Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (28 page)

What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.
D. H. Lawrence

The facts of Melville’s life (much is hazy) have been exhaustively chronicled, principally by Hershel Parker’s leviathan biography. He was born (‘Melvill’) in New York, with deeper family roots in Boston. Few families had a nobler American pedigree. Herman (the third child and second son) was the descendant of a paternal grandfather who had led the ‘tea party’ in 1773. His maternal grandfather, of Dutch extraction, had served as a general in the Revolutionary Wars. Herman belonged, as Parker puts it, to ‘the highest aristocracy in the country’. It was a crushingly heavy mantle for a child not initially recognised as in any way exceptional. ‘Slow in comprehension’ was one damning verdict; the more so since Melville’s father, Allan, did not in any way add to the familial distinction. The family business in dry goods was bankrupted and Herman’s father died when his son was twelve. Hershel Parker’s massive biography begins with a vivid vignette of ‘the terrified child and the broken man’ packing up household valuables for flight from the advancing creditors.

Herman’s later childhood was a thing of irregular – but good – schooling and false starts. Following further financial reverses (his amiable brother Gansevoort was now head of the family, and its business), Herman followed the script written by romantic fiction for adventurous lads like him and went off to sea. He did not, as the same script ordained, ‘run away’. Gansevoort secured him a berth as a cabin boy on a voyage from New York to Liverpool and Herman spent a few weeks in England before the return trip. The experience is recalled, wryly, in the later novel
Redburn: His First Voyage
(1849). On his return, Melville tried school teaching and clerking, a drudgery he immortalised in his late short story ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ – in which the pen-pushing hero, an American Pooter, withers away, muttering, to every suggestion that he actually do something, ‘I would prefer not to.’

Melville’s ‘life began’, as he preferred to say, when, like Ishmael, he again answered the call of the sea and, now bearded and ‘wild-haired’, enrolled as a ‘common sailor’ on the whaler
Acushnet
in January 1841. He was crammed for months into the forecastle – one of the only places in America where different races, even blacks and Indians, mixed on equal terms. There were half a dozen languages and a score of bodies crammed into a space the size of a bedroom. As Parker notes, ‘mutual masturbation was commonplace, sodomy much less so’. Communal onanism was called ‘claw for claw’ – sailors going at each other’s privates like fighting cocks. In his later fictional version of life aboard the
Acushnet
, Melville refers
darkly to the ‘sins of Gomorrah’, by which he presumably means more criminal intercourse than jovial clawing.

After six months of the stifling intimacies of the foc’sle, the sailors enjoyed a taste of ‘liberty’ in the Marquesas, in the South Pacific, having sailed around Cape Horn. The
Acushnet
was welcomed by native girls swimming, naked: ‘What a sight for us bachelor sailors! How avoid so dire a temptation?’ the hero asks in
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life
(1846). Melville, it is presumed, didn’t. But a few days’ liberty was not enough. With a companion (‘Toby’ in
Typee
), Melville jumped ship. Had they been apprehended, they would have been clapped in irons. They weren’t. For Melville, it was his second great escape in life.

How long Melville – he and Toby being soon separated – spent with the Typee natives is not exactly known. But it was long enough to enjoy a voluptuous relationship with ‘the beauteous nymph Fayaway’, clad in ‘the garb of Eden’, and to discover that these ‘savages’ and reputed ‘cannibals’ were, in fact, as civilised as any American citizen. Melville’s observations, as recorded in
Typee
, are anthropologically sensible and decades ahead of his time. This refusal to adhere to the romantic stereotypes (‘heathenish rites and human sacrifices’) popularised by other novels, perversely, was one reason that his seafaring novels were regarded as merest invention.

If his life started when he embarked on the
Acushnet
, his life as a novelist began when he deserted the ship. He made no attempt to carry on whaling, signing on to sail home on a short-handed barque, the
Lucy Ann
. It was a poorly disciplined vessel and Melville, somewhat reluctantly it seems, made part of a mutiny against the captain. This led to jail – not entirely uncomfortable – in Tahiti, a phase of Melville’s adventures which is chronicled in his second novel,
Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
(1847). Indirectly, the
Acushnet
mutiny inspired what is Melville’s finest novella, ‘Benito Cereno’, in which he explores the malign reciprocities of racism – the servant holding the razor to the throat of his nominal ‘owner’. Every ship, every country, is in the possession of the oppressed, if they choose to take it.

Melville was further delayed in his return to America by a stopover in Hawaii. He had now, for a period, ‘gone native’, freed of the ‘tabus’ of his country, class and time. While in Hawaii (then the Sandwich Islands) he agitated against the sexual puritanism imposed by missionaries – a theme pursued, fiercely, in
Omoo
. This freebooting phase of his life ended in August 1843, when Melville signed on, in Honolulu, with the US Navy, as an ‘Ordinary Seaman’. This final voyage, in a very orderly frigate, is chronicled in
White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War
, the third in his great sea-going sequence. In the longer journeys at sea undertaken by US Navy vessels, there was, Melville observed, more sodomy or, as he put it, ‘The sins for which the city of the plain were overthrown still linger in some of these
wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep.’ Less viciously, these ships had libraries which were better supplied with good fiction than many towns onshore. Melville read widely over these months. Whether he indulged any of the sins of Gomorrah is not known.

A manly and bronzed Herman returned home in October 1844 to find the Melville family fortunes improved. Gansevoort was making his way in public life as an aide to President James K. Polk. Herman was encouraged by his family to turn his rich trove of Marquesan ‘yarns’ into print. His sea-faring years were over. Having settled down, he began to write his first novel. But
Typee
was not wanted by America’s publishers. Bizarrely, Harpers turned it down on the grounds that ‘it was impossible it could be true’. Gansevoort, currently posted to London (and very ill – he would die a few weeks later), got it taken by Murray’s, the country’s leading publisher of travel books, for a generous £100.
Typee
came out in 1846, and was well received. The sequel,
Omoo
, was snapped up.

A confident Melville, now determined on a career in fiction, married in 1847. His wife, Elizabeth Shaw, was from as distinguished a family as his own. The daughter of a chief justice in Massachusetts, she came with money – which the Melvilles (with Gansevoort gone) were short of. The newlywed couple retired to an estate, Arrowhead, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where Herman could mix his writing with some genteel farming. Here they lived for a dozen years, as the family grew by four children. Here, too, Melville wrote
Moby Dick
(initially ‘The Whale’) and where he had a brief intense friendship with the novelist’s dedicatee, Nathaniel Hawthorne, living nearby. Much has been made of their very occasional contacts.

The Melville marriage was difficult, however. Herman was temperamental, disappointed and, reportedly, drunken and mentally unstable. Elizabeth Shaw Melville had a lot to put up with. He was publishing steadily, but without the success he knew he deserved.
Moby Dick
baffled its readers, and continued to do so for decades. Was it even a novel? contemporaries wondered, as they ploughed through chapter after chapter of cetaceous zoology, marine myth and abstruse nautical history. Neither was Melville’s angular poetry much to American public taste, which preferred Longfellow.

Melville clinched his downward trajectory with the supremely baffling
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
(1852), the first, and only, of his land-based novels. The hero, Pierre Glendinning, only son of a rich widow, breaks his engagement with the eminently suitable Lucy when he discovers a half-sister, Isabel, the illegitimate daughter of his revered father. The couple run away to New York where he tries his hand, unsuccessfully, at authorship. It all ends tragically. When they learn of the hidden scandal, Lucy and Pierre’s mother both die of grief. Isabel and Pierre, who are in prison,
contrive to kill themselves. The last paragraphs, as the dead hero and dying heroine are discovered by a friend, conveys the grotesque quality of the whole:

‘Yes! Yes! – Dead! Dead! Dead! – without one visible wound – her sweet plumage hides it. – Thou hellish carrion, this is thy hellish work! Thy juggler’s rifle brought down this heavenly bird! Oh, my God, my God! Thou scalpest me with this sight!’

Pierre
fell flatter than flat, taking Melville’s reputation with it. Melville’s publication rate thereafter slumped, although he was still writing energetically. He turned to lecturing about the South Seas, which he evidently did well. The family moved to New York during the Civil War, and at its conclusion, in 1866, his in-laws contrived to secure him a sinecure as a customs inspector in New York. His later life was nevertheless unhappy. His two sons died before their father; one, apparently, by suicide. Melville’s creative energies were directed to an epic poem,
Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land
(1876), which has the distinction of being the longest published poem in American literature. A narrative work, it chronicles a young theology student’s quest for belief. When published, it set the seal on a life of failed literary innovation.

The rehabilitation of Herman Melville started in the 1920s. D. H. Lawrence asserted, in his study of classic American writers, that ‘
Moby Dick
is a great book’. The first serious biography was published in 1923, which similarly focused on the ‘mystic’ aspect of Melville’s work. His writings (with a stress on the more manageable novellas) were installed on educational curricula; doctoral dissertations were written. The ‘Melville Revival’ received a further boost in the 1970s. E. M. Forster had been an early enthusiast and had identified Herman Melville as a closet homosexual in one of his notebooks, as early as 1926. Benjamin Britten’s opera,
Billy Budd
, with Forster’s libretto, drew out the perceived sexual implications of the strange love and death triangle between the ‘handsome sailor’, Claggart, and Captain Edward Fairfax Vere.

This ‘new explanation’ of Melville and the greatness of his fiction depended on the supposed ‘encrypted sexuality’ of the texts. Rich pickings for such cryptanalysts were located in
Chapter 11
of
Moby Dick
, in which Ishmael and Queequeg share a double bed, before embarking, and such passages as that in the later section describing the removal of sperm from the ‘cassock’ of the whale:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,– Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

‘Surely the oldest piece of phallicism in all the world’s literature,’ D. H. Lawrence comments. Oldest, perhaps; oddest, certainly.

‘Villain!’ gasped Le Noir, shaking his fist and choking with rage; ‘villain! you shall repent this in every vein of your body!’
From
Capitola’s Peril
, a sequel to
The ‘Hidden Hand’

One of the band of American women novelists who came to prominence during the 1850s, Mrs Southworth’s style was more gothic and sensational than others of the ‘feminised fifties’ group. Emma Nevitte’s father was a merchant whose import business was ruined and whose health was shattered by the 1812 war with England. He died when his daughter was four. The religious background to Nevitte’s childhood was mixed. Her father was Catholic, her mother Episcopalian. She herself was to be more sceptical and a less propagandistic Christian novelist than her peers – Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or ‘Fanny Fern’.

The young Emma was, by her own account, ‘not beautiful’, and later confessed herself jealous as a growing girl of her sister Charlotte, who was. Emma, on the other hand, was the cleverer of the two and began working life as a teacher, aged fifteen, in 1834. In 1840, barely out of her teens, she married an inventor, Frederick Hamilton Southworth and they had two children. However, the marriage soon failed and the couple separated in 1844. In later life Southworth often referred to herself as a widow – presumably so as not to alienate her stricter readers.