Chapter 4

In 1828 Allan’s position in society ballooned a little. He moved to a house on Broadway, with a lot two hundred feet deep, and doubtless more commodious rooms, for the rent was almost double that of his old quarters; but whether he was losing hold of his prudence or miscalculating, or whether circumstances that lay beyond his view were altering his position as an importer, one does not quite know. It is possible that, without being fully aware of his losses, he was shaken by the financial crisis of 1826, or it may be that his importations became inept, and the old lines were giving out. At all events, his business became so bad that he moved to Albany in 1830, so that, perhaps, he might take advantage of the Gansevoort connections. But he moved too late. He became a bankrupt. In 1832, when Herman Melville was only thirteen years old, his father gave up the struggle and died.

One suspects from the look of Allan’s portrait that he was a fair-weather sailor and did not know what to do when the winds began to blow adversely. He left his loving wife with eight children, and only the family name to support them. No thanks to Allan that part of the family name was Gansevoort; but although that name certainly was an asset, and although Uncle Peter and his wife doubtless did all that they felt was in their power to make things easier for the proud widow and her orphans, the morals of bourgeois society are meant, like Allan’s character, for smooth sailing, and when hardship overtakes one branch of the family there is usually no such general sharing round among the surviving groups as there is among the poor, who know shipwreck perpetually. Herman was going to the Albany Academy when his father died; he probably knew only by hints and murmurs and brooding faces that a calamity was approaching—and he suddenly found himself a half-orphan, with only the dear mild image of his father to comfort him.

This death before Herman had reached intellectual penetration did Allan a kindness: he became “a shrine in the fresh-foliaged heart of [his son] up to which he ascended by many tableted steps of remembrance; and around which annually he ... hung fresh wreaths of a sweet holy affection. In the shrine stood the perfect marble form of his departed father, without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, serene ... fond personification of perfect human goodness and virtue.” But this did Herman himself an ill turn, for instead of permitting the august image of his father to experience the vicissitudes of the weather, and ripen into the natural disillusion that greets a son when he finds his deity one in flesh with himself, equally mortal, equally fallible—instead of this, the image became fixed, and when Herman outgrew his father, he did not simply leave him behind: he rose up and annihilated him, revenging himself upon the actual Allan for the perfect marble shadow he had carried in his heart. In the asperities of fortune, Mrs. Melville, with a hard row of her own to hoe, doubtless fell in Herman’s heart because she had to face comparison with the marble portrait of his father: even the best of mothers, under such circumstances, would seem a little harsh and unkind, beside him who had by his bankruptcy and his death escaped the dilemmas of both his creditors and his family. At all events, Herman found himself at thirteen in the midst of a hard-hearted world; and the shock of that transposition left him breathless and weak.

The aunts and uncles were kind, of course; but they had cares and interests of their own; and it needed dire extremity to move them to action. Herman’s cousins continued to go to school: the cousins had butter on their bread and cream on their porridge; but the Melvilles must have known that sinking feeling that comes to a big family at table when the eye takes in the bowl of stew or the little roast and the nine plates that wait for it, and knows instantly that no thinning of slices or spreading of gravy will make the portions large enough to satisfy a healthy appetite. The summers in the country, the long, lazy summers, were over: it was winter all the year round. Gansevoort, dogged, patient, resourceful fellow that he was, opened a hat store on Market Street, and as soon as Herman was fifteen, he got a job as clerk in the New York State Bank, of which Uncle Peter was one of the trustees: a year later, Herman shifted over to the hat store, where Gansevoort now needed an extra clerk.

This was not the way, Herman doubtless felt, that one’s adolescence should open. The son of a gentleman can, it is true, remain a gentleman, even when he adds figures or sells hats: in America, thank Heaven, every trade is an honorable trade; but there is something wrong with a world that gives the young Gansevoorts all that their hearts ask for, and that draws the Melvilles up sharply wherever they turn. All Herman’s ambitions, to go to college, to become an orator, like Patrick Henry, to become a great traveller, like Uncle John or Papa, or to become a great general, like Grandfather Peter, to live in Paris, like Uncle Thomas, to make the name of Melville somehow glorious—all these dreams were like great bonfires suddenly drenched by cold rain. He was as unambitious as a man of sixty. Such careers do not begin in a hat shop. The stream of life had suddenly stopped; its margins became stagnant; there was no way out; one might add columns or sell hats forever. One’s uncles and cousins didn’t care. One’s friends only said they cared. Cold, bitter cold as December, the world seemed to young Melville. Fifteen years later, he still felt the bitterness and sting. He had only a lonely pride to wrap around him; and the world, not seeing any money in the pockets of that garment, smiled a little scornfully, and wondered whether it might not be just as well to leave such wrappings off!

At fifteen a lad can do little more than earn his keep; there was no question of Herman’s helping to support the family, as Gansevoort patiently did. Some one must have observed that things were not going well with Herman in the hat shop; or perhaps there were not enough hats to be sold to make his presence necessary; in the summer of 1836 he lived with his Uncle Thomas at Broadhall, helping in the hayfields; and when autumn came he taught school—one needed muscle rather than letters for teaching school in those days—in the Sykes district, near by. He spent the winter in the shadow of Washington Mountain, and when spring came, and his pupils were needed in the fields, he himself felt a desperate longing to see his mother and his sisters again, and Gansevoort and young Allan and little Tom; so, presently, he went back to Lansingburgh, a little river village just outside of Albany, where his mother had moved. Scarcely had the welcome worn off before he realized that his existence was a problem: he was another mouth to feed! What was he going to do? Perhaps Uncle Peter would get him another chance at the bank. Not that? Well, what then? Gansevoort is doing bravely: Allan is already thinking of the law: every one must help.

Young Melville felt the world closing in on him. He had no answer to the major problem of civilization, namely, how to get a living without losing all the other things that make life joyful and significant. Herman’s contemporaries, with all their factories and mines and new-fangled machinery and speeding ships, were perhaps as far from solving this problem as any civilization has yet been: the only people who were contented with the current solution were those whose narrow aims and limited personalities were completely fulfilled by the business routine itself. Herman was not of that cast, so he must invent an alternative. If he cannot go to college, he must at least have that other advantage of an education: the Grand Tour. He will be his own tutor, guide, philosopher, and friend. Why should he not ship for a trip to Europe? He would not merely earn his keep; but at the end of his voyage he might have a little to spare. Europe itself was at least a goal, or the promise of a goal; not a dead-end, like the bank.

Herman had not spent his early years in Manhattan for nothing. He doubtless knew, up in the fresh waters of Albany, the nostalgia of desiring just a whiff of salt-laden wind: when he looked at the little glass ship in the square case that stood on the claw-footed Dutch table in one corner of the sitting-room, that admirable ship, with masts, yards, ropes, all of glass, and little glass sailors on the rigging, and a glass figurehead, and a glass captain smoking a glass cigar and looking at the world with a glassy eye, all his desires somehow crystallized into a sudden overwhelming passion to be on the sea, and to wake up some early moonlit morning in a distant port, with dawn breaking over strange roofs. His father’s books reinforced his dreams; and he was still bound by his father’s heroic image and wanted to follow it, ancient guidebook in hand, through the streets of Liverpool. That would somehow establish a connection with those better and happier times before bankruptcy, death, penurious circumstances, had cut like flint through the soles of paper boots. In England, he might recapture his magnificent ambitions; or, if not that, he would at least return to Lansingburgh with a badge of cosmopolitan distinction: his sisters, Fanny, Helen, Kate, Augusta, would be proud of him; and people might say when he passed: Do you know that Herman Melville has been to Europe? Yes, and he’s only seventeen!

It sounded daring and adventurous; but there was a brackish taste in the going. At the outset of the journey, on the boat to New York, he did not have enough fare for the trip and had to brazen his poverty out: his sole wealth was a fowling-piece his brother had given him, to sell in New York for spending-money; with the gun and a dollar and his brother’s cast-off shooting-jacket, he set out to face the world. He felt himself driven out into the desert, an infant Ishmael, without a maternal Hagar to accompany him and give him comfort. Riches and poverty stared at him at his very first venture alone beyond the family nest: the jovial party in the saloon, gay, flushed over wine, crackers, cheese, cigars—and himself on deck, collar up, outcast, facing the rain! “Talk not of the bitterness of middle-age and after life,” exclaimed Melville in Redburn, “a boy can feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mildew has fallen; and the fruit, which with others is only blasted after ripeness, with him is nipped in the first blossom and bud. And never again can such blights be made good; they strike in too deep, and leave such a scar that the air of Paradise might not erase it.”

Melville’s downheartedness was deepened by contrast with the natural expectations which he had formed in the balmier period of his childhood, and which people somehow kept up, for form, to go with the family name. His sisters told all inquiring friends that Herman had gone abroad, as if just for his health and education with no expense spared; and when he applied for a place on ship, under the tutelage of a young family friend, his friend’s high talk about Melville’s name and connections enabled the sly captain to withhold an advance in pay—because the family would attend to that! The pretensions were shabby ones; they brought Herman nothing but an insufficient supply of clothes and an empty stomach in the day that elapsed between his saying good-bye to his friend and leaving port. That was the irony of having a proud name and a poor purse, of following in his father’s footsteps and sleeping in the forecastle instead of a stateroom.

Thirty days on the water will take the wind out of these pretensions. Herman will forget that he is a Melville and a Gansevoort and a pupil of the Albany Academy and a relative of a regent and a general, and a reader of books, and a member of the Juvenile Total Abstinence Association and the Anti-smoking Society; he will lose many of the little refinements of birth and breeding; but the loss will not leave him destitute. In exchange, he will learn the ropes, and find out what men are like in the rough.