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