Herman Melville (1819-1891)
by Robert W. Watson
(24 April 2004)

Born in New York City on August 1, 1819, Herman Melville was a direct descendent of some of America's earliest and most aristocratic settlers. Of them he was understandably proud, and from them he received a magnificent physique, Patrician tastes, and a highly adventurous, courageous personality. Unfortunately, his heritage could not save him from a painful childhood fraught with difficulties. Melville spent most of his childhood in Albany without a father; living in poverty; suffering under the domination an imperious, unsympathetic mother whom he believed hated him. As a penniless youth, Melville worked several jobs including bank clerk, retail sales, farming, and teaching. Little wonder that at the age of 17, Melville shipped out to sea as a cabin boy.

Melville's adventures at sea (described in Redburn) were romantic, harrowing, and indelibly etched in his mind because of the tenderness of his age. After another stint at teaching, he sailed again--this time to the South Seas on the whaler Acushnet. This eighteen-month voyage was the basis for his most famous book, Moby Dick. Tired of whaling, Melville and a friend jumped ship at the Marquesas where they lived the native life for a month. Melville vividly described these exotic adventures in Typee and Mardi, including being held captive by savages from whence he escaped on an Australian trader. Jumping ship again, Melville landed in Tahiti where he worked as a field laborer and studied the island life.

Melville depicted native life in Omoo. From this and other of his writings, it is apparent that he agreed philosophically with Rousseau's idea of "the Noble Savage." No one has ever glorified more than he the virtues of the primitive man set against the missionaries' narrow way of life. Next he traveled to Honolulu where he enlisted as an ordinary seaman on the frigate USS United States. He was discharged a year later when the vessel returned to Boston. Melville had spent the last four years wandering and collecting memories that furnished the material for the rest of his career.

Melville returned to civilian life both famous and notorious. On the one hand, he was a romantic hero who had lived among cannibals and traveled the world. After all, Melville was one of the first white men to travel to the islands of the South Seas. On the other hand, he drew much criticism because of his verbal attacks on the missionaries. Like Rousseau, Melville believed that missionaries ruined the natural joy, exuberance, and innocence of native peoples. Unfortunately Melville mistook a conscience that has not been quickened for innocence and virtue.

In 1847 Melville married Elizabeth, the daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts. Within two years, his first child was born, and he had visited England and Paris, and moved his family to the farm Arrowhead, where they would live for the next thirteen years. These years were mostly influenced by his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne who lived nearby at Lenox. During this time, Melville wrote Moby Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne. Many critics credit Hawthorne as solely responsible for Melville's transition from the clumsy, predictable allegory of Mardi to the symbolic richness of Moby Dick. Later writings revealed the toll that writing Moby Dick had taken on Melville, who wrote that this work had been "broiled in hell-fire."

In 1856, Melville journeyed to the Holy Land in order to discover some answers about life. As with his south-sea wanderings, which represented the perfect in the physical realm, Melville viewed the land of Israel as the centre of Western spirituality, where he hoped to find some roots. His life from this point would be an attempt to reconcile the physical with the spiritual. The War for Southern Independence would provide the material for expressing his inner conflict, a mirror image of the greater external one taking place on battlefields across the South.

Apart from Southern poets like Catholic priest Abram Joseph Ryan (the Confederacy's poet laureate), William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville are the poets of the so-called "Civil War." Yet, Whitman's poetry has always had the ascendancy, and Melville's has always been ignored, even though Melville is arguably the better poet. No doubt this neglect of Melville is due to his views about the "glorious union." Melville refused to see the "union" as a mystical form or even as an absolute, unlike Lincoln and Whitman. While Melville desired a simple solution to the conflict, he believed that unity that is enforced by weapons should never override greater human values. Lincoln and Whitman shared a common faith in democracy and a passion for power, and this power was for the sake of forcing a union, even if the union is not based on commonality of purpose or mutual goals.

While Whitman had little regard for the role of the U.S. Constitution, Melville believed, on the other hand, a Union victory could undermine the "founders' dream." In "The House-Top," Melville alludes to this wanton power when he considered the draft riots in New York City that took place in 1863. The citizens who opposed Lincoln's policies were brutally suppressed by Union troops, and many were killed. In this poem, Melville questions the faith in democracy espoused by Whitman. Prophetically, Melville could foresee the central government quickly shifting from a Constitutional republic to an imperial regime governed not by the U.S. Constitution, but by a contrived "Manifest Destiny." Melville writes:

...and the Town, redeemed,
Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds
The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied,
Which holds that Man is naturally good,
And--more--is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.

It was in 1866 when Melville's volume of poetry appeared. This volume, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, contains poems that for the most part were written after the conflict. Unlike the war poetry of Whitman, which uses concrete and vivid images, Melville's poetry is definitely analytic. Melville tries to determine the "why" of the war. In other words, Whitman takes the safe position by merely describing events of the war through imagery, which, when considering the fickle public, is risk-free; however, Melville questions deeply the democratic faith and the mystical union, which of course are both fictions and were never supported by the founding fathers. Thus, countering the Lincoln dogma, Melville the war poet had doomed himself to obscurity.

At the end of his life, Melville lectured on the South Seas and also on Roman Statuary to supplement his income, but after failing to receive an appointment for a consulship, he completely withdrew from society. Melville moved his family to New York, but he had passed so entirely out of the public eye that Robert Buchanan wrote in 1885: "I sought everywhere for this Triton, who is still living somewhere in New York. No one seemed to know anything of the one great writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on that continent." Only Benito Cereno, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Billy Budd can be even remotely compared with his masterwork in terms of depth and feeling. Melville completed Billy Budd just three months before his death, and this novel would be unknown to the reading public until 1924.

Melville's life spans nearly an entire century, and his experiences reflect the values, mores, and societal changes of nineteenth-century America, which would struggle under a centralised, unitary government after rejecting its founding document. Like many American authors, Melville did not receive the recognition he deserved in his lifetime. Although his fame never passed into obscurity in England, Americans ignored him until the 1920s when books about the South Seas suddenly came into vogue, and a biography in 1921 helped restore Melville's genius as a writer. Only years after his death did the critics and the public give him his due. In Melville's writing is the sense of a constant struggle between good and evil, liberty and chance, and the known and unknown. Today, Melville is truly regarded as one of the American literary greats, who indeed touches the reader's imagination.