L-G-0015189140-0047257953.Pdf

Herman Melville

A Half Known Life

John Bryant

Volume I Eternal Ifs: Infant, Boy, and Man (1819–1840) This edition first published 2021 © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of John Bryant to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials, or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Bryant, John, 1949– author. Title: Herman Melville: a half known life / John L. Bryant. Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, [2020] | This resource is a multipart monograph with two volumes. | Contents: A half known life – The biography of a half known life. Identifiers: LCCN 2020016327 (print) | LCCN 2020016328 (ebook) | ISBN 9781405121903 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119072690 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119106005 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Melville, Herman, 1819–1891. | Novelists, American–19th century–Biography. Classification: LCC PS2386 .B79 2020 (print) | LCC PS2386 (ebook) | DDC 813/.3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016327 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016328 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Images: © portrait of Herman Melville © Anita Impagliazzo, charcoal portrait after oil portrait by Asa Twitchell, Liverpool from the Sea © duncan1890/Getty Images, Letter of Herman Melville 1828, The Osborne Collection of Herman Melville Materials, Special Collections, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas Set in 10/12pt Bembo by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Virginia Blanford

Contents

Preface xi

Introduction 1

Part I Manhattan and Albany (1819–1832) 15 1 Last Leaves, New Leaf 17 2 Commerce and Providence 29 3 Home and Street 37 4 Awakenings 53 5 The Secret of Our Paternity 69 6 A Marriage of New England and New York 83 7 Recuperations 91 8 Schoolboy and Reader 97 9 The Birth of Ishmael 109

Part II Growing Up Gansevoort (1832–1836) 117 10 Patriarch and Hero 119 11 Gansevoort and the Indians 131 12 Broken Temple 141 13 Jackson and the Negro 151 14 Albany and Africa 157 15 Black Gansevoort 169 16 Mourning and Arousal 177 17 Summer of Plague 187 18 Spoils and Debt 199 19 Working Boy: Steam and Temptation 205 20 Moving Up 217

vii Contents

Part III Sibling Coterie (1836) 225 21 Brother Gansevoort 227 22 Happiness and Power 243 23 Sister Helen 253 24 “Emancipated school-girl” 263 25 Sister Augusta 281 26 Dark-Eyed Darling 295 27 Composing Yourself 307

Part IV Inland Identities: Farmer, Teacher, Debater, Lover, Actor, Writer (1836–1839) 319 28 “Deep inland there I” 321 29 Uncle Thomas 331 30 Schoolmaster 345 31 Debater and Cosmopolite 359 32 Lansingburgh: River Banks and Bankruptcy 377 33 The Intimacy of Reading 385 34 “Occasional writting & reading” 399 35 “Love is then our Duty” 413 36 Published Writer 429

Part V The Imperative of Travel (1839) 441 37 “On the go-off” 443 38 Circumambulating the City 453 39 “Sort of a looking sailor” 463 40 A Brotherhood of Outcasts 471 41 Secret Sympathy 483

Part VI First Voyage (1839) 491 42 Along the Marge 493 43 His First Crew 499 44 Learning the Ropes 507 45 “No school like a ship for studying human nature” 517 46 Irish Sea and Liverpool 529

Part VII Liverpool and Back (1839–1840) 543 47 The Liverpool of His Father 545 48 Roscoe and The Picture of Liverpool 559

viii Contents

49 What Melville Saw in Liverpool 575 50 The Moment of Liverpool 585 51 Home Again; Teacher Again 595 52 Rent 607 53 Maria’s Boys 619

Preface

Biography is impossible, it is said. If we cannot fully “know” ourselves or our contemporaries, how can we possibly know the life of someone born 200 years ago? I never sat with Herman Melville, never observed his daily quirks, his manner of speaking, dressing, moving about the house. I’ve not observed his moods around strangers, shipmates, editors, friends, or family. All I really know of him are his writings, mostly prose fictions, many poems, a couple essays and reviews, and lamentably few letters. Like several worthy predecessors, this biography is a narrative of the known facts of Melville’s childhood, adolescence, young manhood, maturity, and old age. But narratives are notoriously subjective and speculative. Biography cannot give you The Life; it can only simulate a life, and what good is a simulation; thus, biography is said to be impossible. Even so, biography is as inevitable as it is impossible; we desire it. But why? Aren’t Typee, Moby‐Dick, “Bartleby,” and Billy Budd all that we need? Yet we want more as we read perhaps because Melville’s works – many of them auto‐fictions – have the urgency of self‐exploration. We seek a connection between his writing and his life as if his creative process and his life experiences were linked versions of the same thing. We want to know how this remarkable writer survived the accidents in his life (some tragic) and the traumas of his everyday living (in adolescence and mid‐life); how he absorbed the world around him (white and black; male, female, and other; material and immaterial); how he learned to translate himself into his writings. I cannot claim that my biography – or any biography – can give you a full knowing of a writer’s life. We might, however, try different ways of “half knowing” Melville. The subtitle of this biography– “A Half Known Life” – comes from a passage in Moby‐Dick that equates the human soul with an “insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy” that is surrounded by “all the horrors of the half known life.” We cannot know peace and joy, Melville suggests, without knowing horror, nor horror without peace and joy. It is a world of interdependencies. The “half known” horrors in our lives are public and private. Social structures, whose power strings are pulled by seemingly invisible agents, have given us slavery, Indian removal, species extinction,

xi Preface urban poverty, alienation, and war. But our private horrors seem utterly adventitious and accidental: the loss of a father and of a son, battles with whales, the threat of the cannibal, or the anxieties of variable sexualities. Melville’s life also suggests to us that certain quirks of thought and strange emotions, certain shocks of recognition penetrating our very being, and a certain gift for language enabled him to write out and through these public and private horrors. What draws us to Melville, and draws me to the impossible art of biography, is that while we cannot know this writer fully, we can know his writings, and knowing how those writings work, in manuscript and in print, is an opening that exposes the unique imperative in him to write. If we can grasp at this fundamental dynamic in his life, we might in turn be able to read his writings in the context of his evolution as an artist. One other impossibility. Herman Melville: A Half Known Life is a literary and “critical” biography, and yet, since the 1940s and the rise of the New Criticism the field of literary interpretation has held “biographical criticism” in low regard. In the view of many critics, biography is impossible because knowing the life does not help us read the writings. The assumption is that a novel or poem contains within it all the information we need in order to interpret it, and that Melville’s intended meanings, his creative process, and revisions have no bearing on how we interpret the final, published work itself. While these assumptions are reasonable if we take literature to be simply an accumulation of publications, the broader view I adopt is that meaning derives from the sum of all writing, before, during, even after the publication of a writer’s novel or poem. Rather than limiting our perspective to single published versions of a literary work, we need to read all versions of a writer’s writing, including revisions of novels and poems in manuscript or adaptations created by writers other than Melville. If we want to experience this broader view of writing as the complicated phenomenon that it is, we need to bring the author as a writer back into our thinking about literature. We need reliable ways to think more critically about the interactions of private and social meanings that we might discover hiding out in a single author’s creative process. One constant in a writer’s life is revision and replay. In Melville’s manuscript revisions such as the erasure of words, characters, and arguments and his invention of new words or in his replaying of images within and throughout published works, we might find lurking the evidence of his discovery of a symbol or the evolution of his picturesque way of seeing and writing. In writing this life of a writer, I focus on the living that unfolds in the writing process itself: what Melville saw in his personal experience of the world around him and how he transformed it into words. The challenge is placing these microscopic moments of creativity in the larger macroscopic context of the writer’s world: Melville’s siblings who learned to write, too, and in writing alongside him influenced his language; the politics and economy of his life in upstate New York and Manhattan; his exposure to African

xii Preface

Americans, who recur throughout his life as a writer; his working life as a farmer, whaler, and naval seaman, as a mutinous beachcomber and a customs inspector; his relation to men and to women; his need to “go off” and be away from home; his conflicting need for domesticity. Though the conclusion of this half known life may still be that we can only half know Melville, a half knowing is enough for us to know more about Melville than we had previously imagined. One warning about Time, Place, and Name. These two volumes of my projected three‐volume biography cover Melville’s early life, adolescence, and young manhood up to his first breakthrough as a writer with the publication of Typee. Since moments from Melville’s early life crop up randomly throughout his lifetime of writing, extending from the 1846 of Typee to the 1891 of Billy Budd, this narrative necessarily jumps ahead in time, from the present of Melville’s life experience, say as a boy named Herman in 1828, to the future of an artist named Melville writing Moby‐Dick in 1850, and back. To keep track during these moments of biographical time travel, I provide time stamps throughout the narrative to remind readers where they are in the chronology of the life. Similarly, the narrative may hop from place to place. For instance, in steaming up the Ohio River in 1840, Herman took a side trip to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which Melville did not record in his journal until 1857 when he was touring the claustrophobic Pyramids of Egypt, and then Rome’s Tiber River, which reminded him of the Ohio. The adjacency of place in Melville’s mind hints at the half known adjacency of ideas in his thinking. Here, too, I provide place signatures to remind readers where they are on the map of Melville’s consciousness. Finally, throughout these two volumes, I use “Herman” when I am speaking about the person as he is experiencing his life, and “Melville” to indicate the writer writing. I started writing this biography in earnest in 2009, but the idea for the project began decades ago when I began to study, write about, and teach Melville at various venues in the US and abroad. From that earlier beginning, I have benefited from the works of several Melville biographers whom I never met – Charles Roberts Anderson, Newton Arvin, William Gilman, Howard Horsford, Leon Howard, Alice Kenney, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, and Raymond Weaver – and biographers I have met and greatly admired: Andrew Delbanco, Hershel Parker, and Laurie Robertson‐ Lorant. Their different approaches and insights have been inspirational. Central to the work of any Melville biographer, researcher, and reader is Jay Leyda’s Melville Log, a two‐volume chronology of Melville‐related events. In the mid‐1980s, Jay confided to me that his reason for consolidating the known facts of Melville’s life was to provide scholars and critics with a communal foundation upon which they might construct their own biographies and biographical criticism. His assumption was that no single biography will ever be definitive and that each generation will create its own Melville biography – its own narrative of the facts – to reflect our collective and evolving sense of life, culture, and humanity. While I hope my

xiii Preface contribution will be comprehensive in scope and accessible in style, I have no illu- sions that it is the final word on Melville’s life but rather hope that it will induce others to write their own half known lives. Another crucial resource for Melville research can be found in the historical and textual notes in each of the fourteen‐volume Northwestern‐Newberry editions in The Writings of Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. As he did for so many scholars, Hayford inspired me to see more concretely how biography and editing are fundamental to interpretation. In addition, Tanselle’s critical editing and theorizing about editing, along with Jerome McGann’s different but equally vital theories have shaped my own theorizing about editing what I call Melville’s “fluid text”; both were also generous in reading chapters from this work in progress. Other scholars were early influences, and their insistence upon historicizing, either through research, editing, manuscript study, or critical analysis, have also shaped my thinking: Hennig Cohen, Robert C. Ryan, and Donald Yannella. Early mentors (including McGann) at the University of Chicago – David Bevington, Walter Blair, Hamlin Hill, Norman Maclean, James E. Miller, Jr., and William Veeder – instilled the not‐easily realized idea that good writing and critical thinking are inseparable. I am particularly grateful for Bevington’s and Veeder’s recent and careful readings of different portions of this biography. Over the past decade, many experts have read all or substantial parts of Herman Melville: A Half Known Life. In particular, Wyn Kelley, Robert Milder, and Brian Yothers provided incisive and useful feedback, regarding fact, argument, and style. I am equally grateful to Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Dennis Berthold, John Gretchko, Samuel Otter, Elizabeth Schultz, Ralph Savarese, Haskell Springer, John Stauffer, and Robert Wallace. My efforts would have resulted in thin and erroneous gruel if not for their encouragements, conversations, corrections, and gracious suggestions. I am also indebted to those who have responded with insight and encouragement to individual chapters and this project in general: Jonathan Arac, Thomas Augst, Magdelena Azabache, Jennifer Baker, Dawn Coleman, Louis de Paor, Jane Desmond, Adam Fales, Meredith Farmer, Jamie Folsom, Christopher Freeburg, Jay Grossman, Pawel Jędrzejko, David Ketterer, Nick Laiacona, Robert Levine, Reagan Louie, Alma MacDougall, Sanford E. Marovitz, Timothy Marr, Katie McGettigan, Tony McGowan, Robert Milder, Christopher Ohge, Steven Olsen‐Smith, Peter Riley, Lance Schachterle, Chris Sten, Edward Sugden, and Marta Werner. I would be remiss if I did not single out several of my many excellent Hofstra University colleagues whose works and interactions have stimulated me throughout my scholarly career and who shaped this work in more ways than they might imagine: Dana Brand, G. Thomas Couser, Joseph Fichtelberg, John Klaus, Ethna Lay, Alice Levine, Lisa Merrill, David Powell, Daniel Rubey, Craig Rustici, Adam Sills, Karyn Valerius, and Lee Zimmerman. My colleagues in Rome and Naples provided open

xiv Preface arms, provocative insights into literature and teaching, and endless opportunities to share my ideas about Melville and biography internationally: Sara Antonelli, Pilar Martinez Benedi, Donatella Izzo, Giorgio Mariani, and Gordon Poole. For guidance in other lands and languages, I am also grateful to Basem Ra’ad for introducing me to Jerusalem and its environs, to Charlene Avallone and Chip Hughes in Hawai’i, to André Revel in Nuku Hiva, to numerous scholars in Japan, among them Arimichi Makino, Yukiko Oshima, Takayuki Tatsumi, and Tomoyuki Zettso, and to the late Jack Putnam, who showed me Melville’s Manhattan. Finally, among these many readers are those who have also been helpful sounding boards in ongoing debates about the art of biography and Melville biography: Jaime Campomar, T. Walter Herbert, John Matteson, John Rocco, Carl Rollyson, Kenneth Silverman, and John Wenke. The librarian is every biographer’s best friend, and I have benefited enormously from the guidance of many, among them William Kelly, Matthew Knudsen, Thomas Lannon, Meredith Mann, and John Cordevez at the New York Public Library; Warren Broderick of the New York State Library; Leslie Morris and Dennis Marnon at Houghton Library; Alex Reczkowski and Kathleen Reilly at Berkshire Athenaeum; Betsy Sherman at Arrowhead; Katherine Chansky at Schenectady Historical Society; Will Hansen at The Newberry Library; Michael Dyer at Mystic Seaport Museum; and Ann Grafstein at Hofstra’s Axxin Library. I would also like to thank the extraordinarily gifted editorial and production staff at Wiley who have patiently and generously squired this project – a proposed ten‐chapter book that grew ten‐fold over ten years – into print. They are editors Andrew McNeillie, Emma Bennett, Rebecca Harkin, and Nicole Allen; copyeditor Tiffany Taylor; and those in production: Mohan Jayachandran, Sarah Peters, and Shyamala Venkateswaran. Independently, my good friend Carol Holmes Alpern volunteered to assist in proofreading. I am no less grateful to friends and family who have lent their eye and expertise to these pages. In particular, I wish to thank five college friends, who have also read portions of these pages; they inspire me to take flight and keep me grounded: Paul Harder, William Hogle, Bernard Sawyer, Philip Russ, and Patrick White. My sister Paula Bonilla and my immediate family – Emma Coate and Eliza Harless Bryant and their spouses Russell Coate and Jessica Harless in Chicago, and Liana Bryant in New York, along with my grandchildren John and Margot Coate and Frances Harless Bryant – have been a constant blessing for their loving support during these many years of research and writing, and for their guidance, friendship, and games: a vital reminder that I live in the twenty‐first century, not the nineteenth. My deepest and forever thanks go to Virginia Blanford whose talents, wit, feeling, judgment, friendship, and love have gone into her multiple readings of every word of this book and into every moment of my life. She has helped me make with her “one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy.”

Introduction

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. (Moby-Dick, Ch. 58)

Island and Isolato

The city of New York sits where three land masses collide to form a broad bay. To the north and east is New England, with marshy inlets quickly giving way to rocky high- lands and lofty mountain chains. To the east is Long Island, Walt Whitman’s Paumanok, shaped like a fish: low‐lying, indifferent, unmovable, but a sandbar nevertheless and destined to erode beneath rising Atlantic tides. North and west is upstate New York, thrusting up from the hilly Bronx to the mountainous Catskills, extending along Washington Irving’s “lordly Hudson,” past the river towns of Poughkeepsie, Albany, Troy, and Lansingburgh, toward the sharp‐peaked Adirondacks, the river’s source. At the center of these converging masses, hanging off the mainland and into the broad bay, like the pendulous ear‐drop of an elegant lady or gay blade, immigrant worker, bowery b’hoy, or piratical entrepreneur, is Manhattan island, center of the world. Or so it might seem: centers of the world come and go. In the blindingly quick 200 years during which it has achieved this distinction, Manhattan has grown from a clustering of villages and farms at the island’s southern tip into a metropolis filling the entire island, and more. Once a colonial outpost, it is now a world capital for

1 Herman Melville: A Half Known Life commerce, finance, and culture teetering on the precipice of consumer‐driven power. In 1811, forward‐looking city officials imposed on the virtually vacant island a grid of north–south avenues and east–west streets that regularized the variable topography of Manhattan. Though the streets would remain undeveloped for decades throughout the nineteenth century, uptown and downtown neighborhoods, East Side and West Side, had come into being. By 1825, the Erie Canal linked New York’s port to the Great Lakes, thereby connecting the Old World across the Atlantic to America’s fertile inland territories, making New York the nation’s trade center, outstripping Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. As the country spread west, Manhattan spread north beyond Wall Street and Greenwich Village into the empty grid of numbered avenues and streets; it eddied around the rocks and mead- ows of Central Park and surged up Broadway, engulfing Harlem. It grabbed the Bronx and stretched east over bridges to take Brooklyn and Queens. It spread west to Staten Island. It grew upward with arrogant, fragile skyscrapers of stone, steel, and glass, piercing improbable heights, tempting fate. As industry and technology grew in the early nineteenth century, the island’s homes – flickering at night with luminous candles made of high‐grade spermaceti extracted from whales – converted their lighting to kerosene, then gas, then Thomas Edison’s electricity. Tunnels taller than houses, and stretching for miles, were dug to bring fresh mountain water to the masses of humanity otherwise decimated by repeated plagues of cholera. Tracks for trains above ground and then below were laid to get those people to work. Up until the early twentieth century, most Americans lived in villages and farms, but Manhattan – reckless juggernaut of urban futurity – was the symbol of their ambition to escape those villages and farms, or simply to escape. It represented their yearning to find themselves or rather a place to lose themselves and begin a new life. It would dedicate a statue to liberty. Yet when the colonies fought for independence in 1776, New York harbored Tories who valued trade over independence and fought to remain loyal to Britain. Nor was African American emancipation deemed a moral necessity: Manhattan or the rest of New York State did not free its slaves until 1827, decades later than all other northern states except New Jersey. Throughout the turbulent 1830s, which brought slave rebellions in the South and a surge in the abolitionist movement up North, the city maintained economic links to the South and its problematic ally, England, playing both sides, making profits. Throughout the nineteenth century and in the shadows of its ever‐rising spires, Manhattan was the tenement home for successive waves of immigrants unparalleled in number and diversity by any other city in the world. Gangs of police, firemen, and militiamen rioted alongside gangs of the underprivileged for control of the streets. The city was and continues to be a scene of exploitation and corruption. Bright home of the free and the brave, its alleys also harbor the mangled and lonely, the angry and dispossessed, the wanderer, outcast, and isolato. Manhattan is after all an island.

2 Introduction

Herman Melville, who invented the word isolato, rooted in the word island, to describe an array of alienated and baffled characters, male and female, in America’s democracy and throughout the world, is known mostly for his novel about whales, or rather one white whale and the obsessive captain and crew who pursue it, set mostly at sea, mostly in the Indian and Pacific oceans, situated about as far from Manhattan as one can travel on this “terraqueous” globe. Yet the author of Moby‐Dick was born in Manhattan, lived for decades on that island, raised children there, and died there. Spilling out prose and poetry during a life that spans some of the most volatile decades of America’s nineteenth century, he invented and reinvented himself as a person and artist. He was one who lost a father and then later a son, who chose obscurity over celebrity, who survived a failing marriage, and who experienced more doubt, pain, and joy than we can ever fully know. From the time he was eight, he wrote. As a boy, bookish street kid, moody teen, young husband, aging inspector of customs, and retiree with a cane, Melville kenned America’s inner life through Manhattan: its streets, parks, theaters, wharves, townhouses, offices, churches, and prison (ominously called the Tombs). Even in the years when he resided elsewhere – 8 years in or near Albany, 4 years at sea, and 13 years at Arrowhead, his inland farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (not far from Albany) – he was never men- tally or physically distant from Manhattan’s island of growth and riot. It was the center of his world. Although his best‐known work – the book about The Whale – was written mostly at Arrowhead, it begins with a walking tour of the piers of lower Manhattan. And Melville’s first and most exotic book, Typee, set in the South Pacific and about another kind of cannibal island altogether, includes glimpses of Broadway and visions of the “cold charities” of the overheated city. The second half of his intense psychological novel Pierre is set in the city, as is his most famous tale, “Bartleby: A Story of Wall Street.” New York suffuses Melville’s life, vision, and writing. And for good reason. If you were to place your hand on a sizable map of America’s Northeast, with the butt of that hand on Manhattan and with your thumb and fingers radiating out to Staten Island and New Jersey to the west, Albany and Arrowhead to the north, and Boston and New Bedford to the east, you would grasp the sphere of virtually all of Melville’s family, friends, and associates. He traveled this city‐centered world incessantly, on steamboats and packets, rattling trains and omnibuses, on stages and carriages, in the saddle and on foot, whatever conveyance was required to get him about town or out of town or back to town, to conduct business with publishing associates and to visit relatives and relatives of relatives, or to avoid them. This image of the writer – rooted in a place – may not comport with our cher- ished myth of him as an adventurer and loser. We think of Herman Melville as a sailor, rover, neglected genius, and angry loner, like his most famous, tragic hero, Ahab. But most of his life was spent with mother, siblings, aunts, uncles, in‐laws, children, grandchildren, and wife surrounding him snugly or conversing in a room

3 Herman Melville: A Half Known Life nearby. Or we like to associate Melville with another familiar isolato, the inscrutably depressed Bartleby, a mechanically efficient copyist of tedious legal documents, who one day stops working and instead of saying “NO! in thunder” like an Ahab or Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, says instead, comically and quite offhandedly that he “would prefer not” to copy anymore and then dispassionately starves himself to death. “Bartleby” remains one of the most startling of all urban stories, a depiction of homelessness and self‐destruction that corrodes the affable assurances of the American dream of freedom, progress, and success. In it are no whales. But Melville was not the characters he invented, neither Ahab nor Bartleby, not even Ishmael. Although we cannot deny the anger and alienation in his own life, the passive resistance and quiet protest, or that he knew depression, and witnessed great loss and suicides in his family and at sea, he was more of a homebody than the obsessive and manic‐depressive that some imagine him to have been. He was hap- pier than we want him to be, both despite and because of his family. He was “lucky” – to use his word extracted from The Confidence‐Man – because of a talent that never failed him, even if it finally failed to provide him a consistent livelihood. Because he always wrote, he survived. For us, the less mythic, more realistic, and harder Melville to know is a half‐ knowable person with an evolving consciousness who inhabited a layered personal- ity. In a passage from “The Gilder” (Chapter 114) in Moby‐Dick that we will revisit in chapters to come, Melville figured human consciousness as a cycle of selves, from unconscious infancy, faithful boyhood, adolescent skepticism, and on to “the pon- dering repose of If” in our maturity; and yet there is no “unretracing progress” in this cycle. Maturity gives way to infancy, and we cycle through our sequential selves repeatedly: “we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eter- nally.”1 These cyclic selves are cumulative so that we are always what we are now and once were. If we are to capture Melville’s extraordinary evolving consciousness – this ocean‐goer and city‐dweller, this son, brother, husband, and father, and this most gifted writer of tales, poems, and novels – we need to acknowledge his own sense of an evolving, growing self. And we must learn to ask some hard ques- tions about his many aggregate selves. Chiefly: How did the shifting consciousness that came to write such diverse works as Typee, Moby‐Dick, “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and Billy Budd learn to change from one to the next and to manage his cumulative and sequential selves? How can biography help us track the life changes that shaped the mind that shaped the words? How was Melville’s uncanny creativity his means of survival? And, more broadly, how can biography make us better, more critical readers, not only of Melville’s writing, but of writing itself, of ourselves, of our own evolving cultures? Melville’s brief career as a professional novelist – it streaked like a meteor through roughly 10 antebellum years (1846–1857) with the rapid succession of 10 books – was as volatile as the unparalleled growth of New York and the nation. Retooling himself

4 Introduction as a poet just before the American Civil War, he suffered the inevitable wages of the sin of poetry – that is, neglect – and after the war he gave up professional publishing to become a customs inspector on Manhattan’s wharves just in time for a midlife crisis. Compounding the professional failure of the 1860s were crushing personal losses, including the suicide of his son Malcom. In his later years, with more death all around him, as he outlived children, close siblings, and mother, it is a wonder that he made it through a day of work, or simply a day, or through a page of writing. Yet he continued to write poetry, including his massive epic Clarel, and to conceive other volumes of poems about the sea, his European travels, and Berkshire reminiscences; about roses, politics, art, and sexuality; even about Rip Van Winkle, oddly enough. One of these poems – a dramatic monologue of a sailor about to be hanged for mutiny – required a little prose head note by way of introduction, but the head note grew into a little novel, Billy Budd; and, like Rip, Melville was resurrected from his 20‐year repose in poetry and returned to prose. He had re‐re‐invented himself, again. At his death, Billy Budd’s unpolished manuscript was tucked away in his papers, not to be released for another 30 years, when, in the 1920s, readers “rediscovered” Melville. To date, that “Melville Revival” continues to grow. Unlike other writers of his day and ours who have succumbed to everyday trauma, depression, alcohol, drugs, stove gas, or shotgun, Melville kept the “spheres of love and fright,” as he called them, somehow dynamically interdependent, or rather he repelled the gravitation of one or the other with a creative energy that enabled him to orbit both spheres: observe them, feel their pull, but not flare out in the friction of their atmospheres. Melville never suffered from chronic writer’s block. But how? and where did he get his gift? How did his ability to scratch out a living by scratching ink on paper “save” him not just professionally but intellectually and emotionally? And for ourselves, we must ask: What meaning can we make out of this man’s life, wherever we might find evidence of that life? Indeed, how do we know the life behind his published work, even beyond the letters and documents associated with him? How do we know this consciousness – or any consciousness – much less how it grew, and grew again? How do we go beyond the invented characters – Ahab, Bartleby, Billy – who are decidedly not Melville, so that we may witness the creative processes of this writer and grasp at the salvific nature of his creativity? As Ishmael might put it, we cannot know the “dim, random way” of creativity; we can only “try.”2 This biography is my way of trying.

Water

Herman Melville was born on 1 August 1819, on the southernmost reach of Pearl Street, which curves east and northward along the lower end of Manhattan. This

5 Herman Melville: A Half Known Life projection – known as the Battery, because of defensive Dutch guns that once pointed out from it – protrudes into the bay, as if to direct our gaze toward the Verrazzano Narrows, the bay’s outlet to the Atlantic between Long Island and Staten Island. That outlet is just out of sight for Manhattanites because Governor’s Island blocks the view. Thus, children allowed to climb along the Battery’s edge, feeling but not yet thinking, clinging to rocks and pilings, staring upon their rippled reflection on calm days, tasting the salt on windy days, would have to crane their necks to see beyond the lake‐like bay and would still not get a glimpse of either the gateway Narrows or the infinite Atlantic beyond. But a child could see big‐bellied ships sail in with the tide, listen to their canvas flapping, hear the private language of sailors profanely calling. Herman lived so close to the bay in his earliest years that, even before he could walk, when the bustle of the street subsided on this lowest edge of town, he could hear water lapping, gulls shrieking, and ships creaking as he fell asleep. Pearl Street was so close to water that it was so‐named because indigenous inhabitants and then early colonial villagers had strewn broken oyster shells along the path for traction. During Melville’s early boyhood, a child still might find a remnant shell while playing furtively in the dirt, letting the sun ignite its smooth, mother‐of‐pearl inner side into opalescence, until a parent or servant snatched the foul thing away, grabbed a hand, and took him inside, off to bed, church, or school. Pearl Street was long ago thickly paved, with no hint of shell or soil. Manhattan island itself has added so much landfill to its former shores that Herman’s Battery birthplace – more recently the site of an insurance company that funds pensions for English professors – is no longer on the water but now situated several hundred feet farther away from the bay. Today, the insurance company is also gone. Place, like mind, is always evolving. During Melville’s life, and since his death in 1891, while the island grew northward and upward, Manhattan also grew in girth. Using refuse and landfill taken from tunnels and the dugout foundations of homes and later skyscrapers, the city has pushed its shore and wharves out into the bay so that a spacious park now dis- places the water Herman once gazed into. But that displacement had already begun in Melville’s younger days. Change was all around him. Citizens and tourists ambled along the railed outer walkway of this park then, just as similar visitants promenade in today’s Battery Park, now a quarter mile away from Manhattan’s original shore and Herman’s first, Pearl Street home, glimpsing the Statue of Liberty across the bay. Even amid the commotion of the walkway, they can, leaning upon the rail, still gaze downward into the bay as Herman Melville often did and reflect as Ishmael does in the opening to Moby‐Dick on how, in his day, citizens and tourists might be drawn like Narcissus to watery reflections, how “meditation and water are wedded for ever,”3 how in staring at water they might realize they have “an everlasting itch for things remote,” how by sailing off they might seek the phantom of consciousness itself, though they only dimly know it, and how, as seekers, they might survive the

6 Introduction anger, alienation, or obsession that is rooted in childhood and adolescence, and randomly relived in adulthood until death. Readers are drawn to Melville as Ishmael tells us we are all drawn to water. Melville’s language is oceanic, not because so much of his writing is about the sea but because his ideas are tidal and deep; his chapters are variable, both rollicking and mild; his sentences have rhythms that go on and on like combers rolling along a beach. And yet his poems – both long and short – are sharp and edgy, irregular and convoluted, indirect and modern, like a coral reef threatening shipwreck. We know Melville by his words and his ability to keep us enthralled by a single, gravity‐ defying sentence. We can read his words, if not his person, and that should be enough. But Melville’s writing is so self‐aware, so conscious of the problems of identity and knowing, so doubtful of god yet hungry for the sources of consciousness, so wordy, watchful, and weird, that we are also drawn to the sources of his oceanic talent, as if his exercise of language, his life lived in creativity, might take us to a creativity that could, for us too, if we can only grasp at it, work as the kind of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual salvation for us that seemed to have worked for him. Can we glean all this from the example of his creativity? We can try.

Peering, Absorbing, Translating

When in childhood did the spark occur? How did Melville find himself and become a creator of words? The adult Melville would write about his creativity, sometimes reflecting back on childhood. But to capture most vividly what this crystallizing moment of awakening might be like, we can turn to Walt Whitman, a fellow New Yorker, an exact contemporary also born in 1819, and an equally oceanic writer, whom Melville read but, as far as we know, never met. In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Whitman adopts the persona of an adult recollecting the very moment he, as a boy wandering along the shore, entranced by the lapping of waves, and hearing a bird’s plaintive call for its lost mate, woke up to his own consciousness, sexuality, awareness of death, and creativity.4 Today, we might call what Whitman’s boy experiences a Zen‐like flash of all knowing, a cosmic consciousness, which includes a simultaneous awareness that the “sweet hell within” us is knowing that the sea is both a mother of life and a whisperer of death. And yet this moment of Satori is also coupled with the exuberance of the boy’s newfound gift to sing out this new understanding, to become a poet. We, too, might have experienced such a moment, although we might tuck it so deep in memory that its meaning or the fact that it ever happened is easily drowned out by the buzz of daily life. Granted, we do not all of us recall an awakening to poetry and prophecy as Whitman tells us he did. Granted, our awakenings may not be so flush with meaning or accompanied by operatic birds, as in Whitman’s brilliant, uncanny seashore

7 Herman Melville: A Half Known Life poem. Regardless of the intensity of our recollection, or whether we recollect it at all, each of us achieves at an early age a moment of self‐recognition, an awareness that I am I, and not mother, father, or you. A cosmic consciousness is a distancing from family rooted in personal identity. So, too, with Melville. If we are to know the life of a writer like Melville, we want to reflect upon what such moments of self‐ and universal awareness – shaped by family, friends, events, economy, plague, war – might have been like for him and how they grew, recognizing, of course, the impossibility of certitude in such reflection but recognizing, too, the necessity of our speculation. Melville’s Whitmanesque moment of poetic self‐ awareness eventually evolved to embrace the lover’s care for others; the painter’s ability to frame things into meaning, to lay on color, to create the picturesque; or the psychologist’s grasp at the mind; the philosopher’s questioning of our being, and the prophet’s courage to say what will surely confuse or enrage us. We cannot know exactly when this out‐of‐the‐cradle moment happened for Melville – at sea, on horseback, walking, or on a train – or how such moments happen to any of us, or why it happened to this otherwise ordinary boy. An ordinary boy, and a white boy. A distinguishing feature of Melville as a writer – nurtured in a culture already sundered by slavery, destined for civil war, and still suffering through racism – is the thread of blackness that entwines his consciousness and writing. In “Playing in the Dark,” novelist and critic Toni Morrison acknowledges the absence of black characters in early American writers as a deaf- ening silence that requires deeper forms of reading. “There is no escape from racially inflected language,” and yet, she observes, a writer’s work is “to unhobble the imagination from the demands of that language.” Melville’s writings are an exception to the pattern of disregard Morrison finds. They often include people of color who undermine stereotype and subvert prejudice. Though Moby‐Dick is not an explicit argument for abolition or an announced polemic against slavery, it is nevertheless about an America torn racially and metaphysically. To borrow from Morrison, it addresses the elemental fears of the “not‐free” and the “not‐me” – what is culturally divided and existentially vacant – shared equally by white and black.5 In his mostly minor but memorable black figures, Melville covertly urges readers to unhobble their minds and explore darknesses within themselves even as he, or rather Ishmael, explores his own underground links to racial blackness. To see Melville’s playing with darkness more clearly, Morrison adopts an essen- tially biographical approach. She tells us she “stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer.”6 By this I take her to mean that we must not only read the words on the page but also “read” the when, where, how, and why writers conceive their covert unhobbling of readers’ minds. Here, Morrison turns to the racialized specificity of American literary biography. The biographer’s task is to push deeper into our post‐colonial culture, to ask when, where, how, and why a white boy, adolescent, and young man began – despite his culture’s insistent silencing of black

8 Introduction voices – to develop his own distinctive strand of black consciousness that enabled him to write of darker figures, male and female, some familiar to us, others waiting to be unsilenced in our reading: among them, Typee’s Fayaway and yet the lesser‐ known Chola Widow, the famous Queequeg and forgotten Tawney, big Daggoo and little Pip, Babo in “Benito Cereno” and yet a briefly mentioned but crucial, unnamed African, intensely black, inserted into Melville’s last fiction, Billy Budd. Melville’s early exposures to the sea along Manhattan’s battery and to black people in the streets of Manhattan and Albany: these are only two strands in the writer’s evolving consciousness. There are more strands unraveled in this biography, linking in unprecedented detail moments of growth in the life to moments in Melville’s writing. Melville was not the only world writer to lose a father as he was beginning to confront his sexuality and its modes of masculinity, as he grew into his various adolescent identities. But, as this biography discloses, his sexual and literary growth were inextricable and grew, as all lives do, in peculiar ways. Melville is likely to have been the first of America’s classic writers to have ridden America’s first railroad, at age 14, but that minor event in transportation history, a day‐trip errand to Schenectady for his Albany bank employer, stranded him amid the temptations of a seedy canal port, an early exposure to the underside of the American forest. Another moment of growth is recorded in a prize book of poems, awarded to Herman in school and preserved in the family. Over the years, it was festooned with suggestive marginalia contrib- uted by himself, siblings, and girlfriends; it served him as a dating manual. His ability to empathize with the disabled was also nurtured in the family as he watched his older brother Gansevoort and sister Helen struggle with separate forms of debilitat- ing lameness. He would write about his own temporary lameness in Typee and transform it in Ahab’s missing leg. Writing itself was a family affair. In what this biography calls a sibling coterie, Melville learned in adolescence to research, write, and revise school compositions alongside his younger sister Augusta and under the tutelage of Gansevoort. In a high school recital at the Lansingburgh Academy, Herman played Shylock, a performance that charmed the community and led to his first local and anonymous publications. On his own but still a boy and young man, Melville confronted his father‐longing in Liverpool, the vacancy of nature out west on the Illinois prairie, the slave trade in the Atlantic, and the otherness of whales in the Pacific. He grew as a sexual being on the islands, exercising his longing for women and men as well. The islands also shaped his way of seeing. These landscapes and seascapes taught him to frame nature in his own version of the picturesque aesthetic: bright summits and valleys of despair; islands in moonlight at dawn, all framed in darkness and light, taking him deeper into the ungraspable strangeness of existence. Does it matter when and how these life events might have occurred? I believe it does. Place, Time, and their Adjacencies in memory trigger thought and words; they are the settings of what Melville might

9 Herman Melville: A Half Known Life have seen and heard; they take us closer to the origins of writing. Can we know these events fully, or even partially? Can they help us read Melville? Let’s find out. At some point in his early childhood, something clicked that later allowed Herman, the second and unpromising son of a New York merchant, to gaze into the water world of human consciousness, let the floodgates open, and write. Like Pip left to drown, he was floating and fearful, suddenly knowing that, with only his life to lose, he was now free, and free to die. Worse than the non‐existence of death is the blankness of existence and the blankness of an empty page. Melville was lucky: he never stopped writing; never had a block; always filled his page. Nor could he keep from traveling. As his mother put it, he was always on “the go-off.” Like Whitman’s wandering boy in “Out of the Cradle,” he traveled to go deeper into himself. He was always “peering, absorbing, translating.” And these three words may well be, as Ishmael might put it, “the key to it all.”7 He could peer deeply – at oceans, islands, or opalescent shells, into the hearts of “meanest mariners, and ren- egades and castaways,” or up at stars and into books and pictures, or down into his own “strange emotions” – and he could absorb all these into himself just as any observed thing might evolve in mind into a symbol, turning both object and symbol into a resource of memories and detail to augment his richly textured works. And – like the “noiseless patient spider” in the Whitman poem of that name, spew- ing “filament, filament, filament” out of itself, or like Jack Kerouac beating out words on his Royal typewriter, or as with Thomas Pynchon’s image in a painting of cloistered women embroidering a tapestry that spills out of their tower to make the world, “seeking hopelessly to fill the void” – Melville could translate what he had witnessed and absorbed and feared. Conscious of the void that Pynchon pro- jects, he was, like Pynchon, compelled despite the hopelessness of the project to convert that void into words and rhythms made of words that could emulate the “feel” of thought and mind, or of spirit, if such a thing exists. He could render as well the desperate feeling in us that thought, mind, and spirit, in fact, do not exist. He could translate the feel of nothingness. He was what Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Poet” called “the sayer, the namer.”8 He was achieving what Morrison calls “becoming.” These talents of the poet shaped Melville’s genius, even as a boy, even before he could write the words, even as he wrote in prose. From time to time, I will use these words – peering, absorbing, translating – to draw us deeper into Melville’s moments of creativity and how he might think, feel, and write in the way that he did. These words may serve to signal to you when I am leaving biographical “fact” and engaging in necessary speculation. As signals of transparency, they can also invite you to question my audacity but also to speculate audaciously yourself about the paths of creativity, not only Melville’s but your own. Concurrent with Whitman’s idea that a consciousness grows through peering, absorbing, and translating is that Melville’s growth is punctuated by trauma: traumas

10 Introduction as dramatic as the loss of a father or the battling, as if in war, with whales; or events as domesticated as everyday adolescent mood swings or moments of awakening so disruptive or disturbing that they feel like the shock of trauma. In this biography, I try to locate some of these likely traumas in Melville’s life by locating patterns of “replay” in Melville’s writing. Just as the sufferer from post‐traumatic stress disorder relives and repeats the original moment of trauma, so, too, do we find Melville replaying “strange emotions” – as disturbing as death and yet as revelatory of a universal “all feeling” as lying in a field of gentians in May – though not, perhaps, as obsessively as the veteran might relive war but nevertheless noticeable in patterns of imagery as we re‐read Melville’s fictions and poems. These replays take us from the writing into the life – at home, on the road or prairie, in cities, on rivers, at sea, in a cave in Kentucky or pyramid in Egypt both replayed on a day in Rome – and once we explore those scattered but connected life events, we find more evidence of their presence in our re‐reading again. This notion of replay has consequences for the art of biography. For instance, the same image of riding through tall grass on the prairie – rooted in Melville’s 1840 trip to Illinois – recurs in White‐Jacket, Moby‐Dick, and the prose‐and‐poem piece “John Marr,” with slight modulations in each replay that include verbal bursts of Indian removal, bison extinction, and the scattering of rabbits at the approach of a horse: the momentous and yet the seemingly trivial. The recurrent image has nothing to do with the traumas we associate with death and violence in the streets or at sea. In fact, Melville’s largely uneventful Illinois visit occurred during a kind of nonthreatening gap year after he witnessed abject poverty and starvation in Liverpool and a year before he first killed a whale. Even so, something happened in that intervening year, his non‐violent moment out on the prairie, that had an impact equivalent to traumatic moments we generally reserve for extreme conflict. Perhaps it was a witnessing of the extinction of prairie species and prairie tribes, the relentless expanse of nature, or the vacancy of the universe, that signaled a vacancy in himself. Melville would later give a term for experiences like this, and repeated versions of it. It was a “shock of recognition,” an expression he used to identify moments of sudden transcendent insight, a form of “genius” shared by humankind, “all over the world … hand in hand.”9 Illinois was a spurt in the evolution of a consciousness that requires our biographical investigation. We might touch upon the literary effects of Melville’s prairie moment linearly, as they were written, in 1850, 1851, and 1884 – which would scatter them throughout subsequent volumes of this biography – but to do so would be to discount the moment of their genesis out on the Illinois prairie of 1840. For a biography to track the creative process, it must step back and forth in time, but with our feet rooted in moments of recognition. In writing this biography, I have indeed kept my narrative on a linear path, but from time to time I leap forward in time and then back, hoping that the reader’s head will not spin too much. I can think of no other way to

11 Herman Melville: A Half Known Life describe how a process of creativity works, how to link the shocks of recognition in life to subsequent moments played out and replayed in repeated acts of writing. Rest assured that Melville’s replays are not pathological; they are a condition of the gradual evolution of self into new versions of the self, a continuous revision of identity. We cannot see this process of replay and versions of self without an over- view of how identity and writing evolve together in terms of revision. In examin- ing Melville’s working draft of his first book Typee, you can see him change his mind about “savages” by revising them into “islanders” or “natives,” and at the same time we see him manipulating his audience and evolving himself emotionally, sexually, and politically. In literary studies, a written work that exists in multiple versions, due to varieties of revision by writers themselves, or their editors, or adaptors of their work, is a “fluid text.”10 These versions – if we can edit them into navigable form so that we can read them in sequence – help us grasp the ideas that motivate change, evolution, and revision. People are fluid texts, too. As Melville put it in a letter to Hawthorne, he saw consciousness as a flower bulb, consisting of compressed layers of leaves, like the skins of an onion – each layer a version of himself. Melville felt that his writing enabled him to peel away the layers, his many selves, to get at “the inmost leaf of the bulb,” his essential being.11 In biography, we reverse this process of self‐discovery by attempting to track the creation of the bulb: the layering on of selves, over time, in life and in writing. This self‐revision process is most concretely evident in documents that show Melville’s revision process, his actual addition and deletion of words on a manuscript leaf. Where possible, and in addition to the focus on replay, I have crafted some of this biography as a “revision narrative” that records Melville’s creative processes, his revisions on the page and in the different versions of himself evident in the kind of replay of imagery already mentioned. Given the fluid nature of identity in the evolving consciousness of a life like Melville’s, rooted in an equally evolving family, society, and volatile democratic economy and culture, biography is necessarily a narrative of revision. Finally, I want to dispel the idea that Melville is a Genius, isolated above the rest of our species and therefore romantically unknowable. Like any of us, and like the “appalling ocean,” as Ishmael puts it, each of us is only a “half known life.” Rather than dismiss the half we do not know, it is far more interesting to watch Melville grow into the heretofore hidden features of his talent than to assume that his bril- liance is merely an inexplicable, chance mutation of the human genome. As any of us might be, he was a thinker who writes, and in writing, he evolved until he died. What we call “Melville” – the text we read and the life we imagine – has also evolved, for almost 200 years, in our re‐reading, our Protean reinterpretations, and our vibrant adaptations of him. If not to marvel at an unknowable Genius, then what can biography of a half known life do for scholars, critics, artists, and all citizen readers? My assumption has