Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  But if Melville found oceanic truth in Turner, he had not encountered anything comparable in words—not even in Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. In 1847, he had reviewed for Duyckinck’s Literary World a memoir by a ship captain entitled Etchings from a Whaling Cruise, finding it long on “unvarnished facts” but short on “the poetry of salt water.” Having already written five maritime books himself, he knew what a writer was up against in trying to bring the subject to life for landlocked readers. “Blubber is blubber you know,” he wrote to Dana, “tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves.” These early remarks about his new work-in-progress have a chipper lightness, as if he is getting ready to rattle off another yarn, trying this, discarding that, smoothing the kinks out; he gives no hint of being engaged in something of an altogether different order from anything he had attempted before. By speaking about the new book in a tone somewhere between modesty and self-denigration, he was tamping down his own expectations.

  Two months later, on June 27, we get another glimpse of Moby-Dick in the making, this time in a letter to his English publisher, Richard Bentley, to whom he expressed the hope that he would have the book done by fall. It will be, he says, “a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer.” In this bit of self-advertising, Melville was reverting to his old hyperbolics. The truth was less glamorous: the only ship on which he might have served as harpooneer was the Charles and Henry, on which he had lived and worked for not quite six months, from early November 1842 to mid-May 1843, and for which he had probably signed up as a boatsteerer.

  As he issued these progress reports—embellished as they inevitably are when an author writes to an editor—he was still living in New York. His speed of composition had slowed from the astonishing pace at which he had poured out Redburn and White-Jacket, which between them had taken only four months. By June he had been in the city uninterruptedly (with the possible exception of an excursion to West Point) since his return from England in February, and he was ready for a break. Lizzie was suffering from her annual spring allergy, or “rose cold,” and worried about being confined in the dusty town all summer. With the hot months approaching, Melville’s thoughts turned to the Berkshires, where he had spent some of his happiest childhood days on his uncle’s farm near Pittsfield—now owned by his cousin Robert, who, needing cash, had turned it into a boardinghouse that he advertised in the Pittsfield Sun as “unrivalled either for the beauty of its scenery or the salubrity of the air.” The place proved appealing enough to attract poets (the Longfellows had come from Cambridge two summers earlier) and ex-presidents (John Tyler had been a guest the previous fall), and for Melville there was the added enticement of childhood memories. It was a place, he knew, that provided opportunities for both sociability and solitude, a convenient meeting ground for the literati of New York and Boston, being roughly equidistant from each.

  By mid-July he was settled in, sharing the house with not only Lizzie and Malcolm but also Allan, Sophia, and their baby Maria, cousin Robert, his wife, children, and widowed mother, as well as a number of boarders, including a New York couple, John and Sarah Morewood, who, in fact, were in the process of buying the property from its financially pressed owner. Melville brought with him some books on whales and whaling that he had borrowed in New York for filling in factual details as he put the finishing touches—or so he thought—on his manuscript, which he somehow planned to polish off on summer holiday amid a gaggle of family and affable strangers.

  But the book had its own plans. It slowed down. Or, rather, it paused before taking off in a new direction and toward a new form. More than a year was to go by before the final version was ready for the press, and when publication was finally at hand, in September 1851, Melville wrote to Sarah Morewood:

  Don’t you buy it—don’t you read it, when it does come out, because it is by no means the sort of book for you. It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk—but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.

  A year earlier, when the evening air started to have an autumn bite, Melville had begun to turn his whaling adventure into the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer.

  2.

  In an expansive mood after sending off the upbeat letter to Bentley on June 27, he had come up to Pittsfield with Lizzie and little Malcolm, planning on a vacation of indefinite length. His comments on the jaunts he took with his cousin around the countryside in the third week of July are full of compliments (“Glorious place & fine old fellow”) about the several hosts who fed and supplied them with drink and bed when they stopped for the night. At the end of the month he made a quick trip back to the city to tend to business and collect the books he needed. His mood was high, as the country pleased him so much that he had pretty much made up his mind to move his family there. Though he had missed the chance to negotiate for his cousin’s place (a grand house, it has since been converted into the main building of the Pittsfield Country Club), he had his eye on a neighboring farm that he heard was coming on the market. This new prospect was more modest; yet, as Duyckinck later wrote, its “grounds would satisfy an English nobleman—for the noble maples and elms and various seclusions and outlooks and all for the price of a bricked city enclosure of 25 × 100!” Anticipating financial help from Lizzie’s father, Melville moved quickly toward a deal (transfer of the deed came in September) to buy these 160 acres spread out below Mount Greylock. He called his new home “Arrowhead,” in honor of the flint arrowheads that were dug up here and there around the property in planting season.

  While in the city, he invited Duyckinck to come up to join him in his temporary lodgings and, in a burst of unauthorized hospitality on behalf of his cousin Robert, he asked the long-winded Cornelius Mathews to come up too. Melville may have read Mathews’s bizarre romance (“as ridiculous a fanfaronade as the age produced,” according to one estimate) entitled Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound-Builders (1839), about prehistoric mound-dwellers who kill a giant mastodon after tracking it to the seashore, where they find the “mighty Brute resting on the sea … presenting, in the grandeur and vastness of his repose, a monumental image of Eternal Quiet.” In time for his thirty-first birthday on August 1 and his third wedding anniversary on August 4, Melville was back in Pittsfield, looking forward to a literary gathering planned for Monday, August 5, by a summer neighbor, the distinguished New York lawyer David Dudley Field.

  Field had in mind a picnic walk up Monument Mountain, to be followed by afternoon supper at his house. Along with Duyckinck and Mathews, the guest list included summer residents Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was renting a cottage near Lenox overlooking Stockbridge Lake. Duyckinck was enthralled. “The Poets have made no mistake,” he wrote. “The air is balm.” And when he got to the old Melvill mansion, to which the Morewoods were soon to give the aristocratic-sounding name “Broadhall” (possibly at the suggestion of Melville’s sister Kate), it struck him as a splendidly Gothic inheritance from times past. “Quite a piece of mouldering rural grandeur,” Duyckinck called it, as if he were visiting Poe’s House of Usher or Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables, and noted that “the family has gone down & this is their last season. The farm has been sold. Herman Melville knows every stone & tree & will probably make a book of its features. The old lady, his aunt, shows you a vial of the Boston tea, brought home by his grandfather in his shoes from the famous Boston tea party in the harbor.”

  The morning of the hike was misty, but for Melville it was to be a clarifying day. As thunderclouds rolled in and the other hikers scrambled to construct makeshift umbrellas ou
t of branches and picnic cloths, he ventured “to seat himself,” according to Duyckinck, “boldest of all, astride a projecting bow sprit of rock while little Dr. Holmes peeped about the cliffs and protested it affected him like ipecac.” After Melville had finished showing off his crow’s-nest cool on the edge of the precipice, the picnickers continued on, as the Boston publisher James T. Fields later recalled, “with merry shouts and laughter.”

  For the history of literature, the important occurrence on Monument Mountain was the immediate and intense connection established that day between Melville and Hawthorne. The older man (Hawthorne was forty-six) had reviewed Typee four years earlier, and his interest in Melville was now renewed by their meeting, which a local journalist reconstructed some thirty years later: “One day it chanced that when they were out on a pic-nic excursion, the two were compelled by a thunder-shower to take shelter in a narrow recess of the rocks of Monument Mountain. Two hours of enforced intercourse settled the matter. They learned so much of each other’s character, and found that they held so much of thought, feeling and opinion in common, that the most intimate friendship for the future was inevitable.” Within a few days, Hawthorne got hold of every book Melville had written and, as Sophia wrote to Duyckinck, read rapidly through them while lying “on the new hay in the barn.”

  Melville, too, turned to his new friend’s writings (he had received a copy of Mosses from an Old Manse as a gift from his aunt) and, in the days following, wrote an excited review of Mosses expressing gratitude to Hawthorne for having “dropped germinous seeds into my soul.” In Hawthorne he found a writer in touch with the dreamworld that he himself had begun to explore in Mardi—a writer who knew, as Hawthorne put it in one of the best stories of the collection, “The Birthmark,” that “truth … finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments.”

  That Melville was willing to take time off from his book testified not only to Hawthorne’s startling effect on him but also to his confidence that his manuscript had reached the filling-in stage when, as he had done with Typee and Omoo, he stepped back from what he had written and added here and there some ballast of factual detail gleaned from other books. He was still telling friends that his work was nearing completion. Two days after the picnic, Duyckinck, who published Melville’s Hawthorne review in The Literary World in two installments, on August 17 and 24, wrote to his brother George that “Melville has a new book mostly done,—a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery—something quite new.” There is no telling how much of the manuscript Duyckinck had actually read, or whether he was merely transmitting the author’s own account of it. “Romantic … fanciful … most enjoyable” are apt enough terms for the opening chapters (sometimes called “the land chapters”) that rehearse once again Melville’s trademark story of a young man in flight from his dreary life ashore in pursuit of something—though he knows not what—that might bring greater satisfaction. But the work that Duyckinck described is not the Moby-Dick we know, at least not the whole of it.

  Sometime after the mountain hike, Melville found himself scrutinizing what he had written so far, getting so close to it that he entered into it and tore it up from within. “Revision” is too slight a term for what he now set out to do. Reading Melville’s review of Mosses from an Old Manse today with the advantage of knowing that he was about to attack his own book anew, one discovers a writer whose ambition has risen beyond anything he had yet attempted. “You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in,” he writes about Hawthorne (who did not write about the sea), and chides Americans for leaving “to future generations the glad duty of acknowledging him for what he is.” Emboldened by Hawthorne’s example and by the approval Hawthorne had expressed for his own early work, Melville proclaimed his blood brotherhood with “Nathaniel of Salem,” whose “soft ravishments … spun me round about in a web of dreams” as they joined together in that fraternity where “genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”

  The review of Mosses was Melville’s announcement to the world of his own genius, registering not only his appreciation of Hawthorne in person and on the page but also his immersion in a number of great writers who now lifted him to a new level of epic ambition. There are echoes of Milton, as when he proclaims that it is “better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation” (Satan, in Paradise Lost, declares it “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n”), and he had accrued a special debt to Virgil. In September 1849, just before his trip to England, he had bought on account Harper’s Classical Library, which included John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid. In Mardi, he had mentioned “Virgil my minstrel,” and in White-Jacket, the sight of Jack Chase encouraging the poet Lemsford had put him in mind of the Roman patron “Mecaenas listening to Virgil, with a book of the Aeneid in his hand.” But these pro forma nods toward the Roman poet had been conventionally reverent; it was not until sometime in 1850 that Melville had his true encounter with the Aeneid and found himself recapitulating Virgil’s story of a haunted mariner voyaging out to avenge a grievous loss.*

  The men of Moby-Dick are Virgilian wanderers. They long for home even as fate calls them away from “safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.” Early in the book, one hears echoes of Virgil’s account of the Trojan mariners preparing, after brief respite, to set sail again with ships newly caulked as Queen Dido watches them from a hilltop in Carthage. There is the same mood of fated, if futile, human striving in Melville’s account of New Bedford as a place where men step briefly ashore before consigning themselves once more to the sea:

  New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale-ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

  The writing here has a controlled intensity of which Melville had not been previously capable. In the long second sentence, the range of alliterated initial consonant sounds mimics the “blended noises” of men laboring on the docks: the words begin with an aspirate “h” (“Huge hills”), a hard “c” (“cask on casks … carpenters and coopers”), a hard “s” (“side by side,” “silent and safely”), a “w” (world-wandering whale-ships), and an “f” (“fires and forges” and “for ever and for aye”)—seven pairs and one triplet of alliterated words that perfectly convey the ceaseless repetition of the dockside work. And by prolonging the sentence with a vowel sound (“aye”) as open-ended as a howl, Melville makes it feel as interminable as the work it describes, then ends the paragraph—but does not exactly conclude it—with a short sentence that reaches for some satisfying inference to be drawn from all that has gone before. He achieves here a mastery of verbal effects that one expects from only the most accomplished poetry.

  In the rhymed couplets of Dryden’s Aeneid, he encountered a poem full of images (“The Cables crack, the Sailors fearful Cries / Ascend; and sable Night involves the Skies; / And Heav’n itself is ravish’d from their Eyes”) that stirred his own memories of life at sea, as when he wrote of “that direst of storms, the Typhoon” tearing the sails from the Pequod’s masts, leaving them briefly visible in blazes of lightning, “fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the tempest had left for its after sport.” When Melville has the narrator of Moby-Dick envision himself losing his balance in a dreamy moment and dropping “t
hrough that transparent air into the summer sea,” he is retelling Book V of the Aeneid, in which the pilot Palinurus, having “clos’d his Swimming Eyes” under a spell from the god of sleep, plunges into the ocean and drowns.

  And then there was Frankenstein. While in London, Melville had acquired from Bentley a copy of Mary Shelley’s novel about an errant genius who hunts down the quasi-human monster he has created after it has turned against him and murdered the woman he loves. Having tracked the creature to the icy North, Frankenstein commandeers a scientific expeditionary ship headed to the Arctic and turns it into an instrument of his private vengeance. This story of obsession and revenge so captured Melville’s imagination that when he read in Lamb’s Final Memorials about William Godwin’s (Mary Shelley’s father) gift for creating characters “marvellously endowed with galvanic life,” he wrote in the margin: “Frankenstein.” Here, in a speech that installed itself in Melville’s mind, is Frankenstein’s oration to the ship’s crew as they falter, in the bitter cold, in their resolve: