Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  By the time he died in New York in 1891, its population had grown to over 3 million, the Brooklyn Bridge was carrying traffic, as was the Second Avenue Elevated Railway, and the city was forested by so many telegraph, telephone, and electricity poles that live wires falling into the street were a hazard of urban life. Slavery, which still existed in New York when Melville was born, had been abolished in every state of the Union. Reconstruction had been tried and abandoned in the South, and the great wave of immigration was at full tide in the cities of the North. In short, during Melville’s childhood, the rhythm of American life was closer to medieval than to modern, but by the time he grew old, he was living in a world that had become recognizably our own.

  These changes in how Americans lived were matched, and probably exceeded, by changes in how they thought about their lives. Perhaps the most important intellectual event of Melville’s early years was the publication in 1836 of Emerson’s Nature, which declared that “the moral law lies at the center of nature and radiates to the circumference” of a natural world that is the “incarnation of God.” In 1890, about a year before he died, Melville borrowed from the New York Society Library the latest novel by William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, a book written in the shadow of Darwin, who had long since destroyed Emerson’s romantic view of creation and replaced it with a vision of the natural world created by chance and filled with brutality.* The protagonist of that novel looks down from the Second Avenue El upon a “lawless, Godless” world in which “the play of energies [is] as free and planless as those that force the forest from the soil to the sky.”

  New York City, 1817 (list of illustrations itr.1)

  We tend to think of Melville as having been a practicing fiction writer for much of the century through which he lived, but in fact he devoted only twelve of his seventy-two years (from 1845 to 1857) to prose that was published in his lifetime. His early years were unpromising—“until I was twenty-five,” he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “I had no development”—and from the age of forty until his death he wrote mainly poems, some of which were never published, and those that did make it into print were scarcely read. In this respect, the shape of his career—a decade of fiction followed by a turn to poetry—resembles that of his younger contemporary Thomas Hardy. At the end of his life, he returned for one last effort at prose fiction: the exquisite short novel Billy Budd, still in manuscript when he died. When the death notices appeared, even people who had known him were surprised; as one of the obituary writers put it, “his own generation has long thought him dead.”

  Melville began his career auspiciously when, after cruising the Pacific by whaleship and warship as a young man, he came home to upstate New York and started to write down (and embellish) his experiences. His first book, Typee, appeared in 1846, and the public liked it. They liked the “labial melody” of the native girls he claimed had held him in “indulgent captivity.” They liked the picture of an American lad lying like a god recumbent on the warm sand, sucking coconut under the tropical moon. They also liked his winks and hints that all was not quite right with the not-so-noble savages who waited on him. In between the banquets and orgies, he worried that he would be forcibly tattooed and that, were he ever to make it back home, he would be received as a freak. And since he suspected that his captors were cannibals, his pleasure at being pampered was mixed with anxiety that he was being prepared like the fatted calf for a tribal feast.

  New York City, 1890 (list of illustrations itr.2)

  Those early books (Typee was followed a year later by a sequel, Omoo) were sunny and charming, dappled only here and there with shade and sorrow. But Melville’s ambition outgrew them, and when he turned outward in his next books (Mardi, Redburn, and White-Jacket) to comment on such issues as slavery, urbanization, and immigration, he began to lose his public, who wanted to hear more about the sirens and savages of Polynesia. It did not help that he turned inward as well, toward what he later called “the tornadoed Atlantic” of his being. Mardi was a book of “depths,” as Hawthorne put it, “… that compel a man to swim for his life,” and most prospective readers declined to take the plunge. The clock had run out on Melville’s fifteen minutes of fame.

  One of the paradoxes of this life is that just when he was being forgotten by his contemporaries, Melville wrote the book for which he would be remembered by posterity. He was in his early thirties, a time when many men feel that the chance for untried things is slipping away. It was the summer of 1850. With his money worries growing and his audience shrinking, he was working on yet another young-man-goes-to-sea story when the new book began, as the phrase goes, to write itself. It became the story of a “moody stricken” captain, bent on vengeance against a great white whale that had dashed his boat to splinters on a previous voyage and ripped him half to death. At first this peg-legged captain, named Ahab for an apostate Israelite king, keeps himself hidden belowdecks just as he had been submerged in Melville’s mind. Only after the Nantucket pilot has steered the ship to the edge of the open ocean does Ahab reveal himself, and the moment he does, we recognize in him that rarity in literature—a truly original character who, “like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself,” so lights up the world that it is as if we are seeing it for the first time.

  Melville had thought that Moby-Dick would be done before the end of that summer. But it outran his intentions, and he found himself experimenting with how best to represent the ebb and flow of the unconscious, the quasi-erotic excitement of killing, and the psychodynamics of demagoguery. Partly, perhaps, out of the fear that every writer feels at exposing his work to public appraisal, he resisted the idea that he would ever finish it. “This whole book,” he wrote with a self-serving sexual pun, “is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught; small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything.” His immense ambition matched the scale and swagger of the young nation whose multitude of voices he wanted to comprehend in prose with the same bear-hug comprehensiveness that Walt Whitman was bringing to poetry. His book became a meditation on that species of madness that, in Melville’s day, was known as “monomania”—as the mutilated Captain Ahab, in his “frantic morbidness,” blames an unreasoning animal for “not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.”

  When Moby-Dick finally appeared at the end of 1851, it did not restore its author’s reputation. It was really two books—a going-to-sea story, and a daring metaphysical adventure—and when the second swallowed the first, it swallowed it whole, leaving it intact like Jonah in the belly of the beast. During Melville’s lifetime, Moby-Dick never came close to selling out its first edition of 3,000 copies, and when, in December 1853, the unsold copies burned up in a fire in the publisher’s warehouse, few noticed and fewer cared.

  Melville managed three more novels that were published under deteriorating contractual terms—Pierre, about a fanatic who destroys his world while trying to reform it; Israel Potter, about an old soldier discarded by his country; and The Confidence-Man, a “masquerade” of disguise and deceit set aboard a Mississippi steamboat. But Moby-Dick had tested (and Pierre exhausted) the patience of his public, and he was forced to retreat into writing for the new monthly magazines such as Harper’s and Putnam’s. In 1856, he collected several of these pieces, including two masterworks, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Benito Cereno, in a volume entitled The Piazza Tales, which was greeted by the editor George W. Curtis with this accurate prediction: “He has lost his prestige—and I don’t believe the Putnam stories will bring it up.” Melville’s subsequent works were written in verse—a collection of Civil War poems, Battle-Pieces and Other Aspects of the War, published in a small edition in 1866, followed at wide intervals by three books of poetry printed privately with the help of subventions from relatives who thought the discipline of meter and rhyme might have some therapeutic value for him.
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  After failing in a brief attempt at lecturing, he withdrew from public life. In 1866, he took a job with the U.S. Custom Service in Manhattan, having earlier traveled to California, Europe, and the Middle East. The following year, he and his wife suffered the worst calamity that can befall any parent: at age eighteen, their firstborn son, Malcolm, shot himself in his bedroom at home. Some twenty years later, their second son, Stanwix, died alone in a San Francisco hotel at the age of thirty-five. Melville never wrote directly about these events, but they cast a shadow over his later writings, and are felt at the heart of his valedictory masterpiece, Billy Budd.

  2.

  Since the present book is mainly concerned with Melville’s work in the context of his life and times, it tells a symmetrical tale of artistic triumph and public failure about a writer who earned little more than $10,000 over his lifetime, counting all his sales in Britain as well as America. Something, therefore, should be said about his posthumous success.

  Over the course of the twentieth century, Melville became an American icon to a degree unmatched by any other writer. Today, there is a journal named Leviathan devoted solely to his work, a thriving Melville Society, and there are academic conferences galore. As one literary scholar puts it, in a formulation that seems poised somewhere between irritation and satisfaction, Moby-Dick is today “the unavoidable centerpiece of the American tradition.” Ever since the 1930s, when the poet and avid Melvillean Charles Olson searched out the surviving volumes from Melville’s personal library (some were donated by his granddaughter to Harvard; others had been sold by his wife to a Brooklyn bookseller), scholars have tried to track down every check mark, underlining, and marginal jotting in every book whose pages Melville may have turned. In Olson’s day, when comments in the margins were found to be erased, the only recourse was to turn the paper to and fro so that different rakings of light might reveal to the naked eye (aided, at best, by a magnifying glass) indentations left by the erased pencil. More recently, Melville’s personal copy of a book he consulted while writing Moby-Dick, Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, was laid out at Harvard like the Shroud of Turin under an infrared camera capable of discerning microscopic graphite traces left by Melville’s pencil after he—or, more likely, someone else—had rubbed away the marks and annotations.

  Mastodon CD, Leviathan, by Paul Romano, 2004 (list of illustrations itr.3)

  If he has become a fixture in “high” culture, Melville has also found a place in popular culture, abroad as well as at home. Hardly a town in America within ten miles of a tourist beach lacks a “Moby Dick” fish restaurant, and as far away as Tehran there is a popular kebab place called “Moby Dick.” Melville’s great book has been the subject of marathon readings, spin-offs, sequels and prequels, adaptations for television, stage, film, painting, and performance art, comic books, cartoons, even dinnerware decorated with images of Ahab and the hated whale. At Yale, students refer to the college hockey rink, designed by the modernist architect Eero Saarinen, as “Moby Dick,” in honor of its undulating form. The New York Post recently offered its readers a “Moby Dick coupon” toward the purchase of a hardback edition sold exclusively at a deli one door down from the Post’s offices on Eighteenth Street. In 2004, the heavy metal rock band Mastodon released an album, Leviathan, devoted to themes (“Seabeast,” “Aqua Dementia,” “I Am Ahab”) from Moby-Dick, and in Denmark one can tour Copenhagen’s canals aboard the sightseeing boat Moby Dick. Outside the medieval Belgian city of Ghent, there is a brothel with the intriguing name “Moby Dick Fun Pub.”

  Melville in Belgium (list of illustrations itr.4)

  A few years ago in New York, a “floor-length periwinkle Grecian gown” with Melville’s words inscribed in the seams was offered for sale at just under $2,000; and today, for considerably less, one can take a boat ride at an Ohio theme park amid sounds of surf with background voices reciting Moby-Dick along with selections from Eskimo poetry. And if the first words of the book (“Call me Ishmael”) have become universally familiar, its last words (“then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago”) have currency too: a reporter for Slate.com quoted them recently to describe the breasts of a formerly buxom actress after her implants were removed.

  The New Yorker, November 21, 1988, cartoon by Gahan Wilson (list of illustrations itr.5)

  What does it all mean? A “literary text acts as a kind of mirror,” one theorist has said, and surely no text written by an American has been as powerfully reflective as Moby-Dick. Melville himself considered the phenomenon of reflection in “The Doubloon” chapter of Moby-Dick, in which Ahab nails a gold coin to the mast as a reward for the first sailor to catch sight of the white whale. Inscribed on that coin are the images of three mountain peaks: one with a tower on top, the next with a flaming volcano, the last with a crowing cock. Ahab stares into the burnished gold and, in his narcissistic frenzy, concentrates his mind upon the only subject that interests him: “The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self.”

  Few readers in Melville’s time wished to look deeply into a book about common sailors who stab to death majestic animals and chop their bodies into bloody broth in order to deliver such luxuries as skirt hoops and canes made of whalebone, hair-dressings and perfume made of whale oil, to people like themselves. Moby-Dick was last reprinted during Melville’s lifetime in 1876; ten years later, it went out of print. While there were stirrings of interest soon after he died (it was published in a new edition in 1892), and, in an article entitled “The Best Sea Story Ever Told,” one critic wrote in 1899 that Moby-Dick had “an Elizabethan force and freshness and swing,” as late as 1917 Melville was still getting only a brief mention in the Cambridge History of American Literature, mainly in the chapter on “Travel Writers.”

  His rediscovery was a joint Anglo-American operation. In England, the novelist Viola Meynell led the way with her introduction to the 1920 reissue of Moby-Dick in the Oxford World’s Classics series. Gradually, the affable travel writer gave way to a writer who had anticipated James Joyce’s literary innovations, and who, in the relishing phrase of one of the leaders of what came to be known as the Melville revival, had “sinned blackly against the orthodoxy of his time.” This was the beginning of Melville’s reclamation as a protomodernist writer fed up with prudery and priggishness, sexually mobile (his biographers suspecting that he enjoyed native boys as well as native girls), and unconstrained by the respectabilities of life or art. Writing in 1919, the American critic Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., reported that reading Melville was “like eating hasheesh”; and in England, D. H. Lawrence, writing in 1921, discovered in him “a futurist long before futurism,” whose work makes one feel “the sheer naked slidings of the elements.”

  As the critic and novelist Frank Lentricchia says of Moby-Dick, “Melville desires, before Joyce, that the something that his writing is about be the writing itself pouring onto the pages … without structural confinement, inspired by the library of his mind.” He jumped from omniscient to first-person to choral narration, mixing the proper speech of well-bred officers with the dirty songs of illiterate sailors. With his ambulatory style—always digressive, never consecutive—he was happier to wander than to go straight. Restlessly experimental, he was by turns playful, ironic, somber, and uproariously funny, sometimes dropping into bawdy comedy, sometimes soaring into soliloquies worthy of King Lear. To those who discovered him in the 1920s, it seemed as if they had come upon a prophet of the Jazz Age. And though he wrote his major works while living in the Berkshire Hills, his sensibility, like that of all the major modernist writers, had been formed by a city—specifically by New York City, where he learned to write with the miscellaneous profusion of a magazine, sending out in d
ivergent directions short chapters that spill onto each other like the overlapping advertising posters on an urban wall.

  In the 1930s, Melville’s reputation continued to grow, but on a new basis. Along with his precocious modernity, his preoccupation with the human capacity for hate and treachery and atavistic violence now touched a nerve. To borrow a phrase from one of his best readers, Walker Percy, Melville seemed to know in advance the great secret of the twentieth century—that “only the haters seem alive.” Already by 1927, E. M. Forster was hearing in Moby-Dick a “prophetic song” about a man whose “knight-errantry turns into revenge,” and two years later, on the verge of what was to be the most hideous decade in Western history, Lewis Mumford described Moby-Dick as a book about a man who, “in battling against evil … becomes the image of the thing he hates.”

  By the 1940s, it was impossible to read about Ahab without feeling his kinship to the jackbooted tyrants who were dragging a whole continent into an orgy of hate. “That inscrutable thing,” Ahab says of the whale, “is chiefly what I hate … and I will wreak that hate upon him”; and in Ahab’s mismatched confrontation with his decent but weak first mate, Mr. Starbuck (now of coffee-bar fame), there seemed a prescient anticipation of Yeats’s twentieth-century lament that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Like those horrific charismatics—the Generalissimo, the Führer, and Il Duce—Ahab had his private squad of secret police, five “dusky phantoms” chosen for their proficient delight in killing, whom he keeps hidden and hungry, as if they are a pack of carnivores left to starve in their cage. Once released, they leap to the chase whenever he spies a breeching whale that might be the one he is looking for. By the early 1950s, the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James could describe Moby-Dick as “the biography of the last days of Adolf Hitler.”