When the packet ship St. Lawrence pulled into its berth at sunrise on October 1, 1839,
on New York’s South Street on its return from England, Herman Melville might have ended his first voyage out to sea, but
was only beginning his restless journey as an adult. The novel he would write a
decade later from this initial shipboard experience, Redburn, would
constitute, according to critic Lewis Mumford, “the first bitter cry” of
Melville’s maturity.
The future author of Moby-Dick, grandson of two Revolutionary War heroes, had shipped out four months before as a callow
19-year-old because his father had died in the wake of his import
business going bankrupt. An attempt to rescue the firm, with Melville as clerk and oldest
brother Gansevoort picking up the reins, had not succeeded, nor had an attempt
to place the teen with an uncle on a farm relieved the pressure on family
finances.
These circumstances, along with the savage
disillusionment he experienced after watching the squalor and cruelty of life
at sea, strongly influenced Redburn, a fictional counterpart to
a bestselling memoir from earlier in the decade by another inexperienced scion
of a prominent American family shocked by what he witnessed on the high seas,
Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the
Mast. (See my earlier post about
the latter.)
Melville wrote as obsessively about the sea as
Joseph Conrad would, nearly a half-century later, in England. He would begin
with Typee (1846), a somewhat
conventional adventure story that made its author famous virtually overnight,
and end with Billy Budd (1890), an
allegory of innocence in conflict with evil. What he wrote in between represented,
if you will, a sea change in creative ambition—and a shipwreck of a career that
began with commercial success.
The sailor-turned-author had turned off public and
critics with Mardi, a novel that
began as one of his familiar South Seas adventures only to take diverge into
more satiric and symbolic territory. With a growing family to support, he soon
had reason to rue his departure from genre fiction, and he conceived Redburn and another 1849 novel, White-Jacket, as a return to realism. Given his vaulting new creative aspirations, he was inclined to
dismiss these new projects, telling his father-in-law, Massachusetts judge Lemuel Shaw, that
they were “two jobs which I have done for money—being forced to it as other men
are to sawing wood.”
All that comment proves is that writers are not the
best judges of their work. In Redburn,
Melville began tentatively to try out settings, characterizations and themes
that he would explore with greater artistry shortly. It would take exposure to
the tragedies of William Shakespeare and a brief but intense friendship with
Nathaniel Hawthorne to turn him within two years to Moby-Dick, but he was already thinking, albeit in a limited way, in
psychological and symbolic forms that were new to him:
*From the
ocean to the city: Most of Redburn occurs on the Atlantic Ocean, but for
the first time in Melville’s fiction he writes of urban settings: England’s
Liverpool and London. They represent new forms of hell, as does the New York of
his disastrous 1852 novel Pierre and
his indelible novella about soul-stealing Wall Street, “Bartleby the
Scrivener.”
*Naming the
outsider: Wellingborough Redburn, Melville's alter ego, regards himself as a “kind of Ishmael” because of abuse
by his fellow shipmates. In the epic that followed, Moby-Dick, the famous opening line is “Call me Ishmael.” In the
Book of Genesis, an angel predicts a troubling future for this son of Abraham
and the Egyptian bondservant Hagar: “a wild man…[with] every man’s hand against
him.”
*A depression
that clings to a first-person narrator: The opening paragraph of Moby-Dick makes no bones about what
influences Ishmael to go continually out to sea: “Whenever I find myself
growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my
soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses,
and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my
hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle
to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically
knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon
as I can.” In contrast, Redburn does not share Ishmael’s self-destructive
streak. The new “boy” on board in Redburn
is certainly despairing (“Cold, bitter cold as December, and bleak as its
blasts, seemed the world then to me; there is no misanthrope like a boy
disappointed”) but there is a discernible reason for his feelings: his family’s
genteel poverty has, in effect, forced his expulsion from the paradise of his
childhood.
*The chief
mate as the crew in microcosm: The chief mate takes an immediate dislike to
Wellingborough Redburn (even the first name sounds highfalutin') because of his social status, shouting at him, “You are
very green, but I’ll ripen you.” Every time the young man thinks to alleviate
his misery (e.g., avoiding a duty that day because of sickness), the mate
disabuses him of any such notion. In this, the mate is no worse than the crew,
who thrust Redburn out of a circle awaiting food. In contrast, the crew in Moby-Dick, in all their good-natured
tolerance for the sea and each other, are no match for the obsessed Ahab—none
more so than the religious, deeply kind mate Starbuck, who protests that the
captain is hunting an unthinking creature, but eventually, against his better judgment, falls in with the mad quest for
the white whale.
*The crew as
representative of American diversity: The sailors aboard Redburn’s ship might be a roguish lot,
but they’re a motley one, too—tilted decidedly toward humble origins but with
someone of higher status (Redburn) on board, and ranging in race and ethnicity
from the black cook to a cockney and an Irishman. The ending of Moby-Dick is catastrophic in more ways
than one: the crew not only dies because of Ahab’s mad pursuit, but its
on-board experiment—sailors from multiple races living in harmony with each
other—ends as well.
*The clash of
freedom and authority: Redburn’s departure from his upstate New York home
might be a symbolic expulsion from Eden, but, like that latter event, it also
puts him face to face with the alternately exhilarating and terrifying prospect
of exercising free world in a new environment. The use of that freedom also
puts him at loggerheads with the ship’s captain, who lashes out at him for
acting too familiarly with him. Proper submission to the authority of a captain
poses even more crucial dilemmas—life-and-death stakes, in fact—in both Moby-Dick and Billy Budd.
*A young
sailor who unwittingly provokes an older one’s malignity: Redburn provokes fellow sailor Jackson,
‘spontaneously an atheist and an infidel…a horrid desperado; and like a wild
Indian, whom he resembled in his tawny skin and high cheek bones, he seemed to
run a muck at heaven and earth.” He can think of no reason why the older man
views him with such “malevolence,” except that Jackson is conscious of his
“miserable, broken-down condition,” whereas “I was young and handsome, at least
my mother so thought me, and as soon as I became a little used to the sea, and
shook off my low spirits somewhat, I began to have my old color in my cheeks,
and, in spite of misfortune, to appear well and hearty.” Redburn is not the
only youngster to have excited strong feelings in Jackson—so had a six-year-old
stowaway. But the stowaway’s instinctive recoil from Jackson only drives the
sailor into further rage, making him one of Melville’s “isolatoes.” Similarly,
John Claggart warms initially to the title character of Billy Budd, only to retreat when he realizes that friendship with a subordinate would not be appropriate. Claggart’s subsequent withdrawal and falsehood about the beloved,
angelic-looking foretopman precipitates the tale’s tragedy. With main
characters depicted as objects of an older man’s gaze, both Redburn and Billy Budd have been viewed as homoerotic fiction.
Melville had little
time to rest once back on land. Later in October 1839, his mother had fallen
into such dire straits that he felt compelled to take a job as a
schoolteacher—a job that was likely ill-fitting, as he found himself wandering
again in 1840—and a short time after that, he had shipped out to sea again, on
a voyage that provided the raw material for Typee.
Like another adopted New Yorker with illustrious
ancestral ties, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Melville began by writing with the
authority of success and ended with the authority of failure. And he was as
wrong as the latter to disparage work he churned out under financial pressure
as being of little if any value.
Redburn
can still be read, with great interest, as a novel of youthful initiation, a
genre that may be more popular now than in Melville’s time. While not as epic in scope as Moby-Dick, it is taut and leaner and is
filled with vivid descriptions. The miasma of depression and defeat that hangs
over the book assures, despite its author’s misgivings, that it could never
really be a concession to public taste.
