If Melville’s father was always off on some flighty new venture, his mother was a woman of gravity. Daughter of a respected family with roots in the quasi-feudal aristocracy of the Hudson Valley, Maria Gansevoort had grown up speaking Dutch with her parents, who provided her with the years of music and dancing lessons essential to a young lady of breeding who was expected to make herself gracious and decorative. But she was trained as well in the severe Protestantism of her ancestors, and remained wary all her life of placing too much faith in the things of this world lest they be snatched away. Especially in the months after giving birth, which she did eight times, she was given to moodiness, and though she wanted her own children to master such worldly arts as penmanship and deportment, she was at pains to prepare their souls for deprivation and death.
It was from Maria that Herman received the rudiments of a religious education. Although she chastised him well into adulthood for his spotty church attendance, and he was never what we would call “observant,” the ultimate questions posed by religion never lost their hold on his imagination. Maria, who knew the Bible in Dutch as well as English, brought biblical stories, exempla, and precedents into the lives of all her children, and for her second son characters from the Bible always remained as vividly alive as the worthies and villains of his own time. Ishmael, Bildad, Ahab, and Elijah are just a few of the names in Moby-Dick by which he invests characters with a priori allegorical significance before they begin to act in his invented world. He ends his great story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” with a quotation from the Book of Job (Bartleby sleeps “with kings and counselors”); and in his final work, Billy Budd, he gives the music of the Bible in a telling variation to Captain Vere, who quotes Acts 17:28, reminding his officers that the “element in which we move and have our being” is not God, but the sea. The pioneer scholar Nathalia Wright counts 250 biblical allusions in Moby-Dick alone. Melville knew the Bible so well, she writes, that “he could smell the burning of Gomorrah, and the pit; hear the trumpet in the Valley of Jehoshaphat and … taste Belshazzar’s feast.”
In the early years when he heard travelers’ tales from his father and Bible stories from his mother, Herman was too young to understand the toxic mixture of gratitude and resentment that both his parents felt because of their continued dependence on their own parents. But the anxieties of childhood stayed with him. “Ah, fathers and mothers!,” he wrote in the self-mocking style of Pierre, “… give heed! Thy little one may not now comprehend the meaning of those words and those signs, by which, in its innocent presence, thou thinkest to disguise the sinister thing ye would hint. Not now he knows; not very much even of the externals he consciously remarks; but if, in afterlife, Fate puts the chemic key of the cipher into his hands; then how swiftly and how wonderfully, he reads all the obscurest and most obliterate inscriptions he finds in his memory.…” When childhood memories do turn up in Melville’s writing, they tend to be “shadowy reminiscences,” such as his allusion in Moby-Dick to the workmen he saw on visits to Boston, pushing wheelbarrows of dirt down Beacon Hill for the landfill that would become Back Bay. Tensions in his parents’ home in New York and summer visits to his Boston grandfather left impressions that became, over time, fragmentary memories tinged with sadness—as when he recalls, in Redburn, the melancholy longing provoked by the miniature glass ship displayed in his grandfather’s curio case, or when, in Pierre, he draws a portrait of a smothering mother whose compulsive demands on her son are a form of displaced rage.
Among the strains between his parents were their religious differences. Although Allan habitually spelled the word GOD with capital letters, he adopted his own father’s mild Unitarianism, which, according to more pious members of the family, including his wife, tended to diminish the majesty of God in favor of the dignity of man. Maria not only took her churchgoing more seriously but was warmly committed to the Calvinist creed to which her family had subscribed in its Dutch Reformed version. After Herman was born, she managed to persuade her pastor, the Reverend J. M. Mathews, to make an exception to the church rule against home baptism. When Mathews came to the Melvill house on Pearl Street in August 1819 to baptize the new baby, he asked both parents to acknowledge the hard truth that “children are … born in sin, and therefore are subject to all miseries, yea to condemnation itself,” and to promise that they would instruct their child “to the utmost of your power” in the shame of its sinfulness. Allan made sure that these affirmations were followed by a reception featuring a strong rum punch.
One thing at which Allan Melvill was adept was living beyond his means, and so his children grew accustomed to comfort and even to a touch of opulence. The family always employed several servants—housekeeper, cook, nurse, and waiter—and Allan did not cut back on expenses as he descended into debt. On the contrary, he increased them by moving from address to address, each an improvement in space and prestige on its predecessor—from No. 6 Pearl Street, just a few steps from the waterfront, a year later to larger quarters on Courtlandt Street (on the future site of the World Trade Center), to a still grander house on Bleecker Street, and finally, in 1828, to Broadway, between Bond and Great Jones streets.
Tracing the Melvills’ movements northward in Manhattan reveals a family trying to disguise the fact that its fortunes were declining. Their migration away from the noise and smell of the waterfront exemplified their plight: even as Allan moved up in the world of appearances, he was losing touch with the source of his livelihood. “In this republican country,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote years later, “amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point”—and Allan Melvill was one of the drowning.
2.
How well he hid this truth from his second son is impossible to know. But we do know that on a stormy October night in 1830, his business in ruins, and owing several months of back rent on his house, Allan Melvill, accompanied by eleven-year-old Herman, fled New York City via steamboat for Albany, where his wife and the rest of the children had preceded him. Two months later, he presented the undignified spectacle of a middle-aged man and father of eight begging his own father for help: “I am destitute of resources and without a shilling,” he wrote to the old Major on December 4, and “may soon be prosecuted for my last quarters rent … without immediate assistance I know not what will become of me.…” He had become, in effect, the ward of his brother-in-law, Peter, the Gansevoort son and heir, who generously agreed to cover his “daily expences” with loans.
It was the end of Allan Melvill’s hopes and of his son’s boyhood. “I had learned to think much and bitterly before my time,” Herman was to write nearly twenty years later in the voice of the fictional narrator in Redburn. “I must not think of those delightful days, before my father became a bankrupt … and we removed from the city; for when I think of those days, something rises up in my throat and almost strangles me.” The memory of cowering with his beaten father in that ship as it pitched and rolled at anchor while the storm blew through New York left its trace in Moby-Dick when, speaking through the voice of Father Mapple, Melville writes of Jonah “lying in his berth” while his mind “turns and turns in giddy anguish.”
The move to Albany brought no relief. As Allan continued to lose his battle against bankruptcy, he fell into that “ambiguous condition,” as Elizabeth Hardwick has described it, in which “the remembrance of things past created by birth, prosperity, [and] an honorable reputation” shades into anger at their loss and the old “feeling of entitlement [becomes] a treacherous companion that encourages debt.” Meeting old debts with new loans, he took a job as a clerk in the local branch office of a cap and fur concern. In December 1831, returning from a discouraging trip to New York during which he had tried to pacify his creditors, he was forced by ice in the Hudson River to disembark from the steamboat at Poughkeepsie. He continued north for the final seventy miles by open carriage through subzero temperatures over two days and nights until, at the village of Greenbush, he crossed the frozen
river on foot to rejoin his family at Albany.
Allan had become, as his son was to write a quarter century later in a story, “Jimmy Rose,” about a ruined New York merchant, “a pauper with wealth of polished words; a courteous, smiling, shivering gentleman” whose “creditors, once fast friends, pursued him as carrion for jails.” Not yet fifty years old, he had been brought so low by fortune “that the plummet of pity alone could reach him.” Still, he was a proud man, and after the grueling trip up the Hudson he thought he could shake off the ensuing cough. Even when he turned feverish with pneumonia he persisted in his work, spending long days at the store, sleeping fitfully at night or not at all.
Early in January 1832, he began to show signs of delirium, and his brother Thomas, the old Major’s eldest son, was summoned from his Berkshire farm to Allan’s bedside, where he found him in a terrible state. “Hope is no longer permitted of his recovery in the opinion of the attending Physicians,” Thomas wrote to a family friend, “and indeed—oh, how hard for a brother to say! I ought not to hope for it—for—in all human probability—he would live, a Maniac!” Herman, having been withdrawn from school, was probably at home much of the time during Allan’s final harrowing days. Years later, with the cries of his bedridden father in his memory, he wrote about the maimed Captain Ahab “raving in his hammock.”
Allan Melvill died a few days after his brother had given up hope. In the wake of his death, it was no longer financially feasible for the two older boys, Gansevoort and Herman, to return to school. Herman had spent four years at the New York Male High School, where the teaching techniques were rote and humiliation, followed by barely a year at the grammar school of Columbia College; then, after the flight from New York, he had entered Albany Academy. But even in relatively flush times, the expense of Herman’s schooling had struck his parents as a dubious investment, and it was now out of the question. Throughout his childhood, they had fretted about his penmanship, and, as anyone knows who has glanced at his manuscripts—even allowing for the relatively loose standards of correctness that prevailed in the nineteenth century—he never really mastered spelling. As part of the family’s retrenchment, he was now taken out of school and put to work as an errand boy in the New York State Bank at its Greek Revival headquarters on Albany’s Market Street.†
Gansevoort Melville, c. 1836 (list of illustrations 1.5)
It was the eldest son, Gansevoort, who earned accolades at school and was, according to his father, a boy of “tenacious memory and glowing fancy,” while Herman, the second son and third child out of eight, was “less buoyant in mind” and “backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension.” Gansevoort was slender and poised; Herman was stocky and ruddy. Before the family finances collapsed, Gansevoort had been expected to go off to Harvard; now he was compelled instead to try his hand at the cap and fur business, and by the summer of 1834 he was doing well enough to hire his brother as his assistant, sending Herman’s wages straight into their mother’s account.
But the family’s string of bad luck had not yet run out, and their half-repaired life began to unravel again. Like those of his father, Gansevoort’s prospects proved illusory. The first blow came in 1835, when fire destroyed the store and most of the stock; then, in 1837, a national financial panic made credit scarce and customers wary. The Melvilles (Maria had by now added the “e” to her married name—perhaps to signify her hopes for a fresh start) had been going back and forth between Albany and Thomas Melvill’s farm near Pittsfield in western Massachusetts, where the children were sent in summer to escape the periodic cholera outbreaks in town.
In May 1838, more dependent than ever on the charity of her brother, Maria moved with the younger children and, apparently, with Herman—who had briefly held a teaching job near his uncle’s Berkshire farm—to the village of Lansingburgh, ten miles north of Albany (today part of the city of Troy), where the cost of living and the conspicuousness of their failure would be smaller. When the Connecticut clergyman Timothy Dwight had visited the area thirty years earlier, he noted depressed real estate values in what had once been a center of trade and shipbuilding; and while there had been some revival with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and more recently because of tourist interest in a local botanical garden, the heyday of the neighborhood was past. The Melvilles’ retreat was now complete: from the metropolis, to a provincial city, and finally to a village where their neighbors included other wellborn families who had never ventured out or else, like them, had been routed in their encounter with the wider world.
3.
It is dispiriting—this tale of a genteel family beset by money woes. Maria suffered from headache and depression, and the children were shocked by the loss of their father and the spectacle of his derangement. “In our cities,” Herman was to write twenty years later in Pierre, “families rise and burst like bubbles in a vat.” But there is a disjunction in tone between his later writings about his early sorrows and the high-spirited bits of juvenilia that survive from his youth. An alert teacher at the Albany Classical School had recognized the boy’s facility in writing “themes”; and Herman’s first appearances in print, in February and March 1838, as the pseudonymous author of three letters to the editor of the Albany Microscope, were playful and exuberant. His election as president of the local literary society had caused a brouhaha when the defeated candidate cried foul in a letter to the newspaper—perhaps sincerely, or perhaps as a plot premeditated jointly by winner and loser to gain attention for their club. In his replies, Melville issued an alliterative blast at the sore loser for trying to “palm upon the public a palpable misrepresentation of the facts,” used a strategic abbreviation to express his indignation (“you published … a vile calumny upon the Ass”), and concluded with an invitation to carry on their mutual pursuit of the truth: “N.B. Your incoherent ravings may be continued if you choose; they remind me of the croakings of a Vulture when disappointed of its prey.”
On the basis of these over-the-top performances, no one could have predicted a major literary career, but as befits the Greek name of the literary club, the Philo Logos Society, they do reveal the boy’s instinctive pleasure in wordplay. When the family moved to Lansingburgh, more effusions followed, again in the form of pseudonymous letters to the local paper, this time the Lansingburgh Democratic Press, in which Herman published two “Fragments from a Writing Desk” (May 4 and May 18, 1839). This two-part story, its prose overheated in the manner of Poe, with sexually charged echoes of Byron and The Arabian Nights, is a vague allegory of a young man obsessed by a ravishing beauty and longing for “one long, long kiss upon her hot and glowing lips.” Beseeching her to declare her love, he discovers at what should be the climactic moment that she, being deaf and dumb, cannot respond.
There may have been something self-therapeutic in these literary exercises, a kind of verbal muscle flexing that relieved the enervating effect of being his mother’s captive confidant. Perhaps there was an uncompleted love affair behind the story (apparently, Herman had courted a local belle without success), or more likely it registered his early education, obtained through witnessing his father’s decline, in the futility of quests and dreams. “Cursing the ignus fatuus, that danced so provokingly before me,” this first of Melville’s quasi-fictional narrators writes from close acquaintance with the cost of self-deception. “Absurd conceits … infested my brain.”
The fledgling writer was a little wild himself—darkly handsome now, long-haired, unkempt, and given to bouts of drinking. In the fall of 1838, at the urging of his uncle Peter, who was losing patience with the prolonged dependence of his sister and her children, Herman took some training in engineering at a local academy. But despite his uncle’s commendation to business friends involved in the construction of the Erie Canal, he failed to land a surveying job there, possibly because he struck his prospective employers as flighty or truculent.
Finally, in the spring of 1839, he decided to make an escape, or at least an experiment. Followin
g the example of one of his cousins, he arranged to sail as a cabin boy aboard a merchant ship that plied the route between New York and Liverpool carrying cotton and a few passengers. “Herman is happy but I think at heart he is rather agitated,” his mother wrote to Gansevoort about his brother’s decision, adding that “I can hardly believe it & cannot realize the truth of his going.” On June 5, 1839, after the downriver trip from Albany to the city of his father’s disgrace, Melville sailed for England aboard the merchant vessel St. Lawrence. He was not quite twenty. His name was mistakenly entered on the crew list as Norman Melville, probably as a consequence of his unimproved penmanship.
4.
With this first embarkation, Herman Melville entered a phase of life we can follow only by means of his fictional recollections written years later—in this case, in his novel published in 1849, Redburn, whose subtitle was His First Voyage: Being the Sailor-Boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service. Except for this deferred work of fiction, there is no documentation of his three months at sea, or of the month ashore at Liverpool. All that remain are a few tantalizing mentions of letters that have since disappeared, as when his mother wrote to her youngest son, Allan Junior, in July 1839 that Herman, in a letter just received, “says he would give all the sights of Liverpool to see a corner of home.”
In Redburn, Melville recalled this first ocean voyage as his leap from boyhood to manhood—an association between going-to-sea and coming-of-age that in antebellum America was almost formulaic, yet for many young men proved nonetheless to be true. Here, as recorded in a crude yet touching poem left in manuscript by one Norman Knox Wood, who had made the round trip between New York and Liverpool as a working seaman a year before, is the same mixture of envy and contempt toward paying passengers that gives Redburn its authenticity:
Melville: His World and Work Page 5