Chapter 3

Typee, which was published in London by John Murray, in his Colonial and Home Library, quickly won a name for itself as a piece of picaresque fiction. The London Times could not believe that a common American seaman could have the style of an educated literary man; and even a friend of the family, Mr. Evert Duyckinck, could hint politely that Melville had manufactured some of his adventures; Typee, literally, seemed too good to be true. The only people who took Typee for what it was were the missionary promoters: they damned the whole account heartily as unfair to the missionaries, and a perversion of Christian teaching, since this impudent and ribald young man pictured evangelical zeal as making no particular improvement in Polynesian morality, and since he even went out of his way to comment sarcastically upon the missionaries in Honolulu, who published a journal in which the doings of the “converted” king were recorded with the unction of an official English court gazette.

Against the charge of untruth and the imputation of fiction, Melville had two answers. One was happily furnished by Richard Tobias Greene, the Toby of Typee, a resident of Buffalo, who had in fact escaped from the Marquesas without being able to effect Melville’s rescue, and who wrote to the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, when Typee was published, verifying Melville’s story and asking Melville to get in touch with him. Melville got from Toby an account of his adventures, and embodied them in a sequel to Typee called The Story of Toby. As for the missionaries, Melville’s instinct in controversy served him well: in his next book, he returned to the misdemeanours of the pious and hit harder in the same place. He had observed that all the eulogistic reports of the missionaries were written by the missionaries themselves: their zeal to propagate Christianity was not unmixed with their concern to get money which would further that fine enterprise: against these glowing reports of conversion and grace and the introduction of shame and sin into the South Seas, Melville pitted his own acrid memories. No animus against Christianity led him to do this; for he had a strong initial bias in its favour: what spurred him was mere honesty of record, and the desire to see the Polynesians left alone in a happier state.

There is one further confirmation of Typee’s verity: one cannot neglect it, though it comes at third hand. M. Philarète Chasles, in his Anglo-American Literature and Mariners, translated and published in New York in 1852, quotes a “well-informed American who reported that a cousin of Melville had said: ‘My cousin writes very well, except when he reproduces exactly what he has felt.... He could not invent the scenes which he describes. Charmed by his improvised reputation, he would be vexed, I think, to lose his reputation as an inventor. The reappearance of his companion, Toby or Richard Greene, a real personage, annoyed him to some degree. It made him descend from the pedestal of romance to the level of mere narrator. For me, who know Melville, his wild disposition, and the history of his youth—who have actually read his rough notes, now in the hands of his father-in-law, and who have talked twenty times with Richard Greene, his fidus Achates, I laugh at the preoccupation of a public accustomed to see a lie where no lie is.’”

A strain of malice lies in this description of Melville’s own reception of praise as an inventor which does not altogether lessen one’s belief in its authenticity. In Redburn, Melville resented his cousins, and in Pierre he made one of his hero’s cousins play the part of a callous betrayer of trust and friendship; one has reason to suspect a little bitterness on Melville’s side, and a little condescension and concealed envy on the other. If the public’s mistake made Melville find more easily his path as an imaginative writer, let us thank the incredulous but forever gullible public: their mistake did him service.