Meanwhile Melville was enjoying a tropical idyll—as much as was possible in his uncertainty whether he was being fattened for a feast. He was generously fed on local delicacies washed down with coconut milk. He found the physical beauty of the Typees irresistible, and gossip had it that he fathered a child by one of their charming girls. Between naps and leisurely smokes on tapa mats he passed his days swimming. But he secretly sought ways of escaping the ominous hospitality. A young man from a neighboring tribe who spoke a little English took word to an Australian whaler that was passing by. The captain sent a boat to his rescue, Melville limped hastily on board, and despite desperate efforts of the outraged Typees he joined the Lucy Ann, a whaler out of Sydney.
The Lucy Ann provided an unromantic adventure under an incompetent captain and a drunken mate, who found no whales, and within a month a mutiny put the whole crew in a jail in Tahiti. But this was only a manner of speaking, for they were left free to become “omoos” (beachcombers) around Papeete. There Melville in the company of the ship’s surgeon observed the corrupting effects of European conquest and missionary conversion on Polynesian life. In early November 1842 he signed on with another whaler, the Charles and Henry out of Nantucket, and by late spring disembarked at Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui. This was to be his last trip on a whaler. In Honolulu Melville signed a contract to become a clerk and bookkeeper in a store, but he had little enthusiasm for the Hawaiian life.
In August he gladly joined the crew of the frigate United States as an enlisted man, and had his first experience of the American navy, until it docked in Boston fourteen months later. The ship retraced Melville’s original course from Nantucket—down the coast of Peru, which remained one of his most vivid and forbidding memories (“Corrupt as Lima” was his phrase). His routine duties included washing decks, polishing brass, regular drill, and caring for Gun No. 15. The only adventure was a spirit of rebellion against the senseless draconian discipline. He was outraged at the bloody floggings he was ordered to witness 163 times. But he did make warm friends among the crew, including the “matchless and unmatchable Jack Chase,” to whom he would dedicate his last work, Billy Budd. After a stormy winter passage around Cape Horn, the United States touched at Rio and arrived in Boston Harbor on October 3, 1844. Three years at sea had brought an end to Melville’s seafaring experience. So speedily had he equipped himself to be what D. H. Lawrence called “the greatest seer and poet of the sea.”
It is easy enough to explain how and why Melville came to have these experiences. But no Melvillian mystery is more tantalizing than how and why he became a writer. Most others in our history of creators had somehow made writing their vocation and from an early age chosen this way of man’s “making himself immortal.” Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Balzac, and Dickens all found their calling in the word. But we find no clues to such an ambition in the little we know of the young Melville. Critics, with some reason, accused Boswell of having written his great book by accident. We might with more reason say that Melville was an “accidental” author, an inspired amateur. Or, less charitably, that he came to writing as an act of desperation—for lack of anything better to do.
His early years gave him his fill of the sea and now he casually turned to the world of words. “Until I was twenty-five,” he once wrote to Hawthorne, “I had no development at all.… From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.” Returning in 1844 to live with his mother in Lansingsburgh, he charmed friends and relatives by exotic tales of his life among “the cannibals.” When he was pressed to put them in a book, his model, if he had a model, seems to have been the popular recent travel books, like Mungo Park’s Travel in the Interior of Africa and “my friend Dana’s unmatchable Two Years Before the Mast.”
When Melville completed his manuscript in the autumn of 1845, he gave it to his brother Gansevoort, who was departing to be secretary to the American legation in London, to submit to the publisher John Murray. After hesitating until he was reassured that the recounted experiences had really happened, Murray published it in two installments in his “Home and Colonial Library” early in 1846. The dispute over its authenticity, which kept interest alive, was calmed by a surprise statement from Toby Greene (then a house painter near Buffalo) confirming the “entire accuracy” of the story. At the urging of Washington Irving, G. P. Putnam bought the American rights and it was published under the coy title Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life During Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas. When Putnam’s partner, John Wiley, was shocked by what he read, Melville agreed to expurgate thirty pages found “objectionable” for their sexual, political, or antimissionary message. Meanwhile Melville, in the fashion of the time, was planning to plant his own enthusiastic review.
Melville’s first literary effort already illustrated his special form of documentary fiction that would flower in Moby Dick. His exotic personal experience set him reflecting on the paradoxes of good and evil, of civilization and barbarism. “After passing a few weeks in this valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But alas! since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of-war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.” The sensational appeal of Typee depended less on its noble sentiments than on a simple adventure story and its vivid and convincing detail in a period hungry for “colonial” travel literature. Would the hero be eaten by cannibals? And all spiced with mildly salacious passages on the unclad Polynesian beauties and the hero’s romance with Fayaway, who was “speechless with sorrow” when she saw him escape on the Australian whaler.
For Melville the popular success of Typee had the charm both of a win-at-the-first-try and of a succès de scandal. Though the book had what some called the “charm of indelicacy,” Longfellow had not found it necessary to omit any passages when he read Typee to his family before the fire. Melville seized the moment and quickly wrote Omoo, a “Narrative of Adventures” in the Society Islands of Tahiti and Eimeo, which appeared in January 1847. Elaborating his experience as an omoo wandering from island to island, it lacked the life-and-death suspense of Typee, but offered “a familiar account of the present condition of the converted Polynesians, as affected by their promiscuous intercourse with foreigners, and the teachings of the missionaries, combined.”
When his brother Gansevoort died, Melville was responsible for supporting his mother and four sisters. His instant celebrity at the age of twenty-eight had given him new confidence. Now he asked the eminent Judge Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of Massachusetts, to whom he had dedicated Typee, for the hand of his daughter, Elizabeth, and they were married in August 1847. While the marriage of Melville and Elizabeth was troubled, she remained a comfort and a stabilizing fixture in his unhappy life. And the marriage had practical benefits. Shaw advanced the funds for the newly married couple to buy their house in New York. And this provided Melville with a base for his new role as pundit and man of letters in the circle of the Duyckinck brothers who published the Literary World, the leading weekly literary review.
Melville had warned John Murray, his English publisher, that his next book would be quite different from Typee and Omoo. And the sales performance of Mardi, too, was a hapless reverse. This book was a flight of fancy, which recycled his Polynesian experience into a sentimental metaphysical romance of the hero, Taji, and the mysterious white beauty, Yillah, whom he rescues from a native priest taking her to be sacrificed. From the transcendental realm of Mardi, where she suddenly disappears, Taji’s desperate search takes him across the world to Dominora (Great Britain) and Vivenza (the United States), in quest of perfect wisdom, pursued by “three fixed specters … over an endless sea.” When Mardi was published in 1849, critics found it dull or ridiculous. Melville tried to shrug off these attacks as “matters of course … essential to the building of a permanent reputation.”
Perhaps the birth of his first child in February 1849 sobered him with the need to writ
e what people would read. During the next five months he doggedly turned out two books based on his youthful trip to Liverpool and his experience as an enlisted man in the United States navy. Redburn: His First Voyage, a short novel, followed closely Melville’s own impressions to depict the miseries of the Liverpool slums. It fulfilled Melville’s promise to his publisher to omit mysticism and metaphysics, was well received, and has survived also as a boy’s book in the genre of Robinson Crusoe. The more substantial White Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War (1850), Melville explained, aimed “by illustrative scenes” at an accurate account of “the established laws and usages of the Navy.” The book remains a reliable, if shocking, source for the history of American seafaring life.
“If you begin the day with a laugh,” he opens his chapter on a flogging, “you may nevertheless end it with a sob and a sigh.” He reports how four crew members were being punished for nothing more than a seaboard scuffle among themselves.
The fourth and last was Peter, the mizzen-top lad.… As he was being secured to the gratings, and the shudderings and creepings of his dazzlingly white back were revealed, he turned round his head imploringly; but his weeping entries and vows of contrition were of no avail. “I would not forgive God Almighty!” cried the Captain. The fourth boatswain’s mate advanced, and at the first blow, the boy shouting “My God! Oh! my God!” writhed and leaped so as to displace the gratings, and scatter the nine tails of the scourge all over his person. At the next blow he howled, leaped, and raged in unendurable torture.
“What are you stopping for, boatswain’s mate?” cried the Captain. “Lay on!” and the dozen was applied.
“I don’t care what happens to me now!” wept Peter, going among the crew, with blood-shot eyes, as he put on his shirt. “I have been flogged once, and they may do it again if they will. Let them look for me now!”
No less excruciating is Melville’s patient description of the unnecessary amputation of a sailor’s leg by the vain chief surgeon Cuticle, for the instruction of the junior surgeons on board.
“The saw!” said Cuticle.
Instantly it was in his hand.
Full of the operation, he was about to apply it, when, looking up, and turning to the assistant surgeons, he said, “would any of you young gentlemen like to apply the saw? A splendid subject!”
Several volunteered; when, selecting one, Cuticle surrendered the instrument to him, saying, “Dont be hurried, now, be steady.”
While the rest of the assistants looked upon their comrade with glances of envy, he went rather timidly to work; and Cuticle, who was earnestly regarding him, suddenly snatched the saw from his hand. “Away, butcher! you disgrace the profession. Look at me!”
For a few moments the thrilling, rasping sound was heard; and then the top-man seemed parted in twain at the hip, as the leg slowly slid into the arms of the pale, gaunt man in the shroud, who, at once made away with it, and tucked it out of sight under one of the guns.
Melville himself considered both Redburn and White Jacket uninspired and routine. But, now trying to make his living as an author, he went to London in October 1849 to secure the best terms from some publisher. On publication in 1850 White Jacket was well received. And in February 1850 he returned to New York to enjoy the favorable reviews from both sides of the Atlantic.
In his seafaring youth Melville had spent the better part of three years on whaling ships, but whaling itself was the one experience he had not mined for his writing. Yet, he observed in his Preface to Omoo, nowhere do sailors more plainly show their “wilder aspects” than on these vessels in the Sperm Whale Fishery—“a business not only peculiarly fitted to attract the most reckless seamen of all nations, but in various ways is calculated to foster in them a spirit of the utmost license.” His books had all been more or less autobiographical. And Mardi, the one least so, was a blot on his literary reputation. Having once found it necessary to assure his publisher that his book would be quite free from philosophy, at this stage in his career it would have been strange if he had purposely written a metaphysical book.
There are few more satisfactory explanations of how and why Melville, author of South Sea travel romances and accounts of life in the United States Navy, came to write the great American epic of man’s struggle against the evil in the universe than D. H. Lawrence’s:
Moby Dick, or the White Whale.
A hunt. The last great hunt.
For what?
For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale; who is old, hoary, monstrous, and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath, having so often been attacked; and snow white.
Of course he is a symbol.
Of what?
I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That’s the best of it.
The story of whaling, his only untapped resource, was rich in weird and legendary possibilities. On his return from England Melville began writing, and by May 1, 1850, he told his friend Richard Henry Dana that he was halfway through. By the middle of the next year he was calling it The Whale (eventually the title of the English edition), and after seventeen months of writing off and on he had finished the book. This seems a short time for a long, intensely researched, and fact-packed work. But it was long enough to admit new influences that shaped Moby Dick and put it in a different class from his earlier books. These two influences were Hawthorne and Shakespeare.
In the summer of 1850 Melville with his wife and baby went to stay with the widow of his uncle Thomas who was then running a summer hotel in their large house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Liking the place and its long family associations, he bought a neighboring house with money advanced by Judge Shaw. There he and his numerous family lived for the next thirteen years. They called it Arrow Head after the Indian relics they had found. And they enjoyed the rural social life of picnics, costume parties, and overnight excursions to mountain summits. The Berkshire Hills, at the time a favorite resort of Henry Ward Beecher, Holmes, Lowell, Longfellow, Audubon, and lesser celebrities, pretentiously boasted of being “a jungle of literary lions.” Hawthorne had recently moved to Lenox. A romanticized contemporary account of a picnic outing on August 5, 1850, by a writer who knew both Hawthorne and Melville described the sparking of their sudden intimacy. “One day it chanced that when they were out on a picnic excursion, the two were compelled by a thundershower to take shelter in a narrow recess of the rocks of Monument Mountain. Two hours of enforced intercourse settled the matter. They learned so much of each other’s character, and found that they held so much of thought, feeling and opinion in common that the most intimate friendship for the future was inevitable.” Later Hawthorne, in his Wonder Book would recall his meetings with “Herman Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his ‘White Whale,’ while the gigantic shadow of Greylock looms upon him from his study window.”
The shadow of Hawthorne himself would loom across Melville as he wrote his book. And a dark shadow it was. When they first met, Melville hardly knew Hawthorne’s writings, but he now began to read them. About the time of the famous picnic, Melville wrote a long and extravagantly favorable review of Hawthorne’s Moses from an old Manse for Duyckinck’s Literary World (August 17, 24, 1850). He praised Hawthorne as the great American author whose works “should be sold by the hundred-thousand, and read by the million; and admired by every one who is capable of Admiration.” And he explained. “Now it is that blackness in Hawthorne … that so fixes and fascinates me.”
For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in blackness, ten times black. But this darkness but gives more effect to the evermoving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circumnavigates his world.… this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free.
This blackness, too, sh
owed Hawthorne’s kinship with Shakespeare. Melville would “not say that Nathaniel of Salem is a greater than William of Avon, or as great. But the difference between the two is by no means immeasurable. Not a great deal more, and Nathaniel were verily William.” For the profundity of Shakespeare, too, came from this “mystical blackness” seen in “the dark Characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago.”
The nation, inspired by Emerson and his disciples, was sailing a continent-sea of optimism. In April 1851 Melville gives us a clue to the grand antithesis he sensed in 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, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego.”
Never before had the troubled self found such a grand oceanic scene or more heroic men and beasts for its struggles. Now, since Hawthorne had shown that American writers could be Shakespearean, Melville would make his own try. Before and during the writing of Moby Dick he had been “hypnotized” by reading and rereading Shakespeare, especially Lear and Hamlet and Timon of Athens. Melville adored Shakespeare as “the profoundest of thinkers,” master of “the great Art of Telling the Truth,—even though it be covertly, and by snatches.” What he most revered was not “the great man of tragedy and comedy.… But it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality:—these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.… Tormented into desperation, Lear the frantic King tears off the mask, and speaks the sane madness of vital truth.”
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 91