It told of Melville’s flight from the despotic captain into a tropical island of perils and pleasures. It told how, after jumping ship, he and Toby clawed their way inland through the brush to escape the pursuing search party, then encountered a naked native boy and girl with whom they tried to communicate in pantomime. Taken back to their village, Melville (he calls himself Tommo) is fussed over by men and pampered by women, especially the beautiful Fayaway, whose very name (one consonant removed from “faraway”) suggested her dreamy remoteness from everything he had known till then.
Typee took place at an island spa where the only item on the menu was lotus; it was Melville’s prose equivalent to Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832) about Odysseus surrendering to luxury in the land of the poppy, “a land / In which it seemed always afternoon … where all things always seem’d the same,” where life is one long easeful sleep. He gave his book the structure of the ancient tale of world-weary man transported to paradise; but if Tennyson had imagined his exhausted mariners relieved to be at ease, Melville told of a young man whose restlessness gets the better of his self-indulgence. Before long, he grows fearful that he has fallen captive to cannibals awaiting a convenient moment to eat him, and once his fear overwhelms the compensatory pleasures, he plans and executes his escape, pursued to the last by one of his enraged captors with a knife in his teeth.
This story, and the way Melville wrote it, made for irresistible reading. In reviewing Typee for the Salem Advertiser in March 1846, Hawthorne expressed delight at its “voluptuously colored” descriptions of native girls, and found himself swept up by a young writer endowed with what the English critic William Hazlitt, whom Melville was soon to read with admiration, had called “gusto.” Hazlitt used this word to describe how Titian represents female flesh in paint. It is a word exactly apt for Melville’s word paintings in Typee of Polynesian beauties, whose bodies, as Hazlitt had observed of Titian’s nudes, seem “sensitive and alive all over; [having] not merely … the look and texture of flesh, but the feeling in itself … the limbs of his female figures have a luxurious softness and delicacy, which appears conscious of the pleasure of the beholder.”
Melville was not free to write about sex with the directness we expect today, and so he sometimes smuggled it into his writing in the form of sniggering jokes—from an aside in Typee about a ghostly vessel “tacking … somewhere off Buggery Island” (a phrase that his wife listed after his death among those he had wanted deleted from future editions) to the celebration of the sperm whale’s penis (as long as a man is tall) as “grandissimus” in “The Cassock” chapter of Moby-Dick. He lived at a time when it was indelicate for gentlemen to refer in the presence of ladies to the leg of a table or chair (the proper term was “limb”) and when, as a guidebook published in 1841 “for the use of young ladies at home, and at school” made clear, modesty was required at every moment of every day:
Do not suffer your hand to be held or squeezed, without showing that it displeases you by instantly withdrawing it. If a finger is put out to touch a chain that is round your neck, or breast-pin that you are wearing, draw back, and take it off for inspection. Accept no unnecessary assistance in putting on cloaks, shawls, overshoes, or anything of the sort.
Among the few contemporary writers who got close to candor about sexual pleasure was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in The Scarlet Letter described Hester Prynne as having “a radiant and tender smile that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood” and was followed, after intimacy with her lover, by a “crimson flush.”
In this context of coyness, Typee was a daring book. One reason Hawthorne appreciated it was its sensuous directness, as when Melville describes the “free pliant figure” of Fayaway, whose skin is “inconceivably smooth and soft”:
Her complexion was a rich and mantling olive, and when watching the glow upon her cheeks I could almost swear that beneath the transparent medium there lurked the blushes of a faint vermilion. The face of this girl was a rounded oval, and each feature as perfectly formed as the heart or imagination of man could desire. Her full lips, when parted with a smile, disclosed teeth of a dazzling whiteness; and when her rosy mouth opened with a burst of merriment, they looked like the milk-white seeds of the “arta,” a fruit of the valley, which, when cleft in twain, shows them reposing in rows on either side, imbedded in the red and juicy pulp.…
Melville was introducing his readers here to a new kind of woman—new, at least, within the boundaries of permissible literary description. In most respectable books of the day, female characters tended to be chaste daughters or virtuous mothers, though in some underground fictions such as Mary Ann Temple: Being an Authentic and Romantic History of an Amorous and Lively Girl, of Exquisite Beauty, and Strong Natural Love of Pleasure! (1849) or George Thompson’s New-York Life (also published in 1849), women are portrayed as furtive masturbators who “scarcely pass a day without some secret violation of the laws of chastity.” Contrary to the cliché of Victorian prudery, women’s capacity for strong sexual pleasure was well recognized; but since female orgasm was thought to be seated in the ovaries and necessary for conception, and was therefore approved as a natural part of the reproductive process, it was also deliberately limited as a form of birth control.
Fayaway, as the phrase goes, was another story. Open and inviting, yet somehow with nothing lewd in her invitation, she was an unself-conscious promise of reciprocal pleasure. She was Melville’s embodiment of a secret about which decent writers were expected to be reticent: that women could be sexually exciting—and excited—without being wanton. She offered, as the literary historian Ann Douglas has written, “exactly what the American Victorian lady would deny her male counterpart: unmoralized pleasure,” and Melville wrote about her with the recollected passion of a now distant lover whose lovemaking had been spiced by the knowledge that their time together was fast running out.
By the time he reached Nukuheva, long overdue for a “warm, wild” reception, Melville was suitably grateful when he got it. “I have more than one reason,” he says with a wink, “to believe that tedious courtships are unknown” in Polynesia. Upon arriving among the Typees, he met with no delay in getting “on the very best terms possible” with Fayaway, his “peculiar favorite,” who introduced him to a new world of sexual frankness. Marquesan girls do not dance modestly in Typee. They “dance all over, as it were; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes, seem to dance in their heads … they so sway their floating forms, arch their necks, toss aloft their naked arms, and glide, and swim, and whirl, that it was almost too much for a quiet, sober-minded modest young man like myself.” Almost, but not quite.
Even in his earliest work, Melville converted the tact required by the literary norms of his time into a means to charge his writing with sexual energy: on the Pacific isles, the winds blow “like a woman roused … fiercely, but still warmly, in our face.” He was later to remember the very landscape as tumescent, the orange trees “spreading overhead a dark, rustling vault, groined with boughs, and studded here and there with the ripened spheres, like gilded balls.” Looking back on his time among the Typees, he describes Nukuheva harbor as a glistening aperture set within a row of swelling hills. When he explored an adjacent bay, he “plunged into the recesses of the first grove that offered,” as if his whole body had become an engorged extension of his penis, and he found himself “floating in some new element, while all sort of gurgling, trickling, liquid sounds fell upon my ear.” The wad of cotton cloth with which he stuffed his trousers in hopes of trading it for the natives’ favor created an unconcealable “protuberance in front.”
With its lubricious accounts of oil rubs and orgies, Typee gave its author a measure of fame and even attracted to him the nineteenth-century equivalent of a rock star’s groupies: “You dear creature,” one woman beseeched him in a feverish fan letter, “I want to see you so amazingly.” What immunized him against the hazards of early fame was his awaren
ess of the gap between what he had done and what he still hoped to do. Melville’s self-confidence was large, but his demands upon himself were larger. His writing had the sort of brashness—as in Typee’s take-the-reader-by-the-collar opening, “Oh! ye state-room sailors … what would ye say to our six months out of sight of land?”—that is usually associated with his contemporary Walt Whitman. But in the realm of self-promotion Melville did not come close to matching Whitman, who shamelessly turned private letters of praise from notable persons into unauthorized blurbs, and even reviewed (anonymously) his own books. What Melville felt was not so much enchantment with himself as surprise at the vitality of what he had created, and a drive to do more.
During this first flush of literary celebrity, he had begun to see more of Elizabeth Shaw. The preceding May, while he was deep in his South Seas reminiscences, she had been in Lansingburgh, putatively to visit his sisters; and now, in March 1846, he went to see her in Boston. The number of intervening contacts—letters, visits, messages carried by his sisters—is uncertain, but later that year, Lizzie, as she was known to family and friends, came to Lansingburgh again, this time for two months. Before the end of the year, they had promised themselves to each other.
Lizzie Shaw was a steady young woman of no exceptional beauty, but even in the spare historical record there are hints of a certain flair that helps to account for why she was drawn to the young adventurer, and he to her. Soon after her first appearance as a bridal candidate on the Boston social scene, she wrote a thank-you note in the form of a biblical parody to the hostess of a Beacon Hill ball:
1. And Lemuel said unto Hope, Come, let us go up to the house of Aunt Dow—and the number of them that went was three.
2. And Hope and Elizabeth took counsel together saying, what shall we wear? And wherewithal shall we array ourselves? And Hope said, ask thy cousin Jane concerning the matter, and whatever she says that shalt thou do.
3. And when Elizabeth could not go to her for reason of a great storm that arose, she sent a man servant to enquire concerning the matter.
4. And after this manner spake Jane unto her. Thou shalt wear thy blue silk with a bare neck, and in no wise shalt thou wear white muslin.
…
6. And when Elizabeth heard the words of the messenger which she had sent, she said within her heart, this will I do, I will wear the blue silk, and the sleeves thereof shall be made short. And it came to pass that she did so, according to the words which she had spoken that day.
…
8. And as they drew nigh unto the house, they heard the sound of music and dancing, and they said one to another, behold it proceedeth from the Brass band, and verily it was so.
…
10. And they tarried there a goodly time until it waxed late, and the hour of departure drew nigh. And Lemuel arose and spoke thus unto Elizabeth, my daughter behold the night is well nigh spent, and thy mother is weary and sorely vexed with her cold. Come now, put on thy thick apparel, and return with us unto thine own home.
11. And when Elizabeth heard the words of her father she was exceeding sorrowful and said unto him, peradventure they will dance again, and if I may not join them it will be a grievous thing unto me; for I have danced but five times, nevertheless, as thou sayest, that will I do.
There is an appealing capacity for self-mockery here, and an awareness of the gap between personal wishes and daughterly duties. Herman Melville, a magnetic young man whose sisters she had befriended and of whose family her father approved, now became the leading candidate to satisfy both Lizzie’s desires and her obligations.
While working on Typee, and in the optimistic aftermath of its publication, Melville had gone from being a boy unencumbered with responsibilities to a man thinking about marriage to a willing bride. In that spring of 1846 he was already working on a sequel that he called Omoo, his transliteration of a Polynesian word meaning “Wanderer.” He was, in other words, becoming a professional writer. Having started out as an unacceptable publishing risk, he had gained bargaining power with the success of Typee, so that in the fall, Harper Brothers offered a relatively generous contract for Omoo, including a $400 advance. Yet he had no illusions that he could support himself with his pen. In the spring of 1847, he was in Washington knocking on the doors of senators and representatives looking for a government job. Fortunately, he did not find one.
4.
For Lizzie Shaw, her proper father, Melville’s chronically anxious mother, and, not least, himself, there remained the question of how he was to turn his talent and ambition into a means for making a living. Typee was a promising start, but the number of Americans in the mid-1840s who could expect even a subsistence income from their writing was extremely small. Melville’s literary hopes marked him as a prospective member of what one contemporary, in 1845, referred to as a “brood of unfortunates, called American authors.”
One reason was the absence of an international copyright law, which meant that American publishers were free to keep all earnings derived from unauthorized reprints of books by foreign authors. In the case of an American reprint of a British book, since publishers had no obligation to pay the author anything at all, they could offer high discounts to retail booksellers—sometimes as much as 50 percent—which, in turn, gave retailers an incentive to push sales. When Charles Dickens came to the United States on a speaking tour in 1842, he complained at every stop that he had never earned “sixpence from an enormous American sale of all my books,” and resolved to “whisper in your ear two words, International Copyright.”
The whispering campaign got Dickens nowhere. What we would call “pirated” British titles continued to dominate American newspaper advertisements and subscription lists (the nineteenth-century equivalents of the front table in Barnes & Noble), while American authors were consigned, in effect, to the back of the store. From the point of view of fledgling American writers like Melville, publishers were deliberately stunting the size of their audience. From the publishers’ point of view, the public was getting what it wanted: English books.
If we take the long view, we can see that while American writers griped and whined, a market for books was at last forming, along with a functional system for distribution and sales—developments that eventually worked to the benefit of American as well as foreign authors. But writers generally are not interested in long-term trends to be discerned by future historians; they are interested in earning a living. Forty years earlier, the Philadelphia novelist Charles Brockden Brown had explained the situation from the point of view of publishers reluctant to publish him:
Here have I a choice of books from England, the popularity of which is fixed and certain, and which will cost me nothing but the mere expences of publication; whereas, from you, I must purchase the privilege of printing what I may, after all, be unable to dispose of, and which therefore may saddle me with the double loss of the original price and the subsequent expences.
This was a frankly economic explanation—probably franker than what authors actually heard from publishers—of why authorship in America remained more a hobby than a profession.
There were also cultural reasons. For one thing, as Thomas Jefferson wrote to an English correspondent in 1825, “Literature is not yet a distinct profession with us. Now and then a strong mind arises, and at its intervals of leisure from business emits a flash of light. But the first object of young societies is bread and covering.” For another thing, the antebellum United States was still a very Protestant country whose few novelists had to contend with what Henry James was later to call “the old evangelical hostility” to the art of fiction. As late as 1850, in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne imagines his “black-browed” Puritan ancestors shaking their heads over him as a “degenerate … writer of story books!”
To make matters worse, although it had been fully seventy years since the Revolution, New World readers retained a filial interest in Old World subjects. The children of the revolutionary generation, such as Melville’s parents,
had grown up as British subjects in cultural attitude if not political allegiance. More than likely, their childhood homes had been decorated with prints and engravings imported from England or, if executed by American artists, depicting English country villages or London cityscapes. The flutes and harpsichords they learned to play as children tended to come from England, as did the teachers who gave lessons in how to play them. In prosperous families, an itinerant decorator—probably an English artisan working temporarily in America—might have been hired to paint landscape murals above the mantelpiece that “were merely slight transformations of English works … with a few details changed to suggest the colonial locality.” In short, in the first half of the nineteenth century the props, accoutrements, and manners of an American household with any claim to refinement imitated English models. As late as 1852, Lizzie’s stepmother wrote to her son traveling in England, seeking advice on a matter of deportment: “You know I am apt to swing my arms,” she acknowledged, so “I wish you to write me how the English ladies walk … how they place theirs to prevent motion that is visible.” There is no record of his response.
The same kind of nervous emulation characterized American literary culture, such as it was. In 1820, soon after Melville was born, a leading Boston publisher estimated that fully three quarters of the books bought by Americans were written in England; in the same year, the editor of the Edinburgh Review posed a sneering rhetorical question—“Who reads an American book?”—to which he gave a plain and largely accurate answer: no one. More than twenty years later, in 1842, when Melville was soaking up experience for his attempt at a literary career, the biggest event of the literary season in the United States was Dickens’s lecture tour.
A general observation by Jacques Barzun sheds light from another angle on the unpromising professional prospects of a young American writer. A “wide-awake youngster,” Barzun points out, “… begins to be aware of the wide world in his or her early teens. By then, knowledge of the recent past has also been absorbed automatically: it was ‘the present’ for the parents, who keep referring to it. Its striking events and startling notions come through this hearsay to seem part of the youth’s own experience.” For Melville’s parents, born in the 1780s, the “recent past” and “striking events” that they passed on to their children in the form of family lore had been the Revolution and the formation of the new nation—their fathers’ military heroics, the presidency of George Washington (who appointed Thomas Melvill Inspector of Customs at Boston and signed Peter Gansevoort’s membership certificate in the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization of Revolutionary War officers). Then, just as Allan and Maria Melvill reached adulthood, English troops returned to sack the capital of the upstart nation during the War of 1812. As Herman grew up, stories of recurrent war against Britain were the stuff of family table talk.
Melville: His World and Work Page 11