Chapter 2

Melville came back to this turbid spring freshet of a world, and he found that his family, too, was in the process of growth and change. Allan had become the business man of the family, a lawyer, with offices in Wall Street; young Tom already wanted to become a sailor, not just to see new places like Herman but to master the sea as a profession; Gansevoort, who had struggled hard and become a little wan and disappointed, had gone in for a political career, and, like Henry Adams a little later, he went to join the American Legation in London in 1845 as secretary. After a little visiting among his relatives and with Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, an old friend of the family with a marriageable daughter, Melville settled down for a while in Lansingburgh: he had decided to write an account of his adventures. The lack of any other opening and the promise of some financial return were the external stimuli; but one cannot doubt that there was also an inner need. This loquacious, introspective sailor, who can so vividly hold an audience that, later, when he described for Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne an encounter in which he had used a club, they searched the house on his departure to find the imaginary club he had left behind—this young man had reached a stage where literary expression was inevitable, necessary—indeed, good for the health.

Up to the age of twenty-five Melville had knocked around the world solely for the purpose of making the best of a bad job. At twenty-five he discovered, in writing Typee, that he actually had made the best of it: his roaming, wasted life was all to the good: its idlest moments could be salvaged; for he had come into possession of something he had not deliberately set out to find, and twenty years of sedentary labour at home would not have given him equal experiences or equal leisure to reflect upon them. The wreckage of these Polynesian years was more precious than any cargo he might have punctually guarded in New York or Boston, at some purser’s job like school-teaching. The outcast came into his own; and the prodigal returned with his own fatted calf to give him welcome!

Herman Melville’s first book was a narrative of his Four Months in the Marquesas among the Typees: its American title was Typee. It was at the opposite pole, at the other end of the world, from another book that was being composed during this period, Thoreau’s Walden, but the similarities are no less important than the contrasts. Typee is Melville’s Walden, without the philosophic reflection and without the premeditated purpose to test the benefits of a more primitive life: Walden is Thoreau’s Typee without the physical derring-do and adventure.

Melville had found in the Marquesas the simplicity and directness of livelihood that Thoreau sought nearer at hand; and as for Thoreau, he treated the oak tree as if it were breadfruit, and was glad to find sweet acorns fit to eat, because they diminished the number of enemies in the universe. Both Melville and Thoreau had found out what it meant to throw off the impedimenta of civilization; and though both of them returned to the society of their own kind, they carried back to everyday American life a little contempt. Life at the core was a much simpler matter than the civilizee would admit: for civilization, which creates enjoyable forms for human activity, also creates grotesque ones, which grow up alongside the shapely forms and tend to supplant them: the accumulation of capital comes to mean more than the provision of food and shelter, and the regalia of the book of etiquette means more than friendly intercourse. The Philistines that surrounded Melville knew no more about the great forms of civilization, about the art of Shakespeare or Rembrandt or the philosophy of Spinoza and Goethe, than the naked savages: they were just as destitute in these higher essentials, and, on top of these disabilities, they lacked the savage’s animal health, charm, and good nature. Melville did not set out to test these things, as Thoreau did; but unconsciously, on the mere weight of evidence, he came to the same conclusion.

Writing is not merely a process of explicating what one already knows: it is also a matter of discovering what one is not aware of: it brings to light the hidden loot in that storehouse which psychologists call the Unconscious. In the very act of writing Typee, Melville must have become conscious of his specific equipment and his gifts as a writer; for, though he had been able to make no notes of his adventures while he was undergoing them, they had sorted themselves out and formed a pattern of their own. In his first book, Melville went about his work with a sure instinct. He read up every account of the South Seas he could lay hands on, Captain Cook’s voyages, missionary reports, travellers’ descriptions: he discovered, what some writers find out far too late, that if one trusts to one’s own experience alone, one gets something less than one’s own experience, while, if the background is filled out and enriched, one’s own contribution comes out more copiously. This habit of reference became characteristic of Melville in almost all his later works: Moby-Dick is full of citations, and even in a series of short sketches, like The Encantadas, he mentions as authorities Cowley, The Buccaneer, 1684; Colnet, The Whaling Ground Explorer, 1798, and Porter, The Post Captain, 1813.

It would have been hard to spoil such adventures as Melville’s: he could only have done it by a weak memory or a poor gift of visualization, or, more fatal perhaps than these, a tendency to touch every event with a sentimental gloss. Melville’s Typee was free from these sins. He trusted his eyes completely; he told what he saw. Did he understand everything? By no means; the taboo was a mystery, the religious observances obscure, the exact status of cannibalism hard to define: in his very failure to interpret these data, he gave an account which is still valuable to the anthropologist as a description of the South Sea Islanders in an entirely primitive and untainted state. If Melville had trusted his eyes less and his wits more he might perhaps have disclosed facts which were sealed to him: he might also have muddled and misinterpreted everything. The very limitations of Melville’s descriptions give one confidence in their authenticity: this is not unvarnished truth, perhaps, because unvarnished truth with no inaccuracies and distortions and running together of separate events is impossible without a written record, promptly made; but it is still truth.

Does one want a further guarantee of Melville’s accuracy in Typee? The answer is to be found in the rest of his work. While his powers of invention were not small, it was only with difficulty that he could escape the actual world and create a world sustained by his own fantasy. He tried to do this in Mardi, and he was forced back upon history and fact; by the time he reached the end of the book, he lost his grip entirely and converted his fabulous Mardians into out-and-out Europeans. He tried again in Pierre, and as we shall see, he fell back upon the stereotyped figures of conventional melodrama: he succeeded completely, in fact, only once, and he did this by an heroic effort, for which he had to pay a severe physical penalty. Like Defoe, Melville was closely chained to the document, the fact, the experience; he could endow these things with imaginative life, for all the other instruments of creative writing were at his command; but he was not given to inventive elaboration. Do we not perhaps exaggerate the possibilities of the pure imagination? The recent studies of Poe’s and Coleridge’s fantasies should warn us. Even in the dream, where the imagination works without any obligation to be understood or communicated, the most bizarre effects are a blowing up into a vast bubble, through the mechanism of dream-work, of some tiny drop of actual soapy water. Indeed, the highest imaginations, those of an Aeschylus or a Shakespeare or a Goethe, work upon themes already given in myth and history: they do not waste their energies upon the skeleton of fact, but take whatever lies at hand, cover it with flesh, breathe upon it, and give it life.

In Typee, then, Melville made no attempt to write a pure idyll, compounded of butterfly wings and spiderwebs and rainbows. Fayaway was interesting to him; but so, on reflection, were the misdemeanours of the missionaries in the Marquesas. The dangers of being eaten were horrid: so were the brutalities that whaling captains inflicted on the natives: so was the military overlordship of the French. Everything was told in its place, as far as everything could be told to an already Victorian public. The wonder is that Melville, in the first edition of Typee, was as frank as he was: when Dickens’ Oliver Twist was published in America it was attacked for its immoral picture of Bill Sykes and Nancy, by one of the shrinkingly pure American newspapers of the time, which no doubt carried in the neighbouring columns advertisements of quack doctors, books on “sexology,” and patent medicines to be used as abortifacients. Melville, who was fresh from four years of travel, wrote with easy freedom and candour, forgetting that his audience was Thackeray’s, not Smollett’s.

Typee belongs to the morning of the imagination—like Pickwick Papers. It is direct, fresh, free from self-consciousness, like the healthy youth who experienced these adventures and sat down to write about them. That quality is precious and irretrievable. Dickens lived a whole lifetime without again creating anything so sanative and comic as Pickwick Papers; and though Melville fared farther and pondered more deeply on life, this book and the one that followed, alone had the full bloom of youth upon them. Such books are written without a formula; their essential quality is almost beyond formulation. When one has said youth one has said almost everything. Typee is a book to make one go visiting tropical islands, a book to make one question the well-arranged career, the carefully ironed routine, the dull inevitability of the days one has chosen to lead. A scholarly boy reads Typee, and engages a berth for himself on a ship bound for Madagascar; a young architect reads the book and leaves his drawing-board for a trader’s post in the Marquesas, where he becomes a specialist in Polynesian dialects; another young man reads Typee and decides to bind his Fayaway to him by the tie of marriage. One reads Typee, and life suddenly shows a new vista. Adventure is possible: Eden is real: life need not include time-tables and bank accounts and exercises in physical culture. And unlike romantic fantasies Typee is not itself a narcotic, a form of escape: it suggests appropriate actions and deeds. If one person becomes a philologist through reading it, another takes to anthropology; another buys himself a sailboat; and another suddenly decides to carry out some difficult course he had resolved on and put aside again and again.

Like Pickwick Papers—but how differently!—Typee communicates its own simple health and manly confidence: its keenness, its straightforwardness, its hearty appetite for life. It is written with that skill which disarms skill, with the clarity beside which a more deliberate artifice would be clumsy. The colour of such romantic episodes may be artificially imitated: Kaloolah was such an imitation, and in a very bad light one may not at once detect the difference: but there is no imitating the down on the cheek and the clear eye—the stigmata of unspotted youth. I do not underestimate the charm of his subject; but Melville imparted to it his own candid and buoyant nature, watching this strange delicious world with intent, water-blue eyes. The subject was made for a young man to tell about—and happily the young man appeared. It was matched to this adventurous young American as the England of comfortable inns and Christmas jollity was matched to young Dickens. Melville varied the formula of wishy-washy romance by treating all romantic facts realistically, as he treated brutality and danger, and both the romance and the hard adventures profited by it.

What a contrast Typee is to Robinson Crusoe! Defoe’s prose was a far richer instrument than that Melville used in Typee; but after the first few chapters of Robinson Crusoe one’s mind refuses to follow that plaguy Philistine: nobody but a classical economist would pursue his tedious moralizings and his adept contrivances on his desert island. Defoe set out to teach a lesson, and before Crusoe has his last boatload of wares stowed away, long before he has re-established himself in that middle estate in life from which he originally fled, we are asleep. Melville sets out to teach us nothing: but at every step we follow eagerly and find ourselves making notes, instituting comparisons, seeing the world in fresh perspective. Typee is a magic mirror. In Typee we hold the secret of youth, and hold the world up to its clear surface: for the first time, perhaps, we note its unhealthy complexion, its fat paunch, its jaded smile, its fatuous anxieties, its lack of even animal repose.