What do we know of Melville’s early sexual life? In Pierre, Melville pictures a passionate attachment between his hero and one of his boy-cousins, and describes how it undergoes the normal sublimation through erotic transfer to a person of the opposite sex: Melville’s sharp observation here anticipated by many years the discoveries of the analytic psychologists. When, in Redburn, we find the youthful hero remembering the three red-cheeked maids who lived in the cottage where he was given bread and milk, we cannot doubt that he made the usual easy transition to a maturer state of sexuality. If we needed any further evidence, these surviving clippings would be sufficient: he pictures himself, beautiful as Apollo, “dressed in a style which would extort admiration from a Brummel, belted round with self-esteem, and sallying in dizzy triumph among the ladies--complimenting one, exchanging repartee with another, tapping this one under the chin, and clasping this one around the waist; and finally, winding up the operation by kissing round the circle.”
It was a grandiose dream: under the cover of a jocose style, he tossed it off in public. “By my halidome, sir,” he cries, “this same village of Lansingburgh contains within its pretty limits as fair a set of blushing damsels as one would wish to look upon on a dreamy summer day.” Young Melville courted by the wholesale; he made love to the village; reluctantly, he narrowed down his vision to a paltry three girls, and dwelt for a little while upon their seraphic beauty. It was high-flown silliness; and the second Fragment from a Writing-Desk, as these pieces were called, went even further, in the manner of Thomas Moore and Edgar Poe, painting a mysterious houri whom he followed to her lair. She was properly mournful and lost in melancholy reverie--all young ladies, in Melville’s day, arrayed themselves in a mysterious sorrow, as an aphrodisiac, so that the tender hand of solace might achieve in compassion what it dared not snatch by brasher methods--and one leaves Herman, brain spinning and faculties gone, kneeling before his Divinity.
This is a correct and roundabout way of announcing that he has kissed a pretty hussy--or perhaps it is a covert expression of more deeply pent-up desires; but one must remember that, when Melville was twenty, Emerson, discussing the sexual life of young men with his literary acquaintances in England, declared that the majority of young men in America were chaste before marriage; and whether he was right or not about the majority--Whitman gives us a different picture of city morals among more plebeian contemporaries--there is little reason, in the general state of morals and opinion and social censure, to doubt that Melville was abstinent sexually during his nonage. When he wrote these pieces, woman was still a divinity to him; and, like his sisters, like his mother, she was still unapproachable.
These Fragments from a Writing-Desk do not merely throw a light upon Melville in an amorous mood; they also are full of hints about his reading and his preparation for authorship.
The manner of these essays was perfervid and exaggerated; the language was the high-flown journalese that Poe never entirely conquered in his short stories; and every word was turned before the mirror, and powdered and ribboned, before being committed to the air. He had nothing to write about except tenuous threads of dream, or rather, his disguise of their warmer reality. Thoreau, at twenty, had ideas that would not have done the man an injustice at forty; not so Melville. Melville, like Whitman, resembled a deep well: he had to pump all sorts of muddy water and stale slush to the surface before the crystal liquid began to run. He was fortunate, however, in belonging to a social class that had libraries: he alluded in these pieces to Burton, Lord Chesterfield, Milton, Byron, Shakespeare, Scott, Coleridge, and we have independent knowledge, through a letter written to a Cooper Celebration Committee, that he had read widely at this period in his best early American contemporary--whom he always valued. These mooning days by the river, and these lone nights of candlelight, were days and nights of preparation. His swollen language, his simpering allusions to beauty, his self-consciousness, were vices, but not unpromising ones: better all these flourishes, to begin with, than a wooden mould and a more definite set of limitations.
There is nothing in print between these press clippings and Melville’s first book, Typee; but from the great clarification of language, and the abandonment of most of his weaknesses, it is plain that Melville must have had much practice, if not at writing, then at ample conversation and oral story-telling. Though Melville dated his growth from his twenty-fifth year, as he told Hawthorne, it actually began at an earlier period: it was self-consciousness that came into existence at twenty-five. The growth was well started with a “solid and profound” boy of six; and at twenty, the down of intellectual manhood was already thickening into a beard. Like Pierre, he was an omnivorous and lynx-eyed reader. With all these qualities leafing and budding, we shall not be surprised at an early blossom.
CHAPTER TWO: SEA-DRIFT
In 1840, Richard Henry Dana published Two Years Before the Mast. It was an account of a long voyage around the Horn, and various experiences in the Spanish settlements of California where American boats traded Yankee calico and trinkets for hides. Written from the point of view of a sailor, Dana’s story gave no picture of unalloyed pleasure and adventure; but there was quite enough exotic charm in the California picture to make a healthy, adventurous lad forget about the floggings, the brutality, the heroic difficulties of rounding Cape Horn. One has no proof that Melville read Dana’s book as soon as it came out; but nine years later, he referred to the author as “my friend Dana,” and the chances are that Two Years Before the Mast gave Melville just the fillip he needed to determine on a wider, farther jaunt into the South Seas.
The wildness and misanthropy of Melville’s joining a whaler in the depth of winter, with the certainty of having to endure a long sea-voyage, may easily be exaggerated: it would be a mistake, I think, to apply to the boyish impulse, which he shared with a thousand other mothers’ sons, the dark words of the opening chapter of Moby-Dick: “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.” In Moby-Dick Melville was supremely an artist, with an eye constantly upon the dramatic values of his story; and in the very first paragraph, no, in the first sentence, he establishes the mood in which the whole book is written. Every bit of factual material Melville uses there is bent to his purpose; and though Moby-Dick is biographic of Melville at thirty-two, in the sense that it discloses every nook and corner of his imagination--one must not make the mistake of reading back from it into the Melville of twenty-one, strapping, healthy, restless, impetuous, and blind to his deepest impulses.
The only certainly objective part of his account of himself in Moby-Dick is his announcement that he had little or no money in his purse, and nothing particular to interest him on shore. Melville was preparing himself for something; but he was not at all sure for what; and in those distracted hours before the feet are set definitely upon the road to maturity he chose the most obvious goal before him--that of adventure in the more watery part of the world. He did not run away from home: he was already disattached. He did not retreat from hard “reality”: his voyage to Liverpool had taught him what to expect as a common seaman. In the light of Melville’s earliest promptings and suggestions, his father’s trips, his uncle’s arduous voyages, his own infinite curiosities, stirred by the strange sails and sailors he had encountered in Liverpool, there is nothing mysterious in either his mood or his purpose. The “Invisible Police Officer of the Fates” knew more about the reason for Melville’s voyage than he himself did.
The whale, perhaps, had already seized Melville’s imagination; he hints as much in the first chapter of Moby-Dick; but one must accept this hint circumspectly; for in Redburn Melville tells how disappointed he was when he first saw whales from the Highlander. “Can these be whales? Monstrous whales such as I had heard of!... It was a bitter disappointment, from which one was long in recovering. I lost all respect for whales!... From that day whales fell greatly in my estimation.” I suspect that the whale was important; but that the distant voyage mattered even more. At all events, Melville, some time in December, 1840, made his way to New Bedford, and on January 3, 1841, he left land behind him.
New Bedford, a town of twelve thousand inhabitants, was already the centre of the whaling industry, a port full of industry and piety, great columned mansions set out on lawns, and benign elms, and iron greyhounds guardedly couchant, and ship-chandler’s shops and dingy little nautical inns, and a rough waterfront that was not altogether puritanic nor of New England. Spots and patches of that New Bedford remain today: the great mansions on County Street are still impressive: the iron greyhounds and deer are unabashed: even the newer streets, except around the dingy factory-slums, are lined with trees: the Seamen’s Bethel is bright with new paint and elegant graining: the chowders and the fish dishes are above the average, especially in the poorer restaurants: but around these patches stretch the dismal shopping thoroughfares, and the dismaler factory districts where an impoverished population, French-Canadian, Portuguese, Italian, minds the looms of vast prison-factories, dumped by the laws of chance and political economy over a lawless landscape of dingy wooden houses.