The days go by; the leaves fall; the candlelight comes early; the mice creep into the cupboard and make nests for themselves in the woodpile; the wide meadows become as bleak as a grey sea. In this most inland scene, with only the Housatonic to connect him with the watery world, Melville still dreams of the sea: his thought centres on the sea, its creatures, its boats, its fish, its men, its deeper monsters. Oh! for a dash of salt spray! he cries; and as substitute he draws upon experience and memory for the savour. The days grow cold. Snow hems in the roof and chimney of Arrowhead. Melville has a sea-feeling all the more: when he looks out of his little window on rising, he feels as if he were looking out of his port-hole in the midst of the Atlantic: his room seems a ship’s cabin, and at nights, when he wakes up and hears the wind shrieking, he can almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, and he had better go up on the roof and rig in the chimney. On a winter morning he rises at eight, helps his horse to his hay and the cow to her pumpkin, stands around to take in the grateful complacency of the cow, she moves her jaws so mildly and with such sanctity; then, with his own breakfast over, he goes to his workroom and lights the fire, runs rapidly through the MS. and starts to work. At half past two a knock comes. He does not answer. Again the knock and again: till he rises from his writing, almost mechanically, and resumes the external round: feed for the horse and cow: then dinner: then he rigs up his sleigh and goes off to the village for the mail, for supplies, for a little friendly chaffer perhaps round the tavern bar. So one day follows another on the surface; but within, there is change and tumult: Melville, like Ahab, finds a creature tearing at his vitals, and that creature the thing he has created.
“How then with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously, my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand. Friends! hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with the outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty volume you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written upon the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”
Such intensity of effort, so many hours of writing and reading, are as exhausting as the direction of a battle: but there is no lying up in winter quarters, no delegation of responsibility: the writer does not live outside his book: the world, the familiar, homely world, becomes a weak picture, and his imagination is the body and blood of reality. Taking a book off the brain, Melville exclaims while in the midst of it, “is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel: you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety--and even then the painting may not be worth the trouble.” Well, Moby-Dick is worth the trouble; the very writing of it becomes a powerful instrument in his own development: what absorbs so much of his time and life is not the book alone, “but the primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting the book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for ... his own private shelf. That it is whose unfathomable cravings drunk his blood; the other only demands ink.”
Melville knows he must not let up on this work; he flogs himself to get his uttermost into it; the application ruins his eyesight. This small aperture and northern light are bad for his eyes: no matter: he writes with one eye closed and the other blinking. By December, in the evening, he is exhausted: he spends the aftermath of the day in a sort of physical trance: but already his mind is anticipating the developments of the next day, and he is up early, and goes back to his task.
Spring comes; but it is no spring for Melville. He will not even be bothered for dinner. Some days he sits at his desk till 4:30 without writing a word; in the spring twilight, when the catkins of the maples glow in the mild sunset and the bluebirds dart about the field like unfettered flowers, he at last comes out and creeps about like an owl. If Melville ploughs and plants, he does it mechanically; his heart is not in it; and he is not nourished by it. In the midst of his writing, his soul reaches a pitch of exaltation, as it does defiantly in a terrible gale, when the hand is firmly on the wheel, and the dangerous seas that wash the decks do not loosen the hold: the letters that he writes to Hawthorne then are prophetic, and deep, and full of proud mastery. In building up his vast symbol of the whale, he strips the universe down to his own ego; like Ahab himself, he says no to all the powers and dominions that lie beyond it. Does not Hawthorne do as much?
“There is a certain tragic phase of humanity,” he writes to Hawthorne, “which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne.... He says No in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say No,--why, they are 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. Whereas, those _yes_-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage and damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.”
But the soft milky air of June gets the better of Melville’s humours: every breath of the warm earth, the spicy perfume of wild strawberries, the honeyed odour of the locust trees, the dank green fragrance of ferns, the sight of buttercups making the fields sunny even on dull days, or the daisies turning the high grass into the whitish green colour of the ocean when the waves disperse on the beach, the warm feeling of animal contentment that the sun itself pours into a man--all these things renewed his energies and revived his spirits. Melville relaxed and refreshed himself in the sunlight, building an addition to the house, and ploughing and sowing, and watching the green shoots rise. He does not doubt the reality of his black moments: for, as he tells Hawthorne, in the boundless, trackless, but still glorious wilderness of the universe, where he and Hawthorne are outposts, there are savage Indians as well as mosquitoes; still, one does not go on fighting them forever. As for the crotchety and overdoleful chimeras, “the like of you and me, and some others, forming a chain of God’s outposts around the world, must be content to encounter now and then, and fight them as best we can.”
Melville goes down to New York to see the first part of Moby-Dick through the press; but the oppressive, humid days in that Babylonish brick-kiln, and the long delays of the printers, disgust him; he comes back to the country, and purposes to end the book, if possible, reclining on the grass, or watching the clouds play on a summer afternoon around old Greylock, from the newly built porch he has added to the north side of the house, where the view lies. The tail of Moby-Dick is not cooked yet; though the hell-fire in which the book was broiled might not unreasonably have charred it before this. Melville’s intention is sane enough, if only he had the leisure to cultivate the calm, grass-growing mood; but no: he must keep on patching and tinkering at his buildings: in July the hay waits for no author to finish his chapter: there are a hundred chores to keep him away from his book, still more from deep questions about the universe and its meaning and evil and truth and all those aspects of reality that need a Hawthorne for perfect communication. There is no help for it; he must go back to New York to finish the book in a third-story room, where there is no cow to milk, no horse to feed, no sister or wife or mother to be a little hurt or concerned by his inattentiveness or moodiness.
These last straining days in New York were not unlike, one might guess, those that Pierre experienced: the book that was begun in health and exuberance in the keen, riotous air of October in the Berkshires was finished in exacerbations and depression and desolation in the humid dog days of a dirty, unkempt city, days of unrelieved sunlight, followed by afternoon thunderstorms that leave the air even heavier than before, the pavements steaming, the waves of warm, unpleasant air, carrying slight odours of putrefaction, wafted upward into even the third story.