Genoa (5 page)

                
Her twenty men set out in three open whaleboats for the coast of South America 2000 miles away. They had bread (200 lb. a boat),
water (65 gallons), and some Galapagos turtles. Although they were at the time no great distance from Tahiti, they were ignorant of the temper of the natives and feared cannibalism.”

and

          
“The three boats, with the seventeen men divided among them, moved under the sun across ocean together until the 12th of January when, during the night, the one under the command of Owen Chase, First Mate, became separated from the other two.

          
“Already one of the seventeen had died, Matthew Joy, Second Mate. He had been buried January 10th. When Charles Shorter, Negro, out of the same boat as Joy, died on January 23rd, his body was shared among the men of that boat and the Captain’s, and eaten. Two days more and Lawson Thomas, Negro, died and was eaten. The bodies were roasted to dryness by means of fires kindled on the ballast sand at the bottom of the boats.”

Thus, Herman Melville was born . . .

          
“. . . which joyous event occured at 1/2 past 11 last night—our dear Maria displayed her accustomed fortitude in the hour of peril, & is as well as circumstances & the intense heat will admit—while the little Stranger has good lungs, sleeps well & feeds kindly, he is in truth a chopping Boy—”

But there is more to this, to the birth of Herman: what is it about
legs
that so possessed the later man? Age twenty-one, the father dead, the family without funds, Herman, unpaid for a year’s teaching, and unemployed, shipped on a whaler for the Pacific, and thus broke away from home; but reaching the Marquesas, he again broke away, deserting ship on the island of Nukahiva, and thus doubly escaped, twice radically changed his world; and, at the entrance to the valley of Typee,

          
“I began to feel symptoms which I at once attributed to the exposure of the preceding night. Cold shiverings and a burning fever succeeded one another at intervals, while one of my legs was
swelled to such a degree, and pained me so acutely, that I half suspected I had been bitten by some venomous reptile . . .”

And subsequently, the leg swelled and pained him whenever he thought or acted to escape from the Typees, subsiding when he was content with his life there: the leg saying to him—or he to himself
—I cannot move.

Again, in O
MOO
, confined to the stocks in the Calabooza Beretanee (British Jail):

          
“How the rest managed, I know not; but, for my own part, I found it very hard to get asleep. The consciousness of having one’s foot
pinned
; and the impossibility of getting it anywhere else than just where it was, was most distressing.

          
“But this was not all: there was no way of lying but straight on your back; unless, to be sure, one’s limb went round and round in the ankle, like a swivel. Upon getting into a sort of doze, it was no wonder this uneasy posture gave me the nightmare. Under the delusion that I was about some gymnastics or other, I gave my unfortunate member such a twitch, that I started up with the idea that some one was dragging the stocks away.”

Or, in W
HITE
-J
ACKET
, the amputation performed by Dr. Cuticle:

          
“. . . and then the top-man seemed parted in twain at the hip, as the leg slowly slid into the arms of the pale, gaunt man in the shroud, who at once made away with it, and tucked it out of sight under one of the guns.”

                                        
(Note: how Melville hated doctors!

And in M
OBY
-D
ICK
, there is Captain Peleg (Pegleg) addressing young Ishmael:

          
“‘Dost see that leg?—I’ll take that leg away from thy stern . . .’”

And Ahab:

          
“So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. ‘Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,’ said the old Gay-Head Indian once; ‘but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.’”

and

          
“His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the lineknife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby-Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.”

August 1, 1819, New York City, a hot, dark night: Maria Melville, Herman’s mother, has, for the third time, gone down into the valley, and Herman, still unborn, struggling in the Dardanelles, the Narrows of a white woman, and perhaps, like the baby whales, “still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence”—Herman dies, to the extent that all life, all vitality retreats trunkward from one leg:—and then the “chopping Boy” is born.

          
“. . . deep memories yield no epitaphs.” And yet, somewhere lies the thought:
one must die to be born.

P
IERRE
:

          
“And here it may be randomly suggested . . . whether some things men think they do not know, are not for all that thoroughly comprehended by them; and yet, so to speak, though contained in themselves, are kept a secret from themselves? The idea of Death seems such a thing.”

I
SRAEL
P
OTTER
:

          
“It was not the pang of hunger then, but a nightmare originating in his mysterious incarceration, which appalled him. All through the long hours of this particular night, the sense of being masoned up in the wall, grew, and grew, and grew upon him . . . he stretched his two arms sideways, and felt as if coffined at not being able to extend them straight out, on opposite sides, for the narrowness of the cell . . . He mutely raved in the darkness.”

W
HITE
-J
ACKET
:

          
“Just then the ship gave another sudden jerk, and, head foremost, I pitched from the yard. I knew where I was, from the rush of the air by my ears, but all else was a nightmare . . .

                
“As I gushed into the sea, a thunder-boom sounded in my ear; my soul seemed flying from my mouth. The feeling of death flooded over me with the billows . . .

                
“For one instant an agonizing revulsion came over me as I found myself utterly sinking. Next moment the force of my fall was expended; and there I hung, vibrating in the mid-deep. What wild sounds then rang in my ear! One was a soft moaning, as of low waves on the beach; the other wild and heartlessly jubilant, as of the sea in the height of a tempest . . . The life-and-death poise soon passed; and then I found myself slowly ascending, and caught a dim glimmering of light.”

Perhaps on that hot night in August, 1819, the unborn Herman lingered like Queequeg in his coffin,

                                        
(a rehearsal of death that was all the cure the savage needed . . .

                                        
(the same coffin, the death-box—unhinged from the sunken whaler—on which Ishmael ultimately survived . . .

And we have this: the great, white, humped monster, that dismasted Ahab:

          
“Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth . . .”

There is again a split, a division of awareness, as earlier, at the dinner table, and for some time I am still, aware of my stillness, aware of my surroundings, of the nineteenth-century attic whose dark, sloping lines seem an extension of frontal and parietal bones of the skull itself—aware that my attention is wandering, or perhaps fixed but inaccessible, and aware that this condition must be allowed to play itself out . . .

There being division, I am able to observe myself, to be at once within and without, and an exploration occurs, inwardly derived, over the surfaces, the topography of face and head, and downward over my body; I gain the sense of being different, of causing this difference in myself, of altering the outwardness of myself. I discover that flesh and muscle, perhaps even bone, and certainly cartilage, are potentially alterable, according as the plan is laid down. And the plan itself may shift and change: I may be this Michael or that, Stonecipher or Mills—Western Man or Indian, sea-dog or lubber, large-headed or small, living then or now; and even such outrageous fables as that of converting Ulysses’ men into swine become not unreasonable, when we understand that the men must have experienced some swinish designs within themselves, to which Circe had access . . .

Certainly, the study of Man: Literature is the study of Man: Anatomy . . . when it ceases to be, books become merely literary.

                                        
(Melville: “I rejoice in my spine.”

Leaning back in the chair, my body straight out, I let the awareness sweep, as a tide, through my trunk, down my legs and into my feet.

          
Ahab: “. . . I’ll order a complete man after a desirable pattern. Imprimus, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to ’em, to stay in one place . . .”

and, with the carpenter,

          
“Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?

                
“Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?

                
“It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, to a hair, do I. Is’t a riddle?

                
“I should humbly call it a poser, sir.

                
“Hiss, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers?”

A sudden fury lashes me, a desire to mutilate myself, to amputate the great, round, ugly globe of a clubfoot—to make it
not me.
As in M
ARDI
, in the chapter Dedicated To The College Of Physicians And Surgeons,

          
“In Polynesia, every man is his own barber and surgeon, cutting off his beard or arm, as occasion demands. No unusual thing, for the warriors . . . to saw off their own limbs, desperately wounded in battle . . .”

and

          
“The wound was then scorched, and held over the smoke of the fire, till all signs of blood vanished. From that day forward it healed, and troubled Samoa but little.

                
“But shall the sequel be told? How that, superstitiously averse to burying in the sea the dead limb of a body yet living; since in that case Samoa held, that he must very soon drown and follow it; and how, that equally dreading to keep the thing near him, he at last hung it aloft from the topmast-stay; where yet it was suspended, bandaged over and over in cerements . . .

                
“Now, which was Samoa? The dead arm swinging high as Haman? Or the living trunk below? Was the arm severed from the body, or the body from the arm? The residual part of Samoa was alive, and therefore we say it was he. But which of the writhing sections of a ten times severed worm, is the worm proper?”

The fury lingers, contorting, aggravating . . .

          
“Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.”