Soon after the war, when the full horror of the death camps had become known, Henry Murray described Moby-Dick as a “prophecy of the essence of fascism.” A little later, in 1953, the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, while incarcerated on Ellis Island courtesy of a xenophobic demagogue named Joe McCarthy, compared Ahab’s monomania to the “intense subjectivism” with which Hitler “repeatedly over-rode the opinions of trained diplomats and the German General Staff, committing blunder after blunder” that led to disaster. As late as 1964, Leo Marx, one of Matthiessen’s most distinguished students, who had come of age in the 1930s and 1940s, saw in the crew of the Pequod under Ahab’s spell “a pliant, disciplined, committed, totalitarian unit.”
What all these readers recognized is that though Melville had been born and had died in the nineteenth century, Moby-Dick was the work of a twentieth-century imagination. As we begin our transition into the twenty-first century, this book has lost none of its salience. In Captain Ahab, Melville had invented a suicidal charismatic who denounces as a blasphemer anyone who would deflect him from his purpose—an invention that shows no sign of becoming obsolete anytime soon.
* Their British competitors, having no such capacity, brought the blubber back to port raw, a practice that limited the maximum length of their voyages, since raw blubber required more storage space and could spoil. (British whalers averaged five months at sea, while a typical cruise by an American whaleship lasted well over a year.) See Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Teresa D. Hutchins, “Call Me Ishmael—Not Domingo Floresta: The Rise and Fall of the American Whaling Industry,” Research in Economic History, Supplement 6 (1991): 197.
† Melville had first heard about Napoleon from his father, who on a trip to Paris in 1803 had seen him reviewing French troops on the eve of the planned invasion of Britain. On his own trip to France in 1849, Melville bought a medallion of Napoleon and Josephine as a gift for Lizzie, and, for himself, an engraved bust of the great man in profile complete with laurel crown. There are Napoleonic props strewn all over Moby-Dick: the Pequod flies the red French battle flag, the crew is compared to the ragtag delegation led into the National Assembly by the revolutionary fanatic Anarcharsis Clootz, and in “The Town Ho’s Story,” a mutinous sailor mounts “the barricade, striding up and down” like a defiant sans-culotte. See Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 110–17.
‡ Ahab would not be surprised that modern scientists have confirmed that, by virtue of their highly developed “sonar” systems, whales can communicate through miles of water.
CHAPTER 7
“HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY”
1.
In the fall and winter of 1851–52, Melville was living at Arrowhead amid a circle of women that included his wife, his frequently visiting mother, and a rotating delegation of sisters. The other males in the house were the nearly three-year-old Malcolm and, as of October 22, 1851, the newborn Stanwix. Then, on November 14, there arrived from Harper & Brothers the first copies of Moby-Dick. Melville had dedicated the book to Hawthorne, “in token of my admiration for his genius,” and that same day he took a copy over to Lenox and invited his friend out to dinner at the local hotel for a proper farewell just a week before the Hawthornes were scheduled to leave for Concord. Though in the midst of packing, the dedicatee wasted no time in reading the book, and two days later, he wrote a letter of appreciation to the author. Hawthorne’s letter has been lost, but Melville’s response survives:
Your letter was handed me last night on the road going to Mr. Morewood’s, and I read it there … I felt pantheistic.… A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome’s Pantheon.… I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.
Hawthorne seems to have proposed that he review Moby-Dick; but Melville, perhaps suspecting an element of obligatory reciprocity in the offer, asked him to keep his praise private. “Don’t write a word about the book,” he replied. “That would be robbing me of my miserly delight.” Referring to his “Hawthorne and His Mosses” of two summers ago, he added, “I am heartily sorry I ever wrote anything about you—it was paltry,” and by the next breath he was bragging that his new book-in-progress would be even larger in conception than the monster work just completed: “So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;—I have heard of Krakens.” But feeling one of his mood swings coming on, Melville confessed that the “unspeakable” joy that had filled him when he first read Hawthorne’s letter was already fading. “In me,” he wrote, “divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous—catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can’t write what I felt.” Melville’s letter is a transcript of one of his manic-depressive episodes.
Two months later, with the first reviews coming in, he was thoroughly deflated. His book had been published in two versions—in October, in London, under the title The Whale, and in November, in New York, under the title by which it has been known ever since. He had tried to control the process by conveying his manuscript directly to the Fulton Street printer Robert Craighead (typesetter for The Literary World) and by checking the proofs himself before creation of the plates from which the book would be printed once he reached terms with Harper & Brothers, whose offices were a few blocks east of Craighead’s shop. In June 1851, he told Hawthorne, he had come down to New York “to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is driving through the press,” but he had fled the hot city and finished the work in the Berkshires in July.
Because of the greater protection afforded by British copyright law, it was customary for American books, if they could find a British market, to appear in England before publication in the United States—and so throughout the summer Melville had been corresponding with Bentley. By September, terms had been reached. Melville’s brother Allan shipped a set of proofs to London even before final agreement had been achieved with the New York publishers, and a few days later, acting as Herman’s legal agent, he wrote to Bentley again. His brother, he explained, had settled on a new title—Moby-Dick—and had added a dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne. The new title, he said, is “legitimate,” since “if I may so express myself,” the whale “is the hero” of the work. At some point during the interval between Melville’s proofreading in the hot days of August and late September, when Allan sent these last-minute emendations to England, Melville evidently lost patience with the process (as he wrote about the hero of his new novel) of preparing his book for the press:
The proofs … were replete with errors; but preoccupied by the thronging, and undiluted, pure imaginings of things, he became impatient of such minute, gnat-like torments; he randomly corrected the worst, and let the rest go; jeering with himself at the rich harvest thus furnished to the entomological critics.
Here was a prophecy—amply vindicated since—that armies of scholars would someday pore over the words of the two first editions of Moby-Dick, trying to sort out the author’s intentions from errors introduced by this or that meddler.
Before giving up, Melville had made substantial changes in the proofs destined for England (adding a long footnote, for instance, elaborating on the word “galley”); but once he received the first printed copies from Bentley later that fall, it was clear that someone else had tampered with the text. Either Bentley himself or one of his subordinates had cleaned it up, removing passages that seemed blasphemous or obscene. Where Melville had described Ahab standing “before them with a crucifixion in his face,” the pious reviser substituted “an apparently eternal anguish in his face.” Where Melville had likened an old male whale to
a marauding Turk who, in his youth, had left “anonymous babies all over the world” before entering “upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life,” some self-appointed censor struck out the word “impotent.” The proposed new title was never used for the English edition, and there were unauthorized structural changes. The Extracts, which Melville intended as a kind of overture, were printed at the end of the work, and the Epilogue, in which Ishmael explains how he survived the shipwreck, was left out altogether. And so it was hardly surprising that British reviewers objected to a story told by a first-person narrator who had, presumably, drowned with his shipmates. How could one of the “miners in a pit,” wondered a critic for the London Spectator, tell his own tale if he is among those who have perished?
Seeing his book mutilated and mocked had the effect of angering Melville permanently against publishers and critics. In fact, Moby-Dick fared better than Mardi, since for every sniggering critic there was someone who expressed respect. But the disproportion between achievement and reception was large enough to confirm what he had written to Hawthorne (“Try to get a living by the Truth—and go to the Soup Societies”), and by early 1852 Melville was referring almost bitterly to his new work-in-progress, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, as if it were a concession to the public taste that Moby-Dick had failed to satisfy. (Total earnings from the American sales of Moby-Dick would ultimately come to $556.37, considerably less than Melville had realized from any previous book.) “The Fates,” he wrote to Sophia Hawthorne in January 1852, “have plunged me into certain silly thoughts and wayward speculations,” and he went on in a tone of injured irony to say that his next book would be a modest confection suited for the ladies: “I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk.”
But by spring 1852 he was flying again and believed he was back on track. Or perhaps he was censoring himself. Writing to Bentley on April 16, he promised that his next book possessed “unquestionable novelty, as regards my former ones,—treating of utterly new scenes & characters;—and, as I believe, very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine—being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work, and withall, representing a new and elevated aspect of American life.”
This prediction proved to be a poor one, and Bentley guessed better. Dismayed by the string of disappointments since Typee and Omoo, he was skeptical about Melville’s prospects, no matter how “regular” and “elevated” the new work might be, and after chiding him for producing books “in too rapid succession,” he proposed a contract that Melville took as an insult. As for the Harpers, the best they would offer now was a royalty of twenty cents per copy, a considerable comedown from the terms (splitting profits fifty-fifty) on which they had contracted for Moby-Dick. At one point in the negotiations, Melville made the pathetic suggestion that his new book might sell better if it were brought out under a pseudonym.
2.
When Pierre was published in July 1852, it bore its author’s own name, and the critics savaged it. The New York Day Book reviewed it under the headline “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY,” and the American Whig Review agreed, declaring that his “fancy is diseased.” The respected critic Fitz-James O’Brien, playing on the pun of Pierre with pierre (the French word for stone), was more polite but still severe: “Let Mr. Melville stay his step in time. He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached to it.” As another critic has put it, Pierre was “the burning out of Melville’s volcano.” It was a performance at once furious and feeble, and of all Melville’s works the one whose tone is hardest to get hold of—a book, as John Updike has remarked, that “runs a constant fever” and whose characters are “jerked to and fro by some unexplained rage of the author’s.”
Most of Melville’s biographers have explained the rage as Melville’s reaction to the reception of Moby-Dick and to the faltering of his literary career; but some fifty years ago, W. Somerset Maugham put forward a different explanation. Melville’s anger, Maugham said, arose from his “disappointment with the married state.” The idea that something was amiss in Melville’s marriage has had many subscribers before and since. In the summer of 1919, a Columbia professor named Raymond Weaver sought out Melville’s granddaughter Eleanor Metcalf, whom Weaver described, upon first meeting her, as an “English-looking woman, with flat heels [and] a rain coat.” She met him on a rainy day at a suburban Boston train station with the following greeting: “This weather is enough to provoke conversation … but you don’t want to talk about the weather. So I’ll tell you at once the worst.… You say, in your Nation article, that Melville was happily married. He wasn’t.” This view had been transmitted to Eleanor by her mother, Frances Melville Thomas (the Melvilles’ second daughter), who construed her own parents’ quarrels as more than standard marital squabbling. Lewis Mumford, having interviewed Mrs. Thomas in the 1920s when he was working on his own study of her father, recalled much later that “only one condition limited that interview: on no account might I even mention her father’s name!” Her silence, he felt, “reopened the dark chapter of Melville’s long alienation from his family.”
But neither Frances’s silence nor Eleanor’s cryptic brevity clarified the Melvilles’ unhappiness, and the few eyewitness comments on their relation, along with the single surviving letter from Herman to Lizzie, are not much help. Early in the marriage, Lizzie herself had written with newlywed gladness to her brother Sam that, while she worried about giving up “dear old crooked Boston” for the unfamiliar novelties of New York, she was sure that “with Herman with me always, I can be happy and contented anywhere.” And to her stepmother she explained that she made herself look “as bewitchingly as possible” for Herman after his long day at his desk. But who knows if he was, in fact, bewitched, or if Lizzie was working at her appearance because she sensed that her husband’s interest in her was already flagging? Years later, Melville’s brother-in-law John C. Hoadley described Lizzie’s “tone and look of love” for Herman as the family sat together around the fireplace; but who can say if the look was warm and spousal or sisterly and chaste? “Of all chamber furniture in the world best calculated to cure a bad temper, and breed a pleasant one,” Melville had written in White-Jacket after Malcolm’s birth, “is the sight of a lovely wife.” But he had never been altogether pleased when his home became a nursery. When one’s wife dandles the babe or is run ragged by the toddler, she may lose her charm, and when the children “are teething, the nursery should be a good way upstairs; at sea, it ought to be in the mizzen-top.”
In the winter of 1852, while she was nursing Stanwix, Lizzie developed a lingering breast abscess that left her so exhausted that the floral design of the bedside wallpaper swam before her eyes until someone took pity and hung a white sheet over the paper to cover the pattern. It was months before she felt well again. Perhaps the only thing one can say with confidence about Melville’s married life is that when he took up sex as a literary theme in Pierre, he was experiencing sexual deprivation.
3.
What goes on between husband and wife is a sealed mystery even if one hears the couple through the bedroom wall—and so we cannot hope to know much about Melville’s actual sexual life. But we do know something about the responsibilities he thought were entailed in managing the human sex drive, in whatever form it takes. This was his theme in Pierre. In Moby-Dick, he had written obliquely about sex as a moral problem, describing the quasi-erotic power that Ahab exerts over his men, and he was to take up the subject again at the end of his life in Billy Budd with the portrait of Mr. Claggart, whose obstructed desire (“Claggart could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban”) is perverted into hatred. In these works, Melville wrote not so much about sex as about sin: about how human beings are liable to be seized, not just in their sexual frenzy, by a passion that reduces the world to a means of achieving self-satisf
action. Like many Western writers at least since Augustine, Melville suspected the body’s unruly independence from the will; and in that drab winter of 1852, he took this suspicion and constructed around it a full-scale story. The result was a book, as F. O. Matthiessen described it, that may be “the most desperate in our literature.”
Melville: His World and Work Page 25