With a Miltonic confidence in his own gifts, Melville came to view these earlier pieces as the first “earthly rubbish” of his “immense quarries of fine marble.” Melville goes on to say that “no commonplace is ever effectually got rid of, except by essentially emptying one’s self of it into a book; for once trapped into a book, then the book can be put into the fire and all will be well.” “But they are not always put into the fire,” he said with regret. And because of his own laxity in cremation, his crude first fruits stalk abroad to accuse him.
At this early period, Melville had nothing very significant to say; but he seems to have been urged to say it with remorseless pertinacity. In Pierre, he satirises his youthful and reckless prolixity where he speaks of his manuscripts as being of such flying multitudes that “they were to be found lying all round the house; gave a great deal of trouble to the housemaids in sweeping; went for kindlings to the fires; and forever flitting out of the windows, and under the doorsills, into the faces of people passing the manorial mansion.”
Having nothing very particular to write about, he followed an ancient tradition, and wrote of love. In Pierre, which is Melville’s spiritual autobiography, and in Pierre alone, does Melville elaborately busy himself with romantic affection. And in Pierre, his is no sugared and conventional preoccupation. He traces his own development through the love-friendship of boyhood, the miscellaneous susceptibility of adolescence, to a crucifixion in manhood between the images of his wife and his mother. His first Fragment from a Writing Desk seems to have been conceived at a time before his “innumerable wandering glances settled upon some one specific object.”
His second Fragment from a Writing Desk concerns itself with an allegorical quest of elusive feminine loveliness: a kind of Coelebs in Search of a Wife, allegorised and crossed with Lalla Rookh. It survives, as has been said, only as a fragment of a Fragment. Its conclusion must remain a mystery until some old newspaper file disgorges its secrets. It begins as follows:
For the Democratic Press
FRAGMENTS FROM A WRITING DESK
No. 2
“Confusion seize the Greek!” exclaimed I, as wrathfully rising from my chair, I flung my ancient Lexicon across the room and seizing my hat and cane, and throwing on my cloak, I sallied out into the clearer air of heaven. The bracing coolness of an April evening calmed my aching temples, and I slowly wended my way to the river side. I had promenaded the bank for about half an hour, when flinging myself upon the grassy turf, I was soon lost in revery, and up to the lips in sentiment.
I had not lain more than five minutes, when a figure effectually concealed in the ample folds of a cloak, glided past me, and hastily dropping something at my feet, disappeared behind the angle of an adjoining house, ere I could recover from my astonishment at so singular an occurrence.
“Cerbes!” cried I, springing up, “here is a spice of the marvellous!” and stooping down, I picked up an elegant little, rose-coloured, lavender-scented billet-doux, and hurriedly breaking the seal (a heart, transfixed with an arrow) I read by the light of the moon, the following:—
“Gentle Sir: