The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  Redburn, throughout the scene, is curious and alarmed by Harry’s way of leaving him standing alone in this unaccountable atmosphere. They proceed to a more private room; so thick are the Persian carpets he feels he is sinking into “some reluctant, sedgy sea.” Oriental ottomans “wrought into plaited serpents” and pornographic pictures “Martial and Suetonius mention as being found in the private cabinet of the Emperor Tiberius.” A bust of an old man with a “mysteriously-wicked expression, and imposing silence by one thin finger over his lips. His marble mouth seemed tremulous with secrets.”

  Harry in a frantic return to private business suddenly puts a letter into Redburn’s hand, which he is to post if Harry does not return by morning. And off he goes, but not before introducing Redburn to the attendant as young Lord Stormont. For the now terrified American, penniless son of a senator and so on, the place seemed “infected” as if “some eastern plague had been imported.” The door will partly open and there will be a “tall, frantic man, with clenched hands, wildly darting through the passage, toward the stairs.” On Redburn goes in images of fear and revulsion. “All the mirrors and marbles around me seemed crawling over with lizards; and I thought to myself, that though gilded and golden, the serpent of vice is a serpent still.” The macabre excursion with its slithering images passes as in a tormented dream and Harry returns to say, “I am off for America; the game is up.”

  The relation between the two resumes its boyish pleasantries. Back on ship, Harry, in full maquillage, comes on deck in a “brocaded dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and tasseled smoking-cap to stand his morning watch.” When ordered to climb the rigging, he falls into a faint and it becomes clear that his account of shipping to Bombay was another handy fabrication. Nevertheless, Redburn remains faithful in friendship, and they land in New York. The chapter heading is: “Redburn and Harry, Arm and Arm, in Harbor.” Redburn shows him around, introduces him to a friend in the hope of finding work, and then leaves him as he must, since he could hardly take the swain back to Lansingburgh. Years later he will learn that Harry Bolton had signed on another ship and fallen or jumped overboard.

  •

  In the novel there is another encounter, this of lyrical enthusiasm untainted by the infested London underworld. It is Carlo, “with thick clusters of tendril curls, half overhanging the brows and delicate ears.” His “naked leg was beautiful to behold as any lady’s arm, so soft and rounded, with infantile ease and grace.” He goes through life playing his hand organ in the streets for coins. Now, on the deck, Redburn sinks into a paroxysm of joy at the sound of the “humble” music:

  Play on, play on, Italian boy! . . . Turn hither your pensive, morning eyes . . . let me gaze fathoms down into thy fathomless eye. . . . All this could Carlo do—make, unmake me; . . . and join me limb to limb. . . . And Carlo! ill betide the voice that ever greets thee, my Italian boy, with aught but kindness; cursed the slave who ever drives thy wondrous box of sights and sounds forth from a lordling’s door!

  The scenes with Harry Bolton were not much admired; as an “intrusion,” contemporary critics seemed to rebuke them for structural defects rather than for the efflorescent adjectives, the swooning intimacy of feeling for male beauty of a classical androgynous perfection that will reach its transcendence in the innocent loveliness of Billy Budd, his heartbreaking death-bed vision.

  Hershel Parker, the encyclopedic biographer and tireless Melville scholar, finds no charm in the “flaccid” Harry Bolton and has interesting thoughts on why Melville was so clearly dismissive of Redburn, a work of enduring interest. “What he thought he was doing in it, as a young married man and a new father, is an unanswered question.” And: “. . . Only a young and still naïve man could have thought that he could write a kind of psychological autobiography. . .without suffering any consequences.” Parker suggests that Melville came to understand the folly of what he had written, came to acknowledge that he had revealed homosexual longings or even homosexual experience.

  Parker provides another item in the atmosphere that surrounded the days and nights of the writer. At the time, there sprang up in America a group called the Come-Outers, a sect wishing to follow Paul’s exhortation in II Corinthians 6:17: “Wherefore come out from them, and be ye separate.” It was the object of the group to reveal information ordinarily held private. Parker’s research seems to indicate that Melville knew about the sect, but did not notice that he had “unwittingly joined the psychological equivalent of this new American religious sect; in mythological terms, he had opened Pandora’s box when he thought he was merely describing the lid.”

  It is not clear whether the Come-Outers were, as in the present use of the term, to announce themselves as homosexual when such revelations were relevant. In the biblical text, Paul seems to be referring to Corinthians who were worshiping idols or pretending to virtues they did not practice, such as sorrow while rejoicing, pretending poverty while piling up riches.

  However, if Melville rejected Redburn because he came to see it as an embarrassing and unworthy self-revelation, why did he open the pages of the subsequent Moby-Dick with the tender, loving union of Queequeg and Ishmael, a charming, unprecedented Mann und Weib? Another wonder about life and art: Where did Melville come upon the ornate and lascivious men’s club he described with feral acuteness in Redburn? There is no record found in the cinder and ashes of Melville’s jottings to bring the night journey into history. But does the blank forever erase the possibility that the extraordinary diversion actually took place? Harder to credit that Melville, in his imagination or from what is sometimes called his use and abuse of sources, was altogether free of the lush, disorienting opening of the door.

  •

  The presence of delicate, hardly seaworthy men, some in officer positions on the rigorously hierarchical sailing vessels, is an occupational puzzle that has the accent of reportage, or at least, of plausibility. In Omoo, Captain Guy, the commander of the ship, is not one of the usual, pipe-smoking tyrants, but an original being. He is “no more suited to sea-going than a hair-dresser.” In one astonishing scene, we find the captain coming from his quarters to investigate the noise of a fight. In perfect “camp” rhythm, Melville’s companion, called Doctor Long Ghost, cries out, “Ah! Miss Guy, is that you? Now, my dear, go right home, or you’ll get hurt.” Selvagee, in White-Jacket, with his cologne-baths, lace-bordered handkerchiefs, cravats, and curling irons, although an inept sailor, is a lieutenant on a US naval ship.

  Jack Chase, the educated, manly friend in White-Jacket, was an actual shipmate never to be forgotten. A man of the world, a brave, respected seaman of the foretop who recites to the winds verses from Camoëns. Yet he is something of a misfit like most sailors; he drinks and wanders the world as he will. Chase stayed in the heart, forever cherished, the only unwavering, beyond the family, friendship of Melville’s life. In White-Jacket he is addressed: “Wherever you may now be rolling over the blue billows, dear Jack! take my best love along with you, and God bless you, wherever you go!” The same sense of the beloved lost wanderer will forty years later illuminate the dedication to Billy Budd: “To Jack Chase, Englishman / Wherever that great heart may now be / Here on Earth or harbored in Paradise.”

  The beautiful Billy Budd is a foretopman, ready to climb up the rigging. He is far from the pretty street hustler Harry Bolton, for whom work under sail is a mysterious and burdensome affliction. Billy is strong, free, and innocent; an illiterate, an orphan, reminding one of a freshly hatched, brilliantly colored bird. He has the body of a Greek Hercules, with a “lingering adolescent expression in the as yet smooth face all but feminine in purity of natural complexion . . . the ear, small and shapely.” In the story, Claggart, the master-at-arms, takes a violent dislike, a raging enmity, to the popular young seaman. He will accuse Billy of wanting to bring the crew to mutiny and, in a confrontation in the captain’s cabin, an outraged Billy strikes a blow which kills Claggart. According to marine law, Billy must be hanged and his body cast into the s
ea.

  Melville, in the careful examination of Claggart’s soul, inserts a very modern reflection that looks beneath an unnatural enmity and finds there a twisted, jealous, thwarted love.

  When Claggart’s unobserved glance happened to light on belted Billy rolling along the upper gun deck in the leisure of the second dogwatch . . . that glance would follow the cheerful sea Hyperion with a settled meditative and melancholy expression, his eyes strangely suffused with incipient feverish tears. Then would Claggart look like the man of sorrows. Yes, and sometimes the melancholy expression would have in it a touch of soft yearning, as if Claggart could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban.

  Thinking about the sharp stabs in the thicket of Claggart’s character, the critic F. O. Matthiessen writes: “. . . A writer today would be fully aware of what may have been only latent for Melville, the sexual element in Claggart’s ambivalence. Even if Melville did not have this consciously in mind, it emerges for the reader now with intense psychological accuracy.”

  Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of Judge Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. They had four children, one of whom, the son Malcolm, put a gun to his head. The marriage was deeply troubled during the time Melville, in another riveting, iconographic biographical fact, was chained to his desk in the New York Custom House for nineteen years. A separation was considered but the couple persevered for forty-four years. Whether the fated meeting with Harry Bolton in Redburn opened a seam of private apostasy in Melville’s life is not known. There are no love letters, no uncovered affairs with male or female “arm-in-arm, in harbor.” The fair young men have a dreamlike quality that fades with the break of day and there we leave them.

  2000

  [1] Philip Rahv, in a collection of essays, Discovery of Europe (Houghton Mifflin, 1947), reprints passages from Redburn and comments about the description of the German emigrants: “An extraordinarily moving celebration of the hopes lodged in the New World and one of the noblest pleas in our literature for the extinction of national hatreds and racial prejudice.”

  THE TORRENTS OF WOLFE

  Thomas Wolfe

  ON THE matter of a manuscript written by Thomas Wolfe, we find his agent busy at work.

  I’ve been cutting like mad since it came and have got it down to ten thousand and a half by cutting very stringently.

  1.

  Thomas Wolfe, were he living today, would be a hundred years old. Thus the year marks his centennial, along with that of a few others, including Louis Armstrong. The moment is honored by an exhibition at the New York Public Library, a celebration at the University of North Carolina, and by the publication of the original typescript of O Lost, the title that became Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe’s first book. There is disagreement about the number of words eliminated by Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Scribner’s—was it 90,000 words or a mere 66,000? The editors of O Lost have toiled over word counts, common typographical errors, spacings, and so on, and have come up with some interesting numbers. “With the same typography and design as the 626-page Look Homeward, Angel, it [the original manuscript] would have made a book of about 825 pages—not impossible to publish in one volume, as this edition demonstrates. Gone with the Wind (1936) had 1,037 pages.”

  Sometimes Thomas Wolfe seems to belong to editorial history rather than to the annals of American literature. Maxwell Perkins, “Editor of Genius,” as his biographer names him with some unintended obscurity: is the editor a genius or are we alerted to Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, among others who came under his care? Maxwell Perkins was modest about the professional duty or privilege to draw a pencil through one line or thousands. Thomas Wolfe was anxious but not modest about the gift to write the lines that made up his mountains of pages. We can read that to accommodate the excisions he would often write transitional passages of greater length than the matter deleted.

  Thomas Wolfe died at the age of thirty-eight. While traveling out west he was taken very ill with pneumonia and, symptoms unabating, was transferred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he died of a tubercular lesion to the brain. He was outsize in every respect; hugeness is his dominating iconography. Six feet four-and-a-half inches tall; awkward, handsome, impressive, and intimidating. A prodigious drinker and brawler, sleepless to produce the pages that arrived at the publisher in a crate, or so it was said. As a writer, he became a statistic of extremity. He was vain in the belief in his talents, and insecure, unsteady in the manner of a refugee who has traveled far from the home that formed his being. Lost, o lost, he cries out again and again. Hunger, another word that dots the pages. Hunger for experience, for escape, for fame. Himself, every step of his journey, his family, that turbulent crowd of folks from which he came, each passage on a train, each face met on the way, landscape, voices, a thousand vignettes, history, memory uncanny, language at hand like water flowing down a stream. And with all this, a Southerner—there was that clinging to him also.

  •

  Thomas Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, a pleasant small city in the Great Smokies. The mountain air attracted tourists, among them George Vanderbilt, who built there one of those monuments to the imagination or lack of it, a “château” of 125 rooms which he named Biltmore. There were also rather grand hotels with suitable accommodations for well-to-do travelers. To these useful items of commerce, Thomas Wolfe’s mother added a shabby rooming house that went by the name of “The Old Kentucky Home,” translated to “Dixieland” in Look Homeward, Angel. In Asheville there were also “lungers,” since the mountain air was felt to be helpful for the victims of tuberculosis.

  Thomas Wolfe, the last child, had seven siblings, one of whom, his brother Grover, would die at the age of ten. The father, W. O. Wolfe, born in Pennsylvania to hard-luck farmers, early orphaned, with little education, was apprenticed to a stonecutter and showed talent for simple tombstones, as well as for decorative carvings of lambs and angels. Wolfe drifted to Raleigh, North Carolina, was something of a rake as the proceedings for his divorce indicated; second marriage forced by pregnancy of the wife, who was tubercular, and thus they trailed on to Asheville where she died. For her he had built a house and into it Thomas Wolfe’s mother would move on their marriage. The father worked at his craft, but he was an alcoholic of serious, scandalous proportions; after a spree of days, picked up on the streets, carried home to bang on the door where his wife, inside, was screaming, Don’t let him in here! and so on. The marriage was a raucous union of mutual distaste.

  As the father wanders through the books of his son, he is a dramatic whiner, given to ornate accusations of abandonment and ill-treatment. His death is a misery, but his life on the page has a certain magnitude born of monstrous frustrations and ruined hopes. He is often a frightening father himself frightened by fate. At his deathbed:

  Nothing was left, now, to suggest his life of fury, strength and passion except his hands. And the hands were still the great hands of the stonecutter, powerful, sinewy, and hairy as they had always been, attached now with a shocking incongruity to the wasted figure of a scarecrow.

  In the South, and perhaps elsewhere, when the father’s origins are dim and better left in the shade, the mother is likely to bear the ancestral burden with some background flourish. So it was with Eliza Gant, true name Westall, known as the Pentland family in the novels. Her father was Major Pentland, “military title . . . honestly if inconspicuously earned.” The Pentland family was “as old as any in the community, but it had always been poor, and had made few pretenses to gentility. By marriage, and by intermarriage among its own kinsmen, it could boast of some connection with the great, or some insanity, and a modicum of idiocy.”

  •

  Eliza Gant in fiction and apparently in life is a personal and historical phenomenon. Born before the Civil War, she is a born business woman, seeming to come by her bent as naturally as some girls are born flirts. Property, real estate was her calling. She could not take a wal
k without saying, “Do you see this corner here—the one you’re on? It’ll double in value in the next few years. . . . They’re going to run a street through there some day as sure as you live. And when they do . . . that property is going to be worth money.” About her husband’s trade she was skeptical: there’s no money in death, people died too slowly in her calculation.

  She took herself and most of her children off to Saint Louis at the time of the 1904 World’s Fair and tried a business venture that did not work, and once back in Asheville, Altamont in the fictions, she bought Dixieland, a blight on her children’s lives, but not on her life, as the owner and manager:

  Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms; it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow. . . . In winter, the wind blew howling blasts under the skirts of Dixieland. . . . Its big rooms were heated by a small furnace which sent up, when charged with fire, a hot dry enervation to the rooms on the first floor, and a gaseous but chill radiation to those upstairs.

  Here in the disheveled, “murderous and bloody Barn,” as the father called it, Eliza reigned with parsimony and grueling labor. She had the suspicious nature of a miser and could not keep help, colored, “never having been used to service,” as her son wrote. The better lodgings had signs reading No Invalids, but Dixieland took anyone that knocked on the door. About a miserably coughing client, the mistress would say that the fellow had only a little bronchial trouble; girls of questionable occupation were agreeable young women who liked to have a good time. The children ate pick-up meals next to the stove and, until they could get away, were shifted from one attic room to another. The father stayed on in the previous house, ill, complaining with considerable rhetorical force to his nursemaid daughters. The church was a definition in small towns at the time; by birth the family was Presbyterian, a middling group in local faiths. The Presbyterians bowed to the richer Episcopalians, condescended to the Methodists, and snubbed the Baptists, but the Wolfes were not church-goers. In Look Homeward, Angel the Gants are tribal, occupying a bit of forest in the middle of downtown Asheville, North Carolina.