With “tremendous displacing and revolutionizing thoughts,” Pierre begins to think about what it might mean, as Henry Murray nicely puts it, that “he ‘fell’ for the Face before he knew it was his sister’s.” Starting to doubt her, he starts to doubt himself. When Isabel moans, “I am too full without discharge,” Pierre’s pity is infused with lust, each feeding the other as the girl’s “big drops fell on him.”
The novel’s pace and tone have by now become as frantic as the processes of Pierre’s mind; his fervid language (“Oh, I am sick, sick, sick!”) matches the agony of Beatrice Cenci, raped by her father, as recounted in Shelley’s poem The Cenci, to which Melville repeatedly alludes:
O blood, which art my father’s blood,
Circling through these contaminated veins,
If thou, poured forth on the polluted earth,
Could wash away the crime, and punishment
By which I suffer …
Finally, Pierre loses what remains of his mental stability—the word “ambiguity,” which Melville used in his subtitle, referred in his day to mental disorder—and murders Glen in a rage. At the revelation that Isabel is Pierre’s sister, Lucy dies, apparently of shock. Pierre and Isabel, together in prison, succumb to self-administered poison as the book stumbles toward a corpse-strewn conclusion in which the prison guards stand around making scatological jokes.
7.
One way to make sense of Pierre is to think of it as a nineteenth-century preview of the camp sensibility that became pervasive more than a hundred years later in late twentieth-century culture. At the beginning of the novel, when Pierre is skipping through the vernal hills crooning nature hymns—“Oh, praised be the beauty of this earth, the beauty, and the bloom, and the mirthfulness thereof”—he seems a nineteenth-century Tiny Tim doing his eyeball-rolling rendition of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” One never knows in this book whether Melville is being straight or arch, which is just the sticking point: there is something stirring about Pierre’s outrage, but there is also something utterly ludicrous about his sense of having been appointed to set the world right.
Pierre is a botched book. While its hero may be kin to Captain Ahab (“Lo!,” Pierre shrieks after reading Isabel’s letter, “I strike through thy helm, and will see thy face, be it Gorgon!… From all idols I tear all veils; henceforth I will see the hidden things.…”), there is an absurd disproportion between his vaulting emotion and the occasions that set it off. Pierre is Ahab gone camp. Melville never brings into focus the casus belli that drives Pierre to declare war on the world, and so Pierre remains a work, as T. S. Eliot famously said of Hamlet, whose “emotion is in excess of the facts as they appear”—and here is the reason why so many readers have tried to identify some secret emotion that might explain it.
When Maugham identified the emotion as “disappointment with the married state,” he was not talking about post-honeymoon cooling between husband and wife. What he meant, and intimated elsewhere in his essay, was that Melville had “married in order to combat inclinations that dismayed him”—inclinations, that is, toward his own sex. Since Melville lived and died before the word “homosexual” came into wide use, there is something plausible about Maugham’s suspicion that Melville may have been perplexedly aware—in himself as well as in others—of impulses for which there was no established language, and that Pierre was his attempt to write about them. Pierre, after all, feels “much more than cousinly attachment” for Glen, who in turn feels scorned by Pierre. By Melville’s time, there had long been legal penalties for specific homosexual acts (grouped under the general rubric of “sodomy”), but the idea that some men felt a confirmed sexual preference for other men was only beginning to be voiced—or, rather, whispered.
In the 1850s, a few literary figures, Whitman being the most prominent, celebrated male-male eroticism as requisite for the comradely spirit of democracy, and new terms were entering the language by which same-sex love could be given a name. Whitman liked the term “adhesiveness,” which he borrowed from what Melville called (in Moby-Dick) the “semi-science” of phrenology, a technique for identifying the particular lobe or sector where this or that emotion or aptitude was located within the human brain. By midcentury it had become fashionable for gentlemen and ladies to submit to examination by a phrenologist, who was trained to feel the swells and valleys of the skull (the cranial equivalent of fingerprints) and thereby supply a profile of one’s character by assessing the relative size of, say, the “cautiousness” bump. There was something slightly daring about going to a phrenologist, whose trade, like that of psychoanalysts in the early years of the twentieth century, occupied the border between science and quackery.
In the vocabulary of phrenology, “amativeness” was the term for love between a man and a woman. “Adhesiveness” was the term for what today we might call male bonding. And by 1850, a few phrenologists were speaking of “excessive adhesiveness” as a pathological condition. Though it is hard now to take seriously this method for matching inner mental qualities to the outer contours of scalp and bone, phrenology was an attempt, however primitive, to explore the mysterious relation between brain and mind—and one of its implications was that human sexuality varied in intensity and in its objects of desire.†
As far as we know, Melville never submitted to a phrenological examination, but it would be prudish to doubt that during his nearly four years at sea he had found himself aroused in the company of other men. In the maritime world of his youth, the pairing up of older with younger men in a relation known as “chickenship” was evidently common. When one young sailor, Philip Van Buskirk, asked a veteran seaman in 1853, “Well, White, what’s your opinion of those men who have to do with boys? If you were King, wouldn’t you kill every one of ’em?” he got a nuanced answer:
White: “Yes; Every feller that lives ashore and does that, I’d shoot Him—yaas, by—, I’d shoot him.”
Van Buskirk: “And if you had a navy, wouldn’t you kill every man in it found guilty of that?”
White: “No;—what can a feller do?—three years at sea—and hardly any chance to have a woman. I tell you … a feller must do so. Biles and pimples and corruption will come out all over his body if he don’t.”
Whether Melville availed himself of male partners, or relieved himself in as much privacy as he could find aboard ship, or waited for the next contact with island women, no one can say. But it is certainly true, as Maugham writes, that he had an “eye for masculine beauty.” In his vagabond days in the Pacific, he had admired the “matchless symmetry of form” of Polynesian boys and relished the services of one in particular, Kory-Kory, who “never for one moment left my side,” having been assigned the task of “adjusting everything to secure my personal comfort,” including “tenderly” bathing his limbs. Even in the evenings when the girls chased away Melville’s personal attendant during their anointing of his “whole body,” Kory-Kory “nevertheless retired only to a little distance and watched their proceedings with the most jealous attention.”
Consider as well this description in Redburn of Carlo, “a rich-cheeked, chestnut-haired Italian boy,” who makes his living walking the streets of Liverpool, playing on his hand-organ:
The head was if any thing small; and heaped with thick clusters of tendril curls, half overhanging the brows and delicate ears, it somehow reminded you of a classic vase, piled up with Falernian foliage.
From the knee downward, the naked leg was beautiful to behold as any lady’s arm; so soft and rounded, with infantile ease and grace. His whole figure was free, fine, and indolent; he was such a boy as might have ripened into life in a Neapolitan vineyard; such a boy as gipsies steal in infancy; such a boy as Murillo often painted, when he went among the poor and outcast, for subjects wherewith to captivate the eyes of rank and wealth; such a boy, as only Andalusian beggars are, full of poetry, gushing from every rent.
The narrator of Redburn is transported “in dreams Elysian” by this boy, who, “pulling and
twitching the ivory knobs at one end of his instrument,” is able to “make, unmake me; build me up; to pieces take me; and join me limb to limb.”
One avowedly gay critic, writing early in the age of AIDS, goes so far as to claim that “every positive depiction of sexuality in Melville is a depiction of male masturbation, frequently mutual.” This was a practice—distinguished in Melville’s day from sodomy, a term generally reserved for anal or oral penetration—to which he seems to allude in the ecstatic “A Squeeze of the Hand” chapter in Moby-Dick, in which the men of the Pequod gather around tubs of spermaceti, squeezing the congealed lumps until they melt into a sort of warm whale soup. One recent critic calls it a “circle jerk”:
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
What can one conclude from such passages about Melville’s sexual life? He may have felt constrained in his marriage to his “milliner’s doll” wife, and he may have longed for some dark-eyed Isabel. He may have been an “androgynic personality,” or bisexual, as Henry Murray believed. These inferences can reasonably be drawn not from this passage alone—which was less freighted with sexual meaning in its nineteenth-century idiom than it might seem today—but from the whole range of Melville’s writings about the sensory life.
Maugham surmised that Melville had discovered early in his marriage that “the expectation of sexual intercourse is more exciting than the realization.” If this was so, Pierre may indeed have been his attempt to write about the constraints of conventional sexual life. Others have gone further and suggested that Melville was consciously struggling to come to terms with inclinations considered wayward in his time. To follow this theme through the history of Melville criticism is to watch the critics register one of the significant developments of modern life—the growing acceptance of same-sex desire—and, not surprisingly, it was in the second half of the twentieth century that Pierre came to be recognized as a work of deep psychosexual insight. When Henry Murray proposed, in 1949, that “Isabel is the personification of Pierre’s unconscious,” he meant that she is Pierre’s “anima,” or the archetypal image of the female within himself:
One reason for the anima’s attracting power is that she embodies the repressed and as-yet unformulated components of the man’s personality: the child in him who felt unloved, the passivity and the death wishes which were forsworn, the grief and the self-pity which have been bottled up, the feminine dispositions which have been denied, and, in addition, scores of nameless intuitions and impulses, the open expression of which has been barred by culture.
Melville was extending in Pierre the symbolic expression of unconscious mental processes that he had begun to develop in Moby-Dick, where he had described Fedallah (the atavistic harpooner whom Ahab secretly brings aboard the Pequod) as “such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams,” one of those “odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth.” In effect, he retold in Pierre the story of Ahab—this time as the tale of a self-deluded boy who declares his independence from the wicked world and withdraws his allegiance from false gods, bestowing it instead upon himself. This boy-man turns himself into a “self-reciprocally efficient hermaphrodite” and, with slowly dawning horror, begins to suspect that he has merely found a rationale for following his own unholy desires.
Until relatively recently, the norms of critical discourse required that such matters be discussed elliptically. When the secretly gay critic Newton Arvin observed in 1950 that Melville “felt himself emotionally trapped between his mother and his wife,” he could only venture the prolix hint that Melville’s “fantasies took the form of imagining an escape from them both through a relationship that would be as tabu in quality as brother-sister incest, even if it were not literally that.” Some forty years later, as the veil was lifting on homosexual life, an openly gay critic could state outright that the incest theme in Pierre was Melville’s way of “transferring his guilt for homosexual desire to a sexual transgression of which he was innocent.” Other gay critics have suggested that Melville felt no guilt at all, pointing to “the wink of homosexuality” in his work, by which they mean that he planted welcoming clues that only members of the perforcedly secret gay society would recognize—as when, in Redburn, he marks Harry Bolton’s pleasure den with a purple light rather than the red light by which sailors find their way to conventional brothels.‡
Whether hinting at it or saying it loud and clear, these critics are saying the same thing: that Melville was homosexual. Yet it remains difficult to know whether this attribution of homosexual feeling is an overdue acknowledgment of something of which Melville was aware or a projection on the part of gay readers who find themselves drawn to him—or, perhaps, both. The quest for the private Melville has usually led to a dead end, and we are not likely to fare better by speculating about his tastes in bed or bunk. He never reduced the complexity of experience to adage or aphorism or any other simplifying summary. On the one hand, Pierre can be interpreted as a covert gay text about a confused young man unable to reveal himself: “for the deeper that some men feel a secret and poignant feeling; the higher they pile the belying surfaces.” As the book proceeds, Melville describes Pierre more and more in androgynous terms until in a burst of self-hatred the “woman-soft” boy destroys both himself and all who love him. “For Pierre is neuter now!” and can consort with neither man nor woman.
On the other hand, as befits a novel whose subtitle is the Ambiguities, Pierre can be read as a satire of a spoiled man-child who fails to stand or walk as an adult must learn to do:
Watch yon toddler, how long it is learning to stand by itself! First it shrieks and implores, and will not try to stand at all, unless both father and mother uphold it.… But, by-and-by, grown up to man’s estate, it shall leave the very mother that bore it, and the father that begot it.… There now, do you see the soul.
Pierre never advances very far into this process of maturation, ending his days soulless, mired in infantile self-pity, a “toddler … toddling entirely alone, and not without shrieks.”
Among Melville’s contemporaries who found themselves dismayed by Pierre was Evert Duyckinck, to whom Melville had once complained “that an author can never—under no conceivable circumstances—be at all frank with his readers,” and for whom Melville had written, in his review of Hawthorne’s Mosses, that “in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself.” As for Melville’s latest novel, Duyckinck found its “cunning glimpses” altogether too revealing:
we cannot pass without remark, the supersensuousness with which the holy relations of the family are described. Mother and son, brother and sister are sacred facts not to be disturbed by any sacrilegious speculations. Mrs. Glendinning and Pierre, mother and son, call each other brother and sister, and are described with all the coquetry of a lover and mistress. And again, in what we have termed the supersensuousness of description, the horrors of an incestuous relation between Pierre and Isabel seem to be vaguely hinted at.
Pierre may not have been, as one recent critic has called it, “the finest psychological novel anyone had yet written in English,” but it was a work, as Melville had said about the plays of Shakespeare, that made “short, quick probin
gs at the very axis of reality.” It amounts to an argument that the socialized self is hopelessly divided between proscribed inner longings and compulsory outward performance. It is a book that goes beyond satire, in which Melville curses sentimental culture for refusing to recognize that its standards and practices are arbitrary and its collective memory as entranced by myth as that of distant savages—but a book in which he finds no salvation in the release from culture.
Among American writers, only Hawthorne had come close to matching its psychological penetration, in such stories as “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” about men obsessed with cleansing the world—especially the bodies of their wives and daughters—of blemish and imperfection. In Pierre, Melville somehow managed to produce both a serious anatomy of the radical imagination that anticipates Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and a manic burlesque that looks toward Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge. After Lizzie finished reading it, she must have turned to the wall, losing herself gratefully in the whirling patterns of the wallpaper.
* Some scholars still cling to an earlier theory that when the young Allan Melvill had shared a house in Paris in 1809 (this was the time when he saw Napoleon) with his brother Thomas Junior and Thomas’s French wife, Françoise, he may have shared his brother’s wife as well. On this theory, the French-born Priscilla Melvill, reputedly Herman’s cousin, was actually Herman’s half sister conceived in adulterous union between Allan Melvill and his sister-in-law. See Jean Simon, Herman Melville: Marin, Métaphysicien et poéte (Paris: Boivin & Cie, 1939), pp. 28–29.
† Without identifying himself, Mark Twain once submitted to a phrenological examination, only to be told that his “Organ of Humor” was unusually small.
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