Herman Melville
debilitation and infirmity.
The word insanity is far too loose to be used about Melville’s mental
illness, even during the limited period we are considering. At the very
end of his life, Melville wrote a passage about insanity in his novel,
Billy Budd, which puts the biographer’s difficulty in touching this
period with great point. “Who,” he asks, “in the rainbow can draw the
line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly,
we see the difference of the colours, but where exactly does the first
one visibly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In
pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some cases,
in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the line of
demarcation few will undertake, though for a fee some professional
experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some man will
undertake to do for pay. In other words, there are instances where it
is next to impossible to determine whether a man is sane, or beginning
to be otherwise.”
Melville realized from his own experience, perhaps, what few people
understood until Janet and Freud re-interpreted this whole series of
disorders, that the line between sanity and insanity is not a line at
all but a wide gradient band. Indeed, as early as 1849, in a letter to
Mr. Duyckinck written apropos the insanity of Charles Fenno Hoffman,
the first editor of The Literary World, Melville had said: “This going
mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who
feels his soul in him, which but few men do. For in all of us lodges
the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt,
momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains. What sort
of sensation permanent madness is may be very well imagined just as we
imagine how we felt when we were infants, though we cannot recall it.
In both conditions we are irresponsible and riot like gods without fear
of fate.”
3
The relationship between insanity and art has been the subject of
much discussion; and it is important, in appraising Melville’s life
and work during this period, that we should avoid the notion that
genius and insanity are one, or that the fantasies of the neurotic
are the equivalent of a work of art. The difference between insanity
and what we agree to call normal conduct is largely one of social
utilization: given a similar set of circumstances and stimuli, the
distinction between a neurotic reaction and a normal one consists
largely in the success a person has in conversion. Had Napoleon, for
example, merely dreamt about his conquests, magnifying them year by
year as his malady grew, he would have been quite properly confined
to an asylum, like so many other “emperors of the world,” as soon as
his patent conduct conflicted with other people’s activities. The fact
that his particular kind of paranoia was permitted at large was due to
his ability to convert it into the forms of contemporary social life,
politics and military activity, things which subjected his grandiose
dreams to the shock and jar of actuality. This conversion into art
signifies health and relative stability, whether the situation that
causes the conversion is morbid or not. Indeed, an effectual work
of art is not merely a counterpoise to psychal difficulties: it is
actually an indication that the artist, during the period of his
creation, has had full possession of himself. Insanity in many cases
befalls those who cannot make this transposition to art, and who,
through inexpertness or inarticulateness, produce therefore unusable
fantasies--fantasies that do not meet the impact of reality. There is
no mistaking the fantasy of the insane for the fantasy of the artist:
issuing from the same headwaters, perhaps, they empty into different
oceans. Had Melville remained mute during this period or had his work
fallen off we might suspect the worst: his superb craftsmanship, in
Bartleby, in The Encantadas, and in Benito Cereno, is, on the contrary,
an objective proof--and a reassuring one. The critics and historians
of literature who said that his work became “wilder and wilder and
more and more turgid in each successive book” after Moby-Dick were
either ignorant of his later work, or blind. Wildness and turgidity
are the precise opposite of the qualities one finds in these stories
and sketches, stories told with delicacy, with restraint, and with
great concentration. With the rumour of his insanity in mind, these
sympathetic scholars were quick to condemn Melville’s work. We may
confidently reverse their logic. With the achieved beauty of Melville’s
work before us, we can isolate and reduce the period of his mental
exacerbation.
Melville’s own blackness and spiritual desolation, his Timonism,
recalls that of Shakespeare himself, from whose play he had taken
the word. Their vision of life went through similar stages, and even
in their personal affairs some of the same anomalies arise, down to
the silent contempt with which Shakespeare apparently dismissed the
products of his imagination, not bothering to see that they reached
the world at all, still less that they did so in the exact form he
had conceived them. In both men, the feeling of a shattered faith and
despondency is expressed in the relationship of a young man, Hamlet
or Pierre, to a proud and worldly mother; in Pierre and Hamlet, an
unconscious incest-wish incapacitates the hero for marriage with the
girl he has wooed; and the final result is doubt and deepest anguish,
culminating in the death of all involved. Alienated from society, a
furious contempt for mankind arises in these writers: Shakespeare
carries this contempt into Lear and Timon of Athens, even as Melville
did into The Confidence Man: the contempt is mixed with impotence and
self-distrust, and the art itself is marred by an uncontrollable sense
of outrage: “In Timon,” as Dowden justly says, “we see one way in which
a man may make his response to the injuries of life; he may turn upon
the world in a fruitless and suicidal rage.” Finally, when each could
go no further without outward violence, he recoiled upon himself,
and each in a final work expressed a reconciliation, Shakespeare in
The Tempest, separating the base, in the form of Caliban, from the
spiritual, in the form of Ariel, under the double mastery of a science
and virtue embodied in Prospero--a resolution which, we shall come to
see, is not singularly different in meaning from Melville’s final work.
What caused this blackness in Shakespeare’s life, what brought him to
the crisis recorded in Timon, surely the worst of his plays, we can
only speculate upon: but in Melville’s life we are aware of tangible
reasons for his frustration, with roots that reach far back into
childhood, his disappointed youth, the hardships of early poverty and
defeated expectations, his unfortunate experiences on his first sailing
voyage, his perpetual feeling of being an Ishmael, through poverty
among the gentlefolk at Albany, through intellectual superiority among
his shipmates, through spiritual hardihood among his contemporaries
in letters, through social isolation in his own neighbourhood, where
people looked upon him as cousin german to the cannibals. Melville
had witnessed this same Timonism in Jackson, and his words remind us
that “there seemed more woe than wickedness about the man; and his
wickedness seemed to spring from his woe; and for all his hideousness,
there was that in his eye at times, that was ineffably pitiable and
touching; and though there were raw moments when I almost hated this
Jackson, yet I have pitied no man as I have pitied him.” Jackson would
enter into arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed,
nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for--and during the
period of his own Timonism, out of his abysmal woe, Melville felt and
wrote, at intervals, particularly in Pierre and in The Confidence Man,
the same way.
Of Melville’s blackness there is no doubt. That this blackness would
ordinarily have led to downright insanity there is little room for
doubt either. But, like Shakespeare and Goethe and many another artist,
Melville found a benign and not a baneful outlet for his energies; and
every evidence of Melville’s work points to the restoration of his
poise and health, intermittently, in the decade we are writing of, and
steadily in the years that followed.
4
Returning to 1853, the year that followed Pierre, we find Melville in
the midst of a series of disappointments: he was to learn the truth of
Hamlet’s observation: misfortunes come not singly but in battalions.
Melville sought for a consular appointment in the South Seas, a place
where he was fitted by experience and sympathy to perform a decent
service, and perhaps, with relief from financial strain, recover
a little that joy in the flesh which he had once known, and find
again in his bosom the radiance of the landscape itself. Melville
had no opportunity to try this remedy. In spite of Richard H. Dana’s
intercession, Chief Justice Shaw’s efforts, and Allan’s assiduous
canvassing, and Hawthorne’s friendly intercession, he did not get the
post, nor did he get a consulship at Antwerp, which for a moment seemed
possible. To make matters worse, Harper’s, his publishers, lost the
plates of his novels and almost all the copies of his books in a fire
that gutted out their quarters. If there was something prophetic in the
foundering of the whaler Ann Alexander, and the total disappearance
of the old Pequod itself, as Melville was finishing Moby-Dick, there
was something equally uncanny in this conflagration. The very elements
played against him, as they played against Ahab. His books were put
out again by Harper’s, but perfunctorily: they had lost their original
momentum. None of Melville’s subsequent books was to meet such eager
acceptance.
Another sign of Melville’s weakened health and lessened energies is
the fact that during 1853 his entire writing seems to have consisted
only of two short stories, Cock-a-Doodle-Do and Bartleby the Scrivener,
both published in magazines towards the end of the year. Melville was
not at home in the narrow confines of the short story: he had scarcely
time to get under way before he was back again in port. The result is
that the best of his short stories are really short novels, while the
lesser ones, like The Lightning Rod Man, are little more than mediocre
anecdotes. I and My Chimney, The Appletree Table, The Paradise of
Bachelors, The Tartarus of Maids, are more in the nature of discursive
essays, “in character,” than they are of tales: Melville was at his
weakest in deliberately symbolic tales, like Cock-a-Doodle-Do and The
Bell-Tower; indeed, the latter might be slipped into one of Hawthorne’s
volumes, without apology, as a minor work of his youth. When in 1852
Melville equably handed to Hawthorne the circumstances of a story he
had gathered from a lawyer in New Bedford, he was so conscious of
treading on the master’s ground that he relinquished his own right to
exploit this particular plot. But except for the original impulse, his
best stories owe nothing to Hawthorne: Melville’s symbolism is more
delicately and carefully concealed; and his moral, like Shakespeare’s,
rests in the demonstration, not in the conclusion.
Bartleby the Scrivener is one of Melville’s longer stories; and it
gains much by its juxtaposition of incongruous personalities. The
story is told by a comfortable, pursy old lawyer, with an office in
Wall Street; the lawyer and his copyists are hit off with a warm
sense of caricature. Into this office comes a pale, bleak creature,
Bartleby, to serve as a scrivener. He is quiet and industrious; but he
refuses to comply with the routine of the office: he will not compare