After attempting to fit whole worlds into Mardi and being soundly rebuked by the public that had eaten up Typee and Omoo, Melville decided that in order to make some money again he would write Redburn and White-Jacket, and make them less crazy.
He does discipline himself dramatically in Redburn. It’s another semi-autobiographical novel, but very different from the two South Seas adventures. Wellingborough Redburn shares, instead, Melville’s very early life story: the son of a New York gentleman gone bankrupt, displaced upstate, whose father has died and left the family with nothing and Wellingborough without his birthright. So young Redburn, at 16, decides to go to sea, and ships with a packet from Manhattan to Liverpool. “Green” and “with hay-seed in [his] hair,” Redburn makes a thorough fool of himself. He’s got the wrong clothes, no supplies, and thinks he can just take a stroll on the quarter-deck and chat with the captain.
So we have a real Bildungsroman on our hands. The Yankee mama’s boy who won’t drink, smoke, or swear crosses the Atlantic with a crowd of boisterous sailors and finds himself in a filthy, depraved old-world port city with little more than his father’s old and out-of-date guidebook to help him. In many ways Redburn was a disappointment to me; it’s certainly the least wondrous of all the Melville I have read so far. Although Redburn narrates the novel later, years after “this [his] first voyage,” he does not become Melville the man (more on that tomorrow), and certainly as a 16-year-old boy he is not living and breathing the same literary allusions that made up so much of the inner workings of Mardi. But Melville can’t stop himself from some flights of his beloved alliteration or some pretty wonderful passages of description.
Of Jack Blunt, a fellow sailor on the Highlander:
His arms and legs were very large, round, short, and stumpy; so that when he had on his great monkey-jacket, and sou’west cap flapping in his face, and his sea boots drawn up to his knees, he looked like a fat porpoise, standing on end. He had a round face, too, like a walrus; and with about the same expression, half human and half indescribable.
On the trip back from Liverpool to New York, the Highlander takes on emigrant passengers:
There was a little old Englishman on board, who had been a grocer ashore, whose greasy trunks seemed all pantries; and he was constantly using himself for a cupboard, by transferring their contents into his own interior. He was a little light of head, I always thought. He particularly doated on his long strings of sausages; and would sometimes take them out, and play with them, wreathing them round him, like an Indian juggler with charmed snakes. What with this diversion, and eating his cheese, and helping himself from an inexhaustible junk bottle, and smoking his pipe, and meditating, this crack-pated grocer made time jog along with him at a tolerably easy pace.
So, even though it was a bit disappointing, and Melville felt a bit hemmed in, below average for him is above average in general. And even without all the metaphysics and flights of fancy there is a lot going on: the business of being American, slavery, emigration, the squalor of Liverpool, pastoralism, seeing the world, the moral condition of sailors.
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