The Whiteness of the Whale

Melville: His World and Work by Andrew Delbanco.  Vintage.  415 pp.  $18.00.  *****

I’m tempted by the first line of The Good Soldier, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”  I don’t suppose that’s literally true, but it’s plenty sad.  I’m reminded of a moment in James Atlas’ biography of Delmore Schwartz, when Schwartz ran into an old literary buddy of his in a bar, and—thinking of all the things they’d hoped for themselves—burst into tears.  There is no such recorded moment in Melville’s life (did he have any such friends?), but there could have been.

Even the basic details are telling.  He was born into a prosperous family, but his father kept failing at different business ventures.  They lived in straitened circumstances and moved from place to place.  Confronted with this hapless example, Melville—at age eighteen—took to the sea, and had four years of seafaring adventures.  When he returned home and began recording them, hoping for a career as a writer, the only real criticism was that he must have fabricated them.  But his adventures fascinated people, and the early books did well.

He’d started a sixth book, about his whaling adventures, when he met Nathaniel Hawthorne, read all of his work, and suddenly saw new possibilities for himself.  He then wrote—at age 31—by far the greatest work of his career, and one of the greatest in all of American literature.  It was so much different a book, so much riskier, that the author must have felt terribly vulnerable.  It wasn’t so much that the book failed as that people misunderstood or didn’t notice it.  They wanted more of those South Sea adventures.

He tried a domestic novel, confining himself to land, but made a mess of it.  He turned his hand to stories and did decently well, wrote a couple of classics, but that market gave out.  He turned to poetry, got a wearying job as a customs inspector, and for twenty years spent most of his time writing verse that has been overlooked.  At the end of his life he wrote one last, great, classic story, but it sat in a breadbox in the family home and wasn’t published until years after his death.  One son committed suicide in the same house in which his parents lived.  Another died young and far from home.  Melville was forgotten at the time of his death; the brief notice in the Times called him the author of Mobie Dick.  It was only years after his death that people realized he had written one of the great—and greatly eccentric—books in all of world literature.

Like Faulkner in the 20^th century, Melville wrote as if he were inventing literature, making up what a book was.  That was true at least of his great works, Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, maybe not so much Billy Budd.  He was a quick study, decided to be a writer and immediately wrote a big seller, encountered the work of Hawthorne (and the man) and became a different writer altogether.  I have heard that he modeled his high style on that of Sir Thomas Browne, the 17^th century author of Urn Burial, in the same way that Hawthorne modeled himself on 18^th century writers.  The Americans were isolated from the larger European culture, trying to create one on their own (which they did, but when you think of the great nineteenth century writers, they were a band of eccentrics.  Maybe not Emerson, though his ideas were out there, but certainly Thoreau, and Melville, and Whitman.  It wasn’t until Henry James that an American seemed to have a real connection with European culture).

Andrew Dalbanco lets us know from the start that Melville didn’t leave a paper trail, not many journals or letters.  Hawthorne knew the man, and famously wrote about him in his own journal, but there aren’t many contemporary memories of him, and they are strangely mixed.  Some said he was a quiet, timid person, others that he was a bibulous and voluble dinner partner; some said he was warm and affectionate toward children, others suspected him of being abusive.  His relationship with his wife is pretty much a blank.  Some readers—Somerset Maugham among them—suspected he was gay; he did spend all that time on ships when he was young.  Maugham thought Pierre betrayed a basic dissatisfaction with marriage to a woman (though how he found a coherent message in that novel I don’t know).

Melville seems to have worked too hard and too obsessively, cutting himself off from human companionship.  There were reports occasionally that he was losing his bearings, or that he was insane.  After one bout of stress and overwork, following the composition of Pierre, his in-laws gave him a trip to the Holy Land, maybe not the best choice for cheering a man up.  He did keep a journal on that trip, recording one bleak moment after another, “stony mountains & stony planes, stony torrents and stony roads,” culminating in a trip to the Dead Sea, whose foam reminded him of the “slaver of a mad dog,” and he noted the “smarting bitter of the water,–carried the bitter in my mouth all day—bitterness of life—thought of all bitter things—Bitter is it to be poor & bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of death.”

No one read the man better than Hawthorne, who met with him just before that trip, and said that Melville “will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief.  It is strange how he persists—and 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 sand hills amid 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 he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than the rest of us.”

Joseph Campbell famously said (echoing many Eastern thinkers) that what people need is not the meaning of life, but the experience of life.  Neither came up with much.  If there had been less striving, and more living, they and their author might have been happier.  But it was meaning they wanted, and they died trying to find it.  Ah Herman.  Ah humanity.