This did not make it any easier for a candid fellow like Melville; and when a new edition was projected in America, the officious and correct Mr. Duyckinck must have suggested, as adviser to Wiley and Putnam, that a little judicious editing would reduce the offence and increase Melville’s audience. The young must be protected; the clergy must be conciliated; just a little pruning here and there would give the book a place on every library table. Melville should not have listened to this nonsense; sooner or later a man with anything worth saying must face the world of Pimminee and be prepared to stuff its prejudices and its gentlemanly objections down its throat: if a young author does not make this stand in his first book, he will increase his difficulties with his fourth or fifth. But in 1846 Melville was still uncertain of himself: a novice in his vocation, he was not aware of all the snares that beset a man of letters: the pressure toward amiable compliance with the all too amiable Mr. Duyckinck must have been pretty stiff; all the more, perhaps, because a Duyckinck might almost be a Gansevoort, and family pressure may have played a part, too. At all events, he consented to let Typee be bowdlerized.
“The _Revised_ (Expurgated?--odious word!) Edition of ‘Typee’ ought to be duly announced--and as the matter (in one respect) is a little delicate, I am happy that the literary tact of Mr. Duyckinck will be exerted on this occasion.” So Melville wrote in the middle of 1846 to Mr. Evert Duyckinck. He grimaced a little at the dose; but unfortunately swallowed it. The anecdote about Queen Pomaree went: the anecdote about the missionary’s wife went; and various other passages were underscored by elimination. What Melville said about the missionaries of the Dollar and the Cross is worth remembering, before Mr. Duyckinck runs his blue pencil through it:
“Look at Honolulu, the metropolis of the Sandwich Islands!--a community of disinterested merchants, and devoted self-exiled heralds of the Cross, located on the very spot that twenty years ago was defiled by the presence of idolatry. What a subject for an eloquent Bible-meeting orator!... But when these philanthropists send us such glowing accounts of one-half of their labors, why does modesty restrain them from publishing the other half of the good they have wrought?--Not until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught horses and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes.”
I would not say that this bowdlerization ruins the book, or that it materially takes away from its value: that is not the point. Small and “immaterial” suppressions may have no effect upon the literary value of a work: but they cannot help having a subtly corrosive effect upon the man who has created it. As A. E. once pointed out, in discussing the matter of censorship, the spirit of the artist is a sensitive one, and in many cases it works only with great difficulty. If its wings are clipped by so much as a feather-tip, its capacity for flight may be ruined. It is perhaps impossible to say how far Melville was harmed by Mr. Duyckinck’s tactful exertions, or by the hysterical denunciations that prompted them. For objective evidence, we have only the fact that sex, except in remote allusions to debauchery in Redburn or to sodomy in White-Jacket, did not enter into any of Melville’s stories, until it suddenly erupted in 1852 in Pierre with the violence of long repression. Mark Twain was burdened by a similar censorship; and he took refuge in the flat obscenity of “1601.” Melville’s own development as a man and a writer might have been a happier one, had not sex become in his day a sanctimonious ritual, with no middle term between the licence of the brothel and the waxen purity of the home. The censorship which operated on Melville’s books bore equally on his spirit: his libido turned back upon itself, and got lost for a time in the mazes of an infantile life. To take sex easily, naturally, rationally, is to subject it to the refining elements in life: to take it with a sense of unholy attraction and holy repulsion is to dissociate it completely from the normal influence of knowledge and convention and taste: in this dissociated, fragmental state, sex rages irresponsibly like a bolt of lightning in an open field: it may disappear into the ground, it may shatter a tree, it may kill a human being.
Melville had carried back from the South Seas the simplicity of an essentially chaste, but, we must suppose, not altogether inexperienced young man. This simplicity had something valuable in it for Melville’s contemporaries, just as his appreciation of savage society must have warned them about the absurd extravagance of acquiring dyspepsia and hard faces and an incapacity for the arts of living by their concentration upon money-making--and the censorship of Typee kept this part of Melville, I think, from maturing with reflection and experience. Sex was taboo. That element in his growth knew no middle state between greenness and blight. One part of life was locked for him in a dark chamber; one part will die by asphyxiation.
5
Typee was a success, and Melville soon had the consciousness of being an author. He could scarcely mention his book, in passing, without pausing to realize how strange it sounded. All his dispersed interests and his random purposes were suddenly concentrated: his life had the spiritual momentum that a genuine career gives it: he was no longer an outcast Olympian, but one of the great circle, now treated by his elders as an equal, respected, deferred to, genially slapped on the back, welcomed when a group of literary men met for conversation: if an English author came to America, as Thackeray did a little later, Melville was bound to be the most promising younger man in the circle that dined him and gave him welcome.
In Pierre, Melville gives his hero’s sensations at suddenly finding himself quoted in the public press, and urged by various grave societies to lecture before them--little gratuities of attention that afflicted him with a sense of his own insignificance, no matter how inflated he might seem to the world outside: and Pierre’s humility was doubtless Melville’s. He had grown a beard; but he did not need that symbol of years and experience to wear his new honours easily: with his reading and his miscellaneous adventure and the deep or brilliant conversation that might unexpectedly escape from him, he must have been a ready companion in any of the current literary circles: indeed, the difficulty was that, in the particular group where he moved, it was hard to single out any minds that came up to his level: the Manhattan literati of Melville’s heyday were a slick and shallow parcel of journalists, with a few scholars like the learned author of the Lives of the Presidents, as makeweight.
Melville’s quick entry into the literary world was partly furthered by two men who once wielded power in American letters, Messrs. George and Evert Duyckinck; George, a little thin and abstemious and given to pious reflections, Evert, more full-blooded, shrewd, worldly, an energetic hack who accumulated more than a modest competence as an editor and a compiler of ostentatious books of reference. They were busy little moles, these Duyckincks; one can scarcely utter their names or recount their ephemeral glories without smiling a little; but they gave Melville support and sympathy at a time early enough for him to profit by it; and if Melville found Evert Duyckinck worthy of his friendship there was something in the man’s geniality that merited it, and it is not for us to withhold what Melville himself freely gave. Evert Duyckinck had, according to Richard Lathers, one of the choicest libraries in the state: he was literary adviser to Messrs. Wiley and Putnam, and after Charles Fenno Hoffman’s brief editorship, he assumed charge of the Literary World. Until the publication of Pierre, Mr. Duyckinck was intimately associated with Melville’s literary ventures. Melville trusted him the way that a foreigner may trust a native as a guide to a strange country, realizing only after many days that the man he has thrown himself in with, whose company he has enjoyed, would be the most antipathetic of companions if one met him on one’s own ground. Duyckinck helped Melville to find his own depths; and when Melville had found them the two men were, by that simple fact, cut off.
It is not difficult to see how this friendship matured and withered: Duyckinck’s life was devoted to those superficies that Melville dedicated his whole energies to piercing and getting beyond. Lowell hit Evert off in one of his Fables for Critics; it was not the least happy of his arrows:
Good-day, Mr. Duyckinck, I am happy to meet With a scholar so ripe and a critic so neat, Who through Grub Street the soul of a gentleman carries. What news from the suburb of London and Paris?