In Troy, not far away, and less than a hundred years after our own revolution, we’d go sympathetically wild with the hope of freedom anywhere else in the world in July—on the fourth—in those days.
Back in ’39, I’d first got to Shakespeare’s plays, then Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Macpherson’s Ossian, Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne-Buriall, A Letter to a Friend, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (only two books of it—and not the most interesting two, I later learned), and of course my Milton! And how does a boy that age who has already published his first set of newspaper feuilletons in the Democratic Press and Laningsburgh Advertiser, who reads Paradise Lost—for two more years, I confess, Paradise Regained defeated me, though I got through it finally—how does such a nineteen-year-old run away to sea?
Why, with his mother and three younger sisters accompanying him to the boat station at Albany, to kiss him good-bye (the girls were there basically to see that Mother, who’d insisted on coming, didn’t get it into her head to wander off; by this point, whatever we said to our friends or relatives, they were more afraid of losing her than losing me), and with a letter of introduction to the family in New York of some college friend of my brother Allan, the Bradfords, with a request to put me up for the two or three days before the St. Lawrence left from Peck Slip for Liverpool, so that after a riverboat journey in which I felt as irked by my poverty as a boy could feel—I had two dollars with which to purchase all I needed for the trip—I spent most of it on the ferry moodily staring at passengers, whom I was sure had more money to eat with on board than I did, till they looked away.
But now you know what I ran from at nineteen, however I could manage it, when first I took off.
Once in New York—city of my birth, but how foreign it felt after the last five or six years—the Bradfords were as hospitable as possible. At dinner that first night Mrs. Bradford would not let my plate get more than half empty, as if she knew the appetites of young men.
After a night in their guest room, the next day I was off to the offices of Howland and Aspinwall at 55 South Street to sign my articles. The busy secretary got most of it right—except my name:
“Norman Melville,” he put down. (Since my father’s death, Mother had, indeed, added the e because she felt it was better for us all. And we had been too young and too loyal to argue that it wasn’t ours.) But they were not going to waste another form for something as silly as that—not for a simple mistake in a couple of letters. It went on, under the appropriate categories:
“Birth: City of New York.
“Country: United States.
“Height: Five feet, eight and a half inches,” measured with my back against the rule painted up the wall beside his desk—
“Complexion: light. Hair: brown.” I’d not spent a summer in the sun for it to get lighter—besides, I’d noted last year, it didn’t lighten as much these days as it had when I was younger.
Then off again. On South Street, I managed to get a red wool shirt, a canvas hat, some stationery and writing material so that I could write Mother that I’d arrived safely in the city and my brother to thank him for the Bradfords, and other trifles for my duffle kit.
I had one penny left.
In a gesture to my own freedom, I flung it off the end of a pier.
New York Harbor received it in a burst of the froth it landed on, and that froth, a second past, once more untroubled, slid down the side of a small swell, the penny surely inches, feet, leagues beneath, twirling down through the water.
Back at my hosts’, Mrs. B. was as generous with her supper as before, and however misanthropic a day in offices and the city’s impersonal streets can make a man feel, as I’ve written in a book perhaps you’ve read, I’ve never felt so bad but I could eat a good dinner.
The next morning, with my kit, I took leave of the fine family for my ship, the St. Lawrence, Oliver P. Brown, master. I’d assumed—because it had said so in the advertisement—we were leaving that day. On board, I found an empty berth, but soon learned that our departure had been put off by at least twenty-four, if not thirty or thirty-six, hours. It just seemed awkward to return to the Bradfords’. So I slept in a bare berth on the ship that night—no one was there to mind. After all, “Norman” Melville had signed on. The next morning I was up and ambled onto the docks, wondering how I’d manage the day and when the ship would start meals for the crew. (Now I missed my penny, which might have gotten me a couple of rolls.) From a grocery just opening up along South Street, I begged a drink of water.
It must have been tainted, for twenty minutes later I was sick as a dog and, on a pile of cable chain, collapsed in the cool June morning and slept a fitful hour on the dock beside a piling, like some destitute drunk. (I’d assumed the disheveled men sleeping up against this wall or under that market cart were drunk. But maybe some were simply sick. And as hungry as I was—a sobering thought.) I got myself together. And wouldn’t you know, it began to rain before I started for the ship. I went on board, still queasy, soaked, and already looking forward to anything I might eat to gentle my belly, with my burping and gagging. I couldn’t be seasick already, I thought—before we had even sailed. Most of those lying about on the streets, of course, were more micks-n’-niggers—in those days you’d have thought it a single combined nationality, like Czecho-Slovakian, the way it was spoken, though here and there were some Italians, some bohunks, and squareheads recognizable under the dirt and the rags.
The niggers already knew where they weren’t wanted, I suppose, but “No Irish Need Apply” signs manifested what was already rampant in the city’s streets around us, more and more common around any neighborhood where hale and ordinary men might find work. (In my kit—a mick word they’d already loaned us along with the smell of their poverty—I had my Milton, but I hadn’t brought my Browne, though by now I could recite the whole of the fifth chapter of the Buriall, as could most of the cultured men I’d known working for and around the Laningsburgh Advertiser—one of the differences between a boy and a man, I say. That’s why I’d learned it myself. There’s no better recitation piece, no matter the many times you hear it. Micks would inundate the American landscape during the famine of 1859—when Billy the Kid himself was born here in the same city as I had been, forty years before him. The signs even mentioned the primitive accordion and drum music of the Irish, becoming something to poke fun at in songs and to sing about. Most people don’t even remember those signs from the years before, however—or, mostly, remember them since, now that they’re willing to hire the Irish for the police force. But the signs were common enough in my youth for me to note.
With 356 on board and 920 bales of cotton, the St. Lawrence sailed on June 5 for Liverpool—where two men quit and three deserted and the most impressive thing I saw was the great Moorish Arch against the clouds outside the Liverpool Railway, with its two smokestacks at either side (though neither was puffing the summer I saw it). Before we’d pushed off from England, we had replacements for the men who’d run. Coming home, the cotton replaced by pathetic Irish folks who were longing for the freedom and work that was reputedly in my country for the having, we sailed by Cape Cod, while the sap oozed in the sun from the ship’s planks to make trails, liquid for a minute then, seconds after, hard as amber. We pulled into the New York docks on October 1.
My first night back, because I had a little money with me, I went to a bar and thought to enjoy some of the conviviality I had seen between three men who had sailed with each other before they had again found one another on our boat, and two others who clearly had taken to one another and were already talking of signing on together again, there among the merchant marines. But though I envied it in the others, either I did not know how to extend, or was weary of extending, myself to do the same. Once we were docked, perhaps, I thought, if the men were freed from the necessity of daytime and nighttime toil, that conviviality might grow greater. But in that South Street drinking establishment, what happened was
that, after half an hour among groups of friends, none of whom were mine, some great blubbering, chestnut-bearded fellow, already half drunk, caught me in an argument. “A sailor? You say you’re a sailor? You think four months on a passenger boat with cotton in her hole makes you a sailor—?” and he staggered off, convulsed with laughter, as if he’d heard the funniest—and foulest—joke one might have told him.
My next adventure was a trip out to Galena, Illinois, with my friend Eli, brother of one of Helen’s friends—Harriet—along the Erie Canal, on the first leg of our trip to the Mississippi.
Eli had sold his first article to the Advertiser and was quite full of himself about it. And he liked to read and had smart things to say about what he read. But he was also always ready to take off on an adventure, rather than sit at a table and work with his pen.
I figured farming would be better than the bank clerk’s job I’d had before I’d gone down to try out the merchant marines, and better too than selling fur caps and fur gloves and arguing for my pay from Mr. Allman, which is what I’d done after I’d come back.
I stood on the blackened boards of the barge deck, watching half a dozen haws lines swoop out to half a dozen mules trudging the bank, past the live oak and the willows and the sumac. On the far bank half a dozen more swooped out to half a dozen more mules. The skinner on that side was riding an unattached mule and smoking his pipe and letting his boot heels flop as he jogged.
In his floppy-brimmed brown hat, Eli was talking to the head skinner, who now turned to tell him: “No—you may not ride one of the mules. These are working animals—not for tourists. You wanted to walk a while? So walk. When we reach the next station—it’s only three or four miles—get back on the barge, stretch out by the gunwale, and take a nap if you like.”
I laughed. And so did Eli, then looked at me in humorous despair. Well, it had been his idea.
On my uncle’s farm, there wasn’t work, it turned out. So we sent a letter and came home. It got there three days before we did—we left our new Indian friends (who, for the perfectly silly reason that we’d wanted to kill them, had wanted to kill us. I hope you find that ironic). I’m surprised we didn’t beat it. In November of the following year, 1841, I saw an advertisement for the whaling ship Akushnett, which would be taking on hands and leaving from Fairhaven, Massachusetts.
It seemed so easy to write the first book. I’d left a copy with Gansevoort and Allan, who’d taken it with them to their Wall Street offices in New York. The next I’d heard, they’d shown it to someone named Dr. Nichols, who’d taken the copy to England, and the next after that I knew, it was coming out from John Murray both in London and New York. It appeared late the following winter. Shortly, it was reviewed most praisefully by both Walt Whitman in the Brooklyn Eagle (though anonymously; I didn’t learn he was the author until several years later) and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Salem Advertiser. He signed his name, and through it we became great friends—till my side, perhaps, grew too intense for him to put up with.
On Bibliomancy, Anthropodermic Bibliopegy, and The Eating Papers; or, Proust’s Porridge
Melissa Pritchard
BIBLIOMANCY: DIVINATION BY MEANS OF A BOOK OPENED AT RANDOM TO A VERSE OR PASSAGE
I have been packing in earnest, the sedimentia of four generations, strata of decades, the weight stone of things rolling away. I have sold, given away, disposed of by means of alleyway, obliging friends, strangers, and the Army that Saves, a third of my possessions. Another third has vanished into that public holding cube, the mini-storage unit. Contracting from 3,000 square feet of living space to 750 square feet requires an epic purge. Mostly, I welcome it, but for one room, a room I resist to the last. My library, my carapace, my identity: writer. A room with a view, three desks, one thousand books, and a reading chair decimated by the dog. Two of the desks have already gone, leaving the third, not a desk at all but a rough-made pine table. The sad-looking chair has been carted off to the upholsterer’s. All that remains is books collected over a lifetime. Inherited, purchased, received as gifts, books signed by their authors, books stolen (my older sister’s college paperback copy of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a 1959 copy of Le Point, “Univers de Proust,” poached from a flat on rue Blanche in Paris, a copy of E. J. Bellocq’s Storyville Portraits, never returned to the Taos Library), dilapidated hardback books from my father’s Navy-brat youth (Robinson Crusoe, The Last of the Mohicans, Robin Hood, 200 More Tricks You Can Do). From my mother’s Chicago girlhood (Linda Lane’s Adventures, Oriole’s Adventures: Four Complete Adventure Books for Girls in One Big Volume, Daddy-Long-Legs). A slim dark-blue-and-gold-lettered book, SNAG 56, about my grandfather’s captaincy of a British hospital in World War II, books from friends, from auditioning lovers. Each book has had a place on my shelves. Now I am pulling them down, striking the set. This private library of paper, ink, and dust, these one thousand books in loose, friendly order, is the closest thing to an honest portrait of my life.
How to proceed? I call my publisher in Brooklyn, whose four-story brownstone feels entirely constructed of and held together by books, the air like old mucilage, tinged with shellac, rabbit glue. She suggests I break the process down, ask myself is this a book I could readily find another copy of, does it have sentimental value? If the former, let go, if the latter, keep. Armed with this system, I begin to sort and divide books into boxes. Initially tentative, indecisive, I turn discriminating, gimlet-eyed, ruthless. First to go are books I feel indifferent to, then ones I loathe but have kept out of guilt or a sense of obligation. Eight boxes go to the Perryville Women’s Correctional Facility, three to my house sitter, also a writer, seventeen to the storage catacomb, to be shuttered into the rented silence of a metal unit, stacked beside a job lot of Christmas ornaments, children’s toys, old linens, incomplete silver sets, stacks of furniture, and three centuries of family albums. The remaining books will be my companions in a narrow room with a pine writing table and a reading chair reclaimed by the dog.
In the art of bibliomancy, one allows the pages of a book considered sacred to fall open to a random passage. The Greeks divined wisdom from Homer’s Iliad. Virgil’s Aeneid was used for divination during medieval times, the I Ching is a current favorite with bibliomancers. There is a website devoted to literary bibliomancy, bibliomancy.org, “the wisdom of the ages at your fingertips.” Enter the site with your life question, receive a reply from Dickens, Dostoevsky, Virgil, Hermann Hesse, Homer, etc. Type the question into a box, select a book from the list, and the answer, intended as insight, appears. I ask Charles Dickens about my future and receive this from Great Expectations, passage 406 of 1550: Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more attentively at me than she had looked at the sailing ships. “It was neither a true nor a very polite thing to say,” she remarked, directing her eyes to the ships again. “Who said it?” I was disconcerted, for I had broken away without quite seeing where I was going to. It was not to be shuffled off now, however, and I answered, “The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham’s, and she’s more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account.” Having made this lunatic confession, I began to throw my torn-up grass into the river, as if I had some thoughts of following it.
I might have consulted Jane Austen, George Sand, Colette, or Mavis Gallant, but none of them are on the list. My diviners are solidly male.
As I relegate one thousand volumes to their fates, I ease my book ache with an invented subset of bibliomancy: epigraphancy. Choosing books at random, I flip to their epigraphs for more insights into my vague future.
Not every book contains an epigraph; a few have three or four. Epigraphs lend smart style, outfitting the author in witty, philosophic, or enigmatic dress. They also offer the reader a set of jeweled binoculars through which to view the distant stage, draw back curtains on the opening scene.
Here are random epigr
aphancies to reflect upon as I take slow leave of my private library, my Jacob’s coat of many books, their ivory, deckle-edged, or smooth pages tattooed with ink both sumptuous and plain:
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.
—Charles Baudelaire
(Roberto Bolaño, 2666)
My dear, these things are life.
—George Meredith
(Mercè Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves)
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.
—F. von Hardenberg, later Novalis
Fragmente und Studien, 1799–1800
(Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower)
I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that.
—Sigmund Freud, Letters
(Lawrence Durrell, Justine)
ANTHROPODERMIC BIBLIOPEGY:
THE PRACTICE OF BINDING BOOKS IN HUMAN SKIN
Stones, clay and wood tablets, bamboo, papyrus, silk, bone, bronze, shell, palm leaf, flax linen, the earliest writing surfaces. Scrolls folded like a concertina, “butterfly” scrolls bound on one edge, scrolls with wood handles on either end, codices—the earliest books. (Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, written in three weeks as a scroll manuscript, without punctuation, was recently republished in its original form.) During the first century AD in China, the earliest known paper was made from a mixture of mulberry, fishnet, and hemp waste. In the third century AD, a writing surface known as parchment began to be made from the skins of asses, antelope, sheep, cattle, pig, deer, horse, camel. Parchment consists mainly of collagen, and the highest-quality parchment, vellum, or veau, was made from the skin of stillborn or unborn animals. Finer still was uterine vellum. A vein network appearing in a piece of vellum was termed a “veining of the sheet.”
From the fourteenth century, the most valuable books and documents were written on vellum. Due to its rarity and expense, monastery parchments were often scrubbed and written over, leaving faint traces of the previous writing, a holy palimpsest of gospels ghosting beneath a medieval sermon.
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