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Well, I’ve come to the end! Let me state the usual for a project recap: I did not do as much as I wanted, and I still have lots more I want to read! (Even more Melville: I did not read every single poem or short story, and hardly any of his letters.)
But…I did pretty much read all of Melville’s work, in chronological order, between last Thanksgiving and now. So I will congratulate myself in a pretty serious way. Also, it was awesome, and all my readers were awesome for somehow liking it. I already did a recap of the first half of the adventure, from Typee through White-Jacket, so now for the second half:
- Moby-Dick was next on the list, and was a re-read for me, of one of my favorite books. I first addressed its alleged boringness, then its discussions of friendship and affinity. I talked a bit about its structure and Ishmael’s ideas about narration, then gushed about Ishmael some more. I wrapped up with the whiteness of the whale and links to many other bloggers’ excellent Moby-Dick posts.
- I started reading Pierre, and then announced the Unstructured Clarel Readalong (which is still “going on”!).
- Back to Pierre, I had to admit things got a little crazy, and not exactly reader-friendly, but certainly not offensive and also totally, in its own way, good (or even great).
- Then I came to the fun and adventurous Israel Potter, discussed Melville’s depictions of clothing and mutability, Israel Potter’s encounters with important historical figures, and Melville’s anti-myth-making.
- Melville’s break from the novel came next, represented here largely by The Piazza Tales. I wrote about “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and The Encantadas, as well as the non-Piazza Tale, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” (I would also strongly recommend “I and My Chimney,” just for the record.)
- When I reached The Confidence-Man, I immediately thought of Mardi. Melville gets even slippier than usual in his language in this one. Of all the novels interlocutors, Pitch was probably my favorite (though who doesn’t love the cosmopolitan?). And I tried, a little bit, to write about confidence itself.
- Before getting into Clarel I wrote just a bit about Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War.
- Then came the monster: Clarel itself. I discussed beauty in the poem, and also weird, ugly weirdness, which may also be beautiful. I wrote about Mortmain, in the running for my favorite character (along with all the others!) and the lovely connection between Clarel and a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
- Suddenly, all that remained was Billy Budd, a novella heavy on the psychology and seemingly very mature though unfinished, and which pays some wonderfully Melvillean attention to the face.
Now, who’s next, and how many years until I do this one all over again? Because you know I will have to.
For a novella so heavy on the psychology, it should perhaps not be surprising that the narrator of Billy Budd spends a lot of time describing people’s eyes. The whole aspect of the three main characters and several of the minor ones is described in minute detail. This is another instance of Melville’s focus on faces. The big thing Melville has to accomplish in Billy Budd is to explain to the reader the psychology of the three main actors—an impossible task, perhaps? It seems the narrator is desperate to get across a sense of the precise character of the men, by painstakingly describing habits, actions, and appearances, and letting “every one…determine for himself by such light as this narrative may afford” the truth behind what he is able to superficially report or speculate on.
But back to eyes. The very first mention of Billy Budd describes him as “welkin-eyed,” a ridiculous, Melvillean thing to say (and he does so two times further). It was the following passage that really jumped out at me, describing Claggart just after he has charged Billy Budd with attempted mutiny:
Meanwhile the accuser’s eyes, removing not as yet from the blue dilated ones, underwent a phenomenal change, their wonted rich violet color blurring into a muddy purple. Those lights of human intelligence, losing human expression, were gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep. The first mesmeristic glance was one of serpent fascination; the last was as the paralyzing lurch of the torpedo fish.
Where else have we seen extended metaphors about eyes and the deep with bizarre creepy images of fish again? Oh, right, in Pierre. “Gelidly” I think makes it, here.
Note that Claggart’s aspect undergoes a transformation there, right in front of Billy Budd. Captain Vere must cover his own face with his arm to effect its transformation, and after uncovering it, it “was as if the moon emerging from eclipse should reappear with quite another aspect than that which had gone into hiding. The father in him, manifested towards Billy thus far in the scene, was replaced by the military disciplinarian.” All the way from Typee to here he’s been repeating how much can be read in the face—and how little.
 After Clarel, Herman Melville published only two books of poetry, both privately, before his death in 1891, but he also worked on a piece of prose that would be found among his papers and remain unpublished until 1924, during his revival. Billy Budd was begun around 1886 and recalls much about Melville’s earlier work. The title character is a Handsome Sailor, not entirely unlike Jack Chase of White-Jacket, working on the merchant marine vessel The Rights of Man in the 1794. He is impressed by the English ship-of-the-line Bellipotent, gets in the bad books of the master-at-arms, and comes to a tragic end.
The exposition of the main action is secondary to extended psychological examinations of three major characters, Billy Budd, John Claggart, the master-at-arms, and Captain Vere. The narrator is not a party to the story but is also not quite omniscient. Superficially, there are many parallels with works like Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick, but in my reading Billy Budd seemed more in the vein of Pierre. In the same sense that Pierre follows up Moby-Dick in its exploration of early insanity in Pierre compared with late-stage monomania in Ahab, Billy Budd relies heavily on another, and a different, instance of mental aberration. Actually, maybe two.
John Claggart, in the words of Billy Budd’s Dansker friend, is “down on” Billy. But why? Just as Melville’s narrator has spent chapters trying desperately to get across to the reader the truest depiction of the personality of Billy Budd and the nature of the Handsome Sailor, he discusses at length the nature of Claggart’s antipathy. He describes Claggart as a sociopath. In fact his appreciation of the Handsome Sailor as a phenomenon simply makes him hate Billy more:
One person excepted, the master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd. And the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at times assumed that of cynic disdain, disdain of innocence—to be nothing more than innocent! Yet in an aesthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous free-and-easy temper of it, and fain would have shared it, but he despaired of it.
Claggart is complex, and the narrator’s portrait of him is intense. His descendence from Ahab is clear, with Melville describing “the monomania in the man—if that indeed it were—as involuntarily disclosed by starts…yet in general covered over by his self-contained and rational demeanor; this, like a subterranean fire, was eating its way deeper and deeper in him. Something decisive must come of it.”
Something decisive does come of it, and it brings into the action of the story Captain Vere—the “one person excepted” from the quote above, and the other possible victim of mental aberration. I found “Starry Vere,” as he is known in the navy, one of Melville’s more interesting characters. I would re-read Billy Budd on his account alone. Also for the narrator, who treats the characters and action with a knowingness but a tone of reportage rarely seen in his other work. How much do I love this scene, of Captain Vere pacing before the “drumhead court” he’s convened:
Turning, he to-and-fro paced the cabin athwart; in the returning ascent to windward climbing the slant deck in the ship’s lee roll, without knowing it symbolizing thus in his action a mind resolute to surmount difficulties even if against primitive instincts strong as the wind and the sea.
Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I think you can tell that Billy Budd was a work in progress, not fully edited and prepared for publication. Melville wasn’t quite done tinkering it the way he’d tinkered with all his other novels. But at the same time there is a maturity in structure, style, and philosophy that makes me feel good about the place Melville was at as a writer late in his life.
Last week during the great Unstructured Clarel Readalong, I was off having fun in and around New Bedford, MA, site of a national historical park devoted to whaling and a really good whaling museum well worth visiting. Continue reading New Bedford and other whaling sights
Reading all of a writer’s work is super awesome and rewarding not just for the insight into a writer’s “project” or even the excellent reading experience itself, but also for the “Easter eggs,” I’ll call them—the unexpected shiny objects that glint back at you only if you’ve been exploring. Melville recycles so much he’s really wonderful for this, and there are not only many familiar motifs but also reappearing details throughout his work, including in Clarel.
But here my favorite source of such a glint was an allusion to another writer’s work—something else Melville does in abundance, of course. And it was an allusion to something I wrote about on this very blog, something that made me reconsider Hawthorne all on its own, even before I knew he was so respected by Melville:
For Vine, from that unchristened earth
Bits he picked up of porous stone,
And crushed in fist: or one by one,
Through the dull void of desert air,
He tossed them into valley down;
Or pelted his own shadow there (3.5)
In “Foot-Prints on the Sea-Shore,” by Hawthorne, the model for Vine:
There lies my shadow in the departing sunshine with its head upon the sea. I will pelt it with pebbles. A hit! A hit!
And this story of Hawthorne seems strangely relevant, if not to the most central themes of Clarel than to many of the ideas in its orbit. Hawthorne’s narrator and his “we” “have been, what few can be, sufficient to our own pastime—yes, say the word outright!—self-sufficient to our own happiness.” As is Vine—and so few others—in Clarel.
And thus ends my portion of the Unstructured Clarel readalong! I feel like I should thank those still reading for bearing with it, if anything, but I do hope it was a positive experience. It was for me. Now, for the Big Question: will she read it again? While reading it, I would have said no. In fact, I did say several times, aloud, things to the effect of, “Man, I’m not re-reading this one.” But now I would have to say, someday—probably.
Title of this post taken from “Foot-Prints on the Sea-Shore.”
If anyone else had ever read Clarel, I would ask you to guess which of the many characters, major and secondary, I liked best. I think you would get it right, but since Clarel is, if not unreadable, certainly unread, I will tell you that it is Mortmain, the Swede who never “relaxes in his state of rigorous gloom.”
He is lovely and dark and a major focus of the middle part of the poem. A former revolutionary, he has come to the Holy Land after becoming disenchanted. I say Mortmain was my favorite, but the psychological depth of Clarel leaves me feeling I barely know him. I do know that he becomes just one of the vehicles Melville uses to comment on politics and war, however, subjects he seems to have become more and more concerned with as he matured as writer. These ideas make their first real appearance in Mardi, but grew, especially with the approach, horror, and aftermath of the American Civil War.
One thing I haven’t mentioned about Clarel, by the way, is that it was Melville’s Centennial poem. As in Israel Potter, but much more dark and serious, there is a lot of material about the success or failure of the American project.
Mortmain is partly Melville’s dark, misanthropic side:
“Man’s vicious: snaffle him with kings;
Or, if kings cease to curb, devise
Severer bit. This garden brings
Such lesson. Heed it, and be wise
In thoughts not new.” (2.3)
“This garden” is Gethsemane.
But like in The Confidence-Man, misanthropy and distrust are not always so wrong. Mortmain is certainly harsh in the next canto, and cynical, but wrong?
“Wouldst meddle with the state? Well, mount
Thy guns; how many men dost count?
Besides, there’s more that here belongs:
Be many questionable wrongs:
By yet more questionable war,
Prophet of peace, these wouldst thou bar?
The world’s not new, nor new thy plea.
Tho’ even shouldst thou triumph, see,
Prose overtakes the victor’s songs:
Victorious right may need redress:
No failure like a harsh success.” (2.4)
And in his own way, he is a humanist as well. He is against war. And it’s the very harshness of success he decries. He is obsessed with the “unutterable” depths of sin and the evil of the world. But so, so cynical, not something Melville likes.
Now that I’ve written this post committing myself to Mortmain forever, all I can think is how much I liked so many others—Vine, who was modeled on Hawthorne, Agath, Rolfe, Margoth… Not Clarel though, so much. He seems almost ephemeral compared to the rest, more like a sponge sometimes than a man of his own. That’s not fair; he manages to have his own arguments and discussions. But he’s on this pilgrimage among men to become a man, and his companions unquestionably have more forceful, fully-formed personalities. In many ways Clarel plays the part of the reader who would, like me, choose among them.
Clarel may be beautiful, in part, in its way, but the ground it covers is not. Melville started his career practically as a travel writer, recounting stories of some of the most beautiful places on earth. Here, in the Holy Land, he describes a desolate, alien wasteland. Clarel might have been a pilgrim to Mars.
From the first canto of the second part, “The Wilderness”:
Not from brave Chaucer’s Tabard Inn
They pictured wend; scarce shall they win
Fair Kent, and Canterbury ken;
Nor franklin, squire, nor morris-dance
Of wit and story good as then:
Another age, and other men,
And life an unfulfilled romance.
It’s a fair warning. Instead, this is what they are on their way to:
Their mount of vision, voiceless, bare,
It is that ridge, the desert’s own,
Which by its dead Medusa stare,
Petrific o’er the valley thrown,
Congeals Arabia into stone.
With dull metallic glint, the sea
Slumbers beneath the silent lee
Of sulphurous hills. These stretch away
Toward wilds of Kadesh Barnea,
And Zin the waste. (3.1)
This passage includes many motifs that will be repeated throughout the poem in descriptions of the Holy Land. There is the blankness motif, in “bare,” which pops up here and there, though I’m not quite sure to what effect, in all cases, in Clarel. “Petrific” is wonderful for its weirdness and the stoniness motif is all over the place. The sea is also everywhere; the narrator of Clarel relies heavily on seafaring metaphors throughout and there is always an overarching sense that this desert was once underwater. “Sulphurous” is menacing, as the constant acrid fumes of the Dead Sea.
Let’s press on:
They climb. In Indian file they gain
A sheeted blank white lifted plain—
A moor of chalk, or slimy clay,
With gluey track and streaky trail
Of some small slug or torpid snail. (3.8)
Blankness, check. Chalk covers both rock (it is one) and signs of the ocean (it is one). “Gluey,” “slug” and “torpid” are characteristically grotesque, like “congeals” above.
One more, shall we?
Abandoned quarry mid the hills
Remote, as well one’s dream fulfills
Of what Jerusalem should be,
As that vague heap, whose neutral tones
Blend in with Nature’s, helplessly:
Stony metropolis of stones. (4.2)
That last line doesn’t ring terribly well to my ears, but I suppose it’s not meant to. By this point all this description had me thinking of only one thing: the Encantadas. And then Melville went and practically said it outright, in the person of Agath, a Greek sailor. I could say so much about Agath, not least about his tattoo of the crucifix. But for now I’ll just give you his story about an island he and his mates once camped at:
“In waters where no charts avail,
Where only fin and spout ye see,
The lonely spout of hermit-whale,
God set that isle which haunteth me.
There clouds hang low, but yield no rain—
Forever hang, since wind is none
Or light; nor ship-boy’s eye may gain
The smoke-wrapped peak, the inland one
Volcanic; this, within its shroud
Streaked black and red, burns unrevealed;
It burns by night—by day the cloud
Shows leaden all, and dull and sealed.
The beach is cinders. With the tide
Salt creek and ashy inlet bring
More loneness from the outer ring
Of ocean.” (4.3)
Yes, I think I will say it again; Clarel can be quite beautiful. At least when you’re used to it.
Amateur Reader, fellow pilgrim through Clarel, noted last week that Melville’s poetry is “often less poetic than his prose!” No joke! Walter Bezanson’s historical and critical note to the poem similarly explains, “Once we face up to the idea that Melville’s poetry is not an extension of the lyric vein of his famous novels but is a wholly new mode of contracted discourse we will be more ready to judge the poetry.”
He’s right. Now, this makes me a bit of an appreciationist when it comes to Clarel, because I genuinely, viscerally love the aesthetics of Melville’s more lyrical work. As anyone who’s ever read Moby-Dick knows, there is a quotable sentence on every page—something truly beautiful. Not that I know anything about aesthetics, per se. But it is to my taste, or whatever.
Most of Clarel is emphatically not to my taste in that way. But! That’s not quite right. On re-reading many passages, I felt for them more. The style and structure of the poem is something you have to really spend time with and almost make peace with. Bezanson mentions the weirdness and constrictingness of its meter, iambic tetrameter, and it is weird, and can be jarring to read. Sometimes things seemed to flow along, other times I felt I was stumbling physically on the words. The rhyme scheme is completely irregular, which almost unavoidably puts you on edge.
Melville also relies—or, probably, chose to use quite specifically—on any number of “poem words,” let’s call them. Things like “anon,” “e’en,” other clipped word forms, extra “ah”s and missing articles, to fit the meter. It gives the whole poem an artificial cast, which, of course, it already had from the simple fact of its being a 500-page epic poem instead of a novel.
But sometimes the poem is beautiful like other Melville is beautiful. Or is it? Perhaps I have only been sucked into its aesthetic world; I can be impressionable. But here:
The speaker sat between mute Vine
And Clarel. From the mystic sea
Laocoon’s serpent, sleek and fine,
In loop on loop seemed here to twine
His clammy coils about the three.
Then unto them the wannish man
Draws nigh; but absently they scan;
A phantom seems he, and from zone
Where naught is real tho’ the winds aye moan. (1.37)
For one thing, the rhyme scheme in this bit seems less stressful; I don’t know if it’s a Thing or truly a pattern, but it sounds well: ABAABCCDD. “Wannish” sounds a Melville word, and there’s something about that last line that makes me want to say it aloud (probably the same thing makes me like stuff like this).
After writing The Confidence-Man, Melville was worn out physically and mentally, and his family was concerned. His father-in-law financed a vacation for him—a trip to the Holy Land. According to Walter Bezanson’s historical and critical note to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Clarel (which truly is essential, though if you read it you may feel completely unoriginal as he’s already thought of everything you have), this was a very standard trip for the day. Melville was a straight-up tourist, following the same route as Mark Twain and a bunch of eminent Victorians and such.
Clarel, which is, after all, “a poem and pilgrimage in the Holy Land,” follows the same geographic route Melville did, after beginning in Jerusalem, where “[a] student sits, and broods alone.” Bezanson explains:
Among the numerous variations on this excusion the most popular was the one Melville chose…a roughly rectangular route which led from Jerusalem northeast to Jericho (6 hours); from Jericho east to the Jordan (2 hours); from the Jordan south to the edge of the Dead Sea (1 hour); from the Siddim Plain southwest up the long ridge to the monastery of Mar Saba (4.5 hours); from Mar Saba west to Bethlehem (3 hours); and from Bethlehem north back to Jerusalem (2 hours).
 Got that? Fortunately, there’s a map. This is the sort of thing that can be fatal about Clarel, though: it’s not that it matters so much that the route is roughly rectangular, or what have you, but the superficial reader is so likely to ignore entirely where Clarel’s party is actually going, beyond the fact that they’re tramping around the desert.
“Clarel’s party” is a somewhat misleading term; it isn’t really his, he’s just in it. The party is at the very heart of the poem, but another thing the superficial reader could easily screw up—like in Mardi or The Confidence-Man—is who is talking about what. Because here again we have conversations. Discussion after discussion, again nearly all philosophical, and very many dialogues. While this is something I’ve liked in all Melville’s novels, it’s not my favorite in an epic poem. I’m fine with the artificiality, but I prefer poems driven more by description or action.
So, a pilgrimage, and conversations, but what is Clarel about? Faith and doubt. Science and religion. Darwin and Luther. Optimism and pessimism. Domestic warmth and celibate seclusion. The depths of personality. Interpersonal relations. God. The state. War. You won’t be surprised to hear I could go on.
This week is Clarel week, my contribution to the Unstructured Clarel Readalong. (There’s still plenty of time to join!) It will leave out far too much, as do all my Melville weeks. And besides, I am out of my depth. I leave you with a fragment, a message perhaps for any potential reader of this poem:
Join that band
That wash them with the desert sand
For lack of water. In the dust
Of wisdom sit thee down, and rust.
While I will be addressing one of Melville’s poems in a big way next week, that still leaves a lot undiscussed, not least of which is Battle-Pieces, and Aspects of the War. Amateur Reader wrote about it earlier in the week (along with other Melville poetry). I still have not finished the collection, and may not, so you should head over there and find out about it instead.
What I have read has been a mixed bag. Some poems I am simply bored by. Others are strange, but sometimes in a good, arresting way. Like “Donelson,” which is weirdly avant-garde and includes news bulletins about the progress of the battle it describes.
But “Misgivings,” the first poem in the collection, is more along the lines of what seems to appeal to me in poetry. The first half of the poem:
When ocean-clouds over inland hills
Sweep storming in late autumn brown,
And horror the sodden valley fills,
And the spire falls crashing in the town,
I muse upon my country’s ills—
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time
On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.
I’m completely in love with the imagery of the first four lines. The spire crashing down like a mast in a storm, but in town, not at sea, where such storms are supposed to happen. And this is happening right now! And look at the awful thoughts it’s causing.
My problem is, I have no idea if this is any good. ABABACC—I don’t know what that is, if anything. I don’t know that the last line might not be a bit too much. I don’t think I particularly like “the waste of Time,” or know quite what it really means in context. But I guess this is what I have to do with poetry for a while, feel it out a bit.
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"As is quite clear, the enchanter interests me more than the yarn spinner or the teacher."—Vladimir Nabokov
Currently Reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville
The March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford
The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo
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