Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

Maria was born in 1791 and died in 1871. Of her girlhood, little or nothing is very specifically known. After Melville’s marriage, she spent the greater part of the remaining years of her life as a dependant in his household, and the oral traditions that survive of her do not halo her memory. She is remembered in such terms as “cold,” “worldly,” “formal,” “haughty” and “proper”; as putting the highest premium upon appearances; as frigidly contemptuous of Melville’s domestic economy, and of the home-made clothes of his four children. Though she condescended eight times to motherhood, such was her animal vigour and her ferocity of pride that she preserved to her death a remarkable regality of appearance. She is said to have made a completely competent wife to Allan, superior both to any undue intellectual distractions, and to any of the demoralisations of domesticity. She managed his household, she bore and reared his children, and she did both with a vigorous and unruffled efficiency, without sign of worry or regret. There persists the story—significant even if apocryphal—that each afternoon, enthroned upon a high four-poster, she would nap in order to freshen herself for Allan’s evening arrival, her children seated silently on a row of low stools ranged on the floor at the side of her bed. In his death, as in his life, she cherished the image of Allan—with that of her father, General Gansevoort—as the mirror of manly perfection.

In Pierre, Melville is said to have drawn an essentially accurate portrait of his mother in the character and person of Mrs. Glendinning. Mrs. Glendinning is presented as a “haughty widow; a lady who externally furnished a singular example of the preservative and beautifying influences of unfluctuating rank, health, and wealth, when joined to a fine mind of medium culture, uncankered by any inconsolable grief, and never worn by sordid cares. In mature age, the rose still miraculously clung to her cheek; litheness had not yet completely uncoiled itself from her waist, nor smoothness unscrolled itself from her brow, nor diamondness departed from her eyes.” Proudly conscious of this preservation, never, even in the most intimate associations of life, did she ever appear “in any dishabille that was not eminently becoming.” For “she was vividly aware how immense was that influence, which, even in the closest ties of the heart, the merest appearances make upon the mind.” And to her pride of appearance she added “her pride of birth, her pride of affluence, her pride of purity, and all the Semiramian pride of woman:” a pride “which in a life of nearly fifty years had never betrayed her into a single published impropriety, or caused her one known pang of the heart.”... “Infinite Haughtiness had first fashioned her; and then the haughty world had further moulded her; nor had a haughty Ritual omitted to finish her.” Nor must Allan’s moralisings, and Dr. Akenside, and Mrs. Barbauld, and Mrs. Chapone, be denied their due credit in contributing to the finished product.

Between Maria and her son there existed a striking personal resemblance. From his mother, too, Melville seems to have inherited a constitution of very remarkable vigour, and all the white intensity of the Gansevoort aptitude for anger. But here the resemblance ceased. In the youthful Pierre, Mrs. Glendinning felt “a triumphant maternal pride,” for in her son “she saw her own graces strangely translated into the opposite sex.” But of his mother’s love for him, Pierre entertained precocious and Meredithian suspicions: “She loveth me, ay;—but why? Had I been cast in a cripple’s mould, how then? Now do I remember that in her most caressing love, there ever gleamed some scaly, glittering folds of pride.... Before my glass she stands—pride’s priestess—and to her mirrored image, not to me, she offers up her offering of kisses.”

Strangely must she have been baffled by this mirrored image of herself,—fascinated, and at the same time contemptuously revolted. What sympathy, what understanding could she know for this thing of her blood that in obscurity, in poverty, a failure in the eyes of the world, returned from barbarism to dream wild dreams that were increasingly unsalable? As a boy, all his passionate cravings for sympathy, for affection, were rebuffed by her haughty reserve, and recoiled within him. Fatherless and so mothered, he felt with Pierre, “that deep in him lurked some divine unidentifiableness, that owed no earthly kith or kin. Yet was this feeling entirely lonesome and orphan-like. He felt himself driven out an infant Ishmael into the desert, with no maternal Hagar to accompany and comfort him.” In Redburn, with the mother image like a fury in his heart, he describes himself as “a sort of Ishmael.” “Call me Ishmael,” is the striking opening sentence of Moby-Dick; and its no less striking close: “On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious cruising Rachel, that in retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” Of his mother he is reported to have said in later life: “She hated me.”

It seems not altogether fantastic to contend that the Gorgon face that Melville bore in his heart; the goading impalpable image that made his whole life a pilgrimage of despair: that was the cold beautiful face of his mother, Maria Gansevoort. One shudders to think how such a charge would have violated Maria’s proprieties. But in the treacherous ambiguities of Pierre, Melville himself hovers on the verge of this insight. Pierre is haunted by a mysterious face, which he thus invokes: “The face!—the face!—The face steals down upon me. Mysterious girl! who art thou? Take thy thin fingers from me; I am affianced, and not to thee. Surely, thou lovest not me?—that were most miserable for thee, and me. What, who art thou? Oh! wretched vagueness—too familiar to me, yet inexplicable,—unknown, utterly unknown!” To the mind of Pierre it was a face “backward hinting of some irrevocable sin; forward, pointing to some inevitable ill; hovering between Tartarian misery and Paradisaic beauty.” In Pierre, this face, “compounded so of hell and heaven,” is the instrument by which the memory of Pierre’s father is desecrated, Pierre’s mother is driven to insanity and death, and Pierre himself is utterly ruined. Pierre is a book to send a Freudian into ravishment.

For five years following this initial daily shifting of bed and board, Allan and his wife lived in Albany. The monotony of this residence was broken by the birth of two children,—Gansevoort, and Helen Marie,—and Allan’s trip to Europe in the spring of 1818: the enforced business trip, already mentioned, that took him to the home of his titled Scotch cousins. Upon his return he resolved to leave Albany, and settle in what he appreciatively called “the greatest universal mart in the world.” On May 12, 1819, he records in his journal: “Commenced Housekeeping at No. Park Street, New York. Mrs. M. & the children who had been to a visit to her Mother at Albany since 6th April, having joined me on this day, to my great joy.”

Three months after Allan’s moving to “the greatest universal mart in the world,” Maria presented him with a third child, and second son, who was christened after Maria’s brother, Herman. At this time, Allan seems to have accepted the excitements of childbirth so casually that Melville’s birth passed unrecorded in his father’s journal. The first surviving record of Melville’s existence is unromantic enough. In a letter dated October 7, 1820, Allan wrote: “Helen Marie suffers most from what we term the whooping cough but which I am sometimes suspicious is only influenza. But Gansevoort and Herman are as yet slightly affected.”

Herman’s infancy seems to have been untroubled by any event more startling than a growing aggregation of brothers and sisters, occasional trips to Boston, and periodic pilgrimages to Albany with his mother to be exhibited to his grandmother Gansevoort. There are frequent references to his ailing health. In April, 1824, Allan complains that “Gansevoort has lost much of his ruddy appearance, while Herman who has never entirely regained his health again looks pale, thin and dejected.”

At this time Allan signed “a 4 yrs. lease at $300 per annum free of taxes, for a new brick 2 story house replete with conveniences, to be handsomely furnished in the most modern style under my own direction & a vacant lot of equal size attached to it which will be invaluable as a play ground for the children. It is situated in Bleecker, the first south, and parallel to Bond St.... An open, dry & elevated location equidistant from Broadway & the Bowery, in plain sight of both & almost uniting the advantages of town & country, but its distance from my store, nearly two miles, will compel me to dine from my family most of the time, a serious objection to us all, but we shall be amply compensated by a residence which will obviate the necessity of their leaving town every summer, which deprives me altogether of their society. I shall also remove professionally on the 1st of May to No. 102 Pearl St. upstairs in the very focus of Business & surrounded by the auction rooms which have become the Rialto of the modern merchants but where I dare say even Shylock would be shy of making his appearance.”

By December 29, 1824, we hear of Herman that “he attends school regularly but does not appear so fond of his Book as to injure his health. He has turned into a great tease & daily puts Gansevoort’s patience to flight who cannot bear to be plagued by such a little fellow.”

On the same date, Maria writes to her brother about pickling oysters, 500 of which she sent to Albany as a gift to his family. The picture of her life that she then gives is evidence that she had cherished the counsels that “her friend A. M.” had appended to Mrs. Chapone. She tells of a call she received before eleven o’clock. “Although the hour was early, all things were neat & in order & my ladyship was dressing herself preparatory to sitting down to her sewing.” She boasts of this fact, she says, in shamed recollection of the time her brother and Mr. Smyth were ushered into a parlour out of order. “It is the first time a thing of this kind has ever happened to me & for my credit as a good housekeeper, I hope it will be the last.” In conclusion she reports: “This afternoon Mr. M. & myself, induced by the enlivening rays of the setting sun, strolled down the Bowery & after an agreeable walk returned home with renovated spirits.”

In December, 1825, Allan is moved to “lament little Herman’s melancholy situation, but we trust in humble confidence that the GOD of the widow and the fatherless will yet restore him.” By the following May, Allan’s humble confidence seems to have been rewarded not only by Herman’s recovery, but by the birth of another child. In the midst of a business letter—the usual repository of Allan’s raptures—he with unwonted vivacity so celebrates his paternal felicity: “The Lovely Six!! are all well, and, while the youngest though both last & least is a sweet child of promise, & bids fair to become the fairest of the fair—so much for affection, now for business.”

On August 10, 1826, Melville was sent out upon his first trip from home unaccompanied by his parents. His destination was his mother’s people in Albany, and his custodian during the trip a Mr. Walker. Allan shifts his responsibility for his son on the shoulders of his brother-in-law, Peter Gansevoort, in these terms:

“I now consign to your especial care & patronage my beloved son Herman, an honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker of the true Albany stamp, who, I trust, will do equal honour in due time to ancestry, parentage & kindred. He is very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and things both solid & profound & of a docile & amiable disposition. If agreeable, he will pass the vacation with his grandmother & yourself & I hope he may prove a pleasant auxiliary to the Family circle—I depend much on your kind attention to our dear Boy who will be truly grateful to the least favour—let him avoid green fruit & unseasonable exposure to the Sun & heat, and having taken such good care of Gansevoort last Summer I commit his Brother to the same hands with unreserved confidence. & with love to our good mother and yourself in which Maria, Mary & the children most cordially join I remain very truly Your Friend & Brother, Allan Melville.”

At the foot of this document, Allan appended in pencil: “please turn over.” On the reverse of the letter is scribbled a breathless last request: “Have the goodness to procure a pair of shoes for Herman, time being insufficient to have a pair made here.”

When Allan here pronounces Melville “very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension,” he puts his son in a large class of genius conspicuous for a deferred revelation of promising intelligence. Scott, occupied in building up romances, was dismissed as a dunce; Hume, the youthful thinker, was described by his mother as “uncommon weak minded.” Goldsmith was a stupid child; Fanny Burney did not know her letters at the age of eight. Byron showed no aptitude for school work. And Chatterton, up to the age of six and a half, was, on the authority of his mother, “little better than an absolute fool.” Allan scorned to take solace from such facts, however. He consoled himself with the fact that though his son was dull, he was at least “docile & amiable.”

Melville spent the summer of 1826 with the Gansevoorts. And he looked back upon it as perhaps the most fortunate privilege of his youth, that this first visit to Albany set the precedent for a whole series of similar summers. He is idealising from his own experience when he says of Pierre: “It had been his choice fate to have been born and nurtured in the country, surrounded by scenery whose uncommon loveliness was the perfect mould of a delicate and poetic mind; while the popular names of its finest features appealed to the proudest patriotic and family associations of the historic line of Glendinning.” Nor does he hesitate to reiterate that Pierre’s was a “choice fate”: “For to a noble American youth this indeed—more than in any other land—this indeed is a most rare and choice lot.” Each summer, for as long as his school vacations would permit, Melville shared the choice lot of Pierre. But Allan, unconverted to Melville’s Wordsworthian creed, regularly recalled his son to the city with the opening of school.

This is the recall for the year 1826, dated “12 Sept. Tuesday, 4 P.M.”: “We expect Gansevoort on Sunday, at fartherest, when we wish Herman also to be here, that they may recommence their studies together on Monday next, with equal chances of preferment, & without any feelings of jealousy or ideas of favoritism—besides they may thus acquire a practical lesson whose influence may endure forever, for if they understand early, that inclination must always yield to Duty, it will become a matter of course when their vacations expire to bid a fond adieu to friends & amusements, & return home cheerfully to their books, & they will consequently imbibe habits of Order & punctuality, which bear sweet blossoms in the dawn of life, golden fruits in ‘the noon of manhood’ & a rich harvest for the garners of old age—business is about as dull and unprofitable as the most bitter foe to general prosperity, if such a being exists in human shape, could desire it, & it requires a keener vision than mine, to discern among the signs of the times, any real symptoms of future improvement.”

On February 28, 1828, Allan reported to his brother-in-law Peter Gansevoort: “We have taken a house on Broadway (No. 675—if I mistake not) for 5 years @ $575 without taxes—being the 2d beyond the marble buildings & nearly opposite Bond Street. The house is a modern 2 stories built 4 years since for the owner & has only been occupied by his family. The lot is 200 feet deep through to Mercer St., Maria is charmed with the house & situation.”

But Allan never lived to see this lease expire. The dull business of which he earlier complained settled upon him, and in 1830 the prospects in New York were so hopeless that he moved back to Albany, to die two years later, leaving his wife and eight children practically penniless.

This is the third letter that I ever wrote so you must not think it very good. I now study geography, gramar, writing, Speaking, Spelling, and read in the Scientific class book. I enclose in this letter a drawing for my dear grandmother. Give my love to grandmamma, Uncle Peter and Aunt Mary. And my Sisters and also to allan,

In Redburn, Melville speaks “of those delightful days before my father was a bankrupt, and died, and we moved from the city”; or again, speaking of Allan: “he had been shaken by many storms of adversity, and at last died a bankrupt.” Allan’s journal, however, which he kept until within a few months of his death, is proudly superior to anything suggestive of the outrageousness of fortune: its hard glazed surface betrays to the end no crack in the veneer. Beyond a persistent tradition, and Melville’s iterated statement, no further evidence of Allan’s financial reverses has transpired.

It is certain, however, that after Allan’s death his family found themselves in straitened circumstances. After 1830, the most specific evidence known to exist about the whereabouts and condition of Melville’s family is preserved in old Albany Directories, as follows:

1830: no Melvilles mentioned. 1831: Melville, Allan, 446 s. Market. house 338 n. Market. 1832: Melville, Gansevoort, fur store, 364 s. Market. Melville, widow Maria, cor. of n. Market & Steuben. 1833: Melville, Gansevoort, fur store, 364 s. Market. Melville, widow Maria, 282 n. Market. 1834: Melville, Gansevoort, fur and cap store, 364 s. Market, res. 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl. Melville, Herman, clerk in N. Y. State Bank, res. 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl. Melville, widow Maria, 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl. 1835: Melville, Gansevoort, fur and cap store, 364 s. Market, res. 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl. Melville, Herman, clerk at 364 s. Market, res. 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl. Melville, widow Maria, 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl.