Yet Moby-Dick was not a book for a particular moment. It is a book for the ages. What gives it its psychological and moral power is that, freakish as he is, Ahab seems more part of us than apart from us. Like all great literary representations of evil, he is attractive as well as repulsive. And so Melville emerged in the twentieth century as the American Dostoevsky—a writer who, with terrible clairvoyance, had been waiting for the world to catch up with him.
Ever since, he has routed his rivals in the competition for readers. Emerson, once regarded as a dangerous infidel, remarked in his journal that “I hate goodies,” but he strikes many readers as something of a goody himself. That other New England worthy, Emerson’s neighbor and friend Henry D. Thoreau, tells us in Walden that he is seized by the desire “to devour” a woodchuck raw, but it seems a good bet that Thoreau cooked his meat thoroughly. These writers are kept alive mainly as classroom assignments; but Melville is different: he is a living presence in the larger culture. Among his contemporaries, he is today by far the largest, having combined Whitman’s New York bluster with Hawthorne’s New England gravity into a sensibility that created, in Moby-Dick, the one nineteenth-century American classic (possibly along with Huckleberry Finn) that remains morally powerful without having come to seem moralistic. To paraphrase the historian Dominic LaCapra, many writers are good for thinking about, but only a few, after their own time has passed, continue to be good for thinking with. Melville belongs to that select company.
Since he “arrived” in the mid-twentieth century, there has been a steady stream of new Melvilles, all of whom seem somehow able to keep up with the preoccupations of the moment: myth-and-symbol Melville, countercultural Melville, anti-war Melville, environmentalist Melville, gay or bisexual Melville, multicultural Melville, global Melville. As for how he will fare in our “postmodern” (or is it already post-postmodern?) age, the early signs suggest that he remains as current as ever. In the immediate aftermath of that terrible day now known as 9/11, Captain Ahab was suddenly everywhere. For some, he was a symbol of America’s obsession with hunting down bin Laden. Writing in The Observer in London a few days after the attack, Edward Said remarked that
Osama bin Laden’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict.
For others, with perfect symmetry, Captain Ahab was a prescient model of Osama bin Laden’s hatred of America—a “demagogue [who] can fuse his personal need for vengeance with the popular will by promising his followers a huntable enemy [the United States] in which evil is ‘made practically assailable.’ ” One scholar has enumerated citations of Melville in the weeks following the terror attacks—in the Scottish Sunday Herald, The Australian, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, Counter-Punch, Daily Nexus, and the University of Wisconsin’s Badger Herald. This is, no doubt, a partial list. The community of Melville critics has lately come to include figures ranging from former Senator Gary Hart to the Hollywood actor Richard Gere, both of whom likened President George W. Bush to Ahab in his determination to attack Iraq.
In all these respects and more, Melville seems to renew himself for each new generation. Even before the last vestiges of what William James called “tender-minded” faith in “the great universe of God” drained out of nineteenth-century thought, Melville had surveyed with twentieth-century suspicion all claims of metaphysical warrant for any idea or ideology. Long before the existentialist movement, he composed what Albert Camus called an “Odyssey beneath an empty sky,” in which there came forth, out of “endless darkness … the visages of foam and night”—not only in Moby-Dick but in a series of works that seemed to anticipate the angst of modern life. He doubted the existence of what his contemporaries called God and postmodernists call “presence”; a doubt that gave rise, in that great chapter of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” to a meditation on the whale’s whiteness as a symbol of the “voids and immensities of the universe.” Yet, as his friend Hawthorne knew, he could “neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.” He never stopped looking for traces of God, as when, in the beautiful “Grand Armada” chapter, he describes Ishmael staring through the clear water at a school of nursing mother whales whose suckling infants “calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast … as if … still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence.”
“I love all men who dive,” Melville once said of Emerson, whom he counted among the “corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.” But writing of those (including himself) who dream of penetrating to the depths of things, he gave vent to a feeling somewhere between eulogy and mockery that marks him as a fellow traveler in our post-theistic world. Consider this passage from Pierre, which can be read as a retort to the Romantic faith—still very much alive in Melville’s time—that at the core of each of us there is some germ or spark or trace of God, if only we could find it:
[As] far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!
There is in that last sentence an antic, even cruel view of man driving himself through an arduous quest only to discover at the climactic moment that in fact there is nothing to be unearthed—nothing but more mud, rock, and dust—and that the self, like the universe, is devoid of meaning except for the meanings we project into it for the sake of reassuring ourselves.
3.
In writing Melville’s life, it is tempting to regard everything in his early years as leading up to Moby-Dick, and everything afterwards as falling away from it. This view is not exactly wrong, but it is a distortion, and it may be helpful to bring out of the shadow of Moby-Dick a number of works that today seem utterly fresh and urgent: Pierre, with its themes of sexual confusion and transgression; Benito Cereno, with its account of the multiple horrors of race hatred; “Bartleby,” about the loneliness of modern urban life; and Billy Budd, with its perennially and, today, particularly salient theme of conflict between individual rights and the safety of the state.
At least since the 1920s, when the failure of Melville’s contemporaries to recognize his genius began to be redressed, every generation has felt a need to come to terms with him in its own way. This continually renewed presentness is the mark of a great writer. For some readers today, the Melville who counts is the corrosive critic of America, the writer who represents the United States in Moby-Dick as a bloodthirsty killing machine with the teeth of killed whales inserted in her bulwarks—a “cannibal of a craft,” a “thing of trophies” decked out in “the chased bones of her enemies.” With fires burning to melt whale blubber into marketable oil, the Pequod is a “red hell,” and her criminally cruel captain beyond appeal from a passing ship whose captain begs for help in finding a man—his own son—lost overboard.
But if Melville warned against America’s violence and hubris, he also wrote with delirious passion about America’s promise. A decade after John L. O’Sullivan coined the now notorious term “Manifest Destiny,” Melville wrote in White-Jacket about—and with—the missionary zeal of the United States:
We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.�
� God has given to us, for a future inheritance, the broad domains of the political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands being lifted. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.… Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember, that with ourselves—almost for the first time in the history of earth—national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world.
This passage has properly become one of the touchstone passages of our literature. When Melville wrote it, it expressed the ideals of a nation that saw itself as the last best hope of earth in the wake of the failure of the European democratic revolutions of 1848. By the turn of the twentieth century, it seemed to anticipate the jingoism with which the United States seized, in the name of liberty, Spanish imperial possessions from Cuba to the Philippines. A century after it was written, when our literature was being deployed in the 1950s as a weapon on the cultural front of the Cold War, it seemed an expression of self-serving generosity in the spirit of the Marshall Plan. By the Vietnam era, it was widely cited as an exhibit of national arrogance—a sort of naive companion text to Norman Mailer’s novel Why Are We in Vietnam?—in which one could see America in all its fatal pride. Today, amid images of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it has again become a passage of great power and unsettling ambiguity.
Herman Melville was one of those writers whom Lionel Trilling described as “repositories of the dialectics of their times” in the sense that they contain “both the yes and no of their culture.” In coming to terms with him, we are free to choose the prose-poet of our national destiny who imagines a world of grateful converts to the American Way, or the writer who saw the ship of state sailing toward disaster under lunatic leadership as it tries to conquer the world. In this respect he was—and is—as vast and contradictory as America itself.
* The entry in the charge ledger is preserved at the library’s current home on East Seventy-ninth Street.
CHAPTER 1
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
1.
He was born on August 1, 1819, into good circumstances. But his parents lacked the money to stay there, and so they turned frequently, at no small cost to their dignity, to their elders for help. On his mother’s side, the benefactor had been Maria’s late father, Peter Gansevoort, a towering man (six foot three in an age when six-footers were rare) famous for having commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix, an outpost guarding the trade route from the Great Lakes, during the British siege of 1777. There is a tendency today to think of the Revolutionary War as a dispute among bewigged gentlemen who sent men into battle with inaccurate guns to the martial music of fife and drum; in fact, it was a brutal war whose combatants literally tasted sweat and blood flung from the bodies of their enemies as they slashed at each other with bayonets. It was not uncommon for wounded soldiers to be stabbed through and left to bleed to death “like sieves,” or to have their brains dashed out with “barbarity to the utmost” by the musket butts of the advancing enemy. Melville was to write about this war in the novel Israel Potter, in which he described the Yankee defenders at Bunker Hill gripping their muskets by the barrel and beating back the British assault by “wielding the stock right and left, as seal-hunters on the beach, knock down with their clubs the Shetland seal.”
Melville’s Gansevoort grandfather was known for his valor in the face of superior numbers of enemy troops. At Fort Stanwix, having refused to receive a verbal message from the officer in charge of the British assault, he was presented with a written ultimatum to surrender “exhibiting in magnificent terms … the strength of the [British] army … and the hopeless situation of the garrison,” to which he replied with formal contempt:
Sir:—In answer to your letter of today’s date, I have only to say, that it is my determined resolution, with the forces under my command to defend this fort, at every hazard, to the last extremity, in behalf of the United American States, who have placed me here to defend it against all their enemies.
I have the honor to be, Sir,
Your most obedient and humble servant,
Peter Gansevoort, Col.,
Commanding Fort Stanwix
This immovable eighteenth-century gentleman lived out his years in Albany. Upon his death in 1812, seven years before his grandson Herman was born, Peter Gansevoort’s assets were passed on to his son Peter Junior, along with the obligation to look after his sister Maria and her unborn children.
On the Melville side, too, there was a modest fortune, and Herman’s father, Allan, did his best to tap it. Allan’s father, Major Thomas Melvill, was also a celebrated veteran of the Revolution, accustomed to being greeted on the streets of Boston with bows of deference. In 1831, when the deference was turning to pity, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes made a little verse sketch of him called “The Last Leaf”:*
My grandmamma has said—
Poor old lady; she is dead
Long ago—
That he had a Roman nose,
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow
But now his nose is thin,
And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff,
And a crook in his back,
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.
One basic fact linked the lives of Melville’s grandfathers: both had been born British and had become, by violence, American. On childhood visits to Boston, Herman heard war stories directly from Thomas Melvill, who still wore his “old three-cornered hat, / And the breeches, and all that,” and proudly showed his grandson the vial containing tea leaves brushed from his clothes after he had taken part in the Boston Tea Party dressed in Indian garb and warpaint. Though he never knew his maternal grandfather, Herman learned about “the hero of Fort Stanwix” from his mother and uncles, and doubtless had him in mind for the portrait, in Pierre, of “grand old Pierre Glendinning”—a massive man who, “during a fire in the old manorial mansion, with one dash of his foot … had smitten down an oaken door,” and “in the wilderness before the Revolutionary War … had annihilated two Indian savages by making reciprocal bludgeons of their heads.”
General Peter Gansevoort, oil painting by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1794 (list of illustrations 1.1)
Thomas Melvill, c. 1834 (list of illustrations 1.2)
If Melville’s grandfathers were holdovers from the glorious past, his father lived in a fanciful future. Born in Boston, Allan Melvill wooed his bride from a venerable Dutch patroon family in Albany, then moved to the fast-growing city of New York. Having made the Grand Tour of Europe as a young man, he became an import merchant specializing in what today we would call accessories—a “deluxe Mr. Micawber,” as James Wood has aptly called him—with the groundless optimism of someone proficient at deceiving himself. He was always counting on this or that “confidential Connexion” to deliver a windfall, or assuring his creditors that some long-pending deal was about to close. “My prospects brighten,” he wrote in 1820 to his own father when Herman was not yet a year old, “& without being over sanguine, I may be allowed to indulge, under the blessing of Heaven, anticipations of eventual success.”
Allan Melvill, watercolor by John Rubens Smith, 1810 (list of illustrations 1.3)
Maria Gansevoort Melvill, oil painting by Ezra Ames, c. 1820 (list of illustrations 1.4)
Allan was being over-sanguine, and everyone knew it—though for a time his bravado almost convinced the world that his failures were temporary and his successes deferred. By all accounts, he had an eye for quality. An advertisement he placed in 1824 in a New York newspaper gives an idea of his inventory: “Fancy Hdfks. and Scarfs … Elastic and Silk Garters, Artificial Flowers, Cravat Stiffners, &c. Also in store … rich satin striped and figured blk Silk Vestings, Gros de Na
ples Hdkfs, Belt and Watch Ribbons, 7–16 & 7–22 Silk Hose … Horse Skin Gloves … Cologne and Lavender Waters, &c.” He could switch easily into the visitor’s native language when a Frenchman entered his store, and he furnished his home with mementoes of his European travels, whose provenance he loved to detail for friends over a glass—or two—of old cognac.
But the yield from his talents was meager. Year by year, Allan turned his life into an almost sordid tale of reckless borrowing and groveling appeals for cash to carry him through to the next promised bonanza. He never became at ease in the increasingly impersonal system whereby European exports were sold in bulk to American auction houses, from which they were bought by wholesalers and distributed to the retail trade—a business in which good taste and personal charm counted for less than the ability to anticipate rising markets by buying low and falling prices by selling high. Following the trade agreements with Britain that settled the War of 1812, something like the frantic rhythm of modern commodities markets developed, and Allan Melvill was unprepared. Nearly forty years later, aspects of Allan turn up in his son’s portrait, in White-Jacket, of an effete Commodore’s secretary who looks like an “ambassador extraordinary from Versailles,” and whose prized possessions include “enamelled pencil-cases” and “fine French boots with soles no thicker than a sheet of scented notepaper.”
Melville: His World and Work Page 4