But Melville stuck to his ideal. He wrote Pierre to show that the more you try to be good the more you make a mess of things: that following righteousness is just disastrous. The better you are, the worse things turn out with you. The better you try to be, the bigger mess you make. Your very striving after righteousness only causes your own slow degeneration.
Well, it is true. No men are so evil today as the idealists, and no women half so evil as your earnest woman, who feels herself a power for good. It is inevitable. After a certain point, the ideal goes dead and rotten. The old pure ideal becomes in itself an impure thing of evil. Charity becomes pernicious, the spirit itself becomes foul. The meek are evil. The pure in heart have base, subtle revulsions: like Dostoevsky’s Idiot. The whole Sermon on the Mount becomes a litany of white vice.
What then?
It’s our own fault. It was we who set up the ideals. And if we are such fools, that we aren’t able to kick over our ideals in time, the worse for us.
Look at Melville’s eighty long years of writhing. And to the end he writhed on the ideal pin.
From the ‘perfect woman lover’ he passed on to the ‘perfect friend’. He looked and looked for the perfect man friend.
Couldn’t find him.
Marriage was a ghastly disillusion to him, because he looked for perfect marriage.
Friendship never even made a real start in him - save perhaps his half-sentimental love for Jack Chase, in White Jacket.
Yet to the end he pined for this: a perfect relationship; perfect mating; perfect mutual understanding. A perfect friend.
Right to the end he could never accept the fact that perfect relationships cannot be. Each soul is alone, and the aloneness of each soul is a double barrier to perfect relationship between two beings.
Each soul should be alone. And in the end the desire for a ‘perfect relationship’ is just a vicious, unmanly craving. ‘Tous nos malheurs viennent de ne pouvoir etre seuls.’
Melville, however, refused to draw his conclusion. Life was wrong, he said. He refused Life. But he stuck to his ideal of perfect relationship, possible perfect love. The world ought to be a harmonious loving place. And it can’t be. So life itself is wrong.
It is silly arguing. Because, after all, only temporary man sets up the ‘oughts’.
The world ought not to be a harmonious loving place. It ought to be a place of fierce discord and intermittent harmonies: which it is.
Love ought not to be perfect. It ought to have perfect moments, and wildenesses of thorn bushes - which it has.
A ‘perfect’ relationship ought not to be possible. Every relationship should have its absolute limits, its absolute reserves, essential to the singleness of the soul in each person. A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party leaves great tracts unknown in the other party.
No two persons can meet at more than a few points, consciously. If two people can just be together fairly often, so that the presence of each is a sort of balance to the other, that is the basis of perfect relationship. There must be true separatenesses as well.
Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist.
Perhaps, so am I.
And he stuck to his ideal guns.
I abandon mine.
He was a mystic who raved because the old ideal guns shot havoc. The guns of the ‘noble spirit’. Of ‘ideal love’.
I say, let the old guns rot.
Get new ones, and shoot straight.
CHAPTER 11
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
MOBY DICK, or the White Whale.
A hunt. The last great hunt.
For what ?
For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale: who is old, hoary, monstrous, and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath, having so often been attacked; and snow- white.
Of course he is a symbol.
Of what ?
I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That’s the best of it.
He is warm-blooded, he is lovable. He is lonely Leviathan, not a Hobbes sort. Or is he ?
But he is warm-blooded and lovable. The South Sea Islanders, and Polynesians, and Malays, who worship shark, or crocodile, or weave endless frigate-bird distortions, why did they never worship the whale? So big!
Because the whale is not wicked. He doesn’t bite. And their gods had to bite.
He’s not a dragon. He is Leviathan. He never coils like the Chinese dragon of the sun. He’s not a serpent of the waters. He is warm-blooded, a mammal. And hunted, hunted down.
It is a great book.
At first you are put off by the style. It reads like journalism. It seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you. It won’t do.
And Melville really is a bit sententious: aware of himself, self-conscious, putting something over even himself. But then it’s not easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just set out with a story.
Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like Moby Dick. He preaches and holds forth because he’s not sure of himselœ And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.
The artist was so much greater than the man. The man is rather a tiresome New Englander of the ethical mystical- transcendentalist sort: Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, etc. So unrelieved, the solemn ass even in humour. So hopelessly au grand serieux, you feel like saying: Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or any- thing else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that’s what I want just now.
For my part, life is so many things I don’t care what it is. It’s not my affair to sum it up. Just now it’s a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar.
One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!
But he was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe.
In his ‘human’ self, Melville is almost dead. That is, he hardly reacts to human contacts any more; or only ideally: or just for a moment. His human-emotional self is almost played out. He is abstract, self-analytical and abstracted. And he is more spell-bound by the strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things men do. In this he is like Dana. It is the material elements he really has to do with. His drama is with them. He was a futurist long before futurism found paint. The sheer naked slidings of the elements. And the human soul experiencing it all. So often, it is almost over the border: psychiatry. Almost spurious. Yet so great.
It is the same old thing as in all Americans. They keep their old-fashioned ideal frock-coat on, and an old-fashioned silk hat, while they do the most impossible things. There you are: you see Melville hugged in bed by a huge tattooed South Sea Islander, and solemnly offering burnt offering to this savage’s little idol, and his ideal frock-coat just hides his shirt-tails and prevents us from seeing his bare posterior as he salaams, while his ethical silk hat sits correctly over his brow the while. That is so typically American: doing the most impossible things without taking off their spiritual get-up. Their ideals are like armour which has rusted in, and will never more come off. And meanwhile in Melville his bodily knovledge moves naked, a living quick among the stark elements. For with sheer physical vibrational sensitiveness, like a marvellous wireless-station, he registers the effects of the outer world. And he records also, almost beyond pain or pleasure, the extreme transitions of the isolated, far-driven soul, the soul which is now alone, without any real human contact.
The first days in New Bedford introduce the only human being who really enters into the book, namely, Ishmael, the ‘I’ of the book. And then the moment’s
heart’s-brother, Queequeg, the tattooed, powerful South Sea harpooner, whom Melville loves as Dana loves ‘Hope’. The advent of Ishmael’s bedmate is amusing and unforgettable. But later the two swear ‘marriage’, in the language of the savages. For Queequeg has opened again the flood-gates of love and human connection in Ishmael.
As I sat there in that now lonely room, the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain: I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wofhish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.
So they smoked together, and are clasped in each other’s arms. The friendship is finally sealed when Ishmael offers sacrifice to Queequeg’s little idol, Gogo.
I was a good Christian, born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with the idolater in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? - to do the will of God - that is worship. And what is the will of God ? - to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me -that is the will of God.
- Which sounds like Benjamin Franklin, and is hopelessly bad theology. But it is real American logic.
Now Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must unite with him; ergo I must turn idolater. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salaamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat. How it is I know not, but there is no place like bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, open the very bottom of their souls to each other and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair -
You would think this relation with Queequeg meant something to Ishmael. But no. Queequeg is forgotten like yesterday’s newspaper. Human things are only momentary excitements or amusements to the American Ishmael. Ishmael, the hunted. But much more Ishmael the hunter. What’s a Queequeg? What’s a wife? The white whale must be hunted down. Queequeg must be just ‘KNOWN’, then dropped into oblivion.
And what in the name of fortune is the white whale ?
Elsewhere Ishmael says he loved Queequeg’s eyes: ‘large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold’. No doubt like Poe, he wanted to get the ‘clue’ to them. That was all.
The two men go over from New Bedford to Nantucket, and there sign on to the Quaker whaling ship, the Pequod. It is all strangely fantastic, phantasmagoric. The voyage of the soul. Yet curiously a real whaling voyage, too. We pass on into the midst of the sea with this strange ship and its incredible crew. The Argonauts were mild lambs in comparison. And Ulysses went defeating the Circes and overcoming the wicked hussies of the isles. But the Pequod’s crew is a collection of maniacs fanatically hunting down a lonely, harmless white whale.
As a soul history, it makes one angry. As a sea yarn, it is marvellous: there is always something a bit over the mark, in sea yarns. Should be. Then again the masking up of actual seaman’s experience with sonorous mysticism sometimes gets on one’s nerves. And again, as a revelation of destiny the book is too deep even for sorrow. Profound beyond feeling.
You are some time before you are allowed to see the captain, Ahab: the mysterious Quaker. Oh, it is a God-fearing Quaker ship.
Ahab, the captain. The captain of the soul.
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul!
Ahab!
‘Oh, captain, my captain, our fearful trip is done.’
The gaunt Ahab, Quaker, mysterious person, only shows himself after some days at sea. There’s a secret about him! What ?
Oh, he’s a portentous person. He stumps about on an ivory stump, made from sea-ivory. Moby Dick, the great white whale, tore off Ahab’s leg at the knee, when Ahab was attacking him.
Quite right, too. Should have torn off both his legs, and a bit more besides.
But Ahab doesn’t think so. Ahab is now a monomaniac. Moby Dick is his monomania. Moby Dick must DIE, or Ahab can’t live any longer. Ahab is atheist by this.
All right.
This Pequod, ship of the American soul, has three mates.
1. Starbuck: Quaker, Nantucketer, a good responsible man of reason, forethought, intrepidity, what is called a dependable man. At the bottom, afraid.
2. Stubb: ‘Fearless as fire, and as mechanical.’ Insists on being reckless and jolly on every occasion. Must be afraid too, really.
3. Flask: Stubborn, obstinate, without imagination. To him ‘the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse or water-rat -’
There you have them: a maniac captain and his three mates, three splendid seamen, admirable whalemen, first-class men at their job.
America!
It is rather like Mr Wilson and his admirable, ‘efficient’ crew, at the Peace Conference. Except that none of the Pequodders took their wives along.
A maniac captain of the soul, and three eminently practical mates.
America!
Then such a crew. Renegades, castaways, cannibals: Ishmael, Quakers.
America!
Three giant harpooners to spear the great white whale.
1. Queequeg, the South Sea Islander, all tattooed, big and powerful.
2. Tashtego, the Red Indian of the sea-coast, where the Indian meets the sea.
3. Daggoo, the huge black negro.
There you have them, three savage races, under the American flag, the maniac captain, with their great keen harpoons, ready to spear the white whale.
And only after many days at sea does Ahab’s own boat-crew appear on deck. Strange, silent, secret, black-garbed Malays, fire worshipping Parsees. These are to man Ahab’s boat, when it leaps in pursuit of that whale.
What do you think of the ship Pequod, the ship of the soul of an American?
Many races, many peoples, many nations, under the Stars and Stripes. Beaten with many stripes.
Seeing stars sometimes.
And in a mad ship, under a mad captain, in a mad, fanatic’s hunt.
For what?
For Moby Dick, the great white whale.
But splendidly handled. Three splendid mates. The whole thing practical, eminently practical in its working. American industry!
And all this practicality in the service of a mad, mad chase.
Melville manages to keep it a real whaling ship, on a real cruise, in spite of all fanatics. A wonderful, wonderful voyage. And a beauty that is so surpassing only because of the author’s awful flounderings in mystical waters. He wanted to get metaphysically deep. And he got deeper than metaphysics. It is a surpassingly beautiful book, with an awful meaning, and bad jolts.
It is interesting to compare Melville with Dana, about the albatross - Melville a bit sententious.
I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a pro- boged gale in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my fore- noon watch below I ascended to the overcrowded deck, and there lashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal feathered thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked Roman bill sublime. At intervals it arched forth its vast, archangel wings - wondrous throbbings and flutterings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some King’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible strange eyes methought I peeped to secrets not below the heavens - the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters,
I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. I assert then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell -
Melville’s albatross is a prisoner, caught by a bait on a hook.
Well, I have seen an albatross, too: following us in waters hard upon the Antarctic, too, south of Australia. And in the Southern winter. And the ship, a P. and O. boat, nearly empty. And the lascar crew shivering.
The bird with its long, long wings following, then leaving us. No one knows till they have tried, how lost, how lonely those Southern waters are. And glimpses of the Australian coast.
It makes one feel that our day is only a day. That in the dark of the night ahead other days stir fecund, when we have lapsed from existence.
Who knows how utterly we shall lapse.
But Melville keeps up his disquisition about ‘whiteness’. I The great abstract fascinated him. The abstract where we end, and cease to be. White or black. Our white, abstract end!
Then again it is lovely to be at sea on the Pequod, with never a grain of earth to us.
It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into thc Iead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued, and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self -
In the midst of this preluding silence came the first cry: ‘There she blows! there! there! there! She blows!’ And then comes the first chase, a marvellous piece of true sea-writing, the sea, and sheer sea-beings on the chase, sea-creatures chased. There is scarcely a taint of earth - pure sea-motion.
‘Give way, men,’ whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet of his sail; ‘there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes. There’s white water again! - Close to! - Spring!’ Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: ‘Stand up!’ and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet. - Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so close to them ahead, yet, their eyes on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern of the boar, they knew that the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound, as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curbing and hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 961