
W.B. Yeats
In the centenary year of Irish Partition, Sally Minogue looks at The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
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Jul
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Aug
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In 1839, after a long
chain of dead-end jobs necessitated by his outwardly prosperous but privately
profligate father’s debt-ridden death seven years earlier, the 19-year-old
Herman Melville did what many other disaffected and adventurous young men had
done before him and ran away to sea. He signed aboard the
merchantman St. Lawrence as a ship’s boy (the lowest ‘green
hand’ rank), for a round trip from New York to the then vast trading port of
Liverpool. Returning to New York in the autumn, he took a teaching position but
left after one term because he never received any wages. After a trip up the Ohio
River in an unsuccessful quest for employment and inspired by Richard Henry
Dana’s nautical memoir Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Jeremiah N.
Reynolds’ 1839 article ‘Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific’ in the Knickerbocker
magazine, Melville headed for New Bedford, Massachusetts, the ‘Whaling
City’. There, he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet, again as a
‘green hand’, for a 1/175th share of the profits, setting sail at
the beginning of January 1841.
It was the custom of whaling vessels to ‘gam’ if their
paths crossed in the open ocean, meaning that the captains and first mates
would meet for drinks and to share intelligence on the movements of whales,
while the crews also got together and swapped stories. The Acushnet regularly gammed with
the Lima from Nantucket, whose company included William Henry
Chase, the son of Owen Chase, who had been the first mate on the whaler Essex,
sunk by an abnormally large sperm whale approximately 2,000 nautical miles west
of South America in 1820:
I turned around and saw him about one
hundred rods directly ahead of us, coming down with twice his ordinary speed of
around 24 knots, and it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect.
The surf flew in all directions about him with the continual violent thrashing
of his tail. His head about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon
us, and again struck the ship.
Chase had survived the appalling aftermath of the
wreck, when the ship’s 20-man crew had spent three months at sea in three leaky
whaling boats, eventually resorting to cannibalism, with survivors drawing lots
to see who would be sacrificed and who would kill them after the corpses of the
men who died of exposure ran out. (In another macabre twist, one boat carrying
three men became separated from the group. It was found years later washed up
on Ducie Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Islands,
the skeletons of the crew still onboard.) Chase wrote an account of the
ill-fated voyage in 1821, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and
Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, after which he returned to
sea for another 19 years. Despite a distinguished seafaring career which saw
him captain first the whaler Winslow and then his own ship, the Charles
Carrol, Chase was haunted by his experiences. He spent eight years in
an asylum after retiring, and when he died in Nantucket in 1869, he was found
to have been hiding food in his attic. William lent Melville a copy of his
father’s book, of which he would later write: ‘The reading of this wondrous
story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck
had a surprising effect upon me.’
In the summer of 1842, Melville and his shipmate
Richard ‘Toby’ Greene jumped ship at Nuku Hiva Bay
and spent several weeks living with the Typee natives. He left the island
onboard the Australian whaler Lucy Ann, where he took part in a
mutiny and was briefly incarcerated in the ‘Calabooza Beretanee’, the British
jail in Tahiti, before escaping. He then spent a month
as beachcomber (an ‘omoo’ in Tahitian), eventually crossing over
to the island of Moorea in French Polynesia. He shipped out as a
boat-steerer on the Nantucket whaler Charles and Henry and was put
ashore at Hawaii in the spring of 1843. After kicking around Honolulu for the
next six months, Melville enlisted in the U.S. Navy as an ordinary seaman
aboard the frigate United States. He was discharged (honourably this
time) at Boston in 1844, having just turned 25.
Back home in New York State, Melville regaled his
family with his adventures and other sea stories picked up along the way. They
urged him to write them down and the result was his first book, Typee: A
Peep at Polynesian Life, published by John Murray in London and Wiley and
Putnam in New York in 1846. As Earnest Hemingway later wrote, ‘Any man’s life
told truly is a novel’ and Typee is a creative nonfiction in the manner
of George Borrow’s Lavengro (1851). Falling somewhere between memoir and
novel, Typee is an exotic account of Melville’s time on Nuku Hiva Island
after deserting from the Acushnet, with the addition of anthropological
and linguistic analysis based on secondary research. Typee was a
controversial book but also a bestseller, establishing Melville as a
significant literary presence on both sides of the Atlantic virtually
overnight. Some critics doubted the veracity of the tale, until Toby Greene and
the Acushnet’s captain, Valentine Pease, publicly corroborated the
story, leading journalists to dub Melville the ‘man who lived among the
cannibals’. Notably, and to the chagrin of several critics, Melville was apt to
sympathise with the ‘cannibals’ while criticising European colonial
interference and the introduction of Christian missionaries:
It may be asserted without fear of
contradictions that in all the cases of outrages committed by Polynesians,
Europeans have at some time or other been the aggressors, and that the cruel
and bloodthirsty disposition of some of the islanders is mainly to be ascribed
to the influence of such examples.
The voluptuous Indian, with every
desire supplied, whom Providence has bountifully provided with all the sources
of pure and natural enjoyment, and from whom are removed so many of the ills
and pains of life—what has he to desire at the hands of Civilization? Will he
be the happier? Let the once smiling and populous Hawaiian islands, with their
now diseased, starving, and dying natives, answer the question. The
missionaries may seek to disguise the matter as they will, but the facts are
incontrovertible.
A sequel soon followed. Omoo: A Narrative of
Adventures in the South Seas, was published by Murray in London and Harpers
& Brothers in New York. The story picks up where Typee finished,
with the unnamed narrator leaving Nuku Hiva aboard a whaler bound for
Tahiti, leading to a largely autobiographical account of the mutiny and Melville’s
subsequent imprisonment and escape. John Murray included both Typee and Omoo in
his Home and Colonial Library, which was sold throughout the
British Empire. Such global distribution cemented Melville’s reputation as a
colourful travel writer with several generations of British Victorians,
anticipating the south sea travelogues of Robert Louis Stevenson.
At this point in his literary career, the newly
married Melville could have played it safe and banged out a series of
crowd-pleasing nautical romances in the vein of Captain Marryat. Instead, his
third book, the enigmatic Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (1849),
resembles Melville’s previous adventure narratives only in the early chapters,
before becoming a love story which then segues into an unfulfilled
philosophical quest. The physical and spiritual journey of the first-person
protagonist, Taji, first with his lover, Yillah, and then in pursuit of her,
indicates the influence of both Swift and Rabelais as he travels from one
fictional island to another, each representing different symbolic and satiric
aspects of human society. (Melville was an autodidact, having been forced to
leave school aged 12, and a voracious reader). Mardi was published in
London by Dickens’ early publisher Richard Bentley, and Harper in New York. A
transitional novel in many ways, in which Melville the storyteller wrestles
with Melville the metaphysician, Mardi contains several themes that the
author would explore and interrogate in almost everything he subsequently wrote:
religious dogma, and the uneasy balance between a faith he did not entirely possess
and the emptiness of absolute scepticism; the Romantic dichotomies of innocence
and experience and good and evil; the apparent human impulse to destroy
anything pure; the morality and delusion of ‘Democracy’; and a yearning search
after some kind of ultimate truth which is always denied the seeker.
Mardi was Melville’s first
commercial failure, with most reviewers finding it neither fish nor fowl,
although it did attract favourable critical attention from Nathaniel Hawthorne,
heralding a long friendship between the two writers, who saw in it ‘depths here
and there that compel a man to swim for his life’. The influential journalist
N. P. Willis also described the prose as ‘exquisite’. Melville followed-through
with the more self-consciously mainstream Redburn: His First Voyage
(1849) – once more published by Bentley and Harper – again drawing on his own
experiences. Like Melville, his protagonist’s father dies a bankrupt, and the
semi-autobiographical account of this period is raw and deeply moving. The main
body of the novel is more happy-go-lucky in tone, recounting the adventures of
Wellingborough Redburn (or ‘Buttons’), a well-mannered middle-class youth who
must find his place among a ragtag crew of foul-mouthed and tough professional
sailors on a voyage to Liverpool, mirroring Melville’s first taste of the
seafaring life on the St. Lawrence in 1839. As he wrote to Bentley: ‘I
have now in preparation a thing of a widely different cast from “Mardi”: – a
plain, straightforward, amusing narrative of personal experience – the son of a
gentleman on his first voyage to sea as a sailor – no metaphysics, no
conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale.’
Redburn was successful enough to
warrant the similarly straightforward creative nonfiction White-Jacket; or,
The World in a Man-of-War the following year (again published by Bentley in
the UK and Harper in the US). White-Jacket is based on Melville’s time in
the US Navy, an institution of which the book is unwaveringly critical,
especially on the subject of flogging. (In this regard, it anticipates his
final, uncompleted novel Billy Budd.) Critics and politicians alike picked
up on this, horrified by the graphic descriptions of this brutal and arbitrary
punishment, in part because Harper sent copies to every member of Congress. Led
by the New Hampshire Democrat John P. Hale – who cited Melville’s novel – Congress
banned flogging on all American ships in September 1850. White-Jacket
was another popular success, but Melville later described it and Redburn as
‘two jobs which I have done for money – being forced to it as
other men are to sawing wood.’ His problem was a familiar one to many writers,
past and present: the tension between writing what he wanted to write (the
metaphysics of Mardi), and what the market dictated (the nautical
adventures). He thus set out to steer a path between both positions, in a new work
he described to Bentley as ‘a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild
legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s
own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer…’
Like Leviathan, Moby-Dick was rising from the depths.
Stephen Carver
End of Part One
Image: 'Sperm Whaling - The Chase' by CF Wright [1885] Credit: Antony SOUTER / Alamy Stock Photo