Taji’s object of desire in Mardi is a beautiful maiden who hails from “the Island of Delights, somewhere in the paradisiacal archipelago,” about whom Melville wrote as if she were a goddess in some Ovidian allegory of love:
Her name was Yillah. And hardly had the waters of Oroolia washed white her olive skin, and tinged her hair with gold, when one day strolling in the woodlands, she was snared in the tendrils of a vine. Drawing her into its bowers, it gently transformed her into one of its blossoms, leaving her conscious soul folded up in the transparent petals.
Here hung Yillah in a trance, the world without all tinged with the rosy hue of her prison. At length when her spirit was about to burst forth in the opening flower, the blossom was snapped from its stem; and borne by a soft wind to the sea; where it fell into the opening valve of a shell.
The rest of the story—double the length of any of Melville’s previous books—is taken up with Taji’s search through the watery world for Yillah, who tantalizes him with tokens of her presence; but the book ends without ending, as “pursuers and pursued flew on, over an endless sea.”
What Melville produced in Mardi was a wildly miscellaneous mix of lyrical writing and metaphysical disquisitions (mostly uttered by a babbling philosopher well named Babbalanja), but by the spring and summer of 1848, when he was deep into the book, political events once again seized his attention. In mid-March, Evert Duyckinck wrote to George, who was still in Paris, that “a walk in Broadway to-day is a thing of excitement, the news of the Revolution in Paris having imparted to every one that vivacity of eye, quickness of intelligence and general exhilaration which great public events extend to private ones.” To press the analogy between Melville’s time and ours, one may say that 1848 was the 1968 for his generation—a year of worker-student alliances and revolutionary manifestos promising the advent of a new age. Everyone was swept up by the high hopes. “I am fairly en rapport with the Revolution,” Evert announced to his brother when, in France, the poet-statesman Alphonse de Lamartine (a “wondrous” man “of physical and moral courage,” according to Whitman) briefly led the Second Republic. Everywhere in Europe, autocratic governments were teetering, and some fell.
But by the early summer of 1848, reaction had set in and the restorationists were gaining the upper hand. In France, the “great whale the French revolution,” as Duyckinck called it, was already in its death throes; the brief period of republican rule came to a bloody end in June when government troops fought pitched battles in the streets of Paris against workers armed chiefly with sticks and stones. By the time the smoke cleared, more than four thousand French citizens had died, and in the aftermath hundreds more were hunted down and shot without trial or sent to labor camps in Algeria. Within weeks, Lamartine was gone and the general who had quelled the uprisings had assumed dictatorial power. Looking back two decades later on these events, again in his retrospective poem Clarel, Melville was to write:
What if the Kings in Forty-Eight
Fled like the gods? Even as the gods
Shall do, return they made; and sate
And fortified their strong abodes.
In Mardi, these events show up in digressive excursions into such half-imaginary countries as “Dominora” (England), where workers march for their rights; “Franko” (France), where the fires of revolution are still flaring; and “Vivenza” (the United States), where bag-of-wind politicians try to talk the slavery issue to death. In 1847, when Melville had begun work on Mardi, calls for revolution were just beginning to be heard; by the time he finished it in the fall of 1848, reaction and restoration were at hand; and in December, Louis Napoleon ascended to the throne once held by his uncle Bonaparte. A few American observers, such as Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun, saw the failed radicals of Europe as heroes who had tried valiantly, if too soon, to extend political rights to all citizens. But most Americans, including Melville, took a “plague on both their houses” attitude toward what amounted to a European civil war. “Evil,” he wrote in Mardi, “is the chronic malady of the universe, and checked in one place, breaks forth in another.”
Under the pressure of events, Melville had veered again into politics, but the cycle of revolution and reaction finally seemed to him a faraway piece of theater, and in most of Mardi he directed his attention inward. This was, as the Jungian critic Henry Murray has written, the book in which he discovered the unconscious and explored (in Melville’s words) “the world of mind; wherein the wanderer may gaze round, with more of wonder than Balboa’s band roving through the golden Aztec glades.” Melville learned in this book to accede to his reckless moods (“better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye Gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do”) and to follow his “radiant young” muse wherever she might take him:
far to the South, past my Sicily suns and my vineyards, stretches the Antarctic barrier of ice: a China wall, built up from the sea, and nodding its frosted towers in the dun, clouded sky. Do Tartary and Siberia lie beyond? Deathful, desolate dominions those; bleak and wild the ocean, beating at that barrier’s base, hovering ’twixt freezing and foaming; and freighted with navies of ice-bergs,—warring worlds crossing orbits; their long icicles, projecting like spears to the charge. Wide away stream the floes of drift ice, frozen cemeteries of skeletons and bones. White bears howl as they drift from their cubs; and the grinding islands crush the skulls of the peering seals.
Mardi was published almost simultaneously in London and New York to mixed notices, ranging from an article in Blackwood’s that dismissed it as “rubbishing rhapsody” to a long, respectful review by a French critic that Duyckinck ran in translation in The Literary World. Melville later remarked to Duyckinck that his book had been “stabbed at (I do not say through)—& therefore, I am the wiser for it.” To his credit, Duyckinck recognized Mardi as “an onward development” for a writer working now in a mood of honeymoon eagerness, driven on, as Melville said of himself, by a “blast resistless.” “Like a frigate,” he wrote, “I am full with a thousand souls; and as on, on, on, I scud before the wind, many mariners rush up from the orlop below, like miners from caves; running shouting across my decks.”
In a letter to her stepmother written in December 1847, Lizzie conveyed the heady mood of these New York days, making as clear as decency would permit that she and her “industrious boy” took domestic but still flirtatious pleasure in each other as she managed the household while he threw himself into his writing:
We breakfast at 8 o’clock, then Herman goes to walk, and I fly up to put his room to rights, so that he can sit down to his desk immediately on his return. Then I bid him good bye, with many charges to be an industrious boy and not upset the inkstand, and then flourish the duster, make the bed, etc., in my own room. Then I go downstairs and read the papers a little while, and after that I am ready to sit down to my work—whatever it may be—darning stockings—making or mending for myself or Herman—at all events I haven’t seen a day yet, without some sewing or other to do. If I have letters to write, as is the case to-day, I usually do that first—but whatever I am about, I do not much more than get throughly engaged in it, than ding-dong goes the bell for luncheon. This is half past 12 o’clock—by this time we must expect callers, and so must be dressed immediately after lunch. Then Herman insists upon my taking a walk of an hour’s length at least. So unless I can have rain or snow for an excuse, I usually sally out and make a pedestrian tour a mile or two down Broadway. By the time I come home it is two o’clock and after, and then I must make myself look as bewitchingly as possible to meet Herman at dinner. This being accomplished, I have only about an hour of available time left. At four we dine, and after dinner is over, Herman and I come up to our room and enjoy a cosy chat for an hour or so—or he reads me some of the chapters he has been writing in the day. Then he goes down town for a walk, looks at the papers in the reading room, etc., and returns about half-past seven or eight. Then my work or my book is laid aside, and as he does not use
his eyes but very little by candle light, I either read to him, or take a hand at whist for his amusement, or he listens to our reading or conversation, as best pleases him. For we all collect in the parlour in the evening, and generally one of us reads aloud for the benefit of the whole. Then we retire very early—at 10 o’clock we all disperse.
Elizabeth and infant Malcolm, c. 1850 (list of illustrations 4.5)
To help buy his share of this house in which he spent his days writing with breaks for meals, walks, and whist, Melville had been offered a $2,000 gift by Lizzie’s father. But having insisted on regarding the gift as a loan, he found himself worrying about money, and with “duns all round him … looking over the back of his chair,” he recognized, as he said of a character in Mardi, “the necessity of bestirring himself to procure his yams.” It took him eighteen months to write Mardi—a slow earnings pace, considering that the $500 advanced by Harper Brothers was not payable till the end of 1848, though the situation was helped when Bentley advanced 200 guineas, in March 1848, for the English edition.
When their first child, Malcolm, was born in February 1849, Herman and Lizzie were at her parents’ home in Boston, and the new father wrote to Allan (to whom a child had also just been born) an oddly arch letter:
When old Zack heard of it—he is reported to have said—“Mark me: That boy will be President of the United States before he dies.”…
The harbor here is empty:—all the ships, brigs, schooners & smacks have scattered in all directions with the news for foreign parts … & … the Devil roared terribly bethinking him of the lusty foe to sin born into this sinful world.—
The author of this letter was a man in high spirits, but also a man with a growing awareness of his responsibilities.
Soon after Mardi was published, he bestirred himself to work faster. After dashing off some reviews for The Literary World, he composed his next two books, Redburn and White-Jacket, in quick succession in the spring and summer. Even before they appeared (in November 1849 and March 1850), he was denigrating them to his father-in law as “two jobs which I have done for money—being forced to it as other men are to sawing wood.” After reading a laudatory review of Redburn, he was even harsher in his journal: “I, the author, know [it] to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with.”
7.
In fact, by comparison to the windy ramble of Mardi, both Redburn and White-Jacket were deft and well paced. For Redburn, Melville reverted to the autobiographical and realist mode, recounting his first ocean crossing of ten years earlier, followed by his experiences in the “pestilent lanes and alleys” of Liverpool, which he found “very much such a place as New York,” and in London, where his “lady-like” friend Harry Bolton shows him around the bordellos and gambling dens. Young Redburn, equipped with a guidebook inherited from his father, and having “impressed every column and cornice in my mind” from the book’s illustrations, had hoped to retrace his father’s route via “priory or castle” around Merrie Olde England. But time has obliterated the picturesque past; and while looking in vain for his father’s world, he discovers instead an unmapped world of cruelty and corruption.
In a chapter worthy of Carlyle or Dickens, Melville described Redburn’s encounter with a woman dying in the gutter with “two shrunken things like children” enfolded in her “blue arms.” Unused to such sights and ill-prepared by his father’s tourist guide, he stands transfixed as one of the children, too feeble to cry, lifts her head and whimpers while he rushes off for help. Everywhere he turns he is rebuffed—by passersby, loiterers, ragpickers, even policemen (“It’s none of my business, Jack … I don’t belong to that street”)—and all he can do is throw down some bread and cheese, at which one of the girls “caught … convulsively” but lacked sufficient strength to chew or swallow. For a moment, Redburn wonders if he has the courage to commit a mercy killing to end their suffering. After further attempts to find help, he returns to the spot, from which there now wafts the smell of rotting corpses. Going off to inform a policeman, he comes back once more to find that this time the authorities have taken action: mother and children are gone, and on the spot where they died is a pile of lime.
With an infant mortality rate among the poor of nearly two in three, versus less than one in five for the rich, Liverpool was a blighted Old World city, and by 1849 Melville knew that New York had become the portal through which such miseries were entering the United States. He still clung to the idea that for the likes of those he had seen dying in the Liverpool gutter, America (“not a Paradise then, or now; but to be made so, at God’s good pleasure, and in the fullness and mellowness of time”) could furnish refuge. He had imbibed from his New York friends a messianic idealism, though within a few years, in a story entitled “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” he was to write that the poor in America “suffer more in mind than the poor of any other people in the world” because of “the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and their grindstone experience.”
In the concluding chapters of Redburn, Melville looked back to his experience of sailing home from Liverpool on a ship carrying hundreds of Irish emigrants packed in steerage as if in “dog-kennels.” While struggling to stay alive on bits of sea biscuit, they were tormented by rumors that they were going to be sold en route as slaves in Barbary. Redburn was Melville’s unflinching rendition of what might be called the prehistory of these newest New Yorkers, who endured weeks at sea huddled “ ’tween decks,” where clearance was too low for a man of average height to stand upright. Many had been coaxed aboard by traffickers who, after renting storage space aboard ship, made big profits by charging as much as twenty-five dollars each; and those who survived the extortion and shipboard conditions were met at the New York pier by slumlord runners who brought them under threat to boardinghouses where they were forced to pay exorbitant rents.
Before the exodus from the Irish famine was over, more than a quarter of Ireland’s population had died or fled, including a million people who crossed the Atlantic. Lydia Child, who had moved to New York from Boston in order to edit an abolitionist newspaper, did not extend her sympathies for Negro slaves to these desperate emigrants, whom she likened to dogs. But Melville was moved by them: he describes in Redburn the stunned joy of an old man who, on a brief escape to the deck, watches porpoises leap in the sea, and terrified children begging their empty-handed mothers for bread, while adults with typhus are dragged behind a screen to die out of sight. Melville was touched by how, to these emigrants, “America must have seemed as a place just over a river. Every morning some of them came on deck, to see how much nearer we were: and one old man would stand for hours together, looking straight off from the bows, as if he expected to see New York city every minute, when, perhaps, we were yet two thousand miles distant, and steering, moreover, against a head wind.” Redburn was a rebuke to the xenophobes: “Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores; let us waive it, with the one only thought, that if they can get there, they have God’s right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them.”
Like the other books that Melville produced at Mozartean speed during his New York years, Redburn was a book of old maritime memories overlaid by new urban experiences. Whether he was writing about emigrants at sea or about the “elbowing, heartless-looking crowd” ashore, he had become an urban writer. New York introduced him to a paradox of modern life: that one depends for psychic survival on a combination of high alertness and willed insouciance. In New York, Melville learned that to live in the modern world meant to live both widely and narrowly—widely in the sense of cultivating a cosmopolitan awareness of human variety, but narrowly in the sense of shutting out the specter of human desperation that presses against the consciousness from all directions all the time.
8.
In the summer of 1849, with Redburn “going thro’ the press,” Melville remained in the city in
order to go over the proofs and to get started on his next book, which he dispatched in the amazingly short span of two months. The second of his two “jobs,” White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War was another paean on behalf of democracy, this time in the form of an embellished memoir of his fourteen months of naval service aboard the frigate United States, which he hopefully called the Neversink. White-Jacket was as loose and baggy as the garment for which it is named—the many-pocketed coat that signifies the narrator’s puffed-up pride. In its pacing, the book was closer to Mardi than to Redburn—organized as a series of illustrative vignettes that oscillate between dignity and cruelty as the men of the ship rise at once to defend one another in the face of arbitrary power and then, at the next moment, take pleasure in the unmerited punishment of a fellow sailor.
The crew of the Neversink included a number of stalwart democrats, notably the large-hearted Jack Chase, who treats every man as if he were a nobleman, with “a polite, courteous way of saluting you, if it were only to borrow your knife,” and the dignified old Ushant, the “Nestor of the crew,” who rather than obey the captain’s order to shave his beard submits to a flogging and spends his last days aboard in the brig. But for every such paragon of dignity there is an abusive beast, led by the captain himself, whose favorite sport is flogging. The theme of White-Jacket was the co-existence in one society—and sometimes in one man—of the worst and best human impulses. Recalling the giddy feeling of working high aloft in the rigging, Melville’s narrator sees the dream of equality realized in the sight of small human figures working cooperatively on the deck far below; but coming face-to-face with the same men in the depths of the ship he discovers a festering ugliness, personified by a “Troglodite” Yeoman who, “immured all day in such a bottomless hole, among tarry old ropes,” keeps watch over the ship’s stores while casting “goggle-eyes” at young sailors.
Melville: His World and Work Page 16