Herman Melville
Indeed, its English edition was so small that it for long remained
unknown to the bibliographer; and in America the work, though it
received occasional praise, did not fare much better. Except in the
roughest political lampooning, satire did not penetrate the leathery
optimism and the cast-iron self-righteousness of antebellum America;
and if Melville wanted support and confidence, The Confidence Man was
the wrong way to go about it. One need not be surprised that the sequel
was never published, and in all likelihood, never written.
Melville’s resolve to be annihilated was lessened by his journey: for
though he had not been shattered with light on the road to Damascus,
faith flickered and smoked occasionally, like smouldering wood
before it is ready to blaze. The shearing of his head, the donning
of sackcloth, the last ironic act of renunciation was still almost a
decade away: with new resolution, he made a succession of attempts to
regain the position he had once occupied.
The lecture lyceum gave him his first opportunity: the Civil
War was the second. Between 1857 and 1860 Melville joined the
politicians and the woman suffragists and the prohibitionists and the
transcendentalists and the Fourierists and the travellers from strange
parts of the world and distinguished foreigners, in the one corner of
the marketplace where they could all get a living: the public platform.
It was not an easy pill for him to swallow, for though he lectured on
the sculpture of the Vatican and the sights of Rome, he was known,
hailed, gaped at still as the famous author of Peedee, Pog-Dog, and
Hullabaloo--the man who had lived among the cannibals. Well might he
write in Pierre: “Permanently to alleviate pain, we must first dart
some added pangs.” He was brave enough about the whole business; in
1858 he wrote: “I should be glad to lecture there [in Baltimore]
or anywhere. If they will pay expenses and give a reasonable fee,
I am ready to lecture in Labrador or on the Isle of Desolation off
Patagonia.”
Melville showed himself; he lectured; but he stooped no further. Mid
all the spellbinders and strutting celebrities of the period, with
their characteristic masks, sonorities, grimaces, this quiet man, with
the small, fine nose and the weary, whimsical smile, and an air of
patient earnestness, could have cut no very great figure to a public
that had never been used to the emphasis of under-statement. Indeed,
Melville’s lecture fees tell as much: they averaged around fifty
dollars a lecture, and at this time Thoreau, with even a narrower
reputation, got as much for a reading. The lectures gave Melville an
opportunity to travel, and he must have welcomed this: he went as far
afield as Montreal and Milwaukee: but in all he gave less than thirty
lectures. One wonders about his audiences. Did Thoreau meet him at the
station in Concord or did Whitman listen to him in New York? Whom did
he fall in with on the Ohio river steamers? What did he make of the
emigrant New Englanders, Germans, merchants, farmers, roustabouts,
gamblers? Had his Mississippi buffoons touched them off, or did they
make his staunchest effects pallid? Did he identify himself with them,
share their aims, feel a thrill of anticipation at their destinies--or
did he foresee in them the final disruption of the America that had
nourished him?
The record is almost a blank; but a newspaper report of one of the
lectures, in the Boston Journal, 1857, shows that Melville’s shrewd
eye was far from being turned inward. Describing the statues in the
Church of St. John Lateran, he observes that “Socrates looks like an
Irish comedian, Julius Caesar so sensible and businesslike of aspect
it might be taken for the bust of a railroad president; Seneca with
the visage of a pawnbroker; Nero a fast young man, Plato with the
locks and airs of an exquisite, as if meditating the destinies of the
world under the hands of a hair-dresser.” These comments prove, what
all the minor documents of Melville’s life during this period show,
that the jocular irrepressible spirit--“bear with mine infirmity of
jocularity,” he exclaims to Duyckinck--the spirit who had written
Omoo and White-Jacket, was not altogether Timonized or defeated. His
satire still worked obliquely, touching both his own countrymen and
their pragmatic contemporaries, the Romans. Nor did Melville conceal
his feelings about the benefits of mickonaree Christianity and “white
civilization.” In another lecture, after quoting from a local English
paper in one of the South Sea Islands, which suggested the propriety of
not having the native language taught in the common schools, he threw
down the sheet in plain disgust, and announced to the audience, in
allusion to the reputed desire of the natives of Georges Island to be
annexed to the United States, that he was sorry to see it, since, as a
friend of humanity, and especially a friend of the South Sea Islanders,
he would pray, and call upon all Christians to pray with him, that
the Polynesians might be delivered from all foreign and contaminating
influences.
During this period of lecturing, Melville began to write again, with no
hope of profit or fame, but for his own satisfaction; and, anticipating
Thomas Hardy’s example, he turned to verse. If one can date his first
new essays in verse--for the poems in Mardi show that there were early
efforts--one must give the time as probably 1858, and for a while only
Elizabeth shared this secret with him. By 1860, before he went for a
voyage with his younger brother, now Captain Thomas Melville, commander
of the Boston clipper Meteor, his verses were numerous enough to make a
volume. The decision to make this voyage came rather suddenly; and one
finds Melville writing to Mr. Duyckinck, mid the haste of departure,
to see if he will undertake to advise with Allan Melville as to a
publisher, and in case of publication, be sure that the printer’s
proof-reader is a careful man. Melville, the author of nine books,
still deferred to Mr. Duyckinck’s professional experience; and, on
getting a favourable reply, he told Duyckinck that “it was quite a wind
from the field of old times.”
From this correspondence with Evert Duyckinck--and an allusion in a
letter to George about Melville’s own “winter and rough weather”--one
gathers that after Pierre there had been an estrangement, or at least
a prolonged silence: in 1856 the Duyckincks had recorded in their
Cyclopedia their conviction that Pierre was a false step, and only now,
after eight years had passed, was the breach healed. As for Melville’s
mood in travel, he had this to say: “I anticipate as much pleasure as,
at the age of forty, one temperately can, on the voyage I am going. I
go under very happy auspices so far as the ship is concerned. A noble
ship and a nobler captain--and he my brother. We have the breadth of
those tropics before us, to sail over twice, and shall round the world.
Our first port is San Francisco, which we shall probably make in 110
days. Thence we go to Manilla--and thence, I hardly know where--I wish
devoutly you were going along. I think it would agree with you. The
prime requisites for enjoyment on sea-voyages, for passengers, is 1st
health--2nd good-nature. Both first rate things, but not universally to
be found.--At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that
respect.” The good-bye and God bless you, with which Melville closed
this letter, showed a sort of solemn warmth. In a lonely life, even an
Evert Duyckinck might prove a comrade....
The book of poetry was never published in its original form. Mr. Meade
Minnigerode conjectures that the manuscript was that of Clarel; but
Melville’s concern, in his memoranda for Allan, that each piece should
be printed on a page by itself, however small the piece, shows, apart
from anything else, that it could not have been Clarel; and when
Melville told his brother, two years later, that he had disposed of his
“doggerel” to a trunkmaker, who took the whole lot off his hands at ten
cents the pound, one must infer that he himself had become dissatisfied
with the bulk of his early work, and destroyed most of it, salvaging
a few pieces, like the verse to the Captain of the Meteor, for his
later volumes. In the first flush of experiment, however, Melville’s
poetry pleased him: the form of verse gave compactness to his thoughts,
and the writing of it did not inflict that long continuous drain on
his vitality that the larger prose pieces called for. Melville would
pace the quarter-deck with his brother, reciting his verses in the
moonlight: the joy of creation, even minor creation, could still stir
him up, and no doubt the cadences of the moving ship, heaving, falling,
rolling, added to the pleasure of the words themselves.
At the end of three months, when they had reached California, Melville
had exhausted his supply of books and papers, probably, and his
brother’s patience, and his own capacity for boredom: by that time his
health had doubtless improved again, and, urging him to break the trip
and quicken his return, his old longing for Elizabeth may have come
back with greater force. He was never quite happy in her company, nor
was he quite happy away from it. All the difficulties of their domestic
economy tended to make their relations prosaic and commonplace, for
one does not cook for and clean and clothe four children without a
considerable amount of unflinching prose; and Elizabeth’s incapacity
for domestic duties and her irritations only made matters worse. Yet
Melville, as far as one can judge, felt not merely affection for
Elizabeth: on these long absences, passion would gather within him
again, like lightning in a heavy summer sky. He might resent her
obtuseness; he might be disappointed by her failure to respond to his
irresponsible hilarity; he might be sobered by the fact that his love
had been unfavourably conditioned by financial burdens and a cramped
household with a scanty larder; but for all that, he clung to her and
needed her. One must take account of this in noting Melville’s moods
and moves and decisions in the decade after 1856. Although Melville,
unfortunately, felt repulsion in a tie that was so plainly rooted in
physical attachment, and longed for a heaven in which there was the
marriage of true minds without the “impurities” and impediments of sex,
although he distrusted the solace of physical union, as he distrusted
all beautiful things which hid the truth from men’s eyes, yet he found
himself perpetually driven back to this wiser folly; and, not turning
easily to any other woman, he kept his faith with Elizabeth.
The rôle was not an easy one for her to bear: make no mistake about it.
Such violence of anticipation and such quick satiety, such tenderness
and such easy disappointment, such self-absorption, and, with it all,
a certain impatience and resentment of the daily round, with its
claims, ceremonies, civilities, annoyances--with all this Elizabeth
Melville was probably never to know such deep, enraptured happiness
in her marriage as Sophia Hawthorne, who had faced dire poverty, too,
had known. Elizabeth was proud of her man: she had faith in him: but
it was only in the closing years of their lives, when, through bitter
experience, she had acquired much, and he, through bitter experience,
had resigned much, that they were on a parity. There is no doubt she
encouraged him in his work, and, whether she understood it or not,
believed in it. While he was gone in 1860 she assiduously looked
after the placing of the manuscript, and would not be put off by the
publishers’ flimsy excuses. Still, for all this sympathy and loyalty,
on both sides, one feels that strain, depression, tenseness, must have
too often marked the life of the Melville household, during these