The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (118 page)

This casual decision, the turning point of Melville’s life, set him on the path to become a high priest of American letters, if only posthumously. It provided the exotic adventure that transformed a young life of frustration and vagrancy into a writer’s career. Once on the uncharted island he and his young companion, Toby Greene, hoped to take refuge with the Happar tribe, that was known to be friendly. But, by a lucky misadventure, they took the wrong valley and arrived instead at the land of the feared Typee, a tribe of cannibals. To their relief they were greeted warmly, feasted, and coddled. While Melville’s mysteriously infected swollen leg was treated by the medicine man, they were troubled that the Typees would not let them leave. To obtain medicine for Melville’s leg, they did allow Toby to go back to the bay, but there he was shanghaied onto another whaler. Now alone, Melville was terrified to discover three human heads and the human remains of a feast. “Long pig”—human flesh—was reputed to be the Typees’ great delicacy, and later anthropologists have confirmed their cannibalism.

Meanwhile Melville was enjoying a tropical idyll—as much as was possible in his uncertainty whether he was being fattened for a feast. He was generously fed on local delicacies washed down with coconut milk. He
found the physical beauty of the Typees irresistible, and gossip had it that he fathered a child by one of their charming girls. Between naps and leisurely smokes on tapa mats he passed his days swimming. But he secretly sought ways of escaping the ominous hospitality. A young man from a neighboring tribe who spoke a little English took word to an Australian whaler that was passing by. The captain sent a boat to his rescue, Melville limped hastily on board, and despite desperate efforts of the outraged Typees he joined the
Lucy Ann
, a whaler out of Sydney.

The
Lucy Ann
provided an unromantic adventure under an incompetent captain and a drunken mate, who found no whales, and within a month a mutiny put the whole crew in a jail in Tahiti. But this was only a manner of speaking, for they were left free to become “omoos” (beachcombers) around Papeete. There Melville in the company of the ship’s surgeon observed the corrupting effects of European conquest and missionary conversion on Polynesian life. In early November 1842 he signed on with another whaler, the
Charles and Henry
out of Nantucket, and by late spring disembarked at Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui. This was to be his last trip on a whaler. In Honolulu Melville signed a contract to become a clerk and bookkeeper in a store, but he had little enthusiasm for the Hawaiian life.

In August he gladly joined the crew of the frigate
United States
as an enlisted man, and had his first experience of the American navy, until it docked in Boston fourteen months later. The ship retraced Melville’s original course from Nantucket—down the coast of Peru, which remained one of his most vivid and forbidding memories (“Corrupt as Lima” was his phrase). His routine duties included washing decks, polishing brass, regular drill, and caring for Gun No. 15. The only adventure was a spirit of rebellion against the senseless draconian discipline. He was outraged at the bloody floggings he was ordered to witness 163 times. But he did make warm friends among the crew, including the “matchless and unmatchable Jack Chase,” to whom he would dedicate his last work,
Billy Budd
. After a stormy winter passage around Cape Horn, the
United States
touched at Rio and arrived in Boston Harbor on October 3, 1844. Three years at sea had brought an end to Melville’s seafaring experience. So speedily had he equipped himself to be what D. H. Lawrence called “the greatest seer and poet of the sea.”

It is easy enough to explain how and why Melville came to have these experiences. But no Melvillian mystery is more tantalizing than how and why he became a writer. Most others in our history of creators had somehow made writing their vocation and from an early age chosen this way of man’s “making himself immortal.” Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Balzac, and Dickens all found their calling in the word. But we find
no clues to such an ambition in the little we know of the young Melville. Critics, with some reason, accused Boswell of having written his great book by accident. We might with more reason say that Melville was an “accidental” author, an inspired amateur. Or, less charitably, that he came to writing as an act of desperation—for lack of anything better to do.

His early years gave him his fill of the sea and now he casually turned to the world of words. “Until I was twenty-five,” he once wrote to Hawthorne, “I had no development at all.… From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.” Returning in 1844 to live with his mother in Lansingsburgh, he charmed friends and relatives by exotic tales of his life among “the cannibals.” When he was pressed to put them in a book, his model, if he had a model, seems to have been the popular recent travel books, like Mungo Park’s
Travel in the Interior of Africa
and “my friend Dana’s unmatchable
Two Years Before the Mast
.”

When Melville completed his manuscript in the autumn of 1845, he gave it to his brother Gansevoort, who was departing to be secretary to the American legation in London, to submit to the publisher John Murray. After hesitating until he was reassured that the recounted experiences had really happened, Murray published it in two installments in his “Home and Colonial Library” early in 1846. The dispute over its authenticity, which kept interest alive, was calmed by a surprise statement from Toby Greene (then a house painter near Buffalo) confirming the “entire accuracy” of the story. At the urging of Washington Irving, G. P. Putnam bought the American rights and it was published under the coy title
Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life During Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas
. When Putnam’s partner, John Wiley, was shocked by what he read, Melville agreed to expurgate thirty pages found “objectionable” for their sexual, political, or antimissionary message. Meanwhile Melville, in the fashion of the time, was planning to plant his own enthusiastic review.

Melville’s first literary effort already illustrated his special form of documentary fiction that would flower in
Moby Dick
. His exotic personal experience set him reflecting on the paradoxes of good and evil, of civilization and barbarism. “After passing a few weeks in this valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But alas! since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of-war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories.” The sensational appeal of
Typee
depended less on its noble sentiments than on a simple adventure story and its vivid and convincing detail in a period hungry for “colonial” travel literature. Would the hero be eaten by cannibals? And all spiced with mildly salacious passages on the unclad Polynesian beauties and the hero’s romance with Fayaway, who was “speechless with sorrow” when she saw him escape on the Australian whaler.

For Melville the popular success of
Typee
had the charm both of a win-at-the-first-try and of a
succès de scandal
. Though the book had what some called the “charm of indelicacy,” Longfellow had not found it necessary to omit any passages when he read
Typee
to his family before the fire. Melville seized the moment and quickly wrote
Omoo
, a “Narrative of Adventures” in the Society Islands of Tahiti and Eimeo, which appeared in January 1847. Elaborating his experience as an
omoo
wandering from island to island, it lacked the life-and-death suspense of
Typee
, but offered “a
familiar
account of the present condition of the converted Polynesians, as affected by their promiscuous intercourse with foreigners, and the teachings of the missionaries, combined.”

When his brother Gansevoort died, Melville was responsible for supporting his mother and four sisters. His instant celebrity at the age of twenty-eight had given him new confidence. Now he asked the eminent Judge Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of Massachusetts, to whom he had dedicated
Typee
, for the hand of his daughter, Elizabeth, and they were married in August 1847. While the marriage of Melville and Elizabeth was troubled, she remained a comfort and a stabilizing fixture in his unhappy life. And the marriage had practical benefits. Shaw advanced the funds for the newly married couple to buy their house in New York. And this provided Melville with a base for his new role as pundit and man of letters in the circle of the Duyckinck brothers who published the
Literary World
, the leading weekly literary review.

Melville had warned John Murray, his English publisher, that his next book would be quite different from
Typee
and
Omoo
. And the sales performance of
Mardi
, too, was a hapless reverse. This book was a flight of fancy, which recycled his Polynesian experience into a sentimental metaphysical romance of the hero, Taji, and the mysterious white beauty, Yillah, whom he rescues from a native priest taking her to be sacrificed. From the transcendental realm of Mardi, where she suddenly disappears, Taji’s desperate search takes him across the world to Dominora (Great Britain) and Vivenza (the United States), in quest of perfect wisdom, pursued by “three fixed specters … over an endless sea.” When
Mardi
was published in 1849, critics found it dull or ridiculous. Melville tried to shrug off these attacks as “matters of course … essential to the building of a permanent reputation.”

Perhaps the birth of his first child in February 1849 sobered him with the need to write what people would read. During the next five months he doggedly turned out two books based on his youthful trip to Liverpool and his experience as an enlisted man in the United States navy.
Redburn: His First Voyage
, a short novel, followed closely Melville’s own impressions to depict the miseries of the Liverpool slums. It fulfilled Melville’s promise to his publisher to omit mysticism and metaphysics, was well received, and has
survived also as a boy’s book in the genre of
Robinson Crusoe
. The more substantial
White Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War
(1850), Melville explained, aimed “by illustrative scenes” at an accurate account of “the established laws and usages of the Navy.” The book remains a reliable, if shocking, source for the history of American seafaring life.

“If you begin the day with a laugh,” he opens his chapter on a flogging, “you may nevertheless end it with a sob and a sigh.” He reports how four crew members were being punished for nothing more than a seaboard scuffle among themselves.

No less excruciating is Melville’s patient description of the unnecessary amputation of a sailor’s leg by the vain chief surgeon Cuticle, for the instruction of the junior surgeons on board.

Melville himself considered both
Redburn
and
White Jacket
uninspired and routine. But, now trying to make his living as an author, he went to
London in October 1849 to secure the best terms from some publisher. On publication in 1850
White Jacket
was well received. And in February 1850 he returned to New York to enjoy the favorable reviews from both sides of the Atlantic.

In his seafaring youth Melville had spent the better part of three years on whaling ships, but whaling itself was the one experience he had not mined for his writing. Yet, he observed in his Preface to
Omoo
, nowhere do sailors more plainly show their “wilder aspects” than on these vessels in the Sperm Whale Fishery—“a business not only peculiarly fitted to attract the most reckless seamen of all nations, but in various ways is calculated to foster in them a spirit of the utmost license.” His books had all been more or less autobiographical. And
Mardi
, the one least so, was a blot on his literary reputation. Having once found it necessary to assure his publisher that his book would be quite free from philosophy, at this stage in his career it would have been strange if he had purposely written a metaphysical book.

There are few more satisfactory explanations of how and why Melville, author of South Sea travel romances and accounts of life in the United States Navy, came to write the great American epic of man’s struggle against the evil in the universe than D. H. Lawrence’s: