Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  His parents, in other words, belonged to a generation peculiarly divided. They were provincials hobbled by their sense of inferiority to Old World culture, so much attached to European customs and standards that, as Melville put it in Pierre, they could be “satirically said to have thought of importing European air for domestic consumption.” But they were proud of, even boisterous about, their fathers’ part in throwing off the Old World master whom they had reason to hate. What they felt toward Europe and England, and doubtless imparted to their children, was a mixture of nostalgia and resentment, and they never quite knew whether to remake themselves into Yankee democrats or to defend their parents’ quasi-aristocratic Old World tastes. All Americans who aspired to culture in the honorific sense of the word were split within themselves over this question, and tried, as we would say, to “have it both ways”—as when, in 1831, a patriotic divinity student set new words to the old tune of “God Save the King” and called his hymn “America” (better known today as “My Country ’Tis of Thee”).†

  But writing new lyrics for old music is, at best, a half-creative act—and here, in miniature, was the dilemma for would-be writers and artists in the young country: How was one to express American ideas and sentiments through European forms? On his trip through America in that same year, Alexis de Tocqueville noted the unpopularity of the “small number of men in the United States who are engaged in the composition of literary works,” which are “English in substance and still more so in form,” and by which they try to “transport into the midst of democracy the ideas and literary fashions that are current among the aristocratic nation they have taken for their model.” One of Melville’s signal contributions to our literature was to help destroy Old World forms and supplant them with something new and essentially American. “Long enough,” as he wrote in White-Jacket, “have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves.”

  As Melville grew up under these conditions of divided cultural allegiance, the scale of literary production in the United States began to grow as well. The call for literary independence became a refrain not only in the salons and magazines but also in theaters, where, by the 1830s, there was brisk competition for a $300 prize to be awarded to “an original comedy whereof an American should be the leading actor.” Slowly, the idea of a distinctive American literature was taking hold, and so was the evidence that such a literature was actually in the making. Between 1820 and 1830, only about a hundred novels by American writers were published in the United States; in the next decade, the number rose above three hundred, and in the 1840s, it leapt toward a thousand. A few American writers, led by Irving and Cooper and followed closely by Emerson, even achieved recognition in Britain.

  What had begun as a professional quarrel between workers and managers in the literary business had become, by the 1840s, a full-fledged national debate, not just about the rights of authors versus the interests of publishers but about whether a homegrown literature suited to “the peculiar nature and the need of those for whom it is made” was possible, and, if so, what kind of literature it should be. The discussion ran parallel to the earlier political debate between Federalists and Republicans over whether the national interest was best served by fostering industry at home or by preserving the rural purity of the United States and relying on imports from Europe for finished goods.

  Melville joined the discussion belatedly. “Believe me, my friends,” he wrote in 1850, “men not very much inferior to Shakespeare, are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio. And the day will come, when you shall say who reads a book by an Englishman …?” By then the subject of what he called “literary flunkeyism toward England” was well worn and, in theory at least, the matter pretty much settled. Eminent New Englanders such as William Cullen Bryant (Lectures on Poetry, 1825), William Ellery Channing (Remarks on National Literature, 1830), and Emerson (The American Scholar, 1837), as well as, more recently, the leading southern man of letters, the South Carolinian William Gilmore Simms (Americanism in Literature, 1845), had all weighed in on behalf of “the expression of [the] nation’s mind in writing.”

  By the time Melville made his own contribution to the discussion, the theoretical question was closed, and everyone agreed that Americans needed a literature of their own—including the British, who chided them for not having produced one. But the old practical questions remained: What kind of writing was called for? And who, if anyone, would pay to read it?

  5.

  Even under the best conditions, it is risky to bet one’s future on literary success; but in starting out with a book whose truthfulness was open to question, Melville stacked the odds against himself. Chances were good that even if the first critical quarrels over his literary merit came out in his favor, someone unhappy with the verdict would wait for an opportunity to attack him again. Typee had given him a degree of renown. But it had also saddled him with a reputation for exaggeration that he never quite lived down, despite Toby Greene’s testimony (published in the Commercial Advertiser in July 1846) backing up his version of what the two men had experienced together in the Marquesas. To shore up his credibility, Melville rushed off “The Story of Toby” to both his American and his English publishers, who added it to reprints of Typee.

  Yet despite his and Toby’s insistence that he had written “unvarnished truth,” many readers still doubted him—and not without reason. Melville was a writer who delighted in what he called, near the end of his life, “literary sin.” His tales were on the tall side, and stretching them was part of the “pleasure which is wickedly said to be in sinning.” His hairsbreadth escapes from cannibal warriors (it is practically impossible that they could have run along a raw coral beach as described in the final chapter of Typee), the sexual profligacy of his shipmates, and his own combination of prowess and self-restraint were all claims that tested credulity.

  Moreover, Melville’s readers doubted that he had much grasp of the Polynesian languages—even of the sound of words he had heard and tried to pronounce himself. After Melville’s death, Robert Louis Stevenson complained that the man possessed “no ear for [the Polynesian] language whatever.” Stevenson liked to say that at Melville’s christening “some influential fairy must have been neglected” among those handing out gifts to baby Herman. When the roll call of fairies was called to announce their donations, they spoke in order: “ ‘He shall be able to see,’ ” decreed the first. “ ‘He shall be able to tell,’ ‘He shall be able to charm,’ ” said the next and the next. “ ‘But he shall not be able to hear,’ exclaimed the last.”‡

  There was something to this charge. Whether one attends to Melville’s garbling of Polynesian words or to his eyewitness accounts of tribal practices, no one is likely to mistake his early books for the work of a scrupulous field anthropologist. They are not reliable. They are willfully outrageous mixings of fiction and fact; their “unvarnished truth” was a melange of embellished memories, yarns he had heard from other sailors, and thefts from books (notably William Ellis’s Polynesian Researches, from which he copied the melancholy Tahitian song) that he raided for anecdotes to supplement his own. He was greedy for anything he could use to attract an audience, and he sometimes fell into a certain coyness—a tone of “I’ll show you only so much” of the sort one expects today from a “romance” novel, with its explicit accounts of foreplay that fade, as the climax approaches, into euphemism and innuendo. His scenes of sex and savagery tend to break off before they culminate. “He gets up voluptuous pictures,” complained one reviewer who was undecided whether Melville went too far or not far enough, “and with cool deliberate art breaks off always at just the right point so as without offending decency, he may stimulate curiosity and excite unchaste desire.” Melville liked to step outside his narrative, reporting debaucheries—as when the island girls swim out naked to offer themselves to his bug-eyed shipmates—which, he claimed, he had declined to join.

  “Their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half-enveloping their ot
herwise naked forms.”

  Typee, illustration by Guido Boer, 1931 (list of illustrations 3.2)

  And so the opening of Typee amounted to a dubious promise to arouse his readers while denying that he had been aroused himself. He describes the Marquesan girls performing a collective striptease: raising the curtains of hair (by winding it into coils) that screen their backs and buttocks, then stroking themselves with oily hands to prepare for what we would call group sex:

  These swimming nymphs … succeeded in getting up the ship’s side, where they clung dripping with the brine and glowing from the bath, their jet-black tresses streaming over their shoulders, and half-enveloping their otherwise naked forms. There they hung, sparkling with savage vivacity.… Nor were they idle the while, for each one performed the simple offices of the toilette for the other. Their luxuriant locks, wound up and twisted into the smallest possible compass … the whole person carefully dried, and from a little round shell that passed from hand to hand, anointed with a fragrant oil.

  But Typee was more than an invitation to leer at what went on in the pleasure groves of Polynesia. It was a work of intellectual precocity set in a half-imaginary Eden, where sexual repression (Melville did not have the word, but he grasped the concept long before Freud named it) was unknown. The “penalty of the Fall presses very lightly,” he wrote, upon the inhabitants of this Edenic world, by which he meant that they had been spared the necessity of labor, and that they relished sex without guilt or shame. To Western eyes, they were no different from savages, as Bushnell had described them—people who “think it no degradation to do” in the open what in “a cultivated state they would blush to perpetrate,” and their precocity was attested by the sight of barely pubescent girls nursing their own babies.

  It was as if he had actually entered the prelapsarian world that earlier writers had only wanly or furtively imagined. He had come to a place where there were neither persons—at least not in the sense in which individual persons were understood to exist in the culture from which he was on furlough—nor property. “There was not a padlock in the valley, nor anything that answered the purpose of one.” It was a place of which Europeans had dreamt from time immemorial, a place free of what he was later to call “social acerbities,” without inhibition, jealousy, or rivalry. He knew that his readers would want to learn what an American lad experienced in this paradise, among voluptuaries with beautiful bodies (“bathing in company with troops of girls formed one of my chief amusements”), but he also knew that his readers’ curiosity was more than merely prurient. He had touched in Typee the age-old longing to transport oneself, if only by the vehicle of imagination, out of worn pathways into places unmapped and unknown. “We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon,” Thoreau was to write a few years later, “though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded” by yesterday’s sun. Typee was Melville’s version of this American dream—not the dream of raising one’s status in the world as it is, but the dream of starting over, getting out from under, and putting it all away to discover life anew.

  6.

  As a description of the culture into which its author had ventured, Typee is not to be taken seriously. Modern anthropologists have made clear that Melville misunderstood the complex kinship relations of the Marquesan islanders as well as their system of marking off sacred from profane activities with taboo and purification rituals. He made no serious effort, as Stevenson complained, to learn their language. What he did was to conduct an irresponsible thought experiment—irresponsible, that is, with respect to trying to understand on its own terms what he had actually seen. He reimagined the Typee world as the inverse of his own, in a book that amounted to an extended rhetorical question: What would it mean to live in paradise?

  In a remarkable chapter entitled “Producing Light à la Typee,” Melville engaged this question by describing how Tommo’s male attendant, Kory-Kory, strikes a spark for the purpose of igniting his master’s pipe. The boy props a six-foot stick at a forty-five-degree angle against “some object” such as a rock or tree trunk, then straddles it, holding at crotch height a shorter stick with a pointed end that he rubs up and down against its longer partner. The friction creates a groove, at the bottom of which a little pile of wood shavings starts to gather:

  At first, Kory-Kory goes to work quite leisurely, but gradually quickens his pace, and waxing warm in the employment, drives the stick furiously along the smoking channel, plying his hands to and fro with amazing rapidity, the perspiration starting from every pore. As he approaches the climax of his effort, he pants and gasps for breath, and his eyes almost start from their sockets with the violence of his exertions. This is the critical stage of the operation; all his previous labors are vain if he cannot sustain the rapidity of the movement until the reluctant spark is produced. Suddenly he stops, becomes perfectly motionless. His hands still retain their hold of the smaller stick, which is pressed convulsively against the further end of the channel among the fine powder there accumulated, as if he had just pierced through and through some little viper that was wriggling and struggling to escape from his clutches. The next moment a delicate wreath of smoke curls spirally into the air, the heap of dusty particles glows with fire, and Kory-Kory almost breathless, dismounts from his steed.§

  Typee was a mirror of the world that Melville left behind—and so, true to the optics of reflection, everything in it was a reverse image of life at home. At home, lighting a fire is easy, but sex is fraught with difficulties. In Typee, sex is relaxed and free, but generating a spark for the visiting Westerner who wants his smoke is a chore. The Typees’ garden needs no tools or tending, while “civilized” man channels his libidinal energy (Freud was to call the process sublimation) into tools far advanced over the native’s stick and groove. It is the achievement of civilization that one need only reach into the drawer to find energy stored in the form of a match. But, Melville asked in Typee, to what end? And at what cost?

  Here, as it were, was the rub: Melville’s self-abrasive knowledge that he could find no lasting pleasure among the lotus-eaters. Typee reported his discovery that he was finally unfit for “long exile from Christendom and civilization,” no matter how strong the enticements. More than anything—more, even, than his sporadic dread of being cannibalized—he feared that his hosts would mark him as a convert to their tribe by tattooing his face and forearms, those public parts of his body that, if decorated Marquesan-style, would forever define him at home as a freak.

  He wanted to be a tourist, not an exile—a point well taken by D. H. Lawrence, who calls attention to the painful swelling in Melville’s leg that begins to torment him as soon as he scrambles down the coastal mountain into the happy valley:

  We can’t go back, and Melville couldn’t. Much as he hated the civilized humanity he knew. He couldn’t go back to the savages; he wanted to, he tried to, and he couldn’t.

  Because, in the first place, it made him sick; it made him physically ill. He had something wrong with his leg, and this would not heal. It got worse and worse.… When he escaped, he was in a deplorable condition—sick and miserable, ill, very ill.

  Paradise!

  But there you are. Try to go back to the savages, and you feel as if your very soul was decomposing inside you.

  From a writer of a temperament very like Melville’s, these remarks go to the heart of the matter. The injured leg is a throbbing reminder of Melville’s half-conscious estrangement from the land he has entered. At his first look “down into the bosom of [the] valley which swept away in long wavy undulations,” a kind of vertigo engulfs him, and with time the abscess in his leg brings on fever and thirst. When relief appears in the form of a running brook, he kneels over it, pausing in order “to concentrate all my capabilities of enjoyment” on the imminent pleasure of drinking; but upon touching his lips to the water, he recoils with a taste like ash in his mouth and pulls back, spitting.

  Amid such spells of sensory confusion, Melville and Toby brace
themselves for their first encounter with people native to the island, but their preparations come to naught when they stumble upon a faint path worn through the jungle by human tread. “Robinson Crusoe,” Melville reports, “could not have been more startled by the footprint in the sand” than he was at his first encounter with two figures, one male, one female, “partly hidden by the dense foliage.” Equally terrified by the white-skinned invaders, the two natives stare at Toby and Tommo like deer poised to run. There is an Abbott-and-Costello-Meet-Tarzan-and-Jane absurdity to the scene as Melville and Toby break into a frantic pantomime of hopping and pointing by which they try to convey the benignity of their intentions. Half convinced, the Marquesan Adam and Eve lead them to the village elders, who inspect them by bending over them, nose to flesh, in order to sniff their skin.