Herman Melville
From Philosopedia
Melville, Herman (1 August 1819 - 28 September 1891)
An internationally respected, major U.S. author, Melville was the son of Alan Melvill (as the family name was spelled when Herman was born). His father imported French dry goods as well as spent the family inheritance, having borrowed $20,000 from his father and from his parents-in-law. His mother, Maria, was a stern Calvinist of the Reformed Dutch Church variety. She believed that all children are born in Original Sin, that they must be “sanctified in Christ,” and they must be baptized. We are predestined, she would relay to her family, by God’s free grace to be chosen, or not be chosen, into the elect. Even a life of “good works” could not persuade God to choose an individual . . . which might explain a line in Pierre (1852), according to biographer Hershel Parker, that if our actions are “foreordained…we are Russian serfs to Fate.”
Upon his father’s death, when Herman was twelve, the family was in deep debt and Herman was sent to work in a bank for over a year at $150 per year. He then worked in his brother’s store as a clerk, taught school, and at the age of twenty joined a whaling ship, signing on as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Liverpool, which he wrote about in Redburn (1849). Spending eighteen months on a whaler in 1841-1842, he found such intolerable hardships on board that he and a companion escaped from the ship at the Marquesas Islands. Here, the two were captured by a tribe of cannibals, then rescued by an Australian whaler, about which he wrote Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847). John M. Robertson points out that in Chapter 24 of Typee, Melville recounts how some of the natives he met were unafraid of their gods, not only abusing them but also challenging them to fight. Melville’s unsympathetic view of Christian missionaries in Polynesia was met with a hostile reaction from church journals. And from this point on, his skepticism about religion was shown in his various works.
Laurie Robertson-Lorant in a biographical work, Melville (1996), tells of his first time crossing the ocean as a passenger, for he was journeying to England to sell the rights to White-Jacket. Walking out onto the ship’s deck one evening, he was shocked to see a man in the water, and he shouted for crew members. The drowning man, however, refused any help and disappeared below the waves. In his journal, Melville recalled the man’s expression: “it was merry,” he wrote. The experience was an upsetting one, but the captain later explained that passengers jumping overboard was not all unusual, that often their loved ones were often on hand to see them leap.
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Melville and Hawthorne
After marrying Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, Melville bought a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, befriending his neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne and being one of the first to appreciate his genius. In fact, it is said that Mrs. Hawthorne found the emotional attachment between Melville and her husband a bit much, and she was pleased when her husband was appointed by his friend, President Franklin Pierce, to the post of consul at Liverpool, England, requiring that they move from the Tanglewood area.
- Melville had written, after meeting Hawthorne and reviewing in 1850 his Mosses from an Old Manse for The Literary World, “Already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further, shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil in my Southern soul.”
Although he tried to disguise his identity by signing the review, “By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont,” Melville and his extended metaphor of insemination were easily detectable. Meanwhile, Mrs. Hawthorne has been quoted as saying of her husband, “He hates to be touched more than anyone I know.”
Moby Dick, Not Moby-Dick
Melville’s masterpiece is Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a symbolic account of a deranged whaling captain’s obsessive voyage to find and destroy the great white whale that had ripped off his leg. On one level, it can be read as a sociological critique of various American class and racial prejudices, on another a repository of information about whales and whaling, and on another a philosophical inquiry into the nature of good and evil, of man and his fate. On yet another, the work is an exposé of the sordidness of the business of butchering whales. Why, Melville speculated, do we follow certain of our desires even when we logically deduce that these desires hurt us? Why is what we call “evil” actually evil? Why if we know something is dangerous do we persist in pursuing it?
- Scholars in 2006 generally agree that the title page of Melville's first American edition was a mistake or editorial arrogation that needn't have been perpetuted. "Moby Dick" is unhyphenated throughout the printed text (incuding a chapter title) and in a surviving letter to Sophia Hawthorne in Melville's Hand. {Frederick Crews, "Melville the Great," The New York Review of Books, 1 December 2005} In short, Herman Melville [[ wrote Moby Dick, not Moby-Dick.
Billy Budd
Billy Budd, Foretopman (written during the last five years of his life but published in 1924) features Billy, a handsome sailor who, because of his innocence and beauty, is hated by Claggart, a dark, demon-haunted petty officer. Billy, in his simplicity, cannot understand why Claggart should hate him, why, in short, evil should desire to destroy good. When Claggart concocts a story that Billy wants to start a mutiny, Billy in his only act of rebellion strikes Claggart, who after the blow dies as he falls and his head hits a hard surface. Although the ship’s captain sympathizes with Billy and recognizes his essential innocence, he is forced to condemn him to death. Following Billy’s hanging, he lives on as a legend among sailors. The book was dedicated to Hawthorne. Its homosexual overtones inspired Benjamin Britten to write an opera, “Billy Budd,” an idea developed by George Steiner in New Yorker (5 July 1993).
According to Caleb Crain's American Sympathy (2001), "The male sexual desire for men was something to be affirmed (or denied). It was a fact of shipboard life, something to be celebrated, sometimes to be rejected, much like sexual desire on land."
Pierre
Pierre, or the Ambiguities, was a critical and financial disaster. A Gothic romance with Shelleyan overtones and a satire on the literary profession, it touches upon a variety of controversial subjects. The title character is doted upon by a mother whose “playfulness of . . . unclouded love” implies a perverse sexuality. He then falls in love with Isabel, who it turns out is his illegitimate sister; yet, “he imprinted repeated burning kisses upon her . . . . They coiled together, and entangledly stood mute.” Mr. Falsgrave, the family clergyman, is as hypocritical and deceitful as everyone else in the community. His cousin Glen, with whom he had felt “an ardent sentiment” when the two were lads and had explored “the preliminary love-friendship of boys,” steals Lucy, the person to whom he is engaged, Pierre murders him in a rage and is imprisoned. Lucy and Pierre’s mother die of grief. Pierre and Isabel, who now are incestuously in love, commit suicide in his prison cell. In short, Pierre, who had hoped to find a way to set the universe aright, is undone by his ideals and becomes “the fool of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate.” The New York Day Book commented upon Pierre with the headline, HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY.
Melville's Freethinking
"Crazy" was not Hawthorne’s analysis of Melville. As Parker points out, Hawthorne wrote that Melville was into metaphysics. In his November 1856 journal Hawthorne had written,
- Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting (during his visit with Hawthorne in Liverpool). He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.
James Wood, noting Hawthorne’s analysis, wrote that Melville “was tormented by God’s ‘inscrutable’ silence—this is clear from the work. Moby-Dick, who is both God and Devil, flaunts his unhelpful silence as God does to Job: ‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?’ In the chapter ‘The Tail,’ Ishmael admits that if he cannot really comprehend the whale’s rear, then he can hardly see his face: ‘Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen,’ an appropriate of the verse in Exodus in which God tells Moses that ‘thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.’ ”
“Most people, Melville tells Hawthorne, “fear God, and at bottom dislike Him . . . because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. . . . You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don’t you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?” The lines exemplify, wrote Wood, that Melville “could not help playing the infidel: he was one of the most delvingly sacrilegious writers who ever existed. . . . He slapped at God; but, in some way, he could not do without the idea of being slapped by God in return. . . .Ahab’s monomaniacal hunt of the whale is not so far from Ishmael’s multiple tolerance of it.” In 1866, when forty-seven, Melville became an outdoor customs inspector in New York City (at the Hudson River on Gansevoort Street, named after his mother’s maternal family), a position he held for nineteen years. During this time he was relatively unknown. It was not until 1920 that literary scholars recognized his genius; in fact, his New York Times obituary referred to him as Henry, not Herman.
Now one of America’s most written about authors, Melville has a large number of supporters as well as detractors. He has been described by Ohio State University professor Elizabeth Renker as a drunken wife-beater who once pushed his wife down a flight of stairs. Donald Kring, when he wrote a biography of Henry Whitney Bellows, came across an 1867 letter from Samuel Shaw, the half brother of Melville’s wife, Lizzie, that proposed they fake a kidnapping to rescue her from Melville’s sporadic violence. The University of Delaware’s Hershel Parker, however, in a 1996 biography, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1, 1819–1883, disbelieves the allegation. But although many scholars may have overlooked Melville’s weaknesses, three of four Melville children had plainly led unhappy lives. His oldest son committed suicide. And the five women in his family who survived him looked on him at times as a “beast,” in the words of Eleanor Metcalf’s son Paul.
Stan Goldman’s Melville’s Protest Theism, The Hidden and Silent God in “Clarel” (1994) challenges past views that Melville was an agnostic. However, he was a member in New York City of the Church of All Souls (Unitarian), whose minister Walter Donald Kring in Herman Melville’s Religious Journey (1997) described Melville’s turning from Calvinism to Unitarianism. But Hershel Parker claims he did so to placate his wife, that actually Hawthorne liked neither Unitarianism nor its other "ism," Utilitarianism.
Of Melville's religion, Alfred Kazin, wrote that he and Abraham Lincoln were
- two tortured souls who wanted to believe in God in the face of annihilation. Melville [retained a faith] even if he did not always know what and where and whom to believe. [Lincoln, however, remained "the rationalist who joined no church."]
Melville's Death
- Melville's grave marker, on the left, is next to that of his teenage son, Malcolm
After his 1847 marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of a well-known Massachusetts judge (Lemuel Shaw), the couple honeymooned in Canada, had four children (sons Malcolm, born 16 February 1849, and Stanwix, born 22 October 1851; and daughters Elizabeth, born 1853, and Frances, born 2 March 1855), and purchased Arrowhead, a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, farm house.
In 1863, Melville and his wife settled with their four children in New York City. In 1867, a time during which his marriage to Elizabeth Shaw was becoming unhappy for both, his oldest son (Malcolm) shot himself, perhaps accidentally. His poetry was not widely accepted by the critics, and for a living he became a custom inspector for the City of New York, holding the post for 19 years. The custom house was ironically on Gansevoort Street, named after his mother's wealthy family.
Melville is buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where also buried are composer Irving Berlin, musician Miles Davis, and former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The obituaries mention that he was so little known at the time of his death.
(See entries for Moby Dick, Ethan Allen, and for James Wood, who holds that Melville was not a Christian theist and did not believe in a supernatural God. Also see entry for Alfred Kazin, who wrote that Melville retained his faith despite knowing in what and where and whom to believe.)
{CE; CL; GL; JM; JMR; JMRH; OCAL; OEL; RAT; TRI; TYD; Philip Weiss, The New York Times Magazine, 15 December 1996; U; UU}
