Genoa

by Paul Metcalf

  PIERRE: “. . . this indeed almost unmans me . . .”

  The Pequod sunk and gone, Melville—1851 and ’52—writes PIERRE . . .

  WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND POLITICS, Catt and Shuler: “No cause ever made such rapid strides as that of Woman’s Rights from 1850 to 1860.”

  The New York HERALD, September 7, 1853: “The assemblage of rampant women which convened at the Tabernacle yesterday was an interesting phase in the comic history of the Nineteenth Century . . . a gathering of unsexed women, unsexed in mind, all of them publicly propounding the doctrine that they should he allowed to step out of their appropriate sphere to the neglect of those duties which both human and divine law have assigned to them.”

  and earlier, Abigail Adams, March, 1776, to her husband, sitting with the Continental Congress: “. . . and, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion . . .”

  There is more, and earlier, in Melville: young Herman, age 21, shipped on a whaler to the Pacific:

  “Weary with the invariable earth, the restless sailor breaks from every enfolding arm, and puts to sea in height of tempest that blows off shore. But in long night-watches at the antipodes, how heavily that ocean gloom lies in vast bales upon the deck; thinking that that very moment in his deserted hamlet-home the household sun is high, and many a sun-eyed maiden meridian as the sun.”

  . . . and there were the islands . . .

  “In mid Pacific, where life’s thrill

  Is primal—Pagan . . .”

  . . . Typee, Fayaway . . .

  “. . . the fair breeze of naked nature now blew in their faces.”

  “’Tis Paradise. In such an hour

  Some pangs that rend might take release.”

  Back in New England and New York, throughout the long years . . . “pale years of cloistral life” . . . with Lizzie, the memory of Fayaway remained, dug in . . .

  PIERRE: “For whoso once has known this sweet knowledge, and then fled it; in absence, to him the avenging dream will come.”

  Dug in, avenging . . . for Melville came to accept Fayaway as original sin . . .

  (1850, checks and underscores in the Old Testament: “. . . art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance . . .”

  . . . to accept that he had “ruined” her . . . and thus, locked in the old Christian myth, in the burden of Adam, he must make it up to all womankind:

  as Pierre, to Delly . . .

  as Herman, to Lizzie.

  MARDI: “And thinking the lady to his mind, being brave like himself . . . he meditated suicide—I would have said, wedlock—and the twain became one.”

  I AND MY CHIMNEY: “By my wife’s ingenious application of the principle that certain things belong of right to female jurisdiction, I find myself, through my easy compliance, insensibly stripped by degrees of one masculine prerogative after another.”

  FRAGMENTS FROM A WRITING DESK (written when he was 19): “What! to be thwarted by a woman! Peradventure baffled by a girl! Confusion! It was too bad! To be outgeneraled, routed, defeated by a mere rib of the earth? It was not to be borne!”

  And there was BENITO CERENO, the Spaniard, captive of his blacks . . . sick of mind and body, loyally sustained (or so it seemed) by Babo, drifting at the mercy of the winds . . .

  Melville as Cereno, captive not this time of the Typees, the friendly cannibals, but of his whites:

  Lizzie, the Shaws, the right and just world (or so it seemed) of the 19th Century . . .

  Lizzie as Babo, loyally sustaining Benito through misery . . .

  (and there was the other ship,

  the Bachelor’s Delight, where all was

  trim and shipshape . . .

  CLAREL:

  “My kin—I blame them not at heart—

  Would have me act some routine part,

  Subserving family, and dreams

  Alien to me—illusive schemes.

  This world clean fails me . . .”

  and

  “‘Serve God by cleaving to thy wife,

  Thy children. If come fatal strife—

  Which I forebode—nay!’ and she flung

  Her arms about him there, and clung.”

  The rhyming couplets—Melville’s aging force thrashing through eight hundred pages, two volumes, of CLAREL. No longer the powering prose of MOBY-DICK, mounting pilingly upon itself, but couplets: chains, darbies . . .

  (the beloved irons that Columbus hugged to himself, swore to die with

  (and did, the iron transmuted into his flesh, as arithritic gout . . .

  Melville: “. . . so that the gallows presented the truly warning spectacle of a man hanged by his friends.”

  ISRAEL POTTER: “The other officer and Israel interlocked. The battle was in the midst of the chaos of blowing canvas. Caught in a rent of the sail, the officer slipped and fell near the sharp edge of the iron hatchway. As he fell, he caught Israel by the most terrible part in which mortality can be grappled. Insane with pain, Israel dashed his adversary’s skull against the sharp iron. The officer’s hold relaxed, but himself stiffened. Israel made for the helmsman, who as yet knew not the issue of the late tussle. He caught him around the loins, bedding his fingers like grisly claws into his flesh, and hugging him to his heart. The man’s ghost, caught like a broken cork in a gurgling bottle neck, gasped with the embrace. Loosening him suddenly, Israel hurled him from him against the bulwarks.”

  Melville: still able to tire a Hawthorne:

  Una, to her aunt: “Mr. Melville was here a day or two, and Mamma overtired herself during his visit, and was quite unwell for a day or two afterwards.”

  . . . and Lizzie:

  reported by Sam Shaw: “Elizabeth’s catarrh is somewhat relieved here but I am sorry to see how generally feeble she is, and prematurely old.”

  Melville: growing older—Lizzie outlived him by many years—no longer able to thrash . . .

  From THE CAREER OF MOCHA DICK: “From first to last ‘Mocha Dick’ had nineteen harpoons put into him. He stove fourteen boats and caused the death of over thirty men. He stove three whaling vessels so badly that they were nearly lost, and he attacked and sunk a French merchantman and an Australian trader. He was encountered in every ocean and on every known feeding ground. He was killed off the Brazilian banks in August, 1859, by a Swedish whaler, which gathered him in with scarcely any trouble, but it was always believed that poor old ‘Mocha Dick’ was dying of old age.”

  There was Columbus, 4th voyage, forbidden by the Court to enter the principal island he had discovered . . .

  “Moreover every man had it in his power to tell me that the new Governor would have the superintendence of the countries I might acquire.”

  . . . cruising elsewhere in the Caribbean, battling tempests and Indians, his ships rotting . . .

  Ferdinand: “Being here at anchor ten leagues from Cuba, full of hunger and trouble, because they had nothing to eat but hard-tack and a little oil and vinegar, and exhausted by working three pumps day and night because the vessels were ready to sink from the multitude of worms that had bored into them . . .”

  . . . putting ashore finally on Jamaica, where the two ships, the Capitana and Santiago, lashed together, beached, worm-eaten and rotten, ended their careers as houseboats . . .

  . . . isolated among his islands—no tools for re-planking or building, his caulkers dead, his crew in mutiny, no ship likely to call as he had earlier reported no gold in Jamaica—Columbus survived for over a year on what food the Indians brought him, living on the arrested caravels . . .

  There is the old Spanish proverb: “La verdad no se casa con nadie” . . .

  and Melville: “Truth will not be comforted.”

  Shi
fting in my chair, I become aware again of the house, the attic, the rafters—poised in the quiet of the city, the dark, early-morning hours. I think of the early days in Indiana, the first settlements. I think of my great-grandfather, Hammond Mills, who built this house—and of his well worn philosophy: The Mind is to the Body as the Whole Man is to the Earth . . .

  I remember fragments of medical school, the boys and men I studied and lived with . . . one became a gynecologist and surgeon, now has a lucrative, busy practice here in the city, scraping out the female troubles of Indiana . . . another has a commission in the Navy, does brilliant research in Space Medicine: the problems raised by sending human beings into outer space . . .

  Shifting again, I am invaded with bitterness: I think of us as a nation of prurient neuters, bald-headed oglers, the men having laid down original tools and taken up others: become science fictioneers, space shippers, nuclear mystics, relinquishing the Body (Earth), seeking to escape it, save only to peer at it naughtily . . . become, with the aid of popular religion, the modern devout of the ether . . .

  There is the population—not only of our own country but of the world—become anaplastic, growing, since World War II, wildly, without roots or viable form . . .

  the cells reverting to simplest, undifferentiated forms, breaking down so rapidly as to lose all trace of roots, of origin . . .

  SEVEN

  I lost track of Carl once again. Letters to both the shop and the room were returned by the post office.

  When word came, after many weeks, it was not from Carl, but from doctors at the mental hospital, where he had again been committed. He had finally told them about me, had given them my address, and they wanted me to come: he was violent, and they thought I might help . . .

  I boarded the train after midnight, as before. I was no longer interested in motion, in adventure . . . the journey was repetition, return over old ground . . . the fact of direction, of heading west, was not exciting: I was moving from one city to another, a simple act of travel, without meaning . . .

  I thought of Carl, as my older brother—and I thought of Herman’s older brother, Gansevoort, who failed in business, then in politics, and, heavily in debt, died, age 30, of “nervous derangement . . .”

  Herman, writing to Gansevoort—unaware that the latter had already died: “Remember that composure of mind is every thing.”

  and later, writing of another: “This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him,—which but few men do. For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains.”

  Tearing apart the paper cup from which I had finished my coffee, I scribbled a few lines on it:

  In Memoriam: Gansevoort Melville

  who fails in business

  goes to politics;

  who fails in politics

  goes to heaven.

  (who fails in all

  goes to whale . . .

  and I thought of the contemporary review of MOBY-DICK: “. . . so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature . . .”

  Arrived in St. Louis, I went straight to the hospital, and the doctor in charge of Carl admitted me to his office.

  I asked about Carl. He said that he was periodically violent, and for this reason was kept in restraint. He was at present in isolation, in a straight jacket. I stood up, paced nervously across the floor—exploiting in my own body the motion denied to Carl. I suggested that whatever else was the matter with him, whatever therapy they might be planning for him, it should be oriented in his having the simplest of personal freedom—that what he needed, first and foremost, was space . . .

  The doctor looked at me candidly for a moment, and then begged me to follow him—we went out of the office, down a corridor, by elevator to another floor, around several corners, and into a room where masons and carpenters were at work. Motioning the workers aside, he showed me where Carl had terrorized a group of inmates: with nothing but his bare hands, he had ripped the paneling from a window frame, removed the window, and, unable to bend the iron bars, had dug with his finger ends into the stonework and masonry itself . . .

  (MOBY-DICK: “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”

  I asked to see Carl, and the doctor readily assented. We passed through various other parts of the hospital, catching glimpses of patients, in private and public rooms, in varying states . . .

  Melville: “I have been in mad-houses full of tragic mopers, and seen there the end of suspicion: the cynic, in the moody madness mustering in the corner; for years a barren fixture there; head lopped over, gnawing his own lip, vulture to himself; while, by fits and starts, from the corner opposite came the grimace of the idiot at him.”

  We found Carl standing, spread-legged, defiant, in the middle of his barren room. The jacket made him appear armless. He began at once to speak, to declaim:

  “But this notion, that science can play farmer to the flesh, making there what living soil it pleases . . .”

  “Try to rid my mind of it as I may, yet still these chemical practitioners with their tinctures, and fumes, and braziers, and occult incantations, seem to me like Pharaoh’s vain sorcerers, trying to beat down the will of heaven.”

  The words were familiar, though I wasn’t sure of the source . . .

  “Please,” I said, turning to the doctor, “take off the jacket . . .”

  He hesitated a moment, and then complied.

  Carl, standing rigid while the doctor untied the tapes, declaimed again.

  “Begone! You are all alike. The name of doctor, the dream of helper, condemns you. For years I have been but a gallipot for your experimentisers to rinse your experiments into, and now in this livid skin, partake of the nature of my contents.

  Begone! I hate ye.”

  He held his arms to his body for some time after they were free. Slowly then, he unlimbered, heaving his shoulders . . .

  The doctor warned that he would be outside if he were needed—and he left us alone. Carl turned to me—and I recalled what it was he was quoting: THE CONFIDENCE-MAN . . .

  “A sick philosopher,” he continued ominously, “is incurable.”

  His body shifted, the defiance went out of it, and a warmth came in, clumsy and affectionate. Raising an arm, he clasped my shoulder, drew me toward him.

  “Mike, boy,” he said—this was the first indication that he recognized me—“Mike, boy, there’s something I want to tell you . . .”

  Bowing his head, he screwed his brow, punched it with thumb and forefinger. He looked up suddenly, declaimed again, vaguely, in fright rather than defiance:

  “He tried to think—to recollect,

  But the blur is on his brain.”

  I began to wonder when in his career he had read so much Melville—read him so well that he had memorized whole passages. Or perhaps he had never actually read him . . . maybe Melville, as history, had impressed himself into the fiber and cells of which Carl was made, had become part of his makeup . . .

  He was sad now, unable to remember what he wanted to tell me, still clutching my shoulder.

  “The Indians. . .” he began—this time he was not quoting—and he breathed hard, letting the sentence hang for some moments . . .

  “The Indians shrank the heads of their enemies. . .”—again he breathed hard—“. . . and we . . .”

  “we shrink the hearts of our friends.” He gripped my shoulder, released it, and turned away . . .

  Again, his mood changed, became matter-of-fact. He went to the bed, lifted the mattress, took out some papers—scribblings, drawings of one sort or another. We sat down together, and he passed tbem to me, one at a time.

  There was a flower picture, rich and luxuriant, the paper covered all over with blossoms. Showing it to me, he waved his hand in free, abstract motions, to suggest the manner of drawing it. There was a title in the corner: �
�Herbage, not verbiage.”

  The next drawing was a vague impression, in good anatomy, of a woman’s womb, drawn as a transparent membrane: inside it, occupying the entire space, was the head of an aged man, with a straight, gray beard . . .

  He shoved another paper into my lap, became suddenly angry. It was a tortured, twisted figure, nailed to a cross.

  thrusting his finger at the face, shouting: “There’s the first sonofabitch! The first coward!” and then, sardonically: “the first bastard that couldn’t control his imagination . . .”

  He stood up, still angry, and stalked about the room, as I read another paper:

  ST. LOUIS MOTEL

  1953

  CARL AND BONNIE

  Carl:

  bonnie bonnie bonnie bonnie bonnie baw

  buh buh buh

  Bonnie:

  Bog the corg

  Carl:

  Anny wen hog,

  Ug.

  waaaaaaaa!waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

  Aw, the wa!

  Daw, the long wa!

  Wa!

  hih!

  Bonnie:

  Bonnie:

  flambleflamble

  I looked up, found him angry, posed.

  “Go mad I can not: I maintain

  The perilous outpost of the sane.”

  and he laughed, roared, at the quote from CLAREL—the book of chains.

  (Lizzie, when Herman was writing it: “If ever this dreadful incubus of a book (I call it so because it has undermined all our happiness) gets off Herman’s shoulders I do hope he may be in better mental health—but at present I have reason to feel the gravest concern & anxiety about it—to put it in mild phrase . . .”

  and Herman, in a footnote to a letter: “N. B. I ain’t crazy.”

  The doctor came in, with an attendant. Carl, as one of the violent, was scheduled for hydrotherapy, which consisted of stripping the patients, herding them together at the end of a tiled room, and playing streams of water on them, at firehose pressure, in an effort to quiet them.