7

Melville’s growth was slow, and we have little evidence of what took place during these three years. School teaching must have given him leisure, and one can infer from two prose pieces, written in 1839, and published in the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, that his dreams and broodings were turned, not to the wretchedness of his adventure, but to the susceptibilities and urges of adolescence.

What do we know of Melville’s early sexual life? In Pierre, Melville pictures a passionate attachment between his hero and one of his boy-cousins, and describes how it undergoes the normal sublimation through erotic transfer to a person of the opposite sex: Melville’s sharp observation here anticipated by many years the discoveries of the analytic psychologists. When, in Redburn, we find the youthful hero remembering the three red-cheeked maids who lived in the cottage where he was given bread and milk, we cannot doubt that he made the usual easy transition to a maturer state of sexuality. If we needed any further evidence, these surviving clippings would be sufficient: he pictures himself, beautiful as Apollo, “dressed in a style which would extort admiration from a Brummel, belted round with self-esteem, and sallying in dizzy triumph among the ladies—complimenting one, exchanging repartee with another, tapping this one under the chin, and clasping this one around the waist; and finally, winding up the operation by kissing round the circle.”

It was a grandiose dream: under the cover of a jocose style, he tossed it off in public. “By my halidome, sir,” he cries, “this same village of Lansingburgh contains within its pretty limits as fair a set of blushing damsels as one would wish to look upon on a dreamy summer day.” Young Melville courted by the wholesale; he made love to the village; reluctantly, he narrowed down his vision to a paltry three girls, and dwelt for a little while upon their seraphic beauty. It was high-flown silliness; and the second Fragment from a Writing-Desk, as these pieces were called, went even further, in the manner of Thomas Moore and Edgar Poe, painting a mysterious houri whom he followed to her lair. She was properly mournful and lost in melancholy reverie—all young ladies, in Melville’s day, arrayed themselves in a mysterious sorrow, as an aphrodisiac, so that the tender hand of solace might achieve in compassion what it dared not snatch by brasher methods—and one leaves Herman, brain spinning and faculties gone, kneeling before his Divinity.

This is a correct and roundabout way of announcing that he has kissed a pretty hussy—or perhaps it is a covert expression of more deeply pent-up desires; but one must remember that, when Melville was twenty, Emerson, discussing the sexual life of young men with his literary acquaintances in England, declared that the majority of young men in America were chaste before marriage; and whether he was right or not about the majority—Whitman gives us a different picture of city morals among more plebeian contemporaries—there is little reason, in the general state of morals and opinion and social censure, to doubt that Melville was abstinent sexually during his nonage. When he wrote these pieces, woman was still a divinity to him; and, like his sisters, like his mother, she was still unapproachable.

These Fragments from a Writing-Desk do not merely throw a light upon Melville in an amorous mood; they also are full of hints about his reading and his preparation for authorship.

The manner of these essays was perfervid and exaggerated; the language was the high-flown journalese that Poe never entirely conquered in his short stories; and every word was turned before the mirror, and powdered and ribboned, before being committed to the air. He had nothing to write about except tenuous threads of dream, or rather, his disguise of their warmer reality. Thoreau, at twenty, had ideas that would not have done the man an injustice at forty; not so Melville. Melville, like Whitman, resembled a deep well: he had to pump all sorts of muddy water and stale slush to the surface before the crystal liquid began to run. He was fortunate, however, in belonging to a social class that had libraries: he alluded in these pieces to Burton, Lord Chesterfield, Milton, Byron, Shakespeare, Scott, Coleridge, and we have independent knowledge, through a letter written to a Cooper Celebration Committee, that he had read widely at this period in his best early American contemporary—whom he always valued. These mooning days by the river, and these lone nights of candlelight, were days and nights of preparation. His swollen language, his simpering allusions to beauty, his self-consciousness, were vices, but not unpromising ones: better all these flourishes, to begin with, than a wooden mould and a more definite set of limitations.

There is nothing in print between these press clippings and Melville’s first book, Typee; but from the great clarification of language, and the abandonment of most of his weaknesses, it is plain that Melville must have had much practice, if not at writing, then at ample conversation and oral story-telling. Though Melville dated his growth from his twenty-fifth year, as he told Hawthorne, it actually began at an earlier period: it was self-consciousness that came into existence at twenty-five. The growth was well started with a “solid and profound” boy of six; and at twenty, the down of intellectual manhood was already thickening into a beard. Like Pierre, he was an omnivorous and lynx-eyed reader. With all these qualities leafing and budding, we shall not be surprised at an early blossom.