements date from these years of