After the war, Israel leads a life of hard labor in the “Egypt” of England. “Desperate with want,” he joins a work gang of “spavined-looking old men” among smoking brick kilns under a “ridged and mottled sky,” where they ladle into wooden trays the heavy dough that hardens into the building blocks of industrial Britain. Later, he turns to caning chairs, then works with shovel and spade in a fence-enclosed London park where, amid the greenery, he dreams “himself home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains.” (By the time Israel gets back, factories of the sort that Melville had written about in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” could be found in those mountains.) After a half century of exile, he sails into Boston Harbor on the Fourth of July, 1826, the date on which both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, and is almost trampled by a holiday mob before heading west to the Berkshires “to get a glimpse of his father’s homestead,” only to discover that “it had been burnt down long ago.” Having petitioned for support as a veteran, he is denied because of “certain caprices of law,” and with his “scars … his only medals,” Israel Potter “died the same day that the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down.”
Beneath its picaresque surface, a weariness of tone kept Israel Potter from rising above the level of minor work as Melville worked at it into the summer of 1854. It was probably then that he also wrote “The Lightning-Rod Man,” an acerbic sketch of a country con man who peddles such advice as avoiding tall men during thunderstorms, as well as two short stories that Melville referred to, in a letter to Harper’s on September 18, as a “brace of fowl—wild fowl.” These unruly birds were “Jimmy Rose,” about a New York bankrupt reminiscent of Allan Melvill, a tale about failure told in the voice of a superannuated gentleman who lives in a leaky house that is half museum, half mausoleum, and “The ‘Gees,” a sketch of the mixed race of Portuguese and Cape Verde islanders whose preference for biscuits over wages makes them popular with whaleship captains. Each of these stories had touches of tart wit but was otherwise undistinguished.
In May or June, Lizzie had become pregnant with the child who would be the Melvilles’ last, Frances, born on March 2, 1855. There is little direct evidence of what life was like in the Melville household, though there survives a speculative account in a letter to Herman from his sister Helen, who was living in Brookline with her husband, George Griggs, and who, in May, chided her brother with a mix of affection and exasperation for ignoring her letters:
I should have sent one of my numerous epistles to your particular address ere now, if I had not been so well acquainted with your usual mode of treating such documents—“Any letters? Herman?” cries Gus [Herman’s sister Augusta], or Lizzie, or Fanny [Herman’s sister Frances], as you are reining up old Charlie in gallant style at the pump-room door. “Y-e-s-s—one from Helen I guess—for some of you—here ’tis.” “Why Herman, it’s directed to you!”—“Is it? Let me see—why so it is! Well, take it along, I’ll be in presently, and then some of you can read it to me.”
In May, Melville missed the annual interest payment on T. D. Stewart’s loan for the third year in a row, and knowing that the full amount was due the following year, his distractions now included financial obligations that he feared he could not meet. The previous winter, while he was working on a long story about an American merchant ship captain who encounters a mysterious slaveship in the South Atlantic, an attack of back pain—“so bad that he was helpless,” Lizzie later wrote—had come on and lingered for months. Eventually, he sought treatment from his neighbor Dr. Holmes, whose son, the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., remembered his father’s patient seventy years later as a “rather gruff taciturn man.” Melville’s mother worried about “dear Herman’s” physical and financial health, both of which, she advised her daughter-in-law, could be improved by the purchase of “half a (½) dozen lb of Halibut once a week it is much cheaper than meat, & is delicious when cold dressed like Lobster.”
3.
By the spring of 1855, George W. Curtis had concluded that Melville “does everything too hurriedly now,” and he advised Joshua A. Dix, one of the new owners of Putnam’s, to “decline any novel from Melville that is not extremely good.” Some of the stories that Melville composed during this period, such as “The Bell Tower” and “The Apple-Tree Table,” probably written between spring and fall of 1855, merited the caution. Their prose, if not quite “arthritically clumsy,” as one critic has judged it, strains to express their themes in allegorical form. “The Bell Tower” is an elaborately concocted tale of hubris punished, and “The Apple-Tree Table” retells a piece of New England lore about an insect that, with an eerie ticking noise, eats its way out of an applewood table in which it has been imprisoned for years. Thoreau alludes to the same story in the conclusion to Walden and draws spiritual refreshment from it: “Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing this?” But Melville turned the tale into a joke at the expense of his narrator who, until the “small shining beetle or bug” makes its appearance, is half convinced by the ticking noises that his house is inhabited by a ghost.‡
These works were a cut above hackwork, yet Curtis retained enough interest in Melville to be “anxious to see” the longer story that he had been working on while the final installments of Israel Potter were appearing. For this work, Melville had turned again to another writer for “a skeleton of actual reality” on which “to build about with fulness & veins & beauty.” It was set once again in the past, but this time the theme—slavery—was utterly current. When Curtis read Benito Cereno in April 1855, he found it “a little spun out,—but … very striking & well done,” and he urged that it be accepted. Benito Cereno appeared in installments in the last three months of the year.
It was a story well suited for Putnam’s, which was becoming increasingly belligerent on the slavery issue. Within a year of Franklin Pierce’s election in 1852, Putnam’s had run a piece by Parke Godwin, a refugee from the Democratic Party, attacking the new Democratic president for trying “to dance upon … cross wires” over the political abyss rather than defend the principle of “the equality and brotherhood of the human race.” By the mid-1850s, the magazine was being denounced by the virulently pro-slavery DeBow’s Review as “the leading review of the Black Republican party,” and it is easy to see why. Among the articles in the same October 1855 issue that ran the first installment of Benito Cereno was a long piece on “the suicide of slavery,” by which the Putnam’s editors meant to prophesy not the death of the peculiar institution but the death of the republic itself. “We sit with dull eyes and heavy spirit,” they wrote about the widening sectional divide, as we “listen to the tick of a death-watch as armed marauders of Missouri” carry their slaves into Kansas under protection of Congress, which had recently annulled the Missouri Compromise by declaring the Kansas Territory open to slaveholders. Readers today tend to encounter Benito Cereno in the neutralizing context of some “Great Short Works” anthology, but its original appearance was in a partisan magazine committed to the anti-slavery cause.
Melville’s source for his new story was a memoir by a Massachusetts merchant sea captain named Amasa Delano, whose ship, the Perseverance, had been anchored off the island of Santa Maria in February 1805 when it encountered a Spanish slaveship in foggy weather and evident distress. Delano devoted one chapter to this incident, which Melville developed into an extended retelling that took its title from the name (Bonito Sereno, as Delano spelled it) of the Spanish captain. The result has provoked more critical contention than anything else Melville wrote—a work that has been increasingly recognized as among his greatest achievements.
Delano’s original was not much to work with, recounting the incidents matter-of-factly: having been rowed over to the slaveship, the Tryal (Melville, by altering the name to San Dominick, alluded to the island of St. Domingo, where slaves had revolted in bloody rage against their French masters in 1799), Delano discovered its officers, crew, a
nd slaves dying of hunger and thirst. He summoned relief supplies from the Perseverance and, while awaiting their arrival, witnessed behavior aboard that he could not explain: a black boy assaults a white sailor as if they are equals in a street fight, while the Spanish captain watches with apparent indifference, looking nervously toward one particular Negro, “who kept constantly at the elbows of Don Bonito and myself.” When Delano asked to speak privately with the Spaniard about the state of affairs on his ship, he declined, explaining that he always kept by his side “his confidant and companion.” Delano could not put his finger on what was amiss until, having shoved off in his boat to return to the Perseverance, Don Bonito leapt from the gunwale into the departing boat and poured out his story: the slaves, led by Bonito’s slave attendant, had commandeered his ship, killed a score of his men, and demanded to be sailed to Senegal. The rest of the narrative recounts the attack by the Perseverance on the Tryal, the capture and execution of the mutinous slaves, and what Delano regarded as the surly ingratitude of the Spaniard, who refused to reward the man who had saved him.
On this bare foundation Melville constructed a work that, in the view of Lewis Mumford (writing in 1929), made the rebellious slaves into symbols of “human treachery.” But others, including the notable black writers Sterling Brown and Ralph Ellison, have found in Benito Cereno a sympathetic portrayal of brutalized people driven to violence in order to regain their freedom. In our own time of terror and torture, Benito Cereno has emerged as the most salient of Melville’s works: a tale of desperate men in the grip of a vengeful fury that those whom they hate cannot begin to understand. It is the story of an American, Amasa Delano, caught in a whirlwind of mutual cruelty, a man, as Benjamin Barber has recently written, whose “blindness to evil” leaves him incapable of recognizing “the moral debacle of slavery itself.” Russell Banks, author of a historically informed novel about that avenging terrorist John Brown, describes Benito Cereno as one of the few works of American literature to confront unflinchingly “the African Diaspora and the violent history of race in America.”
Benito Cereno is also our best evidence that during his years of personal withdrawal from the intellectual circle to which he had once belonged, Melville had kept his eye on the gathering storm. He turned to the subject of slavery at a time when Americans on both sides of the divide feared that slave rebellion was imminent. By the 1850s, pro- and anti-slavery polemics had become fierce and frequent; apologists who had once described slavery as a benign paternalism toward a childlike race now described blacks as beasts requiring strict oversight, while opponents of slavery declared that years of white cruelty would soon incite—and justify—black reprisal. After years of self-suppression, writers on both sides of the question brought slavery into the mainstream of American literature, culminating with the publication in 1852 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The escaped slave Frederick Douglass, in his widely read Narrative of the Life of an American Slave (published in 1845 and reprinted eight times within three years), described how he had seen his master “tie up a lame young woman, and whip her with a heavy cowskin upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood to drip” while he quoted from the Gospel of Luke: “ ‘He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.’ ” In 1854, with this kind of outrage in mind and referring to an infamous slave uprising against the French on the island of Hispaniola, Theodore Parker warned that “to mutilate … Africans whom outrage has stung to crime … is only to light the torches of San Domingo.” The South, he added, “sits on a powder magazine” that sooner or later was bound to ignite.
But if people on both sides of the debate agreed that the explosion was coming, they disagreed about how or even whether it might be forestalled. With one side calling for suppression of the black “domestic enemy” and the other calling for abolition, Putnam’s readers were likely to be found between these two positions—sympathetic to the slaves, but frightened of what would happen if they should break their chains. The historical Amasa Delano, too, had inhabited this borderland, and in Benito Cereno, Melville made him into a representative type in whom his readers could see themselves: a basically decent man trying to reconcile the unwritten natural law of charity with the written law requiring him to defend a slaveowner’s rights.
In the mid-1850s, a tale of slave revolt at sea was not a far-fetched fiction. In 1839, the Spanish schooner Amistad was sailing between the Cuban ports of Havana and Guanja, carrying some fifty slaves illegally purchased in Africa (Spain was a signatory to an 1817 treaty banning the international slave trade), when the slaves rebelled, killed two crew members, and demanded to be returned home. Having wandered off course, the ship was seized by an American naval vessel off the coast of Long Island, and the legal battle that ensued went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the venerable John Quincy Adams argued successfully in favor of the slaves’ freedom.
Two years after the Amistad incident, a similar event at sea led to a similar result in court. The American ship Creole was transporting legally purchased slaves from Virginia to New Orleans when, in the fall of 1841, nineteen slaves seized control and, after killing a white sailor, forced the crew to sail to the British Bahamas. Despite demands for restitution by Secretary of State Daniel Webster, the mutineers were freed under the British Act of Emancipation, which in 1833 had eliminated slavery throughout the empire. More than a decade after the Creole uprising, Frederick Douglass made the leader of the revolt, Madison Washington, the hero of his short novel The Heroic Slave, published in Douglass’s newspaper, The North Star, in March 1853.
Years before undertaking his one sustained work about slavery, Melville had written a sentence in White-Jacket that furnishes a clue to what he now set out to do with these and other precedents in mind: “Depravity in the oppressed is no apology for the oppressor; but rather an additional stigma to him, as being, in a large degree, the effect, and not the cause and justification of oppression.” Here was the theme of Benito Cereno: the mirroring relation between oppressor and oppressed.
4.
The story begins with Captain Delano being awakened at dawn in his cabin by his first mate, who brings news that a “strange sail” has been sighted entering the bay where the Perseverance lies at anchor. Sleepy and sluggish, he ascends to the deck and, trying to discern the approaching vessel, finds himself staring into an impenetrable fog through which he can barely distinguish the wings of gulls from the enveloping grays of sea, cloud, and sky. Against this background, the phantom ship “showed no colors” by which its origin or intent might be known.
As he had done in The Encantadas, Melville organized Benito Cereno pictorially. With “shreds of fog here and there raggedly furring her,” the ship appears to Delano “like a white-washed monastery after a thunder-storm, seen perched upon some dun cliff among the Pyrenees”—an impression intensified by dark figures in “dark cowls” moving about the deck like “Friars pacing the cloisters.” These images are supplied by an apparently omniscient narrator who stands outside the action and tells the tale in the third person (“Delano continued to watch …”), but whose perspective is so close to Delano’s that the two seem to merge.
Having “ordered his whale-boat to be dropped,” Delano is rowed over to the slaveship San Dominick, a sort of Gothic death-ship complete with “shield-like stern-piece” in which is carved the image of a masked satyr stepping on the writhing body of a defeated enemy, also masked. Once aboard, Delano is struck by the scarcity of whites amid the blacks. In the historical Delano’s account, this scene occupies one phrase (“captain, mate, people and slaves, crowded around me to relate their stories”), but Melville expands it to a full paragraph as the human cargo pours out its tale:
Climbing the side, the visitor was at once surrounded by a clamorous throng of whites and blacks, but the latter outnumbering the former more than could have been expected, negro transportation-ship as the stranger in port was. But, in one language, and as with one voice, all poured o
ut a common tale of suffering; in which the negresses, of whom there were not a few, exceeded the others in their dolorous vehemence. The scurvy, together with a fever, had swept off a great part of their number, more especially the Spaniards. Off Cape Horn, they had narrowly escaped ship-wreck; then, for days together, they had lain tranced without wind; their provisions were low; their water next to none; their lips that moment were baked.
The slippage here from narration by the omniscient narrator (“all poured out a common tale”) into indirect discourse by the slaves (“The scurvy … had swept off a great part of their number.…”) moves us so close to Delano’s perspective that we witness the scene as if over his shoulder and hear the “clamorous” crowd as if through his ears.
As the crowd tells its tale of woe, Delano is made “the mark of all eager tongues,” and “his one eager glance took in all the faces, with every other object about him.” But who is taking in whom? Delano is an easy “mark” (already, by 1850, a colloquial term for the victim of a confidence trick), and when the crowd disperses like the chorus in an opera making way for the lead performers—the Spanish captain and his personal slave, Babo—the slave plays his part especially well. Setting his face in the guise of “a shepherd’s dog … mutely turned up into the Spaniard’s,” Babo strikes the gullible Delano as a portrait of “sorrow and affection … equally blended.” With “master and man … before him, the black upholding the white, Captain Delano could not but bethink him of the beauty of that relationship which could present such a spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other.”
Yet Delano has a vague sense that something is wrong in this interracial pas de deux, as if the two men, “for some unknown purpose, were acting out … some juggling play” for his benefit. The fawning little black man seems part valet, yet also part manager, subordinate yet somehow superior. When Cereno’s voice goes hoarse, Babo speaks for him; when Cereno falls silent, Babo prompts him. When the captain swoons against him, the black man half naked in skirtlike trousers cut from the topsail, the two conjoin in a kind of grotesque simulacrum of coitus.
Melville: His World and Work Page 32