Pierre Glendinning grows up pampered in an arcadian country villa under the loving eye of his widowed mother. In fact, she is rather too loving. Mary Glendinning dotes on her son with a “playfulness of … unclouded love” that seems a rehearsal for sex play, and mother and son coquettishly call each other sister and brother. The flirting titillates Pierre, since “much that goes to make up the deliciousness of a wife, already lies in the sister,” and he regrets that “a sister had been omitted from the text” of his life.
King Richard III, Act 3, Scene 1: “The Two Princes,” print in Melville’s collection (list of illustrations 7.1)
“The friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys.” Maurice Sendak, illustration for Pierre, 1995 (list of illustrations 7.2)
But if he misses a sister, Pierre also misses the childhood friends with whom he had once tumbled and tussled, and he preserves a particularly “ardent sentiment” for his male cousin Glen, with whom he had explored “the preliminary love-friendship of boys.” Glen’s name is a truncated version of Pierre’s surname, Glendinning—suggesting a variation on the Greek idea, which Melville knew from Plato’s Symposium, that sexual love manifests the primal memory of having once been whole and the urge to complete oneself by coupling with one’s severed half. In a poem entitled “After the Pleasure Party,” which he may have drafted not long before writing Pierre, Melville put forth this idea of sex as self-reunification in the voice of a woman who has forsworn the life of the body in favor of the life of the mind:
Why hast thou made us but in halves—
Co-relatives? This makes us slaves.
If these co-relatives never meet
Self-hood itself seems incomplete.
And such the dicing of blind fate
Few matching halves here meet and mate.
In just this sense, Pierre and Glen’s feelings for each other are “much more than cousinly attachment”—so much more that Melville takes the occasion to reflect, in almost baroque prose, that “the letters of Aphroditean devotees” are not “more charged with headlong vows and protestations, more cross written and crammed with discursive sentimentalities, more undeviating in their semi-weekliness, or dayliness, as the case may be, than are the love-friendship missives of boys.”
This is one of several passages in which Melville seems to anticipate Freud’s idea of “uncertainty in regard to the boundaries of what is to be called normal sexual life.” In 1905, in his Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (better known as the Story of Dora), Freud was to write that as for “the sensual love of a man for a man,”
each one of us in his own sexual life transgresses to a slight extent—now in this direction, now in that—the narrow lines imposed upon him as the standard of normality. The perversions are neither bestial nor degenerate in the emotional sense of the word. They are a development of germs all of which are contained in the undifferentiated sexual predisposition of the child.… When, therefore any one has become a gross and manifest pervert, it would be more correct to say that he has remained one, for he exhibits a certain stage of inhibited development.
Pierre is a novel about a boy who remains in a state of inhibited, or (as the German Entwicklungshemmung is more commonly translated) arrested, development. He is looking for his missing half but has no idea where to find it.
Pierre’s mother wants to keep it that way. She is a model of the overbearing mother whom Freud blames for homosexual tendencies in boys, and since she has some inkling of her son’s preoccupations, she wants him coaxed away from his “uncelestial” desires. So she arranges his betrothal to a “reverential, and most docile” girl, Lucy Tartan, who will keep him out of trouble. At first Pierre is dutifully pleased with his fair-haired fiancée, but he has presentiments that she is too delicate for the coming exertions of marriage. “Methinks,” he muses, speaking like some vexed lord in an Elizabethan play, “one husbandly embrace would break her airy zone, and she exhale upward to that heaven whence she hath hither come, condensed to mortal sight.” In this respect, Pierre shared Melville’s own tastes at a time when fashionable ladies used whitening powders to simulate the pallor associated with female purity. The “stiffness, formality, and affectation” of a proper lady struck Melville as a poor substitute for the “artless vivacity and unconcealed natural graces of … savage maidens.” He had written in Typee that to witness a lady and a “savage maiden” standing side by side would be to see “a milliner’s doll” beside the Venus de’ Medici. Although he may not have quite shared his friend Nathaniel Willis’s “passion for fat women,” Melville was put off, no less than Willis, by women whose “skinny scrawny arms” reminded him of “reptiles and crawling things.”
Lucy is more than a bit reptilian. Given her resemblance to the woman Melville married (Longfellow’s wife remarked about Elizabeth Shaw that after Melville’s “flirtations with South Sea beauties,” she was a “peculiar choice”), one wonders what Lizzie thought when she met herself in her husband’s new book. The likeness was hard to miss. Lucy, like Lizzie, is the daughter of “an early and most cherished friend” of the father of her betrothed. And Mary Glendinning (in whom Maria Gansevoort Melville could have recognized herself) senses her son’s hesitations about his designated bride.
Meanwhile, Pierre has been having a recurrent vision of another young woman whose face floats into his mind in moments of reverie, and Mrs. Glendinning worries that he might be susceptible to some such “dark-eyed haughtiness” if he should ever meet her in the flesh. She tries to reassure herself:
Yes, [Lucy is] a very pretty little pint-decanter of a girl; a very pretty little Pale Sherry pint-decanter of a girl; and I—I’m a quart decanter of—of—Port—potent Port! Now, Sherry for boys, and Port for men—so I’ve heard men say; and Pierre is but a boy; but when his father wedded me,—why, his father was turned of five-and thirty years.
This is whistling in the dark. Mrs. Glendinning is right to worry: her son is overdue for the taste of port.
Pierre wants to travel to some sexual terra incognita, but Lucy, he is beginning to realize, is not the woman to take him there. Soon enough, he gets a better chance. Not long after the first visitation of the haunting face, he calls at the home of two charitable spinsters who employ wayward girls as seamstresses—a sanctuary that seems straight out of the pages of some didactic novel warning women of what will become of them should they fail to guard their virginity. When Pierre is introduced by name to the fallen girls bent over their needlework, a raven beauty in the back of the room lets out a muffled shriek. He stares, recognizing her as the creature of his dreams, his eyes traveling down from her face onto the “contracting and expanding” velvet collar that encircles her beautiful neck. This is the moment at which Pierre discovers sex—discovers, that is, an object that focuses his hitherto inchoate cravings. Like a boy confused by his first wet dream, he rushes home to question his mother about what is happening to him. Who can this girl be? Why this mutual feeling of electric excitement? When Mrs. Glendinning deflects his questions, he gets the feeling that he is being lied to about something he needs to know.
It is the first in a series of blows to Pierre’s fabricated world. He has been living in a household drenched in mother love and consecrated to the spotless memory of his father, but he somehow knows that it is a world of lies, and that some dangerous and delicious truth is to be found in this renegade girl who beckons and excites him. Constrained by the decency standards of his time, Melville had to write discreetly of Pierre’s “all too obvious emotion.” In a recent edition of the novel, the artist Maurice Sendak is more explicit, translating Pierre’s “emotion” at his first encounter with Isabel into visual terms by picturing him in a pair of tights that shows off his erection.
After managing for a while to keep himself under control, the horny boy gets his next shock as he walks at dusk toward Lucy’s house and notices “beneath the pendulous canopies of … the weeping elms of the village” a light bobbing along across the road that k
eeps up with him as if synchronized to his own pace. He tries to convince himself that this light belongs to some elderly townsman equipped with a lantern; but just as he reaches the cottage door, the light crosses toward him, held by a hooded man who presents him with a letter, then disappears into the night. These pages have much the same atmosphere as the eerie street scenes in which the tempted protagonist (Dr. Harford) of Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut hears the footfalls of a man following him as he is about to plunge into a sexual underworld.
Melville was groping here, as in “The Counterpane” chapter of Moby-Dick, toward a psychological vocabulary that he did not quite possess, in a book whose subject, as Lewis Mumford was among the first to realize, “was not the universe, but the ego.” He was pushing toward the insight that the content of the portentous letter somehow already resided in the young man’s mind. After receiving it, but still before reading it, Pierre steps up to Lucy’s cottage. His hand recoils from the cold feel of the iron knocker (a sure sign that the girl behind the door is frigid), and without having knocked, he rushes home. So much for Lucy. When he arrives at his own house with the hot letter in hand, Pierre sees himself in a hallway mirror and feels strangely split between the self he has known and the reflected figure whose “features [are] transformed, and unfamiliar to him.” Echoing Faust’s discovery that “two souls, alas, dwell in my breast,” he comes “distinctly to feel two antagonistic agencies within him; one of which was just struggling into his consciousness, and each of which was striving for the mastery.” All this before opening the envelope.
When he finally sits down to read, the words set Pierre on fire, and with amazing alacrity and “boundless expansion” he renounces everything he has previously believed about his family, his obligations, and his place in the world. The girl, whose name is Isabel, claims that she is his illegitimate sister by his father’s French mistress. Since her abandonment by their common father, she has lived bereft, subject to the charity and abuse of strangers; but now, at last, she is within reach of Pierre’s redemptive love. As his eye rushes across the page, he can almost feel her hot breath:
Dearest Pierre, my brother, my own father’s child! art thou an angel, that thou canst overleap all the heartless usages and fashions of a banded world, that will call thee fool, fool, fool! and curse thee, if thou yieldest to that heavenly impulse which alone can lead thee to respond to the long tyrannizing, and now at last unquenchable yearnings of my bursting heart? Oh, my brother!
As suddenly as St. Augustine is converted by the voice in the garden, Pierre is transformed by Isabel’s letter. He is appalled at what he takes to have been the treachery of his father: “Not only was the long-cherished image of his father now transfigured before him from a green foliaged tree into a blasted trunk, but every other image in his mind attested the universality of that electral light which had darted into his soul.” As for his mother, she is instantly changed in his eyes into a dissembler draped in “scaly, glittering folds of pride” for having put her own respectability ahead of the girl’s welfare. Pierre feels duped by everyone and everything. The trees that had once given him shade, the mossy rocks over which he had scrambled with never so much as a skinned knee, now taunt him with their indifference to the enormity of what he has learned. But there is one compensation: in Isabel he has found an object of desire that delivers a rush of pleasure in which rage and love are deliciously commingled.
4.
Melville’s weird book was made up of elements borrowed from the Gothic thrillers of his time, but he mixed them into a concoction unlike anything yet served up by an American writer, and his readers did not know what to make of it. He took up standard themes, which one scholar has inventoried as “the dark-haired ‘forest girl’ [who] casts her shadow between the hero and his betrothed; brother and sister [who] discover each other, passionately, by ancestral tokens … and mysterious portraits and letters [that] unveil a hidden world of secret kinship, broken taboos, and pervasive sexual innuendo,” and turned them into something overwrought and self-parodying. To read Pierre is to feel the discomfort one feels in the presence of a brilliant friend who, in the grip of some new passion, has gone “over the top.” It is the first of Melville’s books in which one feels the proximity of genius to madness. Until now, Melville had “not yet … dropped his angle into the well of his childhood, to find what fish might be there,” and there is something embarrassingly personal about the book, as if it were an anthology of grudges against his mother, wife, sisters, publishers, and, most of all, himself. Some readers have regarded Pierre as “spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel,” though Melville’s granddaughter Eleanor Metcalf, writing some thirty years after her meeting with Raymond Weaver, issued an appropriate caution: “Here [was] a sick man writing of some matters known to be true, some entirely untrue, combined in such a way that the family feared its members and their friends might assume all to be true.”
One theory that has proven especially enduring has been that Melville’s father had, in fact, produced an illegitimate daughter—and, sure enough, there eventually came to light (in 1977) a letter that seemed to back up this theory with a fact. The letter had been written in 1832 to Lemuel Shaw by Allan’s brother Thomas Melvill, Jr., who reported that two women, apparently mother and daughter, had recently called twice at the home of the old Major Thomas Melvill, seeking payment owed to them by his recently deceased son Allan. The senior Melvill was not at home, so Thomas Junior went after the petitioners to pay them off, perhaps to keep them from embarrassing the family further by dredging up his brother’s past. It is biologically and geographically possible that the younger of these two women was, in fact, the product of Allan Melvill’s youthful love or lust. Her mother (not, as it turns out, the older woman who accompanied her on the dunning expedition to Major Melvill’s house) had probably been a twenty-one-year-old shop assistant in Boston in the summer of 1797 when she conceived her child. At the time, fifteen-year-old Allan Melvill had been living in the neighborhood and was possibly employed as an apprentice in the same store. “Judging from what we know of his sons,” writes one scholar who is agnostic about Allan’s early paternity, he “was not slow to reach physical maturity,” and in taking advantage of a willing shopgirl Allan may in fact have been fast.
This is a slender thread from which to hang a claim about a shameful family secret, but whether or not Melville actually had (or thought he might have had) a half sister, he certainly brought to the writing of Pierre a volatile mixture of defensiveness and anger toward his father.* Ever since witnessing Allan’s downfall and collapse, he had felt both allegiance and contempt toward the respectabilities to which his father had aspired, and he remained angry at him for foisting the illusion of gentility upon the family—angry, as well, at what the world had done to his father and thereby to himself. Melville was divided much as Pierre is shown to be: dissatisfied by prescribed family life as the standard for right living, yet frightened by the prospect of losing the stability his family provided. Sometimes he felt himself coming apart under the pressures of this internal conflict between the drive to rebel and the need to conserve.
One effect of his dividedness was a split between sympathy and contempt for the quasi-autobiographical character around whom he built the novel. This kind of ambivalence is turned to effect in two works that Melville greatly admired, King Lear and Don Quixote, but he never found in Pierre the balance between melodrama and farce. He reached deep with this book into his own ambivalence toward the official pieties of a culture in which, as Thornton Wilder once put it, “the heroic flourished side by side with the mock-heroic, and the mock-heroic itself seemed to be a smiling tribute to the heroic.” Pierre in this sense was Melville’s representative American—a quixotic believer who trusts his own righteousness even as he swings wildly between allegiances (Mother vs. Father, Lucy vs. Isabel) that are incompatible with one another. The rest of the novel follows this fanatic-in-the-making on what he thinks is a pilgrimage to hea
ven but turns out to be a journey into hell. As the critic Sacvan Bercovitch has written, the story of Pierre proceeds “from ambiguity to ambiguity, until it ends in a solipsistic void,” with the hero “ranting to no one about a New Revelation that remains forever unrecorded, unfulfilled, except in the mock apocalypse of his self-destruction.”
First Pierre renounces Lucy. Then he rescues Isabel by pretending to the world that he has married her, and for good measure he completes his menage by taking in another fugitive girl (with the rather bovine name Delly Ulver) who has been disowned by her parents for having fallen to some sexual tempter. Meanwhile, Pierre is tempted by his own “sister,” listening with rapture as Isabel tells her story, “his eyes fixed upon the girl’s wonderfully beautiful ear, which chancing to peep forth from among her abundant tresses, nestled in that blackness like a transparent sea-shell of pear.” In case the reader misses the vaginal characteristics of Isabel’s ear, Melville has her sing the rest of her story while accompanying herself, with positively Polynesian abandon, on her exceptionally resonant guitar:
The wild girl played on the guitar; and her long dark shower of curls fell over it, and vailed it; and still, out from the vail came the swarming sweetness, and the utter unintelligibleness, but the infinite significancies of the sounds of the guitar … bounding and rebounding as from multitudinous reciprocal walls; while with every syllable the hair-shrouded form of Isabel swayed to and fro with a like abandonment, and suddenness, and wantonness.…
The young Pierre may have felt “more than cousinly attachment” for his male cousin Glen, but the older Pierre is aroused by the sight of Isabel’s nestled “ear” and craves the sensation of being enveloped by the throbbing walls of her “guitar.”
Melville: His World and Work Page 26