For Americans of restive temperament, this little essay in universal history was an invitation to time travel. It held that to travel west is tantamount to going back to the beginning of time—like entering the Hall of Man at the exit and moving against the traffic toward the entrance.
Melville himself had gone a short distance in that direction on his aborted journey with his boyhood friend Eli Fly, and now, on the Acushnet, he was going further. He had skipped the continental route and was headed straight to an encounter with the Beginning of Man.
6.
Yet, amid all the self-congratulating, a growing number of dissenters were not so sure how much celebration the so-called civilizing process really deserved, and as Melville headed inland with Toby, he became one of them. A question was forming in his mind—the same question that Walt Whitman posed in Leaves of Grass a few years after Melville returned from his trip:
The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?
Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?
Though Melville had as yet no clear plan to become a writer, this question was to become the theme of his first book.
Long before Melville began seriously to think about the question, it was already a recurrent theme for writers whom we tend to group under the rubric “Romantic”—writers who doubted that civilization in the sense of technological advancement and self-suppression was all boon and benefit. From the pioneer physician Benjamin Rush (a contemporary and friend of Jefferson’s), who speculated that sedentary life leads to insanity by weakening blood circulation to the brain, to Melville’s contemporary Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who declared his “constitutional affinity for undeveloped races,” and recommended athletic exercise as a means for restoring the zest of savage life, a strong countercurrent ran against the Enlightenment idea of civilization as linear progress. The ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft, for example, who traveled in the 1820s among the Indians of Minnesota and Wisconsin, envied their “primitiveness and freshness of fancy belonging only to the mind in its incipiency.” And though he knew much less than Schoolcraft about Indian languages, Cooper praised Indians for the “sententious fulness” of their language, for drawing “metaphors from the clouds, the seasons, the birds, the beasts, and the vegetable world,” and for their ability to “express a phrase in a word, and convey different significations by the simplest inflexions of the voice.” This mythic Indian—ancestor of the Hollywood Indian who speaks in monosyllables like “Uggggh” and “How”—is more body than mind, and has a quasi-erotic relation to the world. His speech is uncorrupted by irony, euphemism, or any other form of self-consciousness. Emerson, too, admired him—remarking that “children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs.… As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry.” Civilization, in other words, comes with a price: it weakens the imagination.
Behind these celebrations of the imaginative, and imaginary, primitive lay a body of Romantic writing that, starting at the end of the eighteenth century, had exalted eloquent innocence as the highest achievement of human culture. History was coming to be understood as a story of degeneration rather than of progress—a theme that Melville was to put in the form of a question in his long philosophical poem, Clarel: “Prone, prone are era, man, and nation / To slide into a degradation?” Terms such as “primitive” and “illiterate” were losing their pejorative connotation and becoming terms of praise—a transformation rooted in the ideas of European Romanticism. The German scholar Friedrich Wolf, for example, in a book published in 1795 that had considerable influence on American intellectual life, proposed that the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey, known as Homer, had actually been a bard who sang his tales, which were redacted by later scribes into written form. The German philosopher Johann von Herder celebrated the intuitional directness of the Old Testament stories in The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–83), which was not translated into English until 1833 (by the Vermont transcendentalist James Marsh), and was one of many contributions to the celebration of feeling and spirit, as opposed to reason and argument, as the ultimate source of morality and wisdom.
Melville had no special interest or even awareness of these scholarly and philosophical developments, but by the time he embarked on his travels, a new and strongly pejorative meaning of the term “civilization” (which Newton Arvin remarks is what Melville “called what revolted him”) was displacing the older, honorific sense of the word. “What a contrast,” Emerson wrote in 1839,
between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveler tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad-axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.
It was a view with which Melville concurred, but usually with a dose of self-mocking irony that shows him doubting the cogency of the new Romantic dissent as well as of the old orthodoxy. “Among savages,” he wrote almost parodically in Mardi, “severe personal injuries are, for the most part, accounted but trifles. When a European would be taking to his couch in despair, the savage would disdain to recline.”
As the vaunted superiority of civilization came into question, intellectuals had also begun to speak not of one universal form of civilization but of plural civilizations—thereby acknowledging no singular means of organizing life to which humankind ought to aspire. In 1838, a pungent writer named Abner Kneeland, who earned the distinction of being the last man in New England to be tried for the crime of blasphemy (in a trial presided over by Melville’s future father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw), had this to say about the idea of civilization as a normative value:
A Parisian will be surprised to hear that the Hottentots cut out one of the testicles of every little boy; and a Hottentot will be surprised to hear that the Parisians leave every little boy two. Neither the Parisian nor the Hottentot is astonished at the practice of the other because he finds it unreasonable, but because it differs from his own.
This kind of cultural relativism had been adumbrated centuries before by Montaigne in his famous essay Of Cannibals, which Melville read with delight not long after returning from the Pacific. It had more recent advocates as well: in the 1780s, Benjamin Franklin reflected that “savages we call them because their Manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs.” Melville was drawn to this kind of relativism, as when he described in White-Jacket a naked Polynesian named Wooloo. The binary balance of his sentences creates a seesaw feeling not very different from what one feels when reading a late twentieth-century postmodern writer like Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man:
[Wooloo] seemed a being from some other sphere. His tastes were our abominations: ours his. Our creed he rejected: his we. We thought him a loon; he fancied us fools. Had the case been reversed; had we been Polynesians and he an American, our mutual opinion of each other would still have remained the same. A fact proving that neither was wrong, but both right.
While Melville cruised the Pacific, this kind of cultural comparison was becoming the subject of formal discussion at meetings of the American Ethnological Society, founded in New York in 1842. The members (several of whom belonged to Melville’s circle when he moved to New York in the late 1840s) held lectures and debates on such topics as the place of missionary work that aimed to convert “primitive” peoples versus disinterested investigation that promised to leave them alone. By the end of the decade, the American Whig Review was describing ethnology as “the science of the age.” In short, although we tend to think of Melville’s America as a nation bursting with jingoistic confidence in itself, countervailing voices were being r
aised against the presumption of conflating the here and now with the high and good.
Ethnological history, which tends to deal with peoples waning or already lost, encourages the view that civilizations follow an inevitable rhythm of rise and fall. And in the nineteenth century, most educated persons had read at least some Thucydides and Gibbon, from whom they learned that power was transient, that every nation follows a parabolic arc, beginning its descent at just the point where it reaches its height (Melville read them—though probably not till after his return from the Pacific). In the late 1830s, the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole captured this theme in a sequence of paintings that Melville saw in 1846 in New York in a gallery on Chambers Street. In the four large canvasses of The Course of Empire, Cole depicted a city, complete with neoclassical columned temples, going through a four-stage cycle of rise, triumph, decline, and decay—from pastoral beginnings, through civic flowering, into decadence, and ultimate destruction. In the first panel we see the city rise out of raw nature, and then we follow it, phase by phase, as it falls back into ruins overgrown by weeds and vines.
Recalling his visit to Pompeii in the 1820s, another contemporary, Theodore Dwight, described the entire expanse of the known world as “a mass of bones and ashes … a melancholy shore, which the waves of time have strewed with the wrecks of nations.” And in 1831, in one of the most delicately ruminative poems composed in America before the Civil War, William Cullen Bryant (whom Melville was to meet in New York in 1847) mused on the recent discovery in the Mississippi Valley of what were thought to be burial mounds constructed by a prehistoric people who had once roamed the American plains.
The prairie-wolf
Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den
Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground
Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone:
All—save the piles of earth that hold their bones …
How much in this vein Melville had read before his Pacific voyages is not known. But in germinal form, these themes of relativism and transience were present in his mind; and on his homeward journey, they grew to the verge of expression, as when he heard a song “chanted, in a low, sad tone, by aged Tahitians”—or so he claimed. In fact, Melville lifted the song from a book called Polynesian Researches, written by the English missionary William Ellis in 1833. But whether he actually heard it, or stole it from another writer, the fact that he was drawn to it tells us something about his mood:
“A harree ta fow,
A toro ta farraro,
A mow ta tararta.”
The palm-tree shall grow,
The coral shall spread,
But man shall cease.
A few years later, in a similar mood, he was to conclude Moby-Dick with the sinking of a whaleship that stays stubbornly afloat as the fatal ocean pours in, until finally “all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” obliterating all except the memory of alone survivor.
In a letter to Hawthorne written in 1851, Melville dismissed his Pacific years as time wasted, remarking that “until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all.” This self-assessment should be doubted. It was during his time at sea, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five, that he awakened from the lethargy by which he had often been touched and sometimes enveloped. Here is his soulmate D. H. Lawrence, imagining Melville’s mood as he planned his escape with Toby: “He was mad to look over horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of our world. To get away. To get away, out!… To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another life.”
If Melville’s mind came alive in the Pacific, so, too, did his senses. He experienced many new physical sensations—from the stench of rotting whale carcasses to the fragrance of fresh-split coconuts, from numbing cold to heat so fierce that he felt his brain being steamed in the equatorial sun. The tales he was eventually to tell about his South Seas adventures came from a young man savoring the memory of all sorts of physical responses more intense than anything he had felt before, from the choking nausea of his first days at sea to the giddy delight of learning how to climb the rigging in the open air or the electric touch of a beautiful Marquesan girl or boy. His eyes had been pleased by the sight of naked native bodies, his ears treated to the “labial melody” of Polynesian women crooning as they squatted down to bathe him. Here was savagery to be savored!
What Melville found at sea was what other writers have found in war: a feeling of contact with the world that shocked him equally with moments of desire and dread. He gave up on notions and theories learned from books and became at last an engaged participant in life—even, as Lawrence lovingly called him, a “gallant rascally epicurean eating the world like a snipe, dirt and all baked into one bonne bouche.”
* Although there is little documentation of wage discrimination aimed against blacks and other minorities in the whaling industry, blacks were more likely to be found in service occupations such as cook and steward than in more skilled roles such as carpenter, blacksmith, or boatsteerer. Lee A. Craig and Robert M. Fearn, “Wage Discrimination and Occupational Crowding in a Competitive Industry: Evidence from the American Whaling Industry,” Journal of Economic History 53, no. 1 (March 1993): 124.
† There is a tantalizing reference in the September 4, 1844, issue of the Honolulu paper The Friend of Temperance and Seamen: “If Mr. Herman Melville, formerly officer on board Am. W.S. Acushnet, is in this part of the world, and will call upon the seamen’s chaplain, he may find several letters directed to his address.” Since Melville had left Hawaii aboard the United States a year earlier, he never saw those letters, which have not been located. See Lynn Horth, ed., The Writings of Herman Melville: Correspondence (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993), p. 565.
CHAPTER 3
BECOMING A WRITER
1.
When he shipped from Honolulu aboard the naval frigate United States in August 1843, Melville began a long voyage home that retraced his outbound route, docking at Nukuheva too briefly to allow shore leave, and at Tahiti, where the ship took on provisions while anchored tantalizingly close to the beach. It must have been strange to see this alien shore again, still foreign yet now familiar, stirring memories rather than anticipations. Perhaps it was one of those experiences that lay behind the many images in Melville’s writing of things desired that seem near enough to reach for, yet too distant to grasp. After a few days at rest, the United States proceeded east, then north along the coast of South America, making stops at Valparaiso, Lima, and, for a period of ten weeks, Callao. There the men were again denied shore leave and mustered twice a day to stand at attention in honor of Commodore Catesby Jones, whose flagship Constellation was anchored nearby while he and his officers were rowed about the harbor to inspect the fleet.
During his months of naval service, Melville witnessed things he had never seen in the whale fishery or the merchant marine. He saw burials at sea conducted with military honors, as well as a good deal of flogging, which was the standard punishment meted out in doses calibrated to the seriousness of the culprit’s offense. He saw, literally in the flesh, what he had read about in Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast—men bleeding from gashes in their backs but with little or no idea of what they had done to merit them. Here is Dana quoting one Captain Thompson as he dances around the object of his ministration, “swinging half round between each blow” to get the torque he needs for full effect:
If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it! Because I like to do it! It suits me! That’s what I do it for!
When the flogged man cries out, “Jesus Christ! O Jesus Christ!,” his captain offers some advice: “Don’t call on Jesus Christ … He can’t help you. Call on Frank Thompson! He’s the man! He can help you! Jesus Christ can’t help you now!”
There were also happier sights and sounds. Melville took dreamy pleasure in th
e “St. Domingo melodies” sung by the man-o’-war’s cook to the accompanying “clattering [of] … soap-stones against the metal” as the mess assistants scoured the copper vats in which beef was boiled into a kind of salty porridge. He loved such culinary words as “dunderfunk” (the sailors’ name for a hard-baked cake of indefinite ingredients) and “burgoo” (a syrupy slop sweetened with molasses) that eluded the better-spoken officers, to whom such words were nothing more than mystifying slang. His initiation into sailor talk had an enduring effect on a writer who inclined toward formality and sometimes slipped into sententiousness. The years Melville spent at sea helped to save him from a certain stuffy earnestness, as he suggests in White-Jacket, when he turns the bulky coat, in which the boy narrator struts about at first like a prig in a tux, into a metaphor for haughtiness. At the climax of that book, he pitches the boy overboard and makes him tear off the coat to save himself from drowning, in effect, in himself.
His predecessors in the gentleman-goes-to-sea genre, including Dana, had never quite got beyond the tone of the Brahmin slumming among the hoi polloi, but Melville opened himself to the sailor’s life and became genuinely part of it. He shed his pretensions. He discovered that at sea competence counts more than breeding. He learned to live at a constant pitch of sentry alertness, since a split second of drowsiness or reverie could kill him. This was to be the theme of that memorable chapter in Moby-Dick, “The Mast-Head,” in which Ishmael reflects on how easy it would be to slip from his height and be dashed to death on the deck below, or, if the ship were listing, to disappear with a quiet splash into the sea. In White-Jacket, in a sentence both reportorial and allegorical, Melville remarks that “Sailors, even in the bleakest weather … never wear mittens aloft; since aloft, they literally carry their lives in their hands, and want nothing between their grasp of the hemp and the hemp itself.”
Melville: His World and Work Page 9