Chapter 2

In Redburn, Melville went back to his youth and traced his feelings about life and his experiences up to his eighteenth year. The book is autobiography, with only the faintest disguises: Bleecker Street becomes Greenwich Street, and the other changes are of similar order. Following Mr. Weaver, I have relied upon Melville’s account of himself in Redburn in giving a picture of his life in the earlier chapters; for it tallies with all the other independently known facts.

For the first time in Melville’s writings, the note of personal disappointment and bitterness appeared. He had, it is true, said in Mardi that the highest happiness known to Mardians was the absence of sorrow, and he had said also, as if to explain his hilarity, that woe is more merry than mirth and only shallow sorrows brought tears. But these observations were not peculiar or original; and they were biographical only in the sense that all a man’s thoughts are autobiographical—whether they arise out of his experience or his reading or a passing mood conditioned by the state of his digestion. In Redburn, Melville discloses to us a disappointed boy, who had hopes of education, cultivation, gentility, and who resented the fate that tore these things from his grasp and made him fight for a living in a fighting world. “Claret for boys, port for men,” he exclaimed in White-Jacket, is a good rule for travel: Mrs. Glendinning uses the same phrase in another application in Pierre: the words took hold of Melville, and one suspects that in his youth he had had an overdose of port, and had participated in experiences that required a stronger stomach.

Now, for the first time, Melville is conscious of the black maggot within him, deposited as a mere egg in his youth, and growing day by day, nourished by his later disappointments and sorrows and frustrations. Things have begun to go badly: he thinks back without difficulty to times when they were even worse. The physical misery of those early years, the patched clothes, the bad food, the rough treatment of the sailors, the feeling of homelessness, the consciousness of being an Ishmael—all these experiences tallied point by point with the world outside, its cruelty, its misery, its sordidness and vice. These events and sights poisoned life for Melville: he had not realized it at the time, he had certainly not realized it while browsing through his father’s books in Lansingburgh, or tramping to school through the wide valleys of the Berkshires or brooding over the calm Pacific seas—but the poison had been slowly working in his bones. Life was not kind. All its hints of kindness, its proffers, its affected politenesses were shams. He had married a divine creature—and she was nearest him when she mended his stockings. The books that he wrote fared best when they revealed least of the author and his deepest thoughts. He wanted something central and solid in life, a house, a family, a sense of continuity and security for his future work—and the baby was an expense, the future was a blank, and instead of being able to plan another Mardi, he must hastily improvise a salable article. “It is not with a hollow purse as with a hollow balloon—for a hollow purse makes the poet sink—witness ‘Mardi.’”

“When a poor devil writes with duns all around him, and looking over the back of his chair, and perching on his pen, and dancing in his inkstand—like the Devils about St. Anthony—what can you expect of that poor devil? What but a beggarly Redburn?” So Melville wrote to Mr. Duyckinck in December, 1849. Those were the words of a harassed man. Redburn, recalling the cruel memories of his youth, was also the first bitter cry of his maturity.

We must not, however, take Melville’s disappointment at its face value. On its level, Redburn is a sound, well-written book. Mr. John Masefield has singled it out among Melville’s books, after Moby-Dick; Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has seconded his judgment: with this praise in mind, one cannot dismiss Redburn as contemptuously as Melville himself did. At his lowest stage of strength and confidence, he could not write anything that did not have his signature on every page. The marks of haste in Redburn are in its simplicity and its reliance upon memory: the reflective and critical passages, which are so copious in Melville’s other books, scarcely appear in Redburn. He wrote about a boy’s consciousness of the world, with a boy’s amazement at its cruelty and hard-heartedness, even as he recalled a boy’s confusion when he was placed in the midst of a strange institution like a gambling-house, something outside book, memory or dream. The captain of the ship will not chat with Redburn: Redburn thinks him no gentleman! Redburn is summarily booted out of a Liverpool club when he intrudes: these English, thinks Redburn, have no manners!

These reflections are just and true; but they are true and just by the criterion of a boy’s world, which has not yet learned the pragmatic justification of lies, cheats, hypocrisies, and hard-heartedness. “Unless ye be as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” The kingdom of heaven is this naïve world, where lies are lies, even if they save one’s face; where cruelty is cruelty, even if it be the custom of the club. To treat human beings as human beings, and not as counters, tools, conveniences, is one of the ultimate efforts of morality; but half the practices of society are, from this point of view, definitely immoral. In Redburn, Melville found himself treated, not with respect to his character and needs and spiritual wants: he found himself treated like any other pauper: put to work and told to keep out of sight. He never forgot that lesson; for, in more subtle and various ways, society kept on dinning it into him. If, when he was a sailor-boy, he was not supposed to converse freely with the captain, after he had written Typee he was not supposed to hold conversations with Plato or Sir Thomas Browne. But he was a man! Society denied it; a sailor, yes, a South Sea adventurer, yes, that too: but a boy, a sailor, a South Sea adventurer always, not a brooding, pondering, philosophic, imaginative man, whose further developments lay in seas unvisited by whalers or Captain Cooks.

“We have had vast developments of parts of men,” wrote Melville in Mardi, in words that anticipated Thoreau and Whitman, and show his kinship with them, “not of any wholes. Before a full-developed man, Mardi would fall down and worship.” It was the consciousness of being clipped, deformed, degraded, that made Melville bitter: circumstances had done this to him as a boy, and now, with duns standing over him, it was doing the same trick in his manhood. Better be a full Polynesian, as large as a native can grow, than be the deformed creature who accommodates himself to success in business or letters.

But Redburn is not primarily a book written about a grievance: it is a narrative of a boy’s trip to sea, an honest narrative, with none of the mildewed rainbows and lily-livered romanticism that usually characterize such efforts. As so often happens with mere decent veracity, Redburn, too, was denounced by one of its contemporary critics as “outrageously improbable,” and though the brutality, vice, and misery it pictured were certainly outrageous, there was nothing at all improbable about it. The book, for all its boyish directness, has the wry humour of the grown man, reflecting on his callowness, and the characters it presents are surprisingly realized—surprisingly because one doubts if Melville spent much pains on them. When one compares Redburn to a much more elaborate work, like Two Years Before the Mast, one discovers at once where Melville’s specific talents lay. While Dana wrote directly and straightforwardly, he was not a creator of character, and he had no gift of selection: in order to realize the sea, he scatters tackle, blocks, mainsails, booms, compasses, bulwarks, bulkheads on every page of the narrative: one is perpetually stumbling over some recondite nautical term which Dana had mastered, and, like a true landsman, hastened to exhibit. Two Years Before the Mast sounds like a Bluejacket’s Manual.

Now, Melville, when he wrote Redburn, had seen far more of the sea than Dana had; and since it was impossible to work a sailing-ship without naming every article of its gear and tackle, he knew the names and uses of these things quite as well as Dana did. But in Melville’s work the lingo enters incidentally; and one encounters, not the physical ship of the shipwright, but the ship in action, the ship that is part of the sailor’s consciousness—in brief, the living ship as contrasted with an abstract compendium of names and relationships. The same is true of the characters. Dana describes his shipmates accurately enough: Melville embodies them. The difference is the difference between a commonplace photograph and a significant portrait. One does not forget Harry or Jackson or Captain Riga or the Negro cook: they live as authentically, within their narrow compass, as Colonel Newcome or Samuel Weller. That is art; and even in his minor passages, Melville was an artist.

Redburn, in sum, showed only a portion of Melville; but he had no reason to be ashamed of it, except for the reason that it fell short of the higher standard he had now set himself, and the maturer art he was now capable of creating. By 1850 twice as many copies of Redburn as of Mardi had been sold, a difference accounted for partly by the difference in bulk and price, but even more, I think, by the preferences of Melville’s public. He had accomplished what he set out to do: he had faced his immediate situation and improved it. That Melville was forced to write such a potboiler was bad luck, and nothing to be proud of: but that he met the situation squarely was a mark of his resolution and balance. As long as Melville could fall back upon his adventurous past, he had something to support him, something that was viable in the marketplace. It was only when he had exhausted his accumulated capital, and was forced to mine his ore and smelt it and cast it, all under pressure of financial necessity, that he drew too heavily on his resources. But we must not read back into these earlier years his later difficulties. Redburn was a victory.