‡ Older critics tended to be too reticent about sexual themes in Melville, but recent critics can be overzealous in finding the gay “code.” In an article on Redburn (“Melville’s Secret Sex Text,” Village Voice Literary Supplement [April 1982]), for example, Jonathan Ned Katz seizes on Melville’s reference in his description of a London bordello to “such pictures as Martial and Suetonius mention as being found in the private cabinet of the Emperor Tiberius,” implying that this allusion somehow identifies Melville’s own sexual preferences as certainly gay. In fact, when Melville notes homosexual behavior as a fact of maritime life, the context is by no means always favorable—as when, in White-Jacket, he mentions a midshipman who is “apt to indulge at times in undignified familiarities with some of the men,” and has them flogged when they resist his advances (WJ, ch. 52, p. 216). As for Tiberius, he was notorious for his wide range of depraved sexual appetites (he liked to use unweaned infants to suck his penis). Suetonius does mention a pornographic picture that Tiberius kept in his bedroom, but the picture depicted the woman warrior Atalanta performing oral sex on her male lover, Meleager.
CHAPTER 8
SEEING TOO MUCH
1.
Toward the end of August 1852, a cousin of Hawthorne’s wrote to a friend that “the Harpers think Melville is a little crazy.” Pierre had appeared in New York on August 6 under the Harper & Brothers imprint, and with every new review, public judgment seemed to merge more completely with private opinion. According to the Boston Post, Melville’s latest book, which sold fewer than two thousand copies, “might be supposed to emanate from a lunatic hospital,” and William Gilmore Simms, never one to mince words (he had described Melville’s portrait of Calhoun in Mardi as “loathsome”), declared in the Southern Quarterly Review that Melville had “gone ‘clean daft.’ ” Lest he be misunderstood, Simms added that “the sooner this author is put in ward the better.”
Earlier that summer, Melville had accepted an invitation to accompany his father-in-law on a trip to what in Massachusetts are still known as “the islands”—Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and, as Melville called it then, “the solitary Crusoeish island of Naushon.” Their destination was the most distant island, which the author of that rollicking fantasy tour in Moby-Dick (“Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it!”) had yet to see with his own eyes. En route, they stopped in New Bedford, where a friend of Judge Shaw’s, Massachusetts attorney general John Clifford, joined them for the boat trip across the Sound. At dinner one night, Mr. Clifford, thinking that a novelist might find the case intriguing, talked at length about an inheritance dispute that had once crossed his desk. Melville must have shown some interest, since a few weeks later Clifford sent him the court clerk’s copy of his notes on the case.
It was a simple story. A shipwrecked sailor named Robertson, who had been accustomed to finding “a wife (for a night) in every port,” married the woman who had rescued him, but after making her pregnant, he deserted her. Seventeen years later, he returned with some tokens for his wife and the child whom he had never seen. Then he left again. After another interval he came back to bring a bridal gift to his daughter, only to set off once more. Upon his death, it became known that Robertson had married two other women during his absences; but his first wife, Agatha Hatch, remained faithful to him in fact and feeling, and in order not to disturb their daughter’s goodwill toward her father, she refrained from ever speaking ill of him.
Melville found Clifford’s story a nice illustration of “the peculiarly latitudinarian notions, which most sailors have of all tender obligations” toward their wives, and of “the great patience, & endurance, & resignedness of the women” while their husbands are away. Drawn to Agatha, perhaps, as a validation of his portrait of the ever faithful Lucy in Pierre, he toyed with the idea of writing something based on her story. But after thinking of Hawthorne’s eerie tale “Wakefield,” about a man who abandons his wife in the city and then spies on her from a hideaway around the block, he enclosed the clerk’s notes with a letter to Hawthorne saying that “in this matter you would make a better hand at it than I would.”
His deference, however, went only so far. In the same letter, which reads like the episode in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon where the Hollywood mogul explains to a novice how to make a movie, Melville coached his friend on how the story should be written:
Supposing the story to open with the wreck—then there must be a storm; & it were well if some faint shadow of the preceding calm were thrown forth to lead the whole.—Now imagine a high cliff overhanging the sea & crowned with a pasture for sheep; a little way off—higher up,—a light-house, where resides the father of the future Mrs. Robinson [sic] the First. The afternoon is mild & warm. The sea with an air of solemn deliberation, with an elaborate deliberation, ceremoniously rolls upon the beach. The air is suppressedly charged with the sound of long lines of surf. There is no land over against this cliff short of Europe & the West Indies. Young Agatha (but you must give her some other name) comes wandering along the cliff. She marks how the continual assaults of the sea have undermined it; so that the fences fall over, & have need of many shiftings inland. The sea has encroached also upon that part where their dwelling-house stands near the light-house.—Filled with meditations, she reclines along the edge of the cliff & gazes out seaward. She marks a handful of cloud on the horizon, presaging a storm thro’ all this quietude. (Of a maratime family & always dwelling on the coast, she is learned in these matters) This again gives food for thought. Suddenly she catches the long shadow of the cliff cast upon the beach 100 feet beneath her; and now she notes a shadow moving along the shadow. It is cast by a sheep from the pasture. It has advanced to the very edge of the cliff, & is sending a mild innocent glance far out upon the water. There, in strange & beautiful contrast, we have the innocence of the land placidly eyeing the malignity of the sea.
When Hawthorne replied, in effect, thanks but no thanks, Melville decided after all to take a crack at the story himself. The result was a novel-length manuscript, now lost, submitted the following spring to Harpers under the title The Isle of the Cross and promptly rejected, possibly because the Harpers anticipated a legal dispute involving descendants of Agatha and her bigamous husband. Melville later made cryptic reference to having been “prevented from printing” it.
2.
Perhaps to soften the blow, the Harpers asked if he had anything else suitable for their three-year-old monthly magazine, and in response Melville sent three stories that were slight and slightly frantic. Two were about coming to terms with failure (“The Fiddler” and “The Happy Failure”) and the third (published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in December 1853) was “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!,” an extended dirty joke about a country gentleman awakened every morning by a “glorious” and “noble cock” whose lusty crowing makes him feel, by comparison, dried up and slack. He is unable to rise to its invitation to romp in a landscape that “looked underdone, its raw juices squirting all around,” and the answer to his lassitude seems to be to get hold of an irrepressible cock for himself. Seeking it far and wide, he comes upon a woodsawyer and asks if he knows “any gentleman hereabouts who owns an extraordinary cock” and might want to sell it. It turns out that the prodigious desideratum belongs to the sawyer, who, not surprisingly, has no intention of giving it up.
The mood revealed in these stories was a mix of grimness and hilarity at his own expense, and Melville’s family was getting worried. In a letter to her brother in April 1853, Maria wrote that “the constant in-door confinement with little intermission to which Hermans occupation as author compels him does not agree with him,” and she expressed fear that “this constant working of the brain, & excitement of the imagination, is wearing Herman out.” A month later, Lizzie gave birth to their third child and first daughter, Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Herman was unable to make the interest payments on the loan from Stewart, and the Harper brothers, having sold less than half the first printing of Pierre, were in n
o mood to advance him more money. He was drifting away from Duyckinck, who had given Moby-Dick a mixed review in The Literary World, and even his friendship with Hawthorne was cooling.
In the first months of their acquaintance, Melville already had objected to a certain chilly reserve in Hawthorne. “There is something lacking—a good deal lacking—to the plump sphericity of the man. What is that?” he had written with confidential cattiness to Duyckinck early in 1851, then answered his own question: “He does’nt patronise the butcher—he needs roast-beef, done rare.” Even in his lavishly praising review of Mosses, Melville had raised the question of whether “Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic doom,” and he had answered his own question equivocally: “This, I cannot altogether tell.” These words amounted to a preliminary version of what Henry James was to say a quarter century later: that the sense of sin is not native to Hawthorne’s mind but “exclusively imported” from the curiosity shop of history, that sin for him “seems to exist … merely for an artistic or literary purpose,” that it was “only, as one may say, intellectual … not moral and theological,” not something that “discomposed, disturbed, haunted” him “in the manner of its usual victims,” but something by which he was amused in the manner of an artist at play. This was the charge that Melville intimated in his essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Was Hawthorne, he wondered, finally a voyeur rather than a sympathetic participant in life?
Writing to Hawthorne after returning to Pittsfield from the trip to the islands, with his own career in decline and Hawthorne’s soaring, Melville filled his letter with a cascade of half-sincere congratulations:*
This name of “Hawthorne” seems to be ubiquitous. I have been on something of a tour lately, and it has saluted me vocally & typographically in all sorts of places & in all sorts of ways.… On a stately piazza, I saw it gilded on the back of a very new book [Twice-Told Tales], and in the hands of a clergyman.—I went to visit a gentleman in Brooklyne, and as we were sitting at our wine, in came the lady of the house, holding a beaming volume in her hand, from the city—“My Dear,” to her husband, “I have brought you Hawthorne’s new book.” I entered the cars at Boston for this place. In came a lively boy “Hawthorne’s new book!”—In good time I arrived home. Said my lady-wife “there is Mr. Hawthorne’s new book, come by mail.” … Well, the Hawthorne is a sweet flower; may it flourish in every hedge.
When, in an earlier letter, Melville declared their everlasting solidarity (“The divine magnet is in you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question—they are One”), he was protesting too much that the comparative size of their “magnets” did not concern him.
But the trouble between them was more than rivalry. Hawthorne was a man who reserved his self-revelations for his wife, for whom his passion was frank and abundant. “My breast is full of thee; thou art throbbing throughout all my veins,” he wrote to Sophia two years into their courtship; and later, after a few weeks’ absence, one feels insatiate desire in his lament that “it is an age since thou hast been in my arms.” But if his love for his wife was brimming and boundless, to others he seemed inward and stingy, “self-centered, self-reproductive, & soliloquial,” according to one ungenerous acquaintance, who described him as a “hermaphroditical sort of thinker and artist,” puffed up with the arrogance of his self-sufficiency. To those whom he did not allow close to him—everyone, it seemed, except Sophia—he appeared to be the kind of man who registers everything but reveals nothing, a man of “unsearchable eyes.” His truest confidante put the matter more appreciatively, contrasting Melville’s eager volubility with Hawthorne’s receptive quiet. “Nothing pleases me more,” Sophia wrote to her sister Elizabeth, “than to sit & hear this growing man [Melville] dash his tumultuous waves of thought against Mr. Hawthorne’s great, genial, comprehending silences … without doing anything on his own except merely being, it is astonishing how people make him their innermost Father Confessor.”
Hawthorne was an instance of what Henry James (who saw in him his only true predecessor in America) called “that queer monster, the artist”: a vampiric monster, that is, who sucks up for his own sustenance the loves and sorrows of his human subjects. As if to brace himself for disappointment, Melville had written in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” that “on a personal interview no great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader.” Years later, in Clarel, he was to model on Hawthorne a character named Vine, of whom he wrote that “Under cheer / Of opulent softness, reigned austere / Control of self,” and he may have had the same person in mind in The Confidence-Man when one character says of another that “there appears to be a certain—what shall I call it?—hidden sun, say, about him, at once enlightening and mystifying.”
One senses Hawthorne’s resistant presence in the many scenes of confrontation that recur in Melville’s fiction between men of ardor and men of reserve: Ahab and Starbuck, Pierre and Falsgrave, even the needy man of “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” and the well-equipped woodsawyer. If Melville was not passing judgment, he almost certainly had been bruised by the collision with his unyielding friend, who, as he was to write of Vine, “could lure / Despite reserve which overture / Withstood.” By the end of 1852, there was in his letters to Hawthorne, as Newton Arvin has remarked, a certain “dryness and tiredness”; perhaps the temperamental differences between the two men were proving to be unbridgeable, and so, finally, was their intellectual and spiritual divide. Hawthorne was a great psychological detective, adept at exposing covert motives behind overt convictions—sexual hunger in those who claim to be devoted to purity, lust for power in those who profess love of equality. Yet he was also, as James was to call him, an apparently “unperplexed” man who hid his contradictions and, like the aptly named Coverdale in his own novel The Blithedale Romance, peeped at the world from a hiding place of his own making. Vine’s heart, Melville wrote in Clarel, was “a fountain sealed.”
At some point between completing Moby-Dick and undertaking Pierre, Melville may have gotten close to some explosive secret in his friend’s private life, and Hawthorne may have pushed him away. We do not know, and are unlikely ever to find out. Some scholars speculate that the theme of incest in Pierre cut too near to sensitivities that “hiddenly reside” (Melville’s phrase from his essay on Mosses) in a man whose feelings for his darkly beautiful sister Elizabeth may have verged on the erotic. But whatever precipitated the estrangement, it seems clear that Melville, like Ahab, was driven by a burning need to get at the why of things, while Hawthorne, like Starbuck, found something puerile and reckless in his friend’s Faustian urge to know the unknowable. A blurter-outer confronting a man of circumspection, Melville was a seeker whereas Hawthorne was endowed with what Keats had called “negative capability”—the ability, that is, to live among “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Perhaps his equanimity was the real object of Melville’s envy.
Whatever were the disturbances between them, by 1853 the two men had subsided into a more formal friendship. After Franklin Pierce was elected president in November 1852, Allan Melville, knowing that Hawthorne had gained the lucrative consulship at Liverpool for himself, wrote him to ask for help in securing a diplomatic post for Herman. Hawthorne agreed, and it was the beginning of a lobbying campaign that, as it turned out, reprised the futile hunt for a patronage job that Melville had made back in 1847 when newly married. This time, however, he stayed on the sidelines and let friends and family do the begging. Uncle Peter weighed in with Edwin Croswell, editor of the Albany Argus, who in turn wrote to the new U.S. attorney general, Caleb Cushing, that for Mr. Melville “constant brain labor seems to render some change of climate & position if not indispensable” at least “very desirable.” Everyone who contributed to the campaign agreed that Honolulu would be best, t
hough a posting in England would be fine and even Antwerp would do—anywhere distant from the scene of his failures. It is uncertain whether Lizzie and the children would have accompanied Herman if something had worked out, but nothing did.
Even the harshest critics of Pierre conceded that Melville had talent left to squander. In a review that called the book “perhaps the craziest fiction extant,” the Boston Post lamented that “it is too bad for Mr. Melville to abuse his really fine talents.” By the spring of 1853, friends and family were wondering if he was spent. Then, late that summer, after the rejection of The Isle of the Cross, the failed lobbying effort, the last salvos in the critical bombardment of Pierre, and the troubles with Hawthorne, he somehow summoned the discipline to compose a story that is among the great achievements of world literature.
3.
“Bartleby, the Scrivener” was published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in two installments, in November and December 1853. Though the first issue of Putnam’s had appeared less than a year earlier, it had already emerged as the nation’s leading literary monthly, and, by 1855, was declared by William Makepeace Thackeray to be “much the best Mag. in the world.” Edited by Melville’s old New York acquaintance Charles Frederick Briggs, Putnam’s was broadly anti-slavery and Whiggish; it drew writers from Horace Greeley’s stable at the Tribune, and had obtained the subscription list of the American Whig Review in order to build circulation. The fact that he fit in well in the Putnam’s circle suggests how far Melville had moved from the Democratic allegiances of his New York literary mentors and his brothers—one reason, perhaps, why his bid for a political appointment had failed. “Herman has always been a firm Democrat,” Uncle Peter claimed in his letter of recommendation to Croswell, who felt obliged to transmit the appeal to Cushing with the emendation that Melville was a Democrat only to the extent that “a literary devotee can be supposed to enter the political arena,” which was, of course, hardly at all.
Melville: His World and Work Page 29