For part of each day, Melville manned a lookout post some seventy feet above the deck. In this “airy perch” he was removed from the cruelties below and shaded from the sun by the mainsails above, and it was there that he befriended Jack Chase, captain of the maintop—the nautical name for the “spacious and cosy” platform, complete with railing, that formed “a kind of balcony” affixed high aloft the mainmast. Near the end of his life, Melville was to dedicate Billy Budd to Chase, whose exuberant wit and charm he remembered with love undiminished by time, thinking back to their long talks some forty years earlier about life and literature (“Jack had read all the verses of Byron, and all the romances of Scott, talked of Rob Roy, Don Juan … Macbeth and Ulysses”) while they “looked down upon the landlopers below, sneaking about the deck, among the guns.”
There were other friends, too, who shared his interest in reading, among them the brooding “man-of-war hermit” Oliver Russ, named Nord in White-Jacket, who mostly kept to himself but one night lowered his reserve and, with Melville as companion, “scoured all the prairies of reading, dived into the bosoms of authors, and tore out their hearts.” It was an occasion of such lasting significance to Russ that, sixteen years later, he gave his son the commemorative name Herman Melville Russ. And there was a fellow New Yorker named Ephraim Curtiss Hine—probably the model for another recluse whom Melville, in White-Jacket, called Lemsford—who snatched every moment he could to write poetry.* Fearful that his poems would be disposed of in one of the bouts of sweeping and scrubbing at which the crew was periodically set to work, Hine stuffed his manuscript for safekeeping into a ship’s cannon by ramming it in with the “tompion,” a sort of plunger kept in place in the barrel to keep out the sea spray. When the ship fired a volley in return to a salute from a shore battery somewhere off South America, he arrived too late at the sheltering gun to save his work-in-progress, which had been blown out to sea in shreds. Jack Chase, whose name Melville retained in White-Jacket, consoled him with words that were later to register on Melville, whose own publishing career was to have its share of misfires:
Never mind, my boy, no printer could do the business for you better. That’s the way to publish … fire it right into ’em; every canto a twenty-four-pound shot; hull the blockheads, whether they will or no. And mind you,… when your shot does the most execution, you hear the least from the foe. A killed man can not even lisp.
Ashore, on a brief leave that allowed him just enough time for a tour of Callao and a dash into Lima, Melville saw dogs and vultures feeding on human corpses amid the rubble of buildings that had fallen to ruin over centuries or—he could not be sure which—that had collapsed during the earthquake that had struck the city not long before, in 1828. These sights were to stay with him, along with his memory of the tarnished silver altar in the cathedral, crowds of cigar-smoking men drinking chicha in the cafés, and dark-eyed women cruising the alleys in cloaks as enticing as they were concealing. Two years later, in Typee, he was to compare the “diminutive” feet of a naked Polynesian girl to those that “peep from below a Lima lady’s dress.” Later still, he was to use Lima as the setting for the gruesome last scene of his great novella Benito Cereno, in which the severed head of a mutinous slave is impaled on a pike, his dead eyes staring at the cathedral and, across the Rimac bridge, the monastery of Mount Agonia in the distance.
Lemuel Shaw (list of illustrations 3.1)
After alternating for months between tedium and diversion, Melville landed in early October 1844 in Boston, where he may have spent a few days “lingering or malingering” (Elizabeth Hardwick’s nicely inconclusive phrase) and possibly a few nights lodging at the home of Judge Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Shaw was prosperous, portly, and nothing if not proper. The executor of Allan Melvill’s estate, he embodied, as Dana remarked, “the social and political respectabilities of Boston.” His stout character twice had been tested by the death of women he loved: he had been engaged to Allan Melvill’s sister, Nancy Wroe Melvill, who died in 1813, while their wedding was being planned; five years later, he married Elizabeth Knapp, who died in 1822 giving birth to a daughter whom he named for her.
When Melville landed in Boston in 1844, Elizabeth Shaw was an eligible young woman still living at home with the judge and his second wife, Hope Savage Shaw. During Herman’s years at sea, she had become friendly with his sisters Helen and Augusta. On the premise that Herman remembered her from childhood, one biographer speculates that he sought out Elizabeth now with the urgency of a sailor returning to a sweetheart, and that she thrilled to the stories that tumbled from the “bearded lips of a brilliant, dark, muscular, handsome young man.” Perhaps. Or perhaps she was out of town. Or he may never have visited the Shaws at all.
But even if he only glanced up from Boston Harbor toward Beacon Hill, where the Shaws’ four-story brick house with its pillared brownstone entrance stood on Mount Vernon Street, he must have felt a twinge of envy, or at least resigned awareness of his own family’s fall. As a child he had walked on that street with his eminent grandfather, whom passersby greeted with bows and salutes; now, for lack of alternatives, he was headed west to a rented house in Lansingburgh ruled by his mother. Whatever detours he may have taken en route, he prepared for the homecoming with mingled feelings of relief and dread. “The flood-gates of the wonder world” that had opened for him during his years at sea were shutting down. There was no reason to believe that his mother had become less importuning during his absence. The correspondence among his sisters is filled with complaints about her, as when Helen, writing to Augusta in 1841, reported that their mother “scanned the page with a critical eye, pronounced the chirography beneath contempt, and insisted upon my copying the document” until it met her stenographic standard.
We cannot know whether Maria spared Herman this kind of pestering when he came home. What we do know, on the authority of Gansevoort’s friend Nathaniel Parker Willis, is that he fought off his feelings of deflation by telling and retelling what he had seen and done. When autumn had passed, the young traveler “beguiled the long winter hours of his own home circle” with stories of his adventures, and was encouraged by family and friends to write it all down.
2.
Melville’s “home circle” was made up now mainly of women. With Gansevoort and Allan off in New York trying to advance their careers in politics and law, the household consisted of four sisters under Maria’s supervision—Helen (twenty-seven) and Augusta (twenty-three), who were occasionally away themselves husband-hunting in Albany or Boston, along with Kate (nineteen), Fanny (seventeen), and Herman’s fourteen-year-old brother, Tom. If we can apply to Herman the musings of young Redburn, he had a “vague prophetic thought that I was fated, one day or other … just as my father used to entertain strange gentlemen over their wine after dinner … [to] be telling my own adventures to an eager auditory.” Aside from his wish to break the cycle of shuttling between a tedious job and a thankless mother, he had gone to sea with the half-formed intent to become a storyteller, and he came home brimming with tales to be disgorged to listeners he hoped would be held rapt by the telling.
Entertaining them was Melville’s rehearsal for a literary career at a time when a fiction writer’s commercial prospects depended largely on the ability to please female readers who, as James Fenimore Cooper lamented in 1849, were likely to find that sea fiction has “the odor of bilge-water” and induces the “maladie de mer.” Against these odds, Melville had to learn to amuse his sisters—to titillate without quite scandalizing them; an apprenticeship that left its mark on his early work, as in Omoo when “he managed,” as the literary scholar William Charvat has noted, “a detailed description of a wildly phallic native dance without seeming to be in the middle of it.” There is something wonderfully incongruous about the Melville family scene in that fall of 1844: the randy young globe-trotter up in the attic reliving his escapades, while his mother and virgin sisters bustle about below tending t
o household business. He felt cooped up in a different kind of “indulgent captivity,” or so one might glean from an early review of his first book. “If he meets a native female Islander,” this reviewer complained, “she is a goddess;—if a missionary’s wife, she is a blowzy looking, red-faced, fat oppressor of the poor native—reducing him to the station of drudge.” Was there a touch of Maria in his portrait of Mistress Missionary? How, for the “family post-man,” could there not have been?
One can only imagine how Melville’s mother and sisters reacted to hearing about the Polynesian girls applying tropical oil with their “soft palms” to his “whole body” and then competing “with one another in the ardor of their attentions.” No wonder he had looked forward “with transport” during his days in the Marquesas to his nightly body rub, which gave him, he was sure, “such sensations” as no sultan in the seraglio had ever enjoyed. But it is a long way from raconteur to author, and most who try to make the transition fail to go the distance. Many young men, Elizabeth Hardwick points out, “have held forth over their schnapps and received a like urging to proceed from the conversation to the blank white page,” but in the cold light of morning they find that writing is a more arduous business than spinning tales in the night.
It is the rare young writer who does not fall in love with the idea of becoming famous, and Melville was no exception. When he remarked years later to Hawthorne that no man “who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows,” he was reproving his younger self for having craved it. In Omoo, he sketches a character, based on the steward of the Lucy Ann, John Troy, in whom there are also touches of self-portraiture: the voluble Dr. Long Ghost, a charlatan posing as a physician who carries in his head great swatches of poetry that come pouring out at the slightest prompt. This charming scamp (“a man of humorous desperation,” D. H. Lawrence called him, “throwing his life ironically away”) was for Melville simultaneously a model to be mimicked and shunned; debonair and decadent, he was a drifter who took pleasure in the attention of his native hosts, yet he was full of contempt for them. The more he delights in his own cleverness, the more one feels a dark belligerence in his charm, an oddly affable hatred toward those whom he deems inferior to himself, heightened by his resentment that he has been sentenced, after some “unfortunate affair that set him a-roving,” to pass his days among them.
Dr. Long Ghost anticipates the sort of character one meets in the novels of Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene, a man self-exiled to some remote colonial outpost, to which he has brought feelings of both superiority and failure. He is an early version of the cosmopolitan raconteur to whom, years later, Melville was to devote the second half of The Confidence-Man, a man for whom “life is a pic-nic en costume,” in which “one must take a part, assume a character, stand ready in a sensible way to play the fool.” A not-so-distant cousin of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, he was a figure who haunted Melville’s imagination and to whom he would return near the end of his life in Billy Budd in the person of John Claggart, whose unfathomable hatred is disguised by his “low musical voice” as he spreads his poison with a sinister smile.
Did Melville himself have something of Dr. Long Ghost’s desperation disguised as antic spirits? No one who heard him hold forth in Lansingburgh or, later, in New York left more than a fragmentary account of the experience, though there is evidence in his writing that he had an instinct for performance—as when he writes, in White-Jacket, about the “difficult art” by which a good comic performer keeps a straight face, “preserving the utmost solemnity,” while setting his audience “all in a roar.” We get a further hint of Melville’s histrionic power from Sophia Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel, who reported that “when he describes any thing with the living voice … it is there, it is here, just as he says it, & he himself is each several person of the tale.”
Yet despite—or perhaps because of—their urgency and vividness, Melville’s tales were greeted with incredulity. In a book published in 1884, while Melville was still alive, Sophia and Nathaniel’s son, Julian Hawthorne, reconstructed an evening his parents had spent with Melville in the summer of 1851, when he came over to their Berkshire cottage to deliver one of his tall tales. It was the story of “a fight which he had seen on an island in the Pacific, between some savages, and of the prodigies of valor one of them performed with a heavy club.” After their talkative guest had gone home for the night, Sophia wondered aloud—probably with a little edge in her voice but also with affection (“a man with a true warm heart,” she later called him, “… with life to his fingertips”)— “ ‘Where is that club with which Mr. Melville was laying about him so?’ ” As for her husband, “Mr. Hawthorne thought he must have taken it with him; Mrs. Hawthorne thought he had put it in the corner; but it was not to be found.” To resolve the matter, “the next time Melville came, they asked him about it; whereupon it appeared that the club was still in the Pacific island, if it were anywhere.”
At first, the young traveler’s audiences were all aglow with eagerness to hear him. “With his cigar and his Spanish eyes,” as his brother’s friend Nathaniel Willis later described him, he “talks Typee and Omoo, just as you find the flow of his delightful mind on paper.” But as the stories grew familiar, Melville’s confidence that he was being admired led to worry that he was being indulged. Years later, he was to play with this theme in “The Town Ho’s Story,” the chapter of Moby-Dick in which Ishmael recalls a stopover in Lima where he had once entertained “a lounging circle of my Spanish friends … smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn.” For a while, Ishmael manages to hold his audience with his tale of shipboard violence and mutiny, but he soon finds himself peppered with skeptical questions: “Tell me,” says one of the listeners, “… if your story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable source?” Ishmael, indignant, calls for a copy of the Bible, upon which he will swear to his veracity.
When Melville moved from telling tales to friends and family to trying to write for the public, he found that he had to defend his truthfulness against the skepticism of prospective publishers. Sometime in late 1844 or early 1845, he joined his brothers in New York City, where he stayed on and off over several months, “writing something,” as his younger brother Allan put it, “about his adventures among the cannibals.” By summer, he had completed his first manuscript under the title Typee and submitted it to Harper Brothers, the leading New York publishing firm. When rejection came on the grounds that “it was impossible that it could be true,” Gansevoort offered to help.
Gansevoort Melville had been dabbling in politics, giving speeches on behalf of Democratic candidates that were, according to the editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, full of “gas and glory”—especially his anti-British tirades delivered to cheering crowds of Irish immigrants who hated the English and wanted them out of the Oregon Territory, which Britain and the United States had occupied jointly for decades. As the number of American settlers rose in the Willamette Valley and farther north (in present-day Washington State) around Puget Sound, Democrats grew increasingly belligerent, and Gansevoort Melville became closely associated with the party’s campaign slogan—“Fifty-four forty or fight!”—calling for Britain to relinquish its claims to the territory south of the 54°40’ parallel. Some historians even credit him with coining the nickname “Young Hickory” for the Democratic presidential candidate, James A. Polk, which identified Polk as heir to Andrew Jackson, known as “Old Hickory” for his unbending resolve against those he deemed enemies of “the people,” especially bankers, Indians, and Old World imperialists.
Soon after Herman’s return from the Pacific, Polk was elected, in November 1844, on an expansionist platform, and Gansevoort commenced a campaign for himself—not for elective office, but for a patronage position. After months of lobbying, he succeeded in getting an appointment as secretary to the American legation in London. Before departing for his new post in the summer of 1
845, he learned that his brother’s book had been rejected by Harpers and offered to take the manuscript with him to see what could be done in what was, after all, still the literary capital of the English-speaking world. By December, he had found a taker. The English publisher John Murray, though he too “scented the forbidden thing—the taint of fiction,” agreed to bring out the book on condition that excisions be made “on the score of taste.”
After placing the manuscript with Murray, Gansevoort continued to work on Herman’s behalf, reading aloud from the page proofs one morning over breakfast to a distinguished visitor, Washington Irving, who liked what he heard and commended the book to his own American publisher, G. P. Putnam, one of the Harper brothers’ rivals. Putnam, in turn, found the book so absorbing that it “kept him from church,” and without delay he contracted with Gansevoort, to whom Herman had given power of attorney, to bring it out under the Wiley & Putnam imprint in New York.
3.
Melville’s first book appeared in February 1846, bearing the title Typee and a dedication—“To Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this Little Work is Affectionately Inscribed by the Author”—that was both ingenuous and strategic. The book was a quick, if modest, success. “Get it and read it by all means,” recommended the New York Illustrated Magazine, and enough people complied so that Typee sold roughly six thousand copies in its first two years; not a best seller, but a more than respectable showing for a first book by an unknown author.
Melville: His World and Work Page 10