CHAPTER XIII

INTO THE RACING TIDE

“As the vine flourishes, and the grape empurples close up to the very walls and muzzles of cannoned Ehrenbreitstein; so do the sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its peril.”--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Pierre_.

“Until I was twenty-five,” Melville once wrote to Hawthorne, “I had no development at all.” When the cable and anchor of the _United States_ were all clear, and when he bounded ashore on his native soil, Melville was in his twenty-fifth year. “From my twenty-fifth year,” he wrote Hawthorne, “I date my life.”

His three years of wandering, crowded as they were with alienating experiences, had, of course, worked deep changes in him: changes more radical than in the dizzy whirl of strangely peopled adventures it was possible for him to gauge. In memory, the fitful fever of the past, deceitfully seems to strive not. But we delude ourselves when we fancy that it sleeps well. During his far driftings, Melville had clung reverently to thoughts of home, his imagination treacherously caressing those very scenes whose intimate contact had filled him with revulsion. “Do men ever hate the thing they love?” he asks in _White-Jacket_, perplexed at the paradox of this perpetual recoil. He was eternally looking both before and after, but never with the smug and genial after-dinner optimism of Rabbi Ben Ezra. The insufficient present was always poisoned, to him, by bitter margins of pining and regret. In headlong escape from his household gods he had been landed among South Sea islands that in retrospect he viewed as “authentic Edens.” Yet even in Paradise did he feel himself an exile, teaching old Marheyo to say “Home” and “Mother,” converting into sacred words the countersigns of a former Hell. He tells in _White-Jacket_, how, with the smell of tar in his nostrils, out of sight of land, with a stout ship under his feet, and snuffing the ocean air, in the silence and solitude of the deep, during the long night watches used to come thronging about his heart “holy home associations.” And he closes _White-Jacket_ with the reflection that “Life’s a voyage that’s homeward-bound!” But he sailed with sealed orders.

Of Melville’s impressions upon his return he has left no record. During his three years of whaling and captivity among cannibals, and mutiny, and South Sea driftings, and adventures in the Navy, life at home had gone along in its regular necessary way; and the scenes of his youth, despite their transformation in his memory, lived on in solid fact unchanged. The identical trees in the Boston Common blotted out the same patterns against the New England stars; none of the streets had swerved from off their prim and angular respectability. His mother he found living in Lansingburg, just out from Albany, N. Y. There was the same starched calico smell to his sister’s dresses, the same clang-tint to his mother’s voice. Such was the calibre of his imagination, that he must have found life at Lansingburg unbelievably like he knew it must be, yet very different from what he was prepared to find.

His brothers must have first appeared intimate strangers to him. His elder brother, Gansevoort, had given up his hat and fur shop, was well established in law and had won a creditable name for himself in politics. His younger brother, Allan, was beginning a successful legal career, with his name emblazoned on a door at 10 Wall Street. Maria was, after all, a Gansevoort; she was not too proud to keep her brothers reminded that she had borne sons. Melville’s youngest brother, Tom, had sprung from boyhood into the self-conscious maturity of youth.

From vagabondage in Polynesia to the stern yoke of self-supporting citizenship was a dizzy transition. But Melville did not clear it at a bound. The very violence of the impact between the two antipodal types of experience for a time must have stunned Melville to their incompatibility. Tanned with sea-faring, exuberant in health, rosy with the after-glow of his proud companionship with Jack Chase, and the respect and affection he had won from his associates on board the _United States_, he was effulgent with amazing tales--the enviable hero of endless incredible adventures. His home-coming may well have been not only a staggering, but a joyous adventure. For he entered Lansingburg trailing clouds of glory. He was panoplied in romance; and though bodily he was in a suburb of Albany, his companion image was the distant adventurer he saw mirrored in the admiring and jealous imagination of his friends. With what melancholy--if any--he viewed this reflected image, and to what degree he was, Narcissus-wise, conscious of its irony, we do not know. But if _Typee_ and _Omoo_ be any index of his mood, he returned home happier and wholesomer than at any other period of his life. Before many years, unsolved problems of his youth were to reassert themselves, heightened in difficulty and in pertinacity. Yet for a time, at least, so it would appear, he reaped very substantial benefits from his escape beyond civilisation.

According to J. E. A. Smith, Melville was soon beset by his enthralled and wide-eyed friends to put his experiences into a book. Even if such a challenge had never been made, it is difficult to see how Melville could have escaped plunging into literature. For the hankering for letters had earlier stirred in Melville’s blood,--a hankering that he had before succumbed to, swathing a vacuity of experience in the grave-wrappings of rhetoric and prolixity. Now he was rich in matter; because of the very straitened circumstances of his family, he was faced again by the necessity of earning some money if he stayed at home; and in so far as we know, he was untempted to venture forth either as vagabond or efficiency expert.

Soon after his arrival home he must have settled down to composition. For the manuscript of _Typee_ was bought in London by John Murray, by an agreement dated December, 1845.

At the time of the completion of _Typee_, Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, was starting for London as Secretary to the American Legation under Minister McLane. Gansevoort threw _Typee_ in among his luggage, to try its luck among British publishers. Whether _Typee_ had previously been refused in the United States has not yet transpired. In any event, John Murray bought the English rights to print a thousand copies of _Typee_--a purchase that cost him £100. Murray did not close the sale, however, until he was assured that _Typee_ was a sober account of actual experiences. _Typee_ appeared in two parts in Murray’s “Colonial and Home Library.” Part I appeared on February 26, 1846; Part II on April 1 of the same year.

Encouraged by the temerity of John Murray, Wiley and Putnam of New York bought the American rights for _Typee_. And by an agreement made in England, _Typee_ appeared simultaneously in New York and London: in America under the title, _Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life During Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas_. In 1849, Harper Brothers took over _Typee_, and issued it shorn of some of the passages the Missionaries had found most objectionable. Up to January 1, 1849, Wiley and Putnam had sold 6,392 copies of _Typee_: a sale upon which Melville gained $655.91. Up to April 29, 1851, 7,437 copies of _Typee_ had been sold in England, netting Melville, if accounts surviving in Allan’s hand be correct, $708.40.

Under the date of April 3, 1846--two days after the appearance in England of Part II of _Typee_, Gansevoort wrote Melville the following letter--the last letter, it appears, he ever wrote:

“MY DEAR HERMAN:

“Herewith you have copy of the arrangement with Wiley & Putnam for the publication in the U. S. of your work on the Marquesas. The letter of W. & P. under date of Jan. 13th is the result of a previous understanding between Mr. Putnam and myself. As the correspondence speaks for itself, it is quite unnecessary to add any comment. By the steamer of to-morrow I send to your address several newspaper comments and critiques of your book. The one in the _Sun_ was written by a gentleman who is very friendly to myself, and who may possibly for that reason have made it unusually eulogistic.

“Yours of Feb. 28 was rec’d a few days ago by the daily packet from Joshua Bates. I am happy to learn by it that the previous intelligence transmitted by me was ‘gratifying enough.’ I am glad that you continue busy, and on my next or the after that will venture to make some suggestions about your next book. In a former letter you informed me that Allan had sent you $100 home, the fruit of my collection. (I refer to the money sent at your request). It appears that this was not so, for Allan informs me that the $100 was part of the £90 s 10--making £100 which I sent out by the Jan. 2 Steamer. Allan seems to find it entirely too much trouble to send me the monthly accounts of receipts and disbursements. I have received no accounts from him later than up to Nov. 30th and consequently am in a state of almost entire ignorance as to what is transpiring at No. 10, Wall Street. This is very unthinking in him, for my thoughts are so much at home that much of my time is spent in disquieting apprehensions as to matters & things there. I continue to live within my income, but to do so am forced to live a life of daily self-denial. I do not find my health improved by the sedentary life I have to lead here. The climate is too damp & moist for me. I sometimes fear I am gradually breaking up. If it be so--let it be--God’s will be done. I have already seen about as much of London society as I care to see. It is becoming a toil to me to make the exertion necessary to dress to go out, and I am now leading a life really as quiet as your own in Lansingburg.--I think I am growing phlegmatic and cold. Man stirs me not, nor women either. My circulation is languid. My brain is dull. I neither seek to win pleasure or avoid pain. A degree of insensibility has been long stealing over me, & now seems completely established, which, to my understanding, is more akin to death than life. Selfishly speaking, I never valued life very much--it were impossible to value it less than I do now. The only personal desire I now have is to be out of debt. That desire waxes stronger within me as others fade. In consideration of the little egotism which my previous letters to you have contained, I hope that mother, brothers & sister will pardon this babbling about myself.

“Tom’s matter has not been forgotten. You say there is a subject, etc., etc., ‘on which I intended to write but will defer it.’ What do you allude to? I am careful to procure all the critical notices of _Typee_ which appear & transmit them to you. The steamer which left Boston on the 1st inst. will bring me tidings from the U. S. as to the success of _Typee_ there. I am, with love and kisses to all,

“Affectionately, Your brother,

“GANSEVOORT MELVILLE.”

With this letter, Gansevoort enclosed fourteen lines from Act III,