ALFRED KAZIN
87
have published at all-long after his death the entangled, barely legible
drafts were recovered from a tin box by a graduate student, Raymond
Weaver, the first to resurrect Herman Melville.
Yet without all this disorder and early sorrow, without New York
"the terrible town" as Henry James called it, Melville might very well
have lived the sterile upper-class life that Edith Wharton fled to live in
Europe. The protagonist of James's marvelous story "The Jolly
Corner," returns to New York from many years abroad
to
seek what
he
would have been if he had lived the life of his class. He finds it in the
ghost of himself, in the old house off Fifth Avenue he grew up in-a
figure beautifully elegant in appearance but brutalized and frighten–
mg.
Melville was swept out of this life into an oceanic space that for
sheer extent and metaphysical .terror resembles the outer space into
which our astronauts go-those heavenly spaces into which, as Mel–
ville well knew, man carries forever the image of himself and tries to
transcend it. "The immense concentration of self in the midst of such a
heartless immensity, my Godl who can tell it!" Melville confronted
this self not as Narcissus but as Ahab: strike through the maskl New
York was the threshold, the jumping off place.
Moby-Dick
opens at the
Battery on "a dreamy Sabbath afternoon, thousands of mortal men
fixed right here in ocean reveries." "Nothing will content lhem but the
extremest limit of lhe land; loitering u.nder the shady lee of yonder
warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as
they possibly can without falling in."
This longing for the sailor's life, pointedly compared to Cata
throwing himself upon his sword, was all too soon to be crushingly
realized by the young boy bound for Liverpool, lhe sailor on the whaler
Acushnet.
The sea turned out to be the open universe. Beyond the
happy valley of the Typees, the Galapagos where he had a premonition
of what Darwin was to publish in
The Origin of Species,
of all that
mystery buried in "my dear Pacific," lay the enigma of man's relation–
ship to what is forever unchangeable by man. This presses hardest on
Americans, lhe people who thought they could change anything. By
contrast New York was the closed world: the fashionable Grace Church
on lower Broadway from which Melville describes himself in "The
Two Temples" being ejected by the sexton; Wall Street in "Bart.leby the
Scrivener," where a man had to starve himself to death to demonstrate
his freedom;
Pierre,
where in Chapter 22 Melville describes the throes
of finishing
Moby-Dick;
finally "The House Top," the extraordinary
Coriolanus poem in Melville's
Battle-Pieces
that describes Melville on
