Herman Melville
of the world outside, among cruel men, grasping men, lecherous men,
men sick and stunted in the soul, like the strayed seeds that creep
up through some cranny in the barnyard floor and become livid spindly
plants, unnourished by sunlight! It was a trial; but not altogether a
fruitless one. He had it in him to deal easily with life aboard ship.
Ill provided with clothes, a shrinking moleskin jacket being his chief
protection, his body was sound enough to furnish its own warmth. “I
frequently turned into my bunk soaking wet, and turned out again piping
hot and smoking like a roasted sirloin, and yet was never the worse
for it; for then I bore a charmed life of youth and health, and was
dangerproof to bodily ill.” This testing and priming of his physical
capacities was a great experience for Melville; and though in the end
he was to pay a heavy penalty for excessive exposure, the confidence he
achieved must have toned up his whole being.
Even dirty work and humiliation have, in retrospect, a power to sustain
a man: for if one has faced the worst indignities of life, if one knows
what it is to be poor and hungry and cold and friendless and beset by
hostile men, nothing that lies in store can really daunt one: once
one has touched the extremities of pain and misery, all the lesser
tribulations of life become small. Perhaps the best proof of this fact
is Melville’s small concern for money or authority in later life,
although it was poverty that drove him to sea, and only a position of
power on ship would have lifted his lot. He never went after these
things, never sought to improve his condition by their aid; and though
in the end, he struggled for a living and got it dearly, he never
sought for more than a living: he did not seek compensation in wealth,
ease, luxury, power.
6
At last Melville and the Highlander reached Liverpool. His anxieties
were at rest for six weeks: he was even freed from the miserable
pot-scrapings of the black cook, for no fire could be lighted in the
galleys while the ship was at dock; and the whole crew dined at the
Baltimore Clipper. England at last: a guest in an English tavern!
“I examined the place attentively,” writes Melville. “It was a long,
narrow little room, with one small arched window with red curtains,
looking out upon a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick wall,
the top of which was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles,
stuck into the mortar. A dull lamp swung overhead, placed in a wooden
ship suspended from the ceiling. The walls were covered with a
paper, representing an endless succession of vessels of all nations
continually circumnavigating the apartment. By way of a pictorial
mainsail to one of these ships, a map was hung against it.... From the
street came a confused uproar of ballad-singers, bawling women, babies,
and drunken sailors.”--And this is England?
It is not by dreams that people are defrauded, so much as by misplaced
pictures of reality. A dream represents an inner urge and movement;
presently it may work through to an objective manifestation; defeated
in one place, it attacks in another; and though its final form may be
far from the image originally projected, it does not disappoint one
like the comparison of an actuality with some previous description.
It was so with Melville in Liverpool: he eventually visited England
again and found its abbeys and its Lord Mayors’ processions; but when
he followed his father’s steps in Liverpool, down to Riddough’s Hotel
where Allan had once stayed, he was completely defeated: the hotel was
gone, and the city that had seemed so great and magnificent in the
guidebook, a generation before, had been swallowed up by a vaster town:
the pool itself, where ships once floated, had been filled up; even the
pretence of age was lacking, and mid the old shops and warehouses of
the waterfront, nothing seemed nearly so venerable as the gable-pointed
mansion of the Gansevoorts, whose bricks had been brought from the
Netherlands long before the Revolutionary War.
Disappointed, Melville nevertheless continued to explore the city. He
went aboard an Indian merchantman, built by Indian shipwrights out of
Oriental wood, manned by Malays, Burmese, and Cingalese: he visited
the floating chapel: he saw the German immigrants about to depart for
America: he was fascinated by the little salt droghers, with broad bows
painted black, and red sails: he even ventured out into the countryside
one fine morning, and got his first glimpse of the English landscape
and the English country people he had dreamed of. These were the
relatively bright lights in the picture: but there were ugly spots,
too: the villainous brothels and doss-houses, where murders were venial
sins and a stale putrid odour hung over every doorway: there were the
dock-wall beggars, full of sores, misery, and monstrous deformations:
worst of all, there was a narrow street, lined with cotton warehouses,
where the sunniest noon became twilight, and where, in an open vault,
communicating with deeper cellars, Melville came upon a motionless
figure of a woman, with a dead baby at her breast, and two blue-skinned
children clinging to her, slowly starving to death, starving, dying,
finally passing out, with not a soul except Melville to offer succour,
despite his pleas with constables and watchmen, until the stench
of their dead bodies demanded their removal and the application of
quick-lime to the spot where they had perished. A fine, prosperous
world! A great, progressive civilization!
Ironically, the city Melville had dreamt much about, London, he saw
only in a baffling nocturnal glimpse, behind the draperies of a
gambling-house, in the company of a new shipmate, a blade of good
family, who made friends with Melville and took a last opportunity,
with Herman for companion, to retrieve his fortunes. The whole journey
to London brought nothing more than the tantalizing glimpses one gets
from a cab--not Westminster nor Whitehall nor Regent Street. Mr.
Weaver has cast doubts on this adventure in London: he regards it
as one of the few wide inventions Melville made in Redburn: but to
me its very vagueness and mysteriousness smells of reality. That an
unsophisticated boy should be as confused by a gambling-house as by
Aladdin’s palace is quite natural: and if anything else were wanted
to show that the trip was real and the disappointment cutting, one
need but remember that Melville treated Israel Potter to a similar
experience on his first visit to Paris, although there is no foundation
in Israel’s story for his being confined to his room until the time
comes for departure.
The six weeks that confronted Melville with all these scenes and people
and apparitions were an essential part of his education. Indeed, there
is no better experience for a well-prepared lad than to be thrown in
a strange city, not too remote in habit and culture from his original
home, with long days for exploration, experience, meditation. Melville
regretted in later life that he had not encountered misery and bad
fortune by degrees; and very possibly, the shock of finding himself
suddenly in the midst of this bestiality, cruelty, degradation, was
too much for him: the inoculation with evil was almost as bad, it may
be, as the disease itself: it certainly must have cast a shadow on his
innocence, and it may even explain, in some degree, the inhibitions
and regressions of his own sexual life--since his first glimpse of sex
was in association with these filthy dives and their rotting inmates.
But, even with these allowances, such an education in men and cities is
better than the non-education given by textbooks and academic treatises
and unrelated “knowledge.” Between the Albany Academy or the Harvard
College of 1837 and Liverpool, the latter had incomparably more to
offer to a lad already sufficiently used to books to make constant
reference to them. If a whaling-ship proved finally to be Melville’s
university, Liverpool was at least an admirable preparatory school.
When the Highlander started home, it must have seemed to Melville that
everything would be smooth sailing: but one of the new crew was a dead
man, shipped aboard by a crimp, the ship met head winds and made no
progress: malignant fever broke out in the steerage: Jackson, with the
yellow skin, the snaky eyes, the projecting bones, the curse against
goodness and beauty, died: and when the ship finally got to port, with
Melville still in sound health, the wily Captain Riga buncoed him of
his wages. Four months of this sort of thing was quite enough. Melville
returned to Lansingburgh. For the next three years, he lived among the
civilities, and taught school, at Greenbush, now East Albany, and at
Pittsfield.
7
Melville’s growth was slow, and we have little evidence of what took
place during these three years. School teaching must have given him
leisure, and one can infer from two prose pieces, written in 1839, and
published in the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, that
his dreams and broodings were turned, not to the wretchedness of his
adventure, but to the susceptibilities and urges of adolescence.
What do we know of Melville’s early sexual life? In Pierre, Melville
pictures a passionate attachment between his hero and one of his
boy-cousins, and describes how it undergoes the normal sublimation
through erotic transfer to a person of the opposite sex: Melville’s
sharp observation here anticipated by many years the discoveries of
the analytic psychologists. When, in Redburn, we find the youthful
hero remembering the three red-cheeked maids who lived in the cottage
where he was given bread and milk, we cannot doubt that he made the
usual easy transition to a maturer state of sexuality. If we needed
any further evidence, these surviving clippings would be sufficient:
he pictures himself, beautiful as Apollo, “dressed in a style which
would extort admiration from a Brummel, belted round with self-esteem,
and sallying in dizzy triumph among the ladies--complimenting one,
exchanging repartee with another, tapping this one under the chin,
and clasping this one around the waist; and finally, winding up the
operation by kissing round the circle.”
It was a grandiose dream: under the cover of a jocose style, he tossed
it off in public. “By my halidome, sir,” he cries, “this same village
of Lansingburgh contains within its pretty limits as fair a set of
blushing damsels as one would wish to look upon on a dreamy summer
day.” Young Melville courted by the wholesale; he made love to the
village; reluctantly, he narrowed down his vision to a paltry three
girls, and dwelt for a little while upon their seraphic beauty. It was
high-flown silliness; and the second Fragment from a Writing-Desk, as
these pieces were called, went even further, in the manner of Thomas
Moore and Edgar Poe, painting a mysterious houri whom he followed to
her lair. She was properly mournful and lost in melancholy reverie--all
young ladies, in Melville’s day, arrayed themselves in a mysterious
sorrow, as an aphrodisiac, so that the tender hand of solace might
achieve in compassion what it dared not snatch by brasher methods--and
one leaves Herman, brain spinning and faculties gone, kneeling before
his Divinity.
This is a correct and roundabout way of announcing that he has kissed
a pretty hussy--or perhaps it is a covert expression of more deeply
pent-up desires; but one must remember that, when Melville was twenty,
Emerson, discussing the sexual life of young men with his literary
acquaintances in England, declared that the majority of young men in
America were chaste before marriage; and whether he was right or not
about the majority--Whitman gives us a different picture of city morals