Chapter 6

“Had I not written and published Mardi,” wrote Melville to Mr. Evert Duyckinck in 1849, “in all likelihood I would not be as wise as I am now, or may be. For that thing was stabbed at (I do not say through) and therefore I am the wiser for it.”

The truth is that Mardi got a mixed reception; whereas except for the missionaries and the unco guid his first two books had been hailed and acclaimed with a heartiness that is rarely accorded to a new author with no well-defined connections. Mardi was praised in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and damned as a rubbishing parody in Blackwood’s; the Democratic Review said that it compared to Typee and Omoo as a cartoon of Raphael to a seven-by-nine sketch of a sylvan lake; but the Dublin University Magazine found it one of the saddest, most melancholy, most deplorable and humiliating perversions of genius of a high order in the English language. So it went, hot and cold, huzzas and hisses.

A book that could evoke such different responses must either be a highly original book or a many-sided one; and Mardi has, it seems to me, both qualities. It was, there is reason to believe, the wealth, the profusion, the diversity of ideas in Mardi that brought down on Melville the irritation of contemporary critics: instead of retiring into after-dinner lethargy with Melville’s smoking, calabash-drinking philosopher and king and poet, they were stirred into unaccustomed mental activity. They resented that: they resented above all the fact that Melville played with ideas. One could not be sure whether he was fooling with the ideas or fooling with the audience; besides, respectable ideas should not be played with: there is a time and a place for everything. In the South Seas one expects to fondle brown maidens: in a library, one locks the door on maidens and wrestles with ideas. Their lips were whetted for another Fayaway: she evaporated into Yillah: and Yillah vanished, leaving only a gritty taste in the mouth, criticism, criticism of Christianity, politics, morality, things that gentlemen prefer to take, if at all, in medical capsules, not as food.

Am I wrong in thinking that Mardi has been damned for its virtues? The idea is all the more plausible because for more than a generation, during which Melville’s work almost disappeared from critical notice, Melville was reprobated, when he was noticed at all, for becoming interested in abstruse philosophy and for writing extravagantly. The burden of this criticism was that a writer of South Sea romances had better leave Plato and Spinoza alone, and get his opinion of the universe from professional purveyors, or rather, not be troubled by such foreign interests. This attempt to keep Melville in his place was absurd enough in itself; but it led to further stupidities, far more deplorable in character. “As early as 1848,” wrote an historian of American literature in 1903, “the quasi-speculative romance entitled Mardi gave premonition of aberration and of the eventual frustration of a promising career.” This criticism is nonsense, and libellous nonsense at that: the aberration it refers to did not exist in Melville but in the historian himself. At the very outset of his career, Melville found himself confronting a similar opaqueness, blank as a wall, in his own contemporaries. One remembers Macaulay’s withering condescension over Plato and the scholastic philosophers; and one realizes that any view of life which did not immediately sanction the pragmatism of the nineteenth century was bound to seem an aberration for those who regarded the local values of the time as ultimates. Melville’s “aberration” was his great intellectual distinction: none of his contemporaries had such a broad base in the fundamental activities of the time, and yet rose so loftily above them. He did not rebel against his milieu; like Thoreau, he reached outside of it, and grew beyond it, taking out of the very environment from which he escaped the necessary materials for his own development.

The scene is now set: the struggle in which Melville is to participate is defined. It is a struggle between a plastic, conventional self, moulded in the fashion of his fellow citizens and fellow writers, and a hard, defiant, adamantine self that springs out of his deepest consciousness of life, and is ready to assault, not merely human conventions, but the high gods themselves. In a conflict between his career and his family duties, between pot-boiling and his maturest literary aims, this drama externalizes itself: it is present in the man, and it is present in his outward relationships. Let us make no mistake about it: Melville was not a writer of romances: it was a mere accident of history that turned the world’s attention to him through the charm and tropical radiance of the South Sea adventures. Herman Melville was a thinker, in the sense that Dante was a thinker, who clothed his thoughts in poetic vision. That thought and vision was one of the most important things the century produced. All honour, then, to the few critics who appreciated Mardi when it appeared: for Melville had a greater work in store; and it was out of the freedom and intellectual audacity acquired in writing Mardi, out of the discovery of his Azzageddi, that he achieved the strength to attack it.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE TARTARUS OF AUTHORS

We return to Herman Melville’s daily life. In January, 1849, Mrs. Melville went up to Boston to live with her mother and await her confinement. At the end of January the last proof-sheets of Mardi were corrected; in the middle of February Malcolm was born. With the coming of the baby, Melville must have felt a certain tightening of responsibility. One knows very little about the economic conditions under which Melville lived during the first years of his marriage, or to what extent Allan may have carried a good part of the burden of the household. But early in 1849 Melville must have begun to write Redburn, which was a potboiler; and before Redburn was printed he wrote, with greater strength and fuller powers, having probably recovered by that time from the strain of writing Mardi, the masterful account of navy life in White-Jacket.

We now have a chance to watch Melville at work under every disadvantage: the distraction of a household with a young baby, the necessity to make a living, and to do this promptly, the handicap of having to produce something on the level of his audience. If there are flaws in the man, they should come out under these conditions. If he has no sense of reality, he will not know how to meet them; if anything has lurked under the surface of his life, it will rise, like dead fish in poisoned water.