Clarel: Melville’s
Centennial Poem
Hershel
Parker
Soon after the
Civil War, the victors began planning triumphant celebrations of a magnificent
century of American progress on all fronts, political, social, economic, and even
intellectual and artistic. At the great
meeting in Philadelphia on July the 4th, 1876, Bayard Taylor was chosen to read
aloud his national centennial ode--Taylor, who as a very young man in 1848 had
been assigned by a Manhattan hostess to write a valentine for a slightly older celebrity,
Herman Melville. Imagine it is June 1876
and you've bought two little unannotated volumes at Putnam's Manhattan store, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy
Land, by the same Herman Melville, no longer a literary celebrity but only
a Manhattan custom inspector. If you were
taking Clarel slowly, on the 4th of
July you might not yet have known that you were reading Melville's own centennial
poem, where in the third Part, "Mar Saba," canto 27, a "hundred
summers" having run since 1776, tough-minded characters grimly foresee the
further downward spiral of the States.
Melville's uncle Thomas had known Joel
Barlow, author of the most famous chauvinistic poetic epics of the young
Republic, The Columbiad and The Vision of Columbus; here Melville
was offering an anti-Columbiad. That July, after the Glorious Fourth, you might
still be progressing purposefully on your modern pilgrimage in the Holy Land
when Americans stopped celebrating and snatched up the latest bulletins about
General Custer from what the papers called the "Little Horn River." Indeed, there were distractions enough for
anyone who first set out to read this poetic epic for private pleasure in 1876.
Any middle-aged
or older American reader in 1876 would have felt more comfortable starting a
long poem like Clarel than
twenty-first century Americans can feel.
They had grown up reading long poems aloud, evenings, in "the
family circle"--or semi-circle around the fireplace. Families read poems as hard to grasp as Paradise Lost as well as brisker ones
like The Seasons, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, and The
Giaour. Later, at mid-century,
families read poems such as Evangeline (what weeping at the end!), Casa
Guidi Windows, and Hiawatha; Melville's
brother-in-law John Hoadley even read aloud Longfellow's less popular The Golden Legend. At the end of the 1860s readers aplenty had
been found for Robert Browning's The Ring
and the Book, and William Morris's long poems were selling. Somewhere in the 1870s or the 1880s, there
was a tipping point after which readers began expecting great American
literature to come in the form of prose fiction, but for Melville, being older,
greatness in literature was to be achieved in poetry, and particularly in the
creation of an epic poem. About that
time, also, fewer families read poetry aloud together, partly because, in
towns, gas lighting and then electric lighting had been introduced into many bedrooms,
so one could more easily read privately.
In June or July 1876, no ordinary reader would have been astounded at
the appearance of a new long poem in two volumes by Tennyson or Longfellow,
although both poets had slowed with age.
The oddity was seeing that the author was Melville, for readers who remembered
him did so because Typee had created
a sensation thirty long years earlier.
Melville as poet was a surprise to anyone who had not heard of Battle-Pieces (1866).
Nothing about Clarel looked especially intimidating. A reader would have seen, soon enough, that in
the first Part, "Jerusalem" (44 cantos, none more than several pages
long), Melville was mustering a diverse company for a pilgrimage over rougher
ground than Chaucer's pilgrims traversed.
Their "Cavalcade" out of the holy city begins the second Part,
"The Wilderness" (39 cantos), in which the party stops at the Dead
Sea. In Part 3, "Mar Saba" (32
cantos), the pilgrims rest at the remote monastery of that name, then curve to "Bethlehem"
(35 cantos) before returning to Jerusalem. Parts or "books" and cantos were
common divisions in familiar poems such as The
Faerie Queene, which Melville knew from adolescence. He also knew long poems where the cantos were
in iambic tetrameter, the meter of Clarel,
among them Scott's Marmion and The Lady of the Lake and Byron's The Giaour. For months in the South Seas he listened as
his friend John Troy repeated "poetry by the canto, especially Hudibras" (Melville said of
"Long Ghost" in Omoo). Tennyson's "In Memoriam," that most
serious of Victorian Faith-Doubt poems, was in iambic tetrameter. Melville's decision to use iambic tetrameter owed
much to Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," another Faith-Doubt
poem, in which the speaker visits a monastery almost as difficult of access as
Mar Saba. What determined Melville to
use iambic tetrameter, however, may have been the phenomenal success of
Whittier's Snow-Bound in 1866, a
longish poem in that meter which contained passages on country school teaching,
cannibalism at sea, and Lady Hester Stanhope's life in the deserts of Lebanon,
all topics sure to fascinate Melville. He
could not have escaped seeing extensive quotations from Snow-Bound printed in New York City newspapers and magazines, even
if he did not buy the little book. Whitter
had proved that a long-loved metrical form could still be employed flexibly in
a popular poem.
Realistically,
twenty-first century readers may need to remind themselves that self-reliance,
the great American virtue, must be exercised if it is to be secured. Clarel
gives you exercise. As you read this 18,000
line poem, still the best-kept secret in American literature, remember that Hoadley,
that amateur poet and builder of locomotives, read it all in 1876. Walter E. Bezanson, its first editor, mastered
it all by himself. Self-reliance is admirable
as a national last resort, but even Emerson could have profited from a Foreword
to Clarel. Here are my bona fides: on more than a dozen
treks I have brought students out of "Jerusalem" all the way through
"Bethlehem" without leaving a single straggler wandering in "The
Wilderness" or immured in "Mar Saba." It's not easy to get into Clarel, but one sure way is by following
the character called only "Vine."
As Bezanson showed, the mysterious, alluring Vine is based on Nathaniel
Hawthorne. In the mind of the young
scholar Clarel, Bezanson showed, Vine and another character, the traveler
Rolfe, play out in Clarel's mind a kind of "tournament of merits" in
which Melville weighs himself against Hawthorne. Furthermore, the sexually charged attraction
toward Vine which the young pilgrim Clarel experiences (in some of the most complexly
erotic scenes in our nineteenth-century literature) reflects Melville's
tolerant, even amused, analysis of his own early enthusiasms, analysis
elaborated in a several-years-long exploration of the appeal of the older man
and limitations he was ultimately discovering in him.
Watching Vine with
Clarel and Rolfe affords us the high satisfaction of sinlessly participating in
literary celebrity gossip, as near as Americans can get to "Julian and
Maddalo," Shelley's portrait of himself and Byron, and, I would say, in
better poetry than Shelley's in that poem. The stakes in Clarel are high enough to enthrall any reader with a biographical
bent. Just what will Melville belatedly
discover and reveal about his own early and present feelings for Hawthorne? Just what literary judgment will Melville
make now on his friend as artist, two decades and more after he wrote the
rhapsodic "Hawthorne and his Mosses"?
With Hawthorne dead (in 1864) and no Bezanson
on the scene to recognize a real man behind the character, just how fairly will
Melville play? Circumstances made
playing fair a supreme test of Melville's character.
For readers
free of suppressed sexual needs like Clarel's, Vine is by no means the most compelling
pilgrim in Clarel. Lured in by the promise of celebrity gossip,
you soon enough may become more intensely ATTRACTED to Rolfe, Nathan, Mortmain,
Ungar, or another among the powerfully sketched characters. Some of these characters may have lived much longer
in Melville's fictionizing imagination than Vine. When Melville visited Hawthorne at Liverpool
and Southport late in 1856 their relationship was back on its old footing fast
enough, so that the visit was for Melville a gratifying part of the present,
not a perturbing part of the past. Both
men seemed to be in mid-career, despite Hawthorne's absorption in his work as
American consul at Liverpool. Melville even
left Hawthorne in charge of seeing The
Confidence-Man into print in England. Perhaps late in the trip, perhaps a little
afterwards, Melville drew on his Mediterranean tour while planning Frescoes of Travel by Three Brothers. There he would portray Rousseau, Cicero,
Byron, and Haydon, the four associated with, or weighed against (a heavily
drawn bow-shaped brace suggested) Venice, Olympus, Parthenon, and Leonardo,
although his notation left unclear whether Cicero was to be played off against or
paralleled with Olympus, or Haydon put against not a place but a great man,
Leonardo. Hawthorne had no place in Frescoes; he was alive, and Melville's own
mood was not retrospective except in historical terms, not personal.
In 1860 if his
first collection of verse, the lost volume called Poems, had been published as planned, Melville would have entered
the British field of modern poetry occupied by Tennyson and the Brownings, not the
American field where he would have been measured against Bryant, Whittier, and
Longfellow. "After the Pleasure
Party" would have marked Melville as engaged with a Tennysonian preoccupation
(education for women and female sexuality) and the variously titled poem "Morning
in Naples," or "Afternoon in Naples" (in which the speaker recognizes
the political tyranny under which the populace lives in apparent joyousness), would
have marked him as a poet of the Risorgimento, like Elizabeth Barrett
Browning. A quick learner, he had gone
from the occasional gaucheries of Typee
to the sustained grandeur of Moby-Dick
in less than seven years. In London
(where praise meant something) he had been acknowledged as a master of prose
for a full decade before he started to make himself a poet in 1857 or 1858. How
long does it take for a great prose writer to become an accomplished poet? Best to trust Melville's judgment: he thought
he was a poet in 1860 when he left Poems
for publication as he boarded the Clipper ship Meteor, captained by his younger brother Thomas, intending to round
Cape Horn then sail and north to San Francisco and afterwards cross the Pacific
to Calcutta.
By the time
they sailed up the Pacific Coast of South America and Central America, Melville
had every reason to be sure that he was officially a poet, already published in
New York City. To judge from the poetic
epics he carried and his marginalia in them, he was ambitious to step beyond
his previous achievement, ready to undertake an epic poem. After his return from the Mediterranean Melville
had become obsessed with classical history and philosophy. In April 1859 two Williams College students
called on Melville unannounced, both primed by Pittsfield gossips to disapprove
of the author. One decided that Melville
"was evidently a disappointed man, soured by criticism and disgusted with
the civilized world and with our Christendom in general and in particular. The ancient dignity of Homeric times afforded
the only state of humanity, individual or social, to which he could turn with
any complacency. What little there was
of meaning in the religions of the present day had come down from Plato. All our philosophy and all our art and poetry
was either derived or imitated from the ancient Greeks." The companion described the same "full
tide of discourse on all things sacred and profane," but exclaimed, "what
a talk it was!" Already, before he
finished Poems, Melville was holding
forth on themes which he expressed in Clarel. He went so far as to try his hand, likely on the
voyage on the Meteor, at a
mythic-historical Hawaiian story which would draw classical-Polynesian
parallels, but he found it uncongenial and dropped it. Whatever he might choose to write about
during the epic voyage to Calcutta, Melville was ready to surpass Poems.
News in San
Francisco dashed Melville's ambition, for there was no printed and bound volume
waiting for him. Poems had been rejected by at least two publishers, and an
unpublished poet with a wife, four children, and no income hardly has a right
to undertake an epic. Furthermore, Thomas
had received orders to sail back around the Horn to England rather than to
cross the Pacific. There was no point in
Melville's staying with his brother. After
arriving home by the Panama route, Melville seems to have put the bulk of his 1860
poems aside for years (if he did not destroy some of them), although textual
evidence shows that he kept trying to work current events in Italy into one
poem from this period or from the very early 1860s, "At the Hostelry." He never stopped writing poems for long, even
if they were no more ambitious than short "Inscriptions" for the
Civil War dead. Battle-Pieces is frequently called Melville's first book of poetry,
and critics speak of his turning from prose to poetry in that 1866 book. No, Battle-Pieces
was his first published book of
poetry. Melville was not a novice poet
in Battle-Pieces. When he at last started his epic poem, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy
Land, a little over two years after becoming a customs inspector in New
York City, Melville had been a practicing poet a dozen years.
Dating the
start of Clarel is both
straightforward and tricky. From the records of Melville's buying source
books, Jay Leyda and Leon Howard decided that Melville began Clarel in January 1870. My less conventional findings confirm their
conclusions. While rightly focusing on
books like W. H. Bartlett's Forty Days in
the Desert, Leyda and Howard slighted other books Melville saw and
sometimes bought in the years around 1870--books by or about Hawthorne. Leyda in 1951 plundered Hawthorne's posthumous
Passages from the American Notebooks (1868)
and Passages from the English Notebooks
(1870) for their evidence about the Hawthorne-Melville relationship in 1850
through 1857: these were, after all, contemporary records belatedly published
(although with tantalizing ellipsis dots where Sophia Hawthorne withheld
portions of what Hawthorne had written).
While expanding The Melville Log
in preparation for my biography, I realized that Leyda had not recognized a
crucial fact of Melville's life--that encountering each Notebook on publication and each other posthumous work by Hawthorne
(and each book about Hawthorne), were
momentous events in Melville's life in the late 1860s and the early 1870s, when
his friend was regularly ranked in newspapers and magazines as the greatest
American writer. Reading about
himself as a man who was memorable because he had known Hawthorne in the
Berkshires, reading passages quoted without his permission from his own intense
letters to Hawthorne, the now obscure custom house inspector began to relive the
friendship between himself at the time of Moby-Dick
and his Lenox neighbor, the impoverished romancer, but he also began to analyze
their relationship from the perspective of the present.
Having
assembled an array of Melville's encounters with the posthumous Hawthorne, I
suggested in the Northwestern-Newberry Clarel
(1991) that the decision to take Hawthorne along on the pilgrimage may have
been the catalyst that let Melville begin work on the poem when he did. I was nearer right than I knew. Later, while looking in Lawrence,
Massachusetts, papers for information about Melville's brother-in-law John Hoadley,
I found an unknown letter signed "Maherbal," reprinted from the
Windsor (Vermont) Journal, a
description of the Hawthorne cottage near Lenox about the time the writer moved
out, in November 1851. Where there is
one letter to a hometown newspaper, there may be more. After five years Richard E. Winslow found a
file of the Journal for me, and in it
another letter describing a meeting of Melville and Hawthorne alone together in
the dining room in a hotel in Lenox, gawked at through the doors by locals--surely
a meeting in the Little Red Inn (later known as the Curtis Hotel), where Melville's
father-in-law Judge Shaw stayed every September, when he held court. The Lenoxites were titillated by the glimpse
of celebrity authors, both reclusive, but they were also shocked, for local men
simply did not dine together at the hotel, as men could do at the Parker House
in Boston or the Astor House in New York.
We Melville
scholars had not asked the obvious question: how did Hawthorne get a copy of
the just-published Moby-Dick in time
to write Melville about it on the 15th or 16th of November 1851? What an author like Melville does when he
dedicates a book to another man is hand him a copy and watch his face when he
sees the dedication. For me as biographer, the meeting proved to be one of the
great bonuses bestowed by the Goddess of the Archives, at first because it
provided a seemingly inevitable conclusion for the first volume. Yet as even simple documents can do, this one
set off an explosion far away, once I paid attention again to an item in the 20
September 1869 Springfield Republican
which Leyda had quoted in the 1969 "Supplement" to The Melville Log: "Among the
notabilities who have been summering at Curtis's hotel in Lenox . . . Herman
Melville of New York." In the early
1990s I obtained the full article for my expansion of the Log: "Among the
notabilities who have been summering at Curtis's hotel in Lenox are Mr Bille,
the Danish minister, Capt H. Stockton of Newport, R. I., Mr and Mrs W. H.
Phillips of Washington, R. S. Oliver of the United States army, Judge Skinner
of Chicago, Herman Melville of New York, Col Schuyler Crosby, United States
army, R. Rangabe, charge d'affairs for Greece, Henry Cram of New York, Gen John
A. Dix and family of New York, William A. Neil and family of Ohio, C. C.
Harrison and E. E. Connor of Philadelphia, and S. B. Schlesinger and Col C. P.
Horton of Boston." In 1869
the old dining room remained, the hotel not yet inflated into a Victorian
behemoth. Overshadowed by post-war
plutocrats, his own old fame submerged into that of an adjunct to Hawthorne's
fame, Melville sat again in the dining room which had witnessed the highest moment
of triumph in his life, the moment his friend read the dedication of the new
book. Could anyone doubt that Melville
remembered that afternoon in November 1851?
In order to
show how these documents about November 1851 and August 1869 confirm what Howard
and Leyda said about Melville's starting Clarel,
I need to describe something less tangible than newspaper articles--a tendency of
Melville's to experience a peculiar mental state when disparate times, places,
and people collided. Most of us,
perhaps, share this psychological tendency with Melville, but he apparently
experienced this state with abnormal strength, in his life, and in his writings
he described it sometimes in quasi-hallucinatory or downright hallucinatory
ways. In Omoo, Chapter 27, on the
beach at Tahiti Melville recognizes that a wrecked ship is from a town on the
Hudson River below Albany: "In an instant, palm-trees and elms--canoes and
skiffs--church spires and bamboos--all mingled in one vision of the present and
the past." In Pierre at the end of Book 4, "Retrospective," the
portrait of Pierre's father and the face of Isabel melt into each other and "interpenetratingly"
unite. An example of this phenomenon occurs
in Israel Potter, and others suffuse "The
Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids." An abbreviated version occurs in "Bethlehem,"
canto 26, where Clarel shares a bedroom with the sensual Lyonese, whom he finds
challengingly masculine although he wears his hair in chestnut curls like a
Polynesian girl's. Clarel dreams that he
stands between the Lyonese and the "pale pure monk," Salvaterre, introduced
earlier, and feels "the strain / Of clasping arms which would detain / His
heart from each ascetic range," arms not identified as the Lyonese's, the
monk's, or his fiancée Ruth's. Awake, Clarel
experiences the beginnings of organic change in his attitude toward sex. Typically in Melville, an image of one
object, place, or person superimposes itself upon another, the images
dissolving back and forth, exactly what we could call "morphing."
Having learned
of the memorable meeting in the hotel in 1851 and the return visit in 1869, and
knowing Melville's habit of playing off one time against another, I had to
allow for the power of Melville's memory.
Whether or not Melville "saw" Hawthorne in the dining room at
the Curtis Hotel in 1869 (morphing, for instance, into the head of General Dix
or Colonel Crosby or whoever sat where Hawthorne had sat), he remembered. Chances are that Melville then brooded through
September, October, November, and December over how he could come to terms with
the utter failure of his own career and with the Hawthorne now exalted to the
highest American literary empyrean. By
January, having deciding that the way to work out his analysis at a bearable
pace was to take Hawthorne along on the "pilgrimage," Melville
started buying source books for Clarel. Conventional evidence of book buying, new
documentary evidence of one memorable new meeting in 1851 (added to
earlier-known documentary evidence of his being at the same place in 1869), and
the recognition of a psychological compulsion--all these work together to date
the start of Clarel as around January
1870, just as Leyda and Howard had thought.
But, you ask,
what kind of man on the basis of collision of past and present suddenly decides
one day to write a book he had not thought of writing, or to introduce a main
character into a book he may have been pondering about? Well, a man like Melville. In 1849 Melville began the wholly unplanned Redburn just after an emotional, and perhaps
all but hallucinatory, re-enactment of a momentous life-event on the docks of
Manhattan, his seeing off his younger brother Tom (who looked so much like him)
on a voyage to China ten years after their older brother had seen him off to
Liverpool (Parker 1.636-37). Melville was
naive in not recognizing the dangers of writing about childhood, especially a
childhood scarred by sudden loss of fortune, flight upriver to a remote city,
death of the father, and abrupt descent into poverty. By the time he wrote the last parts of Pierre (NN, p. 284), he knew that when one drops a fishing line into the well of
childhood what he pulls up may be monsters.
Melville's precipitous psychological development--the development that
allowed Moby-Dick and Pierre--came because he wrote Redburn just when he did, under the
impetus of such a powerful collision of memory against the present. One would not expect such precipitous
psychological development in a man in his early fifties, even if he began writing
because of the collision of memory and the present, but where Melville grew most
during the writing of Clarel, other
than in greatness as a poet, was in his capacity for sustained psychological analysis--a
capacity manifested long before in Pierre,
but, one could argue, pursued here to depths even more profound.
The force that
kept Melville tightly buckled to the task, at least in the first two or three
years, may have been his need, reinforced at intervals by new Hawthorne
publications, to come to terms with his powerful feelings about Hawthorne in
the present, not only feelings from two decades earlier. For my biography, after looking hard for
anything that could be tied to particular personal or public events starting in
1870, I took the rough and ready approach in describing the composition. I treated "Jerusalem" in part of
the chapter on 1870, "The Wilderness" in 1871, "Mar Saba"
in 1872, and "Bethlehem" in 1874, working the discussions of Clarel into my biographical narrative. That narrative was partly drawn from newly
discovered newspaper articles but mainly from long-known letters in the NYPL and
from a host of other manuscript letters which had long lain there unread. Despite all the vicissitudes Melville
experienced (double griefs so great in 1872 that he may not have written much
for many months), I assumed, partly just for convenience of sorting out what I
said about Clarel, that he most
likely did not write much more or less than a Part each year up until he
finished, some months into 1875. (We had
long known that the poem was finished by the summer of 1875, when Melville's
uncle, Peter Gansevoort, offered to pay for its publication.) In the portions of these chapters devoted to
the poem, my strategy was to follow Melville's portrait of Vine which gradually
included judgments on his intellect. As
the poem progressed, Melville engaged more intensely with characters who
themselves were more urgently involved in present life and thought than Vine--Rolfe
and Ungar in particular.
This remarkable
cast of characters in Clarel grew out
of Melville's solitary reading but also by occasional intense conversations
with men who had seen much of the world and had pondered on what they had seen. From Liverpool in November 1856 Melville
wrote his brother Allan about a man he did not name (it was George Campbell
Rankin) who had crossed on the Glasgow
with him: "there was one man, who interested me considerably, one who had
been an officer of the native troops in India, and besides was a good deal of a
philosopher and had been all over the world.
With him I had many long talks." Melville also was a man who had
been in far corners of the world and was a good deal of a philosopher. By focusing too often on him in mid or late
career as a prose writer, from Moby-Dick
to a few of the short stories, we
forget that early in life he had been an eyewitness to history in the New World
and the Pacific and was uniquely qualified, by experiences and by voracious
reading, to take on great topics of the century.
No other
important American writer lived for weeks anywhere with a primitive tribe
almost untouched by western civilization, as Melville did in the Marquesas. From the experience Melville gained a
permanent, instinctive sense of cultural relativity, whether Polynesian,
Christian, Muslim, the Greece and Rome of myth and history, or other
societies. America was not ready for
cultural relativity: fundamentalist reviewers exacted a high price for
Melville's allowing Ishmael to worship Yojo with Queequeg. But equality of myths and religions is a
recurrent theme in Clarel. In "Jerusalem," canto 33, Homeric
sites and Christian sites seem equally real.
In "The Wilderness," canto 5, the young Smyrniote Glaucon shocks
Clarel with his lack of either historic or religious awareness: "Fine shot
was mine by Nazareth; / But birding's best in Tempe's Vale."
No other important
American writer witnessed colonialism and imperialism first hand, as Melville
did when the French admiral on his warship thuggishly declared the Marquesas to
be French property or when the British, under pressure from the American
president, relinquished control of the Hawaii.
No other American writer reported on the devastation which followed
Europeans into the South Seas--systematic destruction of native cultures,
natives left prey to European diseases, the islands themselves vandalized by new
construction which destroyed essential tropical vegetation and natural features
such as coral reefs. Ungar bursts out
("Bethlehem," canto 9) against those who "in the name of Christ
and Trade" deflower "the world's last sylvan glade!"
No other
American writer exposed the human and physical costs of Christianizing the
South Seas, particularly in Hawaii, where natives were hitched to go-carts to
pull missionaries' wives about the island, and lashed. Low church reviewers (that is, the
missionary-minded Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists) savagely
denounced Melville as the traducers of missionaries because he described in the
first issue of Typee just what he saw
in Tahiti and Hawaii. Telling what he
knew, first hand, cost Melville his career because of the virulent power of
what we would call the religious right.
The "solid stolid Elder" who rejects the party and turns back
to Jerusalem ("The Wilderness," canto 10) would, given the chance in
the 1840s, have brutally denounced the author of Typee and Omoo.
Melville's
unique experiences as eyewitness to history occurred during the more than two
years he worked in one of the largest American industries, the slaughter of
whales in order to light the lamps of the Young Republic, before he served more
than a year as a sailor on an American man-of-war. Other Americans served on whaleships,
merchant ships, and naval vessels and wrote (and wrote well) about their
experiences, but no other American writer of his time, not even Richard Henry
Dana, Jr., had Melville's varied experience with living in extremely close
quarters for prolonged periods with men
of different races and nationalities.
For all his
unique experiences, Melville brought to Clarel
a life crowded with experiences shared in some degree by some of his
contemporaries, including the great English poets of the mid century and
beyond. He was far from unique in seeing
Paris less than two years after the revolution of "the red year Forty
Eight" ("Mar Saba," canto 1), which he wrote into both Mardi and Clarel. Margaret Fuller and
other Americans had been on the scene in Italy for that red year, and other
Americans witnessed other battles, other years, while Melville went the length
of Italy in 1857 witnessing shows of force but no military engagements. Still, he saw enough of post-Revolutionary Europe
to affect his thinking. He had grown up
when Edmund Burke's Reflections on the
Revolution in France was still battling with Thomas Paine's rejoinder, The Rights of Man, and all his life the
first French Revolution remained the archetypal modern revolt, almost as
powerful as Satan's against God. He knew
that the United States, the result of the revolution won by his two
grandfathers and their fellows, was an experiment which might fail. From what he saw in France and in Italy and
from his readings and broodings Melville created Mortmain in Clarel, an archetypal revolutionary
become disillusioned with the hope of social reform through overthrow of
governments.
Melville had
little experience with Catholicism, other than being defended by some Catholic
reviewers who were delighted at his criticisms of the Protestant missionaries
in the South Seas, but he knew from American magazines and newspapers of
"the ecclesiastical crisis" in England and knew something, most
likely, about John Henry Newman's turning to Catholicism. In Clarel
Rolfe suggests that Protestantism, in the grand battle between Roman
Catholicism and "the Atheist," would not be a contender for dominance:
Protestantism would figure only as a base of operations covertly used by
Atheism ("The Wilderness," canto 26).
Taught the doctrine of total depravity by his mother's Dutch Church, Melville
carried the lurking idea of Original Sin along when he married into a Unitarian
family. More than any other poet of his
time, he was tormented by the wish that one could obey Jesus absolutely (as in what
Jesus said to the rich young man) and by the certain knowledge that any attempt
to put Jesus's words into practice would end in disaster. Christians were not Christians, by Melville's
standards, and in a similar mood Ungar argues ("Bethlehem," canto 18)
that Christianity is only nominal, without "working practice." Worse is Rolfe's depiction of Christianity as
a victimizing confidence game ("Mar Saba," canto 3). Rolfe thinks that Christ may have been the
"last and best" avatar of godhood but that men "Made earth
inhuman; yes, a den / Worse for Christ's coming, since his love / (Perverted)
did but venom prove" ( "The Wilderness," canto 21).
Clarel was timed to be Melville's centennial
poem, his skeptical testament about the state of the country his two heroic
grandfathers had helped to create, a counter-demonstration against public
self-congratulation. Melville gave his
strongest characters (Americans, almost all) some of his own deep respect for
those who remember the past and apply it to the present: "Historic memory
goes so far / Backward through long defiles of doom; / Who consults it honestly
/ That mind grows prescient in degree" ("Bethlehem," canto 21). Rolfe proposes ("Bethlehem," canto
21), "the New World's the theme."
The talkers find themselves dismayed by agreeing that the New World of
the Americas had been swiftly despoiled, and Ungar, Rolfe, Vine, and Clarel all
silently lament "the arrest of hope's advance, / And squandered last
inheritance" ("Bethlehem," canto 21). The new Paradise opened by Columbus and the
Paradise Magellan found in the Pacific are not fit subjects for a Paradise Lost but only for a Paradise Squandered. Vine will offer
only "Grudged thanks" to Columbus ("The Wilderness," canto
27), and the American pilgrims at the end can think of offering sacrifices to
only Terminus, the god of limits, not the god of opportunities
("Bethlehem," canto 21).
Disillusioned, dismayed, disheartened, the pilgrims nevertheless elevate
our spirits. It is a great privilege to
be in their company for so long, to hear them speak so intelligently in what we
begin to take for granted, some of the best American poetry ever written.
Twenty-first
century survivors of this paperback can seek out, later on, the full
Northwestern-Newberry edition (1991), which reprints Walter E. Bezanson's monumental
introduction and notes to the 1960 Hendricks House edition. The NN volume includes also a historical
supplement and monkey ropes and hoist posts aplenty, including glosses that
pile Harrison Hayford's Pelion atop Bezanson's Ossa, evocative black and white
orientalist period illustrations, and tantalizing related documents. Not yet sated, you can dip into five chapters
of Hershel Parker's Herman Melville: A
Biography, 1851-1891 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002), one for each Part of Clarel
and a fifth on the publication and reception.
New discoveries are in Parker’s Melville
Biography: An Inside Narrative (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2012 [out in January 2013], in Chapter 17, “Melville and Hawthorne’s Dinner at
the Hotel in Lenox” and Chapter 18, “Why Melville Took Hawthorne to the Holy
Land: Biography Enhanced by Databases and an Amateur Blogger.” Bezanson in 1960
had Melville's copy of the Arnold, from which he gave an exemplary reading of
Melville's grappling with aesthetic issues.
Books from Melville's library keep surfacing, especially since the late
1970s ; literary artifact though his introduction was, Bezanson could not
resist working in a bit from Melville's recently discovered Dante. We know more all the time, and for an
up-to-date interim report the truly insatiable reader can go to Parker's Melville: The Making of the Poet
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), which shows Melville the autodidact copying from and arguing with
a world-class teaching staff--Dante, Vasari, Cowley, Wordsworth, Jeffrey,
Hazlitt, Arnold, Ruskin. Listening to Melville
in his marginalia, you love the man, and seeing how he grew beyond his great
course of study in aesthetics (in 1862), you may catch the Clarel fever as strongly as I have.
You will know you
have the fever if you begin to feel edgy, vaguely dodgy and sore, as you move
into Part 4. Then you realize that you
are coming to the end and pretty soon there won't be any more. Whatever Vine and Clarel had to say, whatever
Rolfe and Mortmain or Rolfe and Ungar had to say, that's going to be all there
is. Having listened for hours as
Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes discussed East India religions and
mythologies "with the most amazing skill and brilliancy on both
sides," the diplomat Maunsell Fields declared, "I never chanced to
hear better talking in my life." Remember
that one of the students visiting Melville in 1859, having been lectured too
long on Plato and Aristotle, nevertheless exclaimed, "what a talk it
was!" You can overhear great talk
throughout Clarel, even before the
journey is quite underway. Reading Clarel, you echo Maunsell Fields. Whoever you are, you may never chance to hear
better talking in your life.
Supplemented
from the Foreword to the 2008 paperback of the NN Edition of Clarel
