Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  Whatever we make of Vere, Melville had too much tact to take us into the cabin to witness his informing Billy of the court’s decision. Vere enters the cabin not as a father confessor but as a confessing father seeking absolution from his son. To intrude would be to violate a private moment that Melville feels as intensely as if he were bidding farewell to his own child—and so we are required to wait outside.

  After Vere steps out, the first to encounter him is the ship’s surgeon, who surmises from the agony legible in his captain’s face that “the condemned one suffered less than he who mainly had effected the condemnation.” Scholars who have studied the manuscript of Billy Budd have shown that Melville repeatedly revised the sections dealing with Vere in order to keep in view the excruciating difficulty of his decision and the good faith with which he makes it.

  Faith is the heart of the matter:

  There is no telling the sacrament, seldom if in any case revealed to the gadding world, wherever under circumstances at all akin to those here attempted to be set forth two of great Nature’s nobler order embrace. There is privacy at the time, inviolable to the survivor; and holy oblivion, the sequel to each diviner magnanimity, providentially covers all at last.

  It is hard to read these words without feeling that Melville had Mackie and Stanny in mind as he wrote them.

  When the sentence is carried out next morning at dawn, Billy Budd dies as the Son of Man had died, ascending into the eastern sky “shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God,” and the last act of his imitatio Christi is a variant of Christ’s plea for forgiveness on behalf of his tormentors. “God Bless Captain Vere,” he sings out in a voice miraculously “unobstructed in the utterance … delivered in the clear melody of a singing bird on the point of launching from the twig,” and then, as if some “current electric” ran from his heart to the hearts of the men summoned to witness his execution, they shout out a “resonant sympathetic echo: ‘God Bless Captain Vere!’ ”

  These words tell us what had happened in the cabin between the “fated boy” and the agonized man who sends him out of the world. But if Billy has reenacted the death of Christ in this tale of sacrifice and redemption, Vere is no Pilate. He is Abraham performing the sacrifice of Isaac, torn to the depths of his soul by the conflict between love and duty—except that in Melville’s reprise of the father-and-son story from Genesis, there is no intervention by a merciful God. There is no God at all.

  8.

  The prose in which Melville wrote this heartrending tale was an altogether different expressive instrument from that of his earlier books. He had made what he had called, in Pierre, “that strange transition from the generous impulsiveness of youth to the provident circumspectness of age,” and his prose in Billy Budd is no longer lush and fleshy. It has become skeletal, more akin to a linear sketch than to the full-palette paintings of forty years before. Yet it is still very intricate. It has not been boiled down to the minimalism of certain modernist writers (Hemingway published his first stories a few years before the first publication of Billy Budd), but the layered richness of the early works is gone, leaving the junctures and linkages exposed. The young Melville had worked accretively, piling on variants and synonyms as if repeated iteration (as in such phrases as “umbrageous shade” or “outreaching comprehensiveness”) could capture in glutinous language the plenitude of creation. But the words in Billy Budd jostle and push against each other, as in the euphemisms for impressment (“arbitrary enlistment,” “enforced enlistment”), where the ideas of compulsion and freedom are held tensely together, or in the definition of irony (“sinister dexterity”), in which there is open conflict between the Latin words for left (sinister) and right (dexter).

  Like Vere’s conscience, the writing in Billy Budd is divided against itself. It is retrospective. It “holds the action at a remove,” as one of Melville’s finest critics, Warner Berthoff, has put it, and “works by a kind of filtered and distilled recollection”—a mood established even before the tale begins, with the dedication to Melville’s old friend Jack Chase:

  Dedicated to

  jack chase

  englishman

  Wherever that great heart may now be

  Here on Earth or harbored in Paradise

  Captain of the Maintop

  in the year 1843

  in the U.S. Frigate

  United States

  Melville wrote this work of remembrance while living in a city of faded and fractured memories to which he had returned to live for the second time since his father’s disgrace long before. New York was by now a place much like the city we know, a place of skyscrapers and cavernous streets, electrified, increasingly international, crisscrossed by mechanized trains and trolleys with the beginnings of a subway system below, linked to the neighboring municipality of Brooklyn by a traffic-laden suspension bridge that was among the technological marvels of the world. Melville watched this city demolish and rebuild itself, burying a little more each day of what was left of his personal past.

  He had found as early as 1870 that not even the proprietor of the Gansevoort Hotel on Little West Twelfth Street, near his “office” at the Hudson piers, had any idea why the establishment bore the Gansevoort name. To Melville’s inquiry at the reception desk, “Can you tell me who was this Gansevoort?,” he got a blank stare, until a guest who had overheard him spoke up to say that the Gansevoorts were a once rich family formerly with property holdings “hereabouts.” Nothing was said, because nothing was known, about the hero of Fort Stanwix. Afterwards, in a letter to his mother, Melville mused “upon the instability of human glory and the evanescence” of all things. By the time he wrote Billy Budd, Melville had become a version of one of those characters in the late stories of Henry James, who “seemed to wander through the old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who was, in the most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self,” walking through a half-familiar New York from which “the old people had mostly gone, the old names were unknown,” where “here and there an old association seemed to stray, all vaguely, like some very aged person, out too late, whom you might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe restoration to shelter.”

  While working on his last masterpiece, Melville was also reworking some of his old unpublished poems; and if we credit the few surviving reports from people who visited him, he spent his waning months wrapped more and more tightly in his memories. The writer who had once declared that “no great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea” now tinkered with a poem about a chipmunk:

  Heart of autumn!

  Weather meet,

  Like to sherbert

  Cool and sweet.

  Stock-still I stand,

  And him I see

  Prying, peeping

  From Beech Tree,

  Crickling, crackling

  Gleefully!

  But, affrighted

  By wee sound,

  Presto! vanish—

  Whither bound?

  So did Baby;

  Crowing mirth,

  E’en as startled

  By some inkling

  Touching Earth,

  Flit (and whither?)

  From our hearth!

  In the final line, Melville changed “the hearth” to “our hearth,” thereby bringing into focus the personal bearing of the poem on the unbearable brevity of Baby Malcolm’s—Mackie’s—“peeping” vanished life. “Whither bound?” was his constant question now, as his sons and brothers (all of them) had gone before him, and he expected soon to go himself. His granddaughter Eleanor told Lewis Mumford that in his waning years, Melville liked to grow roses on the patch of land behind the house; but beyond this sort of family lore, if we look for evidence of the writer’s mood in his old age, there is little to be found outside the gnomic texts of the late poems.

  In one of them, Melville recounted a church experience in which, fallen asleep to the preacher’s droning, the speaker d
escribes a vision of paradise:

  The preacher took from Solomon’s Song

  Four words for text with mystery rife—

  The Rose of Sharon—figuring Him

  The Resurrection and the Life;

  And, pointing many an urn in view,

  How horrid a homily he drew.

  There, in the slumberous afternoon,

  Through minister gray, in lullaby rolled

  The hummed metheglin charged with swoon.

  Drowsy, my decorous hands I fold

  Till sleep overtakes with dream to boon.

  I saw an Angel with a Rose

  Come out of Morning’s garden-gate,

  And, lamp-like hold the rose aloft.

  She entered a sepulchral Strait.

  I followed. And I saw the Rose

  Shed dappled down upon the dead;

  The shrouds and mort-cloths all were lit

  To plaids and checquered tartans red.

  I woke. The great Rose-window high,

  A mullioned wheel in gable set,

  Suffused with rich and soft in dye

  Where Iris and Aurora met;

  Aslant in sheaf of rays it threw

  From all its foliate round of panes

  Transfiguring light on dingy stains,

  While danced the motes in dusty pew.

  We get another glimpse of the old man who wrote this delicate dream-poem in a touching little memoir by a New York bookdealer and antiquarian, Oscar Wegelin, who in 1935 remembered seeing Melville forty-five years earlier in the Nassau Street bookshop where he had been an apprentice. Walking with “rapid stride and almost a sprightly gait,” the old man struck the boy as a person of generosity and gentleness. Whenever books were to be delivered to the Melville home, Oscar was eager to take them, since he could always expect a kind word and a tip. To the boy’s point of view, Melville cut a deliberately anachronistic figure (his “beard … impressive even for those hirsute days”), and though Oscar had heard people say that Mr. Melville was a disappointed and misanthropic man, he never saw him “permit his disappointment to come out into the open.”

  Melville was still welcome in certain quiet corners of New York’s café society, but he mostly preferred to stay away from what he had once called “the party-giving city of New York.” His house was close enough to the original Madison Square Garden (demolished in 1928) that he could hear the ruckus of the crowds and see from his second-floor windows the gilded statue of naked Diana (preserved today atop the grand staircase in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) that adorned the tower. It was an easy walk to Delmonico’s, where every night the “dining salon was filled with beautiful women and men of national celebrity,” but Melville visited these places mainly in his imagination—as when he set his poem “At the Hostelry” at Delmonico’s, where he imagines a group of painters, including Tintoretto, Rubens, and Michelangelo, has gathered, having time-traveled to New York.

  His brother Allan had belonged to the prestigious Century Association until his death in 1872, but Herman never joined, though not for lack of invitation. In 1882, the directors of the Century, perhaps under the impression that hefty dues were keeping prospective members away, created a subsidiary “Authors Club,” which Melville was invited to join for a nominal fee. At first he accepted, then reconsidered, writing (in the club secretary’s paraphrase) that “he had become too much of a hermit, saying his nerves could no longer stand huge gatherings and begged to rescind his acceptance.”

  In 1886, in a notice about some local literati, the New York Commercial Advertiser remarked that Herman Melville, “after all his wanderings, loves to stay at home.” But Oscar Wegelin knew better. The old man “would take long walks in those latter months, voyaging as far afield as Central Park—a promenade which I doubt if many residents of East Twenty-sixth Street indulge in today.” Almost to the end, Melville was out and about in the great city that he had always found both enlarging and enervating. Broadway was not far from his house, and there he still “found some relief,” as he had written (about Pierre) nearly forty years earlier, in walking “through the greatest thoroughfare of the city [where] the utter isolation of his soul might feel itself the more intensely from the incessant joggling of his body against the bodies of the hurrying thousands.” A British admirer, who thought Melville “the one great imaginative writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman,” had the impression that in New York “no one seemed to know anything of him,” while another reported that “it was difficult to get more than a passing glimpse of his ‘tall, stalwart figure’ and grave, preoccupied face.” He was, as the scholar Alan Trachtenberg remarks, an “internal exile within the nervous city.”

  When he did venture out, he stepped into his own past, and would sometimes accept an invitation to talk about it. There are reports that he would drop in “for an hour or two” when asked to this or that literary gathering, and one old acquaintance from sailing days remarked that he “never denied himself to his friends,” though “he sought no one” of his own accord. He seemed to know that he would not live to see his genius affirmed, and when he went out “voyaging,” he went, as he had always done, alone. He suffered increasingly frequent and virulent infections, from each of which he would emerge weaker than before—portents of death, which he had once called “the King of Terrors,” but by which he had never been terrified. In his copy of Hawthorne’s story “The Birthmark,” which he had first read in 1850, and to which he refers in Billy Budd, he underlined a passage in which Hawthorne reflects that to live much beyond the span of three-score years and ten would be to “produce a discord in Nature which all the world, and chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum, would find cause to curse.”

  Melville did not live long enough to curse himself for outliving his time—though he had survived Hawthorne by more than a quarter century. By the summer of 1891 he was clearly failing, and in the early hours of September 28 he died at home in his iron-framed bed. The doctor wrote “cardiac dilatation” on the death certificate. There was little public awareness (a posthumous reference on October 6 in the New York Times garbled Melville’s first name), and a private funeral service was held in the house the next day, at which the pastor of All Souls Church spoke briefly. After the house was sold the following spring, Lizzie Melville moved from East Twenty-sixth Street into an apartment hotel eight blocks south, where she did her best to replicate the furnishings of her late husband’s study. She took the portrait painted by Joseph Eaton twenty years earlier that had hung in the back parlor and placed it over the mantel in her new library, whose shelves she filled with Herman’s books.

  Melville’s obituary notice in Harper’s Magazine (December 1891) (list of illustrations 12.3)

  Elizabeth Shaw Melville, 1894 (list of illustrations 12.4)

  In one of them, Isaac Disraeli’s The Literary Character, Lizzie marked the following passage by Disraeli’s widow: “My ideas of my husband … are so much associated with his books, that to part with them would be as it were breaking some of the last ties which still connect me with so beloved an object. The being in the midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and which contain his marks and notes, will still give him a sort of existence with me.” On Herman’s desk she placed the precious bread box containing his unpublished manuscripts, from which she would extract a poem or two, or a few pages of Billy Budd, to show to some interested guest.

  Some thirty years later, soon after Billy Budd was finally in print, its almost unbearable beauty was recognized not only in Melville’s own country but also by such twentieth-century European masters as W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, and Albert Camus. When Thomas Mann, close to death, came to read it, he called it “the most beautiful story in the world” and, expressing the pardonable envy of one great artist for another, exclaimed: “O could I have written that!” During the second half of the twentieth century, Billy Budd was scored for opera by Benjamin Britten and adapted for film by Peter Ustinov, and today it continues to exer
t an emotional and intellectual force attained by only a very few works of art.

  For some readers, the Melville who speaks most directly to the mind and heart is the chastened author of Billy Budd. For others, the true Melville will always be the boisterous young author of Moby-Dick. Still others have found, with replenished gratitude, that there is a season in life for each.

  * This narrative was initiated by D. H. Lawrence’s friend John Middleton Murry in “Herman Melville’s Silence,” a review of Billy Budd for the Times Literary Supplement (July 10, 1924). Two years later, the fine English critic John Freeman could refer to Melville’s “nearly forty years’ supineness” as an uncontested fact.

  † Robert Penn Warren points out (Introduction to Selected Poems of Herman Melville, p. 53) the startling similarity between Melville’s sea-slug and the worm in Thomas Hardy’s great poem on the sinking of the Titanic, “The Convergence of the Twain”: “Over the mirrors meant / To glass the opulent / The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb indifferent.”

  ‡ Julian, whom Melville had hoisted onto his horse some thirty years before, had by the 1880s become something of a literary posturer, and later would be sent to prison for taking part in a stock swindle.

  § Jonathan Edwards, for instance, writes that in heaven “the glorious saints … will have ways of expressing the concord of their minds by some other emanations than sounds.” Edward Hickman, ed., The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2 vols. (Boston, 1834), II, 619.

  ‖ Melville had seen Raphael’s cartoon of The Death of Ananias at Hampton Court in 1849, and, since 1871, he had owned a copy of Hazlitt’s Criticism on Art, which devotes four pages of discussion to that work. See Robert K. Wallace, “Melville’s Prints: David Metcalf’s Prints and Tile,” Harvard Library Bulletin 8, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 19.