Cannibal Old Me

Spoken Sources in Melville's Early Works

Mary K. Bercaw Edwards

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612775869
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

An examination of Melville's "borrowing"

"Mary Bercaw Edwards has researched the sources very thoroughly, going well beyond the previously published source studies. The result is a sound historical account of the 'talk' Melville encountered in the 1840s, and in emphasizing the oral sources of Melville's discourses, Edwards provides an original contribution to source studies of Melville. She presents her research interestingly as well, in clear, readable prose. Her scholarship will certainly be of interest to Melville scholars, but it will also engage the attention of anyone interested in American culture and popular culture of the period." —John Samson, associate professor of English, Texas Tech University

At the age of twenty-one, Herman Melville signed on the whaleship Acushnet as a common seaman and sailed from Massachusetts to the South Pacific. Upon reaching Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, he deserted and spent a month ashore on this reputed "cannibal island." He departed as crew of another whaleship but was put ashore in the heavily missionized Tahitian islands after participating in a bloodless mutiny. Eventually making his way to Hawaii, he joined the crew of the American frigate United States and finally reached Boston in October 1844 after four years at sea.

By the time he sat down to write his first book, Melville had been recounting tales of these experiences orally for four years. The spoken elements of the overlapping discourses involving sailors, cannibals, and missionaries are essential to his first six books. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards investigates the interplay between spoken sources and written narratives. She closely examines how Melville altered original stories, and she questions his truthfulness about his experiences. Bercaw Edwards also explores the synergistic blend of the oral and written worlds of seafaring and the South Pacific and provides an analysis of Melville's development as a writer. It is a study of the aesthetic, ethical, linguistic, and cultural implications of Melville's borrowing.

Cannibal Old Me is an excellent contribution to Melville scholarship, challenging long-held assumptions regarding his early works. Scholars as well as students will welcome it as an indispensable addition to the study of nineteenth-century literature and maritime history.

CHAPTER 1

“Where the Wild Things Are”

Questioning Typee

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

—Vladimir Nabokov

But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!”

—Maurice Sendak

THAT Herman Melville spent at least four weeks living among the inhabitants of the Taipi valley on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands has never been questioned. Although scholars have long dismissed Melville’s elaborations and fictional extension of time in the valley, no biographer—not even Andrew Delbanco, Hershel Parker, or Laurie Robertson-Lorant—has doubted the veracity of the mere fact.¹ Melville presented his time in the valley of the Taipi as the factual basis for his first work, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846). That portrayal has long been accepted as truth. Nonetheless, an examination of biographical, geographical, historical, and textual evidence suggests at least the possibility that Melville may never have strayed any farther from the beach than necessary to avoid capture and that his description of himself as the “man who lived among the cannibals” is a fiction.² I will argue that such a consideration sheds light on our understanding of Melville as a writer.

Questions concerning Melville’s route to the Taipi valley have come to the forefront with paired essays by anthropologist Robert C. Suggs and Melville scholar John Bryant in the 2005 issue of ESQ, to be discussed below. Bryant contends, “Melville may have been a thief, but he was no liar.”³ The relevant question is not whether Melville was either a thief or a liar, but whether he commenced his writing career as a creative artist or a journalist. His concern was always first and foremost his art. That he compromised to the extent of presenting Typee as a travelogue in order to have the book accepted by a publisher of such material in a time when he was first attempting to make a living from his writing says nothing about the reliability of any element of the text as an account of his own personal experience.

There are a few incontrovertible facts and some clearly demonstrable evidence-based conclusions concerning Melville’s sojourn on Nuku Hiva. It is a happy coincidence that Max Radiguet, Secretary to Rear Admiral Abel Aubert Dupetit-Thouars, was on Nuku Hiva during the same period as Melville. His Les derniers sauvages: Souvenirs de l’occupation française aux îles Marquises, 1842–1859, published after Typee, demonstrably confirms, for example, Melville’s presence in Haka‘ui Bay as a witness to incidents Radiguet reports due to the similarities in his and Melville’s accounts. And it is likely but not provable that Melville and Richard Tobias Greene did indeed head toward the interior of the island immediately after they deserted the whaleship Acushnet knowing that it would increase their chances of evading capture. Other assertions, however, remain conjecture.

The discourse of cannibalism that Melville encountered aboard ship and throughout the islands of the South Pacific profoundly shaped his first book. European dread of the cannibal Other was omnipresent. As with many things, this dread was mixed with desire. Sailors both feared and longed to encounter flesh-eaters. When Melville slipped away from his shipmates during shore leave on Nuku Hiva, he too may have experienced such mixed feelings. At the very least he understood them. Four years later, when he came to write Typee, this tension lingered in his mind.

As he did throughout his life, Melville turned to written sources when he began writing Typee. The language as well as some of the action is borrowed from David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean (1815, 1822), which records Porter’s encounter with Nuku Hiva thirty years before Melville arrived.⁴ Melville’s method of composition in Typee and the subsequent acceptance of the book as truth are significant not only as a study of the importance and influence of discourse but also because they cast light on the genesis of Melville’s literary genius.

Typee was Herman Melville’s single biggest commercial success, a widely read first book by a twenty-six-year-old writer.⁵ When Gansevoort, Melville’s brother, submitted the manuscript of Typee to English publisher John Murray, Murray wrote that it read like the work of a “practised writer” who may not have experienced the adventures he described.⁶

The “practised” element that Murray sensed in Typee may have come from Melville’s years of repeating the story orally, first to his shipmates and then to his family. In his transition from told tale, spoken text, to written text, Melville is much like his contemporary Frederick Douglass. By the time Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), he had been telling the story of his life orally to audiences for four years. The Narrative is a carefully crafted piece. See, for example, how Mr. Auld reprimands his wife for teaching young Frederick to read: “If you give a [slave] an inch, he will take an ell.”⁷ When Douglass learns to write at Durgin and Bailey’s shipyard, it is the L that is his first letter.⁸ Analogously, the pain in Tommo’s leg in Typee appears and disappears according to Tommo’s feelings about his confinement by the Typees. When he ceases to brood on his captivity, as he does in much of the middle of the book, the pain in his leg goes away, only to reappear later. Douglass’s speaking career began on Nantucket in 1841, four years before the publication of his own Narrative in 1845. Melville began telling his story when he left Nuku Hiva aboard the Lucy Ann in 1842, four years before the publication of his Narrative—Typee was published in Great Britain under the title Narrative of a Four Months’ Residence among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands—in 1846. During those four years of oral transmission, the stories were shaped and crafted in response to their audiences.

Gansevoort responded to Murray’s concern: “The Author will doubtless be flattered to hear that his production seems to so competent a judge as yourself that of ‘a practised writer’—the more so as he is a mere novice in the art, having had no experience.”⁹ He went on to assure Murray of the truth of the story, presumably on the basis of intra-family storytelling.

Despite Gansevoort’s assurances, the problem of authenticity came to a head when British papers began reviewing the book after its February 1846 London publication. Reviewers were skeptical that Typee was the work of a common sailor, and skeptical about Melville’s adventures. The controversy continued with the March 1846 publication of the American edition. The review that most incensed Melville was printed in the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer of April 17, 1846. The reviewer, possibly Charles F. Daniels, strongly stated:

In all essential respects, it is a fiction,—a piece of Munchausenism,—from beginning to end. It may be that the author visited, and spent some time in the Marquesas Islands. . . . But we have not the slightest confidence in any of the details, while many of the incidents narrated are utterly incredible. We might cite numberless instances of this monstrous exaggeration; but no one can read a dozen pages of the book without detecting them.

This would be a matter to be excused, if the book were not put forth as a simple record of actual experience. It professes to give nothing but what the author actually saw and heard. It must therefore be judged, not as a romance or a poem, but as a book of travels,—as a statement of facts;—and in this light it has, in our judgment, no merit whatever.¹⁰

Melville wrote indignantly: “So many numskulls on this side of the water should heroically avow their determination not to be ‘gulled’ by [Typee]. The fact is, those who do not beleive [sic] it are the greatest ‘gulls’.—full fledged ones too.”¹¹ (Is it telling that the word misspelled is “beleive”?)

The question of authenticity appeared settled with the dramatic appearance of Richard Tobias Greene, the “Toby” of Typee, whom Melville had feared dead.¹² Greene wrote the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser on July 1, 1846: “I am the true and veritable ‘Toby,’ yet living, and I am happy to testify to the entire accuracy of the work so long as I was with Melville.”¹³ Greene wrote letters to the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser on July 1 and 11, 1846, which were then forwarded to Melville. Melville and Toby met between July 15 and 22, and Melville subsequently published “The Story of Toby” in late July of 1846. With the publication of Toby’s story, the case for authenticity seemed proved and the questions died away.¹⁴

Since then, Typee has been accepted as an elaborated version of Melville’s own experiences. The nineteenth-century reading public was intrigued that a common man, a sailor, had become an accomplished and popular writer. Melville’s early celebrity was based as much on the sensational aspects of his story—the narrative is driven by the mounting fear of cannibalism—as on his skill as a writer, and he became known as the “man who lived among the cannibals.”¹⁵ Part of Melville’s success, therefore, was based on the assertion that he really did live among the cannibals. But what if this never occurred? What if, in fact, Melville never entered the valley of the Taipi? What if Melville’s experiences were little different from those of many other deserting whalemen? What if his early success as a writer was based as much on creative reconstructions from other writing as on his own experience? Having his fictional creation accepted as reality would have a profound effect on Melville’s sense of himself as a writer.

Melville’s status as a common sailor was cause for early skepticism about Typee. After that skepticism was laid to rest, it continued to be cause for wonder and interest among his acquaintances, as seen in Evert Duyckinck’s letter to his brother George when he reports: “By the way[,] Melville reads old Books. He has borrowed Sir Thomas Browne of me and says finely of the speculations of the Religio Medici that Browne is a kind of ‘crack’d Archangel.’ Was ever any thing of this sort said before by a sailor?”¹⁶

Duyckinck expected sailor talk from Melville. Typee, published two years before Duyckinck’s letter to his brother, is Melville’s book closest in time to his own involvement with sailor talk. He wrote Typee before reading “old Books” and before being caught up in New York literary circles, such as those connected with Duyckinck, Melville’s editor for the American publication of Typee. As noted above, by the time Melville began work on Typee, he had already been telling his stories of Nuku Hiva and elaborating them for four years. Melville’s delight in his prowess as a storyteller gave him confidence that he could be a writer. Even at its most sophisticated, Melville’s first book does sound like a told tale.

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Herman Melville signed ship’s articles for a whaling voyage on Christmas Day 1840. Nine days later, he departed New Bedford, Massachusetts, aboard the whaleship Acushnet, bound around Cape Horn into the Pacific to hunt ...