In Typee, Melville’s first book, a semi-autobiographical account of a runaway sailor on a Polynesian island, “Tommo” is taken captive by the isolated tribe of the Typee, rumored to be fearsome cannibals. They do hold him there, preventing his going to the beach, let alone leaving, and they do seem to be cannibals. But they also assign him a valet who will even carry Tommo piggyback all over the valley, let him do pretty much whatever he pleases, give him plenty of food, drink, and entertainment—and they basically live in paradise.
Maybe I am just more mellow than average about cannibalism—or who knows, maybe they really were going to eat Tommo—but hanging out with Fayaway and eating poee-poee seemed like not such a bad way to spend a few months to me. Tommo says he wants to go home to his family and friends, but based on how eager he is to make it back around Cape Horn in Omoo, I’m not really buying it.
Fayaway is sort of interesting. The back cover of my Northwestern-Newberry edition (not the green kind, but the one pictured above) tells me that “[t]hroughout his lifetime, Melville’s most famous and popular character was Fayaway.” But who is she? One of the daughters of the household Tommo inhabits; beautiful, savage, and mostly naked; the love-interest of Typee (which is pretty racy, really). She doesn’t have a whole lot of personality, though—at least, not really one that Tommo has access to. But I do love the scene of her “beautiful freak,” after Tommo persuades the priests of the valley to lift a taboo to allow Fayaway to laze around a lake in a canoe with Tommo.
This lovely piece of water was the coolest spot in all the valley, and I now made it a place of continual resort during the hottest period of the day. One side of it lay near the termination of a long gradually expanding gorge, which mounted to the heights that environed the vale. The strong trade wind, met in its course by these elevations, circled and eddied about their summits, and was sometimes driven down the steep ravine and swept across the valley, ruffling in its passage the otherwise tranquil surface of the lake.
One day, after we had been paddling about for some time, I disembarked Kory-Kory, and paddled the canoe to the windward side of the lake. As I turned the canoe, Fayaway, who was with me, seemed all at once to be struck with some happy idea. With a wild exclamation of delight, she disengaged from her person the ample robe of tappa which was knotted over her shoulder (for the purpose of shielding her from the sun), and spreading it out like a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the canoe. We American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars, but a prettier little mast than Fayaway made was never shipped a-board of any craft.
In a moment the tappa was distended by the breeze—the long brown tresses of Fayaway streamed in the air—and the canoe glided rapidly through the water, and shot towards the shore. Seated in the stern, I directed its course with my paddle until it dashed up the soft sloping bank, and Fayaway, with a light spring, alighted on the ground; whilst Kory-Kory, who had watched our manoeuvres with admiration, now clapped his hands in transport, and shouted like a madman. Many times afterward was this feat repeated.
No wonder Tommo thinks he is in fairy land.
Another thing illustrated by this passage: already Melville is really, really good at this kind of writing. Typee and Omoo are basically travel narratives, and he’s got an awful lot of exotic locales and customs to explain. There’s a clarity of image and action here that I think it’s a bit hard to appreciate, but also hard to achieve. It’s a big part of the episodic way he tells his stories—more on that later.
After the romance of Typee, Omoo is a bit of a bitter pill; Tahiti is not nearly so untouched as this little valley in the Marquesas.
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