Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  Near the markets, and around the food stalls along the avenues, good odors—the aroma of smoked and fried eel still “with heads and skins on,” as well as “tripe, pigs’ feet, plates of boiled lobsters, crabs, and other delicacies” favored by the business-lunch crowd—competed with the stench of manure and rotting garbage. The rising level of filth was fast catching up with that of Europe’s notorious slum cities, whose inhabitants, as Friedrich Engels wrote of Manchester in 1844, could not enter or leave their outside privies without “wading through puddles of stale urine and excrement.” In the 1840s, horses were everywhere in New York and pigs still ran loose on Sixth Avenue, so the streets were coated by “mud” made of animal droppings mixed with rainwater; without a sewage system, the city was literally flowing with both animal and human shit.

  No wonder, then, that when the “mud” dried in the sun, New Yorkers, as Briggs described them in his 1839 novel The Adventures of Harry Franco, “hurried through the streets, wrapped in their cloaks, and their hats drawn tightly over their eyes, and their heads bowed down to keep the dust out of their faces, as it met them in spiral eddies at the corners of the avenues.” Shop doors were shut tight, and on the horse-drawn trolleys the boys whose job it was to open and close the doors kept their hands in their pockets, unwilling to let in blasts of fecal dirt.

  When Melville relocated himself to this “babylonish brick-kiln” of a city, its tempo was already in his pulse. Ever since he had wandered out as a boy onto Broadway, the sound and sight of revelers had been “as natural” to him, as Lewis Mumford put it, “as the sound of rain or the play of sunlight.” In New York, Mumford observed, Melville “simply could not forget the wideness of the world.” Its human variety stirred him. It was already the city in which, as F. Scott Fitzgerald was to write some seventy-five years later, one feels the “satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.” Melville savored his childhood memories of watching belles and dandies stroll along the Battery and, hand in hand with his father, witnessing veterans of the Revolutionary War march by in full regimentals, or free blacks celebrate the African American festival “Pinkster’s Day” in gold-edged scarves and bright bandannas. Years later, he caught the spectacle of the city in nautical analogies that registered a sense of freedom akin to what he had felt at sea—as when he wrote, in “Bartleby,” of the “bright silks and sparkling faces … in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway.”

  By the late 1840s, New York had established itself as the American city, a magnet not only for intellectuals and entrepreneurs but also for upcountry farmboys looking for work, and the greenhorn theme was already a motif in New York novels and stories. (Although his origin is never made clear, Melville’s most memorable urban character, Bartleby, has the “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable” demeanor of an out-of-towner.) The originating book was Briggs’s Harry Franco, which retold the ancient tale of young-man-comes-to-big-city-and-gets-fleeced. One of the most popular novels of its day, it included scenes that Melville likely had in mind while working, in 1852, on the New York chapters of Pierre. Harry’s father sends him off with a pep talk: remember, he tells the boy as he leaves the family farm, that “men are but men, and there is no station whatever can make more of them.” But it does not take long before the big-city sharks and schemers, Mr. Dooitt, Mr. Slobber, Mr. Bargin, and the portly Miss Rippletrump—like everyone else Briggs had been reading Dickens’s Pickwick Papers—put this democratic faith to the test. Everyone in town seems to be out to extract something for nothing from the country rube, and they usually do.

  New York Street Scene, Harper’s Weekly, 1859 (list of illustrations 4.3)

  With the influx of immigrants both domestic and foreign, housing grew scarce and dear, and boarders in the cheaper rooming houses were sometimes forced to live five or six to a room. Between 1840 and 1850, the number of residents in the city shot up from 400,000 to nearly 700,000, and though there were large open tracts north of Fourteenth Street, most New Yorkers still clustered at the southern tip of Manhattan, where they felt themselves living in a city of “crowded hotels, crowded streets, hot summers,” as the landscape architect Andrew Downing put it in 1851. “Where is the quiet reverse side of this picture of town life?” Downing wondered, dreaming of “a green oasis for the refreshment of the city’s soul and body”—an oasis that came into being a few years later when his student Frederick Law Olmsted designed and, by a political miracle not duplicated since, actually built a great public park north of Fifty-ninth Street.

  When Melville came to town, it had as yet no “reverse side.” It felt cramped and crammed—a mood he was to evoke in the opening pages of Moby-Dick (published in the same year as Downing’s plea for air), where he writes of “crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive,” with their faces set toward the open sea and their backs to the “insular city.” When the old Trinity Church was torn down in 1839 to make room for a larger church building, one New Yorker savored the break in the wall of buildings that allowed, for a few months, “an unobstructed view of the bright blue Western sky,—the only bright prospect left for the thousands who daily visit that street.” In “Bartleby,” when Melville described a law office separated from the adjacent building by an air shaft three feet wide, he was noting a fact of life as true for many New Yorkers then as it is for most New Yorkers now.

  5.

  Among the striking aspects of New York life has always been the proximity of poverty and wealth. In 1840, the horse pulling a rich man’s carriage down Broadway could expect to sleep that night in better quarters than the man who knocks on the carriage door begging for a coin. Many of the poor were young. Of the city’s roughly 600,000 inhabitants in 1845, nearly a third were children under the age of fifteen. Those lucky enough to have something like a real childhood could be seen trotting beside open gutters down which they guided toy boats made of folded paper or nutshells—anything that would float in the filthy water.* Others were orphans or vagrants working as peddlers, messengers, newspaper hawkers, or else petty criminals and prostitutes. By midcentury, New York’s “Five Points” neighborhood, a cluster of swampy alleys and rat-infested buildings near today’s Foley Square and Chinatown, was the most famous slum in the nation, if not the world. “The gorgeous rainbow that spans the whirling torrent of metropolitan life,” Greeley wrote on Christmas Day, 1845, “rests its base on … dark depths of misery and crime.”

  It has always been possible in New York to avert one’s eyes from the “dark depths,” but when Melville lived there the screen that divided rich from poor was wearing thin. Unofficial boundary lines broke up the city into crazy-quilt patterns of rich neighborhoods bordering on poor ones, with no transition or buffer between them. Fashionable shops illuminated by gaslight gave some neighborhoods the luminous enchantment of Paris by night, while a block or two away the only interruptions in the darkness were smudgy spots of light from oil lamps.

  Under these conditions, it was common for proper New Yorkers, as Margaret Fuller wrote in the Tribune, to “creep into a safe retreat, arrogantly to judge, or heartlessly to forget, the others.” Every crowd seemed potentially a mob. Periodic outbreaks of cholera were blamed on the mainly Irish immigrants, who were widely held responsible for the squalor in which they lived. As early as the 1820s, there were complaints about “worthless foreigners, disgorged upon our shores,” as if the Old World were excreting its waste into the New World, and broad agreement that “the inmates of [Europe’s] Alms-Houses … land as paupers, live as paupers, and have no ambition to live in any other way.” In 1844, even before the nativist and anti-Catholic “Know-Nothing” Party emerged as a force in national politics, New Yorkers elected a mayor who ran on the platform of “No Irish Need Apply,” and everyone blamed immigrants for the rising incidence of street crime. According to the New England reformer Lydia Maria Child, who had moved to the city in 1841, New York was “a sort of common sewer for the fil
th of nations.” Later, in Redburn, Melville was to write about this human “filth”—in this case German—just before it spilled ashore: “old men, tottering with age and little infants in arms; laughing girls in bright-buttoned bodices, and astute, middle-aged men with pictured pipes in their mouths,” who, while at sea, sang “the songs of Zion to the roll of the great ocean-organ.”

  When Melville moved to this increasingly immigrant city, the United States was just entering its “take-off” stage,† and New York was the best place to feel the power of the young nation coiled for release. Yet beneath the ebullience was a sense of foreboding that the social problems accompanying industrialization—worker unrest, disease born of unsanitary conditions, predatory crime among the poor—were heading for America like a toxic cloud drifting in from Europe. Newspaper editors sent fast schooners to meet incoming ships miles out at sea in order to bring back the latest news from Paris or London ahead of the competition. By the late 1840s, the news was of socialist dreams, utopian experiments in communal living, and heady visions of a new international regime of democracy. Led by Giuseppe Mazzini, the Young Italy (Giovine Italia) movement sought to establish a Roman republic, and New Yorkers read about the struggle in the Tribune’s excited eyewitness letters from Greeley’s European correspondent, Margaret Fuller (who, according to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was “one of the out & out Reds”). By the late 1840s, the Tribune had become America’s first truly international newspaper, featuring articles in translation from German and French sources, including a column on revolutionary events by a socialist sympathizer named Karl Marx.

  By February 1848, the unrest had spread to France, and Europe seemed on the brink of conflagration. Mobs of workers and students in Paris tore up paving stones and pulled up trees in order to build barricades against the king’s army. George Duyckinck, on a European tour, wrote to Evert that “every shop was shut … [and] doors, boards, carriages, whatever came to hand was pressed into the Barricade” by citizens “armed with rusty old swords, spits, hatchets and iron bars from the railings of the nearest church.” Within weeks, Louis Philippe abdicated, and Austria and Germany had descended into civil war, while in England (where the French king sought refuge), four thousand policemen were deployed in battle-ready formation on the Thames bridges to keep mobs of jobless men at bay, as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert fled for safety to the Isle of Wight.

  To the New York partisans of “Young America,” what was happening in the Old World seemed a kind of backdraft from the New World—a democratic wind sweeping away the remnants of feudalism as humankind embraced the doctrine (as Melville was to call it in Moby-Dick) of “divine equality.” Yet the prospect of political and social upheaval at home was growing as well. New technologies such as mechanized threshers were throwing agricultural workers out of work and swelling the flow of unskilled men to the cities even as the flow of immigrants across the Atlantic reached flood tide. By the mid-1840s, nearly half of New Yorkers were foreign-born, many living in wretched conditions, especially in winter, when frozen canals and sluggish ocean commerce reduced demand for packers and carters, leaving them no money for shelter just when they needed it most. In 1849, when Melville wrote in Redburn that “to be a born American citizen seems a guarantee against pauperism,” he was writing wishfully.

  As it became clear that this guarantee would not be honored, Young America came to believe that the only means of relieving the pressure of immigrants pouring into the city was to open the “safety-valve” of the frontier. Most of Melville’s friends in the Duyckinck circle were both democratic idealists and avowed expansionists, but in the 1840s it became increasingly difficult to reconcile these two commitments. The first shock came in 1845, when the United States annexed the Republic of Texas by admitting it to the Union as a slave state. Already in 1844, when Gansevoort Melville had stumped for Polk, the strain between pro- and anti-slavery Democrats had grown severe, and Gansevoort tried to mediate between the anti-annexationist camp (still loyal to the venerable Martin Van Buren) and the Polk expansionists. At one point, the influential editor of the Post, William Cullen Bryant, proposed splitting the difference—secretly urging New York Democrats to vote for Polk but, in congressional contests, to support only candidates who opposed annexation. When fighting broke out in 1846 between the United States and Mexico over competing land claims, opposition to the war surged among anti-slavery northerners, both Whigs and Democrats, who opposed it as a ploy to enlarge the territory open to slavemasters. The battle cry of the Democratic Party, “Manifest Destiny,” first used in The Democratic Review in 1845 by Duyckinck’s friend John L. O’Sullivan, was coming to seem a pretext for an imperialist land grab.

  Allowing for the imprecision of such analogies, it may be said that the political atmosphere in which Melville found himself during his New York years was a nineteenth-century preview of what twentieth-century Democrats were to experience in the 1960s. The Democrats of Melville’s day, as well as progressive Whigs like Greeley, saw themselves as inheritors of Andrew Jackson’s political struggle against that “class … who … hedge themselves round with exclusive privileges and elevate themselves at the expense of the great body of the people.” Their literary program was populist and nationalist. They defined themselves as partisans of the New against the Old, of Youth against Age, of the Future against the Past. “Manifest Destiny” was their “New Frontier.” (“Americanos! Conquerors! Marchers humanitarian!” Whitman wrote, trying to hold the ideas of conquest and liberation together in one poetic line.) But just as the Democrats of the 1960s saw the New Deal consensus weakened and ultimately destroyed by a war that drove them into bitterly opposed factions, Democrats of the 1840s split over the Mexican War, which exposed the dirty secret of the expansionist ideology—that it favored slavery. By the end of the decade, even as the editors of The Democratic Review insisted that “slavery in the South will never break up our glorious Union,” everyone could see that the Jacksonian consensus was coming apart. Greeley, though nominally a Whig, shared the Democratic enthusiasm for expansion, and coined the phrase “Go West, young man”; but he moved to the left on the issue of slavery and eventually became a critic of President Lincoln for moving too slowly toward emancipation. O’Sullivan, champion of “Manifest Destiny,” drifted to the right and ended his career as a Confederate sympathizer. A fissure was opening up between men who had once stood together on the platform of Democracy.

  The Democratic Funeral of 1848. Calhoun, wearing an iron collar labeled “Slavery,” is at center carrying the stretcher bearing the bodies of Martin Van Buren (as a fox) and Lewis Cass (as a gas bag). The body of retiring President Polk is borne on the second stretcher. Cartoon published by Abel & Durang, Philadelphia, 1848 (list of illustrations 4.4)

  In the summer of 1847, Melville fell into the breach. Duyckinck asked him to write something for Yankee Doodle about the hero of the Mexican War, General Zachary Taylor, and Melville complied with “Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack,” a series of sketches that recounts Taylor’s habit of slapping his buttocks whenever he wants to emphasize a point (which was often), thus wearing down “the seat in his ample pants” until they become almost threadbare. Knowing how thin the cloth has become, a drummer boy puts a tack in Zack’s saddle, expecting that when the General jumps off his horse with the pin in his ass, everyone will blame the Mexicans. The “Old Zack” sketches were the closest thing that Melville ever did to hackwork, and yet they waver between affection and contempt—tonal incongruities that tell us something about his growing political confusion. Like his friends in the Duyckinck circle, he was unable to reconcile the messianic vision of “Manifest Destiny” (as late as September 1847, Walt Whitman could still refer to the Mexican War as “the best kind of conquest”) with the increasingly manifest fact that America was making the world safe not so much for democracy as for slavery. Writing some twenty years later in Clarel about the mixed motives of medieval Crusaders, Melville remained persuaded that “in that age,” no less t
han in his own, “Belief devout and bandit rage / Frequent were conjoined.”

  6.

  In the summer of 1847, newly married and settled in the house on Fourth Avenue, Melville put punditry aside and resumed his career as a writer of books. Determined to free himself from his lingering reputation as an author who passed off fiction as fact, he announced that this time he was writing a pure “romance” in order to “see whether, the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity; in some degree the reverse of my previous experience.” The new book, Mardi, took shape in his mind as yet another tale of a young man (Taji) who jumps ship with a friend, but it quickly left realism behind and became a fantasy tour of its author’s imagination. In a letter of March 1848 to John Murray, the English publisher who had brought out Omoo, Melville explained about his new work that “proceeding in my narrative of facts I began to feel an incurable distaste for the same; and a longing to plume my pinions for a flight, and felt irked, cramped and fettered by plodding along with dull commonplaces,—So suddenly abandoning the thing alltogether, I went to work heart and soul at a romance.” Murray balked, adopting what Melville called an “Antarctic tenor” in his reply, and Mardi, with its “peculiar thoughts & fancies of a Yankee upon politics & other matters,” was eventually published in London in March 1849 by Murray’s rival, Richard Bentley. In April, Harper & Brothers brought it out in New York.