What a contrast Herman Melville felt between the wholeness he felt within, in response to wind and sea and sky, and the crass deformities of the world outside, among cruel men, grasping men, lecherous men, men sick and stunted in the soul, like the strayed seeds that creep up through some cranny in the barnyard floor and become livid spindly plants, unnourished by sunlight! It was a trial; but not altogether a fruitless one. He had it in him to deal easily with life aboard ship. Ill provided with clothes, a shrinking moleskin jacket being his chief protection, his body was sound enough to furnish its own warmth. “I frequently turned into my bunk soaking wet, and turned out again piping hot and smoking like a roasted sirloin, and yet was never the worse for it; for then I bore a charmed life of youth and health, and was dangerproof to bodily ill.” This testing and priming of his physical capacities was a great experience for Melville; and though in the end he was to pay a heavy penalty for excessive exposure, the confidence he achieved must have toned up his whole being.
Even dirty work and humiliation have, in retrospect, a power to sustain a man: for if one has faced the worst indignities of life, if one knows what it is to be poor and hungry and cold and friendless and beset by hostile men, nothing that lies in store can really daunt one: once one has touched the extremities of pain and misery, all the lesser tribulations of life become small. Perhaps the best proof of this fact is Melville’s small concern for money or authority in later life, although it was poverty that drove him to sea, and only a position of power on ship would have lifted his lot. He never went after these things, never sought to improve his condition by their aid; and though in the end, he struggled for a living and got it dearly, he never sought for more than a living: he did not seek compensation in wealth, ease, luxury, power.
6
At last Melville and the Highlander reached Liverpool. His anxieties were at rest for six weeks: he was even freed from the miserable pot-scrapings of the black cook, for no fire could be lighted in the galleys while the ship was at dock; and the whole crew dined at the Baltimore Clipper. England at last: a guest in an English tavern!
“I examined the place attentively,” writes Melville. “It was a long, narrow little room, with one small arched window with red curtains, looking out upon a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick wall, the top of which was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles, stuck into the mortar. A dull lamp swung overhead, placed in a wooden ship suspended from the ceiling. The walls were covered with a paper, representing an endless succession of vessels of all nations continually circumnavigating the apartment. By way of a pictorial mainsail to one of these ships, a map was hung against it.... From the street came a confused uproar of ballad-singers, bawling women, babies, and drunken sailors.”--And this is England?
It is not by dreams that people are defrauded, so much as by misplaced pictures of reality. A dream represents an inner urge and movement; presently it may work through to an objective manifestation; defeated in one place, it attacks in another; and though its final form may be far from the image originally projected, it does not disappoint one like the comparison of an actuality with some previous description. It was so with Melville in Liverpool: he eventually visited England again and found its abbeys and its Lord Mayors’ processions; but when he followed his father’s steps in Liverpool, down to Riddough’s Hotel where Allan had once stayed, he was completely defeated: the hotel was gone, and the city that had seemed so great and magnificent in the guidebook, a generation before, had been swallowed up by a vaster town: the pool itself, where ships once floated, had been filled up; even the pretence of age was lacking, and mid the old shops and warehouses of the waterfront, nothing seemed nearly so venerable as the gable-pointed mansion of the Gansevoorts, whose bricks had been brought from the Netherlands long before the Revolutionary War.
Disappointed, Melville nevertheless continued to explore the city. He went aboard an Indian merchantman, built by Indian shipwrights out of Oriental wood, manned by Malays, Burmese, and Cingalese: he visited the floating chapel: he saw the German immigrants about to depart for America: he was fascinated by the little salt droghers, with broad bows painted black, and red sails: he even ventured out into the countryside one fine morning, and got his first glimpse of the English landscape and the English country people he had dreamed of. These were the relatively bright lights in the picture: but there were ugly spots, too: the villainous brothels and doss-houses, where murders were venial sins and a stale putrid odour hung over every doorway: there were the dock-wall beggars, full of sores, misery, and monstrous deformations: worst of all, there was a narrow street, lined with cotton warehouses, where the sunniest noon became twilight, and where, in an open vault, communicating with deeper cellars, Melville came upon a motionless figure of a woman, with a dead baby at her breast, and two blue-skinned children clinging to her, slowly starving to death, starving, dying, finally passing out, with not a soul except Melville to offer succour, despite his pleas with constables and watchmen, until the stench of their dead bodies demanded their removal and the application of quick-lime to the spot where they had perished. A fine, prosperous world! A great, progressive civilization!
Ironically, the city Melville had dreamt much about, London, he saw only in a baffling nocturnal glimpse, behind the draperies of a gambling-house, in the company of a new shipmate, a blade of good family, who made friends with Melville and took a last opportunity, with Herman for companion, to retrieve his fortunes. The whole journey to London brought nothing more than the tantalizing glimpses one gets from a cab--not Westminster nor Whitehall nor Regent Street. Mr. Weaver has cast doubts on this adventure in London: he regards it as one of the few wide inventions Melville made in Redburn: but to me its very vagueness and mysteriousness smells of reality. That an unsophisticated boy should be as confused by a gambling-house as by Aladdin’s palace is quite natural: and if anything else were wanted to show that the trip was real and the disappointment cutting, one need but remember that Melville treated Israel Potter to a similar experience on his first visit to Paris, although there is no foundation in Israel’s story for his being confined to his room until the time comes for departure.
The six weeks that confronted Melville with all these scenes and people and apparitions were an essential part of his education. Indeed, there is no better experience for a well-prepared lad than to be thrown in a strange city, not too remote in habit and culture from his original home, with long days for exploration, experience, meditation. Melville regretted in later life that he had not encountered misery and bad fortune by degrees; and very possibly, the shock of finding himself suddenly in the midst of this bestiality, cruelty, degradation, was too much for him: the inoculation with evil was almost as bad, it may be, as the disease itself: it certainly must have cast a shadow on his innocence, and it may even explain, in some degree, the inhibitions and regressions of his own sexual life--since his first glimpse of sex was in association with these filthy dives and their rotting inmates. But, even with these allowances, such an education in men and cities is better than the non-education given by textbooks and academic treatises and unrelated “knowledge.” Between the Albany Academy or the Harvard College of 1837 and Liverpool, the latter had incomparably more to offer to a lad already sufficiently used to books to make constant reference to them. If a whaling-ship proved finally to be Melville’s university, Liverpool was at least an admirable preparatory school.
When the Highlander started home, it must have seemed to Melville that everything would be smooth sailing: but one of the new crew was a dead man, shipped aboard by a crimp, the ship met head winds and made no progress: malignant fever broke out in the steerage: Jackson, with the yellow skin, the snaky eyes, the projecting bones, the curse against goodness and beauty, died: and when the ship finally got to port, with Melville still in sound health, the wily Captain Riga buncoed him of his wages. Four months of this sort of thing was quite enough. Melville returned to Lansingburgh. For the next three years, he lived among the civilities, and taught school, at Greenbush, now East Albany, and at Pittsfield.
7
Melville’s growth was slow, and we have little evidence of what took place during these three years. School teaching must have given him leisure, and one can infer from two prose pieces, written in 1839, and published in the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, that his dreams and broodings were turned, not to the wretchedness of his adventure, but to the susceptibilities and urges of adolescence.