Chapter 4

The decision was made; the door was closed: Melville’s troubles and humiliations could carry him no lower. For the first time in ten years Melville had the means, the energy, the relief from anxiety necessary for the prosecution of a long work, and with indomitable spirit he set to work again. Melville’s retreat was not a withdrawal from his proper self, but a withdrawal from the conditions that hampered its expression—the taste of the public and the predilections of publishers, the demand for warmed-over Peedee and Hullabaloo. “How live at all,” he asks himself, “if once a fugitive from thy own nobler part, though pain be portion inwrought with the grain,” and in this sense Melville was never a fugitive. His next effort was a long narrative poem—the original edition in two volumes numbers 571 pages and about 20,000 lines—based on his Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. In his Constantinople notebook, he had originally set down a suggestion for Frescoes of Travel by Three Brothers, Poet, Painter, and Scholar; and in the intervening years the conception had grown and expanded into a modern Canterbury pilgrimage of the harassed, the faithless, the doubting, the exiled. Clarel, this new work, was not published till 1876; but the book itself was probably written shortly after the Civil War: the heightened skill in verse, the reference to the Civil War in Part IV, the fact that the poem is all of a piece, and the testimony of Melville’s surviving daughter, all focus on this period; and Melville’s own reference to the poem’s having been long in existence before his uncle, Mr. Peter Gansevoort, generously provided money for its publication, enables one to associate the beginning of this mental pilgrimage with his withdrawal into the Custom House.

Melville’s short sojourn in Palestine had made a deep impression on him: the notes that belonged to those weeks were full of observations. In Jerusalem he had encountered all sorts of queer people: an old commercial man giving tracts to people whose language he did not understand; a Philadelphian turned Jew, who had married a Jewess; a fanatical American missionary going about Jerusalem with an open Bible, looking forward to the opening asunder of Mount Olivet and in the meanwhile preparing the highway for the procession of the dead; a crazy American woman who had opened an agricultural academy for the Jews without converting a single Jew to either agriculture or Christianity. Deliberately he had saturated his mind with the atmosphere of Jerusalem, “offering myself up,” he noted, “as a passive subject, and no unwilling one, to its weird impression,” and always rising at dawn and walking outside the city walls. In the afternoon he would stand by the Shepherd’s Gate, on the spot where Christ was stoned, and “watch the shadows sliding, sled-like, down the hills of Beretta and Zion into the valley of Jehoshaphat, then, after resting awhile, creeping up the opposite side of Olivet, entering tomb after tomb, and cave after cave.” The Christ-mood sometimes came over him; he felt in himself the unrecognized god, or the goaded deity, the mystic scapegoat of an inscrutable patriarchal presence; he too had climbed the way of Calvary. But the Devil’s ingenuity did not impress him: the Mount of Temptation was only a black, arid mount overlooking the Dead Sea: why did the foolish fiend think any one would value the rulership of such an empire—and if it was only a vision, why take him up to the Mount? But though every rock and road had an association, it was the landscape of Palestine that overwhelmed him: the arid hills, the smell of burning rubbish in Jerusalem, the melancholy olive tree, the whitish mildew that pervaded whole tracts of landscape—bleached—leprosy—encrustation of cakes—old cheese—bones of rocks—crunched, gnawed, and mumbled—mere refuse and rubbish of creation, comparing with ordinary regions as a skeleton with the living and rosy man. “Is the desolation of the land,” Melville asked himself, “the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are the favourites of Heaven!” Palestine had dissipated his romantic expectation; but it had reciprocated all the aridness and emptiness of his spirit. In the antediluvian port of Joppa, just before his departure, Joppa, which was too ancient to have antiquities, he felt like Jonah himself, and only strong self-control and grim defiance enabled him to keep cool and patient. The Dead Sea had concentrated all these impressions: the foam on the beach and pebbles had been like the slaver of a mad dog: the water had been swarthy, bitter, and, carrying the bitter taste in his mouth all day, he had felt the utter bitterness of life. “Bitter is it to be poor and bitter to be reviled, and oh, bitter are these waters of death, thought I.”

All these sights and experiences formed the background of Clarel; but the poem itself is far richer in detail than the notebooks: it is an imaginative elaboration of his experiences, and not a reproduction of them. The arid background, which reflected Melville’s own feeling of hopelessness in 1857, retreated: the foreground is thronged with people who have independent lives and motives. All the major characters, Clarel the student, Vine the wanderer, Rolfe, another uneasy wanderer, Mortmain, the disillusioned Swedish revolutionary, and Ungar, a Baltimore Catholic with a streak of Indian in him, all these characters, it is true, centre like focussed rays in Melville’s own being, baffled by his perplexities, and arguing, like his own doubts, among themselves. The spirit that pervades Clarel is sober, restrained, steady-eyed: its failure as poetry is due, in part, to this very sobriety of thought.