In the mythology of American letters, the popular and critical failure of “Moby-Dick,” and Melville’s subsequent withdrawal into wounded silence, is a central image, ranking with Henry James’ self-exile to England and Mark Twain’s final phase as a white-suited pet of the rich, and with Fitzgerald’s alcoholic crackup and early death and Hemingway’s spendthrift exercises in celebrity. Something is wrong, these images tell us, with being a writer in America; one of Melville’s biographers, Newton Arvin, calls his subject’s treatment by the public “the heaviest count in our literary annals against the American mind.” Inspection of Melville’s books after “Moby-Dick” and of the biographical particulars framing his famous silence yields, however, a few surprises.
The first surprise that greets us is how young Melville was when he wrote “Moby-Dick.” He was thirty when, on the first day of February, 1850, he returned to New York from a four-month excursion to England whose ostensible purpose was to settle the details of the British publication of his fifth book, “White-Jacket.” He had been married not three years before, to Elizabeth Shaw; his first child, Malcolm, was not quite a year old. Shortly after his return, he, who had written “White-Jacket” and “Redburn” together in a mere five months, settled to compose a sixth book based upon his seafaring days—his whaling experiences in this case. The most prolonged of his voyages had been his eighteen months on the whaling ship Acushnet, with briefer stints on the whalers Lucy Ann and Charles & Henry; but until 1850 whaling itself had been conspicuously absent from the running fictionalized account he had made of his adventures. The whaling ships in “Typee,” “Omoo,” and “Mardi” were all points of departure; their actual business was left undescribed, it would seem, until the writer felt worthy of the task. He worked in a room of a New York household that included his mother, four unmarried sisters, a married brother with his pregnant wife, and two children, plus domestic help. We first hear of his new book in a letter of May 1, 1850, to another literary sailor, Richard Henry Dana, Jr.:
In the midsummer of that year, while a friend, Evert Duyckinck, was informing his brother that “Melville has a new book mostly done—a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery—something quite new,” Melville almost all at once visited his cousin Robert’s farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; was given a copy of Hawthorne’s “Mosses from an Old Manse;” decided to bring his wife and young son from New York to Pittsfield for a summer vacation; met Hawthorne at a picnic on Monument Mountain; wrote an enraptured anonymous appreciation of Hawthorne for the Duyckinck brothers’ journal The Literary World; and decided to buy the farm, six miles from Hawthorne’s new home near Lenox, that Melville called Arrowhead, and where he and his family were to live for the next thirteen years. That first year, he was stimulated and emboldened by the proximity of the older author, of whom he had written in his review, “I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.” Melville thoroughly revised the whaling story, making of it the elaborate, symbolic, rhapsodic, pessimistic volume of wonders it became. He finished the last chapters in New York while the first chapters were in the printer’s press, and passed the last proof sheets in late July, a week or so before his thirty-second birthday.
A second surprise is that the reviews weren’t all that bad. Not as bad, certainly, as those which had greeted “Mardi,” two years before. In London, The Athenœum, whose review on October 25th of the English edition (entitled “The Whale”) was the first and almost the strongest blast against the book, yet bestowed a backhanded compliment in its judgment that “our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities,” and as one who “seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.” The magazine John Bull, on the other hand, and on the same day, recognized that “of all the extraordinary books from the pen of Herman Melville this is out and out the most extraordinary” and noted “the flashes of truth . . . which sparkle on the surface of the foaming sea of thought . . . the profound reflections uttered by the actors in the wild watery chase . . . and the graphic representations of human nature in the startling disguises under which it appears on the deck of the Pequod.” In New York, three weeks later, “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale” was greeted warmly by the Morning Courier & New-York Enquirer: “No American writer is more sure, at every re-appearance, of a more cheerful welcome than the author of Typee . . . This book has all the attractiveness of any of its predecessors; in truth, it possesses more of a witching interest . . . The author writes with the gusto of true genius, and it must be a torpid spirit indeed that is not enlivened with the raciness of his humor and the redolence of his imagination.” The Albion thought “Moby-Dick” “not lacking much of being a great work,” and offered criticism that even the most reverential modern Melvillean might admit to be sound: that the seamen don’t talk like seamen, and that the central character of Captain Ahab has been “grievously spoiled, nay altogether ruined, by a vile overdubbing with a coat of book-learning and mysticism.” The Home Journal reported that “the result is a very racy, spirited, curious and entertaining book, which affords quite an amount of information, while it enlists the curiosity, excites the sympathies, and often charms the fancy.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine asserted that “Moby-Dick” “in point of richness and variety of incident, originality of conception, and splendor of description, surpasses any of the former productions of this highly successful author.” Enough, perhaps, has been quoted to show that even those with strong reservations about “Moby-Dick” spoke respectfully of the author’s talent, and that a number of early enthusiasts for this willful and extravagant work were among the reviewers. It is true, Melville did not receive what might have been psychologically useful at this time—a fully generous public salute from a high minded peer, such as he had given Hawthorne, or as Emerson was to give Whitman (in a private letter that became public) upon receipt of “Leaves of Grass.” The “joy-giving and exultation-breeding” letter that Hawthorne did write Melville about this work that borrowed so much courage from their neighborliness was destroyed, along with almost all the letters that Melville received; but, in a letter to Evert Duyckinck, Hawthorne wrote, “What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones.” And Melville might have taken additional comfort by glancing over Longfellow’s shoulder as he wrote in his journal one November night, “Sat to read all the evening in Melville’s new book, ‘Moby Dick or the Whale.’ Very wild, strange, and interesting.” Melville’s critical and popular position after the publication of “Moby-Dick” was still high; he was commonly written of as a genius, and in a London New Year’s survey of new presences in American literature was ranked with Hawthorne and the forgotten Richard Burleigh Kimball and Sylvester Judd. There is nothing in his situation like the obscurity in which, at his age, Hawthorne and Whitman labored—or, for that matter, in which Joyce, Proust, and Kafka secreted their modern classics. Newly established in the Berkshires, his farm and his wealthy relatives ready to supplement his income from writing, Melville had every apparent motive and means to continue triumphantly within his literary vocation.
“Moby-Dick” stands, indeed, in the middle of Melville’s shelf of books; two novels, a collection of short stories, a novelization of another man’s memoir, four books of poetry, and a novella followed it. Sometime during the fall when “Moby-Dick” was published, and Melville’s second son, Stanwix, was born, he began work on his next novel, “Pierre.” He worked with his usual fury. His Pittsfield neighbor Sarah Morewood wrote to Duyckinck, “I hear that he is now engaged in a new work as frequently not to leave his room till quite dark in the evening—when he for the first time during the whole day partakes of solid food—he must therefore write under a state of morbid excitement which will soon injure his health—I laughed at him somewhat and told him that the recluse life he was leading made his city friends think that he was slightly insane—he replied that long ago he came to the same conclusion himself.” Elizabeth Melville’s doctor, Amos Nourse, also worried: “Her husband I fear is devoting himself to writing with an assiduity that will cost him dear by & by.” Melville expressed fond hopes for this new work: to Sophia Hawthorne he promised it to be “a rural bowl of milk,” and to his English publisher, Richard Bentley, he described it as “very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine—being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work, representing a new & elevated aspect of American life.” In the event, “Pierre” proved to be—and this is our third surprise—grindingly, ludicrously bad. It is doubtful if elsewhere in the history of literature two books as good and bad as “Moby-Dick” and “Pierre” have been written back to back. The action of “Pierre” is hysterical, the style is frenzied and volatile, the characters are jerked to and fro by some unexplained rage of the author’s. These five hundred pages, as T. S. Eliot said of some plays by the Elizabethan John Marston, “give the effect of work done by a man who was so exasperated by having to write in a form which he despised that he deliberately wrote worse than he could have written, in order to relieve his feelings.”
The plot is this: Pierre, a young country gentleman happily ensconced in rural wealth and in lyrical engagement to a suitable local gentlewoman called Lucy, upon discovering that his dead father in likelihood was also the father of an illegitimate daughter named Isabel reacts by renouncing his fiancée, his wealth, and his mother’s affection and carrying his sister off in the semblance of a wife to the big city, where, the gentle fiancée with equal quixoticism following him, all three eventually perish. Whereas in “Moby-Dick” the figure of Ahab takes all the madness upon himself, here it belongs to the author; where the basic chase action of the earlier book carries us through all the elaborations, digressions, and explosions of authorial wit, in “Pierre” the white whale never surfaces but slides as an unsighted horror beneath the clashing, improbable waves. When Pierre receives the news that he has a bastard sister, and reacts by swooning and vowing to love and protect her “through all,” Melville wonders in print at so violent a reaction to “a piece of intelligence which, in the natural course of things, many amiable gentlemen, both young and old, have been known to receive with a momentary feeling of surprise, and then a little curiosity to know more, and at last an entire unconcern.” Throughout the book, we long for that amiable gentleman, that representative of mundane orderly and elastic society. Instead, the book runs a constant fever, and seems especially unreal in the Arcadian setting of its first half, though Melville had his own aristocratic background and the surrounding hills of Berkshire to draw upon. Melville was, in truth, at sea on land. The domestic and social arrangements he imagines are as gothic and moldering as those in Poe, with few of the natural affectionate details of home life we might expect from a man who was simultaneously, under his roof at Arrowhead, father, son, brother, and husband. His first six books had all been first-person narratives derived from his seafaring days. “The Paradise of Bachelors” is the title of one of his short pieces and seems to represent his ideal of the good life; men adrift or at ease in a company, eating and talking and struggling against fate together, constitute his recurrent and sufficient subject. The third of the world that is dry land and the half that is the female sex turned the compass of his imagination away. Never again, after “Pierre,” will he attempt to make significant characters of women, and hereafter the ground beneath his extended fictions will be watery, if not the sea then the Mississippi of “The Confidence-Man” or the Palestinian desert of “Clarel,” transformed by innumerable nautical metaphors into a ghost ocean. The masterpiece of his old age, “Billy Budd,” is, of course, a sea tale, as are “Benito Cereno” and “The Encantadas” in “The Piazza Tales.” Even the characters in “Pierre” at the end seek relief in a short ride on a ferryboat, the hero announcing, “I must get on some other element than earth. I have sat on earth’s saddle till I am weary.”
Where “Pierre” does burn through to reality is in the evocation, in the city part of the novel, of the menace of poverty and the ordeal of writing. Pierre, we are tardily told, is something of a writer; eloping to New York with not only Isabel but another country waif, Delly Ulver, and then acquiring as one more dependent the wronged but faithful Lucy (much as Melville’s Berkshire household was composed of a multiplication of women), Pierre hopes to support them all by writing a book. The description of his labors is horrendous and heartfelt:
Here we have a book describing its own composition, and that of all the hurried and bulky books before, which yet have secured the writer no sure immortality, and no lasting income.
In “Pierre,” to judge by his comments in the letters just quoted, Melville imagined he was concocting “a regular romance,” “calculated for popularity.” When the book upon which poor Pierre so painfully labors is rejected by the publisher, it is with the note “Sir:—You are a swindler. Upon the pretence of writing a popular novel for us, you have been receiving cash advances from us, while passing through our press the sheets of a blasphemous rhapsody, filched from the vile Atheists, Lucian and Voltaire.” Among the reviews of “Pierre,” that in The American Whig Review spoke of “atrocious doctrines” and “glaring abominations,” while that in the Southern Literary Messenger warned, “If one does not desire to look at virtue and religion with the eye of Mephistopheles . . . he had better leave ‘Pierre or The Ambiguities’ unbought on the shelves of the bookseller.” Author and hero alike are unable to turn their pens to the necessary task, sinking instead into “blasphemous rhapsody.” “Pierre” both in style and in action verges on parody—a quality that some recent critics have sought to make a virtue but modern readers are apt to find as disorienting as did the novel’s few contemporary reviewers. “Typee” and “Omoo” successfully took up the engaging manner of a purveyor of romance and adventure. With the enormous intellectual expansion and relative commercial failure of “Mardi,” Melville entered into a bitter relation with his prospective readers. “Redburn” and “White-Jacket,” quickly written to recoup the disaster of “Mardi,” were, he confided to his father-in-law and the chief underwriter of his household, the wealthy Massachusetts judge Lemuel Shaw, “two jobs, which I have done for money—being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood. . . . So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail’—pardon this egotism.”
Melville, like Norman Mailer and Lord Byron, began, in his mid-twenties, with a success that ever after he had to live up to. On both sides of the Atlantic, “Typee” created a sensation that still resonated when all else of Melville’s production had been forgotten. But what did best-sellerdom mean in mid-nineteenth-century America? Two and a half years after “Typee” ’s publication in 1846, Melville’s brother Allan drew up an account of the American edition, brought out by Wiley & Putnam. Of a total printing of sixty-five hundred copies, 2,178 copies bound in muslin and costing a dollar each had been sold, and 3,575 paperbound at seventy-five cents each, bringing total receipts to $3,235.94, less publishing expenses of $1,663.01, making a profit of $1,572.93, of which Melville’s half was $786.46. “Omoo” also did well, though less well. Its edition, by Harper & Brothers, had by the first of August, 1847, sold about thirty-six hundred copies, giving Melville a profit of $718.79, less his advance of four hundred dollars. After “Mardi,” which sold a little over two thousand copies, Harper’s statements show Melville, because of his unearned advances, in debt to them. “Moby-Dick” eighteen months after its publication had sold a not inconsiderable twenty-three hundred copies, but “Pierre,” for which Melville had received a five-hundred-dollar advance, eight months after its publication had sold a miserable two hundred and eighty-three copies of a hopeful edition of twenty-three hundred and ten. In Melville’s entire lifetime, royalties on the “bowl of milk” amounted to a hundred and fifty-seven dollars. Of course, English publication should not be left out of account; it could win for a nineteenth-century American author more prestige and no less profit than native publication, and was usually arranged to fall earlier. By Allan’s reckoning, Melville’s British receipts from the first five books totalled $3,775.05, or slightly more than the American total of $3,591.21. These sums, plus a seven-hundred-dollar English advance on “Moby-Dick,” come to over eight thousand dollars: an average annual earning, over five years, of sixteen hundred dollars—making Melville one of the best-paid American authors of this era. Yet by 1851 he was deep in debt, owing Harper & Brothers hundreds and his father-in-law thousands. In England, the firm of Richard Bentley refused to pay any advance for “Pierre,” reporting losses from Melville’s last four books of four hundred and fifty pounds.
The population of the United States in 1850 was about twenty-three million, so “Typee” ’s sale here of nearly six thousand can be multiplied by ten to give us a modern equivalent; a sale of sixty thousand hardbound copies might get you a low rung on the Times’ best-seller list for six weeks or so. The same rough rule of ten could be applied to the dollar amounts, in a world where a clothbound book cost a dollar, an apple a penny, a restaurant meal forty cents, a slave a thousand dollars, and a farm in Pittsfield sixty-five hundred. Even if we allow the 1850 dollar to be worth fifteen of ours, Melville would not have been rich by, say, the standards of his brother-in-law Lemuel Shaw, Jr.—who left an estate of over three hundred thousand dollars—even had his sales continued at the rate of “Typee” ’s. When at last, in late 1866, Melville obtained a government post as a Deputy Inspector of Customs in the City of New York, his salary was four dollars a day, which came to around twelve hundred annually—a “pittance,” in the word of his brother-in-law John Hoadley in 1873, but a sufficient living, with his wife’s unearned income, and far more than he had averaged in twenty years of authorship. The United States of his time would seem to have been like Third World countries today—able to breed a literary community of sorts, but with a reading public insufficiently large to sustain a free-lance writer of books. The first significant professional American writers, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, were men of some wealth; it was Melville’s additional irritation to have wealthy relatives whose doles merely underlined the pathos of his own struggle to support a family with an increasingly willful pen. “Dollars damn me,” he wrote Hawthorne. “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.”
There remained the burgeoning world of journals and magazines, which had employed and published Poe and had first led the young hermit of Salem, Hawthorne, out into the light of print. To this form of professionalism Melville turned, with surprisingly solid results. After “Pierre,” Melville’s family attempted to secure for him a consular post such as Hawthorne had in the new Administration of Franklin Pierce; but no sinecure forthcame. However, the editors of a new journal, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, sent him in October of 1852 a letter inviting him to become a contributor, and he evidently turned aside from several book-length projects he was working on—one a “Tortoise Hunting Adventure,” for which Harper had advanced him three hundred dollars, and the other an idea that he had tried to persuade Hawthorne to execute, the tale of a sailor’s grass widow named Agatha—to compose in 1853 his celebrated short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In the following year, he wrote five more stories and a long work called “Israel Potter,” which was serialized in Putnam’s before publication in book form. In the two years after that, he wrote eight more tales as well as his farewell to the novelist’s art, “The Confidence Man.” As far as is known, Putnam’s rejected only one submission, and that not for aesthetic reasons but for fear that it (“The Two Temples”) would offend the sensibilities of parishioners of Manhattan’s Grace Church. He was paid by the page, and for “Bartleby” received eighty-five dollars from the magazine, for the Hawthornean tale “The Bell-Tower” thirty-seven fifty, and for “Israel Potter” all of four hundred and twenty-one dollars and fifty cents. These were good fees for the time, but the rewards of magazine publication did not induce Melville to continue long in that field. After the Civil War, Putnam’s Monthly, having failed in 1857, was revived as Putnam’s Magazine; its prospectus asked, “And where . . . is Herman Melville? Has that copious and imaginative author . . . let fall his pen just where its use might have been so remunerative to himself, and so satisfactory to the public?” Though Melville told the editors, “You may include me in the list of probable contributors,” he never did contribute again. When, in 1856, he had collected his published tales and sketches in “The Piazza Tales,” he left over half of them out and was done with selling short pieces to magazines. His total earnings for these three years of piecework have been calculated at seven hundred and twenty-five dollars.
The stories of “The Piazza Tales” are, with “Moby-Dick,” “Typee,” and “Billy Budd,” the most widely read of Melville’s work. They evince a competence, even a mastery, that Melville chose not to exercise much. “I would prefer not to,” Bartleby famously says, and there is in all these tales a certain reserve, a toning down into brown and sombre colors the sunny colors and brilliant blacks of the earlier work, a desolation hauntingly figured forth by the eerie slave-seized ship of “Benito Cereno” and the cinderlike islands of “The Encantadas.” The style, though a triumphant recovery from the hectic tropes of “Pierre,” is not quite the assured, playful, precociously fluent, and eagerly pitched voice of the sea novels. It is a slightly chastened style, with something a bit abrasive and latently aggressive about it. However admirable, these tales are not exactly comfortable; their surfaces are not seductive and limpid, like those of Hawthorne’s tales. How uncomfortable Melville was will burst forth in “The Confidence-Man,” which has the texture of gnashing teeth; but before grappling with it we might linger a moment upon “Israel Potter,” the one book of Melville’s quite out of print, and yet a charming one, and one indicating how entertainingly Melville could perform when bound to the constraints of a brisk professional intent.
Like “Benito Cereno” and “Billy Budd,” “Israel Potter” is based upon a document—a pamphlet, printed in Providence in 1824, that Melville had picked up, “rescued by the merest chance from the rag-pickers.” The cover describes the “Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter,” who “was a soldier in the American Revolution and took a distinguished part in the Battle of Bunker Hill . . . after which he was taken Prisoner by the British, conveyed to England, where for 30 years he obtained a livelihood for himself and family, by crying ‘Old Chairs to Mend,’ through the Streets of London— . . . he succeeded (in the 79th year of his age) in obtaining a passage to his native country, after an absence of 48 years.” In the footsteps of this bizarre, not very consequential memoir, Melville trots along amiably, elaborating, poeticizing, inventing portraits of such eminences as Ben Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allen, and giving us a vivid notion of our country’s patriotic pantheon while its deities were not many decades in the grave. Though caustic in places, the book has something of its hero’s naive patriotism and that innocence of an Edenic America lost forever with the eighteen-fifties. “Israel Potter” is notable for containing the one sketch in all post-Polynesian Melville of a woman perceived as an inviting sexual object. Our hero is the guest of Ambassador Franklin in Paris:
For the equivalent of those ribbons and graceful elbow tips one has to go back to Fayaway in “Typee.” “Israel Potter” also holds a number of matchless descriptions of battles at sea, Olympian in their mood and startling in their playful poetry:
Metaphors abound: Melville transmutes the lowly fact that Potter labored for a time in a brickworks into a meditation on mankind; bricks become men, in the kiln of imagination, and Israel Potter, as he slaps wet clay into the molds, thinks, “ ‘What signifies who we be, or where we are, or what we do?’ Slap-dash! ‘Kings as clowns are codgers—who ain’t a nobody?’ Splash! ‘All is vanity and clay.’ ”
No writer, not even Dickens, invents from whole cloth; but Melville was especially an embroiderer, who needed the ready-made fabric of either his own recalled adventures or an account of someone else’s to get his needle flying. His sense of truth held him stubbornly close to the actual; he was, in a style we can recognize as modern, both bookish and autobiographical. Though such a writer can never run out of other men’s books, he can run out of autobiography.
Many burdensome things happened to Melville in the years after the writing of “Moby-Dick” besides that novel’s indifferent reception. Hawthorne and his family rather abruptly left the Berkshires for eastern Massachusetts after a brief year and a half; though too much can be made, I believe, of Melville’s love for Hawthorne, it undoubtedly existed, as his monody on the older man’s death and the oddly inactive but intense figure of Vine in “Clarel” show. Like Hollingsworth to Coverdale in “The Blithedale Romance” (which Hawthorne wrote in the year immediately after leaving the Berkshires), Melville came on too strong with his wish to be called “brother,” but it is unlikely that this was what drove Hawthorne away; the friendship straggled on for years. Nearer home, two daughters were added to Melville’s responsibilities, and his health, the constant theme of worry in his wife’s letters, decisively broke in 1855; rheumatism and sciatica sent him to bed for weeks. While convalescing, he wrote the sketch “I and My Chimney,” which, though fondly quoted by the present civic caretakers of Arrowhead, is, in thin and facetious disguise, a harrowing revelation of Melville’s domestic attitudes. The sketch is a fantasy that the narrator’s wife and daughters are conspiring to tear down the massive central brick chimney that is his chief comfort and pride. The chimney seems a phallic symbol of male independence, and also, with its many secret chambers, a symbol for his creative life. “I must say a few words about this enterprising wife of mine,” the narrator tells us. “Her maxim is, ‘Whatever is, is wrong; and what is more, must be altered; and what is still more, must be altered right away.’ Dreadful maxim for the wife of a dozy old dreamer like me.” This ogress proposes “to take upon herself all the responsibilities of my affairs,” and a certain Mr. Scribe is called in to attest to the chimney’s soundness. The reference may be not only to Melville’s sciatica but to an earlier occasion, around the time of the publication of “Pierre,” when—according to a scholar, William Braswell, who based his information upon conversations with Melville’s granddaughter Eleanor and with Raymond Weaver, Melville’s first biographer—“he had worked himself into so frightful a nervous condition that his family had physicians examine him for insanity.” One of the physicians may well have been Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself a scribe. They pronounced Melville sane, as Scribe pronounces the chimney sound, but the reviewers of “Pierre” brutally impugned its author’s sanity. The Boston Post speculated that “the craziest fiction extant . . . might be supposed to emanate from a lunatic hospital rather than from the quiet retreats of Berkshire,” and The Southern Quarterly Review stated, “The sooner this author is put in ward the better.” Though Melville left no record of his reaction, such insults must have pained a man who at the age of twelve had watched his own father die a raving maniac. The question of “soundness” hovered about Melville, and self-doubt must often have visited his bedside in these stressful mid-eighteen-fifties. But more important than all oppressions and deprivations real or imagined was, perhaps, an event within the œuvre: “Moby-Dick” used up the last major portion of Melville’s artistic capital, his years at sea. Henceforth, he must draw upon the accounts of other seafarers or write about land. And little that he saw around him in Pittsfield interested him enough to write about or could be written about with frankness. “I and My Chimney” is a virtual assault upon the women in his life; Elizabeth Melville felt obliged to pen in self-defense alongside the printed copy kept in a scrapbook of her husband’s magazine contributions, “All this about his wife, applied to his mother, who was very vigorous and energetic about the farm, etc. The proposed removal of the chimney is purely mythical.”
Melville’s last attempt to rewin the public that had once existed for his novels took up a fashionable subject the West and the riverboat swindler, the frontier sharper. Very likely, Melville read in Harper’s New Monthly, to which he contributed and subscribed, Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s sketch “Remembrances of the Mississippi,” in the issue of December, 1855, just before “The Confidence-Man” was begun. Melville himself had been to the Mississippi in 1840, on a visit to his charming, eccentric, unsuccessful Uncle Thomas; whatever hopes he had of the excursion went unrealized, and by the year’s end he had returned East and signed up for the fateful first whaling voyage. Memories of the Mississippi trip and of his unhappy family and dismal youth may have contributed to the dire pessimism of “The Confidence-Man.” This crabbed and inert work has attracted much learned comment and appreciation in recent decades, second in this respect only to “Moby-Dick,” and no doubt there is much to be said for it: it yields many evidences of ingenuity to academic analysis, and does anticipate an apocalyptic vein of American fiction, from the later Twain to Nathanael West to yesterday’s black humorists. Black the book is, and humorous its intent; but appreciation should begin with the acknowledgment that it is suffocatingly difficult to read. As one commentator (R. W. B. Lewis) has wittily said, it is more rereadable than readable, and “seems rather to bulge and thicken than to progress.” Where “Pierre” is at least a bad novel, “The Confidence-Man” is no novel at all; it is a series of farfetched but rather joyless conversations upon the theme of trust, or confidence. The Confidence Man himself, implausibly tricked out at an early appearance as a “grotesque negro cripple . . . cut down to the stature of a Newfoundland dog,” assumes a series of less contorted disguises and deprives a few fellow passengers on the riverboat Fidèle of a few dollars; but by mid-excursion Melville seems to forget his trickster theme and permits his shifty central figure to stay in one costume and to indulge in a parade of haranguing dialogues. A number of critics have noticed the dizzying, vertiginous effect of “The Confidence-Man;” there is the sensation of wheels whirling to no purpose. The objective of swindling has sunk within some murkier purpose satisfied, it seems, by sheer discourse. The novel, with hardly a female character though many women must have ridden the riverboats, strikes me as the most homosexual of Melville’s works; men are trying to “get at” each other with a merciless, adhesive nagging. The action is all verbal and takes place in a sensory vacuum; almost no attempt is made to render the boat itself or the river and its banks real—how far a fall is here from the sea sense the early books give us! Melville’s style has dismissed the voluptuousness that excited and even scandalized his first readers, and ranges from sharp and dry to monstrous, as in this sentence:
However, the theme, of confidence, is a mighty one. Confidence is the lubricant of American enterprise, “the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions,” the boosterism needed to fling a rickety economic frame across the still ragged and sparsely populated nation; the theme is worth a satire or a tragedy, neither of which Melville was well equipped to write. One cannot help thinking of what Mark Twain would have done with this material; at moments, interestingly, the Confidence Man sounds like Whitman: “No man is a stranger. You accost anybody. Warm and confiding, you wait not for measured advances.” But Melville, though born the same year and in the same area as Whitman, looked the other way—not forward to the democratic apotheosis but backward to Calvinism and its dark negations. What fascinated and enraged him was confidence universalized as religious faith. The linkage of the business and religious senses of the concept was, and is, tightly established in the American success formula. The Confidence Man, in his longest role as “the cosmopolitan,” sweeps it all together, extolling the press as “defender of the faith in the final triumph of truth over error, metaphysics over superstition, theory over falsehood, machinery over nature, and the good man over the bad.” Optimism, whether encountered in Emerson or Goethe or the American press, galled Melville; his ship of fools is called Fidèle—“faithful.” “A proper view of the universe,” the Confidence Man prates, “that view which is suited to breed a proper confidence, teaches . . . that . . . all things are justly presided over.” Melville doubted this; but was dismayed to doubt it, and his dismay hobbled him.
Ishmael tries to tell us, in “Moby-Dick” ’s famous chapter on whiteness (XLII), what the great whale is a symbol of:
Melville shrank from atheism, and from all facile theisms. The whale’s head is a “dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever;” it is “one broad firmament of a forehead, plaited with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men.” “In that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.” At the book’s climax, in a very curious phrase, when Moby Dick smashes the ship of his pursuers with “the solid white buttress of his forehead,” he is seen “vibrating his predestinating head.” Predestinating: the awful absence of God, of the Calvinist God, becomes, in a way, God. Moby Dick represents the utter blank horror of the universe if Godless. Melville has been described as a mystic, but to me he has nothing of mysticism such as might be ascribed to Wordsworth or D. H. Lawrence. Melville is a rational man who wants God to exist. He wants Him to exist for the same reasons we all do: to be our rescuer and appreciator, to act as a confidant in our moments of crisis and to give us reassurance that, over the horizon of our deaths, we will survive. In 1856, after completing “The Confidence-Man,” but without waiting for its publication, Melville took a restorative voyage to the Holy Land. Landing first in Great Britain, he met with Hawthorne, then the American consul in Liverpool, and told him, in a famous conversation noted in Hawthorne’s journals, that he “had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated.” “But still,” Hawthorne went on, “he does not seem to rest in that anticipation.” One wonders if Melville knew at this time that the prodigious prose writer within him had already been laid to rest.
Upon his return from his travels through Europe and the Mideast, he made an announcement, according to Lemuel Shaw, Jr.: “Herman says he is not going to write any more at present & wishes to get a place in the N. Y. Custom House.” Not until 1866 was this ambition satisfied; for the remainder of the crucial decade of the fifties Melville turned to lecturing. On the circuit, talking about Roman statuary or Polynesian islands, he received mixed notices. The Cleveland Daily Herald reported:
In Rockford, Illinois, the local newspapers were less philosophical: one protested, “It has rarely been our lot to witness a more painful infliction upon an audience,” and the other concluded, “No man has a right to set himself up as a lecturer at $50 per night, who cannot for one minute take his eyes from his manuscript.” Melville gave his last lecture early in 1860, having earned by this method $1,273.50, and in 1863 he and his family moved from Pittsfield, from a farm that had never been an idyll, to 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, New York City, where he stayed, working as a customs inspector and collaborating in his own ever profounder obscurity. Toward the end of his life, there would be an occasional flurry of excitement in literary columns over the fact that he was still alive. Robert Buchanan, an English versifier and student of American letters, upon a visit to New York in 1885, was unable to find the man he termed “the one great imaginative writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on that continent,” and published a poem complaining that
The enchantments of “Typee” and “Omoo” were never quite forgotten, however, and figure in the memoirs of younger writers such as Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson. Strangely, in those late, silent years the statements that Harper & Brothers sent Melville showed no longer a debit but some modest earnings on his royalties. After he died, in the fall of 1891, a communication to the Times headed “The Late Henry Melville” remembered how one pilgrim to his dwelling was startled to be told that the author owned no copies of his own books.
Yet—our last surprise—Melville had never really stopped writing. He never surrendered his pursuit of literary greatness—merely shifted the mode and slackened the pace. No sooner had he given up prose fiction than he began to study and write poetry, as a medium perhaps better suited to his pure aspirations and metaphysical bent. By May of 1860, he had prepared a volume of poems, which Charles Scribner declined to publish. Through the Civil War, he wrote poems based upon battle dispatches—one of the best deals with an event he witnessed at a distance, the New York draft riots of 1863—and these were collected in “Battle-Pieces,” which was published in 1866. After his retirement from the Customs Service in 1885, Melville privately published two small collections of poems in paperbound editions of twenty-five copies each—“John Marr and Other Sailors” (1888) and “Timoleon” (1891). Melville’s poetry has been some of the last of his production restored to favor; but now it can be found in every anthology, and critics no less than Randall Jarrell and Robert Penn Warren rank him with Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We have, perhaps, more tolerance for the awkwardness and obliquity that damned his verse with contemporary reviewers; but even the most sympathetic reader now cannot but be struck by a feeling of deliberate and stubborn effort in the poems, an effect of muttering quite unlike the full-throated ease of the prose. Like another novelist turned poet out of disgust, Hardy, Melville moves us with his effort to thrust honesty and complex insight toward us through the resistant slats of metre and rhyme. Whereas Whitman and Dickinson turned their backs on the ornate variety of Victorian verse forms and created individual prosodies, Melville set himself to school with traditional metrics, wielding the stanzas of English balladry with frequent archaism of diction and striking a resolute music of iron and wood. “Battle-Pieces” was his last bid for public attention, and his last commercially published volume. The publication of his magnum opus in poetry, “Clarel,” was privately financed with a benefice from his uncle Peter Gansevoort, in 1876. No more incongruous volume could have been issued in the centennial year, amid the coarse flourishings of the Gilded Age. A massive work of over eighteen thousand lines in rhyming tetrameter, it is an epic of doubt, scored for a dozen male voices and set, as it were, amid the menacing wrinkles of Moby Dick’s brow.
“The Confidence-Man” has an abrupt, Beckett-like ending, crammed by Melville with more cosmic meaning than it can hold. Belowdecks, the Confidence Man persuades a feeble-witted old man that a commode with its chamber pot will serve as a life preserver, and leads him away into darkness. “Something further may follow of this Masquerade,” the last sentence reads, and though much criticism has worried this hint to no conclusion, I will venture to assert (following a suggestion of Jay Leyda’s, in his notes to “The Portable Melville”) that a sequel is promised, and that “Clarel” is that sequel. Immediately upon finishing “The Confidence-Man,” Melville embarked for the Holy Land with, my presumption is, the reasonable hope that this voyage would yield the material for another picaresque satire along the lines of confidence and deception. He kept a conscientious journal, and his reactions in Palestine were negative but forceful. Of Jerusalem, he wrote, “The color of the whole city is grey & looks at you like a cold grey eye in a cold old man . . . In the emptiness of the lifeless antiquity of Jerusalem the emigrant Jews are like flies that have taken up their abode in a skull.” Barrenness and decay assaulted his senses; of the site of Christ’s resurrection he noted, “It is like entering a lighted lanthorn. Wedged & half-dazzled, you stare for a moment on the ineloquence of the bedizened slab, and glad to come out, wipe your brow glad to escape as from the heat & jam of a show-box. All is glitter & nothing is gold. A sickening cheat. The countenance of the poorest & most ignorant pilgrims would seem tacitly to confess it as well as your own.” Slowly, during the nearly twenty years after he took these notes, Melville, working in the mood and metre of Matthew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” and drawing upon guidebooks and all the sore wisdom of his disillusioned life, built up a tangled, talky tale of pilgrims circling from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea to Bethlehem and back, over rocky wasteland; one line near the end exclaims, “O blind, blind, barren universe!” The characters, as in “The Confidence-Man,” represent a cross-section, but they are more leisurely and tolerantly drawn; Melville has put two versions of himself in the poem—the troubled young divinity student Clarel and the more robust middle-aged humanist Rolfe—as well as the version of Hawthorne called Vine, and a meliorist Anglican clergyman called Derwent, and an assortment of exiled European and American monomaniacs, and several Muslim escorts all of whom speak a very elegant English. The poetry can be comically awkward, with its rhyming inversions:
And its innocent flatness:
But it can also be quite lively, its desert imagery compulsively shot through with memories of the sea:
Compared with that of “Pierre” and “The Confidence-Man,” the air of “Clarel” breathes with relief; there is still pain in the topic, but less in the writing. Melville is here engaged in his favorite pastime—woolgathering upon absolute matters in an atmosphere of male companionship. The characters are not quite rounded, but, like sets of facts, they are seen in different lights, as the controlling mind restlessly moves. After quite convincing us of Palestine’s and Christianity’s desolation, Melville as fatherly author comes forward in a pentameter epilogue to reassure his fictional progeny Clarel:
Thirty-three years after his death, Melville emerged with one last evidence of greatness, the completed but unpublished “Billy Budd,” begun as a mere headnote to the poem that concludes it. The novella combines Melville’s preoccupations in a beautifully calm, enigmatic fashion. Like Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” it seems to sum up, and takes us beneath the troubled waves. Billy at the end lies full fathom five, and oozy weeds about him twist. The message of “Billy Budd” is no more consoling, really, than that of Father Mapple’s sermon in “Moby-Dick;” that is, a counterfeit Christ legend is shown in the coining, and Billy goes to death blessing his condemner as credulous men everywhere go down to doom praising God. But the story is enclosed in serenity, as, from what biographical evidence there is, Melville’s later years of obscurity were—years of faithfully observed official duty, of wide reading whose underlinings and marginalia are among the chief surviving clues to his thinking, and of opportune inheritances from both his own and his wife’s family. The fate of his sons imposed a double sorrow in these years: Malcolm committed suicide at the age of eighteen, and Stanwix, a pathetic drifter, died of tuberculosis at thirty-five. Like some metamorphic outcropping, his sons’ ruin hints of the fierce strains of the household in which they were children; not idly did Melville make his most tenderly conceived father figure, Captain Starry Vere in “Billy Budd,” the filial Billy’s inflexible executioner.
Considerations of Melville’s withdrawal, whether that withdrawal is dated from “The Confidence-Man” of 1857, or the move from Pittsfield in 1863, or “Battle-Pieces” of 1866, tend to center upon the neurasthenic symptoms reflected in family letters of the early fifties and come to a head in his long siege of illness in 1855. His biographers all—Newton Arvin most sensitively, Edwin Haviland Miller most relentlessly—read his life and works for the pattern of a neurosis that, after “Moby-Dick,” cramped and truncated a career of infinite promise. The ineffectual father, early dead in a dreadful scene of madness; the domineering mother; the shaming poverty amid genteel pretensions; the latent (or, in his shipboard years, active) these existed, as well as the pressing financial limitations of authorship and a general incomprehension of the expressive experiments the mature Melville was determined to make. But the golden day, as Lewis Mumford has called it, of American literature was no feast of best-sellers; of its four masterpieces—“The Scarlet Letter” (1850), “Moby-Dick” (1851), “Walden” (1854), and “Leaves of Grass” (first edition 1855)—only “The Scarlet Letter” was an immediate worldly success. There are other sorts of success, and Melville’s withdrawal—not so instant or so complete, we have seen, as the mythic image of it—can be viewed as itself a necessary and therefore successful artistic gesture.
The word “novel,” at root, means “news,” and no novelist, even though he explore no further than the closets and back stairs of his own home, can be without some news he wishes to bring. Melville, by a series of accidents of which not the least remarkable was the luxuriant verbal gift he discovered in himself, brought the news from the South Seas—among the first to bring it, and still among the best. The next piece of news he had—that God was dead and life a cruel fraud—would have been less warmly received even if Melville had himself taken more joy in it. A writer with a democratic public for a patron must hope that he will in his work instinctively line up with enough people’s notion of what is entertaining and informative to make that work pay. “Pierre” and “The Confidence-Man,” for all the huge talent ensnared in their designs, and for all their uncanny foreshadowing of aspects of modernism, were written with Melville’s instincts in rebellion; they are protest novels cast in a would-be popular vein, and brim with tensions the author cannot express. “Israel Potter” and “Clarel,” though relatively unknown, are relatively relaxed, if curious, productions. History elicits a certain fatalism from its students, and I am left with a sense that Melville was right to withdraw when he did, from a battle that had become a losing battle. His rapport had been broken with an audience that cared about him chiefly as “the man who had lived among the cannibals.” He had taken the sea tales as deeply into cosmic significance as he could, and had spent the treasure of experience laid up in his youth. He had come to writing, at the age of twenty-five, rather suddenly, with scant record of earlier literary ambition, and had no great love for the small change—the proofreading, the polite hustling and catering—of the authorial profession. By mid-life, though not yet forty, he had come to care only about greatness, in the sense that Shakespeare and Dante possessed it, and that Hawthorne—cool, slight Hawthorne—had once represented it to his fervent, impressionable prime. In that youthful prime, he wrote to Hawthorne of his own rapid and furious development, “Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then & now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.” By bowing to that organic fall, and abstaining from a forced productivity, and turning to public silence and private poetry, Melville preserved his communion with greatness, and enhanced with the dignity of a measured abstention the communion we enjoy with him. ♦
