Herman Melville
bred and cultivated in the arts and able to command men. There was
Grandfather Thomas at Boston, he whom Oliver Wendell Holmes poked a
little fun at in the trivial piece of verse called The Last Leaf: he
had been a major, too: he had fought well in the Revolution, too:
a dried-apple sort of man who had lost his juices and perhaps his
sweetness: let the times change as they would, he kept his shape, and
to define it, he wore cocked hat and knee-breeches up to the day of his
death: the eighteenth century was good enough for him. Then there was
Uncle John de Wulf, who dropped in miraculously one day to see Herman’s
father: an old man with hair as white as the pin-feathers on a swan’s
breast, and face as red as a cranberry: he used to sail to a place
called Archangel, and, more marvellous still, he had crossed Russia
with Captain Langsdorff, starting from the Sea of Okhotsk in Asia and
going to St. Petersburg, drawn by large dogs in a sled. What a hearty
old fellow he was! His clothes almost had the smell of the far-off
places he had visited. Ever memorable was that June day when his father
and Uncle John took Herman over to Staten Island, and they explored the
ruin of a fort that had been hastily erected by Governor Tompkins to
defend the city against the British in 1812. Uncle John was a mystery:
the crumbling walls of the fort were a mystery: but the sky above was
as blue and benign as the blue eyes of Herman’s mother, and in the
still air of noon, there was no sound but the twitter of birds, and a
great shout of delight and happiness in the little boy’s heart.
But Manhattan was always full of mysterious strangers and sunburnt
men with a rolling walk and a sea-bag or a chest jauntily carried on
one shoulder. New York did this for Herman Melville: it taught him to
be discontented with New York. There was Liverpool: there was London,
Havre, Paris. The trim little packets down at the docks went back and
forth between Liverpool and New York as regularly as clockwork, or very
nearly: the swift ones could make the journey, with a little luck, in
fifteen or sixteen days, and the best record for a sailing vessel was
considerably under this: they took away wheat and furs and passengers,
and they brought back cloth from the Midlands and carpets from Brussels
and gloves from Paris and knives from Sheffield and cheap gewgaws from
Birmingham and china from Burslem, or even from China itself--and more
passengers. One simply could not forget the wideness of the world in
this wide harbour, edged with green banks and feathery trees. Even some
of the furniture in the house had been made in Europe: Herman looked at
it again and again, wondering where the mahogany grew and whether the
workmen who made the furniture were still alive, and what they might
be doing with themselves now. His papa had been a great traveller; in
a score of years, as he methodically noted down, he had travelled “by
land 24,425 miles, by water 48,460 miles” and had been 643 days at sea;
and once Allan had lived two whole years in Paris. Every stone, every
mast, every stick of furniture, every print had a message for Herman:
Travel!
How the books and prints Allan had brought home fomented Herman’s
dreams! There were prints of French men-of-war, of French fishing
boats, with “high French-like land in one corner and a gray lighthouse
surmounting it. The waves were toasted brown and the whole picture
looked mellow and old. Perhaps a piece of it would taste good.” On
Saturdays, when school didn’t keep, and the rain imprisoned the
children in the house, Augusta and Gansevoort would take out a
French portfolio of coloured prints. More romance! Versailles: grand
drawing-rooms: fountains where writhing Tritons spouted gleefully:
rural scenes: shepherd boys and cottages: above all, there was a
picture of a great whale, as big as a ship, stuck full of harpoons,
and three boats sailing after it as fast as they could fly. Then, too,
there was a tall brown bookcase in the hall; behind its glass doors
one might see long rows of old books that had been printed in Paris
and London and Leipsic. There was the Spectator in six volumes with
“London” on the title page: there was a copy of D’Alembert in the
language Uncle Thomas used to speak to Tante Marie.
Some day Herman would grow up too: he would see the world and have
stories to tell about it: he would confront these marvellous pictures
and find out how real they were. How snug Herman felt on a winter
evening by the old sea-coal fire in Bleecker Street, when his father
would tell the children of monstrous waves at sea, waves mountain-high
and masts bending like twigs. Herman’s stomach curdled pleasantly
at the thought of it, or the equally dizzy but in some ways more
marvellous thought of looking over London from the ball of St. Paul’s,
and picking out the Monument and London Bridge and Blackfriars and
St. Dunstan’s crown, and Southwark, where Shakespeare used to act,
across the Thames. One would risk waves as high as mountains if one
had some assurance of reaching eventually this fine old land, full
of cathedrals and churches that were built before Columbus sailed to
America, and narrow, crooked streets without sidewalks, and fields and
woods that were as tidy as an American garden. That would be Albany or
Gansevoort, prodigiously magnified by age and association. How hard
to remember that little boys went to school in Europe, too, and were
punished if they didn’t learn their lessons. Did they study geography,
grammar, writing, speaking, and spelling there? Did they wear their
shirt collars turned over and tied with a black ribbon; and did their
papas allow them to wear boots, nice manly boots, instead of shoes? A
long breath; a sense of choking anticipation. The days pass so slowly.
Herman will be quite old--he may be twenty or twenty-five at this rate,
before he goes there!
4
In 1828 Allan’s position in society ballooned a little. He moved to
a house on Broadway, with a lot two hundred feet deep, and doubtless
more commodious rooms, for the rent was almost double that of his
old quarters; but whether he was losing hold of his prudence or
miscalculating, or whether circumstances that lay beyond his view were
altering his position as an importer, one does not quite know. It is
possible that, without being fully aware of his losses, he was shaken
by the financial crisis of 1826, or it may be that his importations
became inept, and the old lines were giving out. At all events, his
business became so bad that he moved to Albany in 1830, so that,
perhaps, he might take advantage of the Gansevoort connections. But he
moved too late. He became a bankrupt. In 1832, when Herman Melville was
only thirteen years old, his father gave up the struggle and died.
One suspects from the look of Allan’s portrait that he was a
fair-weather sailor and did not know what to do when the winds began
to blow adversely. He left his loving wife with eight children, and
only the family name to support them. No thanks to Allan that part
of the family name was Gansevoort; but although that name certainly
was an asset, and although Uncle Peter and his wife doubtless did all
that they felt was in their power to make things easier for the proud
widow and her orphans, the morals of bourgeois society are meant, like
Allan’s character, for smooth sailing, and when hardship overtakes
one branch of the family there is usually no such general sharing
round among the surviving groups as there is among the poor, who know
shipwreck perpetually. Herman was going to the Albany Academy when his
father died; he probably knew only by hints and murmurs and brooding
faces that a calamity was approaching--and he suddenly found himself a
half-orphan, with only the dear mild image of his father to comfort him.
This death before Herman had reached intellectual penetration did Allan
a kindness: he became “a shrine in the fresh-foliaged heart of [his
son] up to which he ascended by many tableted steps of remembrance;
and around which annually he ... hung fresh wreaths of a sweet holy
affection. In the shrine stood the perfect marble form of his departed
father, without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, serene ... fond
personification of perfect human goodness and virtue.” But this did
Herman himself an ill turn, for instead of permitting the august image
of his father to experience the vicissitudes of the weather, and ripen
into the natural disillusion that greets a son when he finds his deity
one in flesh with himself, equally mortal, equally fallible--instead
of this, the image became fixed, and when Herman outgrew his father,
he did not simply leave him behind: he rose up and annihilated him,
revenging himself upon the actual Allan for the perfect marble shadow
he had carried in his heart. In the asperities of fortune, Mrs.
Melville, with a hard row of her own to hoe, doubtless fell in Herman’s
heart because she had to face comparison with the marble portrait of
his father: even the best of mothers, under such circumstances, would
seem a little harsh and unkind, beside him who had by his bankruptcy
and his death escaped the dilemmas of both his creditors and his
family. At all events, Herman found himself at thirteen in the midst
of a hard-hearted world; and the shock of that transposition left him
breathless and weak.
The aunts and uncles were kind, of course; but they had cares and
interests of their own; and it needed dire extremity to move them to
action. Herman’s cousins continued to go to school: the cousins had
butter on their bread and cream on their porridge; but the Melvilles
must have known that sinking feeling that comes to a big family at
table when the eye takes in the bowl of stew or the little roast and
the nine plates that wait for it, and knows instantly that no thinning
of slices or spreading of gravy will make the portions large enough
to satisfy a healthy appetite. The summers in the country, the long,
lazy summers, were over: it was winter all the year round. Gansevoort,
dogged, patient, resourceful fellow that he was, opened a hat store
on Market Street, and as soon as Herman was fifteen, he got a job as
clerk in the New York State Bank, of which Uncle Peter was one of the
trustees: a year later, Herman shifted over to the hat store, where
Gansevoort now needed an extra clerk.
This was not the way, Herman doubtless felt, that one’s adolescence
should open. The son of a gentleman can, it is true, remain a
gentleman, even when he adds figures or sells hats: in America, thank
Heaven, every trade is an honorable trade; but there is something wrong
with a world that gives the young Gansevoorts all that their hearts
ask for, and that draws the Melvilles up sharply wherever they turn.
All Herman’s ambitions, to go to college, to become an orator, like
Patrick Henry, to become a great traveller, like Uncle John or Papa, or
to become a great general, like Grandfather Peter, to live in Paris,
like Uncle Thomas, to make the name of Melville somehow glorious--all
these dreams were like great bonfires suddenly drenched by cold rain.
He was as unambitious as a man of sixty. Such careers do not begin
in a hat shop. The stream of life had suddenly stopped; its margins
became stagnant; there was no way out; one might add columns or sell
hats forever. One’s uncles and cousins didn’t care. One’s friends only
said they cared. Cold, bitter cold as December, the world seemed to
young Melville. Fifteen years later, he still felt the bitterness and
sting. He had only a lonely pride to wrap around him; and the world,
not seeing any money in the pockets of that garment, smiled a little
scornfully, and wondered whether it might not be just as well to leave
such wrappings off!
At fifteen a lad can do little more than earn his keep; there was no