Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  Gansevoort Melville left behind a burden of debt that pushed the family back into what Herman called “exceedingly embarrassed circumstances”—so close to insolvency, in fact, that covering the funeral expenses proved a strain for his survivors. Though Allan Junior was now the family’s best financial hope, Herman tried to help by building on the success of Typee. In 1846, he was often in New York, cultivating literary contacts that Gansevoort had made for him and negotiating directly with prospective publishers of Omoo, the book he was working on from spring through the end of the year (he had gotten fed up with Wiley’s tampering, and signed a contract with Harper & Brothers in December), in which he carried on the tale of his adventures through his time in Hawaii and Tahiti. When Omoo appeared in the spring of 1847 under the Harper & Brothers imprint, the critics divided again between praising and scolding. The Sunday Times & Noah’s Weekly Messenger greeted Omoo as the work of the “De Foe of America,” while Horace Greeley, in the Tribune, objected to its “racy lightness.” Whatever the verdict, Melville had become a figure on the New York literary scene, and by the summer of 1847 he and his bride-to-be had decided to settle there.

  In the months leading up to the wedding, Melville traveled the triangle between Lansingburgh (according to Maria, he was “restless and … lonely here without his intended”), Boston, where Lizzie busied herself with wedding preparations, and New York, where he and Allan (also recently engaged) planned to set up house together with their wives, two sisters, and, inevitably, their mother. Already at work on a new book, Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, which he was soon to describe as “continued from, tho’ wholly independent of, Omoo,” Herman was now the senior Melville male. He was also a young man enjoying literary celebrity and looking forward to a stylish marriage.

  On August 4, 1847, Herman Melville and Elizabeth Shaw were married in Boston, in a ceremony attended by troops of Beacon Hill worthies. The groom’s fame was sufficient to merit an unconventional wedding notice in one New York newspaper, the Daily Tribune, on August 7:

  BREACH OF PROMISE SUIT EXPECTED—Mr. HERMAN TYPEE OMOO MELVILLE has recently been united in lawful wedlock to a young lady of Boston. The fair forsaken FAYAWAY will doubtless console herself by sueing him for breach of promise.

  Elizabeth Shaw Melville, c. 1847 (list of illustrations 4.1)

  During their honeymoon trip, Lizzie discovered that she liked the French sophistication of Montreal—a good sign for her capacity to adjust to life in New York, which, remarkably enough, she had never visited, even briefly. In October the four newlyweds, having pooled their resources (Allan’s bride, Sophia Thurston, came from a well-to-do family), moved into a house on Fourth Avenue just behind Grace Church. With his New England affiliations and Beacon Hill wife, Melville was still “half Bostonian” at a time when the Independent newspaper, taking account of the number of New England émigrés in town, described New York as “the capital of the universal Yankee nation.” According to Charles Briggs, who had spent his childhood on Nantucket, so many New Yorkers came originally from out of town that “it somehow or other happens that you rarely meet with a New Yorker born.” Among the city’s literary lights, Willis came from Maine; Bryant (editor, since 1829, of the Evening Post) from western Massachusetts; Greeley and his managing editor at the Tribune, Charles A. Dana, from New Hampshire; and that flamboyant Virginian Edgar Allan Poe, Briggs’s colleague at the Broadway Journal, had been born in Boston. (Like many New Yorkers, Poe was, as Yvor Winters called him, a man “without a background.”) Then as now, life in New York was about forgetting the past and inventing the future.

  Even before Melville took up full-time residence, the city had begun to affect his tone. If Typee had a certain primness, the voice in Omoo moves away from the family fireside and closer to barroom banter—especially when he gets around to his old subject of sexually precocious girls. In body and spirit, “the soft, plump” girls of Omoo are city girls of the sort whom Willis approved—not “fleshy … exactly … but large and full,” and fulsomely frank. Consider one particularly instructive beauty, who while “dallying with her grass fan” is eager to help the young visitor improve his “knowledge of Tahitian.” When asked if she is “mickonaree”—that is, converted to Christianity by missionaries—she laughs with confidential glee and points to her genitals, provoking Melville to recall a couplet from Pope’s Epistle to a Lady:

  A sad good Christian at the heart—

  A very heathen in the carnal part.

  This is a South Seas version of what Melville encountered in New York—not just the “Kates” romping on Broadway, but streetwalkers of the sort he was later to sketch in Pierre, standing by night in the “cross-lights of a druggist’s window … a figure all natural grace but unnatural vivacity … horribly lit by the green and yellow rays” of the gaslight. Sex in Typee had been an innocent pleasure. In Omoo, it is a transaction.

  3.

  After settling in the city in the fall of 1847, Melville was to go on over the next two and a half years to write most of Mardi, all of Redburn and White-Jacket, and, in the early weeks of 1850, the first chapters of the book that was to become Moby-Dick. The New York literary scene that he joined was presided over by a pair of native-born brothers, Evert and George Duyckinck, who, like Melville’s family on the Gansevoort side, were descended from old Dutch stock. Both Duyckincks were “very clerical looking,” according to Whitman (“thin—wanting in body: men of truly proper style. God help ’em!”), but they made up in spark and savvy for what they lacked in body. In 1840, when The Democratic Review moved to New York from Washington, D.C., Evert became its literary editor, and over the next twenty-five years he edited, and sometimes bankrolled, a host of magazines, including the highbrow Arcturus (in Mardi, Melville named his ship Arcturion, and complained about the low literary level of its crew: “Ay, ay, Arcturion! thou wast exceedingly dull”), the broadly satiric Yankee Doodle, and the mass-market Holden’s Dollar Magazine. Duyckinck’s most significant venture was the weekly Literary World, to which Melville contributed reviews and for which Duyckinck himself wrote a column, “The City Desk,” that (along with Lewis Gaylord Clark’s “The Editor’s Table” in the rival Knickerbocker Magazine) is recognizable as a forerunner of “Talk of the Town” in today’s New Yorker.

  Evert Duyckinck (list of illustrations 4.2)

  Not yet thirty in 1846 when he first met the twenty-seven-year-old Melville, Evert Duyckinck was also the editor of Putnam’s “Library of American Books” in which Typee had appeared. Though he, too, had doubts about the young author’s veracity, he recognized Melville’s talent and made an effort to promote him. A master at setting up raves for his friends and getting his enemies panned, he sent copies of Typee to Hawthorne and Simms and also arranged for the first chapter to run in the Mirror. Like many literary patrons before and since, Duyckinck and his younger brother George were dabblers—“elegant inutilities,” one friend called them—with money and time to waste. Credited by no less an authority than James Russell Lowell with maintaining “the soul of a gentleman” through the rough-and-tumble of America’s Grub Street, Duyckinck turned his house at 20 Clinton Street into New York’s leading literary salon and made his extensive book collection available as a kind of lending library to friends, including Melville.

  But if Duyckinck was adept at what Briggs called “the art of puffing,” he was hardly the only player in town. Each of the new magazines had an aggressive editor who built up his own coterie of writers, who in turn made mutual genuflections in the pages of whatever journal was paying them at the moment. With the reading public expanding, editors were hungry for fresh material and willing to pay for it; but a young writer’s aim was not so much the pay as the exposure, which he imagined might help the reception of his next book and, when that day of which every author dreams finally comes, turn into money.

  Melville never quite threw himself into the fray. Even when his talent was budding and he was trying to sell himself, he stood in uneasy relation to
the backscratchers and backbiters with whom he waited in line. In 1846, Poe described the literary scene in a merciless essay called “The Literati of New York City,” published in a Philadelphia magazine whose readers could be expected to appreciate the attack on their rival city to the north. (There is no evidence that Melville and Poe ever met, though Melville was later to model a character after Poe in The Confidence-Man.) Poe understood that sheer bulldoggishness could get a tin-eared versifier or a humorless humorist published and noticed:

  The most “popular,” the most “successful” writers among us, (for a brief period, at least,) are ninety-nine times out of a hundred, persons of mere address, perserverance, effrontery—in a word, busy-bodies, toadies, quacks. These people easily succeed in boring editors (whose attention is too often entirely engrossed by politics or other “business” matter) into the admission of favourable notices written or caused to be written by interested parties—or, at least, into the admission of some notice where, under ordinary circumstances, no notice would be given at all. In this way ephemeral “reputations” are manufactured which, for the most part, serve all the purposes designed—that is to say, the putting money into the purse of the quack and the quack’s publisher; for there never was a quack who could be brought to comprehend the value of mere fame. Now, men of genius will not resort to these manoeuvres, because genius involves in its very essence a scorn of chicanery: and thus for a time the quacks always get the advantage of them, both in respect to pecuniary profit and what appears to be public esteem.

  Melville was not immune to the blandishments of flattering editors, and his own contempt for the literati, though it eventually exceeded Poe’s, was in part directed at himself. In Pierre, whose title character becomes a bad writer combining the swagger of Byron with the self-pity of Goethe’s young Werther, he looked back to these New York years and, in recognizing how limited his achievement had been in Typee and Omoo, captured the absurdity of it all: “From the proprietors of the Magazines whose pages were honored by his effusions, [Pierre] received very pressing epistolary solicitations for the loan of his portrait in oil, in order to take an engraving therefrom, for a frontispiece to their periodicals.” There was an allusion here to the Duyckincks’ request for Melville’s daguerreotype after they had acquired Holden’s Dollar Magazine.

  In retrospect, Melville’s “petitioning and remonstrating literary friends” seemed to him men of small minds and large egos, their talent outstripped by their ambition. Yet for a time they were his exemplars and guides, from whom he learned that to live in New York was to live on the edge, as much for the sake of the risks as in spite of them. To succeed as a writer, you had to be able to look an editor in the eye and to accept a deadline that you know you will miss; and you had to have the gumption, when he comes back in anger to berate you, to laugh him off. The city, largely rebuilt since the “widespread and disastrous” fire of 1835 (as Melville describes it in Pierre), was no longer the same place through which Melville had walked with his father as a child. Yet in coming back to New York, he had returned in all essentials to his father’s world—a place where a man’s most valuable assets were the calm with which he made his promises and the charm with which he broke them.

  4.

  In and beyond New York, the Duyckinck circle was coming to be known as “Young America”—a term that had been in circulation for years (“If there is la jeune France,” James Fenimore Cooper had declared in 1838, “there is also la jeune Amérique”), but that had lately become affixed in particular to the Duyckincks and their friends. They were proud, raw, and strident, less cerebral than the “transcendentalists” of New England and more comfortable with the populist rhetoric of the Democratic Party with which Gansevoort had become associated during the ’44 campaign. “Young America” was a national movement, of which the New York branch was loudest and largest, made up of brooders and glib talkers, ideologues and idealists; some were green, others were seasoned, but all had a scrappy, streetfighter style, and could be counted on to blow up in indignation on behalf of their friends and to stoop to name-calling when provoked by their enemies. In a city that had become a “world capital of invective,” they were short on niceties and long on insults. When Greeley attacked the New York Herald in 1841 as a scurrilous rag (which it was), the editor of the Herald, James Gordon Bennett, replied by calling him, in print, “Horace Greeley, BA and ASS,” adding for good measure that one could “galvanize a New England squash, and it would make as capable an editor as Horace.” One observer wrote that “the only way of securing exemption from [Bennett’s] attacks” was “to advertise largely in the paper … or to send the editor presents in money or other direct bribes.”

  Bennett may have set the standard for vulgarity, but his was a difference in degree rather than kind. Another New York editor gleefully described the leading journal of New England, the North American Review, as a spittoon for over-the-hill Bostonians, a “superannuated dust-box into which old fogydom expectorates freely,” and even the relatively genteel Duyckincks regarded Boston as a “country town of litterateurs and blue-stockings.” Evert was delighted when he heard about a New York doctor who lost his temper with a patient afflicted with chronic bad breath and—presumably working on the homeopathic principle—advised him with New York bluntness to “Eat sh—t.”

  But there was another side—a “soft-focus” side, we might call it—to the local scene in which, by the late 1840s, Melville had become a presence. The same literary culture that produced Willis’s bawdy sketches had also produced, as recently as 1830, such treacle as George Pope Morris’s ballad “Woodman, Spare That Tree!” (“Touch not a single bough! / In youth it sheltered me, / And I’ll protect it now”) and, a little earlier, John Howard Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home,” a song that eventually migrated from his forgotten opera, Clari, or, the Maid of Milan (1823), into the collective American unconscious, from which it periodically erupts, as when Judy Garland clicks together her magic slippers in The Wizard of Oz: “ ‘Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, / Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like Home!” Such sentimental effusions were produced by would-be patrician authors nostalgic for a bygone era when people knew to which class they belonged and were, supposedly, content to stay there. This sort of thing was a protest against the fast pace, social mixing, and, in general, what we would call the edge of urban life. It was led by Washington Irving and his fellow “Knickerbockers”—writers who described a softer, gentler world that existed, of course, mainly in their imaginations, and who wrote with a fairy-tale charm that gave some of their writings an afterlife as children’s stories (of which “Rip Van Winkle” has proven the longest-lasting).

  By the time Melville joined the New York literati, most regarded it as a sin to be sappy or solemn or without a ready quip—a fact that James Russell Lowell turned into a rhyming couplet when he wrote of Briggs, “He’s in joke half the time when he seems to be sternest / When he seems to be joking, be sure he’s in earnest.” Remarking on the New York impatience with anything prissy or provincial, Lowell pointed out to Briggs in 1844 that “You Gothamites strain hard to attain a metropolitan character, but I think if you felt very metropolitan you would not be showing it on all occasions.” Lowell was on to something. As their city outstripped its American rivals, New Yorkers were turning in a spirit of competitive emulation toward metropolitan Europe. This was not new. What was new was that by the 1840s New York had become a credible competitor.

  Among those who had foreseen the ascent was Melville’s father. Long before the rise of Young America, when Maria was pregnant with their second child in the winter of 1819, Allan Melvill had written with local pride to his Boston friend Lemuel Shaw that “New York the empress queen of this vast continent … will most unquestionably before the close of the present century, equal London in arms, commerce & population.” It was a good prediction. By the time his son Herman moved to New York twenty-eight years later, the demand for European fashions had grown expon
entially, as had the demand for “European style” restaurants complete with tablecloths and menus—places that seated customers at private tables and cooked meals to order rather than putting out a dish or two at communal tables at advertised times. Opera and gambling were regular features of New York nightlife, and the same shops that sold libretti for the evening’s performance displayed lottery tickets in their windows. Reputable gentlemen openly kept mistresses, a “French” innovation to which American wives were not always reconciled, as in the notorious case of Mrs. Charles Astor Bristed, who broke up her husband’s Parisian-style menage when she “clapper-clawed” her rival in public.

  As life in New York became self-consciously sophisticated—a contradiction in terms, as Lowell was right to point out—its pace accelerated to something like what we know today. In 1851, one observer posted himself in front of City Hall in order to estimate the number of vehicles that passed by, and within an hour he counted more than twelve hundred. The noise level rose to what seemed to nineteenth-century ears a terrible din: the perpetual clip-clop of iron-shod horses on stone block, the whistle of steamboats running the ferry routes between Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, the scrape and clang of rail trolleys equipped with bells and bellowing drivers, the rattle of carriages bumping over cobblestone. “A more ingenious contrivance for driving men mad through sheer noise was undoubtedly never invented,” said Poe, himself a connoisseur of madness. Above the transit noise soared the ubiquitous newsboy’s voice not yet deepened by puberty, rising “high above the city’s din” with news of “accidents and casualties … and the murderous barbarities of savages, which were never perpetrated, except in his own teeming fancy.” And then there were the hollering pushcart peddlers, each with his own style of navigating the crowded streets—some patient and careful, some reckless and careening—and the barkers in the fishmarkets, who “made considerable noise” in trying to pawn off “refuse pieces of stale halibut” on gullible shoppers.