Melville's stages to his thirty-year prose silence are clearest. The presage in his famous letter to Hawthorne, as he had to hurry
Moby Dick
to an end:
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 | | I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me. . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the
other
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash . . .
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Reiterated in
Pierre,
writing ''that book whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood . . . When at last the idea obtruded that the wiser and profounder he should grow, the more and the more he lessened his chances for bread."
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To be possessed; to have to try final hash; to have one's work met by "drear ignoring"; to be damned by dollars into a Customs House job; to have only weary evenings and Sundays left for writing
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| | How bitterly did unreplying Pierre feel in his heart that to most of the great works of humanity, their authors had given not weeks and months, not years and years, but their wholly surrendered and dedicated lives.
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Is it not understandable why Melville began to burn work, then ceased to write it, "immolating [it] . . . sealing in a fate subdued"? And turned to occasional poetry, manageable in a time sense, "to nurse through night the ethereal spark." A thirty-year night. He was nearly seventy before he could quit the customs dock and again have full time for writing, start back to prose. "Age, dull tranquilizer," and devastation of "arid years that filed before" to work through. Three years of tryings before he felt capable of beginning
Billy Budd
(the kernel waiting half a century); three years more to his last days (he who had been so fluent), the slow, painful, never satisfied writing and re-writing of it.
*
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| | * "Entering my eighth decade [I come] into possession of unobstructed leisure ... just as, in the course of nature, my vigor sensibly declines. What little of
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