Melville in Love (12 page)

In a bookcase of the Melville Room at the Berkshire Athenaeum is a large blue volume of engravings that once belonged to Sarah Morewood. In the Pittsfield of her day,
Turner's Rivers of France
would have stood out immediately as an unusual and expensive work to grace any shelf. J. M. W. Turner's genius wasn't so widely recognized in those days, but there was at least one local connection to this English painter. Herman Melville was such an enthusiastic admirer that his own treasured collection of engravings would eventually include at least thirty-three from Turner's work. While Melville was writing
Moby-Dick,
there were some in the English press who thought young Melville and Turner were kindred talents.

As the London
Athenaeum
argued in 1850, Turner and Melville had no other peers when it came to capturing “the poetry of the Ship—her voyages and her crew.” Much of Turner's work was sure to appeal to Melville because it featured so often the majesty of the
sea, and the stark beauty of the tall ships. He couldn't help but identify with a great artist boldly willing to impose his vision on a scene that others saw only in the most literal terms. Turner's work showed him how to take real experiences at sea and merge them with the swirling impressions of something greater and more imaginative.
¹

Turner's fondness for experimenting with colors and shapes created mysteries in his canvases that realists abhorred. This was especially true in the 1840s when Turner took up a subject that was entirely new to him. A rich patron—Elhanan Bicknell, an Englishman in the whale oil business—encouraged him to create a few works featuring whaling ships and their prey. The painter had never been at sea in one of the ships, but the possibilities intrigued him, especially because most people knew so little about the look and movements of these enormous sea creatures.

Bicknell gave Turner a learned book on the subject—Thomas Beale's
The Natural History of the Sperm Whale
—and after carefully examining various sections of it, Turner set to work. (“Turner's pictures of whalers were suggested by this book,” Melville wrote on the title page of Beale's history when he bought a copy in 1850.) Neither the businessman nor the critics liked the results of the painter's efforts. Fashionable London wasn't ready for Turner's whales. Critics ridiculed two of his paintings that were exhibited at the Royal Academy. One of the comic wits of
Punch
suggested that one of the paintings was really a shadowy sketch of “lobster salads.” More serious was the attack in William Harrison Ainsworth's
New Monthly Magazine,
which claimed that Turner's pictures were so garishly ugly that they cast a shadow over every other work exhibited at the Royal Academy. “Mr. Turner is a dangerous man,” warned the magazine, “and ought to be suppressed. But if he must continue to work in this
brimstone vein, he ought to have a small apartment to himself, where he could do no harm.”
²

The common complaint against Turner's work of this period was that his views of real objects were “indistinct,” and no one could tell what was what. The bold use of color, the dreamlike visions, the subtle play of light, and the mere hint of distant shapes were annoying to buyers accustomed to lush realism. When an American collector complained about one of Turner's paintings being “indistinct,” the artist took the criticism in stride, saying, “You should tell him that indistinctness is my fault.” When the next exhibition at the Royal Academy opened, Turner defiantly came back with two more paintings of whaling ships—one of which bore the clumsy and unattractive title
Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves
. He was thumbing his nose at the marketplace, brazenly showing his independence and his refusal to bend to its demands. Of course, both went unsold, but so too did one of the great masterpieces of the century, his apocalyptic vision in a brilliant gold tint,
The Angel Standing in the Sun
—a disturbingly beautiful explosion of light at the end of time.
³

Like Turner at his easel, Melville learned to make a virtue of the fault of indistinctness.
Moby-Dick
is the literary equivalent of a gallery filled with the best of Turner's canvases. So much of the book shows the painter's influence, which can be felt in the bold sweep of the story, in the iridescence of the language, and in the author's frequent willingness to cast a suggestive haze over certain scenes.
Moby-Dick
features an overwhelming collection of powerful scenes in which the shapes we know from reality float in a tumultuous wash of colors and images spilling from the artist's eye. The effect is what happens when the “great flood-gates of the wonder-world”—as Ishmael calls
them—swing wide, producing a cascade of suggestive impressions whose full force may not be understood for years. The first image of the great white whale in
Moby-Dick
is a Turner oil in eleven words—“one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” (It was also a good description of Mount Greylock that winter.)
⁴

When Ishmael is in New Bedford at the beginning of the book and decides to visit the Whaleman's Chapel, a painting catches his eye as he watches Father Mapple mount the pulpit to deliver a sermon on Jonah and the whale. A large work dominating the wall behind the preacher, it shows a ship in distress, fighting to stay afloat in a violent storm “off a lee coast” where the winds have brought it dangerously close to “black rocks.” But in the bleak sky overhead there is a bright beam of sunlight breaking through, and in the middle of that radiance is an angel offering hope—or so Ishmael believes. He thinks the angel is saying, “Beat on, thou noble ship . . . for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling off—serenest azure is at hand.”
⁵

In a book that consistently questions conventional religious dogma, this vision of an angel emerging from the sun is not some pious appeal to faith, as young Ishmael—yet untested by his voyage on the
Pequod
—innocently presumes. It is a profound omen, a sign of the dangers awaiting Ahab and his crew when they commence their voyage on Christmas. As a warning, it is as wasted as all the others because the temptation to overreach for glory or revenge or pride is so strong. But there is something much darker at work here. It is one of the first hints in the book of Melville's fear that all human endeavor, no matter how grand or seemingly righteous, is doomed to fail and be tainted by what he calls the “horrible vulturism of earth”—the universal predatory urge that sweeps humanity into countless voyages to chase and capture one thing or another. It is the vision that Turner
brought to his canvas when he painted the work that Melville alludes to in the description of the chapel painting—
The Angel Standing in the Sun
.
⁶

In Turner's masterpiece the angel standing in the middle of the sun may look benign at first glance, but it is the archangel Michael holding his sword aloft on the Day of Judgment, and in the molten gold of the light pouring down from him, there is nothing below but a few frightened humans fleeing in panic and despair. Overhead, like a blot on the canvas, is a swarm of black birds circling in a frenzy. It was one of the great magical effects of Turner's brushwork that he was able to create the impression of an overwhelming light circling outward and turning inward at the same time. Light flows from the angel while seeming to collapse into a vortex at the outer edges, swallowing the shadowy humans below. Then again, Turner was a master at painting an elemental vortex, especially at sea. What the noted painter and art critic Sir Lawrence Gowing says of light in Turner could also be said of humanity in Melville's vision of a universal vulturism: “Light is not only glorious and sacred, it is voracious, carnivorous, unsparing. It devours impartially, without distinction, the whole living world.”
⁷

Near the end of
Moby-Dick,
as Ahab closes in on his fatal encounter with the whale in what he calls his forty years of “war on the horrors of the deep,” the dawn comes up one morning in a blaze of light that drenches the whole scene and turns the sea into “a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.” It is a frightening but gorgeous Turneresque moment, with sunlight flashing in all directions. Blind to the approaching danger, Ahab mistakes this explosion of light as nature yielding to his will. At this moment, he thinks he is not only a great captain, but a Neptune whose ship is
a “sea-chariot” towing the sun across the world, independent of any other power on earth. Fueled by his “fatal pride,” Ahab soon finds his whale, and the two mighty enemies engage in a battle to the death that will sink the
Pequod
and send every member of its crew to the bottom—except Ishmael. After the whale rams it, the ship is swallowed in a ravenous “vortex” of water. The famous scene is nothing less than a prose version of Turner's
The Angel Standing in the Sun,
complete with “archangelic shrieks,” as Melville puts it, accompanying the disappearance of the mainmast beneath the waves, and the flocks of birds suddenly appearing overhead: “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf.”
⁸

HOW DID A
YOUNG
WRITER
in Pittsfield learn so much from a painter he never met in a country thousands of miles away? Periodicals, books, and museum visits in London taught Melville some of what he knew about Turner. In December 1849, he spent parts of two days that month with one of Turner's oldest friends, the poet and wealthy collector Samuel Rogers. In the Royal Academy catalog for
The Angel Standing in the Sun,
Turner cited two lines from Rogers as the only contemporary inspiration for his painting: “The morning march that flashes to the sun; / The feast of vultures when the day is done.”
⁹

Thanks largely to the high reputation of
Typee
in England, Rogers welcomed his young American visitor warmly, and gave him a tour of his spacious townhouse in London, near Buckingham Palace. It was as much a museum as a residence, with the walls adorned by some of the finest art in any private home—a Rembrandt self-portrait, a large historical scene by Rubens, a majestic Titian, four
paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, five by Nicolas Poussin, eleven by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and several works by Turner. On December 20 Melville stayed for three hours, and came back on the twenty-third for another three hours with Rogers, who was a walking encyclopedia of British life and culture, an old man famed for his anecdotes about the many famous people he had known—from Romantics like Byron to the recent Victorians like Tennyson. There were few men of genius he knew better than Turner, who was then ill and nearing the end of his life.

Samuel Rogers and Turner had worked closely together in 1830 on an expensive book of poetry and engravings called simply
Italy
. (“An interesting book to every person of taste,” Melville would later say of it.) A few years later the two men combined their talents again to create an illustrated version of one of Rogers's best poems,
The Voyage of Columbus
. The poet conceived of the explorer as a man of peace betrayed by future generations who would fight over the New World and spoil paradise with the violence and greed of the Old. It was in this poem—in a canto titled “The flight of an Angel of Darkness”—that Rogers so neatly captured the disillusion of heroes who begin their adventures with high hopes (“The morning march that flashes to the sun”) only to find death and defeat in the end (“The feast of vultures when the day is done”).
¹⁰

For two mornings in London, Herman Melville was the guest in a house where poetry, painting, angels, vultures, Turner's career, fame, and ambition could all occupy the same intellectual space in a setting that was a veritable temple of art. The young man would never again be entertained in any place that could compare with Rogers's house at 22 St. James's Place. An engraving by Charles Mottram in 1815 shows Byron, Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Turner, and Words
worth gathered around the very same dining table where Melville was served breakfast in December. This was a heady moment for an American writer with so few years of literary experience behind him. It provided the kind of inspiration that Melville would describe in his Hawthorne essay: “Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”

The treasures inside Rogers's home were worth far more than the building itself, but Rogers liked to think of his tall townhouse “as a fitting frame to a beautiful picture, or a precious binding to a rare book.” More than his poetry or his money, this house had brought him the greatest renown in his old age. So many visitors to England longed for a glimpse inside that a London guidebook included a detailed list of its most valuable contents, and then added the discouraging note: “Mode of Admission—A letter of introduction (the only mode).” The information was in a section grandly labeled “Houses of the Principal Nobility and Gentry.” (Besides his just claims as a celebrated author, Melville was also able to supply Rogers with a letter of introduction from Edward Everett, then president of Harvard and a former ambassador to Britain, as well as a friend of Judge Shaw.)
¹¹

AFTER LEAVING THIS
HOUSE
of artistic wonders and being regaled for hours with stories of great writers and great painters, Melville must have still had his head in the clouds when he sailed for America a few days later. Within weeks of his return to New York, he was hard at work on a story of a “whaling voyage,” and joking with Richard Henry Dana that he was trying to find poetry in “blubber.”