Chapter 6

Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, had procured an advance from Murray on the English edition of Typee; and his new fame and financial success must have made Melville look forward to literature as the source of a permanent livelihood. In that “maturer and larger interior development” that was now taking place in Melville, pride of career supplanted pride of race: it was himself, his own nature, his experiences, his thoughts, that mattered, and not the size of his grandfather’s breeches or the length of that other lineage which perhaps joined him with bonnie Jeanie Melville in the Scots ballad. His racial inheritance had but added to his humiliation; by his own exertions and skill, he had achieved his first triumph. He is now a proper child of the Revolution; he knows, like Napoleon, that men make families quite as much as families make men—and there is no ancestor so powerful as one’s earlier selves.

Melville promptly followed Typee with a sequel of his adventures in the South Seas called Omoo, which signifies rover. In the meanwhile, Gansevoort, who had been the mainstay of the family while Melville was growing up in Albany, had found nothing in the bleak streets and grimy house-fronts of London to lessen his own depression; and he died. The early struggle, which had left such a bitter taste with Herman, had even more fatally taken the heart out of Gansevoort. From the last of his letters home one has the feeling that he resigned from life, rather than that he was suffering from any physical malady. “Selfishly speaking,” he declared, “I have never valued life very much.” The fibre loosened in Gansevoort; the grip relaxed; he passed out. There is no sign in Omoo that Gansevoort’s death was a very profound event for Melville; and yet one suspects that his sadness and hopelessness came in later years to mingle with Melville’s pain.

Omoo is a description of Melville’s life from the day he escaped the Typees to his signing up for another whaling voyage off the coast of Japan: its contents I have already used in telling about his life during that period. The narrative itself is done in the direct, vigorous, rapid style of Typee: if anything, there is more humour in it, and Melville gave himself greater liberties in using the material and embroidering it. Omoo is perhaps the most underrated of Melville’s books. While it solidified the reputation he had gained in Typee, the first book has held first place, because of the unique people and customs Melville dealt with there; whereas Omoo, which is a more raffish tale, and in some respects superior in literary quality, has been treated as if it were but the rinsings of the heady Typeean jug. This is far from being true. The relatively unromantic, if outlandish, quality of these later adventures, with the exception of the mutiny of the Julia’s crew, made him rely more heavily upon his own skill: and although the main incidents are probably accurate, all the characters are focussed with a slight distortion, through Melville’s sense of the comic: Dr. Long Ghost’s adventures and peccadillos are filled out a little, and the venial doctor of Papeetee was treated in such a fashion that the actual character uttered a cry of belligerent protest when the book came to his attention.

Melville’s skill at character-drawing, of which his description of Mehevi and Kory-Kory gave promise in Typee, became in Omoo more firm. Here is a scene in which two minor characters, a land-lubber, Rope Yarn, and an “affable-looking scamp”—Flash Jack—appear only for a minute.

“Flash Jack crosses the forecastle, tin can in hand, and seats himself beside the land-lubber.

“‘Hard fare this, Ropey,’ he begins; ‘hard enough, too, for them that’s knowed better and lived in Lun’nun. I say now, Ropey, s’posing you were back to Holborn this morning, what would you have for breakfast, eh?’

“‘Have for breakfast!’ cried Ropey, in a rapture. ‘Don’t speak of it!’

“‘What ails the fellow?’ here growled an old sea-bear, turning around savagely.

“‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ said Jack; and then, leaning over to Rope Yarn, he bade him go on, but speak lower.

“‘Well, then,’ said he, in a smugged tone, his eyes lighting up like two lanterns, ‘well, then, I’d go to Mother Mill’s that makes the great muffins: I’d go there, you know, and cock my foot on the ’ob and call for a noggin o’ somethink to begin with.’

“‘And what then, Ropey?’

“‘What then, Flashy,’ continued the poor victim, unconsciously warming up to his theme; ‘why then, I’d draw my chair up and call for Betty, the gal wot tends to the customers. Betty, my dear, says I, you looks charmin’ this mornin’; give me a nice rasher of bacon and h’eggs, Betty, my love; and I wants a pint of h’ale, and three nice hot muffins and butter—and a slice of Cheshire; and Betty, I wants—’

“‘A shark steak and be hanged to you!’ roared Black Dan with an oath.”

This quotation serves not merely to show how immediately and vividly Melville can put before us a forecastle ragging. The passage is interesting for another reason. Despite his admiration for Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson gave rise to one of the parrot judgments about Melville’s work when he said: “At his christening some influential fairy must have been neglected. ‘He shall be able to see, he shall be able to tell, he shall be able to charm,’ said the fairy godmothers; ‘but he shall not be able to hear,’ exclaimed the last.” In this passage Stevenson was reproaching Melville for his inadequate rendering of the Marquesan speech, a matter over which there is small cause for wonder, since Melville’s four months among the Typees were followed by four years before he committed the names and words to paper; but the actual fact is just the reverse of Stevenson’s dictum: Melville had a curiously accurate ear; and the little passage just quoted proves it. Here, from an American writer, is perhaps the first clue to the existence of modern cockney. One will not discover that speech in the pages of Thomas Hood’s Punch; one will not discover it in Pickwick Papers or Oliver Twist; what one finds there, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has pointed out, is an earlier urban dialect. In Omoo, on the contrary, Melville gives us the modern forms: the ink ending for ing and the dropped and added aitches. He was almost equally felicitous in rendering the difficult Belfast brogue: his transliteration of haul into harl is a test of it; and only an accurate ear will thus catch the living tongue. Unlike Ruskin, Melville was not a painter with words, but a musician; and in his maturity, his great passages have a musical structure of their own. In a phrase like “a soft seething foamy lull” he uses the sound of lull, rather than its sense, to convey his meaning; and among the modern poets it is natural to find him turning, later in life, to Shelley and to James Thomson.

Omoo was a rambling book: it had in a formal sense neither beginning nor end; but it had something of the bright immediacy of a sketchbook filled with graphic notes that might be worked into a finished picture. There were no clouds over Melville when he wrote Omoo; even its ugly parts were saturated with sunlight; beachcombing left Melville a little brighter for being scoured by the sand. Smollett had taught him all he needed to write this kind of work, Smollett and Defoe. Omoo had the sharpness, the force, the exaggeration of character which the eighteenth century had in its satiric artists; and every episode was carried off with a dry discretion. With the habit of long verbal practice, Melville watched his listeners: he never overloaded Omoo: he knew where to skip and where to elaborate: he is a writer who knows that one wants everything in a travel book except the tedium and fatigue of actuality. Throughout the narrative, one always feels that Melville has more up his sleeve: one is prepared to believe that he has a hundred Omoos in his bosom: perhaps he had, and at all events it required talent to make us believe so. More and more, his speech cleansed itself of affectations: the direct, vigorous lingo of the sea, with all its Elizabethan locutions, was doubtless a sound influence in this part of his development: of the young man who wrote the sublime gibberish in the Lansingburgh newspaper, there is scarcely a trace left. One measures such growth in feet, not in inches: in seven years Melville had not merely renewed his physical body completely: he had acquired an equally complete literary shape.

In every sense of the word, Omoo is a companion volume to Typee. It is not merely that the milieu is still these wild, wooded, mountainous, sun-drenched islands, with their attractive brown inhabitants: it is not simply that as soon as Melville steps aboard a boat, the deck begins to climb and fall under one’s feet and the smell of pitch and hemp rises to one’s nostrils: it is not merely that this South Sea Prospero, as Robert Buchanan called him, is a weaver of spells, as full of happy mischief as a Polynesian maid and as seductive as a tropical night. In Typee and Omoo, Melville had that superb aplomb—formed by an athleticism, an inner poise, a dexterity of hand, a sharpness of eye—which we call Greek because for a little while the Attic peoples experienced it as a community; the attitude which Whitman valued as the sign and seal of the new American. Melville is appreciative; he is humorous; but he is neither a professional funny man nor a syrupy preserver of glamour. His aplomb never deserts him. He is always in command. That trait is the key to his early literary success; it explains the effortless accuracy of his descriptions. Such poise, such aplomb, such confidence, rest on the nicest sort of spiritual and physiological interplay: blood and muscle form a part of it as well as mental serenity. We have seen this balance in our own day, embodied in a young man who flew to Europe alone. The gesture surrounding this act was the same precious essence that Typee and Omoo give us in the form of art. I have called this quality youth; but it is what the Athenians called virtue; and as soon as we depart from it we are hoary with sin, and there is no health in us.

CHAPTER FOUR: AZZAGEDDI

In 1847 Herman Melville was twenty-eight years old. Omoo had been finished at the end of the previous year; and, in the excitement of finding himself established as an author and recognized as a man of promise, he was casting about for a theme that would more fully evoke his own proper powers. So far he had been living on his material: it was time for his material to get a living from him. He found the theme in Mardi, the vast allegorical romance of Mardi; but before he settled down to it, the friendship or the affection between him and Judge Shaw’s daughter, Elizabeth, deepened, and in August, 1847, they were married.

One can only dimly speculate upon what manner of girl Elizabeth Shaw was. There is no reason to think that Melville drew her portrait in Pierre, and the “wife” of the stories he wrote in the fifties is always a conventional feminine foil. The letter she wrote to her mother during the first week of her marriage was dutiful, girlish, commonplace; and ten years later her letters were equally inexpressive and jejune. Her freshness or her amiable temper or her capacity for devotion may have attracted Herman; but more likely, he loved her because he loved her; and there is no need or possibility of explaining that. Certainly, there was no intellectual parity between them, as there was between Hawthorne and his linguistic blue-stocking, Sophia—and Elizabeth had none of his ranting high spirits.

Melville probably worshipped Elizabeth at first, and idolized her beyond all reason; for he loved romantically, and romantic courtship is a heightened and extravagant season even for men of less imagination and hot impulse than Melville. He who wishes to keep that original and etherealized image of his lady should run away from her: when he breaks it, he will feel, Melville later declared, like Pluto snatching his Proserpine, and once the image is broken every fragment will be a reproach. It is the romanticized Circe, and not her victim, who under the spell of marriage turns into an animal, not a swine, of course, but a pea-fowl, grey-feathered and not gorgeous, or a hen, clucking over her chicks and moving only within the limits of the farmyard, or a dove, cooing a little plaintively, unable to awaken the proud strut of the eager, following male, who has wooed once too often.

After an arduous honeymoon, by stage-coach and rail through the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, on up through Montreal, and back by Lake Champlain and the Champlain Canal, a rough, jouncing, crowded, distracted sort of journey, and a brief sojourn with Herman’s mother at Lansingburgh, they settled down at 103 Fourth Avenue, New York, in company with Melville’s brother Allan and a swarm of sisters. Elizabeth Melville has left us a picture of that household and her husband’s daily routine; one cannot do better than put it in her own words:

“We breakfast at 8 o’clock, then Herman goes to walk and I fly up to put his room to rights, so that he can sit down to his desk immediately on his return. Then I bid him good-bye, with many charges to be an industrious boy and not upset the inkstand and then flourish the duster, make the bed, etc., in my own room. Then I go downstairs and read the papers a little while, and after that I am ready to sit down to my work—whatever it may be—darning stockings—making or mending for myself or Herman—at all events, I haven’t seen a day yet, without some sewing or other to do. If I have letters to write, as is the case today, I usually do that first—but whatever I am about I do not much more than get thoroughly engaged in it, than ding-dong goes the bell for luncheon. This is half-past 12 o’clock—by this time we must expect callers, and so must be dressed immediately after lunch. Then Herman insists upon taking a walk of an hour’s length at least. So unless I can have rain or snow for an excuse, I usually sally out and make a pedestrian tour a mile or two down Broadway. By the time I come home it is two o’clock and after, and then I must make myself look as bewitchingly as possible to meet Herman at dinner.... At four we dine, and after dinner is over, Herman and I come up to our room and enjoy a cosy chat for an hour or so—or he reads me some of the chapters he has been writing in the day. Then he goes down town for a walk, looks at the papers in the reading room, etc., and returns about half past seven or eight. Then my work or book is laid aside, and as he does not use his eyes but very little by candlelight, I either read to him, or take a hand at whist for his amusement, or he listens to our reading or conversation as best pleases him. For we all collect in the parlour in the evening, and one of us reads aloud for the benefit of the whole. Then we retire very early—at 10 o’clock we all disperse.”

Admirable Elizabeth! In your direct, simple way you have told us everything we need to know. You are busy and happy: you have adapted yourself, with the aid of such extra space as was once enjoyed by all families of moderate means, to the clan of sisters and brothers and cousins and aunts that make up the provincial family of the old kind: you make it possible for Herman to economize all his energies, and go ahead, with gentle resolution, at his work. What a beautifully divided day it is: Herman working behind closed doors, and you yourself, very cheerful and attentive and industrious, cocking your ear occasionally for sounds of restlessness. Then the little breaks: the sociability and—do you not perhaps overestimate a lover’s capacity for conversation?—the hour or two of cosy chat. Already Herman’s eyes must be saved, and you are there to save them. True: he has devoted sisters, too; and they are very nice in their way, all such a jolly, helpful, numerous family. People are a little more punctilious here than they are in New England; that is part of the European air which New York somehow preserves; the men bow lower, make prettier compliments, and get drunk more often. When you go to a dance without Herman, you are treated as one of the sisters, and by virtue of your supposed maidenhood, you are quite a belle again. Herman doesn’t like dances and parties overmuch: the late hours and the late suppers take the edge off his writing next morning: he finds it hard to begin and is a little cross and irritable: but what difference does that make? You would give up all these frivolities for such a shapely, manly, courteous, thoughtful man: if he will stay by, the world may gaily pass.

You are not alone, Elizabeth Melville: Mrs. Darwin feels the same way, too; so, with less satisfaction and complaisance, does Jane Carlyle; so, presently, does Sophia Tolstoy. But such helpfulness and affectionate sacrifice cannot last forever. Children will come; you and your fine, high-spirited boy will see less and less of each other: you will interrupt his deepest intimacy with concern for the baby’s bottle. You will wonder, when you are alone, whether you have any right to thrust these burdens on his shoulders: you will feel that the world is a little cruel, and your being joined to this lover who is so strange and remote, this affectionate man who is also so exacting, is uneasy bewilderment.... I do not understand you, Elizabeth Melville? Reflect again carefully: do not be afraid of your feelings: some of them are still visible in the fading ink of old letters; and some of them are in your heart, because you are a human being. If you do not resent sharing Herman so much with his family, you are a greater angel than you should be.

“How much,” wrote Melville in Pierre, “that goes to make up the deliciousness of a wife already lies in the sister.” Do you sometimes feel, Elizabeth, that Herman has only added another sister to the family; that Lizzie is now but a step away from Kate and Helen and Augusta? It is not that he loves them too tenderly, but that he worships you too much, or, in alternate fits, is far too indifferent and puts you at a sisterly distance from him. Do you feel that he will never get near enough to you, will never appreciate the you that is, although he may be disappointed because of the you that is not? He accepts you, of course, accepts you tenderly: you darn his stockings and sew new tapes in his drawers when he breaks them: you put up patiently with the languors and irritabilities that follow an intense morning at the desk, and at times, you have the power to erase them and make his eyes shine with triumph instead.

But this Herman is not the jovial boy who once played with Fayaway: he has his turns of high spirits, but his humours are a little obscure and beyond you, and his face shades a little with disappointment when he notes that your plain, literal mind does not follow his sallies. He is growing beyond you: in the very act of writing Mardi, Elizabeth ceases to exist: the book is haunted by a phantom called Yillah: a Yillah who will never mend socks or replace broken tapes. Some day he will learn, perhaps, that women, like whales, are objects of natural history; and when he is weary with his wandering and his quests, he will not despise your tired arms: one of the best and tenderest of his poems, The Return of the Sire de Nesle, will be addressed to you. But before that happens, you have both a long hard journey before you. Courage! The burden of writing these books will not fall upon his shoulders alone.