Genoa (30 page)

                
“My illness permits me to write only at night, because in the daytime my hands are deprived of strength.”

and another time:

          
“I wrote a very long letter to his Highness as soon as I arrived here, fully stating the evils which require a prompt and efficient remedy . . . I have received no reply . . .”

                                        
(Melville, in a letter, advertises
C
LAREL
:
“. . . a metrical affair . . . eminently adapted for unpopularity.”

          
and Columbus signs his letters to Diego, “Your father, who loves you as himself.”

          
as Melville ended a letter to Stanwix: “Good bye, & God bless you, Your affectionate Father, H. Melville.”

Melville,

age 69, begins work on B
ILLY
B
UDD
, as an afterthought to his life . . .

creates “Starry” Vere, the educated, literary captain, aware (as Melville was) of history and tradition, knowing that their demands must and will be met . . . knowing, too, that the present act is a compound of many elements: out of the hazy near-past, the strong and clear distant-past, and the immediate moment . . .

Melville, as Captain Vere, creates himself a bachelor . . . the old dream!

and creates Billy, the Handsome Sailor—a foundling . . . the old Ishmael dream!

Vere and Billy, bachelor and bastard—the two elements of Melville, split . . .

and Vere it is (as the agent of tradition) who sends Billy to his death . . . Melville, as Vere, thereby accepting responsibility for his son Mackey’s death; and perhaps, too, for the death of the Handsome Sailor in himself . . .

or perhaps Billy—pure and merry—was the sexual transposition of Fayaway: the dark savage girl become a pure white man,

                                        
(Billy:
“. . . a lingering adolescent expression in the as yet smooth face, all but feminine in purity of natural complexion . . .”

                                        
(it being safer to love a man than a woman . . .

                                        
(as Dreiser transposed himself, saying, in effect,
it is not safe to be myself, I will be
S
ISTER
C
ARRIE
. . .

Melville, an old man, recalls Fayaway . . .

          
B
ILLY
B
UDD
:
“In fervid hearts self-contained some brief experiences devour our human tissue as secret fire in a ship’s hold . . .”

          
and Julian Hawthorne reports an interview with Melville: “. . . he told me, during our talk, that he was convinced that there was some secret in my father’s life which had never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in his books.”

Melville—ever the writer—placing things of self in someone else . . .

          
Mrs. Glendinning, in
P
IERRE
:
“Oh, that the world were made of such malleable stuff, that we could recklessly do our fiercest heart’s wish before it . . .”

and my hand reaches for a newspaper clipping, the first in a series—date, 1953:

BOY
, 6,
IS KIDNAPPED

AT PRIVATE SCHOOL

Son of Wealthy Kansas City

Family Taken by Woman Who

Gave False Story to Nuns

KANSAS CITY
, Mo., Sept. 28 (
UP
)—The 6-year-old son of a wealthy Kansas City business man was kidnapped from a Roman Catholic school here today by a woman who represented herself to be the boy’s aunt.

The stocky, red-haired woman led Robert C. (Buddy) Williams Jr. from the French Institute of Notre Dame de Sion after falsely telling the nuns that his mother had had a heart attack. Hours later the police had been unable to find any trace of the boy or his abductor.

The child’s father is the owner of the only Cadillac automobile agency in Kansas City, and has similar interests in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The family has a large, English-style home across the state line in Kansas.

The police said that there was no indication whether the kidnapper planned to seek a ransom.

The boy was in the primary grade of the school. He was a half-day pupil and was picked up each school day by the family chauffeur and taken home during the lunch hour. When the chauffeur arrived today the boy was gone.

FIVE

KIDNAPPED BOY FOUND DEAD

AFTER BIG RANSOM IS PAID

Two Jailed

In Missouri

KANSAS CITY
, Mo., Oct. 8 (
AP
)—Little Buddy Williams’ body was dug out of a shallow grave today, ending with sickening tragedy 10 days of waiting by his wealthy parents who paid a record $600,000 ransom for his return.

Arrested as his kidnappers were the woman who lived in the house in St. Joseph, Mo., where the body was found, and her ex-mental-patient boy friend Carl Austin Mills, 43, whose spending spree in St. Louis led police to part of the ransom money.

The slightly built, 6-year-old boy had been shot and killed the same day the woman, Mrs. Bonnie Brown Heady, 41, took him from his private school by ruse.

The city, the Indiana country around us, are dead quiet. Rising, I find my joints stiff, my body tired. I move around, amble to the end of the attic, loosening my limbs . . .

Carl, stealing a child, attempting by ransom to convert him to his own future,
is a little like Melville—un-centered by the failure of M
OBY
-D
ICK
—clutching Hawthorne: trying to push off on him the “Agatha” story, get him to do Melville’s writing:

          
“. . . it has occurred to me that this thing lies very much in a vein, with which you are peculiarly familiar. To be plump, I think that in this matter you would make a better hand at it than I would.—Besides the thing seems naturally to gravitate toward you . . .”

          
“. . . it seems to me that with your great power in these things, you can construct a story of remarkable interest out of this material . . . And if I thought I could do it as well as you, why, I should not let you have it.”

and, perhaps, like Columbus, before or during the 3rd voyage, writing the Letter to the Nurse . . .

the center-line of communication with the Sovereigns broken: writing, therefore, to an underling, hoping by court gossip to reach the Royal ear . . .

no longer confident . . .

Through the little window in the gable end, I can see only darkness . . . staring through the glass, I think of the 1st voyage, return: Columbus on board the
Niña,
caught in a violent storm, writing “with caligraphic poise” on a single piece of parchment, trying to reduce to this space the content of his discovery . . . and sealing the parchment in a cask, throwing it overboard . . .

          
there was the story that came out of Spain: “At noon of August 27 in the year 1852, an American three-masted brig named the
Chieftan,
of Boston, under command of Captain d’Auberville, found itself upon the coast of Morocco. As a storm was approaching, the Captain determined to increase his ballast, and while engaged in this occupation, the drag brought up what at first glance appeared to be a piece
of rock, but, finding it light in weight, the sailors examined it more closely, when they discovered it to be a coffer of cedar wood: opening this, there was disclosed a cocoa-nut, hollow, and containing a document written in gothic letters upon parchment. Not being able to decipher this, it was given to an American bookseller when the ship arrived at Gibraltar. The latter immediately upon glancing at the manuscript offered the American Captain one hundred dollars for the cocoa-nut and its contents, which offer the Captain declined. Thereupon the bookseller read to the astonished Captain the document, which was no other than the holograph relation of the discovery committed to the sea three hundred and fifty-nine years before.” . . . but the fictional parchment disappeared . . .

          
and, likewise, “My Secrete Log Boke”—a “facsimile edition” of a version found by a fisherman off the coast of Wales—printed in English, the “universal maritime language”—and appropriately adorned with barnacles and seaweed.

but—in fact—there was Raymond Weaver—first of Melville scholars—who, in 1919, dug loose the tin bread box from the tight seaweed of Melville’s heirs and descendants, and brought out the crabbed, incoherent manuscript of B
ILLY
B
UDD
. . .

I think of Isabella, first permanent settlement in the Indies—swept by epidemic, poverty, and starvation, and rapidly depopulated . . .

          
“It was also said . . . that one day one man or two were walking amidst those buildings of Isabella when, in a street, there suddenly appeared two rows or choruses of men, who seemed to be noble and court people, well dressed, with swords girt and wrapped in traveling cloaks of the kind worn in Spain in those days, and when that person or those persons were wondering how such people so new and well dressed had landed there . . . on asking them whence they came, they answered silently by putting their hands to their hats to greet them and, when they took their hats off, their heads came off also and they remained headless, and then vanished: of which vision the man or men were left nearly dead and for many days pained and astonished.”