CHAPTER FIVE: THE TARTARUS OF AUTHORS

We return to Herman Melville’s daily life. In January, 1849, Mrs. Melville went up to Boston to live with her mother and await her confinement. At the end of January the last proof-sheets of Mardi were corrected; in the middle of February Malcolm was born. With the coming of the baby, Melville must have felt a certain tightening of responsibility. One knows very little about the economic conditions under which Melville lived during the first years of his marriage, or to what extent Allan may have carried a good part of the burden of the household. But early in 1849 Melville must have begun to write Redburn, which was a potboiler; and before Redburn was printed he wrote, with greater strength and fuller powers, having probably recovered by that time from the strain of writing Mardi, the masterful account of navy life in White-Jacket.

We now have a chance to watch Melville at work under every disadvantage: the distraction of a household with a young baby, the necessity to make a living, and to do this promptly, the handicap of having to produce something on the level of his audience. If there are flaws in the man, they should come out under these conditions. If he has no sense of reality, he will not know how to meet them; if anything has lurked under the surface of his life, it will rise, like dead fish in poisoned water.

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In Redburn, Melville went back to his youth and traced his feelings about life and his experiences up to his eighteenth year. The book is autobiography, with only the faintest disguises: Bleecker Street becomes Greenwich Street, and the other changes are of similar order. Following Mr. Weaver, I have relied upon Melville’s account of himself in Redburn in giving a picture of his life in the earlier chapters; for it tallies with all the other independently known facts.

For the first time in Melville’s writings, the note of personal disappointment and bitterness appeared. He had, it is true, said in Mardi that the highest happiness known to Mardians was the absence of sorrow, and he had said also, as if to explain his hilarity, that woe is more merry than mirth and only shallow sorrows brought tears. But these observations were not peculiar or original; and they were biographical only in the sense that all a man’s thoughts are autobiographical--whether they arise out of his experience or his reading or a passing mood conditioned by the state of his digestion. In Redburn, Melville discloses to us a disappointed boy, who had hopes of education, cultivation, gentility, and who resented the fate that tore these things from his grasp and made him fight for a living in a fighting world. “Claret for boys, port for men,” he exclaimed in White-Jacket, is a good rule for travel: Mrs. Glendinning uses the same phrase in another application in Pierre: the words took hold of Melville, and one suspects that in his youth he had had an overdose of port, and had participated in experiences that required a stronger stomach.

Now, for the first time, Melville is conscious of the black maggot within him, deposited as a mere egg in his youth, and growing day by day, nourished by his later disappointments and sorrows and frustrations. Things have begun to go badly: he thinks back without difficulty to times when they were even worse. The physical misery of those early years, the patched clothes, the bad food, the rough treatment of the sailors, the feeling of homelessness, the consciousness of being an Ishmael--all these experiences tallied point by point with the world outside, its cruelty, its misery, its sordidness and vice. These events and sights poisoned life for Melville: he had not realized it at the time, he had certainly not realized it while browsing through his father’s books in Lansingburgh, or tramping to school through the wide valleys of the Berkshires or brooding over the calm Pacific seas--but the poison had been slowly working in his bones. Life was not kind. All its hints of kindness, its proffers, its affected politenesses were shams. He had married a divine creature--and she was nearest him when she mended his stockings. The books that he wrote fared best when they revealed least of the author and his deepest thoughts. He wanted something central and solid in life, a house, a family, a sense of continuity and security for his future work--and the baby was an expense, the future was a blank, and instead of being able to plan another Mardi, he must hastily improvise a salable article. “It is not with a hollow purse as with a hollow balloon--for a hollow purse makes the poet _sink_--witness ‘Mardi.’”

“When a poor devil writes with duns all around him, and looking over the back of his chair, and perching on his pen, and dancing in his inkstand--like the Devils about St. Anthony--what can you expect of that poor devil? What but a beggarly Redburn?” So Melville wrote to Mr. Duyckinck in December, 1849. Those were the words of a harassed man. Redburn, recalling the cruel memories of his youth, was also the first bitter cry of his maturity.

We must not, however, take Melville’s disappointment at its face value. On its level, Redburn is a sound, well-written book. Mr. John Masefield has singled it out among Melville’s books, after Moby-Dick; Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has seconded his judgment: with this praise in mind, one cannot dismiss Redburn as contemptuously as Melville himself