90
PARTISAN REVIEW
Now, in
Clarel,
he was in the Holy Land; in
Timoleon,
in the
Villa Albani-removed from the city that just a century ago Edith
Wharton remembered with a shudder as row on row of brownstones
put up by venal landlords in the 1860s. "Out of doors, in the mean,
monotonous streets, without architecture, without great churches or
palaces, or any visible memorials of an historic past ... cursed with its
uni versal chocolate-covered coating of the most hideous stone ever
quarried, this cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers,
porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly unifor–
mity of mean ugliness .... "
Melville, who was to spend many Sundays with his granddaughter
Eleanor in the newly opened Central Park, had nothing to say about
the urban scene in this first great public park in the New World,
nothing about the thousands pouring every year into New York
harbor. Henry Adams in the
Education
at least did the huddled masses
seeking to breathe free the courtesy of attacking them. Melville, writ–
ing in his poetry of the Pyramids, of tormented Confederate veterans in
Jerusalem, of the Age of Antoninus, of conflict with his own androg–
yny, had nothing to say of the rapacity of finance capitalism in the age
of Jay Gould and Jim Fiske-nothing of the crime and squalor of the
lower New York streets so convenientl y .adj acent to police head–
quarters. Jacob Riis, taking his extraordinary photographs of destitu–
tion for
How the Other Half Lives,
used to obtain his flash in the dark
rooms by firing a pistol; this often set off a fire, but a cop laughed that
dust was so thick on the walls that it smothered the fire.
If
there is nothing in Melville "dwelling somewhere in New York"
of the world that Stephen Crane was soon to describe in
Maggie
and in
his sketches of the Bowery and the Tenderloin district, material that
enraged the police forever shaking down prostitutes and practically
excluded Crane from New York, neither is there anything of Whit–
man's feeling for the people, the streets, the sheer life-giving vitality
that made Whitman describe
Leaves of Grass
and his city as counter–
parts. "I can hardly tell why, but feel very positively that if anything
can justify my revolutionary attempts
&
utterances, it is such
ensemble-like
a great city to modern civilization
&
a whole combined
clustering paradoxical unity, a man, a woman."
The port, the greatest harbor as it used to be thought of, was to
stupefy and alarm Henry Adams at the end of the old century and
Henry James at the beginning of the next. But Melville the "isolato,"
his word, reminds us in his New York secretiveness of so many poets,
artists, and visionaries who in New York found perfect solitude even if
they were afraid of dying in it-a creative race that tolerated New York,
