Herman Melville
among more plebeian contemporaries--there is little reason, in the
general state of morals and opinion and social censure, to doubt that
Melville was abstinent sexually during his nonage. When he wrote these
pieces, woman was still a divinity to him; and, like his sisters, like
his mother, she was still unapproachable.
These Fragments from a Writing-Desk do not merely throw a light upon
Melville in an amorous mood; they also are full of hints about his
reading and his preparation for authorship.
The manner of these essays was perfervid and exaggerated; the language
was the high-flown journalese that Poe never entirely conquered in
his short stories; and every word was turned before the mirror, and
powdered and ribboned, before being committed to the air. He had
nothing to write about except tenuous threads of dream, or rather, his
disguise of their warmer reality. Thoreau, at twenty, had ideas that
would not have done the man an injustice at forty; not so Melville.
Melville, like Whitman, resembled a deep well: he had to pump all sorts
of muddy water and stale slush to the surface before the crystal liquid
began to run. He was fortunate, however, in belonging to a social
class that had libraries: he alluded in these pieces to Burton, Lord
Chesterfield, Milton, Byron, Shakespeare, Scott, Coleridge, and we have
independent knowledge, through a letter written to a Cooper Celebration
Committee, that he had read widely at this period in his best early
American contemporary--whom he always valued. These mooning days by the
river, and these lone nights of candlelight, were days and nights of
preparation. His swollen language, his simpering allusions to beauty,
his self-consciousness, were vices, but not unpromising ones: better
all these flourishes, to begin with, than a wooden mould and a more
definite set of limitations.
There is nothing in print between these press clippings and Melville’s
first book, Typee; but from the great clarification of language,
and the abandonment of most of his weaknesses, it is plain that
Melville must have had much practice, if not at writing, then at
ample conversation and oral story-telling. Though Melville dated his
growth from his twenty-fifth year, as he told Hawthorne, it actually
began at an earlier period: it was self-consciousness that came into
existence at twenty-five. The growth was well started with a “solid and
profound” boy of six; and at twenty, the down of intellectual manhood
was already thickening into a beard. Like Pierre, he was an omnivorous
and lynx-eyed reader. With all these qualities leafing and budding, we
shall not be surprised at an early blossom.
CHAPTER TWO: SEA-DRIFT
In 1840, Richard Henry Dana published Two Years Before the Mast. It was
an account of a long voyage around the Horn, and various experiences
in the Spanish settlements of California where American boats traded
Yankee calico and trinkets for hides. Written from the point of view
of a sailor, Dana’s story gave no picture of unalloyed pleasure and
adventure; but there was quite enough exotic charm in the California
picture to make a healthy, adventurous lad forget about the floggings,
the brutality, the heroic difficulties of rounding Cape Horn. One has
no proof that Melville read Dana’s book as soon as it came out; but
nine years later, he referred to the author as “my friend Dana,” and
the chances are that Two Years Before the Mast gave Melville just the
fillip he needed to determine on a wider, farther jaunt into the South
Seas.
The wildness and misanthropy of Melville’s joining a whaler in the
depth of winter, with the certainty of having to endure a long
sea-voyage, may easily be exaggerated: it would be a mistake, I think,
to apply to the boyish impulse, which he shared with a thousand other
mothers’ sons, the dark words of the opening chapter of Moby-Dick:
“With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword;
I quietly take to the ship.” In Moby-Dick Melville was supremely
an artist, with an eye constantly upon the dramatic values of his
story; and in the very first paragraph, no, in the first sentence, he
establishes the mood in which the whole book is written. Every bit
of factual material Melville uses there is bent to his purpose; and
though Moby-Dick is biographic of Melville at thirty-two, in the
sense that it discloses every nook and corner of his imagination--one
must not make the mistake of reading back from it into the Melville of
twenty-one, strapping, healthy, restless, impetuous, and blind to his
deepest impulses.
The only certainly objective part of his account of himself in
Moby-Dick is his announcement that he had little or no money in his
purse, and nothing particular to interest him on shore. Melville was
preparing himself for something; but he was not at all sure for what;
and in those distracted hours before the feet are set definitely upon
the road to maturity he chose the most obvious goal before him--that
of adventure in the more watery part of the world. He did not run away
from home: he was already disattached. He did not retreat from hard
“reality”: his voyage to Liverpool had taught him what to expect as
a common seaman. In the light of Melville’s earliest promptings and
suggestions, his father’s trips, his uncle’s arduous voyages, his own
infinite curiosities, stirred by the strange sails and sailors he had
encountered in Liverpool, there is nothing mysterious in either his
mood or his purpose. The “Invisible Police Officer of the Fates” knew
more about the reason for Melville’s voyage than he himself did.
The whale, perhaps, had already seized Melville’s imagination;
he hints as much in the first chapter of Moby-Dick; but one must
accept this hint circumspectly; for in Redburn Melville tells how
disappointed he was when he first saw whales from the Highlander.
“Can these be whales? Monstrous whales such as I had heard of!... It
was a bitter disappointment, from which one was long in recovering. I
lost all respect for whales!... From that day whales fell greatly in
my estimation.” I suspect that the whale was important; but that the
distant voyage mattered even more. At all events, Melville, some time
in December, 1840, made his way to New Bedford, and on January 3, 1841,
he left land behind him.
New Bedford, a town of twelve thousand inhabitants, was already the
centre of the whaling industry, a port full of industry and piety,
great columned mansions set out on lawns, and benign elms, and iron
greyhounds guardedly couchant, and ship-chandler’s shops and dingy
little nautical inns, and a rough waterfront that was not altogether
puritanic nor of New England. Spots and patches of that New Bedford
remain today: the great mansions on County Street are still impressive:
the iron greyhounds and deer are unabashed: even the newer streets,
except around the dingy factory-slums, are lined with trees: the
Seamen’s Bethel is bright with new paint and elegant graining: the
chowders and the fish dishes are above the average, especially in
the poorer restaurants: but around these patches stretch the dismal
shopping thoroughfares, and the dismaler factory districts where an
impoverished population, French-Canadian, Portuguese, Italian, minds
the looms of vast prison-factories, dumped by the laws of chance and
political economy over a lawless landscape of dingy wooden houses.
The whale has become a memory. The gold rush of 1849 resulted in
a vast secession of whaling-men, lured from the South Seas to the
gold-diggings, and the discovery of petroleum in 1859 introduced a
cheaper substitute for whale-oil, whilst the manufacture of spring
steel took the place of whalebone for corsets. The Confederate blockade
under Simms and the sinking of the Stone Whaling Fleet in Charleston
Harbor, whose failure Melville was in due time mournfully to celebrate,
resulted in a large loss of tonnage; and, finally, the manufacture of
cotton for profit attracted capital more readily than the uncertainties
of the sea. All these things heaped together, and the mechanical
improvements of harpoons and harpoon guns and steam vessels and
launches, could not offset them.
Melville saw the whale’s day of glory; and that day was soon done.
There is a real whaling-ship embedded in concrete at South Dartmouth,
and an admirable reproduction on half scale in the Historical
Society’s museum; there are numerous prints and whaling treatises in
the New Bedford Library--Moby-Dick itself is bound in whaleskin, first
edition--and there is a tank labelled sperm oil on the waterfront:
in the museum collections there are models, log books, trinkets,
ornaments, scrimshaw work, tools, harpoons, Polynesian and African
loot, and names like Pease and Coffin still survive, in positions
more or less commanding, in New Bedford, and on Marthas Vineyard and
Nantucket. But there are no whaling-ships in New Bedford now: the
Norwegians maintain the trade; for the American masters of Leviathan
abandoned their calling in the years after the Civil War. The whaler is
to New Bedford what the Conestoga wagon is to Pittsburgh--a romantic
compensation for a dreary and untidy and depauperate provincial life.
The vessel on which Melville shipped was the Acushnet of Fairhaven,
sailing from New Bedford. The master was Valentine Pease; but one
must not look for Queequeg and Tashtego and the Parsee in this boat:
the motley crew of the Pequod was, perhaps, a possibility; but the
actual ship list shows twenty-one Americans, three Portuguese, and one
Englishman. For the first time, Herman Melville enters our vision with
a definable external appearance: forgetting the beard of his later
portraits, one is conscious of a small straight nose, high forehead,
full, mobile, sensitive lips, and, most curious of all, remote, cold
green-blue eyes, that, in this big head, below a shock of dark-brown
hair, have the canny, speculative look of the whale himself. His
complexion in the ship’s list is given as dark--which may merely mean
that he was used to the outdoors and well tanned by the sun. His
height, at twenty-one, was five feet nine and a half inches.
This is the sober-hilarious lad who scanned the tablets in the Seaman’s
Bethel and noted all the young men who had met their death fighting
weather and whales on remote seas: this is the young writer who
listened to the pedantic-looking Chaplain Mudge, and transformed him,
through later acquaintance with Father Taylor of Boston, into Father
Mapple in Moby-Dick: this is the secretive fellow who put down his
place of residence as Fairhaven, the little village across the river
where he had taken lodging. Does he sometimes look dour and grim around
the mouth? Perhaps; but he is as elastic as an india-rubber ball, and
he will bound back with a joke and a smile: and it will take more than
a little jouncing to break down that quizzical reserve.
We leave Herman Melville in New Bedford, and we do not really pick
him up again until he is in the South Seas, sailing towards the line,
one of a dissatisfied company on a harsh, uncomfortable ship, under a
brutal master. The ship stopped at Rio de Janeiro and at the Galapagos
Islands; and probably on the coast of Peru: there he picked up sights
and yarns that served him well in a later period; and in spite of the
bad food, the mean-spirited crew, and the inhuman treatment of the
sick, conditions about which every decent non-professional writer,
like Browne and Dana, justly complained, the voyage had not been a
lost one. For the man there are misfortunes, bitter ones, laming
ones. For the writer, who wishes to heighten his consciousness of
existence, to relive other men’s lives, and to share with them the
deeper realities of their experience, there are no misfortunes. Every