Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  2.

  As he was working on this bilious book in the spring of 1856, T. D. Stewart was pressing him for repayment of the loan he had made to him five years before, on which Melville had fallen behind. With full settlement of principal and interest due on May 1, Melville started selling off portions of his land in order to raise cash and also wrote to his publishers to inquire if he might expect any income any time soon. Lem noted that his brother-in-law was feeling “dispirited and ill,” and Judge Shaw, who regarded his subsidies as advances on his daughter’s inheritance, agreed to finance a trip for Herman through Europe to the Middle East, in the hope that travel might restore his spirits. It was fashionable at the time for cultivated Americans to tour Arabia and Judea (also called the Holy Land, or the Levant), and Melville had long been curious to see Greece and Italy as well. The prospect of a journey bolstered him, though he might have recognized himself with chagrin in Emerson’s comment that America was full of over-the-hill “authors … who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine.”

  Early in October 1856, having dispatched Lizzie and the children to his in-laws in Boston, he came down to New York, according to Duyckinck, “fresh from his mountain, charged to the muzzle with his sailor metaphysics and jargon of things unknowable.” Melville in these years swung sharply between sociability and withdrawal, between talk and silence; one visitor who saw him in Pittsfield, probably in late summer 1855, described him as “the most silent man of my acquaintance,” and reported that he would walk his land alone, “patting” the trees “upon the back” as if they were his best companions. But the same visitor, a New York acquaintance named Maunsell Field, also attended a raucous dinner at the home of Dr. Oliver Holmes, where Melville discoursed “with the most amazing skill and brilliancy” on the topic of “East India religions and mythologies.”

  With his old New York friends, he was in the latter mood. After delivering the manuscript of The Confidence-Man to his publisher, Dix & Edwards, a day or two before leaving for points east, he had a long and lubricated dinner with the Duyckincks, highlighted by his telling, as Evert described it, that “good story from the Decameron of the Enchantment of the husband in the tree.” This was Boccaccio’s tale about a young wife who persuades her much older husband that the pear tree in their garden has the power to make jealous forebodings seem real. Having convinced him that he should test the truth of what she says by climbing the magical tree, she has eager intercourse with a servant before her husband’s eyes, humping away as if in perfect seclusion, while the husband blames his jealousy rather than his wife. Melville made this story the centerpiece of what Duyckinck called an “orgy of indecency and blasphemy” that went on into the night a few days before he left, on October 11, bound by steamer for Scotland.

  He kept no journal en route, but began to make notations once he reached Glasgow, where the banks of the River Clyde reminded him of the towpath along the Erie Canal, and the cathedral, looming over sod and thatch houses, called to his mind a “picture of one of the old masters smoked by Time.” Now and then, a flash of color broke through the Scottish gloom, as when soldiers in red coats scattered among the coastal rocks caught his eye “like flamingoes among the cliffs,” but even the fleeces of grazing sheep seemed gray with chimney soot. Melville’s journal was written in the mood of Benito Cereno, in which the world is shrouded in fog and shadow.

  Upon arriving in England, he sought out Hawthorne in a Liverpool suburb where the writer-turned-diplomat had lived with his family when they first arrived in 1853. Finding that the Hawthornes had since moved, Melville caught up with his old friend in his office at the consulate. Decades later, Julian Hawthorne, who had been a boy of ten in 1856, remembered his father’s visitor as “depressed and aimless.” The reunion received spare comment in Melville’s journal—“An agreeable day. Took a long walk by the sea. Sands & grass. Wild & desolate. A strong wind. Good talk”—but Hawthorne was more expansive, entering in his own journal a striking account of a friendship that had not only survived but deepened:

  November 20th, Thursday. A week ago last Monday, Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to (a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner. He had crossed from New York to Glasgow in a screw steamer, about a fortnight before, and had since been seeing Edinburgh and other interesting places. I felt rather awkward at first; because this is the first time I have met him since my ineffectual attempt to get him a consular appointment from General Pierce. However, I failed only from real lack of power to serve him; so there was no reason to be ashamed, and we soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; he has been affected with neuralgic complaints in his head and limbs, and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind. So he left his place at Pittsfield, and has established his wife and family, I believe, with his father-in-law in Boston, and is thus far on his way to Constantinople. I do not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labor and domestic life, following up so wild and adventurous a youth as his was. I invited him to come and stay with us at Southport, as long as he might remain in the vicinity; and, accordingly, he did come, the next day, taking with him, by way of baggage, the least little bit of a bundle, which, he told me, contained a night shirt and a tooth-brush. He is a person of very gentlemanly instincts in every respect, save that he is a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.

  Melville remained with the Hawthornes for three days, on the second of which he and Nathaniel took their walk along the sea at the coastal resort of Southport, where they

  sat down in a hollow among the sand hills (sheltering ourselves from the high, cool wind) and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than the rest of us.

  Hawthorne threw his usual dash of irony into these remarks about Melville’s metaphysical preoccupations—arguably the most incisive account of his temperament ever written. In trying to imagine what he said to Melville on that windy day, it is tempting to hear Hawthorne’s voice in this rebuke spoken by Vine in Clarel:

  Art thou the first soul tried by doubt?

  Shalt prove the last? Go, live it out.

  But the tone of Hawthorne’s journal entry is mostly gentle and leavened by pity, and he captures perfectly Melville’s uneasy suspension between faith and skepticism, a yearning that gave him the air of distractedness that some found trying.

  Over the weekend, the two men took an excursion to the cathedral town of Chester, where they saw the Roman wall, an old stone bridge, and bits of a castle whose turret was said to have been built by Julius Caesar—just the sort of picturesque ruin that had eluded Redburn in his search for traces of Olde England. Having returned to Liverpool and parted “at a street-corner … in the rainy evening,” they saw each other again the day before Melville left for the Mediterranean aboard the screw-steamer Egyptian. Hawthorne found his friend “much overshadowed since I saw him last,” and sensed that he “did not anticipate much pleasure in
his rambles, for that spirit of adventure is gone out of him.” A day or two before departing, Melville left his trunk at the consulate, retaining only a carpetbag, which prompted Hawthorne to muse that traveling light

  is the next best thing to going naked; and as he wears his beard and moustache, and so needs no dressing-case—nothing but a toothbrush—I do not know a more independent personage. He learned his travelling habits by drifting about, all over the South Sea, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trowsers. Yet we seldom see men of less criticizable manners than he.

  3.

  As the Egyptian steamed through the Straits of Gibraltar along the African coast (“peeps of villages, wild looking”), there came into view a scattering of houses amid lush gardens, and Melville found himself thinking of the story in Don Quixote of the Moorish traveler and his beautiful bride. But as the ship coasted past the whitewashed houses of Algiers, they became a blotchy blur of light spots on a dark background that made him think of a large “sloping rock, covered with bird lime.” This was to be his recurring pattern of response: at first, some pleasurable association arises in his mind as he glimpses some sight with anticipation, but expectancy soon gives way to disgust. At the Greek port of Syra, he disembarked (December 2) for a tour of the “warren of stone houses or rather huts,” which may have reminded him of the slums of New York and seemed a “terrible nest for the plague.” There he recorded scenes that delivered stabs of sadness, such as the sight of a “man ploughing with a peice [sic] of old root.”

  As the ship approached Constantinople, Melville beheld the Church of Hagia Sophia from the deck through fog so thick that he was able to make out its base and walls only dimly and could not see the dome at all. “It was a coy disclosure, a kind of coquetting, leaving room for imagination & heigthing [sic] the scene.” But his imagination was no longer up to the task. Once ashore, he filled his journal with images of breakage, occlusion, and “nature feeding on man.” In the city he witnessed a woman fling herself across “a new grave—no grass on it yet,” howling in grief. “This woman and her cries,” he wrote, “haunt me horribly.” He remarked about one mosque that it “would make a noble ball room” and, about the dome of St. Sophia, that it had “a kind of dented appearance, like crown of old hat. Must inevitably cave in one of these days.” Inside the great church, he was followed by “rascally priests” trying to sell handfuls of mosaic tile that had fallen from the ceiling. Outside in the streets, he felt menaced.

  As the trip wore on, Melville sometimes retrieved what the biographer Hershel Parker calls his “old … intense, verbally inventive badinage,” as when, at Smyrna, he described a camel:

  From his long curved and crain-like neck, (which he carries stiffly like a clergyman in a stiff cravat) his feathery-looking forelegs, & his long lank hind ones, he seems a cross between an ostrich and a gigantic grasshopper. His hoof is spongey, & covered with hair to the ground, so that walking through these muddy lanes, he seems stalking along on four mops.

  More common were images of decay and obstruction, reported in a flat tone of the sort one associates with Camus’ description of the North African heat. At Cairo, Melville saw blind men with “flies on the eyes at noon” staring into the unseen sun. Climbing the pyramid at Cheops, he struggled for breath and suspected treachery from his Arab guides. Watching an old man stagger and faint, he felt himself reeling too, fearful of being beaten and robbed in one of the inlets that here and there broke up the “dead calm of masonry.”

  When he finally arrived in Palestine, Melville surveyed the “stony mountains & stony plains; stony torrents & stony roads; stony walls & stony feilds [sic], stony houses & stony tombs” and ventured the “theory … that long ago, some whimsical King of the country took it into his head to pave all Judea, and entered into contracts to that effect; but the contractor becoming bankrupt mid-way in his business, the stones were only dumped on the ground, & there they lie to this day.”* In this wretched landscape, he tried to jolly himself (“no wonder that stones should so largely figure in the Bible”) but, standing by the water’s edge at the Dead Sea, found that the “foam on beach & pebbles” reminded him of “slaver of mad dog” and noted the

  smarting bitter of the water,—carried the bitter in my mouth all day—bitterness of life—thought of all bitter things—Bitter is it to be poor & bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death.

  Even the wind felt hot. In the dead of night, he would rise from damp sheets and cut himself tobacco for a calming smoke, which he hoped might help to disperse the fleas.

  In divers ways which vary it

  Stones mention find in hallowed Writ:

  Stones rolled from well-mouths, altar stones,

  Idols of stone, memorial ones,

  Sling-stones, stone tables …

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  By stones died Naboth; stoned to death

  Wahs Stephen meek; and Scripture saith,

  Against even Christ they took up stones.

  On January 6, 1857, the day he first laid eyes on the “blank, blank towers” of Jerusalem (as he was later to describe them), Melville was greeted inside the Jaffa Gate by the choral whine of lepers begging. In Clarel, published nearly twenty years later, he was to recall the explanations of the guides as they led tourists along the Via Dolorosa, retracing the route on which Christ had borne the Cross:

  … ’tis here

  They scourged Him; soldiers yonder nailed

  The Victim to the tree; in jeer

  There stood the Jews; there Mary paled;

  The vesture was divided here.

  In the journal he kept during his visit, Melville reports this scene as a mixture of phony solemnity and vulgar hawking: “Talk of the guides, ‘Here is the stone Christ leaned against & here is the English Hotel.’ Yonder is the arch where Christ was shown to the people, & just by that open window is sold the best coffee in Jerusalem, &c&c&c.” At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jews were forbidden to enter by Turkish policemen, who sat “cross-legged & smoking, scornfully observing the continuous troops of pilgrims entering & prostrating themselves before the anointing-stone of Christ,” and the “reputed Calvary” was dimly lit by “the smoky light of old pawnbrokers lamps.” The anointing stone itself was “veined with streaks of a mouldy red” that made it look, to Melville’s eye, “like a butcher’s slab.”

  His writing had always been rich in images of holy places gone to ruin or lost in mist or fog, as in The Encantadas, where he compared the sight of seagulls perched on coastal rocks to “the eaves of [an] … old … abbey … alive with swallows,” or in Benito Cereno, where he described the looming slaveship’s first impression on Delano’s dim mind as akin to a “white-washed monastery” in the Pyrenees. Now, at the sacred heart of the Christian world, he watched veiled Muslim women hurry home from market and old Jews shuffle toward their own holy places, indifferent to the putative power of the Christian sites that left him, too, unmoved. It was a wonder to him that anyone could hear God’s voice in this land. He later wrote in Clarel about the sight of Jews at the Wailing Wall, that “the Turk permits the tribes to creep / Abject in rear of those dumb stones.”

  From January till April, he continued to write almost daily journal entries as he made his way back to England via Lebanon, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Switzerland. In February, passing the isle of Patmos on an Austrian steamer, he was “again afflicted with the great curse of modern travel—skepticism. Could no more realize that St. John had ever had revelations here, than when off Juan Fernandez, could believe in Robinson Crusoe according to DeFoe.” One effect of the trip was to confirm Melville’s sense that the Bible was a collection of improbable fictions, and he cursed the secular scholars who had lately exposed it as an unreliable book compiled over time by fallible men rather than written by God. “When my eye rested on arid heigth [sic], spirit partook of the barreness.—Heartily wish [Barthold Georg] Niebuhr and [David Friedrich] S
trauss to the dogs.—The deuce take their penetration & acumen. They have robbed us of the bloom.”

  Melville’s journal is a document of spiritual exhaustion. It registered not only his sense of deflation in the presence of religious monuments from which he had hoped to get some hint of sublimity but also his loss of pleasure in making the sort of stretched associations that had once been the glory of his prose. He was no longer the writer (to use a phrase from The Confidence-Man) of “bravadoing mischievousness” who had compared the splintered wreck of a whaleboat to “grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch,” or who had recalled winters at sea so cold that a “man could have undergone amputation with great ease, and helped to take up the arteries himself.” Now and then, he still had salivary moments, as when he savored his meals and snacks in Florence and in the charming village of Fiesole, especially when he felt he had gotten good value. But mostly he felt dull and aimless, as when, experiencing pain in his chest and back, he wrote in Rome, on March 15, “This day saw nothing, learned nothing, enjoyed nothing, but suffered something.” Heading north in mid-April out of the Italian sun, he stopped at Berne and Strasbourg, then made a quick trip across the Channel to two English landmarks, Madame Tussaud’s and Oxford, where he felt at last an “amity of art & nature” in the college gardens. On May 4, he returned to Liverpool to pick up his trunk and bid farewell to Hawthorne, for what turned out to be the last time. On May 5, he sailed for home.

  4.

  Back at Arrowhead, Melville was uncertain whether he would ever write again. Lem Shaw wrote to his brother Sam that Herman had decided he was “not going to write any more,” though Lem qualified the statement by adding the phrase “at present.” In the summer of 1857, Melville responded to a request from The Atlantic, saying, yes, he would like to write for them but could not “name the day when I shall have any article ready.” He had come home to four children: eight-year-old Malcolm and six-year-old Stanwix, along with their sisters Bessie, now four, and Frances (or Fanny), age two. The family, according to Melville’s granddaughter, “had begun to suffer not only from insufficient funds for daily needs, but far more from his bursts of nervous anger and attacks of morose conscience.” He complained now to everyone about everything: to his publishers for their failure to pay or promote him, to the cook about the preparation of his coffee, which, like Pierre, he wanted roasted and ground “instantaneously previous to the final boiling and serving.” To a Williams College student who called on him in the spring of 1859, he seemed, though he was not quite forty, “a disappointed man, soured by criticism, and disgusted with the Civilized world and with our christendom in general and in particular.”