Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  Melville relished the challenge. In December 1850, he appealed to Duyckinck to “send me about fifty fast-writing youths” so that he might dictate the thoughts that were flooding into his mind faster than he could write them down. With his powers of invention surging, he filled his book with a dazzling array of human types, each embodying some attitude or temperament captured in a revelatory phrase—from the serene and selfless Queequeg, whom he likened to “George Washington cannibalistically developed,” to the lean and greedy Bildad, whose bony body is “the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character,” to the blasphemously jolly third mate Flask, “so utterly lost … to all sense of reverence” that for him “the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or … water-rat.”

  As his book hurtled along, Melville had trouble keeping track of its characters, saying repeatedly that the Pequod’s crew numbered thirty (the whaleship standard), even though the number of distinguishable persons grew to forty-four—not to mention the profusion of unnamed sailors who function in the background as a kind of chorus. Characters who seem destined for significant roles are suddenly dropped, such as Peleg, who, as his name suggests, was probably originally intended to be the Pequod’s peg-legged captain (he is identified as her former first mate), or Bulkington, the sailor “with a chest like a coffer-dam,” whom Melville introduces with fanfare and then, twenty chapters later, summarily dismisses, never to mention him again.

  Most striking was what happened to Ishmael. Around the twenty-fifth chapter he fractures into multiple voices contending with one another as if taking turns in a stage play, and soon the “I” of the book is telling us things he cannot possibly know: all over the ship sailors mutter to themselves while standing in the howling wind, yet Ishmael, wherever he is, somehow hears every word. The captain sits with his three mates over dinner in his cabin, yet Ishmael—a common sailor who would never be permitted to join the officers’ mess—tells us how they cut and chew their meat and who says what to whom. He becomes a sort of mobile consciousness, extracted from his own singular identity, then multiplied and redistributed into the mind of every man aboard.

  Looking back at his labors on Moby-Dick, Melville saw “two books … being writ … the larger book, and the infinitely better, is for [his] own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink.” Moby-Dick was Melville’s vampire book. It sapped him—but not before he had invented a new kind of writing that, we can now see, anticipated the kind of modernist prose that expresses the author’s stream of consciousness without conscious self-censorship. Melville was aware of this ideal in its incipient Romantic form, having marked approvingly a passage in an essay by William Hazlitt that declares true writing to be an “ebullition of mind,” a “flow of expression” that, by analogy with frescoes, must be executed with fast and free strokes before the wet plaster dries—a burst of inspiration whose “execution is momentary and irrevocable.” Melville was the first American to write with such outrageous freedom. He was the first to understand that if a literary work is to register the improvisational nature of experience, it must be as spontaneous and self-surprising as the human mind itself. Aware, as Freud later puts it, that “in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish,” Melville also knew that by concealing the existence of earlier versions of his work, he ran the risk of falsifying himself.* In this sense, Moby-Dick was like an active archeological site in which the layers of its own history are left deliberately exposed.

  7.

  Consider, for instance, what happens to Bulkington, that man of “noble shoulders” whom Ishmael glimpses at the Spouter Inn. As his name implies, Bulkington is a natural aristocrat—an almost cartoonish paragon of manly virtue, complete with deep tan and “white teeth dazzling by contrast,” and a serious contender for the position held in White-Jacket by Jack Chase, the democratic leader who commands respect out of trust and comradely love. When we first meet Bulkington at the Spouter Inn, he seems destined to play a major role in the book. He has about him every mark of importance: dignity, bearing, refinement. He is Melville’s first candidate to resist the tyrannical Ahab once the Pequod is under way (a miniature version of this story survives in the chapter entitled “The Town Ho’s Story”), but just as “there is but one planet to one orbit,” he was later to write in The Confidence-Man, “so can there be but one such original character to one work of invention. Two would conflict to chaos.” And so Melville replaced Bulkington with a lesser man who recognizes Ahab’s madness but who cannot muster the strength to challenge him—namely, Starbuck, the first mate:

  Brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery … which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.

  Detailed reconstruction of Melville’s revisions of Moby-Dick is impossible since no manuscript or notes survive. But that he changed his ideas about who should lead and who should resist aboard the Pequod can hardly be doubted. Twenty chapters after introducing him, Melville says farewell to Bulkington as he stands at the helm on the bitter Christmas night when the Pequod heads for the open sea:

  Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

  When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington.

  This is the last we see of Bulkington as he falls back into the faceless crew that sails the ship to her doom—but not before Melville honors him with a eulogy: “Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!”

  But why leave him in the book at all? Why not excise the sentence in which, as one scholar puts it, Melville “introduces a character and says that there is no use in introducing him”? This decision to retain a short-lived character as what Freud calls a “memory-trace” is one of the telltale marks of Melville’s method in Moby-Dick, and a clue to why the book, rejected in its own day, was so warmly embraced in the twentieth century as a protomodernist work. To nineteenth-century readers with a taste for unified narrative (“the idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again,” complained one reviewer), these kinds of decisions made no sense. They made for a messy and lumpy book—a kind of “intellectual chowder,” as Duyckinck called it when he read the published version. But “there are some enterprises,” says Ishmael, “in which a careful disorderliness is the true method,” and to twentieth-century readers Melville’s book fit the mode of Joyce or Woolf, in which superseded stages of development express the author’s evolving state of mind. With wonderful insolence, he went back to Ishmael’s original description of Bulkington and simply inserted a parenthetical update: “This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him.” And when, many pages later, he devoted an entire chapter—albeit a short, “six-inch chapter”—to saying goodbye to Bulkington, he confirmed that he was writing less about the world he imagined than about the self-revising process by which he continuously reimagined it.

  In 1926, when Joyce’s Ulysses had already established itself as that oxymoron, an avant-garde classic, the English critic John Freeman recognized Melville a
s a prophetic writer who had anticipated the sort of modernist writing in which rationality retreats before “the unconscious mind, stealing silently between the eyes and pen … as it suggests, offers, presses and overwhelms the conscious mind, and makes it less an equal than a servant.” The great book that carried Melville away between the spring of 1850 and the summer of 1851 was a young man’s coming-of-age story, an encyclopedic inventory of facts and myths about whales, a concatenation, as Duyckinck described it with fond bewilderment, “of romance, philosophy, natural history, fine writing, good feeling, [and] bad sayings.” It was all these things, but it was also an audacious attempt, long before Freud and his modernist followers, to represent in words the unconscious as well as conscious processes of the human mind itself.

  * It seems likely that he had already read Dryden’s Aeneid in a copy borrowed from some friend or library before adding the book to his own collection—a lag consistent with his customary practice. In other instances of his literary borrowing, for example, his allusion to Friedrich Schiller’s poem “The Veiled Statue at Sais” (also acquired in 1849) at the end of chapter 76 of Moby-Dick, he does not seem to have marked the poem until years after first reading it. See the note in the annotated edition of Moby-Dick, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York: Hendricks House, 1952), p. 771.

  † This recollected experience is strikingly similar to William James’s famous account in The Varieties of Religious Experience, written some fifty years later, of the dreadful night when he “felt something come into the room and stay close to my bed,” filling him with a “consciousness of a presence” that induced in him “not pain so much as abhorrence” (his italics).

  Mapple was an invention, but also an amalgam of preachers whom Melville had actually heard, including the wonderfully named Enoch Mudge, to whom he had listened in New Bedford before sailing on his first ocean voyage, to Liverpool, in 1839, and the better-known Edward Taylor, who was enough of a cultural celebrity that when Dickens came to the United States early in 1842, he made a point of attending one of his sermons. Stirred by Taylor’s “rude eloquence,” Dickens believed that he studied with his “keen eye” the “sympathies and understandings” of his congregation not to impress them with “the display of his own powers” but in order to touch their hearts. Like Taylor, Father Mapple had been, Melville tells us, “a sailor and harpooneer in his youth.” Charles Foster, “Something in Emblems: A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick,” New England Quarterly 34 (March 1961): 3–35, suggests that the Mapple chapters were “late insertions” in the manuscript.

  As the art historian Meyer Schapiro has said of expressionist and post-expressionist painting, “the subjective becomes tangible,” by which he means that on a canvas by, say, Monet or Cézanne, we see in “the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip”—none of which is effaced or concealed—“the drama of decision in the ongoing process of art.” Melville’s creative process in Moby-Dick was the verbal equivalent of the “tangible subjectivity” that he had seen in the canvases of Turner. As the English critic Henry Chorley wrote astutely in 1850, “Mr. Melville stands as far apart from any past or present marine painter in pen and ink as Turner does” from lesser painters.

  CHAPTER 6

  CAPTAIN AMERICA

  1.

  During his surge of creativity in 1850–51, Melville sometimes seemed to shut out the world and to live virtually alone in the universe of his imagination. But he did not escape the outer world entirely, and when political events broke through to him, they did so with more force and effect than at the time of the Mexican War. In that spring of 1850, the United States was facing the question of how to organize the vast territories it had won in the war. Comprising all of present-day California, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming, the Mexican cession, formally ratified in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, quickened westward migration; and when gold deposits were discovered in California later that year (“It seems a golden Hell!” Melville wrote in Mardi, where he described men starving in the mines and killing one another for an ounce of yellow dust), the march of settlement became a stampede.

  The defeat of Mexico at first seemed another step toward the glorious fulfillment of America’s manifest destiny, but it turned out to be one of those instances with which history is replete, in which military victory sets off a political crisis in the land of the victor. “The United States will conquer Mexico,” Emerson declared in 1846, “but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” Privately, Melville was thinking along similar lines. In his copy of the works of William D’Avenant, purchased on his London trip in 1849, he checked the following passage: “for God ordain’d not huge Empire as proportionable to the Bodies, but to the Mindes of Men; and the Mindes of Men are more monstrous and require more space for agitation and the hunting of others, than the Bodies of Whales.”

  Thirty years earlier, a fragile equilibrium had been established between slave states and free states when Congress agreed, in what was known as the Missouri Compromise, to partition the country along the 36°30’ parallel, permitting slavery to the south and forbidding it to the north. Although talk of southern secession had revived during a tariff dispute in 1832, the dividing line of 1820 held for three decades of relatively little political turbulence. It was in these years that Melville came of age, a member of a generation that lulled itself into thinking the slavery problem would somehow be resolved. “Let slavery take care of itself,” Evert Duyckinck wrote to his brother George in 1848, and added, for good measure, “it will.” But as one historian puts it, slavery remained “the unacknowledged ghost” in American politics—and everyone knew at heart that it had not been put to rest.

  In the early months of 1850, the ghost began to stir. California had petitioned for admission to the Union as a free state, raising the prospect—indeed, the certainty—of another addition to the growing northern majority in Congress. On March 4, a skeletal John C. Calhoun, senior senator from South Carolina, came to the Senate chamber, his skin sallow and loose, but still with fire in his eyes. In assembling a portrait from contemporary descriptions of Calhoun, one could do worse than apply to him Melville’s description of Captain Ahab: “He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them.” Too ill to deliver his remarks himself, Calhoun asked a colleague from Virginia to read what was to be his final appeal to the North that it use its “exclusive power of controlling the Government” to guarantee the rights of the South once and for all or else face secession.

  With the preponderance of power shifting northward, Calhoun insisted that the South must be protected from those who would seal off new territories from slave labor, on which the southern economy depended. It was the eleventh hour for anyone who would save the nation, which

  cannot … be saved by eulogies on the Union, however splendid or numerous. The cry of “Union, Union, the glorious Union!” can no more prevent disunion than the cry of “Health, health, glorious health!” on the part of the physician can save a patient lying dangerously ill.

  Calhoun knew of what he spoke. Four weeks later, he would be dead.

  On March 7, Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, dressed in the brass-buttoned suit that he always wore on significant occasions, rose to speak in response. Mindful of Calhoun’s warning that the time was past for windy speeches about the glories of the Union, he followed his own pledge of allegiance (“I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American”) with a pragmatic endorsement of the proposed Fugitive Slave Law, which he regarded as a necessary concession to the South:

  John C. Calhoun, c. 1850 (list of illustrations 6.1)

  Every member of every Northern legislature is bound by oath, like every other officer in the country, to support the Constitution of the United States; and the article of the Constitution [Article IV, sect. 2,
para. 2] which says to these States that they shall deliver up fugitives from service is as binding in honor and conscience as any other article. No man fulfills his duty in any legislature who sets himself to find excuses, evasions, escapes from this constitutional obligation.

  Historians call the outcome of this congressional session the Compromise of 1850. At stake was the future of the slaves and of their unborn children, or so we tend to think today. In fact, the primary issue on the minds of Calhoun, Webster, and almost all of their colleagues was the question of whether the United States would continue as a viable nation or was about to break in two. And since virtually no one could imagine a way of eradicating slavery (Webster had “nothing to propose” to effect its “extinguishment”) while leaving the nation intact, the problem seemed as intractable as conflict in the Middle East or AIDS in Africa seems today. Men as prudent as Tocqueville and Jefferson had predicted that sooner or later the United States would collapse into a war between the races or a war over race. “We have the wolf by the ears,” Jefferson had written about slavery in 1820, “and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

  In hopes of taming the beast, some reformers proposed gradual emancipation, with compensation to slaveowners for their property losses. But how could such a plan be financed? How could a whole region of the country be reconstructed on a new relationship between capital and labor? And what would be done with a large population of former slaves in a society where only a few crackpot dreamers took the idea of racial equality seriously? There was talk of sending them to Liberia; but, as a Whig politician named Abraham Lincoln pointed out, “if they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days.” Lincoln, who wanted slavery banned from all federal territories that had not yet been organized into states, remarked that “if all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do” about slavery in states where, by tradition and statute, it already existed.