COME BACK TO THE RAFT AG'IN, HUCK HONEY!
In
Two Years Before the Mast,
in
Moby Dick,
in
Huckleberry
Finn
the water is there, is the very texture of the novel; the Leather–
stocking Tales propose another symbol for the same meaning: the
virgin forest. Notice the adjective-the virgin forest and the forever
inviolable sea. It is well to remember, too, what surely must be more
than a coincidence, that Cooper who could dream this myth invented
the novel of the sea, wrote for the first time in history the sea-story
proper. The rude pederasty of the forecastle and the Captain's cabin,
celebrated in a thousand jokes, is the profanation of a dream. In a
recent book of Gore Vidal's an incipient homosexual, not yet aware
of the implications of his feelings, indulges in the apt reverie of run–
ning off to sea with his dearest friend. The buggery of sailors is taken
for granted among us, yet it is thought of usually as an inversion
forced on men by their isolation from women, though the opposite
case may well be true, the isolation sought more or less consciously as
an occasion for male encounters. There is a context in which the
legend of the sea as escape and solace, the fixated sexuality of boys,
the dark beloved are one.
In Melville and Twain at the center of our tradition, in the lesser
writers at the periphery, the myth is at once formalized and perpetu–
ated; Nigger Jim and Queequeg make concrete for us what was
without them a
va~e
pressure upon the threshold of our conscious–
ness; the proper existence of the myth is in the realized character,
who waits, as it were, only to be asked his secret. Think of Oedipus
biding in silence from Sophocles to Freud.
Unwittingly we are possessed in childhood by the characters and
their undiscriminated meaning, and it is difficult for us to dissociate
them without a sense of disbelief. What! these household figures clues
to our subtlest passions! The foreigner finds it easier to perceive the
remoter significance; D. H. Lawrence saw in our classics a linked
mythos of escape and immaculate male love; Lorca in
The Poet in
New York
grasped instinctively the kinship of Harlem and Walt
Whitman, the fairy as bard. Yet in every generation of our own wri–
ters the myth appears; in the Gothic reverie of Capote's
Other Voices,
Other Rooms,
both elements of the syndrome are presented, though
disjunctively: the boy moving between the love of a Negro maid–
servant and
his
inverted cousin.
In the myth, one notes finally, it is always in the role of outcast,
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