Much of the charm of Typee is in this kind of self-mockery. Melville described himself not with the high self-regard that one finds in contemporary narratives by missionaries or explorers, but as a galumphing oaf in the country of the graceful. As his leg worsens, he submits to the ministrations of the tribal medicine man, who chants invocations and pounds the swollen leg, while his assistant holds down the patient writhing like “a struggling child in a dentist’s chair.” Whether by time or by magic, the leg heals, and Melville begins to wonder at the eagerness with which his hosts work at restoring him to wholeness. Are they planning to eat him?
A taste for human meat is not something the Typees willingly reveal, and Melville builds narrative tension by describing how their inadvertent hints lead him to fear that their cannibal appetite is the true reason for their solicitude. In Melville’s time, the question of cannibalism was, as it remains today, a contested one. There were periodic reports of “survival cannibalism” at sea—incidents in which shipwrecked sailors resorted to eating the bodies of perished shipmates in order to stay alive. Not long after Typee appeared, news spread of the hideous experience suffered in the winter of 1846–47 by the Donner party—a group of emigrants who, trapped by early snows en route to California through the Sierra Nevada, were forced to subsist on the flesh of their comrades. But such incidents (Edgar Allan Poe had taken up the theme of survival cannibalism ten years earlier in his story “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”) underscored the horror without confirming the existence of man-eating outside extreme circumstances. Although there were occasional speculations that beyond the civilized world cannibalism was a regular feature of life—as when a Fiji chieftain, brought to the United States in 1842, died of what the New York Herald presumed was withdrawal from his usual diet of human flesh—it was an unproven premise, perhaps even a “fiction,” as one scholar has put it, “of the nervous white mind.” Therefore, any book that promised eyewitness proof was guaranteed an audience, rather the way a book promising to prove the existence of UFOs finds readers in our own time.
But even though Melville became known as “the man who lived among cannibals,” he was coy about the question in Typee—full of hints without ever offering anything conclusive. The first clue comes the morning after a group of warriors has returned from battle with a neighboring tribe, and Melville notices that a wooden cooking vessel has appeared overnight in the village “piazza.” Lifting the lid, he catches a glimpse of what seem “the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture,” before he is chased away with cries of “Taboo! Taboo!” We are left to surmise that what he has seen is the residue of a human stew consumed the night before, when the returning warriors had borne on their shoulders poles to which were strapped bundles wrapped in palm leaves—“green winding sheets,” as he pointedly calls them—stained with blood. But he never quite establishes that these bundles are the oozing bodies of slain enemies, and he never sees anyone feast on them.
It is impossible to know how much Melville depended on his own memory for Typee and how much he played variations on books about the South Seas that he had hauled up to the attic in Lansingburgh or bought or borrowed in New York. There was no shortage of available accounts containing scenes similar to passages he included in Typee. Ellis, for instance, reports in Polynesian Researches (on secondhand evidence) that Polynesian warriors baked the bodies of slain enemies “in leaves of the hibiscus and plantain, as they were accustomed to wrap their eels or other fish.” And though Melville was never charged with outright plagiarism, some critics doubted that his limited experience (he claimed to have stayed among the Typees for four months, but it had actually been less than four weeks) could have provided him with all the incidents he related. Before he sat down to write, according to one reviewer, what he “remembered of the Islands of the Pacific, had become a sort of confused mass in his own brain,” and so he turned to other men’s recollections as substitutes for his own.
Among his aids to memory may have been Adventures in the Pacific, published just the year before Typee, by an English physician, John Coulter, who writes with a self-exculpating squeamishness akin to Melville’s own. “I must throw a veil,” Coulter wrote about a cannibal feast, “as I had only one look at the beginning of it, and left the area sick to loathing.” This kind of strategic reticence was conventional in the many accounts of primitive culture that poured off the presses in Melville’s day—books in which the island world is seen through screens of foliage, glimpsed in moonlight or shadow, or inferred from the discovery of what look like gnawed human bones.
7.
So Melville was no anthropologist, but he had proven himself a writer who could hold an audience. The portrait of Fayaway was a hit with readers, for whom she became a successor princess to that sexually passionate mother-of-America, Pocahontas—primitive yet refined, dark yet saved from savagery by her natural modesty, as expressed in her capacity to blush. Among her many admirers was the poet Ellery Channing, whose tribute “The Island Nukuheva,” which he sent to “bold / Adventurous Melville,” noted with proper discretion that Fayaway “Moved like a creature wove of sanctity, / Fell like a sunbeam in that summer world.” Channing did not mind at all that her customary dress was nothing more than “a slight belt of bark.”
What Melville had done was to establish a connection with his audience. He cared less about misinforming them than about enthralling them. Years later, he put a check mark in his copy of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads beside the statement in the preface that “every Author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed: so it has been, so will it continue to be.” The young Melville felt constricted by prevailing standards of taste, and knew that in order to make a place for himself in the emerging American literary scene he would have to push his readers to expand their range of curiosity and tolerance.
For the revised American edition of Typee, he was forced to excise some of his harsher comments about missionaries. There, compared to what he would demand of his readers in later books, he inflicted only slight pressure; he was at that stage of life when a young man worries about how he is doing in the eyes of acknowledged practitioners and, even as he chafes within the rules, has an uncertain sense of what is required of him.
He had learned to be a writer by shutting himself up with his recollected emotions for the purpose of reliving them, becoming a student of his own senses. One imagines him swirling wine on the tongue to delay the swallow and prolong the taste, or postponing exhalation while holding tobacco smoke in his lungs. Years later, in the voice of Ishmael in Moby-Dick, he was to report that “when between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed.” One imagines the young Melville, after his vitalizing years at sea, with eyes closed in the effort to recall this or that delicious sensation. While he wrote Typee, he was living again in a muffled world among guarded people from whom he could find refuge only in his memory and imagination.
The Melville who wrote Typee was not, as Elizabeth Hardwick has put it, “a painter of his own face in the mirror,” but, as he himself wrote in 1850, “if you rightly look for it, you will almost always find that the author himself has somewhere furnished you with his own picture.” To find Melville in Typee, it is best not to look for him in the young man frolicking among the natives—episodes doubtless embellished if not invented. We are more likely to find him before the story gets rolling, for example, on the beach at the Bay of Tior, where he had rowed over in one of the Acushnet’s whaleboats in order to witness the French admiral take possession of the place. Watching the admiral in “laced chapeau” being greeted by a “tattooed savage” chieftain, he stands to the side, peels back the skin of a banana, and chomps on it while he muses on the two men in their divergent decorations and symmetrical pride. This is Melville standing
between two fantasies of the Western mind—the Noble Savage and the Enlightened Emissary of Europe—while giving his allegiance to neither. He is Melville as flâneur, loafing not in Baudelaire’s city or Whitman’s, but in the tropical jungle, refraining from all judgments, soaking up experience for the day when he would be ready—at his desk in Lansingburgh, alas—to pour it all out.
* In 1848, Hine’s The Haunted Barque was privately printed at Auburn, NY.
† The student, who went on to become a Baptist minister, was Francis Smith, a Harvard classmate of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (class of 1829), and an acquaintance of both the Melvills and the Shaws.
‡ Some modern scholars defend Melville’s ear, suggesting that Stevenson was misled by Melville’s habit of spelling Polynesian names that end in a vowel sound, such as “Happa” (Melville spelled it “Happar”), with a terminal “r.” For an English speaker with a mid-nineteenth-century Northeast American accent, the terminal “r” may have designated a preceding long “a” sound. This is as close as we are likely to get to hearing Melville’s speaking voice: broad and open, not unlike the Boston accent (he probably pronounced the word “farther” the same way he said “father”) that today has become a caricature of itself. See Harrison Hayford and Walter Blair, eds., Omoo (New York: Hendricks House, 1969), pp. 344–46.
§ In the surviving fragment of the Typee manuscript (now in the New York Public Library), Melville originally used the phrase “attains his climax” to describe Kory-Kory’s exertion. Sometime before first publication, this phrase was changed to the more decorous “approaches the climax of his effort.” See Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 36.
CHAPTER 4
ESCAPE TO NEW YORK
1.
With the success of Typee behind him and Omoo in progress, Melville was more than ready to give up village life. After returning from the Pacific, he had enrolled part time in that peerless school for the study of literary careerism, New York City, where he visited his brothers Allan and Gansevoort at their law firm ina neighborhood of taverns and coffeehouses south of City Hall. Since in the 1840s scheduled steamboat service linked New York to the river towns of the Hudson Valley, it was relatively easy to travel to the city for business or refreshment. Melville made the trip regularly, and by early 1845, he had become known as the “runaway brother,” a familiar presence in the office sitting at a spare desk poring over a manuscript rumored to be a racy account of his adventures in the South Seas.
Up in the quiet country, he was an expansive young man trying unsuccessfully to contract himself. A family friend who saw him in Lansingburgh early in 1846 wrote to his sister Augusta that “his countenance spoke his thoughts” as he worked at “making himself agreeable” while waiting one Sunday morning for his mother and sisters to dress for church. But down in the city, he dispensed with restraint. “I would to God Shakspeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway,” he remarked a few years later. “Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor [Hotel], or made merry with him over a bowl of … punch; but that the muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakspere’s full articulations.”
In January 1845, while in this unmuzzled city, Melville wrote to his sister Catherine, teasing her about her nickname, Kate:
I don’t know how it is precisely, but I have always been very partial to this particular appellative & can not avoid investing the person who bears it, with certain quite captivating attributes.… Besides loveliness of form & face, the Kates are always amiable, with fine feelings, a little too modest at times, but wondrous sly, always in good-humor, sometimes in regular mad-cap spirits & once in a while (I am sorry to say it) rather given to romping.
Melville’s expertise about Kates (“They romp with such grace & vivacity, that I verily believe they are more dangerous then”) had been acquired by studying the promenading beauties on Broadway. “Now, I saw a girl in Broadway yesterday, & I’ll lay you a rose-bud her name was Kate—Why, I’m sure of it.—Did’nt she have … a merry smile, & even a kind of a merry little walk?”
With coquettish girls on parade and young men openly sizing them up, New York was a very different place from buttoned-up Boston, where Melville courted Lizzie with due deference and his sisters felt safely at home. The distinction was nicely caught in the writings of Nathaniel Willis, who had left Boston a few years earlier to edit the New-York Mirror, which he dedicated to the proposition that “the country is tired of being be-Britished.” Willis liked to play on the differences between Boston, where churches were points of origin from which the whole town had radiated outward, and New York, where even landmark churches had become minor elements in the cityscape squeezed between the proliferating shops and hotels. He loved the opera (all the rage in New York while still considered a low taste by Bostonians), and especially such enchantresses as the French soprano Juliette Bourgeois, who in 1845 sang the title role in Rossini’s Semiramide under the name Eufrasia Borghese, delighting Willis with her “intoxicating way of crushing her eyes up to express passion.”
In his generically titled “City Lyric” (1843), Willis registered the New York presumption that there is really only one place in America that merits the term “city”:
Come out, love—the night is enchanting!
The moon hangs just over Broadway;
The stars are all lighted and panting—
(Hot weather up there, I dare say!)
What perfume comes balmily o’er us?
Mint juleps from City Hotel!
A loafer is smoking before us—
(A nasty cigar, by the smell!)
Oh Woman! thou secret past knowing!
Like lilacs that grow by the wall,
You breathe every air that is going,
Yet gather but sweetness from all!
On, on! By St. Paul’s, and the Astor!
Religion seems very ill-plann’d!
For one day we list to the pastor,
For six days we list to the band!
The city Willis described in these slight but atmospheric poems was a place where chance encounters seem full of promise: not yet Whitman’s “city of orgies,” but a city of erotic opportunity where eyeing and being eyed by strangers is a permissible pleasure. Here, in 1844, he recalls his excitement at finding himself seated on a bus beside a young woman who dozes off as her kerchief grazes his leg:
And I have felt from out its gate of pearl
Her warm breath on my cheek, and while she sat
Dreaming away the moments, I have tried
To count the long dark lashes in the fringe
Of her bewildering eyes! The kerchief sweet
That enviably visits her red lip
Has slumber’d, while she held it, on my knee,—
And her small foot has crept between mine own—
Willis was among the many New Yorkers, as E. B. White put it a century later, who had “pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment.” They had come to a place, as the novelist and editor Charles Briggs wrote with requisite obliqueness, where a young man could openly enjoy the viscous slipperiness of a meal of oysters, which “fills up [his] mouth, touches all the organs of taste at the same time, and leaves nothing to be desired.”
2.
But if New York was a place of daring frankness, there were limits to be observed by respectable writers—and by the spring of 1846, at the request of his publisher John Wiley, Melville was arranging for an expurgated edition of Typee. Wiley himself had tinkered with the text before allowing typesetting to proceed for the first American version. He had struck out the description of the native queen who “threw up [her] … skirts” to reveal her tattooed buttocks, as well as a reference to “the unholy passions of the crew.” But the Morning Courier and New York Enq
uirer still found the book “utterly incredible,” and to the critic of the New York Evangelist, Typee seemed, despite Wiley’s cleanings-up, best suited for those who liked “opera-dancers, and voluptuous prints.” In a letter to the Albany Argus, Melville expressed his irritation at the tongue-cluckers: “Typee is a true narrative of events which actually occurred.… Although there may be moving incidents and hairbreadth escapes, it is scarcely more strange than such as happen to those who make their home on the deep.”
In the midst of these exchanges he received an alarming letter from Gansevoort, sent off from London on April 3 with news of favorable English reviews. The letter was otherwise grim: “I sometimes fear that I am gradually breaking up,” his brother wrote, and “it is becoming a toil to me to make the exertion necessary to dress to go out.… Man stirs me not, nor woman either.… The only personal desire I now have is to be out of debt.” There was something terminal about Gansevoort’s tone (“I never valued life much—it were impossible to value it less than I do now”), and even as the letter crossed the ocean, he was losing his sight, bleeding from the gums, and coughing blood. On May 29, Herman wrote back with buck-up encouragement: “I … think I see you opening this letter in one of those pleasant hamlets roundabout London, of which we read in novels.… At any rate I pray Heaven that such may be the case & that you are mending rapidly.” Gansevoort never received that letter, having died on May 12. When the news reached the family in early June, Herman went down to New York to meet the coffin and brought his brother’s body home to their mother.
Although no direct statement survives from Melville about his reaction to the news of Gansevoort’s death, there is an entry (November 24, 1849), poignantly confused about the passage of time, in the journal that he kept during his own London trip three and a half years later: “No doubt, two years ago, or three, Gansevoort was writing here in London, about the same hour as this—alone in his chamber, in profound silence—as I am now. This silence is a strange thing. No wonder the old Greeks deemed it the vestibule to the higher mysteries.” And in a strongly felt chapter of White-Jacket, also written in 1849, Melville related a vignette about a common sailor who learns that his brother, an officer aboard a supply ship, is due to come aboard after years of separation. Loath to be seen in his state of mean subservience, the sailor cannot bear to reveal himself. Melville writes the scene with great intensity (“ ‘How my heart thumped,’ ” says the sailor, “ ‘when I actually felt him so near me; but I wouldn’t look at him—no! I’d have died first!’ ”), and one comes away with the feeling of having read a writer deeply aware of the inevitable mix of love and rivalry in the fraternal relation.
Melville: His World and Work Page 13