Since the mid-1850s, he had from time to time put parcels of his land on the market in order to raise cash. Now, in February 1863, having recovered from the driving accident, and finding himself restless in what young Stanwix called their “square, old-fashioned” rental house in Pittsfield after several failed attempts to sell the whole Arrowhead property, he approached his brother Allan, who had moved with his second wife (Sophia had died five years before) into a new Manhattan residence, with the offer to hand over Arrowhead in partial exchange for Allan’s house on East Twenty-sixth Street. A deal was struck, and he and Lizzie, who had inherited part of her father’s real estate holdings, agreed to take over what remained of Allan’s mortgage in the city.
When Melville returned to New York City for good on November 3 or 4, 1863, it was with no intention of resuming the active literary life he once had led there. On the last day of 1863, he thanked Duyckinck for sending him a book but declined to review it. “As for scribbling anything about it,” he wrote, “tho’ I would like to please you, I have not spirit enough.” Three years later, with Battle-Pieces in print, the search for a government job finally paid off; but instead of a foreign posting in some sunny port, it was a four-dollar-a-day, six-day-a-week job across town on the Hudson River piers. In December 1866, Melville reported for work as Deputy Inspector No. 75 of the United States Custom Service.
And then the darkness closed in. He had long been one of those “bards,” in Emerson’s phrase, who “love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal exhilaration” they can lay their hands on. In this respect, he was among the most ardent of lovers. At the height of his friendship with Hawthorne, he had gleefully protested that “I won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven,” and proposed that when the two men meet in paradise, they must “smuggle a basket of champagne there” to mark the occasion. Looking forward to seeing Hawthorne before the next life, Melville urged him to “keep some Champagne or Gin for me” in this one, and to “have ready a bottle of brandy because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together.” For his part, he promised to provide a “most potent Port” to share as they “crack jokes & bottles from morning till night.” In Pierre, he expressed contempt for “lean ones” who subsist on Graham crackers and cold water, recommending instead that they “attach the screw of your hose-pipe to some fine old butt of Madeira! Pump us some sparkling wine into the world!” Cyrus the Great was also, in Melville’s view, Cyrus the Wise, since he ordered this epitaph to be engraved on his tombstone: “I could drink a great deal of wine, and it did me a great deal of good.”
But as Melville’s drinking increased, the joking subsided. It is likely, as Charles Olson once speculated, that he became “periodically violent to his wife.” “His moods he had,” as he was to write about a character in Clarel, “mad fitful ones, / Prolonged or brief outbursts or moans,” and sometime after the return to New York, things between him and Lizzie evidently turned desperate. In a letter of May 1867 to Henry Whitney Bellows, minister of the New York Unitarian church where the Melvilles rented a pew, Sam Shaw alluded to the minister’s proposal that since Lizzie was (in Sam’s words) “convinced that her husband is insane,” her brothers must find a way to rescue her. Bellows was sufficiently alarmed by Melville’s behavior that he believed Lizzie should leave him and retreat to the care of her brothers. But in the end, she did not leave. How, or whether, the matter was resolved remains unknown, since all that survives is a brief note in which she thanked her pastor for counseling her in the face of “whatever further trial may be before me.”
As the Melvilles’ marriage touched bottom, so did their firstborn, Malcolm. An eighteen-year-old of “purity … gentleness [and] truthfulness,” according to his uncle Hoadley, Malcolm had joined a regiment of volunteers who, having been spared by age and social standing from army service, met in the afterglow of war for drills and calisthenics. They were boys playing at being military men. At home, Malcolm proudly sported his uniform, complete with working pistol; and to his parents’ dismay, he often stayed out late with his comrades.
On the night of September 10, 1867, he did not come home till three o’clock in the morning. His mother, unable to sleep, had stayed up waiting for him. The next morning, Malcolm did not appear downstairs or report to his job in Richard Lathers’s law office. According to Sam Shaw’s account of the events, Malcolm answered yes when one of his sisters called to him through his bedroom door. Before leaving for work, Herman advised Lizzie to let him sleep and take whatever reprimand or penalty Lathers thought fit. Over the course of the day, Malcolm failed to respond to his mother’s periodic calling. When Herman came home that evening, the door was broken down, and the parents found their boy dead in his bed from a pistol shot to the head. Here is how, many years later, Melville’s great-grandson (grandchild of Frances) described the children’s fate:
And there were the children:
Mackey,
Stanny,
Bessie,
& Fanny,
hovering at the edge of the storm, the vortex, and
killed, crippled or withered, according to the order of birth, to how
near in time (the father’s Space) they came
to the eye of it.
At first, the coroner ruled Malcolm’s death a suicide. But a few days later, perhaps under pressure from the family, the jurors of the inquest reversed the ruling on the grounds that “no motive having appeared,” it was more plausible that Malcolm’s “boyish whim” of “sleeping with his pistol under his pillow” had led to an accident in “disturbed or somnambulistic sleep.”† After the funeral, in which Malcolm lay in an open coffin, his father wrote to Hoadley: “I wish you could have seen him as he lay in his last attitude, the ease of a gentle nature. Mackie never gave me a disrespectful word in his life, nor in any way ever failed in filialness.”
Between the high-spirited letter that Melville wrote to Allan four days after Malcolm’s birth (“He’s a perfect prodigy … I think of calling him Barbarossa—Adolphus—Ferdinand … Grandissimo—Hercules—Sampson—Bonaparte”) and these remarks written five or six days after Malcolm’s death eighteen years later, there is next to nothing in the record by which to take the measure of Herman Melville’s feeling toward his son. There is a poem, “Monody,” that some scholars believe (on little evidence) is about Melville’s estrangement from Hawthorne, but that seems more likely to have been a meditation on his son, who was buried on the rolling grounds of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx:
To have known him, to have loved him
After loneness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal—
Ease me, a little ease, my song!
By wintry hills his hermit-mound
The sheeted snow-drifts drape,
And houseless there the snow-bird flits
Beneath the fir-trees’ crape:
Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine
That hid the shyest grape.
Whether or not this poem was a too-late expression of love for his lost Malcolm, we do know that Melville was capable of taking joy in the presence of children. On New Year’s Eve, 1850, while baby Malcolm was away from Pittsfield with his mother in Boston, Augusta Melville predicted in a note to their sister Helen that Herman, who sorely missed his wife and child, would “fairly devour” his baby son upon their return. And a sweet letter survives from ten-year-old Stanwix to his Boston grandmother reporting that Papa had taken him in 1861 to see the soldiers drilling at the Pittsfield parade ground; after the parade was canceled (the men were needed to put out a factory fire), he took Stanny for a happy ride in the country, during which they stopped to play a game of catch and to make “little round curls of the dandelion stems.”
In the journal that Nathaniel Hawthorne kept during his Berkshire years, there is a si
milar glimpse of avuncular Melville putting the beaming little Julian beside him in the carriage during a moonlit ride and, on another occasion, dismounting from his horse and hoisting him into the saddle, then walking beside the animal while the boy rode proudly with the “fearlessness of an old equestrian.” Melville was capable, as not all adult men are, of showing children that combination of solicitude and respect that lights up their child’s eyes with the knowledge of being taken seriously; and five-year-old Julian assured his father that he “loved Mr. Melville as well as me, and as mamma, and as Una.” In a charming letter to Julian after the Hawthornes had moved to Newton, Melville expressed his gratitude: “I am very happy that I have a place in the heart of so fine a little fellow as you.”
There is no reason to believe that Melville withheld these kinds of tenderness from his own firstborn son, who was still an infant when Julian was five—though one may wonder whether he had the patience required of the father of an adolescent, especially one who tended toward laziness and posturing. Immediately after Malcolm’s death, shocked to his core and worried about his wife, Melville received permission to take a week off from work and accepted Allan’s suggestion that he and Lizzie go by themselves to their old home at Arrowhead. Although their time there went unrecorded, it is known that a neighbor presented the grieving parents with a book of hymns into which Lizzie inscribed the words that had been carved into Malcolm’s gravestone: “So good, so young, / So gentle, so sincere, / So loved, so early lost, / May claim a tear.” In a letter to Allan’s daughter Maria (named for the family matriarch), Herman wrote that he and his wife were having photographs made from two tintypes of Malcolm, “one representing him in his ordinary dress, and the other in the regimental one.” He thanked her for her concern, adding that he was “touched at the way in which you speak of Mackie.” There is no trace of a further eulogy to his son until, some twenty years later, he poured his heart into Billy Budd, the story of a beautiful boy whose last act is to bless the severe yet tender man who has ordered that he be put to death.
Malcolm Melville (list of illustrations 11.1)
Malcolm Melville in military dress (list of illustrations 11.2)
4.
In the months following, and for most of the next ten years, Melville devoted himself to a long narrative poem, Clarel, about an American student who journeys to the “barrenness of Judea” in search of his lost faith. In “Bartleby” he had written about the “innate and incurable disorder” of the human mind, and in The Confidence-Man he had noted that “the mind is ductile … but images, ductilely received into it, need a certain time to harden and bake in their impressions.” By the time he began working on Clarel in the late 1860s, it had been a “certain time” since his trip to the Holy Land, and now, out of his memories, and with Malcolm’s death in constant view, he constructed a work that was, in part, a work of mourning.
As he was later to explain to an English correspondent, Clarel was “a metrical affair, a pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for unpopularity.” It did indeed prove unpopular with the public, as well as with Lizzie, who referred to it as a “dreadful incubus of a book (I call it so because it has undermined all our happiness).” Clarel ran to 18,000 verses divided into 150 cantos, a vast “philosophical verse-novel” whose structure provided Melville with a sort of template that spared him from having to invent, as he had once done in prose, his own forms. After a day on the piers, the quiet hours in his study producing his daily complement of rhymed octosyllabic lines (over ten years, he averaged roughly five lines per day) served as a salutary discipline for a writer whose well of invention was depleted if not dried up.
There is an apposite comment by Seamus Heaney about Robert Frost that applies to Melville’s mood and motive in the years he worked on Clarel: “Frost believed,” Heaney says, “… that individual venture and vision arose as a creative defense against emptiness, and that it was therefore always possible that a relapse into emptiness would be the ultimate destiny of consciousness.” Such a relapse—or fear of it—was Melville’s subject in Clarel, and the labor of composing the poem was his stay against emptiness. He set the poem in a place, as he had described it a decade earlier in the fractured prose of his travel journal, of “whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape—bleached—leprosy—encrustation of curses—old cheese—bones of rocks,—crunched, knawed & mumbled—mere refuse & rubbish of creation.” Into this place of death comes an American student seeking some seed of faith amid the holy sites of Jerusalem, that city of “blind arches … sealed windows,” with “portals masoned fast” against the encroaching desert:
The student mused: The desert, see,
It parts not here, but silently,
Even like a leopard by our side,
It seems to enter in with us—
Clarel was set in a world of heat and sand, but its deeper locale was the spiritual desert of the mind. Shadowed by the death of his son, Melville was writing as well in the shadow of Darwin, whose theory of evolution had destroyed the idea of superintending providence and replaced it with blind chance as the primary force at work in nature and, by implication, in history. “How,” he asks in Clarel, can faith “be derived from things / Subject to change and vanishings?” The chief doctrines of Christianity—the Fall, Original Sin, the Atonement, the Resurrection and Redemption—were incompatible with the new truths of science, and though Melville had never exactly been a believer, religious ideas had always exerted power over his imagination. But by the late 1860s, no educated person could think blithely of nature as the work of divine consciousness, or of the human creature as created in the image of God and endowed with an immortal soul. As Melville’s contemporary Emily Dickinson put the matter in a poem that registered the Civil War carnage in which faith itself was among the casualties, God’s “Hand is amputated now / And God cannot be found.”
Melville lived when “the great curse … of skepticism” (as he called it in his Mediterranean travel journal) was pushing back in time the age when God had communicated directly to human beings as if they were impressionable children. The rational Protestantism that Melville imbibed from his father’s side of the family had little use for claims of religious inspiration, which it regarded as the foolish and dangerous delusions of gullible people. The age of miracles, when God had instructed human beings with gaudy demonstrations of his power through plagues or miracles, was long past (“Men have come to speak of the revelation,” Emerson wrote in 1838, “as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead”), and had been supplanted by an age of reason in which man must seek God in the impersonal processes of nature or the fitful progress of history. This kind of deracinated Protestantism, as Orestes Brownson wrote in 1844, condemned those who hungered for some manifestation of divine spirit in their lives “to feed only on inspirations made in the past.”
Melville, craving more, still looked with longing into the natural world for signs of divine immanence, hoping to immerse himself in what Emerson called “the divine aura which breathes through forms.” He sometimes did feel, as Emerson had written in Nature, the “floods of life stream around and through us,” as when, exhilarated by his discovery of a kindred spirit in Hawthorne, he declared the world (in 1850) “as young today as when it was created; and this Vermont morning dew … as wet to my feet as Eden’s dew to Adam’s,” or when, the previous year, he recalled in Redburn his youthful feeling at sea of being enveloped in the lap of God:
Every happy little wave seemed gamboling about like a thoughtless little kid in a pasture; and seemed to look up in your face as it passed, as if it wanted to be patted and caressed. They seemed all live things with hearts in them that could feel; and I almost felt grieved, as we sailed in among them; scattering them under our broad bows in sunflakes, and riding over them like a great elephant among lambs.
But Melville could never escape the melancholy suspicion that his feelings of divine immanence were illusory—and at the next mo
ment, the luminous world fades away and he finds himself in chill and darkness:
I could not see [from high in the rigging] far out upon the ocean, owing to the darkness of the night; and from my lofty perch, the sea looked like a great, black gulf, hemmed in, all round, by beetling black cliffs. I seemed all alone; treading the midnight clouds; and every second, expected to find myself falling—falling—falling, as I have felt when the nightmare has been upon me.
He tried to hold on to his glimpses of transcendence for the flashes of consolation they delivered. Without them, he knew, the vein of bitterness within might burst and bleed into his soul, leaving him, like Ahab, to experience the world as a wasteland.
By the time he wrote Clarel, Melville was losing the struggle, and in his defeat he was representative. By the 1870s, as Frank Kermode has written, there had “departed the last hope of a science which could regard natural history as a phenomenal representation of the operations of divine providence.” Science, so full of promise for its insights into the processes of nature, could do nothing to satisfy what William James was soon to call “the craving of the heart to believe that behind nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is,” and Clarel was Melville’s reproach of science for its failure to slake his craving:
Shall Science then
Which solely dealeth with this thing
Named Nature, shall she ever bring
One solitary hope to men?
The anguish here is expressed in the form of a question, but it was a question that Melville had answered earlier in the poem:
Melville: His World and Work Page 38