“A Living Presence” in the Culture of Our Time : Looking Ahead to Election Day With Herman Melville
By Stuart Mitchner
Herman Melville died 125 years ago today in a three-story brick townhouse at 104 E. 26th Street in Manhattan. The makeshift bomb that shook the same neighborhood a week and a half ago exploded a short walk away at 23rd and Sixth Avenue. Virtually unread and unremembered on September 28, 1891, Melville’s most famous work ends, in effect, with an explosion: “then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” The actual last words of Moby Dick, however, are less epic than domestic as a ship named Rachel searching for “her missing children” only finds “another orphan.”
The orphan, of course, is Melville, the metaphorical survivor of his most ambitious work, a castaway on the desert island of his obscurity sending the civilized world messages carried like “notes in a bottle” across two centuries and the ocean of the internet.
In Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work (2005), the author is seen as “a living presence in the larger culture,” not only “good for thinking about” but one of the “select company” of writers who “continue to be good for thinking with.” Since his literary revival in the mid-20th century, there have been, according to Delbanco, “a steady stream of new Melvilles, all of whom seem somehow to keep up with the preoccupations of the moment: myth-and-symbol Melville, countercultural Melville, anti-war Melville, environmentalist Melville, gay or bisexual Melville, muticultural Melville, global Melville.”
And how about a political Melville? Imagine him holding forth from his island on the issue of whether “multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores,” about which he says “they have God’s right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them.” In the same book, Redburn: His First Voyage (1849), this time on the subject of Germans emigrating to America, he refers to “the mode in which America has been settled” that “should forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes,” adding with the fervor of a candidate for all time: “You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.”
Melville in Love
One of the most romanticized incarnations of the “new Melvilles” can be found in Michael Shelden’s Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby Dick (Ecco 2016). Readers familiar with Jay Leyda’s two-volume compendium The Melville Log, or the Northwestern-Newberry edition of the Correspondence, not to mention Delbanco’s biography, are going to have serious doubts about Shelden’s premise, however responsive they may be to this readable, amusing, and, for people new to Melville’s story, illuminating book, with its charming cover. However appealing the notion of Melville lounging in the lap of a lively literary neighbor named Sarah Morewood, Moby Dick’s muse was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Consider Melville’s reaction to the “joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter” Hawthorne sent him after reading the published book. Shelden can offer no recorded words between the supposed lovers as intense or explicit as the passage where Melville tells Hawthorne “your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s” and “By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips — lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.”
In fact, Shelden quotes nothing from Sarah Morewood equal to the swooning words of Hawthorne’s wife Sophia referring in a letter to Melville’s “air free, brave and manly,” and “an indrawn, dim look” which “makes you feel that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into himself.”
Melville on Race
Delbanco’s “multicultural Melville,” most famously evoked in Moby Dick through the friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg, shows up two years earlier in Redburn among the “Sailor-boy’s” memories of Liverpool, “his first foreign city.” When Redburn sees the ship’s “black steward, dressed very handsomely, and walking arm in arm with a good-looking English woman,” he suggests that “in New York, such a couple would have been mobbed in three minutes; and the steward would have been lucky to have escaped with whole limbs.” Again, Melville could be a candidate for office holding forth on America’s racial divide as he points out that “we Americans leave to other countries the carrying out of the principle that stands at the head of our Declaration of Independence.”
Con Men Then and Now
While Melville might not have cast his political net wide enough to catch a phenomenon as bizarre as The Donald, Delbanco’s approach to The Confidence Man (1857), the last novel published in Melville’s lifetime, does have a familiar ring: “In the spring of 1855, there was widespread press coverage of a New York swindler who fleeced hs victims by passing himself off as a honest soul in need of an emergency loan …. Whether he is selling counterfeit stock, extorting money for some spurious charity, or ‘borrowing’ an item of value with a promise to return it with interest, the confidence man offers his customers what they most want: hope, hope for themselves, hope for the world.” Although The Confidence Man was panned at the time, one more in a series of critical dismissals beginning with Moby Dick, it has been, as Delbanco shows, “rehabilitated” for holding “a mirror up to the American people” by “telling the truth about the tricks Americans played on themselves in their effort to worship both God and Mammon.” Says Delbanco, “Melville’s book now seems a prophetically postmodern work in which swindler cannot be distinguished from swindled.”
Some lines from Melville’s poem “The House-Top,” which was inspired by the deadly Draft Riots of 1863, have a certain resonance as the storm-tossed ship of the 2016 campaign approaches the great white whale of Election Day: “All civil charms/And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe —/Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway/Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve,/And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.”
The Plaque
On a cold day in January 1982 a group of Melville scholars put up a bronze plaque on the side of a Manhattan office building just east of Park Avenue South. It reads: “HERMAN MELVILLE The American Author Resided from 1863-1891 at This Site 104 East 26th Street Where He Wrote BILLY BUDD Among Other Works.”
An article by Herbert Mitgang in the January 19 New York Times quotes one of the scholars observing that when Melville was a district inspector in the Custom House Service, he walked from his house west to the Hudson River. After his post was moved uptown along the East River in later years, “he probably took the Third Avenue El to work — it was already in existence in the 1880s. It’s strange to think of this man, who once sailed in square-rigged ships, riding the El.”
Next to the plaque is the rear of the 69th Regiment Armory building, which served as a counseling center for the victims and families after the September 11 attacks.
Anyone curious to see how Melville anticipates the terrorist paranoia of our time through the fears and prejudices of mid-19th-century America should read his novella, Benito Cereno (1855), Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World (2014), and Elizabeth Hardwick’s brilliant essay in the June 15, 2000 New York Review of Books, which bears the same title as Michael Shelden’s book.
Having just finished Melville In Love, I think its value isn’t so much in the case it makes for a secret love affair but as a biographical introduction to a great American writer that also introduces a remarkable woman who deserves to be remembered. Sarah Morewood may not be the muse of Moby Dick, but she clearly enhanced Melville’s life. In that sense she was there: she was on board. The cover art for Shelden’s book, by the way, is based on a painting (Couple of Lovers) by Pal Szinyei Merse (1845-1920).