Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  Now our ship with foaming spray,

  Over the ocean takes her way,

  Around her bows the dolphins play,

  As we sail

  I have left my peacefull home

  On the Oceans depth to roam

  And be wet by briny foam

  Let landsmen rail

  We listen to the Oceans roar

  They shivering about the open door

  And call for blankets half a score

  Almost froze to death

  While we watch on deck do walk

  Under the bulwarks take a caulk

  Or eat a piece of good fat pork

  & warm our fingers with our breath

  In Redburn, ten years after the fact, Melville reconstructed his own journey as the first time in his life that he was neither pampered nor pressured by adults who placed high hopes in him, but was ordered about as just another hired hand. “Let to rove / At last abroad among mankind,” he found himself amid rough men who had no interest in his pedigree except as a subject for mockery. In Liverpool, he was struck by the sight of black men embracing willing white women, and of people dying or dead in the gutter while pedestrians passed by unfazed as if the bodies were trash awaiting disposal by the street sweepers.

  The Melville we know from these early years is a young man retrospectively imagined by his older self as an angry brooder wrestling with his sense of grievance. There is a scene in Redburn in which the boy, having ventured for the first time from home carrying a fowling piece and wearing pants patched by his mother, steels himself aboard the Hudson River steamboat for the moment when he must tell the ticket collector that he can produce only half the two-dollar fare. With a mixture of shame and insolence, he refuses the clerk’s order to relinquish his cabin seat and go out on deck in the sleet and wind, then spends the rest of the trip glaring at the paying passengers who, fearful that this boy with a musket might be crazy, sneak worried looks back at him. In describing the boy’s distress, Melville was surely recalling his own feelings as a boy of twenty:

  Talk not of the bitterness of middle-age and after life; a boy can feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mildew has fallen; and the fruit, which with others is only blasted after ripeness, with him is nipped in the first blossom and bud. And never again can such blights be made good; they strike in too deep, and leave such a scar that the air of Paradise might not erase it. And it is a hard and cruel thing thus in early youth to taste beforehand the pangs which should be reserved for the stout time of manhood, when the gristle has become bone, and we stand up and fight out our lives, as a thing tried before and foreseen; for then we are veterans used to sieges and battles, and not green recruits, recoiling at the first shock of the encounter.

  Yet even as he pitied himself, Melville sensed opportunity in his misfortune. When he later remarked—in the voice of Ishmael in Moby-Dick—that “a whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” he was looking back with both resentment at his loss of a privileged life and relief at having escaped it. Perhaps he did blame his father for squandering the family money and good name; but he also understood that a father’s failure can create a son’s freedom. He was beginning to feel the exhilaration of being untethered. There was no more cap and fur business, no more of Allan’s surviving associates to whom he needed to prove himself, and, perhaps most important, no hovering mother fretting about his future. He had become a young man at large, if not at ease.

  But the thrill of being at liberty did not last. As soon as he returned to New York aboard the St. Lawrence, on the last day of September 1839, he was sucked back into family troubles. Maria was all but frantic now with money worries, and by October her brother Peter was writing “with the most painful feelings” to Judge Lemuel Shaw that “by the failure in business, some time since, of her son Gansevoort, Mrs. Melville has become entirely impoverished—mortgages are foreclosing upon her real estate & as I have just heard, the furniture is now advertised for sale.” After a recreational day or two in Manhattan, Herman was back upstate, where he landed a teaching job in Greenbush (the same village from which his father had crossed the frozen river on his last voyage home) and was promising his mother that she could expect from him at least $150 to $200 a year—the equivalent of $5,000 or $6,000 in today’s dollars. Since he hiked to Albany on Friday nights to pick up the mail before going on to tend to his mother at Lansingburgh, one of his aunts called him, a little cruelly, the “family post-man.” Years later, in Pierre, he was to describe how the widow Mrs. Glendinning tries to turn her son, who is “strangely docile to the maternal tuitions in nearly all things,” into a surrogate husband.

  A few surviving documents suggest Melville’s state of mind while he marked time as schoolteacher and dutiful son. A sketch called “The Death Craft,” signed “Harry the Reefer,” and published in The Democratic Press, has been attributed to him—another bit of Gothic fluff, about a young man terrified by a vision of a ship with a bloody human head hanging from the jib-boom and skeletons from the yardarms, only to wake from his dream in the arms of his bride. There is also a peculiar note in Melville’s hand appended to a letter written by his mother on December 7, 1839, to his younger brother Allan, who was clerking in Albany. Melville signed this note “Tawney,” perhaps in ironic acknowledgment of names he was being called by people mocking him for the suntan he had acquired at sea. (Nearly a decade later, in White-Jacket, he would recall “an old negro, who went by the name of Tawney … a staid and sober seaman, very intelligent, with a fine, frank bearing, one of the best men in the ship, and held in high estimation by everyone.”) The sound of the speech he had heard aboard the St. Lawrence from black and Cockney shipmates had stayed with him, and now found its way into what may have been a coded message conveying to Allan what today we would call the feeling of being infantilized:

  How is you? Am you very well? How has you been?—As to myself I haint been as well as husual. I has had a very cruel cold for this darnation long time, & I has had and does now have a werry bad want of appetisement.

  Too much ought not to be made of this odd bit of baby talk, but there is reason to read it as an expression of his restiveness in the extended childhood that seemed his lot. Effects of the economic contraction of 1837 were still being felt, among them the failure of the school at Greenbush to meet its payroll. “Money has not for many years been more scarce than it is at present,” Uncle Peter wrote to Maria, who eventually replied that Herman “thinks of going far-west, as nothing offers for him here.” He was itching to get out—out of the domestic enclosure in which he felt stifled, out of the shadow of Gansevoort, who while in New York trying to establish himself in the law wrote to reprimand him for “that laziness which consists in an unwillingness to exert oneself in doing at a particular time, that which ought then to be done.” This kind of aphoristic chiding is hard for a younger brother to take, and one can imagine Herman muttering as he runs another errand for his tongue-clucking mother: What, exactly, “ought … to be done”?

  Nearly fifty years later, in his copy of a translation of Balzac’s novella The Two Brothers (1887), Melville underscored and checked a passage that must have sent him back in memory to his boyhood feelings of drift and deficiency:

  Agathe [the mother] believed that the purely physical resemblance which Philippe [her older son] bore to her carried with it a moral likeness; and she confidently expected him to show at a future day her own delicacy of feeling, heightened by the vigor of manhood.… Joseph, three years younger, was like his father, but only on the defective side. In the first place, his thick black hair was always in disorder, no matter what pains were taken with it; while Philippe’s, notwithstanding his vivacity, was invariably neat. Then, by some mysterious fatality, Joseph could not keep his clothes clean; dress him in new clothes, and he immediately made them look like old ones. The elder, on the other hand, took care of his things out of mere vanity. Unconsciously, the mother acquired a habit of scolding Joseph and holding up his br
other as an example to him. Agathe did not treat the two children alike; when she went to fetch them from school, the thought in her mind as to Joseph always was, “What sort of state shall I find him in?” These trifles drove her heart into the gulf of maternal preference.

  Balzac’s family romance held up a retrospective mirror in which Melville recognized his incorrigible younger self in the shadow of his impeccable older brother.

  As dreamy as he was slovenly (all his life he remained, as Hawthorne later remarked, “a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen”), he settled now into that mood of longing to be evoked so often in his writing—beginning with the portrait in Typee of his melancholy friend Toby gazing over the bulwarks of the ship at anchor just out of reach of the beckoning islands, and continuing in the opening paragraphs of Moby-Dick, in which he describes the scene in lower Manhattan along the Battery:

  Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

  In Melville’s world, men ashore gaze to sea and men at sea gaze to shore. The deck, as much as the ground, burns beneath their feet.

  5.

  So he went adventuring again, this time in his own country. In June 1840, in hopeful partnership with his friend Eli Fly, but with no plan in mind beyond the notion that his rudimentary knowledge of surveying and his friend’s clerical skills (Fly was a good copyist) would find them work, he headed west, joining a stream of migrants who felt stymied in the East. Some were sons who had inherited little or nothing—or nothing but debt—from their fathers; others were artisans out of work or farmers struggling to compete with larger farms to the west whose goods could now be transported east quickly and cheaply via the Erie Canal. Like many of their contemporaries, Melville and Fly anticipated help in the form of lodging and introductions from relatives who had preceded them. They pinned their hopes on Herman’s uncle Thomas, who had left the failing family farm in the Berkshires a couple of years earlier to make a fresh start in Galena, Illinois. But as it turned out, Thomas Melvill was reprising the family theme, with the variation that he was courting legal as well as financial disaster. Not long before Melville and Fly arrived, he had been caught embezzling, and avoided a jail term only because his employer decided not to press charges. The wave of loan recalls and foreclosures that had begun in the East had spread westward, and by the time the young seekers arrived in Illinois they found nothing to do but knock about as low-budget tourists in depressed frontier towns.

  “There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes.… Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.” Moby-Dick, chapter 1

  New York Harbor from the Battery, lithograph by Thomas Thompson, 1829 (list of illustrations 1.6)

  Unaware of what awaited them, the pair made their way to Buffalo through the Erie Canal, coasting slowly in boats pulled by horse teams slogging along a towpath that ran beside the four-feet-deep waterway, passing “billiard-room and bar-room” along “one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt” life. From Buffalo they continued to Chicago by steamboat over the Great Lakes, whose “ocean-like expansiveness” stirred them. Melville stored the memory and, ten years later in Moby-Dick, combined his personal recollection of Indians encamped on the shore with his secondhand knowledge of such historic events as Commodore Perry’s victory over the British on Lake Erie during the War of 1812. The result was a prose-poem on America’s inland sea:

  In their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the birch canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

  After the fruitless visit to Galena, Melville and Fly resumed their journey downriver by steamboat on the Mississippi, possibly as far south as Cairo, Illinois. Then they made their way home via the Ohio River to somewhere in the Alleghenies, whence they traveled by foot, stage, and possibly rail through Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to New York, and finally by riverboat back upstate to the doldrums from which they had fled. Like the journey to Liverpool, the trip is undocumented except in scattered fragments in Melville’s later writings—in the paean in Moby-Dick to the Great Lakes, in glimpses of down-and-out characters boozing “in the groggeries along the towpath” of the Erie Canal, or in allusions to Niagara Falls (“if you travel away inland into his deep and noble nature,” he wrote of Hawthorne, “you will hear the far roar of his Niagara”), which Melville probably saw on a detour from Buffalo just when it was first becoming a tourist attraction. If he had gone west to test the rumor that there was easy money to be made on the frontier, he came home having learned something about his credulity.

  By late summer or fall of 1840, still in the company of Fly, he fled again, this time to New York City, with no idea of what to do with himself. Gansevoort, whose worry about his younger brother’s future grew in proportion to Herman’s aimlessness, set him up in a cheap boardinghouse and took him for meals to the popular tavern Sweeney’s, where a barker outside the door called out the house specialties—“Rosebeefrosegoosemuttonantaters!”—in one amazingly extended breath. Melville liked the buzz and tumult of the place. Having let his hair grow since he had given up schoolteaching for pioneering, he was looking wild again, and from Gansevoort’s reports one imagines him eating with canine urgency, as if he fears that his food will be snatched away by some equally ravenous creature hovering near and ready to pounce.

  Fly found work as a copyist, but officework seemed to Melville a soul-killing business, and in any case his poor spelling and penmanship made him an unlikely candidate. Besides, he had other interests. The trip to Liverpool had stirred his curiosity to see the world, and “far inland,” possibly during the abbreviated trek west, he had read James Fenimore Cooper’s swashbuckling sea romance The Red Rover; not long afterwards he read Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s gripping account of life as a common sailor, Two Years Before the Mast, and felt himself “tied and welded … by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy” to its Boston Brahmin author.

  There was, as well, a family history of roving. One cousin, Guert Gansevoort, had sailed the Pacific aboard a warship; another had died in a shipwreck; a third had recently returned from a whaling cruise to New Zealand; and yet another, while Herman was still groping toward his
future, had embarked on a naval expedition charting unexplored islands. “The Melville family,” according to his cousin Julia, “resemble the Jews in one particular, they are to be found in every part of the globe.” With these precedents in mind—both ominous and encouraging—and with small prospects in a city swarming with job seekers, Herman left New York to spend Christmas in Lansingburgh and to tell his mother what he had decided.

  After the farewell visit, he headed off for the whaling port of New Bedford in search of a ship that would sign up a deckhand with only a few weeks’ merchant marine experience. Gansevoort went along to see him off. “It is a great consolation to me,” Gansevoort wrote a few weeks later to their brother Allan, “that I have done my duty towards him, thoroughly and conscientiously in this his last cruise upon land.” In their last hours ashore, they went to a shop where Herman exchanged his coat for “duck shirts, etc.,” since, as Gansevoort put it, “shore toggery is of no use to a sailor.”

  Writing a few days later to her daughter Augusta, Maria recounts how the two brothers parted. After a sunny description of Herman’s mood, she takes note of Gansevoort’s brotherly attentiveness in a sentence that, with little emendation, could be a description of a deathbed vigil:

  Last week I received a long letter from Herman, who has embarked for a long Voyage to the Pacific, under the most favorable auspices, and feeling perfectly happy. Gansevoort was with him to the last and assisted with his more matured Judgement in supplying him with every comfort.

  It was a mother’s way of acknowledging, with mixed satisfaction and foreboding, that her second son had broken free.

  * The surname was usually spelled without the final “e” until Maria added it after her husband’s death.