Melville wrote, “and the deeper and deeper that he dived, [he] saw that
everlasting elusiveness of Truth: the universal insincerity of even the
greatest and purest written thoughts. Like knavish cards, the leaves
of all great books were covertly packed.” Melville did his best to
avoid playing a foul hand: he dealt his cards as they slipped from the
fingers of Fate, Chance, Necessity, Truth; and in this grave honesty
of his the greatest of thinkers seemed little better than fictioneers.
“Plato, Spinoza, and Goethe, and many more belong to this guild of
self-impostors, with a preposterous rabble of muggletonian Scots and
Yankees whose vile brogue still the more bestreaks the stripedness
of their Greek or German Neoplatonic originals.” Not exactly a kind
criticism; but, in Melville’s exacerbated state, he went even further:
not merely did the “compensationists” or the “optimists” seem shallow:
literature itself was a hollow business, too. The ultimate, the
final truth was inexpressible, and even the mere hinting of it was
inadequate: the intensest light of reason did not shed such blazonings
upon the deeper truths in man as the profoundest gloom. Utter darkness
is the wise man’s light; silence his highest utterance. Catlike,
one sees in the dark distinctly objects that are erased by blatant
sunshine; indeed, one calls to one’s aid senses and instincts that are
dormant when one can move and see. “Not to know Gloom and Grief,” said
Melville, in the midst of this illumination, “is not to know aught that
an heroic man should learn.”
But if the gold of the transcendentalists was pewter and brass,
Melville was equally honest about his own treasures. “By vast pains
we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gaspings we come to the central
room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid--and
nobody is there!--appallingly vacant, as vast as the soul of man.”
One threw away literature and philosophy, yes, language itself, only
to find oneself without visible support. One eliminated not merely the
debris and muck: one got rid of the miner, and the very purpose of his
occupation. “In those hyperborean regions to which enthusiastic Truth
and Earnestness and Independence will invariably lead a mind fitted
by nature for profound and fearless thoughts all objects are seen in
a dubious uncertain and refracting light. Viewed through the rarefied
atmosphere, the most immemorially admitted maxims of men begin to slide
and fluctuate and finally become wholly inverted.... But the example
of many minds forever lost, like undiscoverable Arctic explorers,
amid those treacherous regions, warns us entirely away from them and
we learn that it is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far,
since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind,
for, arrived at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points, there,
the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike.”
Within the heap of fragments in Pierre that mark the thrust and power
of Melville’s mind, there is one fragment, fallen at random in the
mass, that remains embedded in the memory. It is the message of the
pamphlet that comes by accident into Pierre’s hand when he is making
his escape to New York: in his overwrought state, the words have a
peculiar significance for his own purposes; and they are remarkable
enough, in their enigmatic quality, to consider by themselves. The
title of the pamphlet is Chronometricals and Horologicals: in it the
fictitious lecturer purports to set forth his own heretical philosophy.
The moral is embroidered in a single trope: the notion that there are
two kinds of time in the world, that which is established at Greenwich
and kept by chronometers, and that which prevails in other longitudes,
recorded by the local watches. It is a parallel of the philosophic and
practical aspects of life, or rather, of ideal and working morality;
and I know no better exposure of the identity, yet dualism, of thought
and action, ideal and practice.
The philosophic or religious minds are always correcting their watches
by Greenwich time; and, by continuous observation of the heavens, they
are always trying to make Greenwich time itself more correct. They know
that the compromises and conveniences of society are useful: but they
also know that these things have no ultimate reason for existence, and
that one’s employment of them must always be modified by reference
to a scale of values alongside which they are false or meaningless.
Shallow people never make such a correction: they believe in “dress”
or “family” or “prestige” or “success” as if these were the vestments
of eternity. Melville’s error, at least Pierre’s error, was just the
opposite of this: he did not see that watches and local time are
necessary, too, that there is no truth so cruelly meaningless as to
give a person Greenwich time without telling him his longitude and
enabling him to make his correction: that way lies disaster, confusion,
shipwreck. A belief in ideal standards and values with no _via media_
is scarcely better than a superficial life with no standards or
insights at all.
The passage from the universal perception to the common life is
difficult to make: it is the point at which religions and philosophies
perpetually flounder. Melville saw this paradox; and he was plagued
and puzzled by it; he even attributes it to Plotinus Plinlimmon, the
leader of the transcendentalist sect, who drinks wine he forbids to
his disciples, and, following supernal ideas, seems to prize cigars
and food far more; Plinlimmon, whose non-benevolent stare seems to
tell Pierre that all that he does is done in vain; Plinlimmon, the
very embodiment of these ambiguities. Melville tended, with Pierre, to
regard horologicals as a dubious frailty instead of what it actually
is--the way that Greenwich time is universalized and incorporated in
local practice. Human ideals are, as Melville saw, like the points of
the compass: one does not seek the north by going northward: one seeks
to reach a humanly important part of the earth, like Pekin or Paris;
and ideals are the means by which a life that more fully satisfies our
human potentialities can be lived. To observe this paradox without
falling into the rôle of Mr. Worldly Wiseman is the essence of an
active morality. Melville confronted the paradox; but the point of it
eluded him. He idealized ideals as he idealized sexual passion: he
wished both to remain for him in that adolescent state in which they
are pure, remote, untouchable--forgetting that life is impossible in
that sterile and clarified medium. Though Melville had anatomized many
human impulses and probed in many sore and hidden places, one part
of the personality remained sacred to him in Pierre: the sanctum of
adolescence. All the values in the book are distorted, its very purpose
is deflected, by Melville’s unconscious assumption that the romantic
purity of adolescence, the purity that arises not through experience
and fulfilment, that is, through continuous purification, but through
an ignorance and stagnation within sealed vials--that this purity is
central to all the other values. That chronometer was correct enough
at nineteen: at thirty-three it was no longer accurate, for a single
reason--it had stopped. That, we shall see, was the chief ambiguity of
Melville’s personal life.
Melville was not alone in parading these fundamental ambiguities.
In the dissociation of society in America, the American writer was
able to examine all the premises and established truths which a
European ordinarily takes so much for granted that he is not aware of
taking them at all; and he could separate the essence of our human
institutions from their conventional overlayers. Emerson, in Uriel,
gives pithy expression to the same insidious ideas one finds in
Pierre: but in Melville’s novel they are on every page. His mother’s
love for her son is self-love and her admiration for him is vanity.
His father’s rectitude leads to a cold marriage, where an unclerked
love had shown him a little radiant and a little finer at the core.
Pierre’s purest love is a disguised incest; his nobility is a worldly
crime--while a lack of generous impulses would have led to wealth
and honour. Melville’s whole life, indeed, had taught him these
ambiguities: Jack Chase was the real captain of the ship, not Captain
Claret: the surgeon who amputated a living man, Surgeon Cuticle, with
his glass eye, his false teeth, his wig, was more dead than the flesh
he carved into: the cannibals of the South Seas were civilized, and the
civilization of the New York slums was lower than cannibal gluttony:
the missionary of Christ inflicted servitude, and the chief goods
introduced by the trader were diseases: finally, the one civilization
which thoroughly disregards the precepts of Christian morality is that
of the Western world, which professes it.
These paradoxes were disturbing enough; but the fundamental ones were
even worse. “The uttermost ideal of moral perfection in man is wide
of the mark. The demi-gods trample on trash, and Virtue and Vice
are trash!” Vice might lead to virtue; virtue might beget vice: the
prostitute may teach purity and the holy man blasphemy! Where is one
left when Melville and Emerson are through? One is left amid a debris
of institutions and habits. Nothing is safe; nothing is secure: one no
longer looks for the outer label, or believes in it. If north be the
direction of one’s ideal, the virtuous captain may have to tack back
and forth from east to west in order to reach that destination: for
no chart or compass ever enabled a ship to steer blindly for its port
without paying close attention to wind and weather.
Had Pierre, as an imaginative work, been a more sufficient
demonstration of these ambiguities, the book would have had a high
destiny. But although the ideas are clear enough, they remain a
potentiality in Pierre, since the story itself lacks integrity of form.
The book is a precious crystal smashed out of its natural geometrical
shape. Only by a chemical analysis of its elements do we discover what
its primal character might have been.
7
The failure of Pierre as a work of art gives us a certain licence to
deal with it as biography, all the more because Melville identified
himself with the hero, giving him the initials and the Christian
name of his beloved grandfather, Peter Gansevoort, and attaching
him to objects like the portrait of his father which correspond to
things about whose existence there is no doubt. If, as a work of art,
Pierre was whole, we should have no good reason to suspect Melville’s
wholeness. It is the failure of Pierre as literature that draws our
attention to Melville’s predicament as a man; for in this particular
way, he had not erred before. The young Melville who wrote Typee is not
in Pierre; instead, a much younger self is there, a self erotically
immature, expressing itself in unconscious incest fantasies, and
capable of extravagant rationalizations in its effort to sustain them.
Pierre is not a demonstration because it is a betrayal--and the person
it betrays is Melville. In Pierre, he was an Iago, driven by his own
frustration to betray the Othello who had been such a valiant captain
in all his previous battles.
The significant question for us is what event, or series of
occurrences, caused a hiatus in Melville’s emotional and sexual
development; and this question cannot be lightly answered by pointing
to the obvious symbols in Pierre--for a symbol describes a tendency,
rather than an objective event. We know that Melville’s earliest
associations of sex had been with vice and sexual disease; and in a
sensitive lad, this introduction to passion may place bit and bridle on
his own development. We know, too, that sexual relations in the United
States among respectable people in the fifties were in a starved and
stunted state: Stanley Hall, a boy in this very decade, recalled that
he had never witnessed the slightest passage of affection between his
father and his mother. It may be that Elizabeth, patient as a wife,
was timid and irresponsive as a lover: in short, there are a dozen
possible circumstances occurring long after childhood, which may have
contributed to Melville’s regression: and the incest-attachment, so far
from being the cause of this, may in Pierre only serve as its emotional
equivalent. Wherever sex is mentioned in other passages in Melville’s
books, it is referred to in a mood of disillusion. In Clarel, for
example, he says:
May love’s nice balance, finely slight,
Take tremor from fulfilled delight?
Can nature such a doom dispense
As, after ardor’s tender glow,
To make the rapture more than pall
With evil secrets in the sense,
And guile whose bud is innocence--
Sweet blossom of the flower of gall?
And in one of the few passages in Moby-Dick where sex is referred to,
the Sicilian sailor implies that sexual joy is in swayings, touchings,
cozenings, and that when one tastes it directly, satiety comes. That,
I submit, is not the experience of a healthy and well-mated man, or of
a mature erotic state: to long for the pre-nuptial condition, to wish
for fixation in courtship, is the mark of an immature, or at least an
incomplete, attachment.
When one says that Melville longed for the pre-nuptial state one
does not merely imply that he found his sexual relations difficult
or unsatisfactory: this earlier condition meant something more: it
meant irresponsibility, freedom to roam, carelessness about health
and daily bread, the opportunity to do his work without foreboding
and anxiety. Sex had brought disillusion not merely because the first
ardour and glow had vanished suddenly with the first physical contact:
it had increased all his burdens and threatened to curtail that inner
development which he had come to prize above all things--even more
than the robust outer experience that had produced Typee. Sex meant
marriage; marriage meant a household and a tired wife and children
and debts. No wonder he retreated: no wonder his fantasy attached him
to a mother who could not surrender, to a half-sister who could not
bear children! The ardent impulse remained; he sought only to make it
innocuous to his own spiritual life.
In view of the terrific pressure upon Melville, one can sympathize
with his retreat; but one sees that, so far from aiding his spiritual
development, it halted a good part of it at a critical point: for he
did not carry over into his thought and his work the experiences of
a husband and a father and a happy lover. He does not speak about
these experiences as a mature man: he speaks as an adolescent. At this
point, his self did not grow and expand; rather, it became ingrown
and withdrawn; and the symbol of incest is perhaps the symbol of
this shrinkage, this defeat, and the ultimate blackness of mood that
resulted from it. He associated his career with the deep well of
adolescent purity, instead of with the running stream of maturity,
turbid perhaps, but open to the sunlight, and swift. Doing so, he
blocked his own development instead of releasing it: towards later
experience he said No: No: and again No. For almost a decade after
this, Melville’s principal characters are tired, defeated, harassed,
tormented, lonely men; and to the end of his days children, the
last symbol of maturity, do not, directly or indirectly, enter his
imaginative life.
So closely were Melville’s sexual impulses and his intellectual career
bound up that I am tempted to reverse the more obvious analysis of
Pierre, and to see in its sexual symbols the unconscious revelation of
his dilemmas as a writer. Lucy, then, may signify the naïve writings
of his youth, which promised him happiness, and Isabel, the mysterious
child of a foreign mother, lost in an obscure youth, may stand for
that darker consciousness in himself that goads him to all his most
heroic efforts, that goads him and baffles him, leaving him balked
and sterile, incapable of going further in literature, and yet unable
to retreat to the older and safer relations with Lucy--the Lucy of
Typee and Omoo. We must recall that in writing Moby-Dick Melville had
premonitions of his own final flowering and of his sudden falling into
mould; and if this prospect haunted him, the relationship with Isabel
would be a perfect symbol of it, since it showed him making an effort
to go on with his literary career, living under the form of marriage
with Isabel, but unable, through the very nature of their relationship,
to enjoy the fruits of marriage. In spite of his confidence in
Moby-Dick, a doubt might still lurk: suppose Isabel were an impostor!
He had given up everything for her: he had abandoned the prospects
of a happy literary career, such a career as his family, Elizabeth’s
family, all his friends and relatives, and the reviewers and society
generally would approve of--abandoned it for a mad, chivalrous espousal
of his inner life. He had defied the world for this dark mysterious
girl; and what she was ready to give him in return the world regarded
as an abominable sin. Very well: so much the worse for virtue, if
virtue meant Mrs. Glendinning’s pride or Lucy’s lovely shallowness.
Melville was not without hopes that success might join the unsanctified
household, that Lucy and Isabel might live side by side; but when the
reviewers told him, upon his publishing Mardi and Moby-Dick, that he
had espoused a girl of the streets and seduced a virtuous maiden,
he saw that there was no way out, except to shoot them and take the
consequences.
Pierre itself, then, was a blow, aimed at his family with their cold
pride, and at the critics, with their low standards, their failure to
see where Melville’s true vocation lay, and their hearty recommendation
of “virtuous” courses that promised so little. Melville anticipated
defeat: Lucy dies of shock, and Pierre and Isabel make away with
themselves by poison; for he saw no way to go on with his deepest
self, and still continue obedient to the conventions of society and
the responsibilities of a married man. His failure to mature with his
actual marriage contributed, I think, to his failure to go further with
his spiritual union; but how much it contributed, and by what means the
injury was done, we can still only speculate. There is no doubt about
the final result. The mood of Pierre, the work of art, became the mood
of Herman Melville, the man, for almost a decade. Before another year
was over, he recovered his grip in writing, and his art became whole
and sufficient once more: but his life suffered, and his vision as a
whole suffered: Pierre disclosed a lesion that never entirely healed.
CHAPTER NINE: TIMONISM
We now draw near the Cape Horn of Melville’s life; and I would remind
the reader of Melville’s own prophetic words in White-Jacket: “Sailor
or landsman, there is some sort of Cape Horn for all. Boys! beware of
it; prepare for it in time. Graybeards! thank God it is passed. And
ye lucky livers, to whom, by some rare fatality, your Cape Horns are
as placid as Lake Lemans, flatter not yourselves that good luck is
judgment and discretion; for all the yolk in your eggs, you might have
foundered and gone down had the Spirit of the Cape said the word.”
The evidence for this part of Melville’s history is incomplete and
ambiguous: the testimony of his contemporaries is obscure, and what
has been handed on to living people has been stated in a fragmentary
way by witnesses whose limitations of knowledge and whose emotional
bias vitiate their judgment, and rob their testimony of any pretence
of impartiality. I do not overlook the value of family tradition in
dealing with this part of Melville’s life; but I prefer to use it as
I shall use Melville’s own expression in literature, not as recording
objective events, but as indicating a certain tendency and direction.
The witness of Melville’s own literary works is far more objective
evidence than more personal stories which can neither be substantiated
nor refuted. “The data which life furnishes towards a true estimate of
any being,” Melville himself reminds us, “are as insufficient to that
end as in geometry one side given would be to determine a triangle.”
During this period the nearest one can come to truth is by avoiding the
grosser forms of error.
The last forty years of Melville’s life have been thoroughly
misinterpreted, for the reason that after Moby-Dick Melville ceased
to be a popular author. This period has been referred to as the long
quietus, and even such a just critic as Mr. Percy Boynton could say:
“Pierre was Melville’s last real and audible word, and even Pierre was
an epilogue.” Such a complete halt in a writer’s life would indeed give
reason for grave suspicions; and popular rumour has filled up this
dismal gap with tales of Melville’s insanity. That there is a spark
of fact beneath this suffocating cloud of conjecture, I am prepared
to show: but the spark was magnified into a bonfire by Melville’s own
contemporaries, absurdly, maliciously enlarged; and later critics have
even been obtuse enough to read back into Mardi the signs of Melville’s
mental disruption. As a matter of fact, Melville’s silence was a very
audible one; and what is usually looked upon as the dark period of his
intellectual quietus is in fact the bleak period of his contemporaries’
neglect. One cannot call silence the reduced but steady output of short
stories, novels, poems, which marked the next forty years of Melville’s
life.
2
Let us separate the romantic overlay of rumour from the actual facts,
and see what is left of the silence and the mystery. The first tangible
bit of testimony as to Herman Melville’s condition in the year that
followed the publication of Pierre is a note that Elizabeth Melville
left in her annotation of his papers: “We all felt anxious about the
strain on his health in the spring of 1853.” By now the direct cause of
this strain should be fairly plain: Melville had exhausted himself in
writing Moby-Dick, and without waiting to recuperate, he had embarked
upon another long work: the effort of writing two such books in two
successive years was a terrific one. In Pierre, Melville has left
more than one picture of his condition. Pierre, writing of his own
hero-author, Vivia, says: “Cast the eye in there on Vivia; tell me
why those four limbs should be clapt in a dismal jail,--day out, day
in--week out, week in--month out, month in--and himself a voluntary
jailer! Is this the end of philosophy? This the larger and spiritual
life? This your boasted empyrean? Is it for this man should grow wise,
and leave off his most excellent and calumniated folly?”
When one pushes the organism so hard, all its latent weaknesses tend
to come out. Presently, the long and terrible exposure he had suffered
rounding the Horn on his return from the South Seas, came back to
exact its physical penalty. As early as 1849, Melville alluded to that
experience and its aftermath; and in 1855 he suffered a severe attack
of rheumatism, and in June an attack of sciatica. Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes attended him, and it is a pity that he did not leave a record
of the case: one could have spared a few autocratic conversations for
this precious evidence. These attacks continued to undermine Melville:
in 1858, he was laid up with a severe attack of “crick in the back” at
his mother’s home in Gansevoort. It is difficult, of course, to draw a
line between the physical and the psychical aspects of an organism; but
the tangible evidence of a drain on Melville’s strength is sufficient
to justify us in calling these disabilities primarily physical ones.
His perfect health deserted him. He was to know pain, confinement,
lassitude; and instead of tanned cheeks and hard muscles, pallor and
debility.