Genoa (25 page)

Some days later, back in Indianapolis, I got a postcard from him.

          
“Dear Herman: The Gin got here!”

and I didn’t understand the significance, until I read Melville’s letters to Hawthorne—the passionate pouring-out, the reach of one man to another—written in the froth of finishing M
OBY
-D
ICK
:

                                        
“It is a rainy morning; so I am indoors, and all work suspended . . . Would the Gin were here!”

SIX

          
“For Delly Ulver: with the deep and true regard and sympathy of Pierre Glendinning.

                
“Thy sad story—partly known before—hath now more fully come to me, from one who sincerely feels for thee, and who hath imparted her own sincerity to me. Thou desirest to quit this neighborhood, and be somewhere at peace, and find some secluded employ fitted to thy sex and age. With this, I now willingly charge myself, and insure it to thee, so far as my utmost ability can go. Therefore—if consolation be not wholly spurned by thy great grief, which too often happens, though it be but grief’s
great folly so to feel—therefore two true friends of thine do here beseech thee to take some little heart to thee, and bethink thee, that all thy life is not yet lived; that Time hath surest healing in his continuous balm. Be patient yet a little while, till thy future lot be disposed for thee, through our best help; and so, know me and Isabel thy earnest friends and true-hearted lovers.”

Melville, as Pierre . . . no longer chasing sperm oil monsters in the Pacific, or writing the hard syllables of
Ahab, Flask, Stubb
and
Starbuck
. . . but softened, turned inward, willingly charges himself to a “ruined” servant girl:
Delly Ulver
. . .

          
P
IERRE
:
“. . . this indeed almost unmans me . . .”

The Pequod sunk and gone, Melville—1851 and ’52—writes P
IERRE
. . .

          
W
OMAN
S
UFFRAGE
A
ND
P
OLITICS
, Catt and Shuler: “No cause ever made such rapid strides as that of Woman’s Rights from 1850 to 1860.”

          
The New York H
ERALD
, September 7, 1853: “The assemblage of rampant women which convened at the Tabernacle yesterday was an interesting phase in the comic history of the Nineteenth Century . . . a gathering of unsexed women, unsexed in mind, all of them publicly propounding the doctrine that they should he allowed to step out of their appropriate sphere to the neglect of those duties which both human and divine law have assigned to them.”

          
and earlier, Abigail Adams, March, 1776, to her husband, sitting with the Continental Congress: “. . . and, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion . . .”

There is more, and earlier, in Melville: young Herman, age 21, shipped on a whaler to the Pacific:

          
“Weary with the invariable earth, the restless sailor breaks from
every enfolding arm, and puts to sea in height of tempest that blows off shore. But in long night-watches at the antipodes, how heavily that ocean gloom lies in vast bales upon the deck; thinking that that very moment in his deserted hamlet-home the household sun is high, and many a sun-eyed maiden meridian as the sun.”

. . . and there were the islands . . .

                                
“In mid Pacific, where life’s thrill

                                
Is primal—Pagan . . .”

. . . Typee, Fayaway . . .

          
“. . . the fair breeze of naked nature now blew in their faces.”

                                
“’Tis Paradise. In such an hour

                                
Some pangs that rend might take release.”

Back in New England and New York, throughout the long years . . . “pale years of cloistral life” . . . with Lizzie, the memory of Fayaway remained, dug in . . .

          
P
IERRE
:
“For whoso once has known this sweet knowledge, and then fled it; in absence, to him the avenging dream will come.”

Dug in, avenging . . . for Melville came to accept Fayaway as original sin . . .

                                        
(1850, checks and underscores in the Old Testament: “. . . art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance . . .”

. . . to accept that he had “ruined” her . . . and thus, locked in the old Christian myth, in the burden of Adam, he must make it up to all womankind:

as Pierre, to Delly . . .

as Herman, to Lizzie.

          
M
ARDI
:
“And thinking the lady to his mind, being brave like himself . . . he meditated suicide—I would have said, wedlock—and the twain became one.”

          
I A
ND
M
Y
C
HIMNEY
:
“By my wife’s ingenious application of the principle that certain things belong of right to female jurisdiction, I find myself, through my easy compliance, insensibly stripped by degrees of one masculine prerogative after another.”

          
F
RAGMENTS
F
ROM
A W
RITING
D
ESK
(written when he was 19): “What! to be thwarted by a woman! Peradventure baffled by a girl! Confusion! It was too bad! To be outgeneraled, routed, defeated by a mere rib of the earth? It was not to be borne!”

And there was B
ENITO
C
ERENO
, the Spaniard, captive of his blacks . . . sick of mind and body, loyally sustained (or so it seemed) by Babo, drifting at the mercy of the winds . . .

Melville as Cereno, captive not this time of the Typees, the friendly cannibals, but of his whites:

Lizzie, the Shaws, the right and just world (or so it seemed) of the 19th Century . . .

Lizzie as Babo, loyally sustaining Benito through misery . . .

                                
(and there was the other ship,

                                
the
Bachelor’s Delight,
where all was

                                
trim and shipshape . . .

C
LAREL
:

                                
“My kin—I blame them not at heart—

                                
Would have me act some routine part,

                                
Subserving family, and dreams

                                
Alien to me—illusive schemes.

                                
This world clean fails me . . .”

and

                                
“‘Serve God by cleaving to thy wife,

                                
Thy children. If come fatal strife—

                                
Which I forebode—nay!’ and she flung

                                
Her arms about him there, and clung.”

The rhyming couplets—Melville’s aging force thrashing through eight hundred pages, two volumes, of C
LAREL
. No longer the powering prose of M
OBY
-D
ICK
, mounting pilingly upon itself, but couplets: chains, darbies . . .

                               
(the beloved irons that Columbus hugged to himself, swore to die with

                               
(and did, the iron transmuted into his flesh, as arithritic gout . . .

          
Melville: “. . . so that the gallows presented the truly warning spectacle of a man hanged by his friends.”

          
I
SRAEL
P
OTTER
: “The other officer and Israel interlocked. The battle was in the midst of the chaos of blowing canvas. Caught in a rent of the sail, the officer slipped and fell near the sharp edge of the iron hatchway. As he fell, he caught Israel by the most terrible part in which mortality can be grappled. Insane with pain, Israel dashed his adversary’s skull against the sharp iron. The officer’s hold relaxed, but himself stiffened. Israel made for the helmsman, who as yet knew not the issue of the late tussle. He caught him around the loins, bedding his fingers like grisly claws into his flesh, and hugging him to his heart. The man’s ghost, caught like a broken cork in a gurgling bottle neck, gasped with the embrace. Loosening him suddenly, Israel hurled him from him against the bulwarks.”

Melville: still able to tire a Hawthorne:

          
Una, to her aunt: “Mr. Melville was here a day or two, and Mamma overtired herself during his visit, and was quite unwell for a day or two afterwards.”

. . . and Lizzie:

          
reported by Sam Shaw: “Elizabeth’s catarrh is somewhat relieved here but I am sorry to see how generally feeble she is, and prematurely old.”

Melville: growing older—Lizzie outlived him by many years—no longer able to thrash . . .

          
From
T
HE
C
AREER
O
F
M
OCHA
D
ICK
: “From first to last ‘Mocha Dick’ had nineteen harpoons put into him. He stove fourteen boats and caused the death of over thirty men. He stove three whaling vessels so badly that they were nearly lost, and he attacked and sunk a French merchantman and an Australian trader. He was encountered in every ocean and on every known feeding ground. He was killed off the Brazilian banks in August, 1859, by a Swedish whaler, which gathered him in with scarcely any trouble, but it was always believed that poor old ‘Mocha Dick’ was dying of old age.”

There was Columbus, 4th voyage, forbidden by the Court to enter the principal island he had discovered . . .

          
“Moreover every man had it in his power to tell me that the new Governor would have the superintendence of the countries I might acquire.”

. . . cruising elsewhere in the Caribbean, battling tempests and Indians, his ships rotting . . .

          
Ferdinand: “Being here at anchor ten leagues from Cuba, full of hunger and trouble, because they had nothing to eat but hard-tack and a little oil and vinegar, and exhausted by working three pumps day and night because the vessels were ready to sink from the multitude of worms that had bored into them . . .”

. . . putting ashore finally on Jamaica, where the two ships, the
Capitana
and
Santiago,
lashed together, beached, worm-eaten and rotten, ended their careers as houseboats . . .

. . . isolated among his islands—no tools for re-planking or building, his caulkers dead, his crew in mutiny, no ship likely to call as he had earlier reported no gold in Jamaica—Columbus survived for over a year on what food the Indians brought him, living on the arrested caravels . . .

          
There is the old Spanish proverb:
“La verdad no se casa con nadie” . . .

          
and Melville: “Truth will
not
be comforted.”

Shifting in my chair, I become aware again of the house, the attic, the rafters—poised in the quiet of the city, the dark, early-morning hours. I think of the early days in Indiana, the first settlements. I think of my great-grandfather, Hammond Mills, who built this house—and of his well worn philosophy: The Mind is to the Body as the Whole Man is to the Earth . . .

I remember fragments of medical school, the boys and men I studied and lived with . . . one became a gynecologist and surgeon, now has a lucrative, busy practice here in the city, scraping out the female troubles of Indiana . . . another has a commission in the Navy, does brilliant research in Space Medicine: the problems raised by sending human beings into outer space . . .

Shifting again, I am invaded with bitterness: I think of us as a nation of prurient neuters, bald-headed oglers, the men having laid down original tools and taken up others: become science fictioneers, space shippers, nuclear mystics, relinquishing the Body (Earth), seeking to escape it, save only to peer at it naughtily . . . become, with the aid of popular religion, the modern devout of the ether . . .

There is the population—not only of our own country but of the world—become anaplastic, growing, since World War
II
, wildly, without roots or viable form . . .