“Birds of prey hover over it”
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America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics, Part 3: The Great American Novel
As a writer, Abraham Lincoln is classical, balanced, controlled...until he sticks in the knife. Unequaled among Americans, he does have a mirror-image, or counterpart, in Herman Melville, who’s style is as Romantic, lop-sided, and ebullient as Lincoln’s is not. Like all doubles, both have sliced their fingers on the sharp edge of evil, and both wink and laugh with us on the page and behind the scenes.
Melville met the already-famous Nathaniel Hawthorne after Moby-Dick had been conceived, and mostly written. The friendship changed both man and novel. In a revision that was more of a transfiguration, Moby-Dick became grandiose, epic, Shakespearian; a before-its-time Modernist story of the human condition, and an allegory of the American nation, set in international waters. Nathaniel Hawthorne was known to be retiring, shy, and quiet, but it seems he was not so around Herman Melville. Melville wrote of him,
in spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black.…You may be witched by his sunlight,—transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you;—but there is the blackness of darkness beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe, and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds.
Melville wrote Moby-Dick in Western Massachusetts, far from the ocean, but with a view of the state’s tallest mountain from his writing desk:
I look out of my window in the morning when I rise, as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.
He wrote in a kind of manic madness. His family was afraid of him, and afraid to disturb him:
The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.
What did writing this novel take from him? Andrew Delbanco called it Melville’s “vampire book”: each day he bled on the page, he was barely human at the end. Delbanco gets this from Melville himself. In Pierre, Melville’s follow-up, semi-autobiographical, and disastrously-received novel, Pierre works at writing a book “from eight o’clock in the morning till half-past four in the evening”:
Is there then all this work to one book, which shall be read in a very few hours; and, far more frequently, utterly skipped in one second; and which, in the end, whatever it be, must undoubtedly go to the worms?
Not so; that which now absorbs the time and the life of Pierre, is not the book, but the primitive elementalising of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting that book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre’s own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink.
Melville’s literary reputation was in decline, even as he was creating “the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer” (Delbanco). Moby-Dick would be poorly received, and forgotten until the 1920s:
Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.
When the book appeared, he wrote to a female acquaintance:
Don’t you buy it—don’t you read it, when it does come out, because it is by no means the sort of book for you. It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk—but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.
(Delbanco quotations from Melville: His Work and World.)