The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (63 page)

Without doubt, Dana’s book successfully conveys the experience of rounding Cape Horn under sail, as well as countless other aspects of seamen’s life and work on the square-riggers of the nineteenth century, with a vividness and intensity that has few equals. Herman Melville vouched for it: “but if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana’s unmatchable
Two Years Before the Mast
. But you can read, and so you must have read it. His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle.”

However, the reason it succeeds in suggesting these realities, better than any other book of the sea, is precisely the fact it is much more than a book of the sea. It is something different altogether: under the appearances of a sober autobiographical narrative it hides a singularly rich and complex work of art.

Of course, its significance was recognised long ago: it stands among the great classics of nineteenth-century American literature, yielding in importance only to Dana’s junior and admirer, Melville, whose beginnings were inspired by his example. Nevertheless, even though connoisseurs and scholars, literary historians, writers and critics have fully acknowledged Dana’s literary accomplishment, and though for more than 100 years studies have multiplied on his subject, one must forgive ordinary readers who simply love this book as a gripping sea adventure: after all, there are no bad reasons for loving a good book. And, anyhow, the author began to take the full measure of his achievement only fairly late in life—too late, in fact, for at that time he also realised that he had missed his true calling.

Dana was born in 1815 into an old patrician family of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a pure product of the Puritan society of New England, an elite that, armed with Protestant faith, British culture, American democracy and Yankee patriotism, was possessed with an unshakeable belief that it constituted the salt of the earth.

The members of this closed society had a haughty awareness of the privileges they had inherited at birth, but these in turn were matched by a demanding notion of their duties and responsibilities. Always under the eye of a stern God, they were permanently subject to the scrutiny of their individual conscience. This austere high bourgeoisie knew how to marry mysticism with realism and audacity with common sense. Their prosperity and their power, fruits of their courage and industry, were to them signs of God’s favour.

Soon after the start of his law studies at Harvard University, Dana was struck by a mysterious illness, the symptoms of which were migraines and failing eyesight (these were thought to be the sequels to measles; in fact they may well have had a nervous origin). As the doctors could suggest no remedy, he decided to cure himself by adopting a completely different way of life: he enlisted as an ordinary seaman on a ship bound for California—at that time still a remote and half-wild province of Mexico—for a voyage of at least two years around Cape Horn. He was nineteen.

The hard life of a seaman—and he took pride in mastering all its
technical aspects as a thorough professional—soon achieved its original purpose: Dana’s health was restored. But, more important, it allowed him to discover not only new skies, but also an entirely new side of the human condition: to enter the sailor’s world, with its language, ways and customs that are utterly foreign to landlubbers. Ashore, he observed a Spanish and Catholic America with its exotic society of Mexicans, Native Americans and kanakas (as the indentured labourers from the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii, were called).

Two years later, on his return to Boston, he resumed his earlier university studies. Simultaneously he wrote in six months a first draft of his seafaring experiences.

The year 1840 marked for him a decisive turning point: after graduation, he opened a law office in Boston, married the daughter of a respected local family and finally found a publisher for
Two Years Before the Mast
. These three events were to determine the orientation of the rest of his life.

He was successful in his professional activity and in his personal life: his law office kept him intensely busy, his wife gave him six children (five daughters and one son) and rock-solid support until the end of his life. Thus he found himself permanently anchored in the position of respected citizen,
pater familias
, warden of the Episcopalian Church and patron of the arts and letters.

His father was himself a writer of some distinction; his uncle, Washington Allston, was a famous painter and poet who introduced him to the cultured circles of Boston; his own son was to marry the daughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; he patronised the same club as Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He became an influential scholar, specialised in international law and admiralty law. (Incidentally, it was he who formulated the still universally accepted principle that sailing vessels have right of way over those under power.)

Soon, also, he made himself quite famous by his political activity: with courage and eloquence, he joined the movement against slavery, and for a while it appeared as if even the highest office of the land might be within his reach.

Meanwhile, the publication of
Two Years Before the Mast
earned him at once, if not royalties (a disastrous contract deprived him of the fortune that was exclusively to enrich his publishers
*
), then at least extraordinary fame; at that time only a new novel by Charles Dickens, then at the high point of his immense popularity, could enjoy similar attention. The success of his book was immediate, universal (loved by the public and praised by the sophisticated critics) and long-lasting: since its first publication 170 years ago, it has never been out of print.

This tremendous (and unexpected) success further strengthened Dana’s social position, but instead of taking advantage of such a triumphant beginning to pursue his literary career, Dana not only became increasingly busy with his activity at the Bar, he launched himself more fully into politics; in this field, however, his ambitions were finally derailed by the vile intrigues of some rivals.

He had in him the makings of a great writer, but he chose instead to become a distinguished lawyer and a failed politician. Like other people of his caste, constant exercise of self-examination enabled him to draw a clear-sighted assessment of his achievements. At fifty-seven, he wrote in a letter to his son: “My life has been a failure compared to what I might and ought to have done. My great success—my book—was a boy’s work, done before I came to the Bar.”

After having exhausted himself all his life in an activity that was intensely absorbing but not really creative, it seems that Dana, in his final years, eventually found a certain form of inner peace: he abandoned his law office to his son and together with his wife went into self-imposed exile from the United States. The old couple first spent two years in Paris, then moved to Rome. Paradoxically, it was in Rome, the Latin and papist Babylon, that our New England Puritan finally felt as if he had reached port. He confessed, “At last I found my life’s dream.” Yet he was not able to enjoy it long: three years later, in 1882, he died of pneumonia. As one of his biographers recalls, “The ghost of his former strength took hold of him at the very end, and during his last days he suffered from hallucinations, struggling to leave his bed as if he wished, once again, to launch himself into some
long and hazardous journey.” He was buried in that same Protestant cemetery that had contained the graves of Keats and Shelley.

The personality of Dana was deeply divided. First among all his critics, D.H. Lawrence perceived this inner conflict. This insight was all the more remarkable in that Lawrence had virtually no biographical information on Dana: his brilliant 1924 essay, published in
Studies in Classic American Literature
, was simply based on a reading of
Two Years Before the Mast
.

In a way, Dana’s decision to go to sea had been a challenge thrown at his conventional society, at the establishment that had produced and nourished him. Then, on his return, the writing of his book was a continuation and a memorial of this youthful rebellion. Dana’s return to Boston was like the return of the prodigal son and for this reason his literary achievement could have no further development. The transparent simplicity of
Two Years Before the Mast
is misleading: the power and inner tension of his narrative are largely the products of all that Dana chose to hide. One single incident can provide a good example of this.

In the middle of his journey, Dana went through a crisis of which he gives us only a truncated picture. In California, just before starting the return journey, the captain ordered Dana to move to another ship, one that would remain there for another two years. This instruction plunged Dana into panic and in his desperation he went to extraordinary lengths to secure his early return home. The methods he adopted then did, in fact, alienate him from the other sailors. They were suddenly reminded of what Dana had tried so hard to make them forget: he was not one of them, he belonged to the privileged class.

But why did the prospect of another two years in California provoke such terror in Dana’s mind? The explanations he provided are not very convincing. Such a delay, he said, would virtually have prevented him from resuming his studies at Harvard and therefore would have condemned him to remain a sailor for the rest of his life. This argument does not hold water.

From the testimony of one of his seafaring companions, another young bourgeois from Boston who had enrolled on the same ship, we learn something of Dana’s life ashore. He was sharing a hut with a
friendly young Indian woman. It seems our Puritan did enjoy for quite a while the brutish bliss of being simply young, carefree and healthy on a sunny Californian beach: he had discovered the animal innocence of life before the Fall.

However, as soon as the captain’s new instructions managed to turn this happy interlude into a more permanent way of life, Dana became terrified. As in R.L. Stevenson’s disturbing tale, where past a certain point Mr. Hyde can no longer revert to his Dr. Jekyll identity—since the chemistry of his organism had been irretrievably altered—Dana realised that should he pursue his Californian life any longer, he would reach a point of no return. This would indeed condemn him to remain a sailor for the rest of his life; there would be no more possibility to reintegrate his original self.

In a short and illuminating autobiographical sketch he wrote for himself in 1842 (this remarkable page was discovered and published more than a century later), Dana described how, after his return to Boston, he went through a dramatic mystical crisis, at the end of which he received confirmation within the Episcopalian Church. Regarding his Californian experience, he summed it up in only one phrase: “Not a man in my ship was more guilty in God’s sight than myself.”

During the remaining years of his life he numbed himself with a constant overload of work, plunging himself into frenzied activity close to neurosis and repeatedly provoking severe depression, which in turn required prolonged rest. At times, also, he suffered bouts of his old illness: migraines, failing eyesight, fainting fits.

At other times he retained a furious lust for adventure and physical effort in open air; he would go hunting and camping with trappers, whose simple and primitive way of life delighted him, and he amazed them with his exceptional physical resilience.

His need for escape sometimes took other forms: far from Boston, he would take advantage of his travels to explore the lower depths of big cities such as New York and London. In a way somehow similar to George Orwell’s exploration in the next century of the marginal worlds of tramps and hoboes, he would disguise himself in sailor’s clothing and descend into “dark, filthy, violent and degrading regions
of saloons and brothels in the harbour districts” or he would spend an evening there chatting with prostitutes.

We know of these episodes only because he wrote them down in private diaries not meant for publication. He was never discovered or identified during these dangerous dives—imagine the scandal that would have resulted—but one wonders to what extent he was not unconsciously looking for such a liberating accident.

Meanwhile, he applied all his energy to discharge with stoic nobility the obligations of a model husband, model father, model parishioner and model citizen. It seems as if the institutions of marriage, family, church and law, as well as his dedication to serving the common good, were so many defences against the “madness of art” that was so obviously his original calling. As for literature, he never wrote anything again.

*
See above, p. 141.

T
HE TITLE
of my little talk is
An Idea of the University
. This is, of course, a humble homage to Cardinal Newman’s great book
The Idea of a University
—a classic work published a little more than 150 years ago, which has lost nothing of its relevance for us today and should remain the basic reference for any reflection on the problems of the university.

This topic is huge—but I shall not be long, for I shall approach it only from the very limited perspective of my own modest personal experience. In doing this, I may repeat things which I have already said or published before. I apologise for this repetitiveness—it cannot be helped, I am afraid: a simple desire to remain truthful to one’s experiences and beliefs is often the enemy of eloquence and novelty.

I have spent all my active life in universities: first, as a student, of course (but, in a sense, every academic always remains a student till his death). For nearly forty years, I have pursued research and carried on teaching in various universities, first in the Far East, then mostly in Australia, with some periods in Europe and in the United States. My career was happy; I have been lucky: all my life, I had the rare opportunity to do work which I loved in congenial and stimulating environments. Only, near the end, deep modifications began to affect the university—I am not talking here of any specifically
Australian
problems, but of a much more broad and universal malaise. As these transformations were progressively taking the university further away from the model to which I had originally devoted my life, I finally decided to quit—six years before reaching retirement age. Considering the
way things have evolved since then, it is a decision that I have never regretted. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I was a deserter. I am not proud of that. Yet today my heart is with the brave people who are starting Campion College and will continue to fight the good fight—and it is to show them my support that I have come here tonight.