Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  The strongest writing in White-Jacket comes when Melville describes the sight of men mangled by the strap and recalls his memory of fearing that he would be flogged himself. Here, as the narrator is arraigned at the mast for an infraction he has not committed, the boatswain’s mate stands “curling his fingers through the cat,” waiting for the captain to give the order:

  The Captain stood on the weather-side of the deck. Sideways … was the opening of the lee-gangway, where the side ladders are suspended in port. Nothing but a slight of sinnate-stuff served to rail in this opening … and though he was a large, powerful man, it was certain that a sudden rush against him, along the slanting deck, would infallibly pitch him headforemost into the ocean.

  Awaiting his stripes, the boy invokes nature as justification for pitching the captain overboard:

  I but swung to an instinct in me—the instinct diffused through all animated nature, the same that prompts even a worm to turn under the heel. Locking souls with him, I meant to drag Captain Claret from this earthly tribunal of his to that of Jehovah.… Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has, of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose. These are the last resources of an insulted and unendurable existence.

  Then an officer steps forward in the nick of time, and the exonerated boy is thereby spared the lash.

  Flogging in the Navy was abolished by act of Congress shortly after Melville’s book was published, but flogging was already a safe issue on which to call for reform.‡ Yet informing the flogging scenes in White-Jacket was the more contentious issue of slavery. No one in America could read in 1850 about people living “an insulted and unendurable existence” without thinking of slaves, though Melville touched the issue only gingerly, allowing it into his book as a whispered analogy. When he says that for a flogged sailor, “our Revolution was in vain” and “our Declaration of Independence … a lie,” he was unwittingly anticipating the words of former slave Frederick Douglass, who in 1852 would ask, with mordant irony, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?”

  As he had done in Redburn, Melville wrote into White-Jacket a displaced commentary on an ominous American reality—poverty in the former case, slavery in the latter. In a harrowing chapter, “Fun in a Man-of-War”—which Ralph Ellison may have had in mind for the account of the “Battle Royal” in his Invisible Man, in which young black men beat each other senseless before a delighted white crowd—Melville described how white sailors take sadistic pleasure in watching black men knock heads. “Head-bumping,” he explains, “consists in two negroes … butting at each other like rams.” When the two black men get overzealous and start to fight in earnest, the captain, for whom such performances are “an especial favorite,” reminds them that “I … permit you to play [but] I will have no fighting.” Naturally, he follows up the reprimand by having them flogged.

  9.

  “I have swam through libraries,” Melville was soon to write about these immensely productive New York years, by which he meant both Evert Duyckinck’s personal library on Clinton Street and the New York Society Library (located then on Broadway between Leonard Street and Catherine Lane, and still in operation today on East Seventy-ninth Street), which he had joined as a shareholding member in January 1848. More and more, Melville’s writing bore the marks of wide and eclectic reading, which included Montaigne, Defoe, Coleridge, Dante, Schiller, Thackeray, and Seneca, as well as those seventeenth-century prose masters Robert Burton and Thomas Browne; he referred to the last as a “crack’d Archangel.”

  In Mardi, his range of reference had vastly expanded over that of Typee and Omoo:

  Like a grand, ground swell, Homer’s old organ rolls its vast volumes under the light frothy wave-crests of Anacreon and Hafiz; and high over my ocean, sweet Shakspeare soars, like all the larks of the spring. Throned on my sea-side, like Canute, bearded Ossian smites his hoar harp, wreathed with wild-flowers, in which warble my Wallers; blind Milton sings bass to my Petrarchs and Priors, and laureats crown me with bays.

  And for White-Jacket Melville pillaged many sea-voyaging tales, among them an obscure volume called A Mariner’s Sketches, by Nathaniel Ames, in which he found a frightening account of a sailor’s fall from the yardarm into the sea. He turned that passage into a near-death experience in which, tumbling toward unconsciousness, the narrator feels “soul-becalmed” until “of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, coiled fish of the sea” that shocks him back to life. Having reversed his fall and ascended to the surface just before he would have inhaled the fatal water, the sailor finds himself weighed down by the “placental” jacket until he rips it “up and down, as if I were ripping open myself.”

  While in the Pacific, Melville had never fallen from a mast—but in the oceanic city of New York he experienced just such a breakout into freedom. It was in this “metropolitan magnificence” that he divested himself of his last vestiges of pride and pretense, and it was here that his writing took on what Warner Berthoff has called its “distinct and original signature suggestive of some whole new apprehension.” One feels the new style emerging in Omoo, and by the time of Mardi Melville had acquired an emphatic New York voice—as in this riff (spoken by Babbalanja) on the theme of smoking, in which pipes turn into symbols of fidelity and cigarettes into signs of mortality:

  Like a good wife, a pipe is a friend and companion for life. And whoso weds with a pipe, is no longer a bachelor. After many vexations, he may go home to that faithful counselor, and ever find it full of kind consolations and suggestions. But not thus with cigars or cigarrets: the acquaintances of a moment, chatted with in by-places, whenever they come handy; their existence so fugitive, uncertain, unsatisfactory. Once ignited, nothing like longevity pertains to them. They never grow old.… The stump of a cigarret is an abomination; and two of them crossed are more of a memento-mori, than a brace of thigh-bones at right angles.

  The pipe is wife or friend, the cigarette a passerby, messenger in a hurry, or one-night whore; the passage catches the rhythm of a city in which “fugitive” chats occur a hundred times a day, where Melville moved between the “vexations” of the street and the comforts of his first post-bachelor home. Though not quite yet his mature voice, it has advanced far beyond what Charles Briggs or Cornelius Mathews or any of the established New York novelists of the day could do. Melville does not exactly write about the city, but the patter of images has the city’s pulse and moves toward the rambling anthological prose of Moby-Dick.

  In The Confidence-Man, written some six years after he left New York, Melville asked, and answered, a salient question: “Where does any novelist pick up any character? For the most part, in town, to be sure. Every great town is a kind of man-show, where the novelist goes for his stock, just as the agriculturalist goes to the cattle-show for his.” This claim may seem odd coming from a writer in whose fiction—except for Harry Bolton in Redburn, and a handful of characters in Pierre, “Bartleby,” and such minor stories as “Jimmy Rose”—the urban population is notably low. Yet it was not so much on Melville’s plots or characters or settings that New York left its mark as in the nerve and sinew of his prose. It was here that he fulfilled Tocqueville’s prediction that when America came of age, its literature would be “fantastic, incorrect, overburdened … loose … vehement and bold”; here that he moved through vehemence (“fire flames on my tongue”) toward a kind of ecstatic blasphemy. His plethoric tables of contents (Mardi has 195 chapters, White-Jacket 93, and Moby-Dick 135 plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue) look strikingly like those of the city magazines he was reading and for which he occasionally wrote. Here is an alphabetical sampling of articles in the 1847 issue of Yankee Doodle that ran one of Melville’s “Old Zack” sketches:

  An Amazed Author

  The Battle of the Frogs and Mice

&nbs
p; Cruelty to Seamen

  Drawing the Line

  Freeks of Feeling

  Great Shakes

  Highly Important

  “I Drunk!”

  New Melody

  Poetry for the Million

  Scenes in our Sanctum

  Skeleton Found

  Slang

  Who asked you?

  Zeal out running Discretion

  And here is a sampling of chapter titles from Moby-Dick, which Melville began writing while in New York:

  Loomings

  Chowder

  Merry Christmas

  The Whiteness of the Whale

  Hark!

  The Hyena

  Monstrous Pictures of Whales

  Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales

  Of Whales, in Paint, in Teeth, &c.

  The Whale as a Dish

  The Pequod Meets the Jeroboam. Her Story

  Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton

  Before his move to New York, Melville’s prose had stayed pretty much within the limits of conventional narrative; but as he immersed himself in the city, his books became eclectic miscellanies, with innumerable tangents spoking out from the spine of the story, each one reaching for some new analogy that diverts our attention to some novel sensation, or topic, or fact. The city itself was a circulating collection of newspapers, leaflets, business cards, broadsides, tabloids, placards, magazines, banners, hired men walking the streets in sandwich boards, signs affixed to carriages (the nineteenth-century equivalent, as one historian has remarked, of bumper stickers), and Melville swam with pleasure through this outdoor collection en route to the indoor reading rooms where he went for more traditional literary plunder.

  Moving clause by clause through Melville’s New York prose is like strolling, or browsing, on a city street: each turn of phrase brings a fresh association; sometimes we are brought up short by a startling image requiring close inspection; sometimes a rush of images flickers by; but there is always the feeling of quickened pulse, of some unpredictable excitement, in aftermath or anticipation. And if New York broke open Melville’s style, it opened his mind as well to the cosmopolitan idea of a nation to which one belongs not by virtue of some blood lineage that leads back into the past, but by consent to the as-yet-unrealized ideal of a nation comprehending all peoples (“our blood is as the flood of the Amazon,” he wrote in Redburn, “made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one”) in a future of universal freedom. New York was the birthplace of Melville’s democratic imagination—both in substance and style.

  With the exception of family trips upstate and to Boston, Melville was relatively stationary during the three years that he lived in New York, from the summer of 1847 till the summer of 1850. One extended absence was a four months’ journey to London and the Continent in the fall and winter of 1849–50, undertaken mainly for the purpose of placing White-Jacket with an English publisher. He had become, by then, a city creature. In his London diary, we get a glimpse of his “vagabonding thro’ the courts & lanes” (including the red-light districts), book buying, bar-hopping, theater- and museum-going, a man at ease with every aspect of urban life from the private gentlemen’s clubs to the spectacle of a public execution. “The mob was brutish,” he wrote in his journal about the howling crowd at a public hanging. (Charles Dickens was present, too, though the two men were unaware of each other.) These city years had deepened the ambivalence he had acquired at sea toward what he later called “ruthless democracy.” In New York, in May 1849, when an anti-British mob attacked the theater at Astor Place to show their contempt for the English actor William Macready, Melville could hear from his house the roar of the crowd and the gunfire from troops called in to quell the rioting. It was an experience that chastened him and, as the scholar Dennis Berthold has cogently written, left him “struggling to understand … a world where … working-class people opposed abolitionism, immigration, and foreign culture, and where state militias murdered citizens,” and thereby further estranged him from “unreflective nationalism.” The energy of the city now felt but one step removed from anarchy, and the faraway revolutions of Europe seemed close to home.

  The Bill-Poster’s Dream, lithograph by B. Derby, 1862 (list of illustrations 4.6)

  Yet Melville is not usually thought of as an urban writer. He tends to be left out of discussions of the “New York School” in American writing—in which declamatory writers such as Whitman and Allen Ginsberg take up their places along with salon writers from Washington Irving to Calvin Trillin, whose cocktail-hour wit suits the small format of the New York magazine sketch. There has never been, however, an American writer more deeply affected, indeed infected, by the tone and rhythm of the city. “Herman by birth & from his residence in the city of New York,” his sister Augusta wrote in 1857, “is known as a New Yorker; all his books are published in that city; all his interests are there.…” Duyckinck, on the other hand, thought him more at home “in the fields and in the study, looking out upon the mountain … [where] he finds congenial nourishment for his faculties, without looking much to cities.” They were both right.

  The city impressed itself indelibly upon Melville’s imagination. It gave his writing a new form, or rather, it liberated him to experiment with formlessness. As the New York Times critic A. O. Scott wrote in an evocative piece (“With Ishmael in the Island City”) published shortly after September 11, 2001, Melville’s work is filled with that New York “feeling of loneliness in the midst of bustle.” He understood, as Scott says, that while “viewed objectively, our lives are small and inconsequential [and] our choices nugatory … they never feel that way, and we struggle to comprehend the nature of the bonds, random or providential, that tether us to history.” A few years after he had moved away from New York (temporarily, as it turned out), Melville remembered the city as a vanity contest:

  In towns there is large rivalry in building tall houses. If one gentleman comes next door and builds five stories high, then the former, not to be looked down upon that way, immediately sends for his architect and claps a fifth and a sixth story on top of his previous four. And not till the gentleman has achieved his aspiration, not till he has stolen over the way by twilight and observed how his sixth story soars beyond his neighbor’s fifth—not till then does he retire to his rest with satisfaction.

  He concluded this reflection with a pastoral suggestion: “Such folks, it seems to me, need mountains for neighbors, to take this emulous conceit of soaring out of them.” This is the Melville who put New York behind him by moving in the summer of 1850 to the Berkshire hills. But it was in New York that he had turned his own incipient hubris into the bold and brawling prose equivalent of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” Melville experienced the great city as every true New Yorker has always experienced it—with a combustible combination of love and hate, out of which his major work was starting to take form.

  * In such recent representations of antebellum New York as Kevin Baker’s novel Paradise Alley (2001) or Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York (2002), we get a vision of a city where the gutters run not so much with water as with blood.

  † The economist Walt Rostow, who coined that term and identified 1844 as the “take-off” year, was named after that ultimate New York booster Walt Whitman.

  ‡ In September 1850, Congress enacted a law abolishing flogging, and during the debates leading up to its passage, one writer for The National Era urged that Melville’s book “be placed in the hands of every member of Congress.” There is no evidence, however, that this was done. See Howard P. Vincent, The Tailoring of Melville’s White-Jacket (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 4, and Myra C. Glenn, “The Naval Reform Campaign Against Flogging: A Case Study in Changing Attitudes Toward Corporal Punishment, 1830–1850,” American Quarterly 35, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 408–25.

  CHAPTER 5

  HUNTING THE WHALE

  1.

  The first glimpse we get of Melville in the grip of his ma
sterpiece comes in a letter to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., on May 1, 1850, declaring that he was “half way” into “a strange sort of book” about a whaling voyage. There was nothing especially original or arresting about this choice of subject, since storms at sea, shipwreck, mariners lost, harbors bristling with mast and sail were all common themes in art as well as in the writing of the day. These subjects, and whaling in particular, were familiar fare at a time when most people still lived on or near the coast and felt a certain intimacy with the “watery part of the world.” Yet Melville’s drive to break the boundaries of literary form reflected his sense that neither he nor anyone else had yet found a way to adequately describe it.

  Searching for models in art as well as literature, he had roamed the picture galleries during his trip to London, visiting the Dulwich and Vernon collections, the newly established National Gallery, the royal collections at Hampton Court and Windsor Castle, and the vast private collection of Samuel Rogers. He had seen seascapes by Canaletto and Claude Lorrain, and was particularly drawn to those of J. M. W. Turner, in which he saw intimations of what, in Moby-Dick, he was to call the “howling infinite.” Early in his new book he describes a painting of an indistinct sea scene, consisting of “unaccountable masses of shades and shadows,” that seemed to him an effort “to delineate chaos” itself. When he described this fictional picture, he may have had in mind Turner’s vertiginous paintings, which Hazlitt had aptly described as “pictures of nothing … representations not so properly of the objects of nature as of the medium through which they are seen.” In one of the books that Melville consulted while composing Moby-Dick, Thomas Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale, he wrote on the title page this high compliment: “Turner’s pictures of whalers were suggested by this book.”