most solicitous Christian hypocrisy, industrialism showed a dingy
one. The little water-driven mill-wheel, which greatly lightened
the domestic labour of the early nineteenth-century farm, and which
served equally to operate the small mill or factory, had only a
brief day of social efficiency: by 1850, Melville could encounter a
factory in the Berkshire Hills, turning rags into paper, and call it
a Tartarus of Maids. Mechanical instruments, so far from diminishing
the amount of servile labour in the world, threatened to turn all
industrial operations into a form of servitude: in this middle period,
craftsmanship of the hand decayed, and craftsmanship of the machine was
subjugated by the demand for the cheap, the shoddy, the ephemeral. The
mills at Lowell, which Dickens described with admiration in 1837, were
already huge, and it was only by contrast with Bradford or Leeds that
they could be called tolerable. In the forties, the concentration of
coal and iron was slowly giving Pittsburgh a pre-eminence over the old
iron mines and furnaces scattered about the countryside in Connecticut,
New York, and New Jersey. Railroads, first laid where capital and
immediate convenience dictated, were now joining along strategic lines
of communication, following coast and inland water routes: as the
stage-coach disappeared, and the inns ceased to get patronage, the
inner parts of the country became inaccessible and they gradually ran
down: only the railroad thread prospered.
Was this a triumph or a _débâcle_, this coming of industrialism,
this volcanic intrusion of new methods of living, new means of
communication, new habits of work? When one thinks of the countrysides
that ran down, the forests that were wantonly destroyed, the soils
that were depleted, the towns that were jerry-built and burned and
jerry-built again, the public lands that were thrown into the laps of
speculators, the industrial population that was starved and depressed
in dingy cities, one sees that there is no easy answer to this
question; and certainly none of the economists has ever been impartial
enough as accountant to tell whether the final result for civilization
was a gain or a loss, and if so, how much was gained and how much
lost, and where these things happened. But when Melville came back to
America, industrialism was a value in itself: people encouraged it as
the patrons of the Renaissance encouraged art, not doubting that the
activity was a great one, and made for a higher civilization.
It is perhaps a little absurd to speak of such disparate things as
Attica and the North Atlantic states in the same breath: but these
regions, between 1820 and 1860, which coincided with Melville’s birth
and maturity, were in many respects in the same situation as Attica
between the birth of Socrates and the death of Plato. An old provincial
culture, closely bound to the land, was being overthrown by a new order
based upon trade and imperialistic enterprise and military expeditions
in support of the prestige of the state; and, at this moment of
dissolution, the spirit fulfilled itself in a sudden outburst which
expressed, in a new form, all that was valuable in the old culture,
with an additional energy, derived partly from the seething activities
of the new life that was inimical to it and already threatened it. The
gap between Sophocles and Menander was no greater than the gap between
Melville and Mark Twain: both these Americans roughed it and travelled
much and gave accounts of their adventures; but their feeling and their
vision belonged to different worlds.
In the America of the forties there was a sense of poignant expectation
which was also a fulfilment. Emerson was giving his lectures on the
Times, Thoreau was making his experiment at Walden Pond: warm spirits
with thin and fantastic notions about the ideal life were discussing
Fourier, welcoming the writings of Cabet, trying by a single gesture
to regenerate the morals of society, to get an easier living, reform
the diet, and alter the institution of matrimony--absurd, rickety
people they were, no doubt, but Bronson Alcott’s preference for the
sun-touched fruits and vegetables has turned out not to be so fantastic
in fact as it sounds in theory; and if it is possible now to eat food
which does not lead inevitably to gout and indigestion, to wear clothes
that do not stifle and constrict the human body, and to think candidly
about institutions which were once too sacred for rational thought, we
owe these improvements not a little to the passionate women who dared
to wear trousers and the comical men who listened patiently to Dr.
Graham’s famous lecture on the benefits of bran bread and squashes.
In 1844 this mixture in society of new and old, provincial and
metropolitan, free and servile, vital and mechanical, was still a
turbid one: the elements had not settled; contrast and comparison were
difficult; and people stood for one or the other, chiefly by intuition,
while perhaps a good part of the population sought both: they wanted
the old privileges of birth and the new ones of opportunity, the
old stability and order, and all the new fields to conquer and the
new positions to occupy. Melville belonged by temperament and shade
of interest to the order that was passing, and not to the chaos and
dissolution that was to come; still, in so far as he was aware of the
change, he accepted it and even took a little pleasure in it, as when
he anticipated from the progress of invention that fifty years hence
it would be a commonplace for an American to spend the week-end in
Honolulu.
2
Melville came back to this turbid spring freshet of a world, and he
found that his family, too, was in the process of growth and change.
Allan had become the business man of the family, a lawyer, with offices
in Wall Street; young Tom already wanted to become a sailor, not just
to see new places like Herman but to master the sea as a profession;
Gansevoort, who had struggled hard and become a little wan and
disappointed, had gone in for a political career, and, like Henry Adams
a little later, he went to join the American Legation in London in 1845
as secretary. After a little visiting among his relatives and with
Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, an old friend of the family
with a marriageable daughter, Melville settled down for a while in
Lansingburgh: he had decided to write an account of his adventures. The
lack of any other opening and the promise of some financial return were
the external stimuli; but one cannot doubt that there was also an inner
need. This loquacious, introspective sailor, who can so vividly hold
an audience that, later, when he described for Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne
an encounter in which he had used a club, they searched the house on
his departure to find the imaginary club he had left behind--this young
man had reached a stage where literary expression was inevitable,
necessary--indeed, good for the health.
Up to the age of twenty-five Melville had knocked around the world
solely for the purpose of making the best of a bad job. At twenty-five
he discovered, in writing Typee, that he actually had made the best of
it: his roaming, wasted life was all to the good: its idlest moments
could be salvaged; for he had come into possession of something he had
not deliberately set out to find, and twenty years of sedentary labour
at home would not have given him equal experiences or equal leisure
to reflect upon them. The wreckage of these Polynesian years was more
precious than any cargo he might have punctually guarded in New York
or Boston, at some purser’s job like school-teaching. The outcast came
into his own; and the prodigal returned with his own fatted calf to
give him welcome!
Herman Melville’s first book was a narrative of his Four Months in the
Marquesas among the Typees: its American title was Typee. It was at
the opposite pole, at the other end of the world, from another book
that was being composed during this period, Thoreau’s Walden, but
the similarities are no less important than the contrasts. Typee is
Melville’s Walden, without the philosophic reflection and without the
premeditated purpose to test the benefits of a more primitive life:
Walden is Thoreau’s Typee without the physical derring-do and adventure.
Melville had found in the Marquesas the simplicity and directness of
livelihood that Thoreau sought nearer at hand; and as for Thoreau, he
treated the oak tree as if it were breadfruit, and was glad to find
sweet acorns fit to eat, because they diminished the number of enemies
in the universe. Both Melville and Thoreau had found out what it meant
to throw off the impedimenta of civilization; and though both of
them returned to the society of their own kind, they carried back to
everyday American life a little contempt. Life at the core was a much
simpler matter than the civilizee would admit: for civilization, which
creates enjoyable forms for human activity, also creates grotesque
ones, which grow up alongside the shapely forms and tend to supplant
them: the accumulation of capital comes to mean more than the provision
of food and shelter, and the regalia of the book of etiquette means
more than friendly intercourse. The Philistines that surrounded
Melville knew no more about the great forms of civilization, about
the art of Shakespeare or Rembrandt or the philosophy of Spinoza and
Goethe, than the naked savages: they were just as destitute in these
higher essentials, and, on top of these disabilities, they lacked the
savage’s animal health, charm, and good nature. Melville did not set
out to test these things, as Thoreau did; but unconsciously, on the
mere weight of evidence, he came to the same conclusion.
Writing is not merely a process of explicating what one already knows:
it is also a matter of discovering what one is not aware of: it brings
to light the hidden loot in that storehouse which psychologists call
the Unconscious. In the very act of writing Typee, Melville must have
become conscious of his specific equipment and his gifts as a writer;
for, though he had been able to make no notes of his adventures while
he was undergoing them, they had sorted themselves out and formed
a pattern of their own. In his first book, Melville went about his
work with a sure instinct. He read up every account of the South Seas
he could lay hands on, Captain Cook’s voyages, missionary reports,
travellers’ descriptions: he discovered, what some writers find out
far too late, that if one trusts to one’s own experience alone, one
gets something less than one’s own experience, while, if the background
is filled out and enriched, one’s own contribution comes out more
copiously. This habit of reference became characteristic of Melville
in almost all his later works: Moby-Dick is full of citations, and
even in a series of short sketches, like The Encantadas, he mentions
as authorities Cowley, The Buccaneer, 1684; Colnet, The Whaling Ground
Explorer, 1798, and Porter, The Post Captain, 1813.
It would have been hard to spoil such adventures as Melville’s:
he could only have done it by a weak memory or a poor gift of
visualization, or, more fatal perhaps than these, a tendency to touch
every event with a sentimental gloss. Melville’s Typee was free from
these sins. He trusted his eyes completely; he told what he saw. Did
he understand everything? By no means; the taboo was a mystery, the
religious observances obscure, the exact status of cannibalism hard
to define: in his very failure to interpret these data, he gave an
account which is still valuable to the anthropologist as a description
of the South Sea Islanders in an entirely primitive and untainted
state. If Melville had trusted his eyes less and his wits more he might
perhaps have disclosed facts which were sealed to him: he might also
have muddled and misinterpreted everything. The very limitations of
Melville’s descriptions give one confidence in their authenticity:
this is not unvarnished truth, perhaps, because unvarnished truth with
no inaccuracies and distortions and running together of separate events
is impossible without a written record, promptly made; but it is still
truth.
Does one want a further guarantee of Melville’s accuracy in Typee?
The answer is to be found in the rest of his work. While his powers
of invention were not small, it was only with difficulty that he
could escape the actual world and create a world sustained by his own
fantasy. He tried to do this in Mardi, and he was forced back upon
history and fact; by the time he reached the end of the book, he lost
his grip entirely and converted his fabulous Mardians into out-and-out
Europeans. He tried again in Pierre, and as we shall see, he fell back
upon the stereotyped figures of conventional melodrama: he succeeded
completely, in fact, only once, and he did this by an heroic effort,
for which he had to pay a severe physical penalty. Like Defoe, Melville
was closely chained to the document, the fact, the experience; he could
endow these things with imaginative life, for all the other instruments
of creative writing were at his command; but he was not given to
inventive elaboration. Do we not perhaps exaggerate the possibilities
of the pure imagination? The recent studies of Poe’s and Coleridge’s
fantasies should warn us. Even in the dream, where the imagination
works without any obligation to be understood or communicated, the
most bizarre effects are a blowing up into a vast bubble, through
the mechanism of dream-work, of some tiny drop of actual soapy
water. Indeed, the highest imaginations, those of an Aeschylus or a
Shakespeare or a Goethe, work upon themes already given in myth and
history: they do not waste their energies upon the skeleton of fact,
but take whatever lies at hand, cover it with flesh, breathe upon it,
and give it life.
In Typee, then, Melville made no attempt to write a pure idyll,
compounded of butterfly wings and spiderwebs and rainbows. Fayaway was
interesting to him; but so, on reflection, were the misdemeanours of
the missionaries in the Marquesas. The dangers of being eaten were
horrid: so were the brutalities that whaling captains inflicted on the
natives: so was the military overlordship of the French. Everything was
told in its place, as far as everything could be told to an already
Victorian public. The wonder is that Melville, in the first edition of
Typee, was as frank as he was: when Dickens’ Oliver Twist was published
in America it was attacked for its immoral picture of Bill Sykes and
Nancy, by one of the shrinkingly pure American newspapers of the time,
which no doubt carried in the neighbouring columns advertisements of
quack doctors, books on “sexology,” and patent medicines to be used
as abortifacients. Melville, who was fresh from four years of travel,
wrote with easy freedom and candour, forgetting that his audience was
Thackeray’s, not Smollett’s.
Typee belongs to the morning of the imagination--like Pickwick Papers.
It is direct, fresh, free from self-consciousness, like the healthy
youth who experienced these adventures and sat down to write about
them. That quality is precious and irretrievable. Dickens lived a
whole lifetime without again creating anything so sanative and comic
as Pickwick Papers; and though Melville fared farther and pondered
more deeply on life, this book and the one that followed, alone had
the full bloom of youth upon them. Such books are written without a
formula; their essential quality is almost beyond formulation. When
one has said youth one has said almost everything. Typee is a book to
make one go visiting tropical islands, a book to make one question
the well-arranged career, the carefully ironed routine, the dull
inevitability of the days one has chosen to lead. A scholarly boy reads
Typee, and engages a berth for himself on a ship bound for Madagascar;
a young architect reads the book and leaves his drawing-board for
a trader’s post in the Marquesas, where he becomes a specialist in
Polynesian dialects; another young man reads Typee and decides to
bind his Fayaway to him by the tie of marriage. One reads Typee, and
life suddenly shows a new vista. Adventure is possible: Eden is real:
life need not include time-tables and bank accounts and exercises in
physical culture. And unlike romantic fantasies Typee is not itself a
narcotic, a form of escape: it suggests appropriate actions and deeds.
If one person becomes a philologist through reading it, another takes
to anthropology; another buys himself a sailboat; and another suddenly
decides to carry out some difficult course he had resolved on and put
aside again and again.
Like Pickwick Papers--but how differently!--Typee communicates
its own simple health and manly confidence: its keenness, its
straightforwardness, its hearty appetite for life. It is written with
that skill which disarms skill, with the clarity beside which a more
deliberate artifice would be clumsy. The colour of such romantic
episodes may be artificially imitated: Kaloolah was such an imitation,
and in a very bad light one may not at once detect the difference: but
there is no imitating the down on the cheek and the clear eye--the
stigmata of unspotted youth. I do not underestimate the charm of his
subject; but Melville imparted to it his own candid and buoyant nature,
watching this strange delicious world with intent, water-blue eyes. The
subject was made for a young man to tell about--and happily the young
man appeared. It was matched to this adventurous young American as the
England of comfortable inns and Christmas jollity was matched to young
Dickens. Melville varied the formula of wishy-washy romance by treating
all romantic facts realistically, as he treated brutality and danger,
and both the romance and the hard adventures profited by it.
What a contrast Typee is to Robinson Crusoe! Defoe’s prose was a far
richer instrument than that Melville used in Typee; but after the
first few chapters of Robinson Crusoe one’s mind refuses to follow
that plaguy Philistine: nobody but a classical economist would pursue
his tedious moralizings and his adept contrivances on his desert
island. Defoe set out to teach a lesson, and before Crusoe has his
last boatload of wares stowed away, long before he has re-established
himself in that middle estate in life from which he originally fled,
we are asleep. Melville sets out to teach us nothing: but at every
step we follow eagerly and find ourselves making notes, instituting
comparisons, seeing the world in fresh perspective. Typee is a magic
mirror. In Typee we hold the secret of youth, and hold the world up to
its clear surface: for the first time, perhaps, we note its unhealthy
complexion, its fat paunch, its jaded smile, its fatuous anxieties, its
lack of even animal repose.
3
Typee, which was published in London by John Murray, in his Colonial
and Home Library, quickly won a name for itself as a piece of
picaresque fiction. The London Times could not believe that a common
American seaman could have the style of an educated literary man;
and even a friend of the family, Mr. Evert Duyckinck, could hint
politely that Melville had manufactured some of his adventures; Typee,
literally, seemed too good to be true. The only people who took Typee
for what it was were the missionary promoters: they damned the whole
account heartily as unfair to the missionaries, and a perversion
of Christian teaching, since this impudent and ribald young man
pictured evangelical zeal as making no particular improvement in
Polynesian morality, and since he even went out of his way to comment
sarcastically upon the missionaries in Honolulu, who published a
journal in which the doings of the “converted” king were recorded with
the unction of an official English court gazette.
Against the charge of untruth and the imputation of fiction, Melville
had two answers. One was happily furnished by Richard Tobias Greene,
the Toby of Typee, a resident of Buffalo, who had in fact escaped
from the Marquesas without being able to effect Melville’s rescue,
and who wrote to the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, when Typee was
published, verifying Melville’s story and asking Melville to get in
touch with him. Melville got from Toby an account of his adventures,
and embodied them in a sequel to Typee called The Story of Toby.
As for the missionaries, Melville’s instinct in controversy served
him well: in his next book, he returned to the misdemeanours of
the pious and hit harder in the same place. He had observed that
all the eulogistic reports of the missionaries were written by the
missionaries themselves: their zeal to propagate Christianity was not
unmixed with their concern to get money which would further that fine
enterprise: against these glowing reports of conversion and grace and
the introduction of shame and sin into the South Seas, Melville pitted
his own acrid memories. No animus against Christianity led him to do
this; for he had a strong initial bias in its favour: what spurred him
was mere honesty of record, and the desire to see the Polynesians left
alone in a happier state.
There is one further confirmation of Typee’s verity: one cannot neglect
it, though it comes at third hand. M. Philarète Chasles, in his
Anglo-American Literature and Mariners, translated and published in
New York in 1852, quotes a “well-informed American who reported that
a cousin of Melville had said: ‘My cousin writes very well, except
when he reproduces exactly what he has felt.... He could not invent
the scenes which he describes. Charmed by his improvised reputation,
he would be vexed, I think, to lose his reputation as an inventor.
The reappearance of his companion, Toby or Richard Greene, a real
personage, annoyed him to some degree. It made him descend from the
pedestal of romance to the level of mere narrator. For me, who know
Melville, his wild disposition, and the history of his youth--who have
actually read his rough notes, now in the hands of his father-in-law,
and who have talked twenty times with Richard Greene, his fidus
Achates, I laugh at the preoccupation of a public accustomed to see a
lie where no lie is.’”
A strain of malice lies in this description of Melville’s own reception
of praise as an inventor which does not altogether lessen one’s belief
in its authenticity. In Redburn, Melville resented his cousins, and in
Pierre he made one of his hero’s cousins play the part of a callous
betrayer of trust and friendship; one has reason to suspect a little
bitterness on Melville’s side, and a little condescension and concealed
envy on the other. If the public’s mistake made Melville find more
easily his path as an imaginative writer, let us thank the incredulous
but forever gullible public: their mistake did him service.
4
The fuss that was raised over Typee was not merely on account of its
supposed lack of fidelity. It was also because it had displayed loose
and immoral scenes. If people could find looseness and immorality in
Melville’s description of sexual customs in the South Seas, or in his
anecdote of the proud South Sea queen examining with naïve pleasure the
tattooing on a French sailor, and, in all innocence, raising her skirts
so as to disclose her own to such a connoisseur of the art, or in the
incident of the beautiful yellow-haired wife of a missionary, who was
worshipped by the natives as a mysterious goddess until they stripped
her of her clothes and discovered that she was even as they--if the
public could feel a titillation of wickedness over these things, it
must have been in a state of pathological sensitiveness; and no doubt
it was, for the exposure of more than the lower part of the female
ankle in society was then the mark of a wicked and abandoned woman.
This did not make it any easier for a candid fellow like Melville; and
when a new edition was projected in America, the officious and correct
Mr. Duyckinck must have suggested, as adviser to Wiley and Putnam,
that a little judicious editing would reduce the offence and increase
Melville’s audience. The young must be protected; the clergy must be
conciliated; just a little pruning here and there would give the book
a place on every library table. Melville should not have listened to
this nonsense; sooner or later a man with anything worth saying must
face the world of Pimminee and be prepared to stuff its prejudices and
its gentlemanly objections down its throat: if a young author does not
make this stand in his first book, he will increase his difficulties
with his fourth or fifth. But in 1846 Melville was still uncertain of
himself: a novice in his vocation, he was not aware of all the snares
that beset a man of letters: the pressure toward amiable compliance
with the all too amiable Mr. Duyckinck must have been pretty stiff; all
the more, perhaps, because a Duyckinck might almost be a Gansevoort,
and family pressure may have played a part, too. At all events, he
consented to let Typee be bowdlerized.