Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness,

  And anchored in his home and reached his wife

  And rode within the harbour of her hand,

  And went across each morning to an office

  As though his occupation were another island.

  For the better part of twenty years, beginning in 1866, he took the horse car down Broadway six times a week, then headed west, where he walked the docks along the Hudson down to the Battery. (Later, he was assigned to an East River pier uptown at Seventy-ninth Street and traveled to work on the new Third Avenue El.) On West Street, wearing a brass-buttoned woolen coat modeled on a naval officer’s uniform, he shared an office with other inspectors in what was little more than a dockside shack, where he prepared and filed his paperwork. His job was to ensure that the required duties were paid on unloaded cargo. He may have occasionally inspected the personal baggage of disembarking passengers, but his main tasks were to confirm the accuracy of cargo lists from newly docked ships, secure the mail, collect fees, and dispatch runners off to merchants awaiting delivery. It was not savory work. According to John Hoadley, who wrote on his brother-in-law’s behalf supporting a request for promotion, he was “surrounded” in his job “by low venality” in the face of which he put “all quietly aside,—quietly declining offers of money for special services,—quietly returning money which has been thrust into his pockets behind his back, avoiding offence alike to the corrupting merchants and their clerks and runners, who think that all men can be bought.”

  Melville may have refused bribes that were offered, but he had to pay those that were demanded. That is, he paid 2 percent of his annual salary to the New York Republican State Committee and, for a time in the 1880s, an equal amount to the national Republican Party. This was, in effect, a tax for political protection—a small price, perhaps, for job security, but a bribe nevertheless. It was one element in a system by which the party in office extorted money from civil servants, thereby encouraging them to pass on the cost to merchants whose goods they had the power to detain or impound. According to the authors of an investigative report issued in 1881, men of Melville’s rank were left “unprotected against arbitrary exactions from their salaries—which they saw used by scheming politicians without audit or responsibility.” Many of his fellow inspectors “retaliated in neglect of duty through which vast amounts of revenue were lost, and in extortions from merchants through which Custom-House morals were debauched.”

  Melville’s tone in Billy Budd toward the cheats and sneaks among its minor characters suggests that his mood toward his colleagues at the Custom House was more weary than incensed. There was something grim about holding a job in which graft was a matter of course, since to acquiesce was demeaning while to hold oneself aloof was self-punitive. In January 1886, after he had retired on the strength of his wife’s inheritance from her aunt Martha Marett, who died in 1878, and her half brother Lemuel Shaw, Jr., who died in 1884, Lizzie wrote, “For a year or so past he has found the duties too onerous for a man of his years, and at times of exhaustion, both mental and physical, he has been on the point of giving it up, but recovering a little, has held on, very naturally anxious to do so, for many reasons.” Melville himself marked a passage, possibly during his last illness, in his copy of Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism: a “man of genius … will occasionally feel like some noble prisoner of state, condemned to work in the galleys.”

  He had arrived, as Frederick Busch imagines him in his novel The Night Inspector, “within a very short distance of depletion.” As early as the spring of 1877, we find him making a revealing comment in a letter to Hoadley. At fifty-nine, Hoadley was a year older, yet Melville thought of himself as Hoadley’s senior: “You are young but I am verging upon threescore and at times a certain lassitude steals over one—in fact, a disinclination for doing anything except the indispensable. At such moments the problem of the universe seems a humbug, and … well nepenthe seems all-in-all.” In a postscript, he repeated himself, but more bluntly: “You are young (as I said before) but I aint; and at my years, and with my disposition, or rather, constitution, one gets to care less and less for everything except downright good feeling. Life is so short, and so ridiculous and irrational (from a certain point of view) that one knows not what to make of it, unless—well, finish the sentence for yourself.” Then he added a second P.S.: “I aint crazy.”

  Later that year, Melville’s behavior became a source of shame to his daughters, especially when a friend or suitor was present. Still a man of what he had once called (in Pierre) “uncelestial appetite,” he was known to shovel potatoes into his mouth while talking long and loudly, and to attack a plate of crabs with a hammer as if he were outdoors trying to break a rock.

  If his daughters were embarrassed, his wife was alarmed. Early in 1877, Lizzie wrote to a cousin that her husband was becoming “morbidly sensitive” and pleaded with her not to fail to “mention Herman’s name in your letters” lest he think (Lizzie and Herman apparently read each other’s mail) that he was regarded as superseded or beside the point. In his copy of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Melville marked many passages of regretful retrospect (“Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! / That Youth’s sweet-scented manuscript should close!”), and in his own poems, which he continued to write till the end, he turned again and again to memories of dead friends:

  Like tides that enter creek or stream,

  Ye come, ye visit me, or seem

  Swimming out from seas of faces,

  Alien myriads memory traces,

  To enfold me in a dream!

  In his best poems, such as “The Maldive Shark”—“that pale ravener of horrible meat”—he retrieved images from his mariner past that evoked the eerie serenity of the cruel sea. In “The Berg,” a ship sinks slowly in white mist after colliding with a mountain of ice (“The impact made huge ice-cubes fall / Sullen, in tons that crashed the deck”)—an almost mute event that disturbs neither the massive berg nor the “seals, dozing sleek on [its] sliddery edges,” nor the “slimy slug that sprawls / Along thy dead indifference of walls,” but drowns a host of human lives.† In the last section of Clarel, probably composed in the early 1870s, Melville likened the swelling and ebbing tones of a church organ to the sound of drowning mariners whose “cries decrease—/ The voices in their ferment cease: / One wave rolls over all and whelms to peace.”

  Lizzie had reason to fear that her husband was sinking. Chronic pain in his hands made writing difficult, and even when the pain eased, he was dogged by the old problem of poor handwriting. Late in 1881, he wrote to a friend that “I have been recently improving my penmanship by lessons from a High Dutch professor who teaches all the stylish flourishes imaginable,” with the goal of passing the promotion exam (12 percent of the grade was awarded for penmanship) and thus increasing his salary. As Melville’s biographer Hershel Parker points out, the so-called Dutch professor was probably himself.

  There were some mitigations. His works were enjoying a small revival in England, championed by writers who today are footnotes in histories of the Fabian and Pre-Raphaelite movements. In August 1885, the British magazine Academy published a bit of verse by one Robert Buchanan, who praised Melville as “my sea-magician” at the expense of such “haberdashers” as Howells:

  Melville, whose magic drew Typee

  Radiant as Venus, from the sea,

  Sits all forgotten or ignored,

  While haberdashers are adored!

  Upon the publication in 1888 of his small book of poems John Marr and Other Sailors, Melville received a favorable squib in the New York Mail and Express noting his “vein of true poetical feeling,” and the following year he got a letter from his Canadian admirer, Archibald MacMechan (later to be instrumental in reviving Melville’s reputation), praising the “unique merits” of Moby-Dick and regretting that they “have never received due recognition.” MacMechan was more accurate than he k
new. On March 4, 1887, Melville received his final royalty statement from Harper & Brothers, which had not reprinted any of his books since 1876.

  He had become so thoroughly obscure that Henry James, despite the immense scope of his literary awareness, mentions him only once in all his critical writing, as part of the “Putnam’s group” that included George W. Curtis and “Ik Marvel” (Donald G. Mitchell), author of such light diversions as Reveries of a Bachelor, all of whom James recalled in 1898 as minor writers of “prose, as mild and easy as an Indian summer in the woods.” That other literary representative of fin de siècle New York, Edith Wharton, a woman of not quite thirty when Melville died, wrote in her memoir that “as for Herman Melville,” he was “a cousin of the Van Rensselaers, and qualified by birth to figure in the best society,” but was “doubtless excluded by his deplorable Bohemianism.” By the 1930s, she had become aware of him, yet in the 1880s—a bookish young woman, living in the same city—Wharton “never heard his name mentioned, or saw one of his books.”

  With the legacies from Lizzie’s aunt and brother, Melville was able to bear at least the financial cost of his failure. A few years earlier, Lizzie had written anxiously (“it is hard enough to get along at all”) to her stepmother that she and Herman lived in fear that his “pay should be reduced, as so many others have.” But now they were free from this worry for the first time since the start of their marriage. She gave him a monthly allowance so he could browse the curio shops, build up his collection of maritime prints, and even frame those he had bought—recklessly, some thought—in the years when money was scarce.

  He took pleasure as well in visits from his granddaughters. Eleanor (born in 1882) recalled much later that her grandfather’s study, with its high bookcases “topped by strange plaster heads that peered along the ceiling level, or bent down, searching blindly with sightless balls,” had seemed menacing; but once she dared to enter, she was rewarded with one of the sticky sweet figs he kept on his desk. Eleanor’s younger sister, Frances (the girl whom Melville, in his absentmindedness, may once have left behind in Madison Square), was less daunted. “I could play with anything on those days when I was invited into the study,” she recalled much later. “Sometimes I piled books into houses on the floor.” Since they were “not too heavy to handle and of a nice palish blue color,” her favorite building blocks were the volumes of Schopenhauer.

  Without children to break the quiet (the Melvilles’ last resident daughter, Bessie, was thirty-three in 1885, and afflicted with arthritis), the household was susceptible to gloom. There was a back porch on which Herman liked to smoke, but the house itself was short on daylight, since the front, where the larger windows were situated, faced north. On a visit in 1883, Julian Hawthorne found his late father’s friend “pale, sombre, nervous,” obsessively getting in and out of his chair in order to open or close the parlor window.‡

  Death was circling, and with increasing frequency it swooped in for a kill. Allan Melville had died suddenly and long ago, in 1872. By the spring of 1884, Herman and Lizzie had lost as well their brothers Tom and Lemuel Junior. The following year, Allan Melville’s daughter Lucy, not yet thirty years old, fell ill and slipped quickly away; that July, Melville’s sister Fanny died, having been tormented by bone tumors. Then, in February 1886, death struck far away but close to home: Stanwix, who had failed at everything from the wholesale business to mining and dentistry, died alone in a San Francisco hotel. Since the death of his older brother nearly twenty years earlier, Stanny had been the focus of his parents’ hopes. A sensitive boy, he was, according to his mother, susceptible to “bowel trouble,” and, ever eager not to disappoint, always promised more than he could deliver, leaving his parents in a state of chronic worry about his future.

  Stanwix Melville (list of illustrations 12.2)

  Through a heartbreaking series of letters that begins in his early twenties, one may follow Stanny’s fluctuating plans—as a sheep farmer (“the most profitable business in California,” his mother wrote to his grandmother, “if Stanny will only persevere …”), in the iron and steel business, finally as a dentist—only to discover some disinclination or disability that dashed his hopes and left him each time with less reserve on which to draw for trying again. Having discovered in 1873, when he was twenty-two, that his nearsightedness posed a “serious obsticle” to his dream of becoming a “number one dentist,” he wrote to his kindhearted grandmother Hope Savage Shaw that “fate is against me in most of my undertakings.”

  Months after Stanny’s miserable end thirteen years later at age thirty-five, Melville’s sister Helen found Lizzie “unable to find solace for her grief—it was so hard,—the sickness and death so far away!” And there was, of course, the merciless presence of the ghost of Malcolm, who had died so long ago in his room upstairs. As Melville wrote in the headnote to his poem “John Marr,” “while the acuter sense of his bereavement becomes mollified by time, the void at heart abides.”

  That same headnote contains another touch of self-portraiture:

  As the growing sense of his environment threw him more and more upon retrospective musings, these phantoms … became spiritual companions, losing something of their first indistinctness and putting on at last a dim semblance of mute life; and they were lit by that aureola circling over any object of the affections in the past for reunion with which an imaginative heart passionately yearns.

  3.

  Around the time that Melville wrote those words, most likely in 1886, he had begun composing another sailor’s reminiscence in verse, possibly intended for inclusion in John Marr and Other Sailors. It was called “Billy in the Darbies” (“darbies” was nautical slang for handcuffs), expressing a sailor’s thoughts on the night before he is to be executed for plotting mutiny:

  Good of the chaplain to enter Lone Bay

  And down on his marrowbones here and pray

  For the likes just o’ me, Billy Budd.—But, look:

  Through the port comes the moonshine astray!

  It tips the guard’s cutlass and silvers this nook;

  But ’twill die in the dawning of Billy’s last day.

  A jewel-block they’ll make of me tomorrow,

  Pendant pearl from the yardarm-end

  Like the eardrop I gave to Bristol Molly—

  O, ’tis me, not the sentence they’ll suspend.

  Ay, ay, all is up; and I must up too,

  Early in the morning, aloft from alow.

  On an empty stomach now never it would do.

  They’ll give me a nibble—bit o’ biscuit ere I go.

  Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup;

  But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay,

  Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!

  No pipe to those halyards.—But aren’t it all sham?

  A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.

  A hatchet to my hawser? All adrift to go?

  The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know?

  But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank;

  So I’ll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.

  But—no! It is dead then I’ll be, come to think.

  I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.

  And his cheek it was like the budding pink.

  But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep.

  Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.

  I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?

  Just ease these darbies at the wrist,

  And roll me over fair!

  I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

  The subject of mutiny had strong personal bearing for Melville. In the 1840s, his cousin Guert Gansevoort had been a junior officer aboard the U.S. brig-of-war Somers while Melville was whaling in the Pacific, and when suspicions of a mutinous plot arose aboard the Somers during a peacetime cruise, a shipboard court of inquiry, of which Guert Gansevoort was a member, found insufficient evi
dence to convict. But under pressure from the captain, the court reconvened and ultimately returned guilty verdicts for three men, who were subsequently hanged. Although young Guert stoutly claimed that “the consciousness of having done my duty shall ever sustain me,” he returned from his tour of duty aboard the Somers so shaken that, though he was barely thirty, he struck his family as “an infirm man of seventy.” The burden of the decision in which he had participated stayed with him all his life.

  At some point after the completion of the poem, Melville’s mind moved outward—perhaps propelled by memories of his cousin, to whom he had alluded in his poem “Bridegroom Dick”—from the interior consciousness of the condemned man to the officers who have brought him to the brink of execution. A prose work began to grow out of the poem and soon surpassed it. In its earlier drafts, the poem is sung by a “tarry hand” who wants to memorialize his shipmate, a man of the world who over the years has given out more than his share of trinkets to buy favors in port. But as the work developed, the poem fell out of tune with the prose, and the seasoned Billy of the ballad became an ingenuous boy—one of those whom Melville had called (in John Marr) “unworldly servers of the world.”

  More child than man, this beautiful child was an amalgam of Melville’s lost sons. While continuing to revise and tinker, Melville noted in the manuscript on April 19, 1891, that the ballad spoken in the voice of the original Billy should be moved to the end of the story. It survives in the published version of Billy Budd as one of those “ragged edges” that he never trimmed, a trace of what had once been a story about a salty old sailor caught scheming but that became the story of a boy defamed.

  We first meet the new Billy aboard a merchant ship, tellingly named Rights-of-Man, on which he is adored by officers and crew alike, including the rough and tough among them. He is a boy of radiant beauty, “and despite his all but fully developed frame, in aspect looked even younger than he really was, owing to a lingering adolescent expression in the as yet smooth face all but feminine in purity of natural complexion.” When the Rights is boarded by a naval lieutenant on a mission of impressment from a nearby warship (Melville had originally called the ship Indomitable, but changed the name to Bellipotent, a Latin compound meaning warpower), the predatory officer immediately spots Billy and orders him to go below to pack his belongings for the trip to his new home. While waiting for his prize conscript, the officer invites himself down to the captain’s cabin to take some grog. With “rueful reproach,” the disconcerted host says, “Lieutenant, you are going to take my best man from me.” Drawing back the tumbler “preliminary to a replenishing,” the unwelcome visitor gives a dismissive response: “Yes, I know, Yes, I know. Sorry.”