Herman Melville
In 1856, Melville gathered together some of the short stories he had
written during the previous three years, and published them as The
Piazza Tales. The sketch that gives the volume its title offers us a
further glimpse of Melville’s life at Arrowhead.
One pictures him seated on that piazza on an August morning, with
the meadow in front of him a little sear from the new-cropped hay, a
haze lying over the valley of the Housatonic, and the light lavender
hills billowing into Greylock’s double ridge against the horizon. The
landscape brings a feeling of outward serenity, unbroken by the faint
happy screams of the children playing in the hayloft, or the muted
hum of his wife or his sisters in the kitchen, preparing the scant
and largely vegetarian meal. What a contrast with the frayed knotty
feeling within! Such warm and deeply balmy days should bring peace:
but no day, however balmy, can annul the anxiety and weariness of the
last five years, the incessant round of writing, and, further plaguing
him, instead of giving relief, the equally endless round of the farm,
wood to be chopped and sawed, hay to be mowed and gathered, cows and
horses to be fed, vegetables to be planted and hoed, cabbage-worms
to be fought ... oh! for a little coconut and poee-poee! Emerson had
discovered that he could not tend his garden and his mind at the same
time; and Melville, though at first robust, doubtless found that two
careers were a little too much for a single man, exhausted, half spent.
In a pinch, Melville could of course apply to Elizabeth’s father or
to Allan for aid; and he did: but he could not continually write out
unredeemable notes for their benefit; that was all right in a matter
like the mortgage, where there was security; but as a source of daily
income, it was little better than outright beggary.
Melville’s eyes would sweep over the valley to the hills beyond. There,
ah! there perhaps lay happiness! What charming fairy might be living
without relatives and grocers and publishers and promissory notes to
harry her, in that little cottage on the mountainside before him? Some
day he must find the road to that delectable retreat.... He found
it, and to his sorrow and disillusion, instead of an idyllic bower,
it was a weather-beaten old place, inhabited by a tired and troubled
girl, who dreams of the happiness that lies in a marble palace in the
distance below--Melville’s own white house. No fairy maiden she: no
fairy prince he: but a sad girl and a tired, dutiful husband, straining
night and day for the few pennies that will shoe his children’s feet,
replace their tattered home-made clothes, and put bread and milk on the
table. These five years, years that have enclosed his highest powers,
his consummate manhood, have not left Melville with an eager taste for
another fifty of the same pattern. Inevitably, he sought escape; and in
his mind, escape meant the sea. Almost any slight change in atmosphere
can bring the ocean back to him: the ocean, where physical sustenance,
hard-tack and salt rhinoceros, was provided for one, where the hours
were long and peaceful, and amid storm and rigour and dangerous
courses, there brooded, within, a deep and unbreakable calm.
With a wry smile, Melville exchanges the topmast of reverie for the
piazza; but tranquillity does not follow. His very pen lives only when
it touches the sea; and when he gathers together these Piazza Tales,
he does not bother to include most of his land-stories. He is wise:
none of them has a tithe of the interest that Benito Cereno possesses.
That story marked the culmination of Melville’s power as a short-story
writer, as Moby-Dick marked his triumph as an epic poet.
7
In Benito Cereno, published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1855,
Melville was again at home. It is such a tale as one might hear, with
good luck, during a gam in the South Seas or at a bar in Callao; and
Melville himself took it boldly from a book of voyages by Captain Amasa
Delano, published in 1816.
A black, ill-kempt ship, commanded by a young Spanish captain and
manned by negroes, is in distress, and calls upon Captain Amasa
Delano, a bluff, frank American skipper, for aid. Delano, coming
aboard with provisions and water, finds the captain almost down with
a fever, and by turns confidential and queerly reserved. The Spaniard
is attended by a black slave who almost smothers him with watchful
endearments; and he has the air of perpetually manoeuvring, in a way
that would seem sinister were his plight not so manifestly pathetic.
Delano is a little troubled at heart, but he is free from intellectual
suspicions. There is something wrong on the Spaniard’s ship; but it
is hard for Delano to put his hand on it. Don Benito is in command:
but he seems helpless, and he tolerates ugly disorder even among the
black boys. Promising further aid, Delano finally leaves the vessel and
is about to pull for his own ship, still powerfully disturbed by the
Spanish captain’s pain, trouble, fever, churlishness, courtesy--does it
mean some treachery? With a wild leap, the Spaniard throws himself in
Delano’s boat, followed by his faithful black, dagger in hand; and the
black aims his dagger, not at the Americans, but at his Spanish master.
When the American crew finally pulls to safety a harrowing story comes
out.
I will not spoil Benito Cereno for those who have not read it by
revealing its mystery; it is enough to point out that the interplay
of character, the cross-motives, the suspense, the central mystery,
are all admirably done: in contrast to some of Melville’s more prosy
sketches, there is not a feeble touch in the whole narrative. The
following passage, which sets the key of the whole story, reveals
Melville’s undiminished ability as an artist:
“Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though
undulated into long roads of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at
the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s
mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl,
kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they
were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows
over meadows before storms.” As in The Encantadas, the writing itself
was distinguished: it had a special office of its own to perform,
and did not, as in Typee and Redburn, serve merely as carriage for
the story. One can mark Melville’s literary powers in the complete
transformation of Delano’s patent story: he adds a score of details to
heighten the mystery and deepen the sinister aspect of the scene; and
by sheer virtuosity he transfers the reader’s sympathies to the Spanish
captain, who in the original story is far more cruel, barbarous, and
unprincipled than the forces he contends against. In order to effect
this change, Melville deliberately omits the last half of the story, in
which the Spanish captain ignobly turns upon his benefactor and seeks
to deprive him of the rights of salvage. The moral of the original tale
is that ingratitude, stirred by cupidity, may follow the most generous
act, and that American captains had better beware of befriending too
whole-heartedly a foreign vessel. In Benito Cereno the point is that
noble conduct and good will, like that Don Benito felt when his whole
inner impulse was to save Delano and his crew, may seem sheer guile;
and, further, that there is an inscrutable evil that makes the passage
of fine souls through the world an endless Calvary. “Even the best
men err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose
condition he is not acquainted.” The world is mortified for Don Benito
by the remembrance of the human treachery he has encountered: no later
benefaction, no radiance of sun and sky, can make him forget it.
Man should offset the malice and evil circumstance one finds in the
constitution of the universe: instead, he aggravates it. One does
not need to heighten the parallels between Benito Cereno’s fate and
Melville’s own life to catch the semblance to his own dilemma and his
own bowed and wounded spirit. “Never,” says one of the characters
in his next book, “has it been my lot to have been wronged, though
but in the smallest degree. Cheating, backbiting, superciliousness,
disdain, hard-heartedness, and all that brood, I know but by report.
Cold regards tossed over the sinister shoulder of a former friend,
ingratitude in a beneficiary, treachery in a confidant--such things
may be; but I must take somebody’s word for it.” The irony of that
declaration is obvious: Melville had met these things, and, like a
splinter of steel in the eye, they tormented him and during these
harassed years the memory of them, the anticipation of them, the
helpless attempt to guard against them or remove them, directed his
whole life towards this single point of exacerbation. The mighty whale
aroused Melville’s utmost powers: there was that in man that steaded
him manfully for such an encounter: but, like Timon, the spectacle
of fair-weather friends and worldly sycophants, turning away from
him during his moment of greatest need, unmanned him completely.
Moby-Dick might slay one: but the torments of black flies and gnats
made life ignoble without bringing death any nearer. Melville did not
need to exaggerate these wrongs. It was their very smallness, their
unassailableness, that made him desperate.
8
The Confidence Man was written in 1856, and published in the
following spring, while Melville was abroad. It is by all odds the
most difficult book that confronts Melville’s biographer; for it is
possibly a palimpsest, and beneath its obvious legend, one may read
indirect revelations of Melville’s own life. With Melville’s actual
life and predicament in mind, there are passages in The Confidence
Man one cannot read without misgiving: the story of Charlemont, The
Gentleman Madman, for one, and the story of the Man in Weeds, wedded
to a fiendish woman, Goneril, who covers up her own lecherousness by
attributing insanity to her husband. Likewise somewhat mysterious
is the story of the Indian-hater, who had been injured in youth by
Indians, and never lost a chance to exterminate one. It is hard to
fit these incidents into the logic of the plot: and their existence
becomes plausible only if one believes Melville’s own torments and
suspicions had, for a brief while, taken on a pathological character.
No one who approached The Confidence Man without preoccupation or
bias would, I think, impute such personal and neurotic motives to
the passages in question; but once the seed of suspicion is sowed,
as the misanthropic one-legged man demonstrates in an early chapter,
it spreads like the Canada thistle, and is almost as hard to root
out. The words suspicion and confidence, that recur in these pages,
increase one’s suspicions and weaken one’s confidence; in fact,
there is no end to the pathological allusions one may discover,
if one begins with the unfavourable hypothesis. Failing positive
independent evidence, it would be foolish to build up a card-house of
conjecture: enough to say that if Pierre partly reveals the causes
of Melville condition, it is in The Confidence Man, if anywhere,
that the psychologist will discover, probably, its immediate outward
manifestations. The problem, though tantalizing, is not of paramount
importance; for there is plenty of independent evidence to show that by
1858 Melville had regained possession of himself, and that his further
life, though full of hardship and difficulty, had nothing in it that
placed him outside the pale of family life and friendship and decent
social intercourse--although it may have been dogged by memories and
revulsions from an earlier period, and by the continuation of evil
suspicions in the minds of those to whom the normal abstentions and