to be duly announced--and as the matter (in one respect) is a little
delicate, I am happy that the literary tact of Mr. Duyckinck will
be exerted on this occasion.” So Melville wrote in the middle of
1846 to Mr. Evert Duyckinck. He grimaced a little at the dose; but
unfortunately swallowed it. The anecdote about Queen Pomaree went:
the anecdote about the missionary’s wife went; and various other
passages were underscored by elimination. What Melville said about the
missionaries of the Dollar and the Cross is worth remembering, before
Mr. Duyckinck runs his blue pencil through it:
“Look at Honolulu, the metropolis of the Sandwich Islands!--a community
of disinterested merchants, and devoted self-exiled heralds of the
Cross, located on the very spot that twenty years ago was defiled by
the presence of idolatry. What a subject for an eloquent Bible-meeting
orator!... But when these philanthropists send us such glowing accounts
of one-half of their labors, why does modesty restrain them from
publishing the other half of the good they have wrought?--Not until
I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of
the natives had been civilized into draught horses and evangelized
into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken
into the traces and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual
instructors like so many dumb brutes.”
I would not say that this bowdlerization ruins the book, or that it
materially takes away from its value: that is not the point. Small and
“immaterial” suppressions may have no effect upon the literary value
of a work: but they cannot help having a subtly corrosive effect upon
the man who has created it. As A. E. once pointed out, in discussing
the matter of censorship, the spirit of the artist is a sensitive one,
and in many cases it works only with great difficulty. If its wings are
clipped by so much as a feather-tip, its capacity for flight may be
ruined. It is perhaps impossible to say how far Melville was harmed by
Mr. Duyckinck’s tactful exertions, or by the hysterical denunciations
that prompted them. For objective evidence, we have only the fact
that sex, except in remote allusions to debauchery in Redburn or to
sodomy in White-Jacket, did not enter into any of Melville’s stories,
until it suddenly erupted in 1852 in Pierre with the violence of long
repression. Mark Twain was burdened by a similar censorship; and he
took refuge in the flat obscenity of “1601.” Melville’s own development
as a man and a writer might have been a happier one, had not sex become
in his day a sanctimonious ritual, with no middle term between the
licence of the brothel and the waxen purity of the home. The censorship
which operated on Melville’s books bore equally on his spirit: his
libido turned back upon itself, and got lost for a time in the mazes
of an infantile life. To take sex easily, naturally, rationally, is to
subject it to the refining elements in life: to take it with a sense
of unholy attraction and holy repulsion is to dissociate it completely
from the normal influence of knowledge and convention and taste: in
this dissociated, fragmental state, sex rages irresponsibly like a bolt
of lightning in an open field: it may disappear into the ground, it may
shatter a tree, it may kill a human being.
Melville had carried back from the South Seas the simplicity of an
essentially chaste, but, we must suppose, not altogether inexperienced
young man. This simplicity had something valuable in it for Melville’s
contemporaries, just as his appreciation of savage society must have
warned them about the absurd extravagance of acquiring dyspepsia
and hard faces and an incapacity for the arts of living by their
concentration upon money-making--and the censorship of Typee kept
this part of Melville, I think, from maturing with reflection and
experience. Sex was taboo. That element in his growth knew no middle
state between greenness and blight. One part of life was locked for him
in a dark chamber; one part will die by asphyxiation.
5
Typee was a success, and Melville soon had the consciousness of being
an author. He could scarcely mention his book, in passing, without
pausing to realize how strange it sounded. All his dispersed interests
and his random purposes were suddenly concentrated: his life had the
spiritual momentum that a genuine career gives it: he was no longer
an outcast Olympian, but one of the great circle, now treated by his
elders as an equal, respected, deferred to, genially slapped on the
back, welcomed when a group of literary men met for conversation: if
an English author came to America, as Thackeray did a little later,
Melville was bound to be the most promising younger man in the circle
that dined him and gave him welcome.
In Pierre, Melville gives his hero’s sensations at suddenly finding
himself quoted in the public press, and urged by various grave
societies to lecture before them--little gratuities of attention that
afflicted him with a sense of his own insignificance, no matter how
inflated he might seem to the world outside: and Pierre’s humility was
doubtless Melville’s. He had grown a beard; but he did not need that
symbol of years and experience to wear his new honours easily: with
his reading and his miscellaneous adventure and the deep or brilliant
conversation that might unexpectedly escape from him, he must have been
a ready companion in any of the current literary circles: indeed, the
difficulty was that, in the particular group where he moved, it was
hard to single out any minds that came up to his level: the Manhattan
literati of Melville’s heyday were a slick and shallow parcel of
journalists, with a few scholars like the learned author of the Lives
of the Presidents, as makeweight.
Melville’s quick entry into the literary world was partly furthered
by two men who once wielded power in American letters, Messrs. George
and Evert Duyckinck; George, a little thin and abstemious and given
to pious reflections, Evert, more full-blooded, shrewd, worldly, an
energetic hack who accumulated more than a modest competence as an
editor and a compiler of ostentatious books of reference. They were
busy little moles, these Duyckincks; one can scarcely utter their
names or recount their ephemeral glories without smiling a little; but
they gave Melville support and sympathy at a time early enough for him
to profit by it; and if Melville found Evert Duyckinck worthy of his
friendship there was something in the man’s geniality that merited it,
and it is not for us to withhold what Melville himself freely gave.
Evert Duyckinck had, according to Richard Lathers, one of the choicest
libraries in the state: he was literary adviser to Messrs. Wiley and
Putnam, and after Charles Fenno Hoffman’s brief editorship, he assumed
charge of the Literary World. Until the publication of Pierre, Mr.
Duyckinck was intimately associated with Melville’s literary ventures.
Melville trusted him the way that a foreigner may trust a native as
a guide to a strange country, realizing only after many days that
the man he has thrown himself in with, whose company he has enjoyed,
would be the most antipathetic of companions if one met him on one’s
own ground. Duyckinck helped Melville to find his own depths; and when
Melville had found them the two men were, by that simple fact, cut off.
It is not difficult to see how this friendship matured and withered:
Duyckinck’s life was devoted to those superficies that Melville
dedicated his whole energies to piercing and getting beyond. Lowell hit
Evert off in one of his Fables for Critics; it was not the least happy
of his arrows:
Good-day, Mr. Duyckinck, I am happy to meet
With a scholar so ripe and a critic so neat,
Who through Grub Street the soul of a gentleman carries.
What news from the suburb of London and Paris?
Walt Whitman met the Duyckinck brothers: he describes them both as
“gentlemanly men” and he could say no worse of any one. “I do not know
of any description that it would have pleased them better to hear,”
added Whitman. “Both very clerical-looking--thin--wanting in body:
men of truly proper style, God help ’em!” But the Duyckincks had a
correct, bowing acquaintance with literature: they represented culture,
tradition, a knowledge of English grammar; and for a good while they
were not the least appreciative of Melville’s critics. If, when they
published their Cyclopedia of American Literature, they gave fourteen
pages to Longfellow and only three and a half to Melville, they were
but reflecting the judgment of gentlemanly men for the next generation.
More than thirty years later, Mr. Barrett Wendell and Mr. George
Woodberry had advanced no further on the road to appreciation.
6
Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, had procured an advance from Murray on
the English edition of Typee; and his new fame and financial success
must have made Melville look forward to literature as the source of a
permanent livelihood. In that “maturer and larger interior development”
that was now taking place in Melville, pride of career supplanted
pride of race: it was himself, his own nature, his experiences, his
thoughts, that mattered, and not the size of his grandfather’s breeches
or the length of that other lineage which perhaps joined him with
bonnie Jeanie Melville in the Scots ballad. His racial inheritance had
but added to his humiliation; by his own exertions and skill, he had
achieved his first triumph. He is now a proper child of the Revolution;
he knows, like Napoleon, that men make families quite as much as
families make men--and there is no ancestor so powerful as one’s
earlier selves.
Melville promptly followed Typee with a sequel of his adventures in
the South Seas called Omoo, which signifies rover. In the meanwhile,
Gansevoort, who had been the mainstay of the family while Melville was
growing up in Albany, had found nothing in the bleak streets and grimy
house-fronts of London to lessen his own depression; and he died. The
early struggle, which had left such a bitter taste with Herman, had
even more fatally taken the heart out of Gansevoort. From the last
of his letters home one has the feeling that he resigned from life,
rather than that he was suffering from any physical malady. “Selfishly
speaking,” he declared, “I have never valued life very much.” The fibre
loosened in Gansevoort; the grip relaxed; he passed out. There is no
sign in Omoo that Gansevoort’s death was a very profound event for
Melville; and yet one suspects that his sadness and hopelessness came
in later years to mingle with Melville’s pain.
Omoo is a description of Melville’s life from the day he escaped the
Typees to his signing up for another whaling voyage off the coast of
Japan: its contents I have already used in telling about his life
during that period. The narrative itself is done in the direct,
vigorous, rapid style of Typee: if anything, there is more humour in
it, and Melville gave himself greater liberties in using the material
and embroidering it. Omoo is perhaps the most underrated of Melville’s
books. While it solidified the reputation he had gained in Typee,
the first book has held first place, because of the unique people
and customs Melville dealt with there; whereas Omoo, which is a more
raffish tale, and in some respects superior in literary quality, has
been treated as if it were but the rinsings of the heady Typeean jug.
This is far from being true. The relatively unromantic, if outlandish,
quality of these later adventures, with the exception of the mutiny of
the Julia’s crew, made him rely more heavily upon his own skill: and
although the main incidents are probably accurate, all the characters
are focussed with a slight distortion, through Melville’s sense of the
comic: Dr. Long Ghost’s adventures and peccadillos are filled out a
little, and the venial doctor of Papeetee was treated in such a fashion
that the actual character uttered a cry of belligerent protest when the
book came to his attention.
Melville’s skill at character-drawing, of which his description of
Mehevi and Kory-Kory gave promise in Typee, became in Omoo more firm.
Here is a scene in which two minor characters, a land-lubber, Rope
Yarn, and an “affable-looking scamp”--Flash Jack--appear only for a
minute.
“Flash Jack crosses the forecastle, tin can in hand, and seats himself
beside the land-lubber.
“‘Hard fare this, Ropey,’ he begins; ‘hard enough, too, for them that’s
knowed better and lived in Lun’nun. I say now, Ropey, s’posing you were
back to Holborn this morning, what would you have for breakfast, eh?’
“‘Have for breakfast!’ cried Ropey, in a rapture. ‘Don’t speak of it!’
“‘What ails the fellow?’ here growled an old sea-bear, turning around
savagely.
“‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ said Jack; and then, leaning over to Rope
Yarn, he bade him go on, but speak lower.
“‘Well, then,’ said he, in a smugged tone, his eyes lighting up like
two lanterns, ‘well, then, I’d go to Mother Mill’s that makes the great
muffins: I’d go there, you know, and cock my foot on the ’ob and call
for a noggin o’ somethink to begin with.’
“‘And what then, Ropey?’
“‘What then, Flashy,’ continued the poor victim, unconsciously warming
up to his theme; ‘why then, I’d draw my chair up and call for Betty,
the gal wot tends to the customers. Betty, my dear, says I, you looks
charmin’ this mornin’; give me a nice rasher of bacon and h’eggs,
Betty, my love; and I wants a pint of h’ale, and three nice hot muffins
and butter--and a slice of Cheshire; and Betty, I wants--’
“‘A shark steak and be hanged to you!’ roared Black Dan with an oath.”
This quotation serves not merely to show how immediately and vividly
Melville can put before us a forecastle ragging. The passage is
interesting for another reason. Despite his admiration for Melville,
Robert Louis Stevenson gave rise to one of the parrot judgments about
Melville’s work when he said: “At his christening some influential
fairy must have been neglected. ‘He shall be able to see, he shall be
able to tell, he shall be able to charm,’ said the fairy godmothers;
‘but he shall not be able to _hear_,’ exclaimed the last.” In this
passage Stevenson was reproaching Melville for his inadequate rendering
of the Marquesan speech, a matter over which there is small cause for
wonder, since Melville’s four months among the Typees were followed by
four years before he committed the names and words to paper; but the
actual fact is just the reverse of Stevenson’s dictum: Melville had
a curiously accurate ear; and the little passage just quoted proves
it. Here, from an American writer, is perhaps the first clue to the
existence of modern cockney. One will not discover that speech in the
pages of Thomas Hood’s Punch; one will not discover it in Pickwick
Papers or Oliver Twist; what one finds there, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has
pointed out, is an earlier urban dialect. In Omoo, on the contrary,
Melville gives us the modern forms: the _ink_ ending for _ing_ and
the dropped and added aitches. He was almost equally felicitous in
rendering the difficult Belfast brogue: his transliteration of _haul_
into _harl_ is a test of it; and only an accurate ear will thus catch
the living tongue. Unlike Ruskin, Melville was not a painter with
words, but a musician; and in his maturity, his great passages have a
musical structure of their own. In a phrase like “a soft seething foamy
lull” he uses the sound of lull, rather than its sense, to convey his
meaning; and among the modern poets it is natural to find him turning,
later in life, to Shelley and to James Thomson.
Omoo was a rambling book: it had in a formal sense neither beginning
nor end; but it had something of the bright immediacy of a sketchbook
filled with graphic notes that might be worked into a finished picture.
There were no clouds over Melville when he wrote Omoo; even its ugly
parts were saturated with sunlight; beachcombing left Melville a
little brighter for being scoured by the sand. Smollett had taught him
all he needed to write this kind of work, Smollett and Defoe. Omoo
had the sharpness, the force, the exaggeration of character which
the eighteenth century had in its satiric artists; and every episode
was carried off with a dry discretion. With the habit of long verbal
practice, Melville watched his listeners: he never overloaded Omoo:
he knew where to skip and where to elaborate: he is a writer who
knows that one wants everything in a travel book except the tedium
and fatigue of actuality. Throughout the narrative, one always feels
that Melville has more up his sleeve: one is prepared to believe
that he has a hundred Omoos in his bosom: perhaps he had, and at all
events it required talent to make us believe so. More and more, his
speech cleansed itself of affectations: the direct, vigorous lingo
of the sea, with all its Elizabethan locutions, was doubtless a sound
influence in this part of his development: of the young man who wrote
the sublime gibberish in the Lansingburgh newspaper, there is scarcely
a trace left. One measures such growth in feet, not in inches: in seven
years Melville had not merely renewed his physical body completely: he
had acquired an equally complete literary shape.
In every sense of the word, Omoo is a companion volume to Typee. It is
not merely that the milieu is still these wild, wooded, mountainous,
sun-drenched islands, with their attractive brown inhabitants: it is
not simply that as soon as Melville steps aboard a boat, the deck
begins to climb and fall under one’s feet and the smell of pitch and
hemp rises to one’s nostrils: it is not merely that this South Sea
Prospero, as Robert Buchanan called him, is a weaver of spells, as full
of happy mischief as a Polynesian maid and as seductive as a tropical
night. In Typee and Omoo, Melville had that superb aplomb--formed by
an athleticism, an inner poise, a dexterity of hand, a sharpness of
eye--which we call Greek because for a little while the Attic peoples
experienced it as a community; the attitude which Whitman valued as
the sign and seal of the new American. Melville is appreciative; he
is humorous; but he is neither a professional funny man nor a syrupy
preserver of glamour. His aplomb never deserts him. He is always in
command. That trait is the key to his early literary success; it
explains the effortless accuracy of his descriptions. Such poise, such
aplomb, such confidence, rest on the nicest sort of spiritual and
physiological interplay: blood and muscle form a part of it as well as
mental serenity. We have seen this balance in our own day, embodied in
a young man who flew to Europe alone. The gesture surrounding this act
was the same precious essence that Typee and Omoo give us in the form
of art. I have called this quality youth; but it is what the Athenians
called virtue; and as soon as we depart from it we are hoary with sin,
and there is no health in us.
CHAPTER FOUR: AZZAGEDDI
In 1847 Herman Melville was twenty-eight years old. Omoo had been
finished at the end of the previous year; and, in the excitement of
finding himself established as an author and recognized as a man of
promise, he was casting about for a theme that would more fully evoke
his own proper powers. So far he had been living on his material: it
was time for his material to get a living from him. He found the theme
in Mardi, the vast allegorical romance of Mardi; but before he settled
down to it, the friendship or the affection between him and Judge
Shaw’s daughter, Elizabeth, deepened, and in August, 1847, they were
married.
One can only dimly speculate upon what manner of girl Elizabeth Shaw
was. There is no reason to think that Melville drew her portrait in
Pierre, and the “wife” of the stories he wrote in the fifties is always
a conventional feminine foil. The letter she wrote to her mother during
the first week of her marriage was dutiful, girlish, commonplace; and
ten years later her letters were equally inexpressive and jejune. Her
freshness or her amiable temper or her capacity for devotion may have
attracted Herman; but more likely, he loved her because he loved her;
and there is no need or possibility of explaining that. Certainly,
there was no intellectual parity between them, as there was between
Hawthorne and his linguistic blue-stocking, Sophia--and Elizabeth had
none of his ranting high spirits.
Melville probably worshipped Elizabeth at first, and idolized her
beyond all reason; for he loved romantically, and romantic courtship is
a heightened and extravagant season even for men of less imagination
and hot impulse than Melville. He who wishes to keep that original
and etherealized image of his lady should run away from her: when he
breaks it, he will feel, Melville later declared, like Pluto snatching
his Proserpine, and once the image is broken every fragment will be a
reproach. It is the romanticized Circe, and not her victim, who under
the spell of marriage turns into an animal, not a swine, of course,
but a pea-fowl, grey-feathered and not gorgeous, or a hen, clucking
over her chicks and moving only within the limits of the farmyard, or a
dove, cooing a little plaintively, unable to awaken the proud strut of
the eager, following male, who has wooed once too often.
After an arduous honeymoon, by stage-coach and rail through the
mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, on up through Montreal, and
back by Lake Champlain and the Champlain Canal, a rough, jouncing,
crowded, distracted sort of journey, and a brief sojourn with Herman’s
mother at Lansingburgh, they settled down at 103 Fourth Avenue, New
York, in company with Melville’s brother Allan and a swarm of sisters.
Elizabeth Melville has left us a picture of that household and her
husband’s daily routine; one cannot do better than put it in her own
words:
“We breakfast at 8 o’clock, then Herman goes to walk and I fly up to
put his room to rights, so that he can sit down to his desk immediately
on his return. Then I bid him good-bye, with many charges to be an
industrious boy and not upset the inkstand and then flourish the
duster, make the bed, etc., in my own room. Then I go downstairs and
read the papers a little while, and after that I am ready to sit down
to my work--whatever it may be--darning stockings--making or mending
for myself or Herman--at all events, I haven’t seen a day yet, without
_some_ sewing or other to do. If I have letters to write, as is the
case today, I usually do that first--but whatever I am about I do not
much more than get thoroughly engaged in it, than ding-dong goes the
bell for luncheon. This is half-past 12 o’clock--by this time we must
expect callers, and so must be dressed immediately after lunch. Then
Herman insists upon taking a walk of an hour’s length at least. So
unless I can have rain or snow for an excuse, I usually sally out and
make a pedestrian tour a mile or two down Broadway. By the time I come
home it is two o’clock and after, and then I must make myself look as
bewitchingly as possible to meet Herman at dinner.... At four we dine,
and after dinner is over, Herman and I come up to our room and enjoy
a cosy chat for an hour or so--or he reads me some of the chapters he
has been writing in the day. Then he goes down town for a walk, looks
at the papers in the reading room, etc., and returns about half past
seven or eight. Then my work or book is laid aside, and as he does not
use his eyes but very little by candlelight, I either read to him, or
take a hand at whist for his amusement, or he listens to our reading or
conversation as best pleases him. For we all collect in the parlour in
the evening, and one of us reads aloud for the benefit of the whole.
Then we retire very early--at 10 o’clock we all disperse.”