Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

The astonishing variety of contradictory qualities synthesised in Moby-Dick exists nowhere else in literature, perhaps, in such paradoxical harmony. These qualities, in differences of combination and emphasis, are discoverable, however, in all of Melville’s writings. And he published, besides anonymous contributions to periodicals, ten novels and five volumes of poetry (including the two volumes privately printed at the very close of his life). There survives, too, a bulk of manuscript material: a novel, short stories, and a body of verse. And branded on everything that Melville wrote is there the mark of the extraordinary personality that created Moby-Dick.

Though some of Melville’s writing is distinctly disquieting in devastating insight, and much of it is very uneven in inspiration, none of it is undistinguished. Yet only four of his books have ever been reprinted. The rest of his work, long since out of print, is excessively rare, some of it being practically unavailable. The scarcity of a book, however, is not invariably a sign of its insignificance. It is one of the least accessible of Melville’s books that Mr. Masefield singles out for especial distinction. “The book I love best of his,” says Mr. Masefield, “is one very difficult to come by. I think it is his first romance, and I believe it has never been reprinted here. It is the romance of his own boyhood. I mean Redburn. Any number of good pens will praise the known books, Typee and Omoo and Moby-Dick and White-Jacket, and will tell their qualities of beauty and romance. Perhaps Redburn will have fewer praises, so here goes for Redburn; a boy’s book about running away to sea.” Even more difficult of access is Pierre—a book at the antipodes from Redburn. Far from being a boy’s book, Pierre was prophetic of the pessimism of Hardy and the subtlety of Meredith. From Redburn to Pierre; from Typee, a spirited travel-book on Polynesia, to Clarel, an intricate philosophical poem in two volumes: these mark the antithetical extremes of the art that mated poetry and blubber, whaling and metaphysics. The very complexity and versatility of Melville’s achievement has been an obstacle in the way of his just appreciation. Had Mandeville turned from his Travels, to write The City of Dreadful Night, the incompatibility would have been no less extraordinary or bewildering.

Indeed, Melville’s complete works, in their final analysis, are a long effort towards the creation of one of the most complex, and massive, and original characters in literature: the character known in life as Herman Melville. “I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids,” he wrote to Hawthorne while he was in the middle of Moby-Dick, “which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould. It seems to me now that Solomon was the truest man who ever spoke, and yet that he managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism.”

Blighted by disillusionment, and paralysed by doubt, Melville came to treat as an irrelevancy, the making of books. “He informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated,’” wrote Hawthorne in his Note-book, after Melville visited him in Southport, England, in 1856; “but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation. It is strange how he persists—as he has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amidst which we were sitting. He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” If, in contempt for the orthodox interpolations by which pious scribes attempted to sweeten Solomon’s bitter message, Melville ever managed truth as he saw it, it was more to violate popular conservatism than to propitiate it. “We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets,” he editorially wrote Hawthorne in 1851, “and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us.” And as Melville grew in disillusionment, he grew in astonishment. In his relentless pessimism he boasted himself “in the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet bag,—that is to say, the Ego.” It was his ripest conviction that the exclamation point and the triumphant perpendicular pronoun were interchangeable signs. But to the end, he bristled with minor revelations.

Though he boasted that he crossed the frontier into Eternity with nothing but a carpet bag, he had, in fact, sent more bulky consignments on ahead. And at the final crack of doom, this dead and disappointed mariner may yet rise to an unexpected rejoicing. For at that time of ultimate reckoning, according to the eschatology of Mr. Masefield, “then the great white whale, old Moby-Dick, the king of all the whales, will rise up from his quiet in the sea, and go bellowing to his mates. And all the whales in the world—the sperm-whales, the razor-back, the black-fish, the rorque, the right, the forty-barrel Jonah, the narwhal, the hump-back, the grampus and the thrasher—will come to him, ‘fin-out,’ blowing their spray to the heavens. Then Moby-Dick will call the roll of them, and from all the parts of the sea, from the north, from the south, from Callao to Rio, not one whale will be missing. Then Moby-Dick will trumpet, like a man blowing a horn, and all that company of whales will ‘sound’ (that is, dive), for it is they that have the job of raising the wrecks from down below.

“Then when they come up the sun will just be setting in the sea, far away to the west, like a ball of red fire. And just as the curve of it goes below the sea, it will stop sinking and lie there like a door. And the stars and the earth and the wind will stop. And there will be nothing but the sea, and this red arch of the sun, and the whales with the wrecks, and a stream of light upon the water. Each whale will have raised a wreck from among the coral, and the sea will be thick with them—row-ships and sail-ships, and great big seventy-fours, and big White Star boats, and battleships, all of them green with the ooze, but all of them manned by singing sailors. And ahead of them will go Moby-Dick, towing the ship our Lord was in, with all the sweet apostles aboard of her. And Moby-Dick will give a great bellow, like a fog-horn blowing, and stretch ‘fin-out’ for the sun away in the west. And all the whales will bellow out an answer. And all the drowned sailors will sing their chanties, and beat the bells into a music. And the whole fleet of them will start towing at full speed towards the sun, at the edge of the sky and water. I tell you they will make white water, those ships and fishes.

“When they have got to where the sun is, the red ball will swing open like a door, and Moby-Dick, and all the whales, and all the ships will rush through it into an anchorage in Kingdom Come. It will be a great calm piece of water, with land close aboard, where all the ships of the world will lie at anchor, tier upon tier, with the hands gathered forward, singing. They’ll have no watches to stand, no ropes to coil, no mates to knock their heads in. Nothing will be to do except singing and beating on the bell. And all the poor sailors who went in patched rags, my son, they’ll be all fine in white and gold. And ashore, among the palm-trees, there’ll be fine inns for the seamen.” And there, among a numerous company, will be Fayaway, and Captain Ahab, and Jack Chase, and Jarl, and Toby, and Pierre, and Father Mapple, and Jackson, and Doctor Long Ghost, and Kory-Kory, and Bildad, and Peleg, and Fedallah, and Tashetego, and Marnoo, and Queequeg. But it seems hardly likely that Melville will there find Hawthorne to tempt by a basket of champagne into some little shady corner, there to cross their legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and to discourse pleasantly of all the things manifold which once so much distressed them. In my Father’s house are many mansions.

CHAPTER II
GHOSTS

“We are full of ghosts and spirits; we are as grave-yards full of buried dead, that start to life before us. And all our dead sires, verily, are in us; that is their immortality. From sire to son, we go on multiplying corpses in ourselves; for all of which, are resurrections. Every thought’s a soul of some past poet, hero, sage. We are fuller than a city.” —Herman Melville: Mardi.