Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  Are you then so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? And wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth, and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome.… Oh! be men, or be more than men.… This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable, and cannot withstand you, if you say that it shall not.

  “He spoke this,” reports the ship’s captain, even as he cedes to Frankenstein his authority over his own men, “with a voice so modulated to the different feelings expressed in his speech, with an eye so full of lofty design, and heroism, that can you wonder that these men were moved?” Melville was soon to write such a scene himself in “The Quarter-Deck” chapter of Moby-Dick, in which an irresistible orator exhorts his crew (“What say ye men … I think ye do look brave”) to prove themselves in their hour of peril. He was to name this man Ahab, after the Israelite king (I Kings 16:29–33) cursed for worshipping the pagan sun god Baal.

  3.

  With his head brimming with these and many other instigating readings—Virgil and Milton; Goethe’s musings on the “Titanic, gigantic, heaven-storming” Prometheus; William Beckford’s Arabian romance, Vathek; Carlyle’s portrait of Cromwell in Heroes and Hero-Worship; Shelley’s mad scientist; a slew of whaling books—the idea of Captain Ahab began to take form. At first, Ahab was a composite of the questers and avengers Melville had met in Beckford’s and Shelley’s novels, in Paradise Lost (in which Satan, banished to hell by God, vows “revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield”), and, more variously, in the plays of Shakespeare. Until recently, he had read only scantily in Shakespeare’s plays, since “every copy that was come-atable to me,” as he explained to Duyckinck, “happened to be in a vile small print unendurable to my eyes.” Stage performances had left him unmoved. After seeing Othello in London, he had merely noted in his journal that the famous William Macready (the object of the crowd’s contempt at the Astor Place riot) was “painted hideously” in the role of the Moor, and that the actress playing Desdemona was “very pretty.” To absorb Shakespeare’s meanings, he needed the silent encounter with words on the page.

  After finally acquiring a readable edition early in 1849, he discovered a Shakespeare far beyond the melodramatist (nineteenth-century productions of his plays were often grossly unfaithful to the text) who put on stage “Richard-the-third-humps and Macbeth daggers.” Inspired and astonished (“if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakespere’s person”), Melville reported to Duyckinck with almost childish delight as he read through his newly bought edition that “I now exult over it, page after page.” In the Hawthorne review, he explained more particularly what enthralled him: through such “dark characters” as “Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago,” Shakespeare “insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them.” Melville had begun to see the outlines of a character through whom he could speak such things himself.

  But this figure—a maimed and raging ship captain “with a crucifixion in his face”—was not yet in the book, or even distinctly in his mind. The central figure in the draft that Duyckinck read or heard described in early August was a young adventurer named Ishmael—after the son of Abraham by the slavewoman Haggar, whose story is told in Genesis 16—who leaves his onshore self behind, goes down, or up, or out (his trajectory is unclear) from New York, to New Bedford, to Nantucket, to the open sea aboard the whaleship Pequod. The question of what or whom he will find there is left in suspension, because while the ship is in port, the captain keeps himself hidden belowdecks and is known to the crew only by rumor.

  The first fifth or so of Melville’s book, probably written while he was still in New York, was devoted to this vagabond boy’s journey away from himself, with Ahab out of sight and, perhaps, out of mind. Ishmael checks into an inn at New Bedford whose entry is ominously adorned with that Turneresque painting of “a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre.” Inside the inn, the clientele consists of “chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards,” and Ishmael learns that by studying their skin he can tell how long they have been ashore:

  This young fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore.

  But none “could show a cheek like Queequeg,” the cannibal harpooneer from “an island far away to the West and South,” whose skin is so densely tattooed that it looks like parchment scratched over with hieroglyphs. The amused proprietor of the Spouter Inn assigns the nervous boy to share a room, and therefore a bed, with this frightful guest. When Ishmael asks if he “is a dangerous man,” the landlord replies that “he pays reg’lar”—not quite the reassurance Ishmael is looking for—and tells him that the man was last seen going off to sell the embalmed heads that he carries around with him dangling from a string like a bunch of onions. The story of Ishmael’s anticipatory anxiety about meeting Queequeg is the ultimate “meet your roommate” story, told with retrospective embarrassment at how worried he had been in advance of meeting the man who is about to become his “bosom friend.”

  Thrown in with such company, the narrator of Moby-Dick starts out as a prig and a prude. When Queequeg rolls in around midnight, Ishmael has already been in bed for a while and is shocked by the stranger’s appearance, then by the ritual genuflections he performs in front of a little wooden idol “the color of a three-days’ old Congo baby” before getting into bed himself. Next morning, Ishmael watches with dismay as the stranger, shameless in his nakedness, dresses from top to bottom, donning first his hat, then his shirt, before putting an end to the indecency by pulling on his trousers. But as befits his name, Ishmael wanders away from his initial prudery until he is more amused by his own proprieties than shocked by Queequeg’s behavior. The whole episode is a case in point of the sort of worldly education that another New York writer (a minor “Knickerbocker” named William Cox) recommended:

  The departure from home and old usages is any thing but pleasant, especially at the outset. It is a sort of secondary “weaning” which the juvenile has to undergo; but like the first process, he is all the healthier and hardier when it is over. In this way, it is a wholesome thing to be tossed about the world. To form odd acquaintance in ships, on the decks of steam boats and tops of coaches; to pick up temporary companions on turnpikes or by hedge-sides; to see humanity in the rough, and learn what stuff life is made of in different places; to mark the shades, and other important matters as you stroll along. What a universal toleration it begets!

  Through his enlarging encounter with Queequeg, Ishmael, who has a capacity for humor at his own expense, learns to laugh at everything he has been taught to consider true and civilized and safe.

  In an extraordinary chapter entitled “The Counterpane,” Melville pushed further this theme of self-discovery, reviewing, in effect, the construction of Ishmael’s self in early childhood and its deconstruction through his awakening experience of sleeping, on the verge of adulthood, with another man. The scene is half fraternal, half erotic. In their shared bed, Queequeg’s tattooed arm, “thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner,” lies across the quilted counterpane that covers Ishmael’s chest; and in the first waking moments of morning, when the line between consciousness and unconsciousness remains indeterminate, Ishmael feels himself dissolve into the flesh and fabric spread out on top of him.
“You had almost thought I had been his wife,” he says about the cannibal’s unconscious embrace, and he cannot distinguish between Queequeg’s arm and the quilt, or even quite tell where his own body ends and the coverings begin.

  It is a liberating confusion. It enables Ishmael to relive a “similar circumstance that befell” him when, as a child, he had incurred the wrath of his stepmother, that fairy-tale figure of cruelty, for having tried to crawl up the chimney. He had been punished by being packed off to bed early in the afternoon of a sun-drenched “21st of June, the longest day in the year”—the kind of day when it is torture for a boy to stay indoors. Now, in bed many years later with a stranger, he remembers the shock of opening his eyes that long-ago night and dimly making out his own hand as if it were disconnected from his body (we would say it had “fallen asleep”), hanging off the bed, inert, seemingly clasped in the hand of some threatening phantom. Whether the stranger was predator or protector he cannot say:

  Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My hand hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bedside. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken.†

  This is the recollected childhood moment when Ishmael first discovered the proscribed otherness of his own body, as if some monitor had come into the room to prevent his hand from touching some forbidden part of himself. It was his first encounter with what Freud calls the discontents of civilization. He had been punished for behaving the way boys behave before they learn to control themselves (the sexual character of the transgression is patent in the image of penetrating the chimney), and his stepmother, after following him into the room in the form of the phantom monitor, takes up residence in his own psyche.

  Having relived this formative moment (“whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle”) in bed at the Spouter Inn, Ishmael begins to re-form himself through intimacy with Queequeg. In a sexually redolent phrase, he remarks “how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them,” as if a prolonged erection has been relieved by another man’s touch—the sort of intimacy of which he had been taught to be afraid. He has been freed, above all, from the appetite for retribution that accompanies guilt: “No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.” The punitive grasp of the stranger has turned into a loving hug. Echoing Genesis 16:12 (“his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him”), Melville writes all these words in Ishmael’s voice; but he writes them so feelingly that he seems to be speaking of himself.

  4.

  In that summer and fall of 1850, he carried forward this story of a young man’s rebirth with the same jubilation with which he had reported the actual birth of his first child, Malcolm, that “perfect prodigy” whose arrival the year before had reverberated as far away as China so that they had to place “props against the great wall.” But in what today we would call “bipolar” mood swings, his high moods were followed closely by lows. This phenomenon of manic depression was well known to both neoclassic and Romantic writers. “Mirth and a heavy heart … often meet together,” as the eighteenth-century physician Benjamin Rush remarked, clinching the point with a quotation from Proverbs (one of Melville’s favorite books of the Bible): “In the midst of laughter the heart is sad.” Or as John Keats, that great poet whose sensibility was akin to Melville’s, put it in his “Ode on Melancholy”: “Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.” Such volatility of feeling seems to be one of the costs of genius, and in Melville’s case, whenever he felt what Emerson called the “currents of the Universal Being” flow through him (as in “The Mast-Head” chapter of Moby-Dick), he suspected that the feeling was illusory—as he confessed that summer in an astonishing letter to Hawthorne:

  In reading some of Goethe’s sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, “Live in the all.” That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one,—good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. “My dear boy,” Goethe says to him, “you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy.”

  Yet even as he dismissed this promise of “the tinglings of life,” he wanted desperately to believe in them:

  This “all” feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head.

  Much of Moby-Dick reads like a transcription of a patient under analysis moving from bravado to depletion, a rhythm of which Sophia Hawthorne gave a revealing account in a letter to her mother not long after Melville’s first meeting with her husband:

  When conversing, [Mr. Melville] is full of gesture & force, & loses himself in his subject … [until] his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression out of those eyes … an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him—It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique—It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into himself.

  Few people were able to see with this kind of clarity into Melville, who concealed himself by taking refuge in theatrics. Only in the presence of a soulmate did the actor’s mask come off. In Hawthorne, whom Cornelius Mathews shrewdly called “Mr. Noble Melancholy,” he had found such a person, and Sophia was the closest witness to the unveilings. “The freshness of primeval nature is in that man,” she wrote to Duyckinck in August 1850, and, two years later, in a letter to her mother, Elizabeth, she surmised that his “ocean-experience has given sea-room to his intellect, & he is in the mere boyhood of his possibilities.”

  Between bouts of writing, the visits to Hawthorne became more frequent, and Sophia was pleased to report that whenever Melville stayed overnight he “was very careful not to interrupt Mr. Hawthorne’s mornings,” since the forenoon was her husband’s inviolate working time. Their conversations, which Melville referred to as “ontological heroics,” “lasted pretty deep into the night; and if the truth must be told,” Hawthorne wrote in his journal, “we smoked cigars even within the sacred precincts of the sitting-room.” In his relations with others, Melville continued to be, as the critic Martin Green has written, “evasive and enigmatic … to all who pierced the jovial surface,” and “none of his friends felt they really knew him.” But Hawthorne was different; he seemed to know that Melville’s public jesting rose and fell in proportion to his private brooding—a division between seeming and being that Melville wrote into Moby-Dick in the form of Ishmael’s detachment from his own anxiety, which the young man describes as if he were trying to make a joke out of his suicidal thoughts:

  Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, etching by A. Schoff (list of illustrations 5.1)

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, oil painting by Cephas Thompson, 1850 (list of illustrations 5.2)

  Whenever … it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

  While rethinking the story told by this version of himself, Melville furnished clues in his essay about Hawthorne to what was driving him to rewrite. In his review (written by “the first person,” Sophia thought, “who has ever in
print apprehended Mr. Hawthorne”), he portrayed the older author as a prophetic mirror of himself—not only by crediting him with being the American who, “up to the present day” (a telling qualification), had “evinced, in Literature, the largest brain with the largest heart,” but also by stressing the dark underside of a writer regarded in his own time as a spinner of bedtime tales set in the picturesque past. Compared to Poe, who was obsessed with such sinister themes as incest and cannibalism, Hawthorne seemed to most contemporary critics a writer of antiquarian entertainments who brought to life the “by-gone days” of Indians and Pilgrims. But Melville, immediately upon reading Mosses, recognized the darker, haunted Hawthorne, of whom he said that “spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black.… You may be witched by his sunlight,—transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you;—but there is the blackness of darkness beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe, and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds.”

  We shall never know the details of their talks, the jokes they swapped, the judgments they discussed late into the night while pondering (this is from Hawthorne’s journal) “time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters.” But the glow of their friendship still warms the pages in which they wrote to or about each other, as when Melville proposed, nearly a year after their first meeting, that they “dig a deep hole and bury all the Blue Devils” (their term for their despondencies) “there to abide till the Last Day.” Sometimes the friendship reached white heat, as when, a few months later, Melville wrote in a mood of valediction, having learned that Hawthorne had given up the place in Lenox and was about to move back east: