Chapter 3

On the heels of Redburn came White-Jacket, or, the World in a Man-of-War. White-Jacket was the sort of book that Melville could hardly have attempted until he was sure of his capacities as a writer. Although there is more than one adventurous passage in White-Jacket, it is full of sober description and realistic criticism; and it depends for its interest on Melville’s own strength of character, his shrewd, quick insight, and his easy, seamanlike way of taking the world, rather than on the glamour of his adventures.

The young writer casts about for interesting materials; the experienced writer knows that no materials are uninteresting if they are capable of being absorbed in the blood, and pumped through all the organs and chambers of a man’s being: the more command a writer has of his own resources, the more confident is he of his ability to turn any experience to account. White-Jacket shows, I think, a greater art and control over the material than any of Melville’s earlier books: in Typee the art is gracefully unconscious: in White-Jacket it is deliberate. Melville’s personal distinction and his own peculiar adventures were subsumed under the jacket itself: he announced the theme in the first chapter, recurred to it from time to time, when he sought to waterproof the jacket, when he rounded the Horn in it, when he tried to dispose of it at auction, and finally when he was blinded by it and lost his hold on the yard-arm. The white jacket gave the narrative a unity without introducing the extraneous mechanism of a plot: it also symbolized his position as a white sheep in the black flock of a man-of-war. Omoo was more fitful and inconsecutive for lack of such a thread; Mardi did not open, like White-Jacket, on the theme with which it closed. Like Redburn, White-Jacket was written under pressure; but by now Melville knew his business. At thirty he had mastery: he could take the dull routine of the man-of-war and make every part of it live, from the maintop to the hold: he could take a hundred dispersed facts and weave them into a solid pattern.

White-Jacket is a great portrait gallery. From the Commodore to the rascally Master-at-arms, from Jack Chase of the maintop to Mad Jack, the sea-going lieutenant, who, like Jermin, knew his business so well he commanded Melville’s deep respect, from Mr. Pert the Midshipman to Surgeon Cuticle—Melville typified, and yet individualized, every character. The Neversink is an old-fashioned frigate of the line, now long out of date, and it is all warships, down to the latest airplane carrier. Mad Jack is an actual person; and he is all the officers who exercise command by knowledge and capacity, none the less liked for being a strict disciplinarian. Surgeon Cuticle is a man; and he is all professional men who become specialized by their skill into a brief-case or a textbook or an operating knife. Melville, who had found that the world was something of a man-of-war discovered also that a man-of-war’s crew was a pretty good representation of the world. “Wrecked on a desert, a man of war’s crew could quickly found an Alexandria by themselves, and fill it with all the things which go to make up a capital.” Melville conveyed this feeling of richness and varied capacity: every face was accentuated slightly in caricature, except Jack Chase’s for Jack stood out among the officers and crew as the real captain, the one complete, full-bodied man among them all, robust, bearded, Jovian, ready in war or love or seamanship, singing Dibdin’s ballads or reciting Camoëns’ Lusiad with equal gusto. Jack Chase would have pleased Whitman: indeed, they had the same large, sympathetic, readily dramatized personalities.

In White-Jacket, Melville’s power of invention appears only a few times; but when it does, it is magnificent. The chapters on the Surgeon of the Fleet and his operation show Melville’s satire at its acutest: the picture would do honour to the Hogarth Melville loved. One sees Cuticle, the eminent man of science and surgery, languishing for three years in a man-of-war without a single major operation. Fate at last hands Cuticle a poor wretch who has broken his leg; and Cuticle cannot ease the itch to amputate. The consultation with the other, surgeons is handled with cruel fidelity: they are all against the operation; but Cuticle, with great presence, browbeats the junior surgeon into an equivocation which his superior pounces upon as a sufficient sanction for the operation. The grizzly preparation and performance is told with the grizzliest humour; Melville went through every detail of the butchery with a terrible levity, and an eye for the vanity, the professional hypocrisy, the routine which, rather than humanity and understanding, so often decide the issues of life and death. The operation was a triumph for science and Mr. Surgeon Cuticle: incidentally, it happened to be the death of the poor man who was brought needlessly to the operating-table.

The satire is perfect; and it is perfect because, at the broadest extreme of caricature, it does not lose sight of the pathetic reality underneath. Melville did not waste breath dissecting the obvious impostors and charlatans; for all but the simple can escape them. It is the man in command, the man we admire, respect, put all our confidence in, that Melville so skilfully opened up. No one has done a better job of it: Cuticle and his operation must be put alongside the best passages in Molière. If operations cannot now be performed in the Navy without the consent of the principal party, Melville’s account of their professional abuse is perhaps responsible, in part, for the improvement.

Nor was this scene merely a lucky hit by Melville; the scene between the two sailmakers, sewing up the corpse, is equally strong and equally endowed with imaginative life. In his earlier books, Melville had defined his limits: they ranged between utmost fantasy and grossest matter of fact: he could grub with Caliban or fly with Ariel, but when he flew, his course was still a little erratic, and when he remained on the ground, he was tied a little too close to actuality. In White-Jacket his powers did not widen; but they gained firmness and control. He could fly groundwise, giving the commonplace the benefits of his imagination, carrying the double theme, the theme of life itself and naval experience, under the same figure; and when he cut loose, he did not need to throw overboard the ballast of good sense before he could reach the upper air. The prose of White-Jacket is an advance on all his previous writing; it has a richness of texture, a variety of rhythm, a decisiveness of phrase that his earlier work had only promised and that Mardi itself had not quite fulfilled.

White-Jacket is a portrait gallery: but it is more than that: it is one of the best all-round characterizations and criticisms of a powerful human institution that the century produced. Melville dealt with the effect of regimentation, with the relation of superior to underling, with the accidents and mischances and the ordinary routine of a man-of-war’s life, in such a fashion that he included other institutions as well: the human truths and relationships would remain, though all the navies of the world were scrapped next week. The malevolence of the Articles of War, the essential degradation of the whole military process, the hectoring, the arrogance of station (the quarter-deck face!), the military necessity of converting all the variable human potentialities into mechanized patterns—that is, human defectives—are here once and for all coolly observed and demonstrated: White-Jacket forms a sort of illustrated supplement to Blake’s keen and devastating epigrams on war. The fact that flogging was abolished in the Navy as a result of an agitation in Congress that followed directly upon White-Jacket’s publication, is a tribute to the moving truth of what Melville wrote: his words on the sham republicanism of a country that fostered an autocratic navy were a little too sharply aimed for even the military racketeers to dodge. Had Melville’s picture been that of a mere propagandist, I doubt if it would have taken such immediate effect: on the contrary, it was that of a genuine critic, who portrayed the whole truth in such a fashion as to make evasion of the unpleasant parts of it almost impossible. He overreached his antagonists by knowing more about their business than they themselves did: as when he used the example of the British admiral, Collingwood, to show that capable officers could govern the rowdiest crew without the lash. Apart from Moby-Dick, White-Jacket is, I think, Melville’s fullest achievement: and it is the best reasoned and seasoned of all his factual narratives. The charm of youth was gone, perhaps, but the manly grasp of maturity had succeeded it—the manly grasp and the steady, unfaltering eye.

Melville’s appetite for facts, his voracious reading, his wide range of experience, his philosophic brooding, at last had an imagination capable of assimilating all these materials and using them to further its own ends. Now was the time for a great leap, a leap which would gather all these powers together and focus them on an object of epic dimensions, a Typee, a Mardi, a Redburn, a White-Jacket, all in one. Melville gathered himself for the leap; but before he could make it, he was forced to attend to more mundane affairs; and in October, 1849, he went over to England to arrange in person for the English publication of Redburn and White-Jacket.

For a few months, we have the rare good luck to follow Melville day by day, almost hour by hour. When, on October 11, 1849, he stepped aboard the Southampton, a regular London liner, on a raw noon, leaving behind his brother Allan and Mr. Duyckinck, who had come to the docks, he began to keep a journal of his voyage. This journal, a later one kept during his trip to the Near East, and a small sheaf of letters, constitute with his books almost the only first-hand material for Melville’s biography. Let us take advantage of this good fortune. The literal, unadorned journal, made up hastily day by day, is the least impeachable sort of testimony, unless the writer has an eye on posterity. One need harbour no such suspicions about Melville’s simple record.