The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (120 page)

While Ahab’s need for revenge may have been sound, the act of vengeance was far from godly. As the blacksmith forges the harpoon barbs, tempered in the blood of Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, the three harpooners,
Ahab deliriously howls,
“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!”

Ahab in one of the most familiar passages reminds us that we can each seek in Moby Dick what each of us wants to find.

So too each of us is served by the doubloon Ahab has posted as a reward for sighting the White Whale. “And this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man but mirrors back his own mysterious self.”

The central mystery of Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick is the mystery of the self. “Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!” Here is no buried treasure, but only grassy glades and “ever vernal landscapes in the soul.”

The story ends in an ocean of ambiguities. After three days of encounter and chase, Moby Dick destroys the whaleboats, Ahab is fouled in the line and tied to Moby Dick, who staves and sinks the
Pequod
. Only Ishmael—the self—escapes, supported by the
Pequod
’s life buoy, which had been made from a coffin. By floating to the “vital centre” of the vortex, Ishmael avoids being sucked down with the sinking
Pequod
. “The unharming sharks, they glide by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage seahawks sailed with sheathed beaks.” He is rescued on the second day by “the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search for her missing children, only found another orphan.”

Melville never recovered from the effort of writing
Moby Dick
, which he said had been “broiled in hell-fire.” From Hawthorne he received a letter of appreciation, to which he responded that “A sense of unspeakable security is on me this moment, on account of your having understood the book.” His reference to “security” was ominous.

He continued to write, but what he wrote might not have survived had they not been written by the author of
Moby Dick
. And his next book, a token of uncertainty, was titled
Pierre; or, the Ambiguities
(1852). This is a semimystical, semiautobiographical tale of a wealthy young man who pretends to marry his illegitimate half-sister, writes an unpublishable book, kills his own cousin, and then commits suicide with his true love. To add to Melville’s discouragement, a fire at Harper’s consumed the stock of his books. No longer the celebrity who had lived among the cannibals, he was now a forgotten—or ridiculed—writer in search of a way to support his family.

In vain he sought a government post, preferably a consulship, with the aid of Judge Shaw and Hawthorne, who was a friend of President Franklin Pierce. Melville managed somehow by the generosity of friends and relatives to meet the pressing financial needs of his family. But he would never again have the satisfaction of earning his own living as a writer. Within five years he would give up his effort to write for the book-buying public. Meanwhile he wrote
Israel Potter
(1855), based on an anonymous book published thirty years before retailing the adventures of a New England boy who joins the Revolutionary army, is captured by the British, takes part in naval intrigues and battles, meets the Revolutionary celebrities, returns home, fails to secure a pension and dies in poverty. Melville turned to writing short stories, brought together in
The Piazza Tales
(1856), including the remarkable and still readable “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Then,
The Confidence Man: His Masquerade
(1857), his last novel published in his lifetime, tells a puzzling unfinished satirical tale of a trickster who boards a Mississippi steamboat in the guise of a deaf mute, and in a series of roles, tests the goodwill and trustfulness of his fellow passengers.

Seeing him on the verge of a “breakdown,” Melville’s family sent him on a trip to Europe and the Near East, paid for by Judge Shaw, hoping to relieve his tensions. The limited psychiatric vocabulary of the period could not provide a name for his disability, nor any remedy. He stopped in Liverpool to see Hawthorne, who noted Melville’s need “to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labour, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was.… Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything else that lies beyond human ken.”

Melville said the spirit of adventure had gone out of him. But he showed uncertainty even about this by leaving his trunk behind at the Hawthornes’ and taking only a carpetbag, recalling his old South Sea days when he carried nothing more than a shirt and duck trousers.

This was their last intimate meeting, and a reminder that still another hope, his wish for a lifelong solacing friendship with his ideal spiritual companion, would not be realized. This trip to the Holy Land via Italy and Egypt did not produce solace or any new certainties. When Melville returned home he was still “a pondering man.” For three seasons he tried lecturing—on “Statues in Rome,” “The South Seas,” and “Traveling”—which brought neither money nor applause. Then an inheritance on Judge Shaw’s death provided the funds to move the family back to New York. Finally, he turned to poetry, and published
Battle-Pieces
(1866), on Civil War themes, which made little impression. His irrational behavior to his family, on whom he vented his frustrations, led his wife, recalling Allan Melville’s last days, to fear that Herman, too, had gone mad.

In 1866 he finally received a government post—not the remote romantic consulship in Hawaii but the prosaic job of deputy inspector of customs, around the corner from his house in New York City. His eldest son, Malcolm, committed suicide at the age of eighteen in 1867. In hours stolen from his routine Melville wrote a monumental epic poem of eighteen thousand lines (two volumes, published in 1876 with a bequest from his uncle). This was a tale of an American theology student, Clarel, who goes to Jerusalem in search of faith, there encounters the lengthy confessions and doubts of a Roman Catholic, an Anglican, and a Jew, and finally suffers the tragic death of his beloved. New legacies made it possible for Melville to retire from the Custom House in 1886. He wrote more poems and left unfinished a short cryptic novel,
Billy Budd, Sailor
, which ends in the unjust hanging of the sailor hero, for his rebellious murder of an evil petty officer. This has provided critics with the Christological symbolism for endless speculation on Melville’s faith. It was not published till 1924.

When Melville died in 1891, there were no praising obituaries, for he had been forgotten. Only a few years before, an English writer seeking him in New York, was puzzled that “No one seemed to know anything of the one great imaginative writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on that continent.” But long before, Melville had taken the precaution of justifying his obscurity. Since “all Fame is patronage,” he had written, “let me be infamous.” He continued to find reasons to discount the reward that had eluded him. “The further our civilization advances upon its present
lines, so much the cheaper sort of thing does ‘fame’ become, especially of the literary sort.” While Melville could disparage fame, he could not prevent it. The unaccountable resurrection of Melville began with the centennial of his birth in 1919, which brought articles and numerous editions of all his works. The first full-length biography, by Raymond A. Weaver, appeared in 1921. But the materials were meager, because Melville had burned his letters from Hawthorne, and his family had expurgated their papers for the period of his deepest depression.

Into
Moby Dick
twentieth-century American readers would pour their own frustrations and ambiguities, making it one of the most popular vehicles for the modern self. To acknowledge Hawthorne’s praise of
Moby Dick
, Melville had written, “I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.” In Melville’s ship of ambiguities each twentieth-century reader would seek that piece of the self.

But, as Melville in a rare moment of humor warned Hawthorne, readers must not expect too much help from him.

“I plunge into the depths,” Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) wrote at the age of twenty-five when his first work had brought high praise from the leading Russian literary critic. “And, while analysing every atom, I search out the whole; Gogol takes a direct path and hence is not so profound as I. Read and see for yourself. Brother, I have a most brilliant future before me!” His
reception into the world of letters had the explosive drama of a scene in one of his novels. The friends to whom he showed the manuscript had burst into his room at four o’clock one morning to shout his praise. They gave the manuscript of his short novel,
Poor Folk
, to Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848), the patron of the radical intelligentsia and the literary arbiter of the day, who quickly summoned the astonished Dostoyevsky to christen him the new Gogol. “That is truth in art!” exclaimed Belinsky, “That is the artist’s service to truth! The truth has been revealed and announced to you as an artist, it has been brought as a gift; value this gift and remain faithful to it, and you will be a great writer!”

Poor Folk
(1846), not much read now, tells the frustrations of a lonely clerk who hopelessly schemes for respectability but whose life is warmed only by love for an orphan girl. It is called the first Russian social novel because its hero is poor and oppressed. Such subjects were a by-product of the age of revolutions that Wordsworth and Coleridge expressed in their
Lyrical Ballads
. By the 1840s the Romantic celebration of the self was giving way to realism, dramatizing the lives of the common people and the dispossessed. That revolutionary spirit was reaching eastward in 1848, when Marx and Engels’s
Communist Manifesto
exhorted the workers of the world to unite.

European writers of the next century would move in two contrary directions. Like Balzac and Dickens, some would reach outward, becoming more public and more social in their subjects and their heroes, re-creating the world. Others, like Kafka, Proust, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, would reach inward to create the intimate self, its memories, fantasies, hopes, fears, and myths. The literature of the outward reach was immediately popular; the literature of the inward reach was arcane, first touching only the literate, and only gradually attracting a wider public.

One of the surprises in this history is that Dostoyevsky, whose novels laid siege to the values of the West, should become an idol of Western literature. For Stefan Zweig he was, with Balzac and Dickens, one of “the supremely great novelists of the 19th century … an epic master … endowed with encyclopedic genius … a universal artist, who constructs a cosmos, peopling it with types of his own making, giving it laws of gravitation that apply to it alone, and a starry firmament adorned with planets and constellations.” Perhaps an explanation of Dostoyevsky’s grandeur for Western readers is that he, like no other novelist before him, embodied the two contrary directions. No other writer had more amply encompassed all the lowest and most unfortunate—criminals, cripples, the sick, and the insane. Nor had any other more relentlessly reached inward to the self. He also translated great moral issues into detective stories with lurid climaxes to engage the unphilosophic reader.