88
PARTISAN REVIEW
the rooftop of his house in East 26th Street scorning the immigrant
mob that in the heat of August, 1863, violently attacked the city in its
protest against the draft.
The life of an author in the New York summer! To Hawthorne he
wrote in 1851, "In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself
in
a
third-story room, and work
&
slave on my 'Whale' while it is driving
thra" the press. That is the only way I can work now-I am so pulled
hither and thither by circumstances." Later in the same month: "The
Whale is only half through the press; for, wearied with the long delays
of the printers, and disgusted with the heat
&
dust of the Babylonish
brick-kiln of New York, I came back to the country to feel the grass,
and end the book by reclining on it, if I may." In Chapter 22 of
Pierre
we read: ''The chamber was meager even to meanness. No carpet on the
floor, no picture on the wall; nothing but a low, long, and very curious–
looking single bedstead, that might possibly serve for an indigent
bachelor's pallet ... a wide board. of the toughest live-oak, about six
feet long, laid upon two upright empty flour-barrels, and loaded with a
large bottle of ink, an unfastened bundle of quills, a pen-knife, a folder,
and a still unbound ream of foolscap paper, significantly stamped
Rule, Blue."
"Now look around at that most miserable room, and at that most
miserable of all the pursuits of a man, and say if here be the place, and
this be the trade, that God intended him for. A rickety chair, two
hollow barrels,/ a plank, paper, pens, and infernally black ink, four
leprously dingy white walls, no carpet, a cup of water, and a dry biscuit
or two.... Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! behold your vic–
tim!"
Melville's distrust of authorship extended to his distrust of litera–
ture as a vehicle for his agonized search for a constant in the chameleon
universe. Failure on failure:
Moby-Dick,
1851;
Pierre; or, The Ambi–
guities,
1852; the putative hack novel
Israel Potter,
1855;
The Piazza
Tales,
1856, first sold to New York magazines for less than $20.00 a
story;
The Confidence-Man,
1857, the last work of prose fiction he was
to publish in his lifetime-the book was the end to Melville's career as
a professional author as well as the most tangled secret assault on
shallow American Christianity as the support of an American opti–
mism that lasts only so long as the money holds out. From 1866 to his
death in 1891 Melville is captive in the city he associates with failure,
indigence, anonymity. In the aftermath of the Civil War, when so
many were seeking a new start, Melville becomes an out-of-door
inspector of customs at a salary of $4.00 a day (it was later reduced to
