During this period of lecturing, Melville began to write again, with no hope of profit or fame, but for his own satisfaction; and, anticipating Thomas Hardy’s example, he turned to verse. If one can date his first new essays in verse--for the poems in Mardi show that there were early efforts--one must give the time as probably 1858, and for a while only Elizabeth shared this secret with him. By 1860, before he went for a voyage with his younger brother, now Captain Thomas Melville, commander of the Boston clipper Meteor, his verses were numerous enough to make a volume. The decision to make this voyage came rather suddenly; and one finds Melville writing to Mr. Duyckinck, mid the haste of departure, to see if he will undertake to advise with Allan Melville as to a publisher, and in case of publication, be sure that the printer’s proof-reader is a careful man. Melville, the author of nine books, still deferred to Mr. Duyckinck’s professional experience; and, on getting a favourable reply, he told Duyckinck that “it was quite a wind from the field of old times.”
From this correspondence with Evert Duyckinck--and an allusion in a letter to George about Melville’s own “winter and rough weather”--one gathers that after Pierre there had been an estrangement, or at least a prolonged silence: in 1856 the Duyckincks had recorded in their Cyclopedia their conviction that Pierre was a false step, and only now, after eight years had passed, was the breach healed. As for Melville’s mood in travel, he had this to say: “I anticipate as much pleasure as, at the age of forty, one temperately can, on the voyage I am going. I go under very happy auspices so far as the ship is concerned. A noble ship and a nobler captain--and he my brother. We have the breadth of those tropics before us, to sail over twice, and shall round the world. Our first port is San Francisco, which we shall probably make in 110 days. Thence we go to Manilla--and thence, I hardly know where--I wish devoutly you were going along. I think it would agree with you. The prime requisites for enjoyment on sea-voyages, for passengers, is 1st health--2nd good-nature. Both first rate things, but not universally to be found.--At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.” The good-bye and God bless you, with which Melville closed this letter, showed a sort of solemn warmth. In a lonely life, even an Evert Duyckinck might prove a comrade....
The book of poetry was never published in its original form. Mr. Meade Minnigerode conjectures that the manuscript was that of Clarel; but Melville’s concern, in his memoranda for Allan, that each piece should be printed on a page by itself, however small the piece, shows, apart from anything else, that it could not have been Clarel; and when Melville told his brother, two years later, that he had disposed of his “doggerel” to a trunkmaker, who took the whole lot off his hands at ten cents the pound, one must infer that he himself had become dissatisfied with the bulk of his early work, and destroyed most of it, salvaging a few pieces, like the verse to the Captain of the Meteor, for his later volumes. In the first flush of experiment, however, Melville’s poetry pleased him: the form of verse gave compactness to his thoughts, and the writing of it did not inflict that long continuous drain on his vitality that the larger prose pieces called for. Melville would pace the quarter-deck with his brother, reciting his verses in the moonlight: the joy of creation, even minor creation, could still stir him up, and no doubt the cadences of the moving ship, heaving, falling, rolling, added to the pleasure of the words themselves.
At the end of three months, when they had reached California, Melville had exhausted his supply of books and papers, probably, and his brother’s patience, and his own capacity for boredom: by that time his health had doubtless improved again, and, urging him to break the trip and quicken his return, his old longing for Elizabeth may have come back with greater force. He was never quite happy in her company, nor was he quite happy away from it. All the difficulties of their domestic economy tended to make their relations prosaic and commonplace, for one does not cook for and clean and clothe four children without a considerable amount of unflinching prose; and Elizabeth’s incapacity for domestic duties and her irritations only made matters worse. Yet Melville, as far as one can judge, felt not merely affection for Elizabeth: on these long absences, passion would gather within him again, like lightning in a heavy summer sky. He might resent her obtuseness; he might be disappointed by her failure to respond to his irresponsible hilarity; he might be sobered by the fact that his love had been unfavourably conditioned by financial burdens and a cramped household with a scanty larder; but for all that, he clung to her and needed her. One must take account of this in noting Melville’s moods and moves and decisions in the decade after 1856. Although Melville, unfortunately, felt repulsion in a tie that was so plainly rooted in physical attachment, and longed for a heaven in which there was the marriage of true minds without the “impurities” and impediments of sex, although he distrusted the solace of physical union, as he distrusted all beautiful things which hid the truth from men’s eyes, yet he found himself perpetually driven back to this wiser folly; and, not turning easily to any other woman, he kept his faith with Elizabeth.
The rôle was not an easy one for her to bear: make no mistake about it. Such violence of anticipation and such quick satiety, such tenderness and such easy disappointment, such self-absorption, and, with it all, a certain impatience and resentment of the daily round, with its claims, ceremonies, civilities, annoyances--with all this Elizabeth Melville was probably never to know such deep, enraptured happiness in her marriage as Sophia Hawthorne, who had faced dire poverty, too, had known. Elizabeth was proud of her man: she had faith in him: but it was only in the closing years of their lives, when, through bitter experience, she had acquired much, and he, through bitter experience, had resigned much, that they were on a parity. There is no doubt she encouraged him in his work, and, whether she understood it or not, believed in it. While he was gone in 1860 she assiduously looked after the placing of the manuscript, and would not be put off by the publishers’ flimsy excuses. Still, for all this sympathy and loyalty, on both sides, one feels that strain, depression, tenseness, must have too often marked the life of the Melville household, during these shadowed years of poverty and ill health and dwindling fame.
If Mrs. Melville stood the strain of it, with all the toughness of middle age to bear up under it, the children did not fare so well. The photograph of the Melville children, Malcolm, Frances, Elizabeth, and Stanwix, taken when the oldest was perhaps twelve or thirteen--that is, during the early sixties--tells as much: they are a little peaked and undernourished, and the eldest child’s face is sullen, dour. The racking poverty of his early youth had left an indelible impression on Melville himself, and, in even more depressing circumstances, a worse image was left upon the minds of his growing children. Melville, a man of originality and penetration in almost every other department of life, was, one suspects, a commonplace father: he expected his children to be dutiful and submissive and not to annoy their mother, and he would read them moral lectures on the whole duty of children, fearful of their being corrupted by association and contact with the age, but incapable of directing their impulses into forms of growth except by desperate exhortation--the most blank and sterile of all pedagogical methods. He wanted them to be noble and courageous and honest and indifferent to money, and, dreading the effect of the mean, bourgeois standards that surrounded them, he was too quick to suspect the ignoble and the base, forgetting that growth is a happier sign in childhood than the semblance of perfection. When his little daughter picked up the word “property” and aired it to her family, Melville relentlessly teased her about it: if he handed her the butter, he would hand it to Miss Property: if he met her on the stairs he would mimic Miss Property: he tormented her for the sins of her elders, forgetting the terrible sensitiveness of a child to dogging that has such a bitter animus behind it. This incident will stand for others: the jolly letters he would write home, with pictures and all manner of funny printing, or the stories he would tell in a pleasant hour, did not wipe out the acrid taste or lessen the distance between father and children. There was nothing to lighten the burden of these days: these children were orphaned, even when their father sat among them. One son ran away; another, in 1867, was found dead in his room, of a rifle wound, under circumstances that left doubt as to whether accident or suicide had caused the fatality; and one of his daughters could not recur to the image of her father without a certain painful revulsion. The picture is not a happy one: but a man with high purposes does not always leave behind earthly children to bless him. One remembers how Milton’s daughters cursed him in his own presence, and one realizes that one can draw no valid conclusions from such conduct--except this, that a man immersed in his inner vision is a difficult man to live with, and if he does not renounce his family and its ties at the outset of his quest, they may live to rise up against him before he is ended with it. And who was to blame? Milton and Melville wanted the warmth of domesticity: but their children had no part in the bargain that gave them cold lodgings in the icy chambers of Heaven, and shabby clothes and insufficient food and few opportunities for pleasure on the earth. These children were of Melville’s flesh, but not of his mind: when he purchased a work of art, a print or a statue for ten dollars, when there was scarcely bread enough to go round, who can wonder at their black memories? If they did not understand the need of a famished soul for art, their father had too quickly forgotten his own humiliation when he went to sea in a discarded hunting-jacket. Circumstances drove Melville hard; but poverty alone does not make such a breach between a parent and his children; and though one must pity Melville in this extremity of misunderstanding, one cannot but feel that he himself contributed to it.