bothered for dinner. Some days he sits at his desk till 4:30 without
writing a word; in the spring twilight, when the catkins of the maples
glow in the mild sunset and the bluebirds dart about the field like
unfettered flowers, he at last comes out and creeps about like an owl.
If Melville ploughs and plants, he does it mechanically; his heart is
not in it; and he is not nourished by it. In the midst of his writing,
his soul reaches a pitch of exaltation, as it does defiantly in a
terrible gale, when the hand is firmly on the wheel, and the dangerous
seas that wash the decks do not loosen the hold: the letters that he
writes to Hawthorne then are prophetic, and deep, and full of proud
mastery. In building up his vast symbol of the whale, he strips the
universe down to his own ego; like Ahab himself, he says no to all the
powers and dominions that lie beyond it. Does not Hawthorne do as much?
“There is a certain tragic phase of humanity,” he writes to Hawthorne,
“which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by
Hawthorne.... He says No in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot
make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say
No,--why, they are in the happy condition of judicious unencumbered
travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity, with
nothing but a carpet-bag,--that is to say, the Ego. Whereas, those
_yes_-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage and damn them! they
will never get through the Custom House.”
But the soft milky air of June gets the better of Melville’s humours:
every breath of the warm earth, the spicy perfume of wild strawberries,
the honeyed odour of the locust trees, the dank green fragrance of
ferns, the sight of buttercups making the fields sunny even on dull
days, or the daisies turning the high grass into the whitish green
colour of the ocean when the waves disperse on the beach, the warm
feeling of animal contentment that the sun itself pours into a man--all
these things renewed his energies and revived his spirits. Melville
relaxed and refreshed himself in the sunlight, building an addition
to the house, and ploughing and sowing, and watching the green shoots
rise. He does not doubt the reality of his black moments: for, as
he tells Hawthorne, in the boundless, trackless, but still glorious
wilderness of the universe, where he and Hawthorne are outposts, there
are savage Indians as well as mosquitoes; still, one does not go on
fighting them forever. As for the crotchety and overdoleful chimeras,
“the like of you and me, and some others, forming a chain of God’s
outposts around the world, must be content to encounter now and then,
and fight them as best we can.”
Melville goes down to New York to see the first part of Moby-Dick
through the press; but the oppressive, humid days in that Babylonish
brick-kiln, and the long delays of the printers, disgust him; he
comes back to the country, and purposes to end the book, if possible,
reclining on the grass, or watching the clouds play on a summer
afternoon around old Greylock, from the newly built porch he has added
to the north side of the house, where the view lies. The tail of
Moby-Dick is not cooked yet; though the hell-fire in which the book was
broiled might not unreasonably have charred it before this. Melville’s
intention is sane enough, if only he had the leisure to cultivate
the calm, grass-growing mood; but no: he must keep on patching and
tinkering at his buildings: in July the hay waits for no author to
finish his chapter: there are a hundred chores to keep him away from
his book, still more from deep questions about the universe and its
meaning and evil and truth and all those aspects of reality that need a
Hawthorne for perfect communication. There is no help for it; he must
go back to New York to finish the book in a third-story room, where
there is no cow to milk, no horse to feed, no sister or wife or mother
to be a little hurt or concerned by his inattentiveness or moodiness.
These last straining days in New York were not unlike, one might guess,
those that Pierre experienced: the book that was begun in health and
exuberance in the keen, riotous air of October in the Berkshires
was finished in exacerbations and depression and desolation in the
humid dog days of a dirty, unkempt city, days of unrelieved sunlight,
followed by afternoon thunderstorms that leave the air even heavier
than before, the pavements steaming, the waves of warm, unpleasant air,
carrying slight odours of putrefaction, wafted upward into even the
third story.
“In the earlier progress of the book, he had found some relief in
making his regular evening walk through the greatest thoroughfares of
the city; and so the utter desolation of his soul might feel itself
more intensely against the bodies of the hurrying thousands. Then he
began to be sensible of more fancying stormy nights than pleasant
ones; for then the great thoroughfares were less thronged, and the
innumerable shop-awnings flapped and beat like schooners’ broad sails
in a gale, and the shutters banged like lashed bulwarks; and the slates
fell hurtling like displaced ship’s blocks from aloft. Stemming such
tempers through the deserted streets, Pierre felt a dark triumphant
joy; that while others had crawled in fear to their kennels, he
alone defied the storm-admiral, whose most vindictive pelting of
hailstones--striking his iron-framed fiery furnace of a body--melted
into soft dew, and so, harmlessly trickled off him. By-and-by, of such
howling, pelting nights, he began to bend his steps down the narrow
side streets, in quest of the more secluded and mysterious taprooms.
There he would feel a singular satisfaction, in sitting down all
dripping in a chair, ordering his half pint of ale before him, and
drawing over his cap to protect his eyes from the light, eye the varied
faces of the social castaways, who here had their haunts from bitterest
midnights. But at last he began to feel a distaste for even these; and
now nothing but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest warehousing
lanes would content him, or be at all sufferable to him.”
“Dollars damn me,” he wrote Hawthorne, “and the malicious devil is
forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a
presentiment is upon me.--I shall at last be worn out and perish,
like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition
of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write,
that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether write the _other_
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash; and all my books are
botches.... But I was talking about the ‘whale.’ As the fishermen say,
‘he was in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going
to take him up by his jaw, however, before long and finish him up in
some fashion or another. What’s the use of elaborating what, in its
very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the
Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter. What reputation H.
M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity as the man who
lived among the cannibals. When I speak of posterity in reference to
myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment
immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost.... I shall go down to
them in all likelihood.... I have come to regard this matter of Fame as
the most transparent of all vanities. I read Solomon more and more, and
every time see deeper and deeper and unspeakable meanings in him. I
did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now. My development has all
been within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of
the Egyptian pyramids which, after being three thousand years a seed,
and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed
itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was
twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I
date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between
then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I
am now come to the utmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower
must fall to the mould.”
If it was in a mood of confidence and creative delight that he sounded
his depths in Moby-Dick, it was in this other mood, chastened, almost
fearful, that his stripped ego rose to the surface after this extreme
plunge. He had looked into the abyss: he was dizzy, terrified,
appalled. His letters to Hawthorne have this mingled sense of awe and
exaltation: they are the mood of the last part of Moby-Dick. Melville’s
notes to Mr. Duyckinck are still jocular and robust; they might be
the words of the imperturbable Stubb or the jaunty Flask: but that
is because Melville gave Mr. Duyckinck only a part of himself, the
polite, free-and-easy, effervescent side, meant for appreciative eating
and solicitous drinking, the side he doubtless turned to his family
and housemates, when weariness did not bury him from their sight--the
last people who could share or understand his quest, his insight, his
triumph. There is no question of wearing a mask: both sides of Melville
are authentic, but the deeper part of him, which would under happier
circumstances have served as ballast and made him face the waves more
steadily, claimed too much of his inner space: he lost buoyancy: the
water crept above the waterline: the ship rode dangerously. Now,
however, we are speaking of the consequences of Melville’s writing
Moby-Dick. The book itself was published towards the end of 1851 by
Bentley, in England, and a little later in the same year by Harper’s in
New York.
Whether it was an angel or a devil that Melville had struggled with
this long year, he had wrestled magnificently, and the book was done.
Before we go further with Melville’s life, we must discuss this great
fragment of it--the most important of Melville’s books, and surely one
of the most important books of the century.
CHAPTER SEVEN: MOBY-DICK
Moby-Dick is a story of the sea, and the sea is life, “whose waters
of deep woe are brackish with the salt of human tears.” Moby-Dick is
the story of the eternal Narcissus in man, gazing into all rivers
and oceans to grasp the unfathomable phantom of life--perishing in
the illusive waters. Moby-Dick is a portrait of the whale and a
presentation of the demonic energies in the universe that harass and
frustrate and extinguish the spirit of man. We must gather our own
strength together if we are to penetrate Moby-Dick: no other fable,
except perhaps Dante’s, demands that we open so many doors and turn
so many secret keys; for, finally, Moby-Dick is a labyrinth, and that
labyrinth is the universe.
Call me Ishmael, says the teller of the story. Ishmael is lured to a
whaling voyage by the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself and
of the forbidden seas in which he rolls his inland bulk: when Ishmael
grows grim around the mouth and feels damp, drizzly November in his
soul, he goes to sea. With his carpet-bag he sets out for New Bedford,
and takes refuge in the shaggy comfort of Spouter Inn. His companion
and bedfellow in the crowded inn is another Ishmael, a cannibal named
Queequeg, who brings into the atmosphere of chowders and tarpaulins a
wild odour from another continent of the soul. His harpoon, his idol,
his sharp filed teeth, the human head he carries around in a bag, for
sale, are for Ishmael hints of that horror in the universe which he
is quick to perceive and be social with, since it is well to be on
friendly terms with the inmates of the place one lodges in.
When Ishmael takes refuge from the driving sleet and mist, on a Sunday
morning, in the Whalemen’s Chapel, he finds reminders of luckless
voyages on the memorial tablets around the hall, and Father Mapple,
who had been a sailor and harpooner in his youth, delivers a sermon
on Jonah! What a preacher, and what a sermon! After ascending to the
pulpit by a rope ladder, hand over hand, Father Mapple drags the
ladder up after him, to signify his spiritual withdrawal from all
outward ties and connections; from that pulpit, shaped like a ship’s
bow, he expounds the fable of Jonah, seeming, as he describes Jonah’s
sea-storm, to be beaten by a storm himself, his deep chest heaving as
with a ground-swell, his tossed arms like the warring elements at work,
thunders rolling away from his swarthy brow and light leaping from his
eye.
Father Mapple’s words and figures belong to the Bible; but their
meaning comes from that bottomless ocean of truth where Moby-Dick plies
back and forth. I must quote the words: one can give no proper hint of
this work, even in its smallest detail, without quoting the language
through which it is expressed: and this is particularly true of Father
Mapple’s noble tongue.
“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is sure
delight; and higher the top of that delight than the bottom of the woe
is deep. Is not the maintruck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is
to him--a far, far upward, and inward delight--who against the proud
gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his inexorable
self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the
ship of this base treacherous world goes down beneath him. Delight
is to him, who gives no quarter for the truth, and kills, burns,
and destroys all sin, though he pluck it out from under the robes
of Senators and Judges. Delight--top-gallant delight is to him, who
acknowledges no law or lord but the Lord his God, and is only patriot
to heaven. Delight is to him whom all the waves and billows of the seas
of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages.
And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay
him down, can say with his final breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me
by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine,
more than to be this world’s or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave
eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime
of his God?”
Humbly participating in Queequeg’s heathenish rites, sharing
confidences with him, Ishmael pledges friendship with the cannibal:
it is the first and almost the last touch of affection in the whole
story: a compact between two strays and outcasts! In Heaven, and
presumably in Hell, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage;
nor are there all those little mollifications, an eloquent meal or a
June garden, which belong to the middle portion of life that has long
been domesticated: once Moby-Dick gets under way, the fable itself
belongs to Heaven and Hell--all its naturalism, all its accurate
detail, are polarized between these two extremes of being, so that
everything which would relieve men’s exasperation or take the edge
off their lonely delight, disappears, as the land disappears beyond
the horizon’s edge. The reason for this is not obscure. In terms of
Heaven and Hell this comfortable, understandable, tolerable middle
portion of existence--that which we agree to call civilized--is the
realm of complete illusion: just as, in terms of immediate animal
existence, Heaven and Hell are illusions, and reality belongs to the
realm of digestion, tropism, reflex action, muscular movement, tactile
and visual adjustments. Melville, as we shall see, comprehended both
aspects of existence: but he projected them both on the plane of
eternity: domestic life and all it implies is seen through reversed
glasses.
On the boat that takes Queequeg and Ishmael to Nantucket, Queequeg
performs a daring rescue in the water. The man he brings up is a
bumpkin whom he had punished just a little while before for mimicking
him: the punishment and the rescue are performed with the indifferent
magnanimity of a soft breeze following a cold wreck of tornado. There
is the key in which the whole story is set. If we forget it, we shall
be disappointed at not finding some continued development of these
separate personalities, some further proofs of their friendship and
affection. But on the plane of Moby-Dick friendship is a small thing,
and heroism a small one, too: the hero is not Ishmael who tells the
story, nor Queequeg, who is one of the crew, nor even Captain Ahab who
commands the Pequod, on which the two finally embark at Nantucket: the
central figure is the whale, and the whale stands for the universe.
The mystery of Captain Ahab and the voyage lies heavy before the sails
are set or the anchor lifted. In the dawn, when Ishmael goes aboard,
he dimly sees through the mist four or five figures running toward
the ship, who completely disappear by the time he gains the decks:
the mystery is more vexing because of a cracked old greybeard on
the wharf who mutters dreadful hints about Ahab and his voyage, not
enough to detain Ishmael, but enough to make him uncomfortable. With a
last blessing of the owners, the ship sets out on Christmas Day. The
captain remains inviolate in his cabin; and with the crew giving three
heavy-hearted cheers, the ship “blindly plunged like fate into the lone
Atlantic.”
Exit the dry, tight, comfortable land: enter wind and weather and sea
and whale. We leave behind the landlord of the Spouter Inn and Mrs.
Hosea and the old owners, with their humorous mixture of the Bible
and worldly stratagem, and Charity, Captain Bildad’s sister, who
places a choice copy of Watts’ hymns in each seaman’s berth: these
genre pictures in the manner of Teniers, with a dash of Hogarth or
Rowlandson, belong to the land and its ways, little ways. Deliberately,
Melville widens the frame of his canvas, and alters the plan of his
design: magnifying every figure into its ideal proportions. He is
about to picture this “mortally intolerable truth; that all deep
earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the
open independence of the sea; while the wild winds of heaven and earth
conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.... Better is it
to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the
lee, even if that were safety.”
Safety we leave behind: safety and the measures of daily life. The sea
is dangerous: the horizon has no bounds: and the fathom-line can never
reach the bottom, once land is far astern.
2
When the whale enters, the narrative for the first time pauses; and, in
the pause, one discovers that the story and the people are secondary
matters, while something more wide and reaching comes into the fable.
The whale is a symbol in the heart of man; it has its own existence
and value there: but the whale is also a creature in natural history,
and its shape, its bulk, habits, anatomical characteristics, family
relations, its place in politics, economics, history, and human
adventure, is a further part of that natural history. The chapter
on the whale, in which the various branches are listed under a sort
of bookseller’s classification, into Folio, Octavo, and Duodecimo
whales, is an excellent example of Melville’s way of assimilating and
revaluating knowledge, so that what was extraneous becomes intrinsic,
and what was a fact in the history of the whale becomes an element in
the myth that he is weaving.
A timid writer would have left these classifications and divisions
out: how on earth is one to make interesting reading out of a bare
catalogue? But Melville carries the load with Olympian levity: he
invents a fresh classification, unknown to Owen or Cuvier, and then,
with a final dash of apparent impatience, he leaves the system
uncompleted--even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, “with
the cranes still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.”
This absurd, bookseller’s classification, and this last touch of
impatience are not due to Melville’s incompetence: the first tells
us that all systems of thought have in them something arbitrary and
human, and the zoologist’s classification and system is no less so
than the human foot, as the standard of linear measurement: when one
sees objects under the figure of eternity, the scientist’s divisions
have the same limitations as the bookseller’s. In a century when only
a few rare-minded mathematicians were elaborating the theory that our
existing geometry was but one out of a number of possible systems,
with different sets of postulates, Melville was slyly demonstrating
that all our thought has this conventional basis. One may alter the
convention, change the point of approach, and create a different
order, equally useful, equally competent, equally true. When Melville
stops abruptly without finishing his own work, he points out to us
that knowledge of all sorts belongs to an infinite series: there is no
final stopping-place: and he who thinks his system is complete has only
demonstrated his own limitations.
Although Melville plays with science, he utilizes all that it can give
him, and he never seriously departs from its findings except in taking
the fisherman’s view that the whale is a fish, and not, as is actually
the case, an aquatic mammal. But the whale that science investigates,
the whale that is stranded on the beach, or whose skeleton is suspended
in mid-air in the natural-history museum, is not, however thoroughly it
may be dissected and articulated and labelled, the whole whale, even
for science; for a whale, like every other creature, has a habitat,
relations with other living creatures, and certain ways of functioning,
moving, mating, finding food; and there is a sense in which one is
as near to the scientific truth about a whale when one is fighting
the creature in an open boat, as when one is counting its vertebrae,
examining its tissues under a microscope, or comparing its skull with
other mammalian skulls. Melville gives a completer account of the whale
than the anatomists: he approaches it with a harpoon as well as a
dissecting-knife: he observes its characteristic reaction to stimuli
as well as the organs by means of which these reactions are effected.
On the other hand, the physical pursuit of the whale is only a part of
the story: the more one learns about such a creature, the more widely
do its relations ramify, not merely in its own world, but in man’s: and
the higher the significance of the hunt itself. These passages about
the whale and the methods of whaling, about its dignity and adventure,
these comments upon the science of cetology--all these things are not
uncouth interruptions in the narrative: they are profoundly part of it:
the stream widens here, as the Hudson widens at Tappan Zee, without
losing its flow and purpose. From now on the universal, symbolic aspect
of the story, and its direct, scientific, practical aspect move in
and out like the threads of a complicated pattern: one modifies the
other, and is by turns figure and background. The physical expanse
of the book, its deliberateness of movement, its slow undulations,
are necessary, like the long swells and the wide expanse of the ocean
itself, to give a feeling of immensity, immensity and power.
3
Who are the men summoned together for this voyage? The chief mate,
Starbuck, is a Quaker by descent, a “long earnest man, and though born
on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his
flesh being hard as a twice-baked biscuit.” Starbuck is conscientious,
prudent, inclined to respect outward portents and inward presentiments:
above all, the memory of his young Cape wife and child bent the welded
iron in his soul. Stubb, the second mate, is a different man: “A
happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant, taking perils as they came
with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis
of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner
engaged by the year.” Beneath these two stands little Flask, the third
mate, a native of Tisbury, in Marthas Vineyard. In his poor opinion,
the whale was but a species of magnified mouse or at least water-rat.
If Starbuck is the prudent imaginative man, and Stubb is the competent
sensible matter-of-fact man, Flask is the happy ignorant man, inclined
to be waggish in the matter of whales.