Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

“Yesterday I received from Gansevoort your long and very entertaining letter to Mamma from Pernambuco. Yes, it was very entertaining. Particularly the account of that interesting young gentleman whom you so uncivilly stigmatise for a jackass, simply because he improves his opportunities in the way of sleeping, eating & other commendable customs. That’s the sort of fellow, seems to me, to get along with. For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible & sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long friendly snooze together, under the sod—no quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heartburnings, & thinking how much better that other chap is off—none of this: but all equally free-&-easy, they sleep away & reel off their nine knots an hour, in perfect amity. If you see your sleepy ignorant jackass-friend again, give him my compliments, and say that however others may think of him, I honour and esteem him.—As for your treatment of the young man, there I entirely commend you. You remember what the Bible says:—

“In another place the Bible says, you know, something about sparing the strap & spoiling the child.—Since I have quoted poetry above, it puts me in mind of my own doggerel. You will be pleased to learn that I have disposed of a lot of it at a great bargain. In fact, a trunk-maker took the whole lot off my hands at ten cents the pound. So, when you buy a new trunk again, just peep at the lining & perhaps you may be rewarded by some glorious stanza staring you in the face & claiming admiration. If you were not such a devil of a ways off, I would send you a trunk, by way of presentation-copy. I can’t help thinking what a luckless chap you were that voyage you had a poetaster with you. You remember the romantic moonlight night, when the conceited donkey repeated to you about three cables’ length of his verses. But you bore it like a hero. I can’t in fact recall so much as a single wince. To be sure, you went to bed immediately upon the conclusion of the entertainment; but this much I am sure of, whatever were your sufferings, you never gave them utterance. Tom, my boy, I admire you. I say again, you are a hero.—By the way, I hope in God’s name, that rumour which reached your owners (C. & P.) a few weeks since—that dreadful rumour is not true. They heard that you had begun to take to—drink?—Oh no, but worse—to sonnet-writing.

That off Cape Horn instead of being on deck about your business, you devoted your time to writing a sonnet on your mistress’ eyebrow, & another upon her thumbnail.—‘I’ll be damned,’ says Curtis (he was very profane) ‘if I’ll have a sonneteer among my Captains.’—‘Well, if he has taken to poetising,’ says Peabody—‘God help the ship!’

Melville’s family seem all to have been more sceptical of his verse than they were of his prose. In 1859 Mrs. Melville wrote to her mother “Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell any one, for you know how such things get around.” Mrs. Melville was too optimistic: her husband’s indiscreet practice is still pretty much a secret to the world at large. And Clarel, his longest and most important poem, is practically impossible to come by.

In 1884, Melville said of Clarel in a letter to Mr. James Billson: “a metrical affair, a pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for unpopularity.” Though this is completely true, Melville used in Clarel more irony, vividness, and intellect than the whole congregation of practising poets of the present day (a few notable names excepted) could muster in aggregate. Yet with all this wealth of the stuff of poetry, the poem never quite fulfils itself. In Clarel Melville brings together in the Holy Land a group of pilgrims; pilgrims nearly all drawn from the life, as a study of his Journal of 1856-7 shows. In this group there are men devout and men sceptical, some suave in orthodoxy, and some militant in doubt. There are dreamers and men of action; unprincipled saints, and rakes without vice. In the bleak and legend-haunted Holy Land Melville places these men, and dramatises his own reactions to life in this setting. The problem of faith is the pivot of endless discussion: and upon this pivot is made to turn all of the problems of destiny that engage a “pondering man.” These discussions take place against a panorama of desert and monastery and shrine. In some of the interpolated songs of Clarel, Melville almost achieved the lyric mood.