Melville: His World and Work
Page 39
The abbot and the palmer rest
The legends follow them and die—
Those legends which, be it confessed,
Did nearer bring them the sky—
Did nearer woo it to their hope
Of all that seers and saints avow—
Than Galileo’s telescope
Can bid it unto prosing Science now.
What Melville did in Clarel was to distribute himself among a range of characters—seekers, cynics, pilgrims looking for respite, proselytizers looking for converts, men broken by grief—and by personifying his own shifting moods in these characters perform a kind of exorcism on himself. There is Celio, a lapsed believer who feels nothing when he pauses at the arch where Pilate, crying “Ecce Homo!” presented Christ to the mocking mob:
Won men to look for solace there;
But, crying out in death’s eclipse,
When rainbow none his eyes might see,
Enlarged the margin for despair—
There is the bitter ex-revolutionary Mortmain (death is in his name), who “roved the gray places of the earth,” and who, like a version of Pierre returned from the dead, renounces the callow belief in human virtue that he once had held. When Mortmain considers the crucifixion, he sees in it no uplifting example of selfless sacrifice, but only measureless human cruelty, as Christ’s tormentors insure that his “hands, nailed down, / Might not avail to screen the face / From each head-wagging mocking one.” There is a scientific materialist, Margoth, who believes only in telegraphs and railroads, and spits out the water of the Jordan as if it were wine turned to vinegar. There is an affable Anglican named Derwent, a spiritual descendant of Falsgrave, who welcomes the “last adopted style” and “abreast kept with the age, the year.” And there is Rolfe, Melville’s fullest self-portrait, who understands the human craving for belief (“Yea, long as children feel affright / In darkness, men shall fear a God; / And long as daisies yield delight / Shall see His footprints in the sod”), but who cannot begin to answer the need for himself.
The landscape through which these people travel is littered with taunting hints of a vanished God. A guide identifies an indentation in a rock as Christ’s footprint, but according to one of the literary sources that Melville used in composing his poem, it was “nothing but a simple cavity in the rock, with no more resemblance to a human foot than to anything else.…” As for the local human landscape, it is a gallery of grotesques; peddlers sell putative relics to gullible pilgrims, while lepers with “faces, yet defacements too” pester tourists for alms.
One of the pilgrims is a frontier American of Puritan stock named Nathan. In early manhood, he was haunted by the sight of Indian mounds that “Dim showed across the prairie green / Like dwarfed and blunted mimic shapes / Of Pyramids at distance seen,” and began to drift away from the cold ancestral creed that had never satisfied his need for a vital faith. Now looking for it, he moves serially through deism to pantheism, then briefly joins a local sect; but at every stage the promise proves false and leaves him “Alone, and at Doubt’s freezing pole” as “He wrestled with the pristine forms / Like the first man.”
When Nathan at last finds peace, it comes from “a source that well might claim / Surprise”: he falls in love with a Jewish woman. In his earlier works, Melville had expressed conventional nineteenth-century ideas about Jews—that their “bigoted Hebrew nationality” keeps them self-lovingly tribal and that they bear the shame of “looking for [the Messiah] in a chariot, who was already among them on an ass.” But in Clarel, though he still speaks of “the mind infertile of the Jew,” he makes this patient and kindly Jewish woman, Agar, into a sort of maternal sibyl. Nathan converts, marries her, and—mistaking her laments over her people’s exile for a desire actually to return to Palestine—becomes a Zionist. With a convert’s zeal, and to Agar’s consternation, Nathan wants to act on the Passover pledge of “next year in Jerusalem” rather than merely to repeat it every year at the family seder as part of the annual holiday ritual. He misses the whole point of Diaspora Judaism—its rootedness in the very condition of exile—and soon enough he demands that his wife and children leave America and move with him to the holy city of his adopted faith:
The Hebrew seers announce in time
The return of Judah to her prime;
Some Christians deemed it then at hand.
Here was an object: Up and do!
With seed and tillage help renew—
Help reinstate the Holy Land.
The family scene, in which one imagines Agar rolling her eyes at her gentile husband’s zeal to be a better Jew than the Jews, is as close to humor as Clarel gets. The poem is often a lugubrious work in which, as one critic puts it, Melville “deliberately hobbled his muse” by keeping himself within its highly confining structure of rhythm and rhyme. There are bursts of power, too, especially in the evocations of desert landscape and descriptions of Jerusalem built atop “dark quarries” into which the holy city seems poised for imminent collapse. And there are passages of concentrated emotion, as when Melville describes how the innocent believer Nehemiah sleepwalks to his death in the Dead Sea, and how his comrades find his body at dawn lying on the sand wrapped in morning mist:
Slant on the shore, ground-curls of mist
Enfold it, as in amethyst
Subdued, small flames in dead of night
Lick the dumb back-log ashy white.
“He’s gone,” says Margoth, the “Hegelized” Jew who believes only in the material world described by science and regards the corpse as nothing more than a lump of dead tissue: “czars, stars must go / Or change! All’s chemistry. Aye so”—to which Derwent replies feebly, “Resurget,” and Vine can only add, “In pace.” Having said these reticent blessings, the survivors bury their comrade in a protected spot on the beach, using the ribs of a camel’s skeleton to dig a trench in the sand. But Clarel is finally a hopelessly talky poem, its intertwined stories over-earnest in the style of Mardi, yet without the madcap energy that made Melville’s early failures seem rehearsals for something grand.
Still, he continued to reach for large themes. In the story of Nathan, he wrote about a futile effort to find changeless truth in this changeable world (the restless questing that Hawthorne had noted in Melville himself), and to Nathan’s story he added a sort of genealogical sequel that furnished the poem with its main plot. Clarel falls in love with Nathan and Agar’s daughter, Ruth, a mixture of Yillah in Mardi and Lucy in Pierre who stuns Clarel with her purity:
One he perceived, as it befell,
Whose air expressed such truth unfeigned,
And harmonies inlinked which dwell
In pledges born of record pure—
She looked a legate to insure
That Paradise is possible
Now as hereafter. ’Twas the grace
Of Nature’s dawn: an Eve-like face
And Nereid eyes with virgin spell
Candid as day, yet baffling quite
Like day, through unreserve of light.
The story Clarel and Ruth share is one of unconsummated love (she dies before he can marry her) through which Melville tried to suggest the exquisite mixture of pain and pleasure that comes of seeking the unattainable.
Melville wrote Clarel by snatching a few night hours after his day’s work at the docks, and there is weariness throughout. His daughter Frances, who became a proficient musician later in life, recalled how as a teenager she would listen, disapproving the monotony of the rhythm, as her father recited “while pacing the floor, certain verses he had written, looking for approbation, she thought, from his wife and daughters.” One can only wonder what this New York girl (if these were among the verses she heard her father recite) made of his melded memories of the ocean he had known in his youth and the desert he had visited in middle age:
Last known photograph of Maria Gansevoort Melville, c. 1872 (list of illustrations 11.3)
Sands immense
Impart the oceanic sens
e:
The flying grit like scud is made:
Pillars of sand which whirl about
Or arc along in colonnade,
True kin be to the water-spout.
Yonder on the horizon, red
With storm, see there the caravan
Straggling long-drawn, dispirited;
Mark how it labors like a fleet
Dismasted, which the cross-winds fan
In crippled disaster of retreat
From battle—
During the years he worked on Clarel, Melville saw his family—young as well as old—raided by death. He had begun work on his immense poem not long after the death of his firstborn child in 1867, and completed it four years after the death of his mother in the spring of 1872. While he was checking page proofs in January 1876, Lizzie wrote to his cousin Kate Lansing, who was contemplating a visit, that “Herman … is in such a frightfully nervous state & particularly now with such an added strain on his mind, that I am actually afraid to have any one here for fear that he will be upset entirely, & not be able to go on with the printing.” Clarel did not rise to the level of the great effort Melville put into it. Yet of all his works, it is the one in which he best expressed the craving for belief that Hawthorne had detected in him as they walked together on the Southport dunes, talking of “Providence and futurity and of everything that lies beyond human ken.” Some of its best lines are wrenchingly beautiful, as when Derwent speaks:
There’s none so far astray,
Detached, abandoned, as might seem,
As to exclude the hope, the dream
Of fair redemption. One fine day
I saw at sea, by bit of deck—
Weedy—adrift from far away—
The dolphin in his gambol light
Through showery spray, arch into sight:
He flung a rainbow o’er that wreck.
As Melville brought Clarel to completion in the winter of 1876, he proposed, for the second time in his life, that his work be published anonymously. His uncle Peter Gansevoort paid the costs, and, in the end, the publisher, Putnam’s, prevailed on Melville to let his name appear on the title page, though he authorized no mention of his earlier works. Probably in the early 1870s, while midway through the poem, he had marked in his copy of Matthew Arnold’s Essays a passage dismissing the value of a public literary career in favor of the “well-kept secret of one’s self and one’s thoughts.” In June 1876, Clarel appeared in an edition of 350 copies, of which about a third were sold and the rest, three years later, pulped. When Lewis Mumford, in 1925, came to read one of the surviving copies in the New York Public Library, he found its pages uncut.
* Presided over by Orville Dewey.
† In 1973, the psychologist Edwin S. Shneidman organized a dubious experiment at a Los Angeles hospital in which the staff of the L.A. Suicide Prevention Center was asked to provide a “psychological autopsy” of a fictitious teenager who, they were told, had recently died of a self-inflicted gunshot. Charged with the task of determining whether the death was accidental or intentional, the staff was provided with information drawn from letters written more than a hundred years earlier by relatives and friends about Malcolm Melville. On the basis of these materials, the staff reached the “near-unanimous” conclusion that the case was a suicide, and that the boy had kept a pistol by his bed in order to protect himself from his abusive father. “On the morning of his death, the choice for Malcolm was between the memory of his mother’s kiss a few hours before and the terror of (and the need to protect himself against) his father’s rage to come.” Shneidman, “Some Psychological Reflections on the Death of Malcolm Melville,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 6, no. 4 (Winter 1976): 231–42.
CHAPTER 12
THE QUIET END
1.
In a comment that has since become a commonplace, F. Scott Fitzgerald, declining into drink and depression while still in his forties, looked back at his early success and remarked that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Melville is often cited as the exemplary literary case of this putative truth. Having scaled the heights with Moby-Dick, he slipped back (or so goes the standard account) and, after several failed attempts to regain his footing, fell into a long silence.* This version of his career has become so well known that when John Updike’s fictional author Henry Bech wins the “Melville Medal, awarded every five years to that American author who has maintained the most meaningful silence,” Updike had no reason to doubt that readers would get the joke.
None of it, of course, is exactly true. After The Confidence-Man, Melville did stop writing fiction. But whatever else they were, Battle-Pieces, Clarel, and the poems of his later years were not silence. Then, in the late 1880s, almost seventy and suffering from recurrent skin and lung infections, he returned to prose for what would be his last sustained literary effort: the story of a handsome young sailor unjustly accused of mutiny aboard a British warship. “My vigor sensibly declines,” Melville replied in December 1889 to a young Canadian who had written to him in admiration of his earlier work, and “what little of it is left I husband for certain matters yet incomplete, and which, indeed, may never be completed.” Among these “matters” was a short novel called Billy Budd. It had begun as the headnote to a ballad recited in the accused sailor’s voice, but Melville found himself repeatedly returning to the headnote, expanding it until the prose outgrew the verse. In the course of revision, he shifted the poem here and there within the enlarged story until finally placing it at the end as a sort of coda to what had become a full-scale prose narrative.
The much-written-over manuscript of Billy Budd is preserved today in the Houghton Library at Harvard, a gift from Melville’s granddaughter. With its many excisions, insertions, and addenda in Melville’s cryptic hand on interleaved sheets and on pinned or pasted scraps, it was difficult even for its own author to decipher. “More than once,” according to the best scholarly authorities, “believing his work to be essentially complete, he undertook to put his manuscript into fair-copy form, but each time was led into further revision and elaboration.” Lizzie helped him with the copying. While she worked at her writing table, Herman rose periodically from his reading or resting to take a leaf from her, on which he changed a word here and there, then returned it to its place in the growing stack—a partnership between husband and wife that is touchingly revealed in their mingled handwritings.
Since there survives only one letter from Melville to his wife (written from Washington during his quest for a government job in that ominous spring of 1861), and since he never wrote at length about marriage except in the fervid pages of Pierre, there is little on which to draw for an inner history of the life they shared for more than forty years. Sometime in the 1870s, Melville marked in an essay by Hazlitt a passage advising that “whoever … dost seek happiness [should] seek it … in books, pictures, and the face of nature, for these alone we may count upon as friends for life.” We cannot know if some deficiency of companionship in his own life occurred to him when he read that passage, or if it provoked him to think of intimacies—with his father, his older brother, his son—that had been broken off by early death. As for his marriage, especially without any letters to compare to the passionate correspondence between Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, the Melvilles’ marriage has come to seem a more or less contractual affair: a quasi-arranged match between two venerable families, one sound and the other faltering, suited for fruitful alliance.
Yet in their later years, a settled tenderness took hold between Herman and Lizzie, as expressed in “L’Envoi,” his poem about homecoming that he probably wrote while working on Billy Budd, and placed at the end of the self-financed edition of Timoleon published only four months before he died:
My towers at last! These rovings end.
Their thirst is slaked in larger dearth:
The yearning infinite recoils.
For terrible is earth!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
&nbs
p; Elizabeth Shaw Melville, 1885 (list of illustrations 12.1)
But thou, my stay, thy lasting love
One lonely good, let this but be!
Weary to view the wide world’s swarm
But blest to fold but thee.
Some thirty years after Melville’s death, Raymond Weaver, having obtained access to the manuscript of Billy Budd from Melville’s granddaughter Eleanor, transcribed it at the request of an English editor who had arranged for Melville’s works to be published in a uniform edition. And so, in 1924, his last work, which had been stored for years in a tin bread box, became available to the public just as Melville was achieving posthumous fame as the author of Moby-Dick. The difference in scale and tone between the two works was so large that even Weaver, the first scholar to examine Billy Budd, did not know what to make of the change; indeed, he missed “the sparkle, the verve” of Melville’s earlier writing. But in the eighty years since, it has been recognized as a supreme example of what the Germans call Spätstil—an end-of-life style of great complexity, yet filled, as has been said of the late quartets of Beethoven, with “songful passages of extreme simplicity.”
Billy Budd, as E. M. Forster was among the first to recognize, “reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from glory.” With its almost ethereal combination of sorrow and serenity, it was the cherished work of Melville’s old age, to which he brought his deepest feelings of love and loss. As a young man, he wrote in gusts and rarely went back to revise; now he wrote slowly, meticulously reworking what he had done, as if he could not bear to let it go.
2.
When Melville began writing Billy Budd, he had been working for nearly two decades for the U.S. Custom Service, “clinging like a weary but tenacious barnacle to the N.Y. Custom House,” according to Hawthorne’s son-in-law, “& very much averse to publicity.” Many years later, W. H. Auden imagined his days and nights: