Chapter 3

Allan Melville was not a rich man; but when Herman Melville was born, on August 1, 1819, Allan Melville was doing well in a modest way: the family lived at Number Six, Pearl Street, and Herman was the second son and the third child of this agreeable union. When Herman was a year old, Allan noted in a letter that he had hired a cook and a nurse, and wanted only a waiter; and one may take for granted, I think, that such a household already has its complement of maids, linen, silver, sherry, port, brocades, and books.

To awake in a home surrounded by the decencies of life must mollify an infant’s indignation at having to enter the world at all; and in Herman Melville’s earliest years, nothing ever conveyed a sense of danger or physical stress. In the even decorum of the days, meals ebbed and flowed like the tides; the sheets were as white as the tops of wind-whipt waves off the Battery; clothes sprang into existence out of the sewing-room as naturally as feathers cover a robin’s back: little boys had handkerchiefs to blow their noses in and pillows to cuddle into when they fell asleep in their cribs; in the obscure world that crowded around little Herman, there were convivial discussions between his father and strange gentlemen in the library, when he might do no more than linger in the shadows of the hall or hush his breath at a crack in the partly opened door; there were visits to relatives and a few select friends that were as sociable as a regimental inspection in the army, when he might not get his pinafore mussed, nor bunk up against the furniture, nor tease his older sister, nor rub shyly into his mother’s neatly disposed dress, visits with every one sitting upright, stiff, the spine imitating the rigid line of the chairs, just blossoming “deportment.”

On the whole, in spite of its high-chokered formalities, it was a kind world that Melville found himself in: shallow men are not obstacles to little boys, and as for Mrs. Melville, she had all the affection for her children that natural instinct and the graces of society prompted her to have, not a great deal, one suspects, for children, like servants, are only subordinate ministers to the ego—and one cannot take pride in satisfying society’s minimal requirements. She was, however, an intelligent and capable mother: all her eight children grew to maturity, and that was no little feat, even for an upper-class family, in the early nineteenth century. Herman must have been a little starved of affection, I think; for in Pierre he gives his hero no sisters or brothers, so that Pierre may absorb all his mother’s warmth for himself; and his hungry claims for sympathy and caresses were no doubt put off by Mrs. Melville’s aloof rectitude, her concern to keep part of her energy and sweetness for her husband, and her manifest partiality to the younger children, when they arrived. Herman stood as in a cold room before an open fire: one side of him was toasted, and another side was chilled. That chilliness remained; and in the parts of his emotional frame that were affected, circulation was never quite restored.

When Herman was five the family moved two miles uptown, to a house in Bleecker Street which combined the advantages of town and country. It was good for Herman that the change was made. He had been ill and had not regained his health fully: he looked, his father reported then, pale, thin, and dejected; but the new house had a vacant lot where children could play; and not far away the farms began to stretch on each side of the Albany turnpike: despite the activity of the City Planning Commissioners in laying out rectangular blocks over the hills and dales and streams and swamps and ponds of the island, the farms themselves were retreating slowly. Life, for little Herman, was no longer a matter of sitting and staring at the furniture: he went to school: he found that c-a-t and d-o-g were a new way of playing with a dog and a cat: when he was bored he could always practise tricks on Gansevoort, who was older and more considerate and could not legitimately hit back.

Still, Herman did not thrive quite as well as he should have. Winter drew a black curtain between him and all the pleasant things one could see or find or do in the country: darkness fell much too soon after school: November’s rains confined him to the house and March’s snows and slush did the same: as the winter progressed his cheeks would grow paler and his small blue eyes more wan. His father shook his head doubtfully and grieved over little Herman’s melancholy situation. As a result of these stops and gaps in his life Herman “is backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension, but”—so Allan reports to the Albany Gansevoorts, when Herman in the summer of 1826 is sent to them on a visit—“you will find him, as far as he understands men and things, both solid and profound and of a docile and amiable disposition.”

One is grateful to Allan for using such unusual words as “solid” and “profound” to describe a child of six: there must have been something in Herman’s attitude or attack that warranted them: one cannot altogether lay those adjectives to pompous speech or parental pride. Is one going back too far if one finds the beginnings of Melville’s reflective turn in these juvenile illnesses and confinements? The periods of solitude in bed, the lassitude of recovery, the slow, patient hours undistracted by physical activity, the rehearsing in the mind of things done and things seen—these limitations make content and docile little boys. John Ruskin amused himself, in an enforced confinement without toys, by tracing minutely the patterns of the parlour carpet: in such dull, quiet states is the beginning of a meditative life.

A year later Herman was sent to his Great Uncle Thomas Melville at Broadhall, near Pittsfield. Uncle Peter, at Albany, was still something of a countryman: Uncle Thomas was a different sort, more fine, more polished, with a touch of the old beau about him perhaps and no little of the courtliness of aristocratic Paris: he had brought home a French wife, and the undercurrent of French between the old fellow and his spouse, when Herman was present and not supposed to understand, must have teased him like a glimpse of a foreign port. Uncle Thomas had nothing of the boor about him; his manners were mild and kindly, “with a faded brocade of old French breeding” and a certain daintiness of gesture, as when he would drop his rake and pause for a pinch of snuff, that brought the reminder of a society less angular and impetuous than that which jostled little boys in the streets of Manhattan. It was a little pathetic, too, to see this fine old gentleman handling a rake or patiently feeding a cow: he was so manifestly cut out for more urbane companionship.

In the galaxy of uncles and grandparents and aunts, the patrician element was dominant: every one of them knew what it was to be well bred and cultivated in the arts and able to command men. There was Grandfather Thomas at Boston, he whom Oliver Wendell Holmes poked a little fun at in the trivial piece of verse called The Last Leaf: he had been a major, too: he had fought well in the Revolution, too: a dried-apple sort of man who had lost his juices and perhaps his sweetness: let the times change as they would, he kept his shape, and to define it, he wore cocked hat and knee-breeches up to the day of his death: the eighteenth century was good enough for him. Then there was Uncle John de Wulf, who dropped in miraculously one day to see Herman’s father: an old man with hair as white as the pin-feathers on a swan’s breast, and face as red as a cranberry: he used to sail to a place called Archangel, and, more marvellous still, he had crossed Russia with Captain Langsdorff, starting from the Sea of Okhotsk in Asia and going to St. Petersburg, drawn by large dogs in a sled. What a hearty old fellow he was! His clothes almost had the smell of the far-off places he had visited. Ever memorable was that June day when his father and Uncle John took Herman over to Staten Island, and they explored the ruin of a fort that had been hastily erected by Governor Tompkins to defend the city against the British in 1812. Uncle John was a mystery: the crumbling walls of the fort were a mystery: but the sky above was as blue and benign as the blue eyes of Herman’s mother, and in the still air of noon, there was no sound but the twitter of birds, and a great shout of delight and happiness in the little boy’s heart.

But Manhattan was always full of mysterious strangers and sunburnt men with a rolling walk and a sea-bag or a chest jauntily carried on one shoulder. New York did this for Herman Melville: it taught him to be discontented with New York. There was Liverpool: there was London, Havre, Paris. The trim little packets down at the docks went back and forth between Liverpool and New York as regularly as clockwork, or very nearly: the swift ones could make the journey, with a little luck, in fifteen or sixteen days, and the best record for a sailing vessel was considerably under this: they took away wheat and furs and passengers, and they brought back cloth from the Midlands and carpets from Brussels and gloves from Paris and knives from Sheffield and cheap gewgaws from Birmingham and china from Burslem, or even from China itself—and more passengers. One simply could not forget the wideness of the world in this wide harbour, edged with green banks and feathery trees. Even some of the furniture in the house had been made in Europe: Herman looked at it again and again, wondering where the mahogany grew and whether the workmen who made the furniture were still alive, and what they might be doing with themselves now. His papa had been a great traveller; in a score of years, as he methodically noted down, he had travelled “by land 24,425 miles, by water 48,460 miles” and had been 643 days at sea; and once Allan had lived two whole years in Paris. Every stone, every mast, every stick of furniture, every print had a message for Herman: Travel!

How the books and prints Allan had brought home fomented Herman’s dreams! There were prints of French men-of-war, of French fishing boats, with “high French-like land in one corner and a gray lighthouse surmounting it. The waves were toasted brown and the whole picture looked mellow and old. Perhaps a piece of it would taste good.” On Saturdays, when school didn’t keep, and the rain imprisoned the children in the house, Augusta and Gansevoort would take out a French portfolio of coloured prints. More romance! Versailles: grand drawing-rooms: fountains where writhing Tritons spouted gleefully: rural scenes: shepherd boys and cottages: above all, there was a picture of a great whale, as big as a ship, stuck full of harpoons, and three boats sailing after it as fast as they could fly. Then, too, there was a tall brown bookcase in the hall; behind its glass doors one might see long rows of old books that had been printed in Paris and London and Leipsic. There was the Spectator in six volumes with “London” on the title page: there was a copy of D’Alembert in the language Uncle Thomas used to speak to Tante Marie.

Some day Herman would grow up too: he would see the world and have stories to tell about it: he would confront these marvellous pictures and find out how real they were. How snug Herman felt on a winter evening by the old sea-coal fire in Bleecker Street, when his father would tell the children of monstrous waves at sea, waves mountain-high and masts bending like twigs. Herman’s stomach curdled pleasantly at the thought of it, or the equally dizzy but in some ways more marvellous thought of looking over London from the ball of St. Paul’s, and picking out the Monument and London Bridge and Blackfriars and St. Dunstan’s crown, and Southwark, where Shakespeare used to act, across the Thames. One would risk waves as high as mountains if one had some assurance of reaching eventually this fine old land, full of cathedrals and churches that were built before Columbus sailed to America, and narrow, crooked streets without sidewalks, and fields and woods that were as tidy as an American garden. That would be Albany or Gansevoort, prodigiously magnified by age and association. How hard to remember that little boys went to school in Europe, too, and were punished if they didn’t learn their lessons. Did they study geography, grammar, writing, speaking, and spelling there? Did they wear their shirt collars turned over and tied with a black ribbon; and did their papas allow them to wear boots, nice manly boots, instead of shoes? A long breath; a sense of choking anticipation. The days pass so slowly. Herman will be quite old—he may be twenty or twenty-five at this rate, before he goes there!