An Arch Between Two Lives: Melville and the Mediterranean, 1856-57

ROBERT MILDER An Arch Between Two Lives: Melville and the Mediterranean, 1856-57 The mediterranean fascinated Melville as early as 1849, when, having barely set foot in England on a journey nominally to arrange for the English publication of White-Jacket, he sketched a plan for traveling across Europe to the Levant. "I am full (just now) of this glorious Eastern jaunt. Think of it! — Jerusalem & the Pyramids — Constantinople, the Egean, & old Athens!" (Journals 7). Above all, Melville hoped to see Rome. A light purse and "the cursed state of the copyright matter" (20) put an end to his daydream, and when he returned to England en route to the Holy Land seven years and five books later he was an altered man. Hawthorne, whom he visited in Liverpool, found him "much overshadowed since I saw him last" (English 170) as well he might be, having lost his novelistic audience in Pierre and written himself into a labyrinth of skepticism in The Confidence-Man. The trip to Europe and the mid-East was the gift of his father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, prompted in large part by family concern over physical and psychological ailments that seemed to threaten outright collapse. Hawthorne noted that Melville journeyed light, "taking only a carpet-bag to hold all his travelling-gear" (English 170). So Melville had figuratively said years earlier when he described to Hawthorne unencumbered spiritual travelers who "cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag, — that is to say, the Ego" (Correspondence 186). Melville liked to imagine himself a similarly free sensibility responding to the impressions of time and place, as he described his Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 4, Winter 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-161o 22 Robert Milder proposed "saturation . . . with the atmosphere of Jerusalem" (Journals 86). But Melville in 1856-57 was hardly a tabula rasa. He was laden with the baggage of an irresolvable spiritual crisis and of a quarrel with his American audience, and therefore with America itself, which had led him to question man and the course of history as for years he had been questioning God. He also carried with him patterns of thought and imagination, clusters of feeling, and tangles ofpsychic need, as well as the attitudes and images he had consciously inscribed in his writing. Through his symbolism ofpyramids, hieroglyphics, Sphinxes, and mummies , he had invented in Moby-Dick and Pierre a literary Egypt that would mediate his perception of the actual Egypt, just as his immersion in the Old Testament would structure his response to the landscape of Judea as it seemed to image the face of God. In this respect Dorothée Metlitsky Finkelstein has reason to call Melville's travels "an end, not a beginning" (3). "In spite of the restoring effect on his health," Finkelstein argues, "the journey to the Mediterranean did not influence Melville's idea of man and God" (3). Of God, no, beyond making more palpable to the senses and the imagination what he already believed with the intellect; of man, yes, so far as the East presented him with a spectacle ofhumanity in the mass he had not witnessed either in America or in Europe. But the great influence of Melville's travels was upon his idea of history and America's place in history, and consequently upon his stance as a writer as he struggled to redefine his subject matter and his relationship to a prospective audience . Beyond "furnish[ing] him with probably the most important pool of experiences for his later career," as William H. Shurr has said (168), the Orient dis-oriented Melville, and then, with time, helped re-orient him in a way that dissolved his New World provincialism and progressively deepened his vision as the lessons of the East joined with his readings of the 1860s and '70s to recontextualize the problem ofhuman destiny. Because 1856-57 were years of uncertainty and transition for Melville —an interregnum—one should not expect a monolinear argument in any discussion of them. My intention in this essay is to travel with Melville and mark this uncertainty and transition but with a foreknowledge of how his perceptions...