Herman Melville
shadowed years of poverty and ill health and dwindling fame.
If Mrs. Melville stood the strain of it, with all the toughness of
middle age to bear up under it, the children did not fare so well. The
photograph of the Melville children, Malcolm, Frances, Elizabeth, and
Stanwix, taken when the oldest was perhaps twelve or thirteen--that
is, during the early sixties--tells as much: they are a little peaked
and undernourished, and the eldest child’s face is sullen, dour. The
racking poverty of his early youth had left an indelible impression on
Melville himself, and, in even more depressing circumstances, a worse
image was left upon the minds of his growing children. Melville, a
man of originality and penetration in almost every other department
of life, was, one suspects, a commonplace father: he expected his
children to be dutiful and submissive and not to annoy their mother,
and he would read them moral lectures on the whole duty of children,
fearful of their being corrupted by association and contact with the
age, but incapable of directing their impulses into forms of growth
except by desperate exhortation--the most blank and sterile of all
pedagogical methods. He wanted them to be noble and courageous and
honest and indifferent to money, and, dreading the effect of the mean,
bourgeois standards that surrounded them, he was too quick to suspect
the ignoble and the base, forgetting that growth is a happier sign in
childhood than the semblance of perfection. When his little daughter
picked up the word “property” and aired it to her family, Melville
relentlessly teased her about it: if he handed her the butter, he
would hand it to Miss Property: if he met her on the stairs he would
mimic Miss Property: he tormented her for the sins of her elders,
forgetting the terrible sensitiveness of a child to dogging that has
such a bitter animus behind it. This incident will stand for others:
the jolly letters he would write home, with pictures and all manner
of funny printing, or the stories he would tell in a pleasant hour,
did not wipe out the acrid taste or lessen the distance between father
and children. There was nothing to lighten the burden of these days:
these children were orphaned, even when their father sat among them.
One son ran away; another, in 1867, was found dead in his room, of a
rifle wound, under circumstances that left doubt as to whether accident
or suicide had caused the fatality; and one of his daughters could not
recur to the image of her father without a certain painful revulsion.
The picture is not a happy one: but a man with high purposes does not
always leave behind earthly children to bless him. One remembers how
Milton’s daughters cursed him in his own presence, and one realizes
that one can draw no valid conclusions from such conduct--except this,
that a man immersed in his inner vision is a difficult man to live
with, and if he does not renounce his family and its ties at the outset
of his quest, they may live to rise up against him before he is ended
with it. And who was to blame? Milton and Melville wanted the warmth of
domesticity: but their children had no part in the bargain that gave
them cold lodgings in the icy chambers of Heaven, and shabby clothes
and insufficient food and few opportunities for pleasure on the earth.
These children were of Melville’s flesh, but not of his mind: when he
purchased a work of art, a print or a statue for ten dollars, when
there was scarcely bread enough to go round, who can wonder at their
black memories? If they did not understand the need of a famished soul
for art, their father had too quickly forgotten his own humiliation
when he went to sea in a discarded hunting-jacket. Circumstances drove
Melville hard; but poverty alone does not make such a breach between
a parent and his children; and though one must pity Melville in this
extremity of misunderstanding, one cannot but feel that he himself
contributed to it.
The death of Elizabeth’s father in 1860 did not relieve the strain,
except by giving the family a clear title to Arrowhead; so, until
1866, the background of Melville’s life cannot be painted save in
dark colours. In spite of a personal interview with Lincoln in 1861,
Melville was again turned down for a consular post; and two years later
Melville finally decided to leave the Berkshires. To this end, he
purchased a house at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, in New York, from
his brother, Allan, to whom he sold Arrowhead in part payment. But
misfortune persisted. In removing his household goods from Arrowhead,
the wagon was upset and he was thrown into the frozen ruts of the road.
The injury was so severe that Melville was forced to lie up for many
weeks in a near-by house, and in addition, to sap further his physical
health, the accident left him with a fear of carriage driving. So his
troubles piled up on him; and in the end, they grew so intolerable
that the humour of the whaleboat would return to him, and he would
smile again. I have painted in every sober and painful detail in the
background; the blacks, the dingy blues, the sear browns are the
dominant colours: true: but against this sordid groundwork one must not
build up a blacker foreground: on the contrary, there are occasional
flashes of warm colour or high light, and to leave them out would
falsify the whole picture.
There is a Micawber in all of us, not unfortunately. We may find
life disappointing without losing our taste for breaded veal cutlets
and stout. Overwhelmed by tragic experience, we may still laugh at
a hundred minor absurdities, as Melville no doubt laughed when he
discovered that in 1865 a firm of Philadelphia publishers, who had
taken over the rights to Israel Potter, had brought it out under the
new title of The Refugee, without Melville’s consent, and had set him
down as the author of two wholly imaginary books, The Two Captains and
The Man of the World! Through all his ailments, one infirmity helped
to counteract them, the infirmity of jocularity. He had one steady
comfort and mainstay which only the blackest incidents could erase for
more than a brief period: he had a sense of humour. More than that,
with a little encouragement, he had positive high spirits. If one
were not fully assured of this from a general knowledge of Melville’s
character, the letter he wrote to his brother Thomas in 1862 would
make this point plain: “Yesterday I received from Gansevoort your long
and very entertaining letter to Mamma from Pernambuco. Yes, it was
very entertaining. Particularly the account of that interesting young
gentleman whom you stigmatise for a jackass, simply because he improves
his opportunities in the way of sleeping, eating, and other commendable
customs. That’s the sort of fellow, it seems to me, to get along with.
For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better.
Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one
of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable
about it, too. Think of those sensible and sociable millions of good
fellows, all taking a long, friendly snooze together, under the sod--no
quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heartburnings, & thinking
how much better the other chap is off--none of this: but all equally
free-&-easy, they sleep away and reel off their nine knots an hour, in
perfect amity.”
Or again, after his accident in 1862, in a letter to Samuel Shaw, his
brother-in-law, the same grave bantering appears: “... I begin to
indulge in the pleasing idea that my life must needs be of some value.
Probably I consume a certain amount of oxygen, which unconsumed might
create some disturbance in nature. Be that as it may, I am going to
try and stick to the conviction named above. Now I have observed that
such an idea, once well-bedded in a man, is a wonderful conservator of
health and almost a prophecy of long life. I once, like other spoonies,
cherished a loose sort of notion that I did not care to live very long.
But I will frankly own that I have now no serious, no insuperable
objections to a respectable longevity. I don’t like the idea of being
left out night after night in a cold churchyard.”
The humour and the sentiments both remind one of another black writer,
a later one, the author of the Shropshire Lad: without losing his inner
thoughts, Melville could nevertheless paraphrase them into a happier
vernacular. Meanwhile, a deeper blackness had settled over the land,
matching, patch for patch, wound for wound, scar for scar, every ill
in Melville’s own body and soul. That darkness was the darkness of
the Civil War; and when it finally lifted, it disclosed a different
country, a different age, a different series of possibilities. The
Civil War was a dividing point in the life of the country, and a
dividing point in Melville’s life. It widened the distance between
Melville and his younger contemporaries and it sealed, with finality,
his own position in society. The provincial culture was overwhelmed;
and what came to take its place was not a genuine culture, but a shoddy
substitute, mere fustian of the spirit. He looked around him after the
worst had happened; and his words must have been Bartleby’s: I know
where I am. That very consciousness was enough to cut him off from the
new society.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ALARUMS AND RETREATS
Between the provincial society into which Herman Melville was born and
the America in which he found himself at the time of the Civil War
there was a vast difference. The Civil War may in one sense be looked
upon as an attempt to preserve the ideological framework of the United
States at a time when its institutions were in a state of disruption,
and all its typical ways of life were being transformed. In that
the Civil War preserved this framework, upholding the Constitution,
confirming the union of the states, concentrating the powers of
government, it was successful: the union was saved. But the very act of
prosecuting the war confirmed the chaos and hastened the disruption,
so that what was saved was not freedom and equality, the freedom of
voluntary association and local initiative, the equality of access to
an unlimited amount of utilizable land: what was left was just the
opposite of these things, servility and inequality. Land and natural
resources, scattered broadcast during the Civil War under the Homestead
Act, and under various acts to promote railroad building, were turned
into exacting monopolies; and the government itself became the
principal agent for establishing and extending privilege. In less than
half a generation Walt Whitman was forced to modify many of his fondest
hopes for America: for with all these new agents of exploitation
dominant, there was no longer any way of distinguishing the American
proletariat from that of Europe, except in their independent manners--a
relic of an equality that had once been real.
The disruption symbolized by the Civil War was expressed in a hundred
ways; and when one examines these manifestations carefully they can
all be characterized by a single figure: the failure to achieve form.
One sees the difference between provincial and industrial America in
the political definition of their units: New England, for example, is
a natural region, like Brittany and Provence, with a mode of thought
and an institutional form based upon certain common geographic features
and cultural history; the new states and territories that were founded
beyond the Alleghenies had no form other than that expressed by the
arbitrary lines drawn by the surveyor: their content was simply so
many blank square miles. The older cities of the seaboard, with the
exception of Philadelphia, had a central nucleus which had grown out
of local needs and habits: the size of the blocks was determined by