The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (117 page)

“Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism,” Eliot explained, were suggested by Jessie Weston’s
From Ritual to Romance
, about the legend of the Holy Grail, and also by “another work of anthropology … which has influenced our generation profoundly,” James G. Frazer’s
Golden Bough
. These would supply the Homer for his verse Ulysses. Eliot himself later ridiculed the notes as a “remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship.” But he did reveal how his work and his
style suited the modern quest, for as he quoted his mentor F. H. Bradley, “the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.” Eliot had already named his poetic device for expressing the private self in the images of the world out there. No more sentimental Songs of the Self! None of that Egotistical Sublime. “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art,” he insisted as he explained the success of Shakespeare’s tragedies, “is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” His examples were the sensory impressions accompanying Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking or the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death. Eliot’s phrase had a vogue that surprised Eliot himself, for it expressed the modern revolt against Romantic sentimentalism.

In revising
The Waste Land
Pound had been his guide. The recent publication of Eliot’s manuscript has revealed that Pound cut many passages, especially the parodies of earlier poets, and removed dramatic lines for the sake of poetic conciseness and cadence. The resulting poem, a paean to emptiness, was widely recognized as an expression of the “malaise of our time.”

Pound hailed it as justifying the “ ‘movement’ of our modern experiment since 1900.” But he was privately envious. “Complimenti, you bitch,” he had written Eliot on first reading Eliot’s draft, “I am wracked by the seven jealousies.” Pound was stirred to resume his own effort at a modernist epic in his
Cantos
.

Still, in later life Eliot felt himself confined and encapsulated by the “rhythmical grumbling” of his
Waste Land
. Unlike Wordsworth, who luxuriated in the vagaries of the self, Eliot became a refugee and, like his idol Dante, a seeker for salvation. In 1927, when he was thirty-nine, he became a British subject and joined the Anglican Church. He abjured Babbitt’s effort to find an alternative to religion. “Humanism,” Eliot complained, was only “a product—a by-product—of Protestant theology in its last agonies.” And Eliot gave up the Religion of Art for the Religion of
Religion, describing himself as “classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” He found solace in the English metaphysical poets Donne and Marvell, who, unlike Milton and other rationalists, had brought thought to the aid of feeling. “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” The catastrophe from which English literature—poetry and drama—still suffered, according to Eliot, was “the dissociation of sensibility,” producing “intellectual poets” like Tennyson and Browning.

While some of Eliot’s phrases became bywords, his poetry remained cryptic to the very community whose Waste Land he depicted. He became a high priest but no therapist. Ironically, in his search outside the expressive self, Eliot found refuge in a style and allusions that were arcane and almost secret. Even Virginia Woolf, his friend, patron, and admirer, would find his poetry “obscure.” He found his solace and his “objective correlatives” not only in classic figures like Dante and Shakespeare but in a host of lesser figures. Many of these were unknown to the reading public. An unsympathetic critic called
The Waste Land
“a true picture of the junkyard of the intellectual mind.” When, after his conversion, Eliot became a more conventional Christian poet, as in
Ash Wednesday
(1930) and in
Four Quartets
(1935–43), his style became less compact and less distinctive.

He showed unsuspected versatility as he turned to poetic drama, expressing his reconciliation with himself and his reach out to the community. And he had some success.
Murder in the Cathedral
(1935) on the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas à Becket used chorus and a sermon to carry its Christian message. It continued to be performed even by those who did not share his Anglo-Catholicism.
The Family Reunion
(1939) pursued similar Christian themes.

And he made surprising adaptations of Greek drama in
The Cocktail Party
(1949), after Euripides. His children’s verse,
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
(1939), was transmuted in 1981 into a popular Broadway musical.

Eliot finally found a new happiness in 1957, when he married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary for the previous eight years. She was now thirty and he was sixty-eight. Friends were shocked at this union by a man who had made a fetish of propriety. Some of his oldest friends were alienated, but, Valerie later explained, “He obviously needed to have a happy marriage. He couldn’t die until he had had it.”

The alchemy that had brought Pound and Eliot together, and given Pound the power to shape and guide Eliot’s talents, somehow had sent them in opposite directions for salvation. Pound never gave up his frantic quest for panaceas and conspiracies, his bumper harvest of hates, nor his belief that private salvation, if there was any, must be in poetry. Eliot settled for the respectable institutions about him. While he shared many of Pound’s prejudices, including anti-Semitism, he finally tried to put his poetry in the service of an ecumenical Anglican Christianity. In 1948, while Pound was incarcerated in Washington’s St. Elizabeths Hospital for the criminally insane, the painfully sane Eliot was receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature from the king of Sweden and the prized Order of Merit from King George VI at Buckingham Palace.

I
N
an age of American city-building, when Chicago and Omaha were rising out of the prairies, when the California gold rush suddenly made San Francisco, when Americans moved westward to fill the continent and new states were being created in startling numbers, the great American epic of the self was cast in the tropical oceans halfway around the world. When the other eloquent voices of an American Renaissance—Emerson (1803–1882), Thoreau (1817–1862), and Whitman (1819–1892)—were singing the beauties of American “Nature” and the wonders of “Democratic Vistas,” the heroic American literary myth would be a classic tale of revenge, negation, ambiguity, madness, and encounter with evil.

The great heroic metaphor the whale—a monster rich in ancient legend—had a short sensational real life in the American economy. The worldwide hunt began when a Nantucket whaler caught its first sperm whale in 1712, and by 1755 New Bedford, Massachusetts, was the world’s greatest whaling port. It was appropriately American, too, that the prosperity of the new whaling adventure was so brief, that it would be the victim of technological change and of the changing styles of women’s clothing. During its brief heyday until the 1850s whale oil was prized for soap-making and especially as a lamp’s fuel, and whalebone was in demand for corset stays and umbrella ribs. But the discovery of petroleum and the kerosene distilled from it in the 1850s displaced whale oil in American lamps. Then in the 1860s the explosive harpoon head, followed later by the harpoon gun and the electric harpoon, and power-driven catcher boats made the whaleboats’ strenuous tussle with thrashing diving whales only a memory.

How Herman Melville (1819–1891) seized this brief window of opportunity as the subject of the Great American Epic, which survives vigorously into the twentieth century, is one of the most surprising tales of the creating imagination. For Melville’s life was a tale of frustration and disappointment, and such brief success as he enjoyed was irrelevant to his enduring work. Melville’s family (before Herman’s generation, Melvill), early Scottish and Dutch settlers of New York, linked him to great events in American history, but his own life was no American success story. One of his grandfathers took part as an “Indian” in the Boston Tea Party in 1772, and another had held Fort Stanwix against the British. His father, Allan Melvill, was a sophisticated importing merchant of dubious business judgment, dealing in fancy French dry goods. He frequently brought back art objects
and fine books and furniture for their comfortable house on lower Broadway. Herman’s father found him, at the age of seven, compared with his bright elder brother, “very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension, but … of a docile & amiable disposition.” His mother, who had social ambitions, never quite satisfied him with her affection, and later in life he seems to have thought that she hated him.

After Allan Melvill went bankrupt in 1830 the family left New York for Albany to be near their Gansevoort relatives. Young Herman and his seven brothers and sisters were catapulted from ease into poverty and the indignity of the decayed aristocrat. When Melville’s father died in a delirium in 1832—a troublesome personal legacy for his son—it was rumored that he had gone mad. Because he left heavy debts the numerous family now depended on the charity of Melville’s uncle Peter Gansevoort. Years later when Herman Melville visited New York and stopped in at the Gansevoort Hotel en route to his Customs House office on Gansevoort Street, he would reflect on the transience of glory and the “evanescence of—many other things.”

At the age of twelve Melville left school, clerked in an Albany bank for two years, then worked in his brother’s store selling fur caps. At eighteen he had a three-month tour teaching in a country school outside Pittsfield while he lived with a local family. But he did not like teaching and returned to Albany. In 1837 his brother went bankrupt and the family moved to Lansingsburgh (now Troy). He took a brief course in engineering and surveying one spring at nearby Lansingsburgh Academy, to prepare for a construction job on the Erie Canal. But the panic of 1837 intervened and jobs were scarce. For a while Melville was burdened with the family he could not support. Frustrations piled up. How was he to escape into some fixed way of life? His brother Gansevoort in 1839 found him a summer tour as a cabin boy on the
St. Lawrence
, a merchant ship sailing from New York to Liverpool. Before he left home he had joined a Juvenile Total Abstinence Association and an Anti-Smoking Society, but he soon lost his inhibitions, acquired a taste for wine and tobacco (especially in cigars), which became a “beguiling” solace. His first taste of the sea also gave him a brief and unforgettable glimpse of the poverty and stench of a modern industrial city in Liverpool.

The next five vagrant years, including three at sea, gave him the material for his writing all the rest of his life. Going to sea seemed an obvious course for a young man with no trade or profession and no fortune. His cousin had gone out on a whaler a few years before. For Melville the sea was escape from family responsibilities. In January 1841 he joined the crew of the whaler
Acushnet
, and set off from Buzzard’s Bay to the South Pacific. A special appeal of such a voyage, Melville later said, was “the overwhelming idea
of the great whale himself.” Whales fired the popular imagination in the 1840s, stimulated by an article in the
Knickerbocker Magazine
(1839) on “an old bull whale of prodigious size and strength” who was “as white as wool.” Called Mocha Dick, or the White Whale of the Pacific, it was known to shatter boats in its powerful jaws. When Mocha Dick was finally captured, it was said to have nineteen harpoons in him, with a record of having stoved three whaling ships and fourteen boats, and having killed thirty men.

Melville’s record of these adventures and misadventures was almost exclusively in his novels. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson and Thoreau, he kept no journal, and for his novels he relied on “simple recollection.” So it is impossible for us to compare his real experiences with those he imagined. During his eighteen months on the
Acushnet
the ship touched at Rio, spent forty days rounding Cape Horn, stopped on the coast of Peru and Ecuador, glimpsed the Galápagos, and sailed on to the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, then a favorite recruiting and outfitting port for the whaling grounds southward around the Society and Marquesas islands, fabled for their volcanic mountains and fertile tropical valleys. At twenty-two Melville had his first intense experience of the rigors and terrors of whaling. Thirteen members of the crew of twenty-three either deserted the ship or left because of disease. One balmy morning in late June 1842, when Melville saw the peaks of the island of Nuka-Hiva behind a delightful bay, he could not resist the opportunity to jump ship and escape its filth and the brutality of his officers, who ruled with “the butt-end of a handspike.” Joined by another crew member, he took off into the lush tropical interior.