OLYMPIAN

CHAPTER ONE: BITTER MORNING

The society into which Herman Melville was born was in the fullest sense of the word a provincial one. His heritage and his work united him with that society; and when its occupations were undermined and its customs effaced by the great tide of destruction that marked the Civil War, he himself was intimately involved in its ruin.

By a provincial society I mean one which finds its sources and motives within its own region, and that achieves a certain balance and continuity by a restricted development. To understand Melville’s background, one must think back to a time when New York was only one of a number of Atlantic ports that claimed the commerce of the seas and the wealth that it brought: Salem was almost as important: so were Boston and Baltimore and Charleston: it was little more than the accident of a regular sailing packet line that made New York take the lead in attracting population, that, and the opening of a direct water-route into mid-America, via the Erie Canal, which was still a-building in 1819, the year that Herman Melville was born.

The United States, except as an abstract political entity, scarcely existed. There were eagles on the furniture: there were eagles on the dollars: there were flags and martial birds on mirrors and bedspreads and glass and china: but a good part of the community, certainly in the older, more settled regions, was hardly yet political-minded, still less conscious of a mystic relation with the other parts. During the War of 1812 New England, threatened with economic ruin, was on the point of breaking loose from the political union: and though the national government coined money in quarter dollars, people still referred to such coins as two shillings. If Rip van Winkle was surprised at the changes that had taken place during his long nap, a modern observer of that provincial society would be even more astounded at the lack of them. Whitman, writing a whole generation later, and loathing the notion of secession, still had a consciousness of the individuality and independence of the separate states which the strongest defender of states’ rights never expressed after the Civil War.

This provincial society had its own economic foundations, its own locus, its own seat of authority: it differed in a marked way from that which was developing on the frontier: the drama of one of Cooper’s best books, The Pioneers, is chiefly concerned with that contrast. The frontier society was a flowing and moving one: the only thing that united it was the common flag that waved over it and the Constitution, to which its officers paid their superficial respect. Its members came from anywhere, got a living anyhow, and pushed on, in an uneasy, restless search for more fertile land, wilder creatures, greater distance from their neighbours—or merely, from the habit of locomotion. It was strenuous, uncertain, heroic; but once the settlement was effected, once the town was founded and the building-lots divided and the outlaws rounded up, it was unbearably tame: the excitements of civilized life, the clash of ideas, the conflict of cultures, the absorption of experience, did not occupy the pioneer: even when he adopted the external habits of the red man, his weapons, his tools, his maize and dried meat, he avoided the inner content of his culture. In provincial society we are nearer to Europe, that is, nearer to a settled life, to order, authority, tradition. In every colony there was an historic mixture of nationalities and stocks, and that peculiar to New York, English and Dutch, with a dash of French Huguenots, had at last begun to bubble and ferment: presently a Whitman, a Melville, came out of it.

In provincial society, the family was still a prime reality; and in New York it was not less so, certainly, because of the fact that the Dutch had founded great landed proprietorships, like those of the Gansevoorts to whom Herman Melville belonged on his maternal side. Two hundred years of inherited wealth create family pride and all the futile snobberies of caste: they also create a firm sense of self-possession. Washington Irving, who was one of the conquering English, might laugh at these Dutch burghers and patroons: but from their manorial seats along the Hudson and the Mohawk, the Van Rensselaers and the Schuylers and the Gansevoorts could view this mockery with sleepy disdain. They had only to sit tight to be eminent; as the population grew, the value of the land doubled and quadrupled, and in spite of rent wars and the abolition of feudal privileges, the landed families rose to the top like cream.

The Dutch throve in this expansive environment, on farms that stretched from hilltop to hilltop, as they throve by intensive activity in the lowlands by the Zuyder Zee: if their old canals were covered over and filled up in New Amsterdam, they still had their commodious stone or brick houses in the country; there was one such at Gansevoort, where the Gansevoorts lived, not far from Saratoga. The fine arts did not find disciples among these great families: the Copleys, Trumbulls, Stuarts, Peales had English names: but the crafts were cultivated in great variety: the architecture was straightforward and in minor matters, like the horizontal windows and the peculiar gambrel roof, original: the landscape was well treated; and above all, there was food, wild pigeon and grouse and deer, well-fed beef and succulent ducks and geese and great handsome cheeses. When Herman is a little boy his mother will remember Uncle Peter Gansevoort, at Albany, with a tub of five hundred pickled oysters.

“A thoroughly developed gentleman is always robust and healthy.” When Melville wrote these words he was thinking of the great gentlemen between whose legs he had walked as a little boy, and particularly, perhaps, of one he used to hear about, that grandest of old fellows, General Peter Gansevoort, a mighty soldier during the Revolution and a great figure among men. He had died but seven years before Melville was born; many of his remains, including a portrait by Stuart, were still visible; and his legend stayed on the tongues of those who had known him. Six foot four he was, with an appetite and a digestion fit to keep that colossal frame in motion. Now, among all the pleasures of life, positive health—not mere freedom from disorder and disease—is surely the first: living needs no extra justification when the blood is clear and all the juices are flowing harmoniously. In Melville’s youth even a city lad could sail a boat, tramp into the country, shoot game, experience the active, outdoor life which has always been the mainstay of the aristocracy, and which doubtless explains its ability to conquer and control the urban populace, habituated to the ledger, the bench, the desk, and the foul air thereof. Melville had scarcely reached maturity before some of these natural pleasures were curtailed in the city of his birth, so that, to preserve them, William Cullen Bryant launched the campaign to create Central Park.

“Too often,” Melville wrote in 1852, “the American that himself makes a fortune, builds him a great metropolitan house, in the most metropolitan street, of the most metropolitan town. Whereas, a European of the same sort would thereupon migrate into the country. That herein the European hath the better of it, no poet, no philosopher, and no aristocrat will deny.” Melville’s ancestors had kept close to the country: Grandfather Peter and Uncle Herman at Gansevoort, Uncle Peter at Albany, little more than a country town, Great Uncle Thomas Melville on his farm, eastward in the Berkshires. Although Melville was born in New York, he was nourished by the agricultural experience of the back-country: when he idealized his early life in Pierre, he gave his hero a twenty-mile ride or a ten-mile walk every day, a turn at felling a hemlock in the forest, or boxing or fencing or boating. That was something like a foundation, and it resembled Melville’s own. When we come to a later period of Melville’s life we will not be tempted, if we remember these things, to overstress his doldrums or his adolescent uncertainties: for we shall not forget that he became a magnificently healthy animal—and healthy animals itch to use their energies and test their muscles.

2

Against the vigorous, fleshy life of the provincial countryside, the immediate environment in which Melville was born must seem a little petty and painful around the neck; and it was. Herman’s father, Allan Melville, was by trade an importer of French goods, and by every evidence of physiognomy, notebook, and letter a trivial but not uncultivated man. The portrait of Allan as a young man that survives is cruel in its exposure of Allan’s simpering elegance: his lip is weak and his eye has a vacuous leer, and when one puts these qualities alongside the careful pedanticism of his letters, one is left with a mixture of odious characteristics.

Allan was completely given to the outward amenities of life. He valued name: he was not unconscious of this, perhaps, when he married a Gansevoort, nor was he less so the year before Herman was born, when he visited his titled Scotch cousins at the original Melville seat. Deportment and modest behaviour were only less in Allan’s eyes than wifely name and beauty: when he married Maria he made sure, remembering it may be a disturbing levity in Napoleonic France, which he had known as a young man, that she saw eye to eye with him on every point. He was the sort of man from whom one expects prudence without imagination. He doubtless had passionate adventures before he married, for he was thirty-two when that happened: but he was circumspect in all things, and if the adventures left any tell-tale traces, we have no better reason for thinking so than the fact that Melville confronted his hero with such a crack in his father’s image, in his novel, Pierre. Such a man may do very well in business, so long as no unforeseen circumstances occur: not doing the wrong thing will suffice in many occupations for actually doing the right thing—and one may be sure that Allan Melville had a sense of gentlemanly correctness in all his dealings. Business was not yet a ruthless obsession: one expected to retire from it into a more cultivated existence; indeed, such an early withdrawal was the capital mark of success.

Maria Melville, born Gansevoort, seems to have been Allan’s counterpart in many ways: each carried the same tune in a different register. Like Mrs. Glendinning, in Pierre, she was a noble creature, but “formed chiefly for the gilded prosperities of life, bred and expanded in all developments under the sole influence of hereditary forms and world-usages.” She was correct, formal, proud; she valued a high station in life, to which her maiden name, at least, entitled her; she valued good food, low voices, courteous servants, correct manners. An only girl in a family of boys, preening herself with a sense of her family’s importance, does not profit by sufficient chastenings of pride: Maria, unfortunately, was such a girl; and to the last she wore her pride in station like a crest.

Maria had stooped a little to marry a mere trader like Allan, although he, too, came of good English stock which sided with the colonies in the Revolutionary War; still, she stooped; and she never quite recovered from the painful crick in her back. She must have attributed the misfortunes that followed in her middle age to this original mistake; at all events, one cannot imagine a woman with such traits as she left behind in the memory of her contemporaries, taking any disaster to her station in life or her income with resignation or becoming meekness. Christianity, for a Gansevoort, meant a prominent pew in church, not an equal place in heaven; and to deprive her of the world’s goods was to deprive her of everything she valued.

Both Melville’s father and his mother were monsters; but it took him a long time to discover this, because they were correct and meritorious members of society, and it is difficult to believe that the image of God can err, if it be repeated often enough. In the New York of the early nineteenth century, Mr. and Mrs. Allan Melville can be duplicated many times over. Their correctness, their pettiness, their shallowness, were the correctness and shallowness of a venial society whose pretensions to culture and civilization were, on the whole, pretty thin. It was an agreeable society, make no doubt, and Mr. and Mrs. Melville were just the sort of people to persuade one to accept its conventions as the very acme of human desire. One visited: one left one’s card; one entertained at dinner; occasionally one went to the theatre, or to one of those miscellaneous exhibitions of forgeries and bad copies and minor masterpieces that served to introduce art into America: one might even descend a little to that prodigious educational spectacle, the Cosmorama, or Picture of the World, at Scudder’s Museum.

It was not London or Paris, of course. Allan had seen the paintings in the Louvre and doubtless knew better than some of his contemporaries: but it was the outward activity of a great city, with none of the inner effort that sustained it in Europe. No one in New York, up to 1819, had dedicated himself to the creative life; and whether one is conscious of it or not, a great poem, an original thought, an effective piece of scientific investigation, subtly affect the spirit and tempo of a place. New York was the counterfeit of a great metropolis, just as the pictures it looked at were the counterfeits of great painting, just as the exhibition of a Cosmorama was a counterfeit of a voyage around the world. Pigs snouted in the gutters; the waterfront had become a jumble of shipping; the old docks had begun to splinter up and decay; the Collect Pond was being filled up to make real estate for the growing city, and later a site for the Tombs; in the vacant fields on the outskirts of the town, squatters settled in little hovels that reminded one of a misery and want not yet wholly native to America: in short, over a vast welter of miscellaneous activities there was only the most transparent film of a civilized life.

As long as one remained on the surface one could manage one’s time agreeably; and the refined, fastidious people who constituted Melville’s social class were unaware of the fact that their provincial shell was becoming more and more hollow, as the organism within it died part by part and shrivelled up. The Erie Canal and the general starvation and impoverishment of Europe after the Napoleonic wars would draw vast masses of needy men across the Atlantic: the city itself would lose its waterfronts and pleasances: the trees would make way for cobblestones and hitching-posts: the area around its little villages would be broken up into building lots, and it would have to convert its Potter’s Fields into parks in order to recapture a little open space: by 1835, dingy-looking tenements, newly built, and made-over “tenant houses,” abandoned by the original merchants, would spread around and engulf the neat provincial city. In the twenties, from the overcrowded slums and the insanitary backyard wells, fever came forth, year after year: a little later, a wave of cholera caused almost a general exodus. Eventually, the noses of the respectable would detect the change and tilt upward in pained appreciation of it; but that the ugliness and misery and disease were in any way connected with the sources of their incomes, they would of course indignantly have denied.

3

Allan Melville was not a rich man; but when Herman Melville was born, on August 1, 1819, Allan Melville was doing well in a modest way: the family lived at Number Six, Pearl Street, and Herman was the second son and the third child of this agreeable union. When Herman was a year old, Allan noted in a letter that he had hired a cook and a nurse, and wanted only a waiter; and one may take for granted, I think, that such a household already has its complement of maids, linen, silver, sherry, port, brocades, and books.

To awake in a home surrounded by the decencies of life must mollify an infant’s indignation at having to enter the world at all; and in Herman Melville’s earliest years, nothing ever conveyed a sense of danger or physical stress. In the even decorum of the days, meals ebbed and flowed like the tides; the sheets were as white as the tops of wind-whipt waves off the Battery; clothes sprang into existence out of the sewing-room as naturally as feathers cover a robin’s back: little boys had handkerchiefs to blow their noses in and pillows to cuddle into when they fell asleep in their cribs; in the obscure world that crowded around little Herman, there were convivial discussions between his father and strange gentlemen in the library, when he might do no more than linger in the shadows of the hall or hush his breath at a crack in the partly opened door; there were visits to relatives and a few select friends that were as sociable as a regimental inspection in the army, when he might not get his pinafore mussed, nor bunk up against the furniture, nor tease his older sister, nor rub shyly into his mother’s neatly disposed dress, visits with every one sitting upright, stiff, the spine imitating the rigid line of the chairs, just blossoming “deportment.”

On the whole, in spite of its high-chokered formalities, it was a kind world that Melville found himself in: shallow men are not obstacles to little boys, and as for Mrs. Melville, she had all the affection for her children that natural instinct and the graces of society prompted her to have, not a great deal, one suspects, for children, like servants, are only subordinate ministers to the ego—and one cannot take pride in satisfying society’s minimal requirements. She was, however, an intelligent and capable mother: all her eight children grew to maturity, and that was no little feat, even for an upper-class family, in the early nineteenth century. Herman must have been a little starved of affection, I think; for in Pierre he gives his hero no sisters or brothers, so that Pierre may absorb all his mother’s warmth for himself; and his hungry claims for sympathy and caresses were no doubt put off by Mrs. Melville’s aloof rectitude, her concern to keep part of her energy and sweetness for her husband, and her manifest partiality to the younger children, when they arrived. Herman stood as in a cold room before an open fire: one side of him was toasted, and another side was chilled. That chilliness remained; and in the parts of his emotional frame that were affected, circulation was never quite restored.

When Herman was five the family moved two miles uptown, to a house in Bleecker Street which combined the advantages of town and country. It was good for Herman that the change was made. He had been ill and had not regained his health fully: he looked, his father reported then, pale, thin, and dejected; but the new house had a vacant lot where children could play; and not far away the farms began to stretch on each side of the Albany turnpike: despite the activity of the City Planning Commissioners in laying out rectangular blocks over the hills and dales and streams and swamps and ponds of the island, the farms themselves were retreating slowly. Life, for little Herman, was no longer a matter of sitting and staring at the furniture: he went to school: he found that c-a-t and d-o-g were a new way of playing with a dog and a cat: when he was bored he could always practise tricks on Gansevoort, who was older and more considerate and could not legitimately hit back.

Still, Herman did not thrive quite as well as he should have. Winter drew a black curtain between him and all the pleasant things one could see or find or do in the country: darkness fell much too soon after school: November’s rains confined him to the house and March’s snows and slush did the same: as the winter progressed his cheeks would grow paler and his small blue eyes more wan. His father shook his head doubtfully and grieved over little Herman’s melancholy situation. As a result of these stops and gaps in his life Herman “is backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension, but”—so Allan reports to the Albany Gansevoorts, when Herman in the summer of 1826 is sent to them on a visit—“you will find him, as far as he understands men and things, both solid and profound and of a docile and amiable disposition.”

One is grateful to Allan for using such unusual words as “solid” and “profound” to describe a child of six: there must have been something in Herman’s attitude or attack that warranted them: one cannot altogether lay those adjectives to pompous speech or parental pride. Is one going back too far if one finds the beginnings of Melville’s reflective turn in these juvenile illnesses and confinements? The periods of solitude in bed, the lassitude of recovery, the slow, patient hours undistracted by physical activity, the rehearsing in the mind of things done and things seen—these limitations make content and docile little boys. John Ruskin amused himself, in an enforced confinement without toys, by tracing minutely the patterns of the parlour carpet: in such dull, quiet states is the beginning of a meditative life.

A year later Herman was sent to his Great Uncle Thomas Melville at Broadhall, near Pittsfield. Uncle Peter, at Albany, was still something of a countryman: Uncle Thomas was a different sort, more fine, more polished, with a touch of the old beau about him perhaps and no little of the courtliness of aristocratic Paris: he had brought home a French wife, and the undercurrent of French between the old fellow and his spouse, when Herman was present and not supposed to understand, must have teased him like a glimpse of a foreign port. Uncle Thomas had nothing of the boor about him; his manners were mild and kindly, “with a faded brocade of old French breeding” and a certain daintiness of gesture, as when he would drop his rake and pause for a pinch of snuff, that brought the reminder of a society less angular and impetuous than that which jostled little boys in the streets of Manhattan. It was a little pathetic, too, to see this fine old gentleman handling a rake or patiently feeding a cow: he was so manifestly cut out for more urbane companionship.

In the galaxy of uncles and grandparents and aunts, the patrician element was dominant: every one of them knew what it was to be well bred and cultivated in the arts and able to command men. There was Grandfather Thomas at Boston, he whom Oliver Wendell Holmes poked a little fun at in the trivial piece of verse called The Last Leaf: he had been a major, too: he had fought well in the Revolution, too: a dried-apple sort of man who had lost his juices and perhaps his sweetness: let the times change as they would, he kept his shape, and to define it, he wore cocked hat and knee-breeches up to the day of his death: the eighteenth century was good enough for him. Then there was Uncle John de Wulf, who dropped in miraculously one day to see Herman’s father: an old man with hair as white as the pin-feathers on a swan’s breast, and face as red as a cranberry: he used to sail to a place called Archangel, and, more marvellous still, he had crossed Russia with Captain Langsdorff, starting from the Sea of Okhotsk in Asia and going to St. Petersburg, drawn by large dogs in a sled. What a hearty old fellow he was! His clothes almost had the smell of the far-off places he had visited. Ever memorable was that June day when his father and Uncle John took Herman over to Staten Island, and they explored the ruin of a fort that had been hastily erected by Governor Tompkins to defend the city against the British in 1812. Uncle John was a mystery: the crumbling walls of the fort were a mystery: but the sky above was as blue and benign as the blue eyes of Herman’s mother, and in the still air of noon, there was no sound but the twitter of birds, and a great shout of delight and happiness in the little boy’s heart.

But Manhattan was always full of mysterious strangers and sunburnt men with a rolling walk and a sea-bag or a chest jauntily carried on one shoulder. New York did this for Herman Melville: it taught him to be discontented with New York. There was Liverpool: there was London, Havre, Paris. The trim little packets down at the docks went back and forth between Liverpool and New York as regularly as clockwork, or very nearly: the swift ones could make the journey, with a little luck, in fifteen or sixteen days, and the best record for a sailing vessel was considerably under this: they took away wheat and furs and passengers, and they brought back cloth from the Midlands and carpets from Brussels and gloves from Paris and knives from Sheffield and cheap gewgaws from Birmingham and china from Burslem, or even from China itself—and more passengers. One simply could not forget the wideness of the world in this wide harbour, edged with green banks and feathery trees. Even some of the furniture in the house had been made in Europe: Herman looked at it again and again, wondering where the mahogany grew and whether the workmen who made the furniture were still alive, and what they might be doing with themselves now. His papa had been a great traveller; in a score of years, as he methodically noted down, he had travelled “by land 24,425 miles, by water 48,460 miles” and had been 643 days at sea; and once Allan had lived two whole years in Paris. Every stone, every mast, every stick of furniture, every print had a message for Herman: Travel!

How the books and prints Allan had brought home fomented Herman’s dreams! There were prints of French men-of-war, of French fishing boats, with “high French-like land in one corner and a gray lighthouse surmounting it. The waves were toasted brown and the whole picture looked mellow and old. Perhaps a piece of it would taste good.” On Saturdays, when school didn’t keep, and the rain imprisoned the children in the house, Augusta and Gansevoort would take out a French portfolio of coloured prints. More romance! Versailles: grand drawing-rooms: fountains where writhing Tritons spouted gleefully: rural scenes: shepherd boys and cottages: above all, there was a picture of a great whale, as big as a ship, stuck full of harpoons, and three boats sailing after it as fast as they could fly. Then, too, there was a tall brown bookcase in the hall; behind its glass doors one might see long rows of old books that had been printed in Paris and London and Leipsic. There was the Spectator in six volumes with “London” on the title page: there was a copy of D’Alembert in the language Uncle Thomas used to speak to Tante Marie.

Some day Herman would grow up too: he would see the world and have stories to tell about it: he would confront these marvellous pictures and find out how real they were. How snug Herman felt on a winter evening by the old sea-coal fire in Bleecker Street, when his father would tell the children of monstrous waves at sea, waves mountain-high and masts bending like twigs. Herman’s stomach curdled pleasantly at the thought of it, or the equally dizzy but in some ways more marvellous thought of looking over London from the ball of St. Paul’s, and picking out the Monument and London Bridge and Blackfriars and St. Dunstan’s crown, and Southwark, where Shakespeare used to act, across the Thames. One would risk waves as high as mountains if one had some assurance of reaching eventually this fine old land, full of cathedrals and churches that were built before Columbus sailed to America, and narrow, crooked streets without sidewalks, and fields and woods that were as tidy as an American garden. That would be Albany or Gansevoort, prodigiously magnified by age and association. How hard to remember that little boys went to school in Europe, too, and were punished if they didn’t learn their lessons. Did they study geography, grammar, writing, speaking, and spelling there? Did they wear their shirt collars turned over and tied with a black ribbon; and did their papas allow them to wear boots, nice manly boots, instead of shoes? A long breath; a sense of choking anticipation. The days pass so slowly. Herman will be quite old—he may be twenty or twenty-five at this rate, before he goes there!

4

In 1828 Allan’s position in society ballooned a little. He moved to a house on Broadway, with a lot two hundred feet deep, and doubtless more commodious rooms, for the rent was almost double that of his old quarters; but whether he was losing hold of his prudence or miscalculating, or whether circumstances that lay beyond his view were altering his position as an importer, one does not quite know. It is possible that, without being fully aware of his losses, he was shaken by the financial crisis of 1826, or it may be that his importations became inept, and the old lines were giving out. At all events, his business became so bad that he moved to Albany in 1830, so that, perhaps, he might take advantage of the Gansevoort connections. But he moved too late. He became a bankrupt. In 1832, when Herman Melville was only thirteen years old, his father gave up the struggle and died.

One suspects from the look of Allan’s portrait that he was a fair-weather sailor and did not know what to do when the winds began to blow adversely. He left his loving wife with eight children, and only the family name to support them. No thanks to Allan that part of the family name was Gansevoort; but although that name certainly was an asset, and although Uncle Peter and his wife doubtless did all that they felt was in their power to make things easier for the proud widow and her orphans, the morals of bourgeois society are meant, like Allan’s character, for smooth sailing, and when hardship overtakes one branch of the family there is usually no such general sharing round among the surviving groups as there is among the poor, who know shipwreck perpetually. Herman was going to the Albany Academy when his father died; he probably knew only by hints and murmurs and brooding faces that a calamity was approaching—and he suddenly found himself a half-orphan, with only the dear mild image of his father to comfort him.

This death before Herman had reached intellectual penetration did Allan a kindness: he became “a shrine in the fresh-foliaged heart of [his son] up to which he ascended by many tableted steps of remembrance; and around which annually he ... hung fresh wreaths of a sweet holy affection. In the shrine stood the perfect marble form of his departed father, without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, serene ... fond personification of perfect human goodness and virtue.” But this did Herman himself an ill turn, for instead of permitting the august image of his father to experience the vicissitudes of the weather, and ripen into the natural disillusion that greets a son when he finds his deity one in flesh with himself, equally mortal, equally fallible—instead of this, the image became fixed, and when Herman outgrew his father, he did not simply leave him behind: he rose up and annihilated him, revenging himself upon the actual Allan for the perfect marble shadow he had carried in his heart. In the asperities of fortune, Mrs. Melville, with a hard row of her own to hoe, doubtless fell in Herman’s heart because she had to face comparison with the marble portrait of his father: even the best of mothers, under such circumstances, would seem a little harsh and unkind, beside him who had by his bankruptcy and his death escaped the dilemmas of both his creditors and his family. At all events, Herman found himself at thirteen in the midst of a hard-hearted world; and the shock of that transposition left him breathless and weak.

The aunts and uncles were kind, of course; but they had cares and interests of their own; and it needed dire extremity to move them to action. Herman’s cousins continued to go to school: the cousins had butter on their bread and cream on their porridge; but the Melvilles must have known that sinking feeling that comes to a big family at table when the eye takes in the bowl of stew or the little roast and the nine plates that wait for it, and knows instantly that no thinning of slices or spreading of gravy will make the portions large enough to satisfy a healthy appetite. The summers in the country, the long, lazy summers, were over: it was winter all the year round. Gansevoort, dogged, patient, resourceful fellow that he was, opened a hat store on Market Street, and as soon as Herman was fifteen, he got a job as clerk in the New York State Bank, of which Uncle Peter was one of the trustees: a year later, Herman shifted over to the hat store, where Gansevoort now needed an extra clerk.

This was not the way, Herman doubtless felt, that one’s adolescence should open. The son of a gentleman can, it is true, remain a gentleman, even when he adds figures or sells hats: in America, thank Heaven, every trade is an honorable trade; but there is something wrong with a world that gives the young Gansevoorts all that their hearts ask for, and that draws the Melvilles up sharply wherever they turn. All Herman’s ambitions, to go to college, to become an orator, like Patrick Henry, to become a great traveller, like Uncle John or Papa, or to become a great general, like Grandfather Peter, to live in Paris, like Uncle Thomas, to make the name of Melville somehow glorious—all these dreams were like great bonfires suddenly drenched by cold rain. He was as unambitious as a man of sixty. Such careers do not begin in a hat shop. The stream of life had suddenly stopped; its margins became stagnant; there was no way out; one might add columns or sell hats forever. One’s uncles and cousins didn’t care. One’s friends only said they cared. Cold, bitter cold as December, the world seemed to young Melville. Fifteen years later, he still felt the bitterness and sting. He had only a lonely pride to wrap around him; and the world, not seeing any money in the pockets of that garment, smiled a little scornfully, and wondered whether it might not be just as well to leave such wrappings off!

At fifteen a lad can do little more than earn his keep; there was no 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 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 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 disappointment, every trial, has its revelation. The crew of the Acushnet was an ill-fated one: ten years later Melville found out from one of them, Hubbard, what had become of them: the record is one of desertion, suicide, murder, or a miserable death from syphilis; and the ship itself foundered in the very year he wrote Moby-Dick: but this catalogue of misfortunes does not exhaust the matter.

Melville undoubtedly chafed at the monotonous routine and the salt horse and hard-tack, varied though it might occasionally be by bananas and breadfruit: in the meanwhile, however, he had jumped into boats and gone in pursuit of the whale: he had helped to dismember its carcass: he had chopped up blubber and watched the fire in the try-works: he had observed his shipmates whittling and carving in wood and in whalebone all sorts of curious tools, ornaments, and fetiches, work that was often done with a more sure aesthetic touch than any of the contemporary arts could show in America; for these whaling implements, particularly the jagging-wheels, are worthy to have a place alongside the handsome coverlets and the hooked rugs of the forties in a museum of American folk-arts. Weaving mats, with the slow methodical motion of the weaver, his thoughts would solidify into new patterns; or aloft, on lookout duty, in the bland air of the tropics, he would gaze into his own mind, still, gently heaving, fathomless, like the waters around him, and be lulled into a feeling of oneness with the circumambient world, not with the ship’s crew or the captain, but that remoter world of infinite space and unthinkable time which somehow, in these moments of solitude, seemed so much nearer to him.

These thoughts have no images and are not framed in words; Melville must wait long before, in any way, he can find word or fable to express them; but though he himself, as observer, was no more conscious of his growth than a child is conscious of the passage of stars in the sky during the daytime, these were growing-days for him. The routine of the ship was in itself a varied education: every sailor was a bit of a musician and a weaver and an artist and a ropemaker and a blacksmith and an athlete: thought, when it existed at all, had the benefit of those manual exercises and bodily rhythms which, quite literally, increase a man’s grasp and range—a true gymnosophy.

“If by any possibility,” Melville said in Moby-Dick, “there be any as yet undiscovered thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not unreasonably be ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than have left undone; if, at my death, my executors or more properly my creditors find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” Melville was not wide of the mark: these broad-bottomed ships, slow, even sailers, cut off for six months at a time from the distractions of any port, were in truth the best of universities for a young man, still not out of adolescence, to retire into: they were a sort of profane cloister. The regular routine, the monastic discipline, yes, even the restricted diet, were all favourable to a vivid and purposive inner life—all the more so because a lick of bad weather or a sudden chase after the whale confronted Melville peremptorily with the demands of reality, and broke the routine sufficiently to avoid the torpor and complacent lassitude that dogs all restricted lives.

2

As the Acushnet approached the Marquesas in order to renew water and to procure fresh food, Melville made plans to escape her. Conditions were intolerable, and he had learned that there was no definite terminus to the voyage: he had already endured a year and a half, and he might have to hover somewhere between the tropics and the poles, if the oil barrels did not fill up quickly enough, for three, four, even five years. At twenty-two, he did not dare to squander so much of his life: he had ties at home, and did not wish to be buried in a floating coffin. Perhaps this tedious prospect determined Melville as much as the inhuman treatment; perhaps the sight of Nukuheva itself, its bold headlands, with the surf beating against the cliffs, its deep inlets with thickly wooded valleys, separated by the bare spurs of formidable mountains, made him ache for solid ground. There is a form of homesickness one must call land-sickness, and perhaps Melville had it. Did the naked maidens who swam aboard when the ship came to port make the scene seem doubly attractive to Melville and to his companion, Toby? Was he pleasantly shocked and intoxicated by those brown bodies, and stirred, as well as repelled, by the open debauchery of the nights they spent aboard ship? Melville does not tell us. The cruelty and the hardship and the tedium and the green jungle and the abrupt mountains and the brown maidens doubtless all played a part in the adventure and gave heat to it: at all events, Toby and Melville made speedy use of their shore-leave, and set out to escape for a while into the interior, till they could make away again on another ship. Their plans miscarried. After dire hardship, sleeping in dank ravines, leaping from tree-trunk to tree-top down gorges, they found themselves in the valley of a dreaded tribe, the Typees, whose very name meant eater of men.

Melville stayed among the Typees for four months, with a leg that had become lamed and infected in making the escape. The people he was thrown among were suspected of ferocity and cannibalism; that is to say, like a good many savage tribes, they fought a species of extravagant and ritualistic battle with their enemies, the Happars, and retired from the fray usually fit enough in flesh and limb to fight another time. As for the cannibalism, at the very end of his stay, Melville had reason to think that one of their feasts was culminating in the extreme delicacy of Long Pig: but up to that time he had had an exemplary vegetarian diet of breadfruit and cocoanut and various fine elaborations of these staples; and but for the anxiety of losing Toby, who disappeared completely, after going in search of medical aid for Melville’s leg, and the further anxiety of not knowing whether he was being treated as a distinguished visitor, entitled to the services of a young man-servant, Kory-Kory, and royal attentions from Mehevi, the chief, or whether he was being fattened for the sacrifice, like the god-apparent among the Aztecs—but for these things all was serene.

If life were merely a matter of getting a living in the physical sense, as Western Civilization had come largely to believe, then the Typees were in a higher state of civilization than New York or Paris or London had achieved. The Typees were a sort of perpetually endowed leisure class; their food fell from the trees; their water flowed at their feet; their garments, of pounded bark, tappa, were a sport to make, and with less attention than they would have to give to a fitting from a Bond Street tailor or dressmaker, they were made; their days were torpid and free from care, like those of a rentier with gilt-edge government bonds; and though they had ceremonial observances and religious feasts and wars, the symbol never stood between them and their physical life: they did not whine about their sins and cry to God: even in their sexual life, there was rivalry without jealousy, and marriage without physical fidelity: almost the only desire they were accustomed to repress was the typical Western desire for a little repression!

The first whaleman Melville had ever met, on his trip to Liverpool, had raised a doubt about the value of civilized society. “And what’s the use of being snivelized,” he used to say. “Snivelized chaps only learns the way to take on ’bout life and snivel. You don’t see any Methodist chaps feelin’ dreadful about their souls; you don’t see any damned beggars and pesky constables in Madagasky.... Blast Ameriky, I say.” Melville could appreciate this among the Typees. “There were,” he says, “none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description; no assaults and battery attorneys to foment discord, backing their clients into a quarrel, and then knocking their heads together; no poor relations everlastingly occupying the spare bed-chamber and diminishing the elbow-room at the family table; no destitute widows with their children starving on the cold charities of the world; no debtors’ prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or, to sum up all in one word—No Money! That ‘root of all evil’ was not to be found in the valley. In this secluded abode of happiness there were no cross old women, no cruel step-dames, no withered spinsters, no lovesick maidens, no sour bachelors, no inattentive husbands, no melancholy young men, no blubbering youngsters and no squalling brats. All was mirth, fun, and high good humour. Blue devils, hypochondria, and doleful dumps went and hid themselves among the nooks and crannies of the rocks.”

By this process of exclusion, Melville tells us much about his experience and the effect it had on him. “Civilization,” he discovered, “does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she had not even her full share of them.... If truth and justice and the better principles of our nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-book, how are we to account for the social condition of the Typees?” Small wonder that Melville’s contemporaries in the money-warrens of the West thought that he was inventing these people out of whole cloth! But it was not by the mere absence of ugly and harassing things that the Valley of the Typees was flecked with sunlight and warm, rose-violet shadows; there were positive pleasures as well; above all things, there was beauty, the constant beauty of splendid forms, undisguised by clothes, beauty so simple and statuesque that, in later years, it gave Melville an immediate clue to Greek sculpture. There were many happy afternoons; afternoons that he spent in bathing with a parcel of brown river nymphs; afternoons when, once he had got the taboo lifted, he paddled idly in a canoe with Fayaway, a lovely girl in his household, who was his constant companion; there were evenings spent watching the dancers in the hula-hula grounds, swaying, arching, gliding, swimming, whirling in an ecstasy of sensuous enjoyment that threatened to rob this “quiet, sober-minded, modest young man” of all his studious inhibitions; and there were days of contrast, spent with masculine gravity in the company of Mehevi and his attendant warriors, feasting heavily, with no cloying reminder of the other sex. Life itself became the most beautiful of rituals: its duties were games, its necessities were pastimes. Rivalry, enmity, jealousy, hardship, violence were all transposed to the realm of art, where, instead of defeating life, they added to its enjoyment.

True: these people were simple to the point of childishness: they could become excited, young and greybeards alike, over a popgun that Melville devised; but did not the Western World have its popguns, too: did not the crowds on Broadway turn out for a fire or a soldiers’ parade with the same naïve delight? It was true, too, that these islanders had taboos, whose meaning Melville could never quite understand: they seemed as capricious as the flight of a bat, and like that flight, were determined doubtless by some imperceptible fact or belief that belonged to the insect order of rationality: but the taboos did not strike many of the essential elements of life. A man might be taboo against the assaults of his enemies and so might venture among them freely as a messenger, like the good fellow who abetted Melville’s final rescue, or the canoe might be taboo against women using it—a comical male reservation—but food and clothing were not made taboo to the destitute by the laws of property, nor were men and women condemned to an acrid chastity by sexual taboos which had also arisen very largely out of laws and customs connected with the succession of property. There was no theft where every one could help himself, and no vice where virtue made such simple and rational demands.

Melville had a healthy capacity to adapt himself to a situation; and he was not ill at ease, little though this life resembled the world of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association, which the missionaries were introducing with the help of biblical pocket-handkerchiefs, pious exhortations, cheap Manchester rags, ugly bedizenments, and the sense of bitter sin that naturally accompanies the horrors of venereal disease. Had it not been for the infection in his leg, the uncertainty as to his eventual fate, and the plain desire of some of his native friends to make a thorough Typee of him, by a spirited application of tattooing, there is no telling how long he might have stayed, or how thoroughly he might have been lulled into forgetfulness of his Western connections.

In Mardi Melville pictured Hautia, the symbol of sensual oblivion, as the constant beckoner of the hero; and Hautia must have pressed him hard in Typee. Nevertheless, Yillah, who represented the spiritual quest, had already stirred him up before he started on his voyage, and in the end, Yillah must have reminded him of activities that found no answering chord among his happy, kindly Typee captors. When that ghastly devil with his tattooing implements made advances to him, Melville felt his quintessential foreignness. People wore queer clothes in Albany, perhaps, but thank heaven, they did not permanently discolour the flesh. Fayaway was lovely to look at, lovely to court, and perhaps lovelier to possess: but no man in full command of his faculties ever looked forward to a lifetime of such possession as sufficient reason for not committing suicide. Kory-Kory, his ugly man-servant, was as faithful as Sancho Panza; King Mehevi was as gracious as Francis I; one might even say a good word about tattooing and man-eating: they were matters of taste, perhaps; but inevitably, Melville felt a little out of it; and neither love-making nor bachelor companionship could quite make up for his spiritual isolation.

The moment for escape at last came. Melville, sadly in need of medical aid, hobbled down to the shore: a boatload of tabooed Kanakas had come with presents of calico and a musket to ransom the captive. The Typees were unwilling to part with Melville, and the boat was about to pull off without him, when, in the midst of the clamour, he broke away and threw himself into the arms of his rescuers, escaping only after he himself had killed a ferocious old chief, hot in pursuit, who in a happier and more apathetic day had been kind to him. Fayaway and Hautia’s bliss lay behind him; Fayaway clutching a piece of calico Melville had thrown her for consolation: Yillah lay in an unfathomable distance beyond, and what stood between was a tortured filthy life in a broken-down whaler, whose planks were rotting and whose hold swarmed with cockroaches and rats. Many a time during the next two years, Melville must have regretted leaving Fayaway’s arms! Yes: and she must have regretted Melville, for a little later an American traveller, Henry Augustus Wise, discovered a brown maid from the valley of Typee, named Fayaway, working as maid-of-all-work to the French commissary of the garrison at Nukuheva—a proper snivelized anti-climax to the unsullied tropical summer of Melville’s residence and courtship among the Typees.

3

A harsh captain is a bad fellow to sail under, but a weak captain is worse. When Melville came to on the Julia, a drab little barque, with a jaunty way of catching the wind, he found himself under the orders of an uncertain cockney landsman from Melbourne, with a crew of discontented scalawags, and a roving commission to hunt whales or seals or pick up a living somehow on the South Seas. Paper Jack, as the men called this landlubber of a captain, signed him on for one cruise, with the stipulation that he be discharged at the next port; and when Melville looked around him, he discovered that between the slack disorder of the Little Jule and the tyranny of the Acushnet he had little to choose.

The physician on board, Dr. Long Ghost, had parted company with the captain and had made his bunk in the forecastle. The mate, a hale, bullet-headed fellow with a kind heart and a heavy fist, John Jermin by name, was always half-seas-over; the captain was one of those watchful, ineffectual, capriciously determined men who achieved the dignity of isolation and got the semblance of obedience by never delivering an order through his own mouth. Without any success in whaling, the ship remained at sea, lest by lying in harbour and replenishing its provisions it might incidentally lose the whole crew by desertion.

Melville was contemptuous of the captain, he admired the bluff, bustling Jermin, and he fell in with the doctor, who was an educated man, as naturally as one globule of mercury will coalesce with another as soon as they touch. The doctor was a capital fellow to finish off Melville’s education and to while away the sleepy hours of the night: “he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk Burgundy, and associated with gentlemen. As for his learning, he quoted Virgil, and talked of Hobbes of Malmesbury, besides repeating poetry by the Canto, especially Hudibras. He was, moreover, a man who had seen the world. In the easiest possible way he could refer to an amour he had in Palermo, his lion-hunting before breakfast among the Caffres, and the quality of the coffee he had drunk in Muscat.” Such a man did not merely bring authentic reports of books and conversations; he was himself a picaresque library, and he who ran with him had much to read. This was the sort of acquaintance Melville could never have picked up in Albany, nor in New York: one first must become an outcast before he can have the privilege of such company.

The captain became seriously ill; and he purposed to send his men to sea under command of Jermin while he recuperated on shore. Heartily sick of the voyage, the crew rebelled at the notion, and when the ship lay off the harbour of Papeetee, they sent a round robin to the English consul, stating their grievances and petitioning to be put ashore. Wilson, the consul, would not hear of it: to cow them into submission, he delivered them over to the French frigate, La Reine Blanche, that lay in the harbour; and for five days and nights Melville had a chance to live on a French man-of-war and to observe the contrast between French customs and character, and the American and English ways he was used to; but the imprisonment was only a demonstration; and the ship returned so that Wilson might again utter his ultimatum to the crew. The upshot of it was that the crew was put inside the British jail, the Calabooza Beretanee, under the surveillance of a huge, brown Polynesian dignitary; and after a few weeks of their semi-confinement, the Julia went off without them; and they finally found themselves at liberty among the miscellaneous riff-raff that haunted the shores of these tropical islands.

During the next couple of months, Melville lived the life of a rover, in the company of Dr. Long Ghost, visiting among the natives, working for a brief period on a Polynesian farm, for a tall robust Yankee born in the backwoods of Maine, and finally trying, unsuccessfully, to advance their fortunes in the court of Queen Pomaree. It was a rambling, roving, thoroughly outlandish mode of life which must have had the episodic and incredible quality of a dream: there was a complete absence of pressure and direction; Melville drifted from one islet in Imeeo to another as a leaf driven by chance breezes will drift on the surface of a still pond. Thrown among the superficially converted Christians of Tahiti, Melville observed no advance over the untainted pagans of Typee; quite the contrary. “So far as mere temporal felicity was concerned, the Tahitians are far worse off now than formerly. Years ago brought to a stand, where all that is corrupt in barbarism and civilization unite, to the exclusion of the virtues of either state ... they must here remain stationary until utterly extinct.”

Away from the purlieus of the Christian “mickonaree” Melville enjoyed the lazy, savage life. The air was relaxing; but for a young American, bred in Albany and Pittsfield, the danger was that he might bless his braces, and damn his relaxes too opprobriously; so, on the whole, one must count these months of rambling and laziness and observation as good ones for Melville. Some of the dreamy, unexpected quality of them went, no doubt, into the fantasy of Mardi when he came to write it: Omoo, which records the actuality, and Mardi, which utters the dream, are the morning and night of the same day. Through it all, Melville kept his shape; he was still a quizzical, modest, slightly sentimental, sober-minded young man: when he beholds the beautiful wife of a sugar-planter, mounted gallantly on a white pony, his emotions are touched by distant adoration and curiosity, just as they might have been in Lansingburgh; and one suspects that he plagued more than one incipient brown sweetheart with a far too respectful and brotherly reserve. Five years later, Melville still remembered how the sugar planter’s wife had captivated him: when he thinks back to this trivial incident he sets it apart in a chapter; and he remembers, too, the brown feminine mockery at his attempts to be sentimental. There is no likelihood that this young man will succumb to Queen Hautia: he is always on guard. If he needs any advice at this period it is that of Koheleth: Be not righteous over-much: why shouldst thou destroy thyself?

4

Whether Melville judged better of his third whaling captain, the Vineyarder, whom he finally fell in with, he does not tell: whether he tired of whaling off the coast of Japan one does not know either. One has a glimpse of him working as a clerk for four months in Honolulu, the capital of the Sandwich Islands, among the fine dwelling-houses, the hotels, the barber-shops, the offices, of the whites; and there one’s knowledge ends. By the summer of 1843 he had shipped aboard the frigate, United States, upon its homeward voyage. The free, vagrant, uncertain life of the rover was over: he was in the Navy now. Melville had not done more than pick up a bare living, certainly, for when he was in Callao, about to equip himself for the terrible exposure of rounding the Horn, he could get no pea-jacket from the purser, and apparently could not afford to purchase one on shore: so he manufactured a white jacket for himself out of a white duck frock, folded and padded, cold comfort enough in dry weather, and colder comfort in wet, when the jacket was so absorbent his shipmates would cruelly stand up against him, to get rid of their own moisture.

Melville was as sick of adventure as Ulysses himself. When he heard the words, “Up anchor! Man the capstan: we’re homeward bound,” from the gruff boatswain, the words ran through his veins like golden wine. Now the little daily current of anxiety was over: there were a few new ropes to learn; but a strong, eager fellow, always ready to bear a hand, always prompt to spring to his post, is pretty sure of getting a good word from his immediate superiors, even though it is not an audible one; and with the big ship’s company, the work itself was not so onerous but that there was time for long chats and lengthier meditations, particularly if one belonged to the maintop. Melville knew the value of height and seclusion to stimulate the inward eye: climbing a high tower, he wrote in The Encantadas, is the best way to see the country around one; and at sea, he would climb the mast: that was his watch-tower and his cloister.