Like many artists, Melville felt constrained to choose between art and money. The turning point of his career came in 1851. With the publication of Moby-Dick, he grew disenchanted with his attempt to please the general reader. Instead, he cultivated a more spiritual language to express the darker, enigmatic side of the soul. Like his letters, Melville’s literary style became torturous and demanding; his themes questioned the nature of good and evil and what he perceived as upheaval in universal order. Pierre, his first published work after Moby-Dick, with its emphasis on incest and moral corruption, exemplifies his decision to change direction. His readers, accustomed to the satisfying rough and tumble of his sea yarns, were unable to make the leap from straightforward adventure tale to probing fiction. The gems hidden among lengthy, digressive passages required more concentrated effort than readers were capable of or willing to put forth.
Under the tutelage of Hawthorne, Melville developed the metaphysical elements of his work, often to the detriment of clarity of diction and flow of language. For example:
On the starboard side of the Bellipotent’s upper gun deck, behold Billy Budd under sentry lying prone in irons in one of the bays formed by the regular spacing of the guns comprising the batteries on either side. All these pieces were of the heavier caliber of that period. Mounted on lumbering wooden carriages they were hampered with cumbersome harness of breeching and strong side-tackles for running them out. Guns and carriages, together with the long rammers and shorter lintstocks lodged in loops overhead—all these, as customary, were painted black; and the heavy hempen breechings tarred to the same tint, wore the like livery of the undertakers. In contrast with the funereal hue of these surroundings, the prone sailor’s exterior apparel, white jumper and white duck trousers, each more or less soiled, dimly glimmered in the obscure light of the bay like a patch of discolored snow in early April lingering at some upland cave’s black mouth. In effect he is already in his shroud, or the garments that shall serve him in lieu of one.
Challenged to delve into the perplexities of human life, Melville avoided the more obvious superficialities and plunged determinedly into greater mysteries. His output dwindled from novel length to short story. One of the most obtuse of these, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” published in Putnam’s magazine in 1855, focused on the dehumanization of a copyist; the nineteenth-century equivalent of a photocopy machine. Suggesting the author’s own obstinacy, the main character replies to all comers, “I would prefer not to,” thereby declaring his independence from outside intervention.
Because the reading public refused his fiction, Melville began writing poems. The first collection, Battle Pieces (1866), delineates Melville’s view of war, particularly the American Civil War. With these poems, he supported abolitionism, yet wished no vengeance on the South for the economic system it inherited. The second work, Clarel (1876), an 18,000-line narrative poem, evolved from the author’s travels in Jerusalem and describes a young student’s search for faith. A third, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), followed by Timoleon (1891), were privately published, primarily at the expense of his uncle, Peter Gansevoort.
Virtually ignored by the literary world of his day, Melville made peace with the creative forces that tormented him by writing his final work, Billy Budd, which records the ultimate confrontation between evil and innocence. It took shape slowly from 1888 to 1891, for Melville had ceased scrabbling for a living and could afford the luxury of contemplative art. As he expressed to his friend and editor, Evert Duyckinck, “I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more.” Such a creature was Melville.
