Herman Melville
question of Herman’s helping to support the family, as Gansevoort
patiently did. Some one must have observed that things were not going
well with Herman in the hat shop; or perhaps there were not enough
hats to be sold to make his presence necessary; in the summer of 1836
he lived with his Uncle Thomas at Broadhall, helping in the hayfields;
and when autumn came he taught school--one needed muscle rather than
letters for teaching school in those days--in the Sykes district,
near by. He spent the winter in the shadow of Washington Mountain,
and when spring came, and his pupils were needed in the fields, he
himself felt a desperate longing to see his mother and his sisters
again, and Gansevoort and young Allan and little Tom; so, presently,
he went back to Lansingburgh, a little river village just outside of
Albany, where his mother had moved. Scarcely had the welcome worn off
before he realized that his existence was a problem: he was another
mouth to feed! What was he going to do? Perhaps Uncle Peter would get
him another chance at the bank. Not that? Well, what then? Gansevoort
is doing bravely: Allan is already thinking of the law: every one must
help.
Young Melville felt the world closing in on him. He had no answer to
the major problem of civilization, namely, how to get a living without
losing all the other things that make life joyful and significant.
Herman’s contemporaries, with all their factories and mines and
new-fangled machinery and speeding ships, were perhaps as far from
solving this problem as any civilization has yet been: the only people
who were contented with the current solution were those whose narrow
aims and limited personalities were completely fulfilled by the
business routine itself. Herman was not of that cast, so he must invent
an alternative. If he cannot go to college, he must at least have that
other advantage of an education: the Grand Tour. He will be his own
tutor, guide, philosopher, and friend. Why should he not ship for a
trip to Europe? He would not merely earn his keep; but at the end of
his voyage he might have a little to spare. Europe itself was at least
a goal, or the promise of a goal; not a dead-end, like the bank.
Herman had not spent his early years in Manhattan for nothing. He
doubtless knew, up in the fresh waters of Albany, the nostalgia of
desiring just a whiff of salt-laden wind: when he looked at the little
glass ship in the square case that stood on the claw-footed Dutch table
in one corner of the sitting-room, that admirable ship, with masts,
yards, ropes, all of glass, and little glass sailors on the rigging,
and a glass figurehead, and a glass captain smoking a glass cigar
and looking at the world with a glassy eye, all his desires somehow
crystallized into a sudden overwhelming passion to be on the sea, and
to wake up some early moonlit morning in a distant port, with dawn
breaking over strange roofs. His father’s books reinforced his dreams;
and he was still bound by his father’s heroic image and wanted to
follow it, ancient guidebook in hand, through the streets of Liverpool.
That would somehow establish a connection with those better and happier
times before bankruptcy, death, penurious circumstances, had cut like
flint through the soles of paper boots. In England, he might recapture
his magnificent ambitions; or, if not that, he would at least return
to Lansingburgh with a badge of cosmopolitan distinction: his sisters,
Fanny, Helen, Kate, Augusta, would be proud of him; and people might
say when he passed: Do you know that Herman Melville has been to
Europe? Yes, and he’s only seventeen!
It sounded daring and adventurous; but there was a brackish taste in
the going. At the outset of the journey, on the boat to New York, he
did not have enough fare for the trip and had to brazen his poverty
out: his sole wealth was a fowling-piece his brother had given him,
to sell in New York for spending-money; with the gun and a dollar and
his brother’s cast-off shooting-jacket, he set out to face the world.
He felt himself driven out into the desert, an infant Ishmael, without
a maternal Hagar to accompany him and give him comfort. Riches and
poverty stared at him at his very first venture alone beyond the family
nest: the jovial party in the saloon, gay, flushed over wine, crackers,
cheese, cigars--and himself on deck, collar up, outcast, facing the
rain! “Talk not of the bitterness of middle-age and after life,”
exclaimed Melville in Redburn, “a boy can feel all that, and much more,
when upon his young soul the mildew has fallen; and the fruit, which
with others is only blasted after ripeness, with him is nipped in the
first blossom and bud. And never again can such blights be made good;
they strike in too deep, and leave such a scar that the air of Paradise
might not erase it.”
Melville’s downheartedness was deepened by contrast with the natural
expectations which he had formed in the balmier period of his
childhood, and which people somehow kept up, for form, to go with the
family name. His sisters told all inquiring friends that Herman had
gone abroad, as if just for his health and education with no expense
spared; and when he applied for a place on ship, under the tutelage
of a young family friend, his friend’s high talk about Melville’s
name and connections enabled the sly captain to withhold an advance
in pay--because the family would attend to that! The pretensions were
shabby ones; they brought Herman nothing but an insufficient supply of
clothes and an empty stomach in the day that elapsed between his saying
good-bye to his friend and leaving port. That was the irony of having a
proud name and a poor purse, of following in his father’s footsteps and
sleeping in the forecastle instead of a stateroom.
Thirty days on the water will take the wind out of these pretensions.
Herman will forget that he is a Melville and a Gansevoort and a pupil
of the Albany Academy and a relative of a regent and a general, and
a reader of books, and a member of the Juvenile Total Abstinence
Association and the Anti-smoking Society; he will lose many of the
little refinements of birth and breeding; but the loss will not leave
him destitute. In exchange, he will learn the ropes, and find out what
men are like in the rough.
5
Every boat is a little world, every ship a Noah’s ark; but the vessel
on which Melville worked his way contained more than its share,
perhaps, of the battered and unvarnished furniture of human society,
from Captain Riga himself, sleek, bland, affable, cunning, a lap-dog
in port and a mastiff at sea, to Jackson, the depraved wreck of a man
who, not through any physical strength, but through a sort of Satanic
energy, ruled the forecastle.
The contrast between the sisterly society of Lansingburgh, clean and
very chaste, and the ugly, dirty, promiscuously vile company of the
forecastle was as acute as the difference between the feather-beds of
his home and the hard, bug-ridden planks on which he was forced to
sleep. A greenhorn in men, a greenhorn in work, Herman met face to
face the uncouth cruelty of men whose own hides had been blackened by
hardship and mean living, and who flayed every new comer until he was
equally able to stand the misery and depression.
With the exception of Jackson, these men were not innately unkind: they
had simply been brutalized. The Greenlander brought Herman Jamaica rum
the first time he was seasick, helping him to recover and incidentally
making him break his pledge of total abstinence; and though they
resented his nice language and his earnest moralizings, which marked
him off as a member of that inimical social class out of which
captains are hewn, they gradually learned to tolerate him when they
found that he was ready to work with a will and tumble out of his bunk
at call. But, at best, it was hard for Melville to get the hang of the
ship’s ways: climbing aloft was terrifying at first; and slushing down
the masts and spars with old grease was disgusting. He would have liked
to chat with Captain Riga in a friendly way and discuss his prospects
in the world and what one might find at Liverpool: surely, a gentleman
would appreciate the plight of a gentleman’s son, and perhaps he would
even cozen Herman with something tasty to eat, as an offset to the
hogwash and hard-tack of the forecastle: Herman was a little surprised
when he dolled himself up for a sociable call to find the mate stamping
with astonished outrage when he discovered Herman’s purpose in time to
turn him back. What a disillusion to find that there is an impassable
gulf between skipper and crew, a gulf that even gentlemen’s sons cannot
cross on any pretext!
There were few books on board: a dream-book and a copy of the Wealth
of Nations which his brother’s friend had solicitously given Herman,
for his self-improvement, on the eve of departure; but the sailors, who
had been to Gibraltar and Canton and Valparaiso and Bombay, just as
Herman might have ventured to Coenties Slip or Hoboken, were a complete
library of Voyages and Travels around the World. The names they uttered
in such a casual way were magical; but the world they moved in was
grim and formidable; a hand with delirium tremens jumped overboard and
drowned before the boat was much beyond the Hook: shipwreck, mouldy
bread, hard weather, mutiny, did not sound so romantic if one had been
in the thick of it; and as for the sailors’ fonder recollections,
these stories were as tasteless as duff: did the bar-girl in Hamburg
have blue eyes or black: what a nice time Max the Greenlander had had
with the young ladies in Stockholm: who kept the Foul Anchor Tavern at
Portsmouth at such and such a time? They had seen so much and taken
in so little, travelling with their bodies, not with their minds: they
knew chiefly the sameness of sailor’s stews and purchased caresses, and
to them one city was like another and one girl was like another: the
best port was that which promised the longest and fullest oblivion.
The ship itself was the strangest port of all. Pails were buckets:
pegs were plugs: floors were decks: “Yes, sir” was “Ay, ay, sir”: in
addition to all these new habits and ways, one must grasp new handles
for old ones. The ropes needed a dictionary in themselves: every knot
and reef had a name. The accent of this world was gruff: Herman had
never dreamed that a malign, cur-faced rascal like Jackson, who swore
he would swipe him off the rigging if Herman got in his way, could
exist in real life; nor could he have imagined the uncouthness of men
to whom life at its best was simply hard work, hard words, hard fare,
fornication, drunkenness and sleep. Herman was shocked: but the sea
gave him what the sailors did not: there were good moments when the
sails were hoisted to the breeze and the ship responded: every mast and
timber seemed to have a pulse in it, and as the ship picked up speed,
he felt a wild exulting in his own heart. “Then,” says Melville, “I was
first conscious of a wonderful thing in me, that responded to all the
wild commotion of the outer world and went reeling on and on with the
planets in their orbits, and was lost in one delirious throb at the
center of the All. A wild bubbling and bursting at my heart, as if a
hidden spring gushed out there.... But how soon these raptures abated,
when after a brief idle interval, we were again set to work, and I had
a vile commission to clean out the chicken coops, and make up the beds
of the pigs in the long boats. Miserable dog’s life is this of the sea:
commanded like a slave and set to work like an ass: vulgar and brutal
men lording it over me, as if I were an African in Alabama.”
What a contrast Herman Melville felt between the wholeness he felt
within, in response to wind and sea and sky, and the crass deformities