Will Morrisey Reviews

Herman Melville: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. [Facsimile edition].

Herman Melville: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Richard H. Cox and Paul M. Dowling, eds. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2001.

Stanton Garner: The Civil War World of Herman Melville. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993.

Richard H. Cox and Paul M. Dowling: “Herman Melville’s Civil War: Lincolnian Prudence in Poetry.” The Political Science Reviewer. Volume XXIX, 2000, 192-295.

 

Note: Garner’s meticulous account of Melville’s life during the war includes careful exegeses of the poems; Cox and Dowling examine several of the most important poems with even greater attention to detail, and offer a brilliant analysis of the way in which Melville structured his book. Although they all rightly describe Melville (in Dowling’s words), as “a poet of moderation,” they differ regarding what that moderation consisted of, interpreting Melville’s politics differently as a consequence. Garner argues for Melville as a Northern Democrat, an admirer of General McClellan; Cox and Dowling regard Melville as a Lincoln man. I concur with the latter judgment, for the most part, but also find it significant that a serious case can be made for both positions. Melville’s prudence and moderation, remarked by all three scholars, lend themselves to such politic ambiguity. Melville wrote a book that might bind up at least some of the nation’s wounds, precisely by inviting many citizens of various convictions to think while reading, ‘Those are my thoughts’—often the best strategy for carefully altering such thoughts.

 

Melville calls the American Civil War a “historic tragedy,” which he hopes has “not been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity.” Moby-Dick is a tragedy in the form of a novel, centering on the fundamentals of human being in nature; through terror and pity, Melville instructs his readers on self-government and tyranny. In his book on the Civil War, Melville shows how the tragic knowledge imparted by Moby-Dick may guide American citizens in practice. In the language of some of the old philosophers, he shows how theoretical wisdom can inform practical wisdom, how the principles distilled from the novel may guide citizens’ deliberation in a political crisis. In this he takes his guidance from Shakespeare, as he had done when writing his novel:

No utter surprise can come to him

Who reaches Shakespeare’s core;

That which we seek and shun is there—

Man’s final lore.

There is in man, and therefore in the Civil War and its aftermath, so much to attract and to repel those who look into him, that we need a guide. For Melville, that guide is Shakespeare, poet of tragic kings and civil wars, above all others; he would be Shakespeare for his own people.

The literary critic Edmund Wilson complained that Battle-Pieces was written by a man who never saw a single battle in the war. That is no ground for complaint. This is a book by a civilian, for civilians, conveying the civilian experience of modern war and concluding with considerations centering on the need for civilians to restore civil peace on new terms. Having won the war, Northerners, how shall you win the peace? How shall you restore the Union you fought for? And what will the character of that Union be? Civil wars are revolutionary wars, wars over regimes. Will the democratic and commercial republic conceived in 1776 survive? Or will it fall apart, defeated politically after the war not by a regime ruled by slaveholding oligarchs, but by the factions that have survived the war? “We have sung of the soldiers and sailors, but who shall hymn the politicians?” Melville writes a poetic ‘reconstruction’ of the war in service of a moderate political ‘reconstruction.’

America’s historic tragedy differed from Melville’s prose tragedy from the outset. The Ahab-figure, tyrannic-souled John Brown, died before the war began, although he may be said to have portended the war in his violent life and death. [1] And, as Stanton Garner argues, the narrator of Battle-Pieces isn’t a fictional Ishmael but Melville himself, the chorus of the tragedy. The American nation takes the place of the tragic hero or anti-hero; the author speaks directly, when he is not presenting the many American voices heard in his 72 poems. Here, the protagonist is ‘the many,’ the chorus only ‘one.’ The democracy does not exclaim, advise, weep for the monarch; the author, the ruler of the book advises, exclaims, weeps for the democracy, where “The People spread like weedy grass,” their impassioned factitiousness having caused “the Founders’ dream” to “flee,” despite their attempts to temper faction with republican institutions.

To this factionalism Melville opposes thought, not additional ‘lyric’ passion. If Wordsworth had called “emotion recollected in tranquility” the origin of poetry, Melville recollects his and his nation’s emotions in anxiety, in caution. “I muse upon my country’s ills,” he announces, “on the world’s fairest hope”—the American republic, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal—”linked with man’s foulest crime.” Most commentators think this crime to have been slavery, the terrifying and pitiable flaw in the regime dedicated to equality of unalienable natural rights; Garner suspects that Melville means fratricide, not America’s but man’s foulest crime, the crime of Cain against Abel, now seen in the war of brother against brother. Since, as Lincoln argued, American slavery—cousin of fratricide, a crime committed by one race of men over another—brought on the war, and since that slavery infuriated the American Ahab, John Brown, who brought America near to the catastrophe of the Pequod, one need not choose. The two crimes are the same kind of crime, attempts to make natural right a “loose-fish.” As in Moby-Dick, so in America: “Nature’s dark side is heeded now”; “Satan’s old age is strong and hale.”

The Founders’ dream, the bright dream of a natural-rights republic, established in reality but flawed like all real things, flawed by the dark line of slave-mastery, impassioned and impassionating, fired the nightmare of Calhoun’s republic founded on that mastery. Nature’s God will settle the matter:

The light and the dark:

Yea and Nay—

Each hath its say;

But God He keeps the middle way.

As he muses on the Civil War, instead of the Hegelian synthesis of thesis and antithesis, Melville recurs to the Aristotelian principle of ‘the mean,’ of moderation—as Cox and Dowling emphasize. Melville was right: In practical terms, Hegelian logic has produced political extremes, the fanatic ‘totalitarianism’ of latter-day John Browns. But “Wisdom is vain, and prophecy.” As in Moby-Dick, grand systems of reason or of revelation animate the tragic victims and fools of nature.

Youth must its ignorant impulse lend—

Age finds place in the rear.

All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,

The champions and enthusiasts of the state:

Turbid ardors and vain joys

Not barrenly abate—

Stimulants to the power mature,

Preparatives of fate.

What fate is that? “It is enough,” Melville answers, “for all practical purposes, if the South have been taught by the terrors of civil war to feel that Secession, like Slavery, is against Destiny; that both now lie buried in one grave; that her fate is linked with ours; and that together we comprise the Nation.” The pre-war regimes of the Southern states put the people “in subserviency to the slave-interest,” which “cajoled” the people “into revolution” against the United States by “plausibly urg[ing] that certain inestimable rights guaranteed by the Constitution were directly menaced” by the election of Abraham Lincoln. Plausibly, but wrongly: “The most sensitive love of liberty was entrapped into the support of a war whose implied end was erecting in our advanced century an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.” “Fate” isn’t Hegel’s Absolute Spirit or Marxian dialectic; it is nature’s shutting-down of self-contradiction, its punishment of the ‘fatal flaw’ within the tragic hero, whether an individual or a people. [2] “Nature is nobody’s ally”; it wounds or kills any person or nation that violates it, impartially.

Melville reconstructs the war by following nature-fate’s successive ‘revelations,’ responses to impassioned, partisan illusions on both sides. “Prophetic, sad” General Nathaniel Lyon became the first Union general to be killed in the war, sorrowfully going in to a battle in which he was outnumbered two-to-one by the Confederate forces near Springfield, Missouri. His men inflicted heavy losses on the Rebels that day, saving Missouri from Confederate control. By contrast, McClellan lost the Battle of Bull’s Bluff, near Loudon, Virginia, in October 1861; this and other early battles saw Northern youth, in whom “Life throbbed so strong,” feeling “immortal, like the gods sublime,” crushed by their Southern counterparts, defeats triggering a Congressional inquiry into why the Union was losing the war.

At sea and on the rivers, ship-battles revealed the modern way of war, the way not of the sailing ships Moby-Dick chronicled but of the “utilitarian,” unheroic, decidedly un-aesthetic ironclad Monitor, bringing “victory without the gaud of glory” with “sheer mechanic power.” The Monitor and its replicas place war “where War belongs—among the trades and artisans,” beyond “passion”: “The anvil-din / Resounds this message from the Fates,” namely, that “warriors are now but operatives,” war itself now “less grand than Peace.” That may be a very good, sobering thing, but it will require a calmer sort of courage than hitherto required of sailors—as seen on land, also, in the Battle of Antietam, still the bloodiest day in American history.

There, McClellan’s forces repelled Lee’s at Sharpsburg, Maryland, stopping the Confederate advance into the state, but McClellan over-cautiously allowed the attackers to escape. Melville’s note to the poem is a masterpiece of ambiguous praise (“whatever just military criticism, favorable or otherwise, has at any time been made upon General McClellan’s campaigns, will stand”) and the poem itself, spoken by a former soldier under his command, itself praises a bit faintly: “Unprosperously heroical!” “You did your best, as in you lay, McClellan.” On the Confederate side, Stonewall Jackson rates compassion but not praise from a Unionist (“Justly his fame we outlaw; so / We drop a tear on the bold Virginian’s bier / Because no wreath we owe”), fuller-throated tribute from a fellow Virginian (for “his Roman heart” and “great soul”). In honoring Pickett’s charge during the Battle of Gettysburg, Melville has prepared his readers for a moral foundation for Reconstruction: On Cemetery Hill, “every bone shall rest in honor.”

The book’s polyphony serves a political purpose. Without descending into moral relativism—at Gettysburg, “Pride was repelled by sterner pride, / And Right is a strong-hold yet”—he presents the voices of citizens who must bind themselves together now, after the war. He wants Americans to listen to one another, and to respect one another, again. In the face of the “Atheist roar of riot” heard in New York from the violent draft resisters as they torched the city, in apparent confirmation of “Calvin’s creed” of original sin and of the “cynic tyrannies of honest kings,” the Draconian imposition of peace redeemed “the Town,” threatened by “The grimy slur on the Republic’s faith implied, / Which holds that Man is naturally good.” New York’s Publius (it might be noted) thought neither thing, simply, nor did the author of Moby-Dick. [2] As the narrator of the poem “Chattanooga” remarks of General Grant, “You must know your men.” Melville wants Americans to know themselves better.

The main section of Battle-Pieces contains 53 poems, the twenty-seventh or central being “The Armies of the Wilderness (1863-65).” The Civil War itself was a wilderness in which the nation lost its way. In that campaign, in Virginia, Grant and Lee played cat and mouse, and for a long time it was not known who was to prove the cat, who the mouse. Animated by “feudal fidelity” to the aristocrat-oligarchs commanding him, a Confederate captive refuses to betray his comrades by giving information to his captors. When they ask him where General Lee is, he ripostes, “In the hearts and bayonets of all yon men!” For his part, General Grant’s heart is “calm as the Cyclone’s core”—that new form of courage, seen in the new kind of sailors, too. Melville’s narrator compares the forest-fire smoke raised by rival armies at Spotsylvania to the Pillar of Fire which led the Israelites through their wilderness. This time, no God guarantees a Promised Land beyond the wilderness; American troops on both sides find not an answer but a riddle, “A riddle of death, of which the slain / Sole survivors are.” In a poem honoring a corps commander in the battle (Union man or Rebel?), he recalls the heroes of Agincourt “who shared great Harry’s mind” because nature is nature, regardless of time or place, and nature; though “oft remiss,” nature does produce eagles. Melville points his readers to nature, not to God:

Nothing can lift the heart of man

Like manhood in a fellow-man.

The thought of heaven’s great King afar

But humbles us—too weak to scan;

But manly greatness men can span,

And feel the bonds that draw.

Those natural bonds are the ones which can help to bind the Union together, Melville hopes. Its spiritual heart in “the proud City” of Charleston, South Carolina, the Confederate regime was founded on the Calhounian principle that all men are not created equal, and so cannot share a true bond, unless that bond derives from a race within the human species, not from humanity itself. Charleston falls victim to “coal-black” “Swamp Angel,” the Parrott gun used to bombard it, dooming the city “by far decree”; the symbol of black former slaves who smashed St. Michael’s church, the church of “aristocratic” Charlestonians, the church named for “the white man’s seraph,” who fled the city whose rulers worshiped at his shrine. In the Bible, Archangel Michael, leader of the Army of God, the heavenly host, escorts the faithful to Heaven at their hour of death, but the aristocrat-oligarchs of Charleston, eminences of ‘slaveocracy,’ found no refuge from the Union’s ‘angel’ of death. Mindful of the need for national reconciliation, Melville appeals to the piety of his Northern readers, not their triumphalism or their passion for revenge:

Who weeps for the woeful City

Let him weep for our guilty kind;

Who joys at her wild despairing—

Christ, the Forgiver, convert his mind.

It was, after all, Christian piety that drove the movement to abolish slavery, not only an esteem for natural right. After accomplishing that good, it must now find a way to restore civil peace. And as readers know from Moby-Dick, Christian sentiment may not suffice. In acknowledging that our “kind,” our nature, is “guilty,” Melville contends the republican faith in the goodness of human beings must be tempered by Publius’ recognition of their darker side, a recognition Publius shares with Calvin and with the Bible itself—a recognition necessary precisely for the maintenance of republican regimes which secure natural rights.

Melville shows how hard Reconstruction, regime change in the Southern states, will be, invoking fresh memories of the military prison camps maintained by both regimes (“In the Prison Pen,” “The College Colonel,” and “On the natural Monument in a field of Georgia”), the deaths of heroes like Jackson and, on the Union side, Major General James B. McPherson. Above all of these, however, stands the brilliant but devastating march to the sea led by General William Tecumseh Sherman, whom Southerners “will long remember” in hatred. Melville recognizes the military necessity of the march, the jubilation of the freed slaves who joined the march, and the political necessity of breaking the slaveholder oligarchy. He greets the later fall of Richmond with forthright approbation: “Right through might is Law,” now. But he knows that for many Southerners, President Lincoln, “by nature the most kindly of men,” authorized Sherman’s march, thereby fortifying his image as “the personification of tyrannic power”; even worse, “each Union soldier was called a Lincolnite.” But for reunion to take hold Southerners and Union soldiers must let go of their mutual hostility.

Consistent with the teaching of Moby-Dick, Melville hardly assumes that this benign outcome will occur. His “Canticle” respecting “the national exaltation of enthusiasm at the close of the war” begins by celebrating the American nation, which “moves in power, not pride,” with a “devotion” as deep “as Humanity is wide.” He goes so far as to offer “Hosanna to the Lord of hosts,” that Lord being “human kind”; this is no sequel to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The rainbow covenant “rekindled” in its brightness here is the national covenant, the Constitution, the covenant among citizens. But even as “repose is in the air,” “the foamy deep unsounded” lies beneath it, and in the deep “the Giant of the Pool / Heaves his forehead white as wool— / Toward the Iris ever climbing / From the Cataracts that call—.” The White Whale, the Ancient of Days, remains below, even as Humanity grows “Toward the fullness of her fate.”

The poem immediately following responds to the murder of Abraham Lincoln on Good Friday 1865. In a final act of treachery (“they killed him from behind”), the rebels “killed him in his prime/ Of clemency and calm— / When with yearning he was filled / To redeem the evil-willed, / And, though conqueror, be kind.” The People, ever prone to passion, now will “bare the iron hand,” once they are done mourning. At the time, Melville explains in a note, Vice President Andrew Johnson was expected to be harsher with the South than Lincoln would have been, although “happily for the country,” those expectations “have not been verified.” The Congressional Republicans would be a different matter, the real “Avenger” of the “Forgiver,” the agent of popular rage. Anticipating this, Melville writes “a plea against the vindictive cry raised by civilians shortly after the surrender at Appomattox.” Melville asks his readers to understand “rebel color-bearers” at Shiloh as “martyrs for the Wrong” but martyrs still: “Perish their Cause! but mark the men.” And “think how Grant met Lee”—with dignified forbearance, even as he required unconditional surrender. The rainbow of the renewed covenant will last only if Nature disbands another light, the Aurora-Borealis, the “Northern lights,” symbolizing the Union armies, whose “steely play” still flashes at the end of the dark night of civil war. God (nature, fate) commanded both the war and its end, but it will be up to Americans, and especially citizens of the victorious North, to renew the work of self-government, again, at dawn.

Melville continues to identify obstacles to this work. A Rebel soldier, released from prison, finds himself in New York City—or as he regards it, the “Nineveh of the North”—awaiting his return home. “But home he shall never see, / Even if he should stand upon the spot,” as it is “gone,” destroyed by the Union troops. And although the rebellion has failed, rebelliousness remains; Melville can only hope that guns buried near sacked Southern cities, intended for use upon return, will remain in their graves. But the longest poem of the collection, “The Scout Toward Aldie,” which Melville places apart from the main body of his book, hints at a more sinister possible issuance.

In spring 1864 Melville and his brother Allan visited their cousin Henry Gansevoort at his army camp in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Melville went on a three-day sortie or “scout” in search of the Confederate lawyer-turned-guerrilla leader John Mosby. With a verse recalling Moby-Dick—”As glides in seas the shark, / Rides Mosby through green dark”—Melville begins to convey the pervasive menace of modern guerrilla warfare. Mosby’s Rangers struck, retreated, blending back into their farms and villages, seldom betrayed by their families and neighbors. The green dark of forests and swamps would become much too familiar to American soldiers fighting in the wars of the next century. “The Grey Ghost” would survive the war; during it, “All spake of him, but few had seen / Except the maimed ones or the low; / Yet rumor made him every thing— / A farmer—woodman—refugee— / The man who crossed the field but now; / A spell about his life did cling.” Although Mosby himself never continued his shark-attacks after the surrender, his spirit haunted the aftermath, as the great Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest turned the guerrilla warriors of the newly-formed Ku Klux Klan on civilian freedmen, terrorizing many into submission and frustrating Reconstruction. In a poetic meditation on a painted portrait of a former slave by E. Vedder, Melville predicts that only “her children’s children” will know “the good withheld from her.” The bitterness of ex-Confederates, the likelihood of continued military resistance in the form of what later generations would call asymmetrical warfare, and the scars of slavery on the freedmen all augur poorly for reunion. As in Moby-Dick, so in America:

So, then, Solidity’s a crust—

The core of fire below;

All may go well for many a year,

But who can think without a fear

Of horrors that happen so?

And even if the Northern men reach out the hand of friendship in magnanimity, the only answering hand in the South may now be dead.

Melville concludes the main section of his book with his own “Gettysburg Address.” In his poem “America,” he likens the American flag to Berenice’s Hair—the constellation named for the ancient Egyptian queen who sacrificed her hair as a votive offering, hoping that her husband, Ptolemy III, would return safely from his campaign in Syria. The American flag flew over a land that “reposed in peace,” a peace rent by the lightning of war. Berenice/America fell asleep during that war, dreaming not in hope, as the Founders had, but in terror:

A silent vision unavowed,

Revealing earth’s foundation bare,

And Gorgon in her hidden place.

It was a thing of fear to see

So foul a dream upon so fair a face,

And the dreamer lying in that starry shroud.

This means that America, all Americans, have seen what Pip saw, afloat and abandoned at sea. Unlike Pip, however, the people have restored their reason, put aside the passions that nearly destroyed their country. Having seen the green dark where the shark-profile of the Grey Ghost glides after its prey, the undulating snake-hair of Gorgon, Americans now know the darker dimensions of nature. Awakening, America recovers, gazing to heaven with “a clear calm look” in pain, “but such as purifies from stain,” and “with hope grown wise.” With “law on her brow and empire in her eyes”—the empire of liberty, won in the first half of the century only to be nearly lost in the war—America now stands high, “on the crag,” like an eagle. This recalls the imagery of an earlier, seemingly anomalous poem, “The Eagle of the Blue.” In it, Melville recalled a live eagle that some of the Union regiments brought to battle with them, whose “eager calm of gaze intent” foresaw victory. “The very rebel looks and thrills” at the eagle, which survived the war. “Well may we think his years are charmed.” Charmed, because the eagle’s country has worked with nature, not against it, as tyrant Ahab did not and as Ishmael learned to do, both in quest of a sight of the Whale, but only one seeing how to live in a cosmos with it. [3]

Malice toward none, charity toward all: In Melville’s account, Robert E. Lee exhibited the one, hoped for the other. Unlike Mosby, the lawyer who operated outside the law, Lee was a warrior who wished to reestablish law. In testifying before Congress in April 1866, “no word he breathe[d] of vain lament;” he accepted the verdict of fate or nature and “acquiesce[d] in asserted laws.” “Who looks at Lee must think of Washington,” that other great secessionist general, if in a far better ‘Cause.’ “Push not your triumph,” he tells the Congressmen; “do not urge submissiveness beyond the verge.” “To elect magnanimity is wise,” and the “fruit” of victory, considered with greatness of soul, is “re-established law.” This is so, because law, to be just, requires recognition of nature, which in human beings finds its ground in love of its own, in home and family, which most Southerners thought of themselves as defending in the war. “Was this the unforgivable sin? / These noble spirits are yet yours to win.” Do not act like Europeans, with their monarchic regimes; “avoid the tyranny you reprobate.”

Which is it, though? Given that “Secession, like Slavery,” is contra natura, “against Destiny,” against the lessons Moby-Dick teaches with words and the Civil War taught in harsh deeds, what then? The dead hand of the South grasped in vain by the magnanimous North? The guerrilla-terrorism of Forrest? Or the noble Southerners who will reunite if only Northerners will understand them? Melville hopes it is the latter, offering “A Meditation attributed to a Northerner after attending the last of two Funerals from the same Homestead”—a family that lost two sons, one a Confederate, the other a Union man. The Northerner likes Christianity no more than Melville does, scoring “the sanctioned sin of blood, / And Christian wars of natural brotherhood.” Against this, he acknowledges, as Ishmael would, “a darker side” to nature but also “Nature’s charity,” which rejects both the rebelliousness of the slaveholding South and the Pharisee self-righteousness of the abolitionist North. After all, Melville later writes in his own voice, the North might have seceded had the South been the stronger. “By how much more they boldly warred: / By so much more is mercy due.” Or, as Melville puts it in his prose Supplement to the book, “Noble was the gesture into which patriotic passion surprised the people in a utilitarian time and country; yet the glory of the war falls short of its pathos—a pathos which now at last ought to disarm all animosity.” “Benevolence and policy—Christianity and Machiavelli—dissuade from penal severities toward the subdued.”

What of the freedmen? They deserve “the sympathies of every humane mind” in “their infant pupilage in freedom,” which for now will mean “paternal guardianship” by the Reconstruction government. But care for the former slaves must not override “kindliness to communities who stand nearer to us in nature.” By “nature” Melville may well mean ‘racial’ nature (“our white countrymen”); he might also mean nature in terms of the full humanity of readiness for civil self-government. “For the future of the freed slaves we may well be concerned; but the future of the whole country, involving the future of the blacks, urges a paramount claim upon our anxiety.” Southern whites are now surrounded by “millions of ignorant manumitted slaves,” some of whom “now claim the suffrage.” Are the ex-slaves ready for citizenship, or has slavery left too deep a mark on this generation of African-Americans? As Lincoln had argued before the war, the preservation of the Union is paramount to the settlement of the ‘race question.’ “Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks, our fellow-men…. Something may well be left to the graduated care of future legislation, and to heaven.” Since “our institutions have a potent digestion,” the American regime “may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.” Because the North won, Northerners are the ones who must show “forbearance.”

It has proven easy to attack Melville’s appeal to ‘white’ racial affinities, but to do so ignores his desperation—seeing, as he does, with Lincoln (and the Founders), the importance of political union to the continued viability of republican self-government in the service of natural rights for anyone, of any ‘race,’ not only in the nineteenth century but in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well. The more urgent problem for Melville and other Americans of his generation was how to locate the Aristotelian ‘mean’ or ‘middle’ as reunion occurred. General Lee’s speech to Congress is eloquent, but it is Melville’s speech put in the mouth of Lee, not Lee’s speech on that day. And even in Melville’s poem, Lee speaks to Northern Republicans, not to ‘his own’ people. There was no Southern Grant, much less a Southern Lincoln—or if there was, he perished in the war, an outstretched hand to be clasped only in death.

Or was there a Southern Lincoln, who could not find a political place to stand in the postwar South? As for Lincoln himself, not only was he murdered, but he was not all mercy, even in victory. Christian charity or agape has its stern side, and Lincoln didn’t intend to forgive all Southerners. He wanted to send the leaders of secessionism into exile, even as the American Tories had been driven out, into Canada and elsewhere in the British Empire, after the Revolutionary War. Gradualism, yes: at the level of civil society, unjust prejudice can only die a slow death. But on the level of those potently digestive ruling institutions, the form or framework of the antebellum Southern state regimes, the aristocracy-oligarchy needed to go. On that, Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans were right, although in practice they failed, in part because they were insufficiently Lincolnian, unwilling or unable to exile the oligarchs. The result of a policy halfway between regime change and amelioration was a century of racial apartheid from which the country has yet fully to recover. Had the oligarchs been exiled, could the voice of the minority Southern Whigs have been raised? Could there have been a Lincoln among them? It seems unlikely but unknowable. Melville tells his readers to “revere that sacred uncertainty which forever impends over men and nations.” He may not have revered it, exactly, in the privacy of his own mind, nor considered it sacred, but he did respect it as more powerful than man-made ‘idealisms.’

There was no Southern Melville, either, at least not until Faulkner. In Melville’s time, the South had its great comic counterpart to the tragedian of the North. Mark Twain attempted to teach in comedy some of what Melville taught in tragedy. Comedy works best in civil society, and thus gradually. For more immediate political purposes, Melville could never address the South the way he could address the North, but Southerners too needed his lesson in moderation, as the war proved an imprecise teacher.

 

Notes

1. Dowling astutely calls attention to Brown’s Southern counterpart, Edmund Ruffin, who (Melville remarks in his supplementary essay) fired the first shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter and committed suicide in Richmond at the end of the war. Both North and South had their ‘Ahab.’ But only one had its Lincoln, and he would be murdered by a Southern Fedallah. See Dowling, “Melville’s Quarrel with Poetry.” In the Cox and Dowling edition of Battle-Pieces, cited above, p.p. 345-346.
2. Garner suggests that the narrator of the poem on the riots is a self-conceived Anglo-American ‘aristocrat,’ sniffing at the unruly (and largely Irish) polloi. This comports with his claim that Melville is a Northern Democrat who prefers McClellan to Lincoln. The argument here is that Melville’s political thought isn’t that easy to simplify.
3. The last two lines of “The Eagle of the Blue” echo rhythmically the last lines of Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott.” On her island in a river near Camelot, the Lady is cursed; to occupy her time she weaves her “charmed web,” but she may not look at reality directly, viewing passersby on the road to Camelot through a mirror and depicting them in her tapestries. “Sick of shadows,” when she sees “bold Sir Lancelot,” his armor shining, singing, she turns away from the mirror and the loom to see him directly. The mirror cracks, “The curse is come upon me”; she sets out for Camelot on a boat, “chanting her deathsong.” When her boat arrives, she is dead. Lancelot sees her, saying, “God in His mercy grant her grace, / The Lady of Shalott.” The contrast with the Union army’s eagle could not be more striking. Far from an artist who cannot face reality without bringing down destruction to itself, the Eagle of the Blue “exulteth in the war” with a “pride of quenchless strength.” “Though scarred in many a furious fray, / No deadly hurt he knew; / Well may we think his years are charmed— / The Eagle of the Blue.” The eagle faces reality and survives; far from cursed, it, not the product of some artistry, is charmed. As a poet Melville insists on looking at reality, requires that his readers look at it, celebrates the symbol of the Union army that did. For Melville, the true weaver is nature/fate, and human beings and their regimes survive only if they know how to live within its tapestry as it binds them, with moderation, good judgment, and sympathy for their fellows, all of whom live and die within those conditions.
4. On this point, see Catherine Zuckert: Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form (Savage, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1990), 99-100.

 

 

 

Charles Olson: Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1947.

 

Burly, blunt Charles Olson emerged as an important voice among literary modernists in the years following the Second World War, as a critic, a teacher, and above all a poet following and extending trails blazed by Ezra Pound. As befits the future author of a poem titled Maximus, he loved Melville and especially Moby-Dick, which he took as the best expression of what he regarded as the true Melville, unfettered by social and especially religious constraints. Olson wrote his Master’s thesis on Moby-Dick before the war, publishing this book a couple of years after it. Far from an academic exercise, Call Me Ishmael follows in prose the principle Pound required of poetry: CONDENSARE. He writes after doing a lot of serious scholarly work on Melville, but with no scholarly ‘apparatus’ and absolutely no academic longueurs. His book has remained a favorite among scholars of American literature; its heart, a discussion of the parallels between Moby-Dick and Shakespeare’s tragedies, shows a fine poet writing on two great poets, one a prose poet. When he writes as a poet, as he mostly does, Olson is unsurpassed. Unfortunately, he was also an ‘intellectual’ who cut his ideological teeth in the 1930s, with Marxist and Nietzschean inclinations that prove a mixed blessing.

Olson divides his book into five parts. He begins with the material aspects of American life seen in the man and his book, followed by sections titled “Shakespeare,” “Moses,” “Christ,” and “Noah.” The first section begins with geography, which he takes to be “at bottom” of or fundamental to America. Space is “the central fact to man born in America,” a large territory split by a big river and lashed by harsh weather. “Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive,” with Melville the rider, Poe the man of the city. “They are the alternatives.” To master this space, Americans partake not so much of democracy as of “the machine,” “the only master of space the average person ever knows.” He regards “the will to overwhelm nature” and not “the will to be free” as the underlying driver of Americans; by freedom he means political freedom, which he incautiously associates with democracy (as Melville does not). The Whale is “all space concentrated,” at least in the mind of tyrannical Ahab, who would conquer the Whale and assume “lordship over nature.” Hence his weakness for magic, the magi-ism of Persian Fedallah. As for Melville, he was a man of the sea, from which human life (Olson assumes) along with all land life, emerged. This made Melville a man of origins, with “Noah and Moses contemporary to him,” not long-dead figures from an old book. “Melville went to space”—to the greater space, the sea beyond the American continent—”to probe and find man.” Americans too are ‘originals,’ “the last ‘first’ people,” a nation of immigrants bent on using and misusing “our land, ourselves.” “I am willing to ride Melville’s image of man, whale and ocean to find in him prophecies, lessons he himself would not have spelled out,” the hundred years since Melville’s death having “give[n] us an advantage” in increased freedom of speech and particularly (in Olson’s mind) in freedom from the censures of the religious, of which Melville needed to be mindful. Marx, Nietzsche.

Among the ‘big’ writers on America, the un-Poe-etic ones, Whitman stands as Melville’s only rival. “Melville is the truer man,” having “lived intensely his people’s wrong, their guilt” while Whitman “gave us hope,” appealed too much to our optimism, marketing himself better without telling us the truth. Melville’s big book “is more accurate” than Whitman’s “because it is America, all of her space, the malice, the root.” That original malice consisted of capitalism and Christianity, Olson claims, and Melville himself eventually “got all balled up with Christ”—a point to which he will return. He gives a good account of sperm-whaling and its importance in the American economy of the mid-nineteenth century, an industry that was (he shouts) “BRAND NEW,” and American “FIRST.” “The Yankees had discovered that the Sperm whale had the finest oil and brought the biggest price,” and “they went after it,” leading the way in “making the Pacific the American lake [it is] now” and building many of America’s “earliest industrial fortunes.” Consistent with his Marxism, Olson describes the whaling economy as initially a “collective, communal affair”—an example of Marx’s ‘primitive communism’—controlled by “WORKERS,” but now controlled by “the exploiters.” “THE TRICK—then as now” was to “reduce labor costs lower than worker’s efficiency,” in what non-Marxists might regard as an indispensable move to enable any enterprise, whether collectively or privately owned, to provide a livelihood for those who work in it, and for investment in it. Olson claims that American politics developed the same way, with the little people losing control to the grandees after 1777 or so, “until Jefferson gave them another chance”—Charles Beard’s claim. Olson also complains that “Melville didn’t put it all on the surface of Moby-Dick,” when it came to the American economy, analyzing and describing the “technic” of whaling—hunting, processing, storing the refined product—while downplaying the “economics,” the industry’s capitalist side. But in fact Melville begins with capitalism, his somewhat comical account of Ishmael’s salary negotiations with the ship owners. It may have been Melville’s refusal to take capitalists and capitalism very seriously that stuck in Olson’s craw.

Olson’s Marxian-materialist introduction to Melville makes economics fundamental to understanding the American regime. As he turns to Shakespeare, one hopes for the political dimension of Melville’s thought. Olson does not entirely disappoint this hope, although his poet’s eye focuses more on the moral and artistic connections between Melville and Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare, Melville “read to write,” his books “batten[ing] on other men’s books.” He read Shakespeare, beginning in February 1849, only a year before he began work on Moby-Dick. Olson really did his own book-battening, here, looking at Melville’s marginal annotations to show the novelist’s intentions respecting Ahab, Pip, and Ishmael. He also sees that Melville sees that Shakespeare wrote carefully, regretting that necessity: “I would to God Shakespeare had lived later,” Melville wrote, “and promenaded on Broadway” because “the muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare’s free articulations.” Although “in this intolerant universe,” no one can be “a frank man to the uttermost,” “the Declaration of Independence made a difference.” “In this world of lies,” Melville continued, “Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling to Truth.” Olson earns his keep by digging out that comment, alone. And he adds to it, noticing that Melville check-marked a line in Antony and Cleopatra, spoken by Enobarbus: “That truth should be silent I had almost forgot.”

There is a reason for this caution in truth-telling, beyond any legal censorship. “Those occasional flashings-forth of truth”—hints, intuitions, “short, quick probings at the very axis of reality,” spoken “craftily,” “insinuate[d],” that “make Shakespeare, Shakespeare”—bespeak the thoughts concerning what Melville in Moby-Dick  calls “the invisible spheres [that] were formed in fright.” As Olson puts it, these are thoughts of the “dark men” in Shakespeare, men of “madness, villainy, and evil… called up out of the plays as though Melville’s pencil were a wand of black magic.” Shakespeare and Melville alike especially find evil in betrayal, and most of all in “disillusion through friendship and its falling off,” including “treacheries within the councils of the state” and within the family, as in Lear. Not only King Lear, but Prince Hamlet, tyrant Richard, Timon of Athens, all see play out permutations of treachery. (“Timon is mocked with glory, as his faithful Steward says, lies, as Melville notes, but in a dream of friendship.” And this, “the Stranger” in the play remarks, “is the world’s soul.”) But it is Lear that Olson finds “pervasive” in Moby-Dick: “the frantic king tears off the mask, and speaks the same madness of vital truth,” seen in “the lusty stealth of nature” Edmund acts out, even as he also displays the virtue of courage and the “power of attracting love”; the baser natures of daughters Goneril and Regan; the “weak goodness” of Albany (anticipating Starbuck); and the sufferers, not only Lear but Edgar and Gloucester. Lear can achieve “spiritual insight” only after gouging out his own eyes, a “crucifixion” “not of the limbs on a cross-beam, but of… the eyes of pride too sharp for feeling.” “What moves Melville is the stricken goodness” of these men, “who in suffering feel and thus probe more closely to the truth. Melville is to put Ahab through this humbling.” In Melville, crucifixion comes with insight but no salvation: “Both Christ and Holy Ghost are absent.” Here tragedy begins, and ends.

If Lear is no Christ, Ahab is no Lear. The world Ahab inhabits, first of all in his own mind, is the world of Macbeth, although Olson rightly distinguishes between the imagined world of Ahab, which drives the action, from the “universe” of the novel, which “contains more, something different,” namely the limits of evil seen in good or “Theurgic” magic, which “seeks converse with the Intelligence, Power, the Angel” and not domination of that trinity. “Right reason” or intuitive insight—noēsis in Plato, “the highest range of the intelligence in Kant and Coleridge, agapic love (or, more accurately, its result) in Christian terms—contrasts with black magic, the magic of domination, tyranny. “In the Ahab-world there is no place” for theurgy; his compact with Fedallah is “Goetic”/black magic. Olson finds theurgic wisdom in the madness of Pip, a madness that is “heaven’s sense,” and which almost but not quite ‘converts’ Ahab. Olson finds its sane, “Right Reason” version in Bulkington and Ishmael. As the chorus in the tragedy (and sailing in but also outside of its action), Ishmael tells the story, the tragedy, of all the others, “thus creat[ing] the Moby-Dick universe in which the Ahab-world is, by the necessity of life—or the Declaration of Independence—included.” One may surely quibble with Olson’s conflation of the erotic love of wisdom seen in Plato with the agapic love of Logos (ultimately a Person) in the New Testament, and with “Right Reason” in either Kant or the Romantics, while appreciating Olson’s insight into Melville’s insight. “The lovely association of Ahab and Pip is like the relations of Lear to both the Fool and Edgar. What the King learns of their suffering through companionship with them in storm helps him to shed his pride,” although Olson makes the parallel nearer than Melville does.

Here Olson brings politics in. “Melville was no naïve democrat.” The ‘great man’ he envisioned comes close to the tyrants “we have faced in the 20th century.” When it comes to tragedy, the modern state differs from the aristocratic, feudal ‘state’ in being prosaic, without knights in shining armor, a political condition lending itself to the new literary genre, the novel, no longer a matter for epic poetry. But when it comes to the possibility for tragedy the modern state only seems to differ from the feudal state. “In the old days of the Mediterranean and Europe it was the flaw of a king which brought tragedy to men”; today, the modern state with its putatively democratic regime has “not rid itself of overlords” because “the common man, however free, leans on a leader.” That leader, “however dedicated, leans on a straw,” or maybe two straws: the straw of fickle public opinion and the straw of his own character. Both may betray him at any time. The purpose of that state, and of its leader, “lordship over nature,” betrays the hubris of the human soul as surely as Lear’s wounded vanity, but on a vaster scale because in modernity the people themselves, the crew of the Pequod, become inflamed by the tyrant’s passion. But as Enobarbus says,

When valour preys on reason

It eats the sword it fights on.

Olson titles his central section “Moses.” Melville “could face up to Moses” because he “was never satisfied” with God of the Bible, New Testament or Old. “His dream was Daniel’s: the Ancient of Days, garment white as snow, hair like the pure wool,” glimpsed in the whiteness of the Whale and of its skeleton as seen on a tropical island. “He was not weakened by any new testament world” but declared himself “the rival of earth, air, fire, and water.” Like “another Moses Melville wrote in Moby-Dick the Book of the Law of the Blood.” To this it must be replied that the Law of the Blood sounds more like the philosophies of vitalism of which Nietzsche was the most discerning and subtle proponent. It must also be said that in this Nietzsche reverses Christianity, which also propounds a law of the blood, the Savior’s sacrificial blood. Melville takes a different stance, worshipping no god at all but instead proposing a tragic humanism. Not for him the will to power, however refined. Yes, we are all cannibals but, like Queequeg, that is not all we are.

Olson turns from Moses to his main target, Christ. He accuses Melville of having “missed his own truth” by turning half-heartedly (as Olson’s contemporary Existentialists would say, ‘inauthentically’) to Christianity in a trip to the Holy Land in 1856. Although in his first stop on the way there, the “polyglot city” of Constantinople, he ranged wildly and wrote extravagantly, “his body alive as it has not been since he swung with [his shipmate] Jack Chase in maintops above the Pacific,” this vitalism faded upon his arrival in Egypt, within whose pyramids “the idea of Jehovah was born” in “a terrible mixture of the cunning and the awful.” “Moses was learned in all the lore of the Egyptians,” going on to proclaim the laws of the Bible. At Jerusalem and with Christ, Melville “lost all he had gained,” all the power that made Moby-Dick. He became “prey to Christ” in “barrenness of Judea.” “It was death, and lack of love, that let him” become “Christ’s victim.” “He denied himself in Christianity,” the religion of the salvation of the individual, “the personal soul.” Vitalism, the call to intensity of life here and now, needs death to concentrate human attention on the here-and-now, but also on the life of the community, which survives the individual. A religion that preaches the eternity of the individual soul substitutes individuality for community, love of this world for hatred of it. In Olson, the marriage of class-conscious Marx and will-to-power Nietzsche generates communalist vitalism. In this he anticipates postmodernism and, as teacher of poets and of those who teach poetry, may have helped to generate its rise.

He titles his concluding chapter “Noah,” evoking the link between the world where the chaos-cosmos of water retook the dry land, then withdrew, some, to enable men to re-inhabit that land. At what Olson takes to be Melville’s best, Melville too was a man who rode the biggest ocean available to postdiluvian man, the Pacific. The Pacific meant three things to Melville: “an experience of SPACE, most Americans are only now entering on, 100 years after Melville; “a comprehension of PAST,” particularly of origins; and “a confirmation of the FUTURE,” in which the Pacific, not the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, would become the center of world commerce and politics. All of this weaves into America as Olson conceives it. If America (and, writing in 1947, he adds Russia) consists first of all of space, and if Russia, larger than America, deserves to be called the “HEARTLAND,” then the Pacific is “twin and rival” of Russia. As for America, the Pacific is “the Plains repeated, a 20th century Great West.” “Heartland” Russia, it might further be observed, then featured a regime animated by the Marxism Olson espoused, but it was America that enjoyed easier access to the “Heart Sea,” a geopolitical advantage Russia would prove unable to neutralize, especially when another rather large place, China, broke its alliance with her.

Respecting the past, “the Pacific was ‘father'” to Melville, older than America, Asia, and Abraham, where abandoned Pip saw the “wondrous depths where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes.” After citing this passage from Moby-Dick Olson cites one from Mardi: “King Noah fathered us all!” Noah, the man of the oceans, before Abraham, Asia, and America, prefigured Melville, the latest voyager on the Flood; after that voyage, “Melville took his dead to be all the fathers and sons of man.” America, originally the land of natural right, according to the Founders and Lincoln, must now begin to understand what Olson and Melville take to be real nature, the nature that borders its western coast.

As a confirmation of the future, the Pacific “opens the NEW HISTORY.” “America completes her West only on the coast of Asia,” in the opposite direction from the coast of the Mediterranean, the land of the Bible. Homer’s sea-voyaging Ulysses “already push[ed] against the limits” of the Mediterranean, seeking a way out” of the circular River Ocean. “Homer gave his hero the central quality of the men to come: search, the individual responsible to himself,” and not so much to the gods of Olympus or the God of the Bible—beyond Athens and Jerusalem. Ahab’s odyssey was “the third and final” one, after those of Homer’s Ulysses and Dante’s. And that means that Ahab marks “the END of individual responsible only to himself,” the final shipwreck of Western Man, who, having conquered the world, will be replaced by—what else can it be?—something like a World Man. Marx and Nietzsche, synthesized.

It hasn’t turned out that way. So far, at least, World Man has proved to be Davos Man—world-oligarch, neither Communist Man nor Superman. Melville never made Olson’s mistake, understanding that human nature remains a bit snaky. Melville’s Christ is no god, but he remains the Man of Sorrows, and Melville would be his latest prophet.

America, take note. Olson never mentions Melville’s civil war poems. There his readers see how Melville applied the teachings on nature and human nature elaborated in Moby-Dick to an actual political crisis in his own country.