Chapter 4

The fuss that was raised over Typee was not merely on account of its supposed lack of fidelity. It was also because it had displayed loose and immoral scenes. If people could find looseness and immorality in Melville’s description of sexual customs in the South Seas, or in his anecdote of the proud South Sea queen examining with naïve pleasure the tattooing on a French sailor, and, in all innocence, raising her skirts so as to disclose her own to such a connoisseur of the art, or in the incident of the beautiful yellow-haired wife of a missionary, who was worshipped by the natives as a mysterious goddess until they stripped her of her clothes and discovered that she was even as they—if the public could feel a titillation of wickedness over these things, it must have been in a state of pathological sensitiveness; and no doubt it was, for the exposure of more than the lower part of the female ankle in society was then the mark of a wicked and abandoned woman.

This did not make it any easier for a candid fellow like Melville; and when a new edition was projected in America, the officious and correct Mr. Duyckinck must have suggested, as adviser to Wiley and Putnam, that a little judicious editing would reduce the offence and increase Melville’s audience. The young must be protected; the clergy must be conciliated; just a little pruning here and there would give the book a place on every library table. Melville should not have listened to this nonsense; sooner or later a man with anything worth saying must face the world of Pimminee and be prepared to stuff its prejudices and its gentlemanly objections down its throat: if a young author does not make this stand in his first book, he will increase his difficulties with his fourth or fifth. But in 1846 Melville was still uncertain of himself: a novice in his vocation, he was not aware of all the snares that beset a man of letters: the pressure toward amiable compliance with the all too amiable Mr. Duyckinck must have been pretty stiff; all the more, perhaps, because a Duyckinck might almost be a Gansevoort, and family pressure may have played a part, too. At all events, he consented to let Typee be bowdlerized.

“The Revised (Expurgated?—odious word!) Edition of ‘Typee’ ought to be duly announced—and as the matter (in one respect) is a little delicate, I am happy that the literary tact of Mr. Duyckinck will be exerted on this occasion.” So Melville wrote in the middle of 1846 to Mr. Evert Duyckinck. He grimaced a little at the dose; but unfortunately swallowed it. The anecdote about Queen Pomaree went: the anecdote about the missionary’s wife went; and various other passages were underscored by elimination. What Melville said about the missionaries of the Dollar and the Cross is worth remembering, before Mr. Duyckinck runs his blue pencil through it:

“Look at Honolulu, the metropolis of the Sandwich Islands!—a community of disinterested merchants, and devoted self-exiled heralds of the Cross, located on the very spot that twenty years ago was defiled by the presence of idolatry. What a subject for an eloquent Bible-meeting orator!... But when these philanthropists send us such glowing accounts of one-half of their labors, why does modesty restrain them from publishing the other half of the good they have wrought?—Not until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught horses and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes.”

I would not say that this bowdlerization ruins the book, or that it materially takes away from its value: that is not the point. Small and “immaterial” suppressions may have no effect upon the literary value of a work: but they cannot help having a subtly corrosive effect upon the man who has created it. As A. E. once pointed out, in discussing the matter of censorship, the spirit of the artist is a sensitive one, and in many cases it works only with great difficulty. If its wings are clipped by so much as a feather-tip, its capacity for flight may be ruined. It is perhaps impossible to say how far Melville was harmed by Mr. Duyckinck’s tactful exertions, or by the hysterical denunciations that prompted them. For objective evidence, we have only the fact that sex, except in remote allusions to debauchery in Redburn or to sodomy in White-Jacket, did not enter into any of Melville’s stories, until it suddenly erupted in 1852 in Pierre with the violence of long repression. Mark Twain was burdened by a similar censorship; and he took refuge in the flat obscenity of “1601.” Melville’s own development as a man and a writer might have been a happier one, had not sex become in his day a sanctimonious ritual, with no middle term between the licence of the brothel and the waxen purity of the home. The censorship which operated on Melville’s books bore equally on his spirit: his libido turned back upon itself, and got lost for a time in the mazes of an infantile life. To take sex easily, naturally, rationally, is to subject it to the refining elements in life: to take it with a sense of unholy attraction and holy repulsion is to dissociate it completely from the normal influence of knowledge and convention and taste: in this dissociated, fragmental state, sex rages irresponsibly like a bolt of lightning in an open field: it may disappear into the ground, it may shatter a tree, it may kill a human being.

Melville had carried back from the South Seas the simplicity of an essentially chaste, but, we must suppose, not altogether inexperienced young man. This simplicity had something valuable in it for Melville’s contemporaries, just as his appreciation of savage society must have warned them about the absurd extravagance of acquiring dyspepsia and hard faces and an incapacity for the arts of living by their concentration upon money-making—and the censorship of Typee kept this part of Melville, I think, from maturing with reflection and experience. Sex was taboo. That element in his growth knew no middle state between greenness and blight. One part of life was locked for him in a dark chamber; one part will die by asphyxiation.