Melville's Good-Bye: "Daniel Orme"

MELVILLE'S GOOD-BYE: "DANIEL ORME" Philip Young* "Your old tars are all Daniels." Mardi (1849) "Ormer is a contraction of Oreille de Mer. [The fish] clingeth to the Rock with the Back, and the Shell covers the Belly." Michael Donovan, Domestic Economy (1830) The story survives in Herman Melville's hand. Thirty-three years after he died in New York, "Daniel Orme" was published in London. It had been found in Wellesley Farms, Massachusetts in 1919, the centenary of the author's birth, by Raymond Weaver. There it rested in a folder along with Billy Budd, unfinished, in a box of manuscripts recently given the writer's first grandchild, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, by her mother. It is the last piece of writing Melville lived to complete. Weaver added a mistaken parenthesis to the title (Omitted from Billy Budd), and without comment published the tale in his edition ofVolume 13 ofMelville's Works (London: Constable, 1924).1 Chief responsibility for its neglect belongs to academics. A new Reader's Guide to the Short Stories ofHerman Melville provides a substantial "compendium of historical and critical data for each of Melville's sixteen short stories,"2 the tour having bypassed "Orme." Twice as big, there is now a Companion to Melville Studies, which appears to ignore nothing but it.3 Since others may be unfamiliar with the text, here is a short account. Meeting with an uncommunicative old sailor in his last refuge, Melville likens to coming across a meteoric stone in a field: "There it lies ... .In what imaginable sphere did it get that strange, igneous look?" (p. 117). The sailor got it from a cartridge explosion that "peppered all below the eyes with dense dottings of black blue" (p. 118), not the first such accident in Melville. This was an old man-of-war's man whom the author calls Daniel Orme, quickly adding that "a sailor's name as it appears on a crew's list is not always his real name" (p. 117). Turned seventy, Orme has slipped into moorings ashore, an undescribed home for retired seamen. He is moody, unsociable, and given to muttering. Sometimes he would "start, and with a look or gesture so uncheerfully peculiar that the Calvinist *Philip Young is Evan Pugh Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and one of the leading scholars of American literature. Among his many books are Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, Three Bags Full: Essays in American Fiction, Revolutionary Ladies, and Hawthorne's Secret: An Un-ToId Tale. He is currently working on a book on Herman Melville. 2 Philip Young imagination of a certain frigate's chaplain construed it into remorseful condemnation of some dark deed in the past" (p. 118). He is striking in appearance, too. Large, strong features cast as in iron, he is "bowed somewhat in the shoulders . . . hands heavy and hard; short nails like withered horn. A powerful head, and shaggy. An iron-gray beard broad as a commodore's pennant" (p. 119). He was a Great Grizzly awaiting the last hour, grim in his den. But he had a peculiar habit. When thinking himself alone he rolled aside the bosom of his Guernsey frock and steadfastly contemplated something on his body. Curious fellows drugged his tea at supper. Next morning an old-clothes man reported what he found: A crucifix in indigo and vermillion tattoed on the chest and on the side of the heart. Slanting across the crucifix and paling the pigment there ran a whitish scar . . . such as might ensue from the slash of a cutlass (p. 120). Gossips told the landlady that Orme was "a sort of man forbid" (p. 120), but she ignored them and he stayed on. His looks said hands off. Yet, let alone, he began to mellow into a sort of "animal decay" (p. 121) that, Melville says, hazes the memory, softens the heart, and perhaps lulls the conscience. On a fine Easter day he was discovered alone and dead "on a height overlooking the seaward sweep of the great haven to whose shore ... he had moored" (p. 121). It was a terrace built for war, neglected in peace, a sanctuary in solitude. An "obsolete...