bibliographing

As Mardi tackled slavery and Redburn the condition of sailors, slums, and emigrants, White-Jacket also has a social-comment component. The simplest thing to focus on here is corporal punishment in the navy. The descriptions are explicit and upsetting; Melville’s rhetoric is in full force and he thoroughly demolishes flogging as bad for body and soul, punished and punisher. And I learned from Wikipedia that “because Harper & Bros. made sure the book got into the hands of every member of Congress, White-Jacket was instrumental in abolishing flogging in the U.S. Navy forever.” Impressive (though I haven’t seen that claim elsewhere).

Other injustices against sailors in the navy are explored as well, including the general tyranny of the officers over “the people.” There is the constant acknowledgment that there must be rules and a hierarchy in order for the navy to function, though the rules in force are unfair, oppressive, and illogical. But then there’s also the inkling that it’s not really necessary to have all those rules anyway because Melville is a bit of a pacifist.

With things as they are, in any case, the interests of the people and the officers are hopelessly opposed. For example, officers hope for war and its accompanying glory, while the much more imperiled sailors do not:

This hostile contrast between the feelings with which the common seamen and the officers of the Neversink looked forward to this more than possible war, is one of many instances that might be quoted to show the antagonism of their interests, the incurable antagonism in which they dwell. But can men, whose interests are diverse, ever hope to live together in a harmony uncoerced? Can the brotherhood of the race of mankind ever hope to prevail in a man-of-war, where one man’s bane is almost another’s blessing? By abolishing the scourge, shall we do away tyranny; that tyranny which must ever prevail, where of two essentially antagonist classes in perpetual contact, one is immeasurably the stronger? Surely it seems all but impossible. And as the very object of a man-of-war, as its name implies, is to fight the very battles so naturally averse to the seamen; so long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.

However, as we are reminded continually, this isn’t really about a man-of-war, but “our man-of-war world.” Can the abolition of any specific tyranny—say, the tyranny of monarchy and its replacement with democracy—do away with the tyranny of any powerful group with antagonistic interests? Melville is clear in many places that equality among men is a major concern, and often alludes to the superior justice of democracy. But he is deeply uncomfortable about how much “uncoerced” harmony will ever really be possible for the brotherhood he both loves and despairs of.

Melville attempts to give moderating advice about the condition of man-of-war’s-men, couching his complaints in an easy reasonableness that admits of the need for rules and order. But turning to “the very object of a man-of-war” (and the object of our man-of-war world?), it becomes clear he can’t stomach the enterprise.

Now, this Jack Chase had a heart in him like a mastodon’s. I have seen him weep when a man has been flogged at the gangway; yet, in relating the story of the Battle of Navarino, he plainly showed that he held the God of the blessed Bible to have been the British commodore in the Levant, on the bloody 20th of October, A.D. 1827. And thus it would seem that war almost makes blasphemers of the best of men, and brings them all down to the Feejee standard of humanity. Some man-of-war’s-men have confessed to me, that as a battle has raged more and more, their hearts have hardened in infernal harmony; and, like their own guns, they have fought without a thought.

Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the staff and bodyguard of the Devil musters many a baton. But war at times is inevitable. Must the national honor be trampled under foot by an insolent foe?

Say on, say on; but you know this, and lay it to heart, war-voting Bench of Bishops, that He on whom we believe himself has enjoined us to turn the left cheek if the right be smitten. Never mind what follows. That passage you can not expunge from the Bible; that passage is as binding upon us as any other; that passage embodies the soul and substance of the Christian faith; without it, Christianity were like any other faith. And that passage will yet, by the blessing of God, turn the world. But in some things we must turn Quakers first.

The national honor certainly means something to Melville. There is no question that he values it, and values the great republican project he’s witnessing come of age, for all its flaws. But he cannot escape a harsh and exacting conscience, “never mind what follows.” It’s the principle of the thing. And with all the bleakness of detestable and noble humanity in his novels, he remains committed to the ideals of equality and dignity of the individual. I always feel very at home with his mix of love, discomfort, and alienation.

I feel like there’s so much more to think about, and I’m already looking forward to someday coming around to a re-read of all Melville’s works. But I’ll close up White-Jacket with this admonition:

Yet the popular conceit concerning a sailor is derived from his behavior ashore; whereas, ashore he is no longer a sailor, but a landsman for the time. A man-of-war’s-man is only a man-of-war’s-man at sea; and the sea is the place to learn what he is. But we have seen that a man-of-war is but this old-fashioned world of ours afloat, full of all manner of characters—full of strange contradictions; and though boasting some fine fellows here and there, yet, upon the whole, charted to the combings of her hatchways with the spirit of Belial and all unrighteousness.

“It was not a very white jacket, but white enough, in all conscience, as the sequel will show.”

That’s how White-Jacket opens: with the whiteness of the jacket. White enough for what? “[W]hite, yea, white as a shroud”; “in a dark night, gleaming white, as the White Lady of Avenel!” And of course, white enough to name our narrator after it.

White-Jacket finds himself without a coat and bound for Cape Horn. He transforms a shirt into one by slicing up the front and quilting the inside with everything he can get his hands on to keep him warm. He designs it especially for himself; there are numerous roomy pockets so he can get at his possessions more than the regulation once per day (and keep a pocket edition of Shakespeare on him in the top). But the jacket that gives him his name is nearly the death of him.

For one thing, it isn’t waterproof—a critical flaw for a sailor. And since it’s a modified duck frock with bits and pieces of woolens quilted on the inside, it seems to actively soak up as much water as possible. White-Jacket wanted to waterproof it by giving the outside a coat of paint, but so late in the USS Neversink’s three-year voyage too much paint has been used by other sailors for him to be allowed any. That pocket Shakespeare doesn’t do so well stored in soaking wool.

This unusual garment also makes White-Jacket stand out in a crowd. He laments the way he has to work harder than other men, because it’s so easy to notice if he is slacking off but also because it’s so easy to call out to him, rather than pick someone out of a faceless multitude, anytime an individual task must be performed.

The jacket also puts him in some direct danger. One night, White-Jacket is dozing on one of the upper yards, where he likes to go to be alone and meditate, when he’s taken for a ghost. His superstitious fellows drop the yard from under him, 200 feet above deck:

“Here it comes!—Lord! Lord! here it comes! See, see! it is white as a hammock.”

“Who’s coming?” I shouted, springing down into the top; who’s white as a hammock?”

“Bless my soul, Bill, it’s only White-Jacket—that infernal White-Jacket again!”
…
In a rage I tore off the jacket, and threw it on the deck.

“Jacket,” cried I, “you must change your complexion! you must hie to the dyers and be dyed, that I may live. I have but one poor life, White Jacket, and that life I can not spare. I can not consent to die for you, but be dyed you must for me. You can dye many times without injury; but I can not die without irreparable loss, and running the eternal risk.”

He begs again for a bit of black paint, to keep him dry and save his life, but still he is denied.

Inspired by an auction of the possessions of dead sailors, White-Jacket tries to get rid of the white jacket that way, but there are no takers for the garment that is now mildewed and untidy on top of being white. The sailors mock the auctioneer for calling it a jacket at all, and White-Jacket, listening in unobserved, feels his “heart swell within” him as he realizes that he is stuck with it forever, unable even to weight it and throw it overboard:

But though, in my desperation, I had once contemplated something of that sort, yet I had now become unaccountably averse to it, from certain involuntary superstitious considerations. If I sink my jacket, thought I, it will be sure to spread itself into a bed at the bottom of the sea, upon which I shall sooner or later recline, a dead man.

All this whiteness—is Moby-Dick prefigured here? I’ll feel more confident talking about that after my Moby-Dick re-read, but here I’m much more struck with the whiteness as a simple, stark marker of identity—an identity that names and defines White-Jacket, haunts him, makes his life more difficult, nearly kills him, and remains inescapable. Until the end, that is, when it nearly kills him again by getting in his way in the rigging and causing him to fall from the main-top into the ocean.

I essayed to swim toward the ship; but instantly I was conscious of a feeling like being pinioned in a feather-bed, and, moving my hands, felt my jacket puffed out above my tight girdle with water. I strove to tear it off; but it was looped together here and there, and the strings were not then to be sundered by hand. I whipped out my knife, that was tucked at my belt, and ripped my jacket straight up and down, as if I were ripping open myself. With a violent struggle I then burst out of it, and was free. Heavily soaked, it slowly sank before my eyes.

Sink! sink! oh shroud! thought I; sink forever! accursed jacket that thou art!

“See that white shark!” cried a horrified voice from the taffrail; “he’ll have that man down his hatchway! Quick! the grains! the grains!”

The next instant that barbed bunch of harpoons pierced through and through the unfortunate jacket, and swiftly sped down with it out of sight.

On second thought, if that doesn’t prefigure Moby-Dick… But what a powerful final image of the jacket, no?

I also love the whiteness of the jacket because it keeps the focus of what is a rather social novel on the individual. White-Jacket is very politically minded and has certain obvious wider concerns, but Melville knows the action is really in the soaked stuffing of “that unfortunate and indispensable garment.”

Melville is such a satisfying author to read chronologically. Typee is so young and fresh, Omoo a bit more jaded, Mardi a letting go and an exploration. With Redburn the sails are trimmed, but perhaps just a bit too much. And then White-Jacket, which serves as both a culmination and a prelude.

White-Jacket has all the techniques we’ve come to expect, all executed in top form. There is the description both of quotidian life and also of the tasks, duties, and skills of the man-of-war’s men; a whole way of life is imparted. There are the descriptions of a legion of idiosyncratic characters—the narrator is friends with the readers of the group, of course. There is the social commentary, this time mostly focused on corporal punishment, but also on war and national service more generally. There is, again, the American issue. The microcosm of the world as a man-of-war. The large number of brief, episodic chapters. Definitely lighter on the metaphysics than Mardi, but it’s still Melville.

And there is an older and a wiser Melville-narrator, a gentle soul who does his best to stay out of trouble, likes to read (or just spend time with books), and has a tendency toward irony. I find him irresistible. The ever-present tangents. The constantly nagging thought that this seaman could not possibly be a seaman. The deep love of and frustration with humanity. Here is some of his advice on how to keep a good disposition despite an unpleasant job:

It would be advisable for any man, who from an unlucky choice of a profession, which it is too late to change for another, should find his temper souring, to endeavor to counteract that misfortune, by filling his private chamber with amiable, pleasurable sights and sounds. In summer time, an Aeolian harp can be placed in your window at a very trifling expense; a conch-shell might stand on your mantel, to be taken up and held to the ear, that you may be soothed by its continual lulling sound, when you feel the blue fit stealing over you. For sights, a gay-painted punch-bowl, or Dutch tankard—never mind about filling it—might be recommended. It should be placed on a bracket in the pier. Nor is an old-fashioned silver ladle, nor a chased dinner-castor, nor a fine portly demijohn, nor any thing, indeed, that savors of eating and drinking, bad to drive off the spleen. But perhaps the best of all is a shelf of merrily-bound books, containing comedies, farces, songs, and humorous novels. You need never open them; only have the titles in plain sight. For this purpose, Peregrine Pickle is a good book; so is Gil Blas; so is Goldsmith.

At the same time, it’s so much lighter than Moby-Dick, and, I think, in much closer dialogue with other works of maritime literature. About to round Cape Horn, White-Jacket tells us:

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.

Melville’s friend Dana is my friend Dana, too, and look what a friendly chat about books we’re having. Doesn’t that have you looking forward to spending some time with Ishmael in the near-distant future? It does me.

In what is probably a pattern for me, I’ve talked about how I was disappointed with Redburn even though there was a bunch of stuff in it I liked (my other pattern is to talk about stuff I didn’t like while saying something is good; this is how I get a reputation for ambivalence, I guess). So what was the problem? This is certainly blasphemous, but…it was boring.

It hit me when, after finishing the novel and preparing to blog about it, I was reading the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition by Harold Beaver*, which noted that the book is full of anticlimaxes:

The forward momentum is continually stalled: by Wellingborough’s failure to find his father’s hotel; by his failure to see the beauties of London; by his failure in the end even to be paid his wages. The quest is deliberately frustrated. Redburn moves from anticlimax to anticlimax as pastoral innocence is trasformed to experience, which means disenchantment and disillusion.

Still, does this even sound like something that would bother me? While I was actually reading it, I ascribed my boredom to the fact that this isn’t “really” a sea narrative. I should be able to explain what I mean by that by now, yet in this case I’m not sure. And my feelings are all muddled: sea novels and Bildungsromane are both grail quests, generally speaking, and I like sea novels, though not so much Bildungsromane… But anyway, I think it is all the hay-seed in Wellingborough’s hair; he is not a sailor and while he grows and changes he does not become a sailor. (Of course, he does, in fact—the older narrator is careful to tell us that this is only the first voyage of many. But that’s hard to imagine. More fodder for my post on the narration, really.)

With White-Jacket we’ll get back to a “real” sea novel, and I enjoyed it much more. Amusingly, though, I read complaints via Amazon of how boring it was—for basically all the things that make it (in many ways) a straight sea voyage narrative. This kind of story is anecdotal, and includes lots of portraits of singular characters and description of quotidian life on a vessel. So, no, there is not really a single unifying plot, or only a loose one of the voyage itself. But so much more charming to read!

*You’ll note that this is not my usual Northwestern-Newberry edition, because for whatever reason they haven’t published the reasonably priced trade paperback version of Redburn (yet). Hrmph. Of course, those don’t have introductions, and have very little material at all other than the text (unlike the expensive green editions), but I really like the covers and am into matching.

I feel like I don’t write about it particularly a lot, but narration is one of the things I’m relatively more interested in when I read. I try especially not to fall into the dread trap of equating author with narrator, but some people make it hard—people, say, like Melville, who writes loosely autobiographical novels and has a way of inserting himself into things. Redburn is much less complex than Mardi on the narration front as well as others, but there’s still a few things going on.

First, we’ve got more than one Redburn. I count three: the 16-year-old boy who goes to Liverpool, the 16-year-old boy who returns from Liverpool, and the man writing about it. And on top of that, Melville is always somewhere in the background.

The first, pre-voyage boy, is embittered and awkward, leaving upstate New York with a shooting jacket and a gun slung over his shoulder, giving dirty looks to the genteel passengers on the Hudson ferry, but much too genteel and naive himself for life as a sailor. His fellows show “so plainly [their] ignorance and absence of proper views of religion” that Redburn pities them—but mostly finds “opportunity to magnify [himself], by comparing [himself] with [his] neighbors.”

How seriously does the man Redburn, writing about the voyage, take his younger self? Not quite seriously, and yet, one things, not quite as unseriously as Melville might have done.

Thinking that my superiority to him in a moral way might sit uneasily upon this sailor, I tought it would soften the matter down by giving him a chance to show his own superiority to me, in a minor thing; for I was far from being vain and conceited.

…I inquited of this Floating Chapel sailor, what all this ringing meat; and whether, as the big bell hung right over the scuttle that went down to the place where the watch below were sleeping, such a ringing every little while would not tend to disturb them and beget unpleasant dreams; and in asking these questions I was particular to address him in a civil and condescending way, so as to show him very plainly that I did not deem myself one whit better than he was, that is, taking all things together, and not going into particulars.

Unsurprisingly, the sailor thinks Redburn a fool, and makes fun of him. Fortunately, Redburn gets angry. Fortunately? “But my being so angry prevented me from feeling foolish, which is very lucky for people in a passion.”

So, older Redburn is certainly aware of how silly he was as a boy. Later, in Liverpool, Redburn befriends Harry Bolton, an English gentleman fleeing some mysterious problems who decides to ship with the Highlander back to America. But he knows nothing of sailing, even less than Redburn, and his silk finery is even more inappropriate than Redburns shrinking moleskine jacket. Redburn is somewhat older and wiser at this point; he has seen England, and knows that he cannot depend on his father’s guidebook anymore, but he’s still acting a bit big when he describes Harry’s naivete in turn:

But I was surprised, that one who had certainly seen much of life, should evince such an incredible ignorance of what was wholly inadmissible in a person situated as he was. But perhaps his familiarity with lofty life, only the less qualified him for understanding the otehr extreme. Will you believe me, this Bury blade once came on deck in a brocaded dressing-gown, embroidered slippers, and tasseled smoking-cap, to stand his morning watch.

How different is that from the Redburn of only one month or so ago who thought he might call on the captain and have dinner in his cabin? He’s even been noted for his silly clothes, though it’s his fancy buttons that earned his nickname and not the silks and brocades he can no longer afford. The older memoirist Redburn says “I was surprised” (emphasis mine), but he does not seem terribly knowing about the whole thing. Or many things. I wondered often while reading, until it became clear from a detail or two, how long after the story was supposed to have been written, because at first I was willing to believe Redburn wrote it all down shortly after his return.

It makes for a somewhat disconcerting experience, because we know how closely Redburn’s adolescence parallels Melville’s, with its disappointments and failures. We don’t want to think of Melville as this bitter, or this foolish—though he captures the volatile emotions of a teenage boy very well. But more, we don’t want to think of Melville as having grown this little; it’s impossible; Mardi wouldn’t exist, neither would Redburn for that matter. Whose ideas are these about religion and temperance and smoking and swearing, for example? We encounter them elsewhere—the Melville-narrator is always a bit genteel—but not like this, and it feels a bit foreign and wrong. The older Redburn still can’t manage to describe the language of the sailors; he’s much too prissy—but wasn’t Melville a bit prissy in Typee as well? In many ways I feel Redburn the least worthy thus far of a re-read, partly because I found it a bit boring, but these are some issues I would like to be able to explore more later. Because, in case you didn’t realize, obviously an integral part of reading through all of Melville will be doing it again a few years down the road.

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.

After regaling you with mediocrity for the week (but I liked Mardi!), today we’ll have the most disappointing bit of the novel, for me. Melville really fails here.

Now, there’s a lot you don’t know about because I haven’t mentioned (tons of blogging fodder if I’m still at it when I do a re-read), including the company in the canoes. Taji, the Melville/narrator, is accompanied by King Media, the philosopher Babbalanja, the historian Mohi, and the minstrel Yoomy. As they paddle around the lagoon of Mardi they conduct quite a salon, delving into sociology, theology, metaphysics, history, politics, literature, &tc. In general, it’s not unlike a philosophical “dialogue.”

Babbalanja is the most interesting. I read somewhere something about how Babbalanja is the head and Taji the heart, with Melville torn between, or something. Maybe that only applies to the end, but anyway. Babbalanja is troubled; he spends a lot of time pondering the nature of the world and coming up short.

“Oh Man, Man, Man! thou art harder to solve, than the Integral Calculus—yet plain as a primer; harder to find than the philosopher’s-stone—yet ever at hand; a more cunning compound, than an alchemist’s—yet a hundred weight of flesh, to a penny weight of spirit; soul and body glued together, firm as atom to atom, seamless as the vestment without joint, warp or woof—yet divided as by a river, spirit from flesh; growing both ways, like a tree, and dropping thy topmost branches to earth, like they beard or a banian!—I give thee up, oh Man! thou art twain—yet indivisible; all thinsg—yet a poor unit at best.”

The company is on a quest, I may have forgotten to mention, for Yillah, Taji’s lover. Among other things, of course. And after however many hundreds of pages of questing, stopping at island after island only to declare it devoid of Yillah, touching every shore, visiting every society, only to admit failure and disappointment at each place, they finally reach Serenia.

The old man who greets them their explains the society he lives in, basically the ideal Christian society. And it is ideal, and good, and I won’t fault Melville for making it into the end of the quest, the perfect place. In the description of the society, though, the company rediscovers Christ—whom they only knew through the corrupt priesthood closer to home—and…

“Oh, Alma, Alma! prince divine!” cried Babbalanja, sinking on his knees—“in thee, at least, I find repose. …Gone, gone! are all distracting doubts. Love and Alma now prevail. I see with other eyes:—Are these my hands? What wild, wild dreams were mine;—I have been mad. Some things there are, we must not think of. Beyond one obvious mark, all human lore is vain. …Reason no longer domineers; but still doth speak. All I have said ere this, that wars with Alma’s precepts, I here recant. Here I kneel, and own great Oro and his sovereign son.”

This is weak sauce. The rest of the part has a similar conversion—even Media, who declares himself “no more a demigod.” But nothing has happened; they haven’t even seen the people of Serenia. They just had some old man say, basically, “God is love, we’re just sinners who are trying to love each other.” Come on!

I’ll give Melville some credit for a good vision of heaven—with levels, and men at the bottom in a zone of eternal sadness because in fact we will never know what we seek to know—but poor Babbalanja, reduced to this: “This have I learned, oh! spirit!—In things mysterious, to seek no more; but rest content, with knowing naught but Love.”

Well, Taji does not learn it at least; and it’s hard to believe Melville did either.

And, sigh, here’s another instance where I wonder if a failure is really a failure. Perhaps the conversion is purposely unbelievable, because moving from such anguish to such peace so easily is quite literally incredible.

I’ll give you a nicer bit of Mardian satire to show that Melville wasn’t only caught up in the minutiae of current affairs circa 1848. Perhaps my favorite is the story of the Mindarian sorcerers.

If a Mindarian deemed himself aggrieved or insulted by a countryman, he forthwith repaired to one of these sorcerers; who, for an adequate consideration, set to work with his spells, keeping himself in the dark, and directing them against the obnoxious individual.

Get it yet? Maybe not. How about now:

And full soon, by certain peculiar sensations, this individual, discovering what was going on, would straightway hie to his own professor of the sable art, who, being well feed, in due time brought about certain counter-charms, so that in the end it sometimes fell out that neither party was gainer or loser, save by the sum of his fees.

It continues pretty extensively, because when Melville decides to satirize you he goes into a lot of detail. He hits all the bases: neverending cases, the perseverance of lawyers right up to the moment their clients go broke, inciting quarrels they alone can solve, too entrenched in everyday affairs to be avoided, friendly with each other though their respective clients were in conflict—but in the end it’s mostly the fault of the clients.

And because he has to dig into every angle, Melville also has to admit the good with the bad. He can’t just satirize lawyers; he has to confess that in some respects their practice is beneficial.

The nature of their pursuits leading them deep into the arcana of mind, they often lighted upon important discoveries; along with much that was cumbersome, accumulated valuable examples concerning the inner working o the hearts of the Mindarians’ and often waxed eloquent in elucidating the mysteries of iniquity.

And that’s what makes the sorcery satire so apt. It actually fits all these angles. Oh, and, the sorcery thing is sort of real, in the sense that it came from part of Melville’s Polynesian research.

You would think, given Mardi’s status as the book that started Melville’s unpopularity, that contemporary critics panned it. Or at least, I had thought that they, along with Melville’s normal readers, felt betrayed by this turn into such strange and muddled territory. But according to the historical note in my edition, reviews were mixed but generally positive in both Britain and the States. And bizarrely, while many enjoyed the first part of the book most, several reviewers thought the present-day political satire was the best part.

I guess I can’t imagine what it was like to be a contemporary reader, because for me, by the time we get to King Bello and the trip round the real world, things have really fallen off a cliff. I also learned from my historical note that this trip round the world was in fact added after the rest of the book had been completed (it recounts events that happened at the end of Mardi’s initial composition and somewhat later). So it was really up-to-the-minute, and Melville really, really wanted to squeeze it in. He also added the chapter about a writer working on a long and demanding book at this point, clearly an apologia.

“They are one and all demi-gods, and have the old demi-god feeling,” declares King Media as the canoes approach Porpheero, but in France (I mean, Franko), a volcano erupts.

“By my eternal throne!” cried Media, starting, “the old volcano has burst forth again!”

“But a new vent, my lord,” said Babbalanja.

“More fierce this, than the eruption which happened in my youth,” said Mohi—“methinks that Franko’s end has come.”

So, first off, this is not going to be fun for someone who doesn’t know a reasonable amount of history. And for someone who does, what is the point? There’s a tiny bit of enjoyment in deciphering the stuff, at least for me, but that’s not enough to carry you through. Especially when a ton of the references are to pretty unimportant stuff.

The section on America (I mean, Vivenza) is sort of better, but only in the sense that you can get a bit of an idea of what Melville thought of his own infant culture at the point when he was really setting out in the serious part of his career. And even for me, contemplating a project on early American stuff, the interest is limited. Well, at least I generally like his thoughts on the subject. Mostly.

In addition to discussing events, he gives an account of the sort of national character of everywhere they pass. I’ll include, in honor of the forthcoming Scottish Literature Challenge, this passage on “Kaleedoni”:

Our chronicler narrated many fine things of its people; extolling their bravery in war, their amiability in peace, their devotion in religion, their penetration in philosophy, their simplicity and sweetness in song, their loving-kindness and frugality in all things domestic:—running over a long catalogue of heroes, metaphysicians, bards, and good men.

But as all virtues are convertible into vices, so in some cases did the best traits of these people degenerate. Their frugality too often became parsimony; their devotion grim bigotry; and all this in a greater degree perhaps than could be predicated of the more immediate subjects of King Bello.

In Kaleedoni was much to awaken the fervor of its bards. Upland and lowland were full of the picturesque; and many unsung lyrics yet lurked in her glens. Among her blue, heathy hills, lingered many tribes, who in their wild and tattooed attire, still preserved the garb of the mightiest nation of old times. They bared the knee, in token that it was honorable as the face, since it had never been bent.

Is Mardi a catastrophe? I don’t think I would go that far. It’s a mess, and not a success. It has me very excited to get to Moby-Dick again, but not any less excited about Melville’s other work. And (standard caveats about predicting the future here) I will certainly read it again at some point.

Between writing Omoo and Mardi Melville read. A ton. You can figure out a bunch of what he read just by reading Mardi—either because of allusions or because he flat-out tells you. He also realized that he could write. And then he lost all self-control and wrote everything imaginable into a single book. Hence the mess of Mardi. He knows he’s doing it:

My cheek blanches white while I write; I start at the scratch of my pen; my own mad brood of eagles devours me; fain would I unsay this audacity; but an iron-mailed hand clenches mine in a vice, and prints down every letter in my spite. Fain would I hurl off this Dionysius that rides me; my thoughts crush me down till I groan; in far fields I hear the song of the reaper, while I slave and faint in this cell. The fever runs through me like lava; my hot brain burns like a coal; and like many a monarch, I am less to be envied, than the veriest hind in the land.

Not very modest either, is it? This is after, by the way, declaring that “in me, many worthies recline, and converse,” including Montaigne, Augustine, Plato, Democritus, and Thomas-a-Kempis.

Readers should not expect an easy or friendly text, based just on his preface, which makes reference to the fact that his earlier two autobiographical tales were deemed impossible to be true. Here, “the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience.” Not bloody likely.

The first part of the book, the story of the narrator and his best friend, the Skyeman Jarl, who run away from their whaling ship as it heads north, is amazing. On its own it puts Mardi way up the charts for me and is a clear precursor to Moby-Dick. The chapters in the whaleboat are especially beautiful. I would quote them, but like Melville I wouldn’t really be able to shut myself up. And the latter part of my reading has so overshadowed the “voyage thither” that the much less beautiful trip around Mardi is more on my mind.