Chapter 8

One may figure Melville’s career as a June evening—the sun glowing in the sky, the birds darting about the trees, chattering, warbling, trilling, intensely active. The sky-gold turns to waves of salmon pink: the pink to lavender: the lavender edges into purple: suddenly dark has come. The cheerful sounds cease. A belated bird or two silently wings to his nest: there is blackness, and the hoarse croak of distant frogs alone breaks the silence. In half an hour the scene changes from the most brilliant activity and ecstasy to utmost passiveness. Bats swoop silently in the air; a chill comes up from the river: darkness is cool as well as silent. Is all over? Not yet. Presently the fireflies make a warm firmament of the fields, and in the pale rising of the moon, the earth itself takes on another glory. There are fireflies and moonlight and the domestic chirp of crickets in the night of Melville’s life, its last quarter century—not silence and unrelieved blackness. After the first collapse of day into night, nature stirs again: there is movement and there is life. A little before the clock tolls the hour of midnight and the day itself passes, a shower of aerolites falls through the sky.... We have just seen the afterglow; and we are now to witness the final brilliance of the night.

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FLOWERING ALOE

The days pass and one day is like another: there is comfort in monotony. The brick house in East Twenty-sixth Street, with its muddy-yellow exterior and its brownstone trim, with its old mahogany parlour furniture, its towering brown bookcases, its print of the Bay of Naples hanging in the front hall, has a calm dark gravity which sets it off from houses that make garish gestures of brightness or gaiety within. When the sun hits the rear rooms there is warmth; when geraniums and pansies appear in the yard below there is colour. Melville’s house is a refuge from the city outside. Looking like every other house in the row, it has still a quiet interior of its own, an interior, like Herman Melville’s, acquired before the débâcle of the Civil War. The brown wallpaper and the black iron bed in the wan north light of Herman Melville’s room almost alone indicate that a day has dawned that is somewhat darker than a starless night.

The sixties have passed; the seventies have come. Heroism gives way to complacency, and courage to chicane. Even General Grant himself, type of resolute action and manly confidence and dogged devotion while the war was on, becomes in Presidential office little more scrupulous than the head of a foraging party: gambling and corruption take place before the magnanimous man who had been chivalrous to Lee and thoughtful of the conquered army. Is it any wonder that New York itself, which had been invaded and seized by people who had left Europe under stress and poverty, and were thrown into its miserable tenements and sinister streets, this Salonica of the Western world, was prey to a ring of politicians as remarkable for their brazenness as for their peculations? On the edges of the city, near the gas tanks, but sometimes spilling over into the respectable sections, gangs line up on each side of the street and exchange bullets. It is worth one’s life to carry a gold watch through certain parts of the East Side: Constantinople, twenty years before, was no happier place for felons and assassins. What superb triumphs offset this brutality, this degradation! In 1869, an elevated railroad is built; a little later, a cable car is attached to a cable, and goes; the human voice finds a means of travelling over an electro-magnetic circuit. Man has stolen fire from heaven again, and is conquering the world with it; but, stealing the fire, he has left the more valuable parts of heaven behind. The voice that travels so far says the same banal things. The railroad that shuttles men back and forth across the city does not improve anything except the potentialities for speculation in real estate.

Melville had foreseen all the sordid developments of “this dishonorable epoch” while they were still in the germ, thus fulfilling the Chinese philosopher’s notion of what a wise man is: he had viewed the myriads playing pigmy parts, debased into equality, and “in glut of all material arts” had predicted a civic barbarism, with man disennobled and brutalized, “dead level of rank commonplace: an Anglo-Saxon China”—the very Dark Ages of democracy. He had perceived that the new democracy, fed by the smatterings of newspapers, and moved by the war-cries of demagogues, was in reality as credulous and foolish as the polity of the Middle Ages; perhaps more so, because it had lost a decent and saving sense of its inferiority. What part could Melville take in this world? How could he cope with the practical men of his time, and “mix with tempers keen and narrow like a knife”? Or how could he have any intellectual transactions with such good-hearted but mushy-minded people as Edmund Clarence Stedman? His new contemporaries were schoolboys. Howells had the optimism of a boom-town newspaper or a stock prospectus: Lanier, who deserved better of Fate, wrote a booster book about Florida for a railroad: and in the decade when Melville published his own Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Mark Twain achieved affluence by producing Innocents Abroad.

Melville himself had hailed the spirit of the West as that which truly reflected America; but when the spirit actually appeared, in the form of a Mark Twain or a Bret Harte, he must have had his misgivings. At thirty, Melville had grappled with spiritual problems that Mark Twain kept furtively locked in his bosom until his old age, and, for fear of destroying his reputation, did not publish till after his death. What did Mark Twain know of “a hell over which mere hell serves for a heaven”? These new Americans were innocents at home as well as abroad. Those who knew that darkness existed were afraid of it: they said, whistling cheerfully, that Progress would do away with darkness in a year or two: the arc-light would abolish the burglar: the long-range gun would abolish war: the ocean cable would abolish international misunderstanding: typewriters would relieve the difficulties of authorship: divorce would do away with the maladjustments of the married. Innocents indeed! Is one puzzled that Melville shrank from the post-war generation?

Melville’s home was a refuge, and his shanty of an office was a refuge too. While the new parts of the city were exulting in the ugliness of brownstone fronts, accentuated by perverse cornices and mouldings, Twenty-sixth Street was still largely red brick, built a little too late for charm, but early enough to possess iron balconies facing south, like London in the Regency. Every morning a grave, firm, square-bearded man leaves Number 104. A little slow and reflective in gait, as if deliberately setting himself apart in pace as well as inward gesture from the world about him, Melville turns west toward Madison Square, passes through its green, and follows Fifth Avenue, whose ranks of trees are just beginning to be broken, down to Fourteenth Street, where already the brownstones, though only a few years old, are being converted into fashionable confectionery stores, bakeries, jewelry shops. He follows the broad thoroughfare clear over to Hudson Street, and then turns to the block below, where the Gansevoort Market and the customs office lie, touching the river. These brown buildings, these smug garish shops, these crass, dirty waterfront hotels, are too ugly to attract his attention even if use and want did not quiet his interest. In five years, ten years, twenty years, the changes are not very important: the horse-cars become fewer and the tangle of traffic at Union Square is worse and Broadway from Fourteenth Street up becomes “Ladies’ Mill,” the fashionable afternoon thoroughfare for shopping: but on the whole the outer world does not make any serious claims. The familiarity of everything is reassuring. The name Gansevoort, on the market at the end of his walk, is a touch of welcome. There is a Gansevoort Hotel on Little Twelfth Street and West Street; but when Melville inquires what it stands for, he finds that the hero of Fort Stanwix is now only a name. Well: names remain! Gansevoort remains; perhaps Melville will remain, too.

Melville, as customs inspector, has one of the lowest political positions open to patronage: he is an Ishmael among Ishmaels, and a pariah among outcasts: impecunious bankers, broken-down sports, bankrupt merchants, political nondescripts, people who were fit for nothing elsewhere, in short, as R. H. Stoddard described it, “an asylum for nonentities.” The scene itself, though mean, brings Melville close to his element: the ships coming in, the odour of tar, hemp, rotting wood, brine, the severe manly ways of the captains, the affable circumspection of the pursers—they remind Melville of another day and another fortune and another disguise. Best for him to do his work, to shut his mouth, to get through the day patiently: like Rama, the Hindu god, misplaced in human lot, discredited, abiding there in outlawry. “May life and fable so agree?” Melville asked in Clarel, and he knew the answer: they did. “There is more power and beauty in the well-kept secret of one’s self and one’s thoughts,” Maurice de Guérin had written, “than in the display of a whole heaven that one may have inside one.” Melville underlined those words, and kept his heaven facing inward.

The monotony brings quiet: the monotony brings peace. On drizzly mornings, before the ships can drudge up the river through the fog, there are hours of inward placidity. Melville peers through the pall on the river outside and sees somewhat more poignantly into his own position; perhaps the final lines of a poem come to him then:

Nor cringe if come the night: Walk through the cloud to meet the pall, Though light forsake thee, never fall From fealty to light.

While he must serve his sentence in this prison, there is only one thing to fear: a new Administration; shifting to a new post, learning new faces, having once more to battle and struggle. Fortunately, Melville has friends in the department, clever worldly fellows like Stoddard: a word to him is passed along to the chief; the rumour of a transfer is quieted. Melville need never leave this cloistered street, this melancholy examination and appraisal, this even equable round: this is as good as another Sailors’ Snug Harbor, over which his younger brother Tom now is governor. Yes, it is good for a lifetime—if one may call these empty hours life.

Gansevoort Pier at one end: Lizzie and the two girls at the other. The meagre evening dinner, indifferently cooked, the household gossip, the strain of observing an emptiness at the table, of Mackie, who is dead, and Stanwix, who has gone off: the sudden look of tenderness on the worn face opposite, that stings yet sweetens everything. The customs office is hell: this family circle is perhaps purgatory: it is only when Melville withdraws to his room upstairs, and is by himself, that he can faintly re-enter the heaven that once surrounded him. There, with his pictures, his books, his glass of brandy to seduce sleep, the day ends in a solitude and a hush—tolerably. This is the daily round; but there are better occasions. On a warm summer night Melville might loll on the canvas steamer-chair placed on the narrow iron balcony, smoking his pipe, looking at the stars, gently holding Elizabeth’s hand. Melville’s passion is spent; but affection has deepened. With the slow renewal of his organic faith, he can accept his wife more fully and warmly, much more fully and warmly than when sex itself was primarily a physical irritation that left him disappointed and doubtful of the very basis of love, when he was tormented by passions at once inexpressible and unreciprocable.

When one of Melville’s daughters grows up and marries, and Melville becomes a grandfather, he goes out to these children easily: he bounces them on his knee, makes noises like wind whistling through the rigging, sings a stave of an old chanty, walks with them in Central Park. This is not the tense harassed man his own children bitterly remembered from their youth: he is benign even when his thoughts are elsewhere, and occasionally downright jolly. His granddaughter still remembers his queer, literary words and the wiry feel of his beard: that bespeaks intimacy. There is a shadow between Melville and his family: they do not see him as he is, but as he is distorted by their own repulsions, their own bitterness: but when Melville’s son-in-law casts eyes on Melville for the first time, buying a cigar in a hotel lobby in the White Mountains, there is something in the old man’s air, like that in the man Flammonde, that captivates him and holds his attention: a distinguished man! In his family, he will remain an exile. They do not understand his jocularity and his occasional high spirits. They are offended by his inept sense of humour. In the Berkshire days he had dubbed one of the village gossips Miss Pecksniff and his mother had covered herself with mortification by addressing the good lady by this title when she called. One never could be quite sure about Herman Melville’s jokes. His notion of a jolly time was to cook up a mess of crabs and sit around the table for a whole afternoon, picking at the flesh, drinking ale, telling stories, and haranguing the world in general, as if his wife and daughters and cousins were in the maintop of the Neversink. They were bored by these jokes, and indifferent to Melville’s high spirits. If his daughters had not been reduced to dowdy dresses, if he had not had the wicked habit of asking belated suitors whether they preferred hominy or oatmeal for breakfast, if the family did not all feel that the high spirits of a poor man were purchased too cheaply, Melville might not have felt the hostile ring around him. These outbursts would be paid for, perhaps, by depression and inner exasperation: but they kept the too-even daily round from appalling Melville like the breath of infinity.

The age was against Melville; and his family were the mirror of the age: he knew that. They believed in work, in working and keeping up an appearance: in being respectable and tepid and unemotional and industrious. Even the nicest of his relatives, like his cousin Kate Gansevoort, with whom he maintained a desultory correspondence, rather apologized for being a person of leisure. For them all, doing, not being, was the main end of life. As if there were any merit in not being a person of leisure! They talked of the dignity of work. Bosh. True work is the necessity of humanity’s earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, ninety-nine hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary or harmful and wicked. What people needed was not work: they needed values. To recite poetry, to contemplate pictures, to write or to talk briskly or to meditate and chew one’s own thoughts, quietly, on the maintop—work was good if it made these things possible, and bad if it blinded one to them, or made them impossible....