Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.
Evoked here in the mystical language of the Eucharist, this feeling of inseparability was much more than collegial; to Melville, it was as if their minds and hearts were linked by a common network of nerves and veins. “Your heart beat in my ribs, and mine in yours,” he wrote to his dear friend, “and both in God’s.”
Melville was drawn to the mysteries and contradictions in Hawthorne as if to plumb their depths would be to solve the riddle of existence itself. Ever alert to the proximity of death in the midst of life, he had never reconciled himself to the sudden losses of his father and brother (“let no man,” he had written in White-Jacket, “though his live heart beat in him like a cannon—let him not hug his life to himself; for, in the predestinated necessities of things, that bounding life of his is not a whit more secure than the life of a man on his deathbed”), and he recognized in Hawthorne a kindred spirit whose “great power of blackness … derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free.” Yet Hawthorne seemed somehow to live equably with the fatedness of life, and Melville wrote about him as if he were a prodigy of nature—a chiaroscuro composition of bright and dark tones, each heightening the other, of the sort he found in the Berkshire forest itself. “You should see the maples,” Melville wrote to Duyckinck on a Sunday evening early in October 1850, after spending the day “Jacquesizing in the woods” (talking to himself about how quickly one traverses the stages of life), “you should see the young perennial pines—the red blazings of the one contrasting with the painted green of the others, and the wide flushings of the autumn air harmonizing both. I tell you that sunrises & sunsets grow side by side in these woods, & momentarily moult in the falling leaves.”
5.
Under these manifold influences—Shakespeare, Virgil, Shelley, and a host of other writers, as well as his colloquies with Hawthorne amid the morbid beauty of the Berkshire woods—the “enjoyable” book that Melville had promised to Duyckinck a year before changed fundamentally. In his fever of creation, Melville became Emerson’s proverbial poet, whose “imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind.” His book opened out into the panorama of history and myth to which he had been exposed in his reading, from the Western scriptures to Eastern tales of dervishes and devil worshippers. In Moby-Dick, “the remotest spaces of nature are visited,” as Emerson had said of poets possessed, “and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by a subtile spiritual connection.”
As he rushed about what sometimes seems the whole history of human culture, embracing “all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs,” Melville took bits of Scripture and wove them into the fabric of his book—into irreverent passages as well as solemn ones, as when, having described a sailor who uses the outer skin of the whale’s penis for a cloak as a good “candidate for an archbishoprick,” he surrounds the pun with a cluster of sexual associations organized around Queen Maacah (mentioned in I Kings as a worshipper of phallic idols). The Leviathan of Isaiah, Psalms, and the Book of Job, so fierce that it makes the ocean heave and boil, comes alive as a symbol of inscrutable strength, and Melville conscripts a whole army of mythic warriors—“Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo”—into the family of gallant whalemen who defy and pursue it. “Towards thee I roll,” cries Ahab in his last outburst of half-sacred, half-demonic rage, “thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” The whole of humankind seems to pass through these pages, as if Moby-Dick were an encyclopedia of “heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets” to whom lesser men turn for guidance and grace when facing the terrors of the deep.
Yet the hunt is an act of worship as well as of vengeance. The white whale, as the critic Richard Slotkin has said, is “at once masculine and feminine, a phallus and an odalisque, enticing and overwhelmingly erotic”—a creature both exquisite and appalling, in which the whole originating force of creation seems concentrated:
A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.
The pursuit of this “grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air,” becomes an allegorical chase as Melville pulls us into the action, obliterating the apparent distance between the frightful lives of whalemen and the seeming security of our life ashore:
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
As he carried forward his all-comprehending book—or was carried by it—toward its apocalyptic conclusion, he was angered by the smallest interruptions. His mother, having packed up and left after a testy visit in March 1851, complained, “Herman, I hope returned home safe after dumping me & my trunks out so unceremoniously at the Depot—Altho we were there more than an hour before the time, he hurried off as if his life had depended upon his speed.…” (Maria should have been used to this sort of send-off, since just the summer before, her nephew Robert had been in such a rush to put her on the train that he almost forgot her luggage.) And while those around him savored the renewed warmth and light as “spring begins to open upon Pittsfield,” Melville, unused to the sun and habituated to daytime reclusiveness, wrote to Duyckinck that “like an owl I steal about by twilight, owing to the twilight of my eyes.” During the days, he sat alone, as Hawthorne wrote of him, “shaping out the gigantic conception of his white whale, while the gigantic shape of [Mount] Greylock looms upon him from his study window.” Arrowhead—a low-ceilinged house of modest proportions inhabited by wife, baby, and, often, by mother and sisters—felt crowded and noisy; the second-floor study was Melville’s sanctuary, a bright corner room filled with morning light streaming through its eastern window and affording a view of Mount Greylock framed in a second window that looked north over an expanse of fields. Despite her best efforts, Lizzie later recalled, he sometimes worked on the book “at his desk all day not eating any thing till four or five o clock,” and then, according to his own account, retired for the evening “in a sort of mesmeric state.”
His furnace intensity was coupled to anxiety—a mixture so unstable as to be explosive. There are hints that for the first time (but not the last), his family feared him, or at least that they learned to cut him a wide berth so as to avoid collisions when he was hell-bent on his work. To ensure that he would keep himself fed, he arranged with Lizzie that she should come upstairs in the midafternoon and knock on his study door for however long it took till he was roused from his desk, but that she should never enter unbidden. In the country, he said, he had “a sort of sea-feeling”—an exhilarating vertigo that left him feeling on the verge of new discoveries, but also exposed, and sometimes desolate. “I look out of my window in the morning when I rise,” he wrote to Duyckinck, “as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My r
oom seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.” The sea for Melville was always a place of both freedom and terror—an “everlasting terra incognita” on which he could travel anywhere, though he had no idea of where he was or when he might drown.
Yet during these crucial months from late summer of 1850 into the summer of 1851, Melville continued to write cheerleading letters to his literary patrons. In August 1850, soon after the Monument Mountain picnic, he chided Duyckinck, with a torrent of variations on the theme of stone and mortar, for imprisoning himself in the city (“those dreary regions which are Trans-Taconic to me”) from which he himself had escaped:
What are you doing there, My Beloved, among the bricks and cobblestone boulders?… I have a horrible presentiment that you are even now hanging round the City-Hall, trying to get a contract from the Corporation to pave Broadway between Clinton Place & Union-Square. For heaven’s sake, come out from among those Hittites & Hodites—give up mortar forever.—There is one thing certain, that, chemically speaking, mortar was the precipitate of the Fall; & with a brickbat, or a cobble-stone boulder, Cain killed Abel.—Do you drink Lime-water in the morning by way of a stomachic? Do you use brick-bats for paperweights in the office? Do you and Mathews pitch paving-stones, & play ball that way in the cool of the evening, opposite the Astor-house?—How do they sell mortar, by the quart now? Cheaper than ice-cream, I suppose.—A horrible something in me tells me that you are about dipping your head in plaster at Fowler’s for your bust.—But enough—the visions come too thick for me to master them.
There is manic pleasure in this writing, but even as his work on Moby-Dick reached fever pitch, Melville was a failing author who became increasingly aware of it. After the cool reception of Mardi (“driven forth” by the critics, he wrote, “like a wild, mystic Mormon into shelterless exile”), he had written gamely to his father-in-law that bad reviews were “matters of course” and “essential to the building up of any permanent reputation.” But Redburn and White-Jacket had only partially recouped his reputation; and to make matters worse, his responsibilities grew as his resources shrank, forcing him, as he wrote to a prospective publisher, “to regard my literary affairs in a strong pecuniary light.” In March 1850, Lizzie had become pregnant again, and a second son, Stanwix, named for the site of his Gansevoort grandfather’s heroics, was born that October. Melville was carrying a $1,500 mortgage and owed his father-in-law $5,000. In the spring of 1851, after the Harpers denied his request for an advance (he owed them nearly $700), he felt compelled to borrow $2,000 more, at 9 percent for five years, from his Lansingburgh friend Tertullus D. Stewart in order to cover the cost of home improvements—extravagances, according to his more frugal neighbors and friends.
With his obligations mounting, the gap between his artistic achievement and his public standing was more and more galling. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” he wrote to Hawthorne in June 1851, “I should die in the gutter.” He apologized for pitying himself (“I talk all about myself, and this is selfishness and egotism”), but quickly returned to the tone he had just forsworn: “Granted. But how help it? I am writing to you; I know little about you, but something about myself.” The same letter rises—or sinks—into full-voiced lamentation: “The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil”—the “printer’s devil,” that is, the boy sent by the compositor to pick up the overdue manuscript—“is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.” A few weeks later, his mood was still sour as he complained to Richard Bentley about the old sore subject of international copyright—or rather, the lack thereof: “This country is at present engaged in furnishing material for future authors; not in encouraging its living ones.” To Duyckinck, as winter (and publication day) approached, he reported that he was working hard to keep “in full blast our great dining-room fire-place, which swallows down cords of wood as a whale does boats.”
It may have been as late as the spring of 1851 that Melville added to his work-in-progress the chapters about Father Mapple, the thundering minister who, at New Bedford, speaks to young sailors and old salts in the language of their own experience—and they listen! These chapters were in part an allegory of his declining hopes for his own literary fortunes. Before Ishmael enters the seamen’s chapel, “each silent worshipper,” contemplating the memorial stones for drowned sailors on the chapel walls, has been “purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable”; but once Mapple begins to preach, his voice fuses them into a community of linked sympathies. When Mapple has ceased, he “drooped and fell away from himself” as if in postcoital exhaustion, his listeners having been gratefully violated by his words—an act Melville no longer felt confident of achieving in his own relation to the public.* Yet even as he was scaling back his hopes for his public career, Melville was experiencing the private “happiness,” as Walker Percy has memorably put it, “of the artist discovering, breaking through into the freedom of his art”—a joy one feels in every paragraph of Moby-Dick. “With the Pequod under full sail through the night with its try-pots blazing,” Percy imagines Melville’s hair flying in the wind of his imagination, his face aglow from the fire to which he consigned his doubts. Like one of his own characters in Mardi, Melville “did not build himself in with plans; he wrote right on; and so doing, got deeper and deeper into himself.”
6.
A later American writer of Melvillean ambition, Norman Mailer, offers a salient comment that describes very well what happened to Melville during the writing of Moby-Dick: “A good half of writing consists of being sufficiently sensitive to the moment to reach for the next promise which is usually hidden in some word or phrase just a shift to the side of one’s conscious intent.” Here is a passage, from the early chapter entitled “Nantucket,” in which Melville reaches repeatedly for the next promise, releasing a tumbling plethora of images like those in his plea to Duyckinck to forsake New York:
Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it!… Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of sand: all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.
What we have here is a writer scavenging in his own mind for images afloat in his memory—snowshoes, sunshades, the Cross—and seizing them for use in the purely fanciful picture he is drawing. There is no empirical observation, as Melville did not lay eyes on Nantucket until 1852. It is an ecstatic cadenza, a riff—showy, boisterous, yet somehow intimate and honest—whose real subject is not Nantucket at all but his own associative imagination. Then, in a concluding sentence that is almost contrite, he stops the adventure as abruptly as a parent puts an end to the high jinks of an out-of-control child—knowing, of course, that after resting a bit, the child will throw another tantrum.
“Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it … all beach, without a background.”
Moby-Dick, chapter 14
Map of Nantucket by William Coffin, 1835 (list of illustrations 5.3)
This styl
istic breakthrough had been intimated in the works of the New York years, but it came to full force in Moby-Dick and took off after the encounter with Hawthorne. There was something almost competitive now about Melville’s writing (“Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!”), and one feels in this friendship, as in that later literary friendship between Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, the energy of rivalry as well as affection. Hawthorne had once confessed in his journal that what trickled through his own writing seemed finally a “shallow and scanty … stream of thought” compared to “the broad tide of dim emotions, ideas, associations, which were flowing through the haunted regions of [my] imagination, intellect, and sentiment, sometimes excited by what was around me, sometimes with no perceptible connection with them.” The problem of transferring mind to page (“taking a book off the brain,” Melville wrote to Duyckinck, “is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety”) must surely have been among the subjects the two men touched upon during their late night talks about all “possible and impossible matters.” To Melville, Hawthorne sometimes seemed on the verge of giving up the effort. “When we see how little we can express,” the older writer had written in his journal, “it is a wonder that any man ever takes up a pen a second time”; and toward the end of his life, in a chapter of The Marble Faun entitled “Fragmentary Sentences,” he was to compare writing to the hopeless task of “gathering up and piecing together the fragments of a letter which has been torn and scattered to the winds.”
Melville: His World and Work Page 20