Among his worries, as usual, was money. And so he had begun to think—at his mother’s urging—about putting his gift of gab and what was left of his celebrity to use in public lecturing. With her usual combination of coaxing and coercion, Maria Melville expressed high hopes for this plan, which she had had in mind for Herman for a long time: “My dear darling Herman,” she had written him back in 1854, “all your friends, relatives & admirers, say that you are the very man to carry an audience, to create a sensation, to do wonders … to do that thing, which at once, and by the same agreeable act, will bring us fame & fortune.” In Pierre, when the unappreciated boy complains of a “low purse,” one of his friends advises him to “Stump the State on the Kantian Philosophy! A dollar a head, my boy! Pass around your beaver, and you’ll get it.” Melville hoped that this advice would now prove pertinent, and profitable, to himself.
In antebellum America, public speaking (as distinguished from preaching or political speechmaking) was indeed a form of beggary, or, as Dr. Holmes said at dinner one night with Melville at the table, just a notch above whoring. “A lecturer,” Holmes declared, is “a literary strumpet subject for a greater than whore’s fee to prostitute himself.” There was a certain indignity in depending on a paying audience to turn out, a prospect that depended in turn on the willingness of local newspapers to publicize the event in advance. And there was the opposite risk that the papers would scoop the speaker by printing what he had said in some nearby town the week before. Emerson, who had been on the circuit for years, once exploded at the editor of the Salem Commonwealth for printing a detailed account of the talk he was about to deliver: “My lectures are written to be read as lectures in different places, & then to be reported by myself,” and “your reporter [has done] all he can to kill the thing to every hearer, by putting him in possession beforehand of the words.” Aware of these risks, Melville was not optimistic about his chances of success. As if to explain his failure in advance, he wrote with sour irony in the fall of 1857 to George W. Curtis, who had advised him to stick to elevated themes, that he was inclined to speak on the “daily progress of man towards a state of intellectual and moral perfection, as evidenced in history of 5thAvenue & 5 Points.”
Since none of the lectures was published, they can only be very roughly reconstructed from contemporary newspaper accounts. Melville began his speaking career in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in November 1857, with a talk on the “Statues of Rome,” and concluded it in February 1860, in Cambridge-port, where (as a last-minute substitute after Emerson canceled) he addressed the general theme of traveling. In the intervening years, he spoke at Boston, Albany, Montreal, New Haven, Milwaukee, Chicago, Yonkers, and a score of other towns, with decidedly mixed results. He earned praise for his “justness of vision” but met with complaints that his words were “articulated so feebly that they died long before they reached a twelfth part of his audience.” One reviewer, having heard him speak about the South Seas, accurately concluded that lecturing was “not his forte, his style as well as the subject matter being intensely ‘Polynesian’ and calculated to ‘Taboo’ him from the lecture field in the future,” while another, after hearing him speak on Roman statuary, noticed that “some nervous people … left the hall; some read books and newspapers; some sought refuge in sleep, and some, to their praise be it spoken, seemed determined to use it as an appropriate occasion for self-discipline in the blessed virtue of patience.” Though he evidently never managed to replicate for the public in the lecture hall the energy and charm he had brought to family and friends by the fireside, his cousin Henry Gansevoort, who attended one of his public talks in a favorable seat, was reminded of the “vivid stories” Herman used to tell at home “under the inspiration of Madeira.”
As for his themes, they were utterly, even perversely, out of touch with the issues of the day. In the spring of 1856, a vicious, if local, civil war had broken out in Kansas between slaveowners and Free-Soilers. In May, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks attacked Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner with a cane and left him half dead at his desk in the Senate chamber. In March 1857, in the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court effectively revoked the citizenship of black Americans. And in October 1859, John Brown led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in the hope of fomenting slave insurrection. He failed, and was executed six weeks later.
These and many other shocks made clear that the nation was hurtling toward disunion, and even among intellectuals of relatively proximate views there were deepening rifts over how to respond to what was happening. Emerson’s reaction to Brown’s capture and execution was to praise him as a martyr who would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross,” while Hawthorne, enraged by Brown’s vigilantism, declared that “never was a man so justly hanged.” Meanwhile, Melville went on talking amiably and, according to many who heard him, aimlessly about “Traveling: Its Pleasures, Pains, and Profits.”
To yammer on about Polynesian girls and ancient statues was to fiddle while Rome burned. Melville never had his heart in his words, which all but died on his lips, coming “through his moustache,” as one of his auditors complained, “about as loud and with as much force as the creaking of a field mouse through a thick hedge.” Much of what he said was lost in his mumbling, but among the recoverable themes are his skepticism at the cant of progress and his sense of the elusiveness of knowledge: he spoke, for instance, of how people tend to confuse their partial perspectives with universal truths, as when Magellan named the ocean “Pacific” because the sea happened to be calm on the day he came through the straits.
As he traveled about the country (he got as far south as Clarksville, Tennessee, and Louisville, Kentucky), Melville’s performances continued to be weak and the returns paltry. If he had spoken with anything like the zest with which that “lion of the platform” Bayard Taylor recounted his own exotic travels, he might have made a place for himself as an escapist entertainer in anxious times. But he was unwilling or unable. According to one visitor who came to see him in 1859, he was still an imposing man, with keen eyes and abundant dark hair, but his “countenance [was] slightly flushed with whisky drinking.” In three seasons, he earned roughly $1,200 (about a third less than Emerson was paid in a single season, and less than a quarter of what Taylor took in over a few months), not nearly enough to make a material improvement in his circumstances. In the spring of 1860, he transferred ownership of Arrowhead to Judge Shaw, who deeded it, in turn, to Lizzie, in exchange for forgiveness of Herman’s debts to him. Melville was now, as one scholar puts it, “in the unmanning position of being a guest in Lizzie’s home.”
5.
By May 1860, he had decided to set off once more on what he hoped would be a restorative journey, and it is unclear whether Lizzie felt more relief or regret that he was leaving her again. Their marriage was now, at the least, troubled; in notes taken after an interview with Lizzie Melville’s niece, Josephine Shaw, Raymond Weaver recorded the niece’s memories of what her aunt had told her:
Mrs. Melville planned to leave Herman twice. The first time his trip to Holy Land a tentative separation. He wrote nothing home—for a time. She in Boston. 2nd time she came to Boston with girls … some crisis possible but not known. But the Melville women settled down in persuasion—and Herman appeared heartbroken—and Lizzie went back home.… Herman violent—Lizzie’s life not always safe.… Herman kinder to daughters—hated sons. Malcolm—affectionate—moody—loved mother—hated father for violence.
At the end of the month, Herman embarked on a trip around Cape Horn aboard the clipper ship Meteor, under the command of his seafaring brother, Tom. The Meteor was bound for that place of “solar optimism,” California, which he hoped (as he had put it in The Confidence-Man) would “restore me the power of being something else to others than a burdensome care, and to myself a droning grief.”
The trip did not revive him. Susceptible to seasickness now, he could not read much, though he managed to play a game or two of che
ss at night with his brother, on a set made for them by the ship’s carpenter. A couple of days after the Meteor had passed within sight of the coast of Tierra del Fuego (“Horrible snowy mountains—black, thundercloud woods—gorges—hell-landscape”), a young Nantucket seaman lost his grip in the rigging and fell to his death on deck, his body oozing blood for hours as the crew waited for the squalls to subside long enough to allow a brief burial ceremony. “I … read & think, & walk & eat & talk, as if nothing had happened,” Melville reproached himself in his journal, “—as if I did not know that death is indeed the King of Terrors—when thus happening; when thus heartbreaking to a fond mother—the King of Terrors, not to the dying or the dead, but to the mourner—the mother.—Not so easily will his fate be washed out of her heart, as his blood from the deck.” He made no further journal entries, at sea or ashore.
He did write to his children. In a letter to eleven-year-old Malcolm, he described how the young man’s body was laid out upon a plank while Uncle Tom prayed over the corpse, and then, “at a given word, the sailors who held the plank tipped it up, and immediately the body slipped into the stormy ocean, and we saw it no more.… Such is the way a poor sailor is buried at sea.” There is an instructional severity in this letter, as if it were past time for the boy to show manly fortitude in facing life’s terrors. Even in his tender moments, Melville stressed to his son that life does not permit much peace or pleasure—“I think of you, and Stanwix & Bessie and Fanny very often; and often long to be with you. But it can not be, at present. The picture which I have of you & the rest, I look at sometimes, till the faces almost seem real”—and then he concluded with a fatherly injunction:
I hope that you have called to mind what I said to you about your behavior previous to my going away. I hope that you have been obedient to your mother, and helped her all you could, & saved her trouble. Now is the time to show what you are—whether you are a good, honorable boy, or a good-for-nothing one.
To seven-year-old Bessie he wrote, more gently, about the speckled seabirds, “big as chickens,” that followed the ship and burst into “mighty cackling” when he threw them bread crumbs. It was, perhaps, with a sense of affinity that he explained, “These birds have no home, unless it is some wild rocks in the middle of the ocean.”
Melville was still enough of a figure that upon his arrival in San Francisco, the Daily Evening Bulletin ran a small announcement that, traveling “in pursuit of health,” he was seeking “new experiences to turn to account in a literary way.” This statement was somewhere between a warranted inference and an editorial flourish. He ended up staying in San Francisco barely a week. All that is known about Melville’s time there is that he was hosted one evening in her house overlooking Golden Gate by Jessie Benton Frémont, wife of General John C. Frémont, and daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, on whom Melville may have modeled Bulkington a decade earlier in Moby-Dick.
On October 20, the Evening Bulletin reported his departure, this time identifying him, with stinging out-of-dateness, as “Herman Melville, the author of ‘Omoo’ and ‘Typee,’ who arrived here but a few days since from around Cape Horn.” He left aboard the steamship Cortes bound for Panama, where he crossed the isthmus by rail and then, on the Caribbean side, boarded the steamship North Star for New York. Upon disembarking in his native city on November 13, 1860, he learned that the Republican candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln, had won the election a week earlier with a plurality of votes in a field of four candidates, and that there was talk of secession by slaveholding states. During what he later called this “gloomy lull” preceding the outbreak of war, he stayed briefly with Allan in New York before rejoining Lizzie and the children in Boston, then returned to Pittsfield to prepare the house for winter.
It was—for all Americans—a winter of nervous waiting. By the end of January 1861, seven slaveholding states, outraged by Lincoln’s campaign promise to ban slavery in the federal territories, had seceded from the Union while the lame-duck president, James Buchanan, disapproved and dithered. Amid rumors that Lincoln would be assassinated en route, the president-elect was forced to travel incognito to his own inauguration, switching from the official train to an unmarked train that arrived at Union Station after dark. Toby Greene, who had once seen and heard Lincoln, wrote to Melville that he was a courageous man who, despite all the assassination talk, would bravely “take the oath on the Capitol steps.” So he did on March 4, speaking firmly but magnanimously to the South.
Stanwix, Frances, Malcolm, and Elizabeth Melville, c. 1860. “The picture which I have of you & the rest, I look at sometimes, till the faces almost seem real.—Now, my Dear Boy, good bye, & God bless you.” Letter from Melville to his son Malcolm, written at sea aboard the Meteor, September 1860 (list of illustrations 10.1)
Melville’s letter to his daughter Bessie, written aboard the Meteor, September 1860 (list of illustrations 10.2)
Melville’s letter to his wife, Washington, DC, March 1861 (list of illustrations 10.3)
For the ensuing months, there is only the usual spotty record of Melville’s movements and activities, but we do know that he was being encouraged once again to pursue a government appointment. His circle of friends was made up now of moderate Democrats and a few Republicans who, while opposed to slavery, were equally opposed to any radical action to end it. He also knew men of more strident opinions, such as the New York merchant Richard Lathers, a Democrat and passionate Calhounite related by marriage to Herman’s brother Allan, and Kate’s husband, John Hoadley, a fervent Republican and close friend of Sumner’s.
Shortly after Lincoln took office on March 4, Hoadley asked Sumner to lobby for his brother-in-law, who he claimed was particularly well suited for the consulship at Florence. By the twenty-second of March, Melville was in Washington attending a public reception at the White House. After standing among the office seekers in the reception line, he described the new president as “working hard” at shaking hands “like a man sawing wood at so much per cord.” Waiting for results, he wandered one morning into Lafayette Park across from the White House, “sunning myself on a seat,” where he might have been mistaken for a bum with nowhere else to go. “The grass is bright & beautiful,” he wrote to Lizzie, “& the shrubbery beginning to bud. It is just cool enough to make an overcoat comfortable sitting out of doors. The wind is high however, & except in the parks, all is dust.” This sole surviving letter from Melville to his wife has a softness—“Kisses to the children. Hope to get a letter from you today”—that suggests even amidst their troubles an enduring love between them. Above his signature he wrote: “Thine, My Dearest Lizzie.”
Melville’s case for employment could not have been helped by the fact that his recommenders described him as a man in frail health in need of a change of scene. At the end of March, Melville received news of his father-in-law’s deteriorating health, and was forced to leave Washington without a job. Several days later, he was back in Pittsfield, where he learned upon his arrival (Lizzie had just received the news by telegram) that his father-in-law was dying. The family rushed to Boston by train, but arrived too late to see the judge alive. Among the papers found in Shaw’s wallet were two letters from his first love, Herman Melville’s aunt Nancy, which he had carried on his person for the forty-eight years since her death. “Yes, my dear friend,” she had written to him not long before she died, “that heart which you have formed shall be yours, you have taught it the endearments of the purest friendship, and for you alone ought it glow.…” Shaw’s half century of devotion to Nancy’s memory may help explain his tolerance of his difficult Melville son-in-law, who now went back to Pittsfield alone.
* Melville later drew extensively on his journal for the writing of Clarel, as in this rhymed and metered version of the riff on stones (pt. II, 10, ll. 1–22), by which he rediscovers his old delight in wordplay:
CHAPTER 11
SEASON OF DEATH
1.
About a year before his California trip, Mel
ville had written a letter to a New York friend on whose name he punned in a faux-pastoral invitation to come up to Arrowhead for a binge. The friend’s name was Daniel Shepherd, and the letter was written entirely in verse:
Come, Shepherd, come and visit me:
Come, we’ll make it Arcady
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
—Of Bourbon that is rather new
I brag a fat black bottle or two,—
Shepherd, is this such Mountain-Dew
As one might fitly offer you?
To judge Melville’s poetic gift by this bit of drinking doggerel would be about as fair as judging Picasso’s draftsmanship on the basis of a sketch dashed off on a napkin in some Montmartre café. Beginning in the late 1850s, however, many of the poems he wrote with the hope of publication were not much stronger. Here is the very sober “Greek Architecture,” probably composed around the same time:
Melville: His World and Work Page 36