realm of shades! and turning my prow into the racing tide, which seized
me like a hand omnipotent, I darted through.
“Churned in foam, that outer ocean lashed the clouds; and straight in
my wake, headlong dashed a shallop, three fixed spectres leaning o’er
its prow; three arrows poising.
“And thus, pursuers and pursued flew on, over an endless sea.”
5
Mardi is strong enough as a satire and a criticism of life to stand
a frank admission of its weaknesses; and I shall not try to conceal
them. The book starts about to be one thing; it presently becomes
another; and before Mardi is entirely explored it becomes a third:
the adventure, the strange scenes and personages, the philosophic
reflection, the satire, all accrete together rather than form a single
intermingled whole. Taji, who begins as the hero and narrator, takes a
smaller and smaller part in the actual dialogue; presently the first
person becomes the third, and Taji emerges at the end out of the shadow
of silence. The reader who expected another Omoo was disappointed once
the first quarter of the story was over; the reader who might have
welcomed the dialogues, the political moralizings, the epigrams, was
put off a little by the original sea-yarn.
This is not all. The satire at its best achieves its end by a delicate
parody of actuality, as in the scene where Melville takes off a session
of the United States Congress; but sometimes Melville’s invention
flags, and he repeats actual history, with altered names, instead of
distorting, magnifying, transposing. Verbally, his touch is almost as
uncertain: at times he drops into obvious metres, only to rise into
passages of prose that have far greater claim to be set off as verse
than any of Yoomy’s stanzas. The verses interspersed in these pages
are worthy of the poet laureate that Yoomy is supposed to be; and that
is the best one can say about them. When Taji sits down with the
five-and-twenty kings, the invocation to wine is about at the level of
Peacock’s drinking songs: and the poorest of Yoomy’s songs are poetry
only by typographic courtesy. These are all faults; and not little
ones; but what means infinitely more is the fact that a brave, vigorous
spirit presides over Mardi, appraising all the evil and injustice and
superstition and ugliness in the world--as they masquerade under the
guise of religion and patriotism and economic prudence and political
necessity. In Mardi, one begins to feel Melville’s range, and his depth.
In this satiric fantasy, Melville had not the sure touch he later
achieved in Moby-Dick: but for all that, his thoughts exploded in a
succession of great rockets and Roman candles and flag-bombs; and the
spectacle was a dazzling and beautiful one. Such wit, such humour,
such starry intelligence, such wide knowledge, such resolute diving,
were not known in American literature before; and they are rare enough
in any literature. Much though we value Melville’s great American
contemporaries, he had something to give in Mardi that is beyond
their reach: we will search Emerson in vain for anything like the
Antiquarian’s catalogue; we will run through Hawthorne’s notebooks
without finding anything like the description of authorship in the
chapter on Lombardo. The Literary World said that the public would
discover in the author of Mardi a capital essayist, at least, in
addition to the fascinating novelist and painter of sea-life, and find
that the author had “original powers of high order”--and the praise was
accurate and just.
Mardi performed a more important work for its author than it did
for its immediate readers: it disclosed to him the nature of his
own demon--that deeper other half whom Babbalanja called Azzageddi.
Melville’s thoughts at this period paralleled each other in somewhat
unrelated layers. There was a Babbalanja who reflected the ideas of
his own time and country, who was a thoughtful Christian, a loyal
republican, a solid provincial, who met adversity with a jest or a wry
smile, who drank brandy with Mr. Duyckinck, and paid his respects with
genteel punctuality to all the Gansevoorts and Melvilles and Shaws.
This Melville never entirely disappeared. The pious man who wanted to
return to Serenia made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land: and when the
Civil War came, Melville accepted without question the doctrine of a
single, indivisible nation, as an unshakable postulate. In this aspect
of Melville there was something correct and limited, characteristics
whose chief advantage was that they kept him within speaking distance
of his contemporaries. In Mardi, however, Melville discovered a deeper
self: the unconscious Melville was not a man of his time, and he often
had intuitions which undermined or destroyed his more commonplace
convictions. This deeper Melville did not altogether supplant the man
of convention: they do not represent several and successive phases
of growth: but, as Melville suggested in Moby-Dick, they represented
aspects of a cycle which one goes through again and again, never
reaching a terminus, because there is in a proper sense no terminus, no
ultimate point of rest, or resolution.
Now it is Melville as Azzageddi, the demon who captures and speaks from
within the man, who interests us. The pious Christian is troubled by
the problems of physical immortality; but Azzageddi says, thinking how
even the sublimest thoughts fade and are lost, “If the fogs of some
few years can make soul linked to matter naught, how can the unhoused
spirit hope to live when mildewed in the damps of death.” The sociable
townsman continues to correspond with Mr. Duyckinck and respect his
judgment; but Azzageddi says: “All round me, my fellow-men are new
grafting their vines and dwelling in flourishing arbors; while I am
forever pruning mine, till it becomes but a stump. Yet in this pruning
I will persist; I will not add, I will diminish; I will trim myself
down to the standard of what is unchangeably true. Day by day I drop
off my redundancies; ere long I shall have stripped my ribs; when I
die, they will but bury my spine. I may have come to the Penultimate
... but where is the Ultimate?”
From Azzageddi’s mouth the deepest perceptions of Melville’s spirit
came forth first, in the form of jests and demonic laughter.
Azzageddi was free in the only unqualified sense of freedom: he was
irresponsible. Nothing will daunt him, no opposition to his conscious
habits, statements, prejudices, conventions will prevent him from
declaring himself. He was Melville, shorn of everything that might
make him circumspect and limited, a skeleton facing the world with
its ultimate grin. Azzageddi brought Melville to his supreme triumph
in Moby-Dick, and plunged him into temporary disaster in Pierre; for
he worked out of the bottomless parts of Melville’s unconscious,
and when he was given free line, he might haul up anything out of
those depths--a chest of gold or a white whale or a green corpse.
His appearance in Mardi was the first sign of Melville’s maturity;
and the attempt of the world to rebuff and castigate and repress
Azzageddi was excellent proof that Melville had found within himself
something worth the saying. Mardi was Melville’s spiritual Omoo. It
gave him the courage to be an intellectual rover, and to scorn the easy
domesticities in which thought reposes, and snores.
“There are those who falter in the common tongue, because they think
in another; and these are accounted stutterers and stammerers,” wrote
Melville in Mardi. Melville was plainly aware of the fact that he
was now acquiring a new language, not a new set of weaknesses: his
inward eye was now keeping pace in its growth with his outward one: he
was at last achieving that genuine bi-focal vision wherein “matter”
and “spirit” united to give depth and perspective to the world which
only through joint effort do they effectually behold. Already, he
had eternity in his eye. The easy triumph was no longer for him.
Clay crumbled, marble chipped, wood rotted, granite eroded: all the
common materials out of which monuments and civilizations are made
lie under the doom of a fatal metamorphosis: Melville sought a truth,
no matter how infinitely small in quantity and precious, which, like
radium, would undergo time and change and emanate energy without losing
perceptibly its bulk or its quality. It was useless to tell him that
there were no ultimate truths; that itself was perhaps the ultimate
truth which he sought. If Mardi were not ready for this search, he
would go it alone--and be the unreturning one. No grey shroud of ocean,
with threat of storm and sleet, would keep him from setting out for
that ultimate destination.
6
“Had I not written and published Mardi,” wrote Melville to Mr. Evert
Duyckinck in 1849, “in all likelihood I would not be as wise as I
am now, or may be. For that thing was stabbed _at_ (I do not say
_through_) and therefore I am the wiser for it.”
The truth is that Mardi got a mixed reception; whereas except for the
missionaries and the unco guid his first two books had been hailed and
acclaimed with a heartiness that is rarely accorded to a new author
with no well-defined connections. Mardi was praised in the Revue des
Deux Mondes, and damned as a rubbishing parody in Blackwood’s; the
Democratic Review said that it compared to Typee and Omoo as a cartoon
of Raphael to a seven-by-nine sketch of a sylvan lake; but the Dublin
University Magazine found it one of the saddest, most melancholy, most
deplorable and humiliating perversions of genius of a high order in the
English language. So it went, hot and cold, huzzas and hisses.
A book that could evoke such different responses must either be a
highly original book or a many-sided one; and Mardi has, it seems to
me, both qualities. It was, there is reason to believe, the wealth,
the profusion, the diversity of ideas in Mardi that brought down on
Melville the irritation of contemporary critics: instead of retiring
into after-dinner lethargy with Melville’s smoking, calabash-drinking
philosopher and king and poet, they were stirred into unaccustomed
mental activity. They resented that: they resented above all the
fact that Melville played with ideas. One could not be sure whether
he was fooling with the ideas or fooling with the audience; besides,
respectable ideas should not be played with: there is a time and a
place for everything. In the South Seas one expects to fondle brown
maidens: in a library, one locks the door on maidens and wrestles with
ideas. Their lips were whetted for another Fayaway: she evaporated into
Yillah: and Yillah vanished, leaving only a gritty taste in the mouth,
criticism, criticism of Christianity, politics, morality, things that
gentlemen prefer to take, if at all, in medical capsules, not as food.
Am I wrong in thinking that Mardi has been damned for its virtues? The
idea is all the more plausible because for more than a generation,
during which Melville’s work almost disappeared from critical notice,
Melville was reprobated, when he was noticed at all, for becoming
interested in abstruse philosophy and for writing extravagantly. The
burden of this criticism was that a writer of South Sea romances had
better leave Plato and Spinoza alone, and get his opinion of the
universe from professional purveyors, or rather, not be troubled by
such foreign interests. This attempt to keep Melville in his place was
absurd enough in itself; but it led to further stupidities, far more
deplorable in character. “As early as 1848,” wrote an historian of
American literature in 1903, “the quasi-speculative romance entitled
Mardi gave premonition of aberration and of the eventual frustration of
a promising career.” This criticism is nonsense, and libellous nonsense
at that: the aberration it refers to did not exist in Melville but
in the historian himself. At the very outset of his career, Melville
found himself confronting a similar opaqueness, blank as a wall, in his
own contemporaries. One remembers Macaulay’s withering condescension
over Plato and the scholastic philosophers; and one realizes that
any view of life which did not immediately sanction the pragmatism
of the nineteenth century was bound to seem an aberration for those
who regarded the local values of the time as ultimates. Melville’s
“aberration” was his great intellectual distinction: none of his
contemporaries had such a broad base in the fundamental activities of
the time, and yet rose so loftily above them. He did not rebel against
his milieu; like Thoreau, he reached outside of it, and grew beyond it,
taking out of the very environment from which he escaped the necessary
materials for his own development.
The scene is now set: the struggle in which Melville is to participate
is defined. It is a struggle between a plastic, conventional self,
moulded in the fashion of his fellow citizens and fellow writers,
and a hard, defiant, adamantine self that springs out of his deepest
consciousness of life, and is ready to assault, not merely human
conventions, but the high gods themselves. In a conflict between his
career and his family duties, between pot-boiling and his maturest
literary aims, this drama externalizes itself: it is present in the
man, and it is present in his outward relationships. Let us make no
mistake about it: Melville was not a writer of romances: it was a mere
accident of history that turned the world’s attention to him through
the charm and tropical radiance of the South Sea adventures. Herman
Melville was a thinker, in the sense that Dante was a thinker, who
clothed his thoughts in poetic vision. That thought and vision was
one of the most important things the century produced. All honour,
then, to the few critics who appreciated Mardi when it appeared: for
Melville had a greater work in store; and it was out of the freedom and
intellectual audacity acquired in writing Mardi, out of the discovery
of his Azzageddi, that he achieved the strength to attack it.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE TARTARUS OF AUTHORS
We return to Herman Melville’s daily life. In January, 1849, Mrs.
Melville went up to Boston to live with her mother and await her
confinement. At the end of January the last proof-sheets of Mardi
were corrected; in the middle of February Malcolm was born. With the
coming of the baby, Melville must have felt a certain tightening of
responsibility. One knows very little about the economic conditions
under which Melville lived during the first years of his marriage, or
to what extent Allan may have carried a good part of the burden of the
household. But early in 1849 Melville must have begun to write Redburn,
which was a potboiler; and before Redburn was printed he wrote, with
greater strength and fuller powers, having probably recovered by that
time from the strain of writing Mardi, the masterful account of navy
life in White-Jacket.
We now have a chance to watch Melville at work under every
disadvantage: the distraction of a household with a young baby, the
necessity to make a living, and to do this promptly, the handicap of
having to produce something on the level of his audience. If there are
flaws in the man, they should come out under these conditions. If he
has no sense of reality, he will not know how to meet them; if anything
has lurked under the surface of his life, it will rise, like dead fish
in poisoned water.
2
In Redburn, Melville went back to his youth and traced his feelings
about life and his experiences up to his eighteenth year. The book
is autobiography, with only the faintest disguises: Bleecker Street
becomes Greenwich Street, and the other changes are of similar order.
Following Mr. Weaver, I have relied upon Melville’s account of himself
in Redburn in giving a picture of his life in the earlier chapters; for
it tallies with all the other independently known facts.
For the first time in Melville’s writings, the note of personal
disappointment and bitterness appeared. He had, it is true, said in
Mardi that the highest happiness known to Mardians was the absence
of sorrow, and he had said also, as if to explain his hilarity,
that woe is more merry than mirth and only shallow sorrows brought
tears. But these observations were not peculiar or original; and they
were biographical only in the sense that all a man’s thoughts are
autobiographical--whether they arise out of his experience or his
reading or a passing mood conditioned by the state of his digestion.
In Redburn, Melville discloses to us a disappointed boy, who had hopes
of education, cultivation, gentility, and who resented the fate that
tore these things from his grasp and made him fight for a living in
a fighting world. “Claret for boys, port for men,” he exclaimed in
White-Jacket, is a good rule for travel: Mrs. Glendinning uses the
same phrase in another application in Pierre: the words took hold of
Melville, and one suspects that in his youth he had had an overdose
of port, and had participated in experiences that required a stronger
stomach.
Now, for the first time, Melville is conscious of the black maggot
within him, deposited as a mere egg in his youth, and growing
day by day, nourished by his later disappointments and sorrows
and frustrations. Things have begun to go badly: he thinks back
without difficulty to times when they were even worse. The physical
misery of those early years, the patched clothes, the bad food, the
rough treatment of the sailors, the feeling of homelessness, the
consciousness of being an Ishmael--all these experiences tallied
point by point with the world outside, its cruelty, its misery,
its sordidness and vice. These events and sights poisoned life for
Melville: he had not realized it at the time, he had certainly not
realized it while browsing through his father’s books in Lansingburgh,
or tramping to school through the wide valleys of the Berkshires or
brooding over the calm Pacific seas--but the poison had been slowly
working in his bones. Life was not kind. All its hints of kindness,
its proffers, its affected politenesses were shams. He had married a
divine creature--and she was nearest him when she mended his stockings.
The books that he wrote fared best when they revealed least of the
author and his deepest thoughts. He wanted something central and solid
in life, a house, a family, a sense of continuity and security for his
future work--and the baby was an expense, the future was a blank, and
instead of being able to plan another Mardi, he must hastily improvise
a salable article. “It is not with a hollow purse as with a hollow
balloon--for a hollow purse makes the poet _sink_--witness ‘Mardi.’”
“When a poor devil writes with duns all around him, and looking over
the back of his chair, and perching on his pen, and dancing in his
inkstand--like the Devils about St. Anthony--what can you expect of
that poor devil? What but a beggarly Redburn?” So Melville wrote to Mr.
Duyckinck in December, 1849. Those were the words of a harassed man.
Redburn, recalling the cruel memories of his youth, was also the first
bitter cry of his maturity.
We must not, however, take Melville’s disappointment at its face
value. On its level, Redburn is a sound, well-written book. Mr. John
Masefield has singled it out among Melville’s books, after Moby-Dick;
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has seconded his judgment: with this praise in
mind, one cannot dismiss Redburn as contemptuously as Melville himself
did. At his lowest stage of strength and confidence, he could not
write anything that did not have his signature on every page. The
marks of haste in Redburn are in its simplicity and its reliance upon
memory: the reflective and critical passages, which are so copious in
Melville’s other books, scarcely appear in Redburn. He wrote about a
boy’s consciousness of the world, with a boy’s amazement at its cruelty
and hard-heartedness, even as he recalled a boy’s confusion when he was
placed in the midst of a strange institution like a gambling-house,
something outside book, memory or dream. The captain of the ship
will not chat with Redburn: Redburn thinks him no gentleman! Redburn
is summarily booted out of a Liverpool club when he intrudes: these
English, thinks Redburn, have no manners!
These reflections are just and true; but they are true and just by the
criterion of a boy’s world, which has not yet learned the pragmatic
justification of lies, cheats, hypocrisies, and hard-heartedness.
“Unless ye be as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of
Heaven.” The kingdom of heaven is this naïve world, where lies are
lies, even if they save one’s face; where cruelty is cruelty, even if
it be the custom of the club. To treat human beings as human beings,
and not as counters, tools, conveniences, is one of the ultimate
efforts of morality; but half the practices of society are, from this
point of view, definitely immoral. In Redburn, Melville found himself
treated, not with respect to his character and needs and spiritual
wants: he found himself treated like any other pauper: put to work
and told to keep out of sight. He never forgot that lesson; for, in
more subtle and various ways, society kept on dinning it into him.
If, when he was a sailor-boy, he was not supposed to converse freely
with the captain, after he had written Typee he was not supposed to
hold conversations with Plato or Sir Thomas Browne. But he was a
man! Society denied it; a sailor, yes, a South Sea adventurer, yes,
that too: but a boy, a sailor, a South Sea adventurer always, not
a brooding, pondering, philosophic, imaginative man, whose further
developments lay in seas unvisited by whalers or Captain Cooks.
“We have had vast developments of parts of men,” wrote Melville in
Mardi, in words that anticipated Thoreau and Whitman, and show his
kinship with them, “not of any wholes. Before a full-developed man,
Mardi would fall down and worship.” It was the consciousness of being
clipped, deformed, degraded, that made Melville bitter: circumstances
had done this to him as a boy, and now, with duns standing over him, it
was doing the same trick in his manhood. Better be a full Polynesian,
as large as a native can grow, than be the deformed creature who
accommodates himself to success in business or letters.
But Redburn is not primarily a book written about a grievance: it is
a narrative of a boy’s trip to sea, an honest narrative, with none
of the mildewed rainbows and lily-livered romanticism that usually
characterize such efforts. As so often happens with mere decent
veracity, Redburn, too, was denounced by one of its contemporary
critics as “outrageously improbable,” and though the brutality, vice,
and misery it pictured were certainly outrageous, there was nothing
at all improbable about it. The book, for all its boyish directness,
has the wry humour of the grown man, reflecting on his callowness, and
the characters it presents are surprisingly realized--surprisingly
because one doubts if Melville spent much pains on them. When one
compares Redburn to a much more elaborate work, like Two Years Before
the Mast, one discovers at once where Melville’s specific talents lay.
While Dana wrote directly and straightforwardly, he was not a creator
of character, and he had no gift of selection: in order to realize the
sea, he scatters tackle, blocks, mainsails, booms, compasses, bulwarks,
bulkheads on every page of the narrative: one is perpetually stumbling
over some recondite nautical term which Dana had mastered, and, like a
true landsman, hastened to exhibit. Two Years Before the Mast sounds
like a Bluejacket’s Manual.