Counter-Currents
4,893 words
“We can’t go back. We can’t go back to the savages: not a stride. We can be in sympathy with them. We can take a great curve in their direction, onwards. But we cannot turn the current of our life backwards, back towards their soft warm twilight and uncreate mud. Not for a moment. If we do it for a moment, it makes us sick.
“We can only do it when we are renegade. The renegade hates life itself. He wants the death of life. So these many ‘ reformers’ and ‘idealists’ who glorify the savages in America. They are death-birds, life-haters. Renegades.” — D. H. Lawrence
“Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo“
chapter 10 of Studies in Classic American Literature
The greatest seer and poet of the sea for me is Melville. His vision is more real than Swinburne’s, because he doesn’t personify the sea, and far sounder than Joseph Conrad’s, because Melville doesn’t sentimentalize the ocean and the sea’s unfortunates. Snivel in a wet hanky like Lord Jim.
Melville has the strange, uncanny magic of sea-creatures, and some of their repulsiveness. He isn’t quite a land animal. There is something slithery about him. Something always half-seas-over. In his life they said he was mad — or crazy. He was neither mad nor crazy. But he was over the border. He was half a water animal, like those terrible yellow-bearded Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships.
He was a modern Viking. There is something curious about real blue-eyed people. They are never quite human, in the good classic sense, human as brown-eyed people are human: the human of the living humus. About a real blue-eyed person there is usually something abstract, elemental. Brown-eyed people are, as it were, like the earth, which is tissue of bygone life, organic, compound. In blue eyes there is sun and rain and abstract, uncreate element, water, ice, air, space, but not humanity. Brown-eyed people are people of the old, old world: Allzu menschlich. Blue-eyed people tend to be too keen and abstract.
Melville is like a Viking going home to the sea, encumbered with age and memories, and a sort of accomplished despair, almost madness. For he cannot accept humanity. He can’t belong to humanity. Cannot.
The great Northern cycle of which he is the returning unit has almost completed its round, accomplished itself. Balder the beautiful is mystically dead, and by this time he stinketh. Forget-me-nots and sea-poppies fall into water. The man who came from the sea to live among men can stand it no longer. He hears the horror of the cracked church bell, and goes back down the shore, back into the ocean again, home, into the salt water. Human life won’t do. He turns back to the elements. And all the vast sun-and-wheat consciousness of his day he plunges back into the deeps, burying the flame in the deep, self-conscious and deliberate. As blue flax and sea-poppies fall into the waters and give back their created sun-stuff to the dissolution of the flood.
The sea-born people, who can meet and mingle no longer: who turn away from life, to the abstract, to the elements: the sea receives her own.
Let life come asunder, they say. Let water conceive no more with fire. Let mating finish. Let the elements leave off kissing, and turn their backs on one another. Let the merman turn away from his human wife and children, let the seal-woman forget the world of men, remembering only the waters.
So they go down to the sea, the sea-born people. The Vikings are wandering again. Homes are broken up. Cross the seas, cross the seas, urges the heart. Leave love and home. Leave love and home. Love and home are a deadly illusion. Woman, what have I to do with thee? It is finished. Consummatum est. The crucifxion into humanity is over. Let us go back to the fierce, uncanny elements: the corrosive vast sea. Or Fire.
Basta! It is enough. It is enough of life. Let us have the vast elements. Let us get out of this loathsome complication of living humanly with humans. Let the sea wash us clean of the leprosy of our humanity and humanness.
Melville was a northerner, sea-born. So the sea claimed him. We are most of us, who use the English language, water-people, sea-derived.
Melville went back to the oldest of all the oceans, to the Pacific. Der Grosse oder Stille Ozean.
Without doubt the Pacific Ocean is aeons older than the Atlantic or the Indian Oceans. When we say older, we mean it has not come to any modern consciousness. Strange convulsions have convulsed the Atlantic and Mediterranean peoples into phase after phase of consciousness, while the Pacific and the Pacific peoples have slept. To sleep is to dream: you can’t stay unconscious. And, oh heaven, for how many thousands of years has the true Pacific been dreaming, turning over in its sleep and dreaming again: idylls: nightmares.
The Maoris, the Tongans, the Marquesans, the Fijians, the Polynesians: holy God, how long have they been turning over in the same sleep, with varying dreams? Perhaps, to a sensitive imagination, those islands in the middle of the Pacific are the most unbearable places on earth. It simply stops the heart, to be translated there, unknown ages back, back into that life, that pulse, that rhythm. The scientists say the South Sea Islanders belong to the Stone Age. It seems absurd to class people according to their implements. And yet there is something in it. The heart of the Pacific is still the Stone Age; in spite of steamers. The heart of the Pacific seems like a vast vacuum, in which, mirage-like, continues the life of myriads of ages back. It is a phantom-persistence of human beings who should have died, by our chronology, in the Stone Age. It is a phantom, illusion-like trick of reality: the glamorous South Seas.
Even Japan and China have been turning over in their sleep for countless centuries. Their blood is the old blood, their tissue the old soft tissue. Their busy day was myriads of years ago, when the world was a softer place, more moisture in the air, more warm mud on the face of the earth, and the lotus was always in flower. The great bygone world, before Egypt. And Japan and China have been turning over in their sleep, while we have ‘advanced’. And now they are starting up into nightmare.
The world isn’t what it seems.
The Pacific Ocean holds the dream of immemorial centuries It is the great blue twilight of the vastest of all evenings perhaps of the most wonderful of all dawns. Who knows?
It must once have been a vast basin of soft, lotus-warm civilization, the Pacific. Never was such a huge man-day swung down into slow disintegration as here. And now the waters are blue and ghostly with the end of immemorial peoples. And phantom-like the islands rise out of it, illusions of the glamorous Stone Age.
To this phantom Melville returned. Back, back, away from life. Never man instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, more than Melville did. And never was a man so passionately filled with the sense of vastness and mystery of life which is non-human. He was mad to look over our horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of our world. To get away. To get away, out!
To get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another life.
Away, away from humanity. To the sea. The naked salt, elemental sea. To go to sea, to escape humanity.
The human heart gets into a frenzy at last, in its desire to dehumanize itself.
So he finds himself in the middle of the Pacific. Truly over a horizon. In another world. In another epoch. Back, far back, in the days of palm trees and lizards and stone implements. The sunny Stone Age.
Samoa, Tahiti, Raratonga, Nukuheva: the very names are a sleep and a forgetting. The sleep-forgotten past magnificence of human history. ‘ Trailing clouds of glory.’
Melville hated the world: was born hating it. But he was looking for heaven. That is, choosingly. Choosingly, he was looking for paradise. Unchoosingly, he was mad with hatred of the world.
Well, the world is hateful. It is as hateful as Melville found it. He was not wrong in hating the world. Delenda est Chicago. He hated it to a pitch of madness, and not without reason.
But it’s no good persisting in looking for paradise ‘regained’.
Melville at his best invariably wrote from a sort of dreamself, so that events which he relates as actual fact have indeed a far deeper reference to his own soul, his own inner life.
So in Typee when he tells of his entry into the valley of the dread cannibals of Nukuheva. Down this narrow, steep, horrible dark gorge he slides and struggles as we struggle in a dream, or in the act of birth, to emerge in the green Eden of the Golden Age, the valley of the cannibal savages. This is a bit of birth-myth, or re-birth myth, on Melville’s part — unconscious, no doubt, because his running under-consciousness was always mystical and symbolical. He wasn’t aware that he was being mystical.
There he is then, in Typee, among the dreaded cannibal savages. And they are gentle and generous with him, and he is truly in a sort of Eden.
Here at last is Rousseau’s Child of Nature and Chateaubriand’s Noble Savage called upon and found at home. Yes, Melville loves his savage hosts. He finds them gentle, laughing lambs compared to the ravening wolves of his white brothers, left behind in America and on an American whaleship.
The ugliest beast on earth is the white man, says Melville.
In short, Herman found in Typee the paradise he was looking for. It is true, the Marquesans were ‘immoral’, but he rather liked that. Morality was too white a trick to take him in. Then again, they were cannibals. And it filled him with horror even to think of this. But the savages were very private and even fiercely reserved in their cannibalism, and he might have spared himself his shudder. No doubt he had partaken of the Christian Sacraments many a time. ‘This is my body, take and eat. This is my blood. Drink it in remembrance of me.’ And if the savages liked to partake of their sacrament without raising the transubstantiation quibble, and if they liked to say, directly: ‘This is thy body, which I take from thee and eat. This is thy blood, which I sip in annihilation of thee’, why surely their sacred ceremony was as awe-inspiring as the one Jesus substituted. But Herman chose to be horrified. I confess, I am not horrified; though, of course, I am not on the spot. But the savage sacrament seems to me more valid than the Christian: less side-tracking about it. Thirdly, he was shocked by their wild methods of warfare. He died before the great European war, so his shock was comfortable.
Three little quibbles: morality, cannibal sacrament, and stone axes. You must have a fly even in Paradisal ointment. And the first was a ladybird.
But paradise. He insists on it. Paradise. He could even go stark naked, as before the Apple episode. And his Fayaway, a laughing little Eve, naked with him, and hankering after no apple of knowledge, so long as he would just love her when he felt like it. Plenty to eat, needing no clothes to wear, sunny, happy people, sweet water to swim in: everything a man can want. Then why wasn’t he happy along with the savages ?
Because he wasn’t.
He grizzled in secret, and wanted to escape.
He even pined for Home and Mother, the two things he had run away from as far as ships would carry him. HOME and MOTHER. The two things that were his damnation.
There on the island, where the golden-green great palmtrees chinked in the sun, and the elegant reed houses let the sea-breeze through, and people went naked and laughed a great deal, and Fayaway put flowers in his hair for him — great red hibiscus flowers, and frangipani — O God, why wasn’t he happy? Why wasn’t he?
Because he wasn’t.
Well, it’s hard to make a man happy.
But I should not have been happy either. One’s soul seems under a vacuum, in the South Seas.
The truth of the matter is, one cannot go back. Some men can: renegade. But Melville couldn’t go back: and Gauguin couldn’t really go back: and I know now that I could never go back. Back towards the past, savage life. One cannot go back. It is one’s destiny inside one.
There are these peoples, these ’savages’. One does not despise them. One does not feel superior. But there is a gulf. There is a gulf in time and being. I cannot commingle my being with theirs.
There they are, these South Sea Islanders, beautiful big men with their golden limbs and their laughing, graceful laziness. And they will call you brother, choose you as a brother. But why cannot one truly be brother?
There is an invisible hand that grasps my heart and prevents it opening too much to these strangers. They are beautiful, they are like children, they are generous: but they are more than this. They are far off, and in their eyes is an easy darkness of the soft, uncreate past. In a way, they are uncreate. Far be it from me to assume any ‘white’ superiority. But they are savages. They are gentle and laughing and physically very handsome. But it seems to me, that in living so far, through all our bitter centuries of civilization, we have still been living onwards, forwards. God knows it looks like a cul de sac now. But turn to the first negro, and then listen to your own soul. And your own soul will tell you that however false and foul our forms and systems are now, still, through the many centuries since Egypt, we have been living and struggling forwards along some road that is no road, and yet is a great life-development. We have struggled on, and on we must still go. We may have to smash things. Then let us smash. And our road may have to take a great swerve, that seems a retrogression.
But we can’t go back. Whatever else the South Sea Islander is, he is centuries and centuries behind us in the life-struggle, the consciousness-struggle, the struggle of the soul into fullness. There is his woman, with her knotted hair and her dark, inchoate, slightly sardonic eyes. I like her, she is nice. But I would never want to touch her. I could not go back on myself so far. Back to their uncreate condition.
She has soft warm flesh, like warm mud. Nearer the reptile, the Saurian age. Noli me tangere.
We can’t go back. We can’t go back to the savages: not a stride. We can be in sympathy with them. We can take a great curve in their direction, onwards. But we cannot turn the current of our life backwards, back towards their soft warm twilight and uncreate mud. Not for a moment. If we do it for a moment, it makes us sick.
We can only do it when we are renegade. The renegade hates life itself. He wants the death of life. So these many ‘ reformers’ and ‘idealists’ who glorify the savages in America. They are death-birds, life-haters. Renegades.
We can’t go back, and Melville couldn’t. Much as he hated the civilized humanity he knew. He couldn’t go back to the savages; he wanted to, he tried to, and he couldn’t.
Because, in the first place, it made him sick; it made him physically ill. He had something wrong with his leg, and this would not heal. It got worse and worse, during his four months on the island. When he escaped, he was in a deplorable condition — sick and miserable, ill, very ill.
Paradise!
But there you are. Try to go back to the savages, and you feel as if your very soul was decomposing inside you. That is what you feel in the South Seas, anyhow: as if your soul was decomposing inside you. And with any savages the same, if you try to go their way, take their current of sympathy.
Yet, as I say, we must make a great swerve in our onward-going life-course now, to gather up again the savage mysteries. But this does not mean going back on ourselves.
Going back to the savages made Melville sicker than anything. It made him feel as if he were decomposing. Worse even than Home and Mother.
And that is what really happens. If you prostitute your psyche by returning to the savages, you gradually go to pieces. Before you can go back, you have to decompose. And a white man decomposing is a ghastly sight. Even Melville in Typee.
We have to go on, on, on, even if we must smash a way ahead.
So Melville escaped, and threw a boat-hook full in the throat of one of his dearest savage friends, and sank him, because that savage was swimming in pursuit. That’s how he felt about the savages when they wanted to detain him. He’d have murdered them one and all, vividly, rather than be kept from escaping. Away from them — he must get away from them — at any price.
And once he has escaped, immediately he begins to sigh and pine for the ‘Paradise’ — Home and Mother being at the other end even of a whaling voyage.
When he really was Home with Mother, he found it Purgatory. But Typee must have been even worse than Purgatory, a soft hell, judging from the murderous frenzy which possessed him to escape.
But once aboard the whaler that carried him off from Nukuheva, he looked back and sighed for the Paradise he had just escaped from in such a fever.
Poor Melvillel He was determined Paradise existed. So he was always in Purgatory.
He was born for Purgatory. Some souls are purgatorial by destiny.
The very freedom of his Typee was a torture to him. Its ease was slowly horrible to him. This time be was the fly in the odorous tropical ointment.
He needed to fight. It was no good to him, the relaxation of the non-moral tropics. He didn’t really want Eden. He wanted to fight. Like every American. To fight. But with weapons of the spirit, not the flesh.
That was the top and bottom of it. His soul was in revolt, writhing for ever in revolt. When he had something definite to rebel against — like the bad conditions on a whaling ship — then he was much happier in his miseries. The mills of God were grinding inside him, and they needed something to grind on.
When they could grind on the injustice and folly of missionaries, or of brutal sea-captains, or of governments, he was easier. The mills of God were grinding inside him.
They are grinding inside every American. And they grind exceeding small.
Why? Heaven knows. But we’ve got to grind down our old forms, our old selves, grind them very very small, to nothingness. Whether a new somethingness will ever start, who knows? Meanwhile the mills of God grind on, in American Melville, and it was himself he ground small: himself and his wife, when he was married. For the present, the South Seas.
He escapes on to the craziest, most impossible of whaling ships. Lucky for us Melville makes it fantastic. It must have been pretty sordid.
And anyhow, on the crazy Julia, his leg, that would never heal in the paradise of Typee, began quickly to get well. His life was falling into its normal pulse. The drain back into past centuries was over.
Yet, oh, as he sails away from Nukuheva, on the voyage that will ultimately take him to America, oh, the acute and intolerable nostalgia he feels for the island he has left.
The past, the Golden Age of the past — what a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don’t want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.
Melville had to fight, fight against the existing world, against his own very self. Only he would never quite put the knife in the heart of his paradisal ideal. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, love should be a fulfilment, and life should be a thing of bliss. That was his fixed ideal. Fata Morgana.
That was the pin he tortured himself on, like a pinned-down butterfly.
Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.
Why pin ourselves down on a paradisal ideal? It is only ourselves we torture.
Melville did have one great experience, getting away from humanity: the experience of the sea.
The South Sea Islands were not his great experience. They were a glamorous world outside New England. Outside. But it w as the sea that was both outside and inside: the universal experience.
The book that follows on from Typee is Omoo.
Omoo is a fascinating book; picaresque, rascally, roving. Melville, as a bit of a beachcomber. The crazy ship Julia sails to Tahiti, and the mutinous crew are put ashore. Put in the Tahitian prison. It is good reading.
Perhaps Melville is at his best, his happiest, in Omoo. For once he is really reckless. For once he takes life as it comes. For once he is the gallant rascally epicurean, eating the world like a snipe, dirt and all baked into one bonne bouche.
For once he is really careless, roving with that scamp, Doctor Long Ghost. For once he is careless of his actions, careless of his morals, careless of his ideals: ironic, as the epicurean must be. The deep irony of your real scamp: your real epicurean of the moment.
But it was under the influence of the Long Doctor. This long and bony Scotsman was not a mere ne’er-do-well. He was a man of humorous desperation, throwing his life ironically away. Not a mere loose-kneed loafer, such as the South Seas seem to attract.
That is good about Melville: he never repents. Whatever he did, in Typee or in Doctor Long Ghost’s wicked society, he never repented. If he ate his snipe, dirt and all, and enjoyed it at the time, he didn’t have bilious bouts afterwards, which is good.
But it wasn’t enough. The Long Doctor was really knocking about in a sort of despair. He let his ship drift rudderless.
Melville couldn’t do this. For a time, yes. For a time, in this Long Doctor’s company, he was rudderless and reckless. Good as an experience. But a man who will not abandon himself to despair or indifference cannot keep it up.
Melville would never abandon himself either to despair or indifference. He always cared. He always cared enough to hate Missionaries, and to be touched by a real act of kindness. He always cared.
When he saw a white man really ‘gone savage’, a white man with a blue shark tattooed over his brow, gone over to the savages, then Herman’s whole being revolted. He couldn’t bear it. He could not bear a renegade.
He enlisted at last on an American man-of-war. You have the record in White Jacket. He was back in civilization, but still at sea. He was in America, yet loose in the seas. Good regular days, after Doctor Long Ghost and the Julia.
As a matter of fact, a long thin chain was round Melville’s ankle at the time, binding him to America, to civilization, to democracy, to the ideal world. It was a long chain, and it never broke. It pulled him back.
By the time he was twenty-five his wild oats were sown; his reckless wanderings were over. At the age of twenty-five he came back to Home and Mother, to fight it out at close quarters. For you can’t fight it out by running away. When you have run a long way from Home and Mother, then you realize that the earth is round, and if you keep on running you’ll be back on the same old doorstep — like a fatality.
Melville came home to face out the long rest of his life. He married and had an ecstasy of a courtship and fifty years of disillusion.
He had just furnished his home with disillusions. No more Typees. No more paradises. No more Fayaways. A mother: a gorgon. A home: a torture box. A wife: a thing with clay feet. Life: a sort of disgrace. Fame: another disgrace, being patronized by common snobs who just know how to read.
The whole shameful business just making a man writhe.
Melville writhed for eighty years.
In his soul he was proud and savage.
But in his mind and will he wanted the perfect fulfilment of love; he wanted the lovey-doveyness of perfect mutual understanding.
A proud savage-soured man doesn’t really want any perfect lovey-dovey fulfilment in love: no such nonsense. A mountain lion doesn’t mate with a Persian cat; and when a grizzly bear roars after a mate, it is a she-grizzly he roars after — not after a silky sheep.
But Melville stuck to his ideal. He wrote Pierre to show that the more you try to be good the more you make a mess of things: that following righteousness is just disastrous. The better you are, the worse things turn out with you. The better you try to be, the bigger mess you make. Your very striving after righteousness only causes your own slow degeneration.
Well, it is true. No men are so evil today as the idealists, and no women half so evil as your earnest woman, who feels herself a power for good. It is inevitable. After a certain point, the ideal goes dead and rotten. The old pure ideal becomes in itself an impure thing of evil. Charity becomes pernicious, the spirit itself becomes foul. The meek are evil. The pure in heart have base, subtle revulsions: like Dostoevsky’s Idiot. The whole Sermon on the Mount becomes a litany of white vice.
What then?
It’s our own fault. It was we who set up the ideals. And if we are such fools, that we aren’t able to kick over our ideals in time, the worse for us.
Look at Melville’s eighty long years of writhing. And to the end he writhed on the ideal pin.
From the ‘perfect woman lover’ he passed on to the ‘perfect friend’. He looked and looked for the perfect man friend.
Couldn’t find him.
Marriage was a ghastly disillusion to him, because he looked for perfect marriage.
Friendship never even made a real start in him — save perhaps his half-sentimental love for Jack Chase, in White Jacket.
Yet to the end he pined for this: a perfect relationship; perfect mating; perfect mutual understanding. A perfect friend.
Right to the end he could never accept the fact that perfect relationships cannot be. Each soul is alone, and the aloneness of each soul is a double barrier to perfect relationship between two beings.
Each soul should be alone. And in the end the desire for a ‘perfect relationship’ is just a vicious, unmanly craving. ‘Tous nos malheurs viennent de ne pouvoir etre seuls.’
Melville, however, refused to draw his conclusion. Life was wrong, he said. He refused Life. But he stuck to his ideal of perfect relationship, possible perfect love. The world ought to be a harmonious loving place. And it can’t be. So life itself is wrong.
It is silly arguing. Because, after all, only temporary man sets up the ‘oughts’.
The world ought not to be a harmonious loving place. It ought to be a place of fierce discord and intermittent harmonies: which it is.
Love ought not to be perfect. It ought to have perfect moments, and wildenesses of thorn bushes — which it has.
A ‘perfect’ relationship ought not to be possible. Every relationship should have its absolute limits, its absolute reserves, essential to the singleness of the soul in each person. A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party leaves great tracts unknown in the other party.
No two persons can meet at more than a few points, consciously. If two people can just be together fairly often, so that the presence of each is a sort of balance to the other, that is the basis of perfect relationship. There must be true separatenesses as well.
Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist.
Perhaps, so am I.
And he stuck to his ideal guns.
I abandon mine.
He was a mystic who raved because the old ideal guns shot havoc. The guns of the ‘noble spirit’. Of ‘ideal love’.
I say, let the old guns rot.
Get new ones, and shoot straight.