island sixteen miles long,
Numberless crowded streets, high growth of iron, slender, strong,
light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies.
— FROM MANNAHATTA BY WALT WHITMAN
CYRUS CLARK AWAKENED TOWARD SEVEN PM NAKED UPON A bed in a ground floor flat off of Chambers Street. He needed to get dressed and make his way home before his wife would begin to worry. But he was reluctant to risk bestirring Walt Whitman, still sleeping beside him, who might see fit to renew their tedious argument. The poet, naked as well, slept fitfully, facing the wall, lightly snoring now and then, making it difficult to judge how tightly moored he might be to Morpheus’ Landing.
Cyrus admired the broad shoulders, the toughened back muscles, the knobby vertebrae, the two dark warts where a seraphim or a demon’s wing might blossom. The rear end, however, was curiously feminine, wide, smooth, pink, hairless. Limiting his vision to just this part of Whitman’s anatomy the weight of perversity lightened. With just this perspective, all he has had is a wild roll with another woman as men are wont to do, another woman in the afternoon after work, an adulterous but passionate assignation. What was the difference really? The whole tawdry human mess was but skin and tissue and bestial urges driving one along with only the barest pretense of control or discretion. Or so he told himself, replaying the point of view he attempted to defend against Whitman’s belittling sarcasm. But he knew then as the gentle summer evening crept in, with its light both comforting and melancholy and with the taste of sour ale and tobacco on his tongue, that it was sheer specificity that drove him to take such risks. It was the cock and balls between his legs and the cock and balls drooping from the poet’s other side that set the fever in play. He had no notion as to why. He only knew it was an animal thing as much a part of him as what it was that drove bucks to lock antlers. The reverends could thunder and rattle all they wished from their termite-infested pulpits but Nature simply smiled and drooled and went about her business.
When making love to his wife, an act he was only persuaded to attempt when she made her own inclinations obvious, his mind went elsewhere. To remain vigorous with her, he would at first have to imagine other women, the young girl who sold newspapers up the block from the press, the bosomy waitress at the pub he frequented far too often these days, even his wife’s twelve-year-old sister, doing unspeakably vile things to the sweet virginal creature despite her cries of fear and protest. And then the inevitable would occur. In order to keep from flagging just when his wife was most in need, the young girl would suddenly morph into his wife’s even younger nephew that he would begin to abuse as well until caught in flagranti by the boy’s miraculously naked father who would then begin to flog him mercilessly with a soiled gutta-percha whip before having his way with him. This would faithfully get the job done, and thus it was that Mrs. Clark was permitted to obtain some satisfaction and bear them, to date, four healthy offspring.
This had been Whitman’s point, that it was not so much which sex one coupled with, but the one that brought on and maintained desire, that mysterious factor he had feared since adolescence and that Whitman pretended to celebrate in private. All Cyrus knew from experience was that encounters like this afternoon’s calmed him and allowed him to continue his own pretense, sometimes for as long as two to three months.
Ten minutes later after he had managed to extricate himself from bed, dress, and get the front door unlatched Whitman turned to face him, manhood in hand, an image difficult to ignore.
“I invite you to come along with me this evening as I continue my conversation with Misters Hawthorne and Melville. It’s the least I can do for you in exchange for your information.”
Cyrus adjusted his spectacles, looking about, nodding, attempting to avoid the languorous onanism in full play before him.
“Impossible. I’m so late now as it is.”
“Get on with you then before your hell-cat discovers the true dimensions of your sordid Nature.”
He pronounced this last word in French and its comely reverberation accompanied Clark along his hurried hike west to the ferry slip and across the river to Brooklyn where decent families dwelled.
An hour later Melville left his hotel alone and found Walt Whitman standing on the newly paved sidewalk whittling a piece of wood.
“Mr. Whitman, I see you were quite serious about continuing our conversation.”
“Indeed.”
They shook hands.
“I regret to say Mr. Hawthorne is indisposed.”
“Nothing serious I trust.”
“He rather over-did it at supper and requires bed rest and a good night’s sleep to put him right, I imagine. And I am late for my engagement.”
Melville had not anticipated having to put so good a face on things so quickly. He was still feeling inner vibrations of stress and displeasure at what had just transpired between himself and his dear friend. Whitman folded his knife and slipped it into his coat pocket.
“If you don’t mind, sir, I shall just accompany you until you arrive at your destination.”
“By all means. And there are two. Back to the Everett House to collect the Dickinsons and then south again to a dinner.”
Melville, who loved to walk, especially in his native city, nevertheless hailed a carriage due to the hour and after giving the driver his instructions the two men took their seats.
“I am not entirely disappointed to have you alone, Mr. Melville, for I have heard rumors about your new work I would very much enjoy confirming.”
“Such as…”
“That it is a sea story, once again, something to do with whales and whaling and with a particular whale, in fact, who is its protagonist.”
“And what might be the providence of such rumors?”
“A friend of a friend who works at Craighead’s printers.”
“Ah-hah.” He was not pleased.
“Is it true?”
“It is.”
“I’ve also heard it is a whale of a book, in size I mean.”
“True as well.”
“And is it based on your personal experiences the way your other books have been?”
“I think you could say, one could say, that with each book I write, the influence of my personal experiences becomes more and more diluted. The first two books were almost a diary, the third a hybrid, and this tale is almost entirely a creation of my own imaginings. I did, of course, work on a whaling ship for a time, and I have since done significant research to fill in all manner of gaps that remained after my own education in that world ceased.”
“And is the main character really a mammoth fish?”
“I see you are a city man, Mr. Whitman.”
“Much less than you. I was born in the wilds of Long Island amidst Indians and deer and the remnants of British warships wrecked along the sandbars. Why do you say that?”
“A nice turn of phrase that: British warships wrecked along the sandbars. I say it because a whale is not a fish, but a mammal, in all respects.”
“Oh yes. I suppose I did know that.”
“And The Whale in question is not the book’s protagonist, really—one of them certainly—but not the only one.”
Thanks to Cyrus Clark, Whitman had, in fact, already read significant tracts from the manuscript.
“Moby-Dick is the creature’s name, I believe.”
“It is.”
“And where might such a strange name, come from?”
“From an actual whale, a huge albino Sperm Whale known as Mocha Dick. Mocha being the name of an island off of Chile where the beast was often sighted—a bull leviathan of prodigious strength whose hide was punctuated with numerous snapped harpoons and who took pleasure in attacking his pursuers.”
“I had no idea. Sounds more like a devil than a mammal.”
“It is a topic the book explores—to a degree.”
“Speaking of devils, what are your thoughts on the gargantuan angry devil of slavery still attacking th
e moral fiber of our nation?”
“Slavery is a vile, immoral, and counterproductive thing.”
“Are you with the abolitionists then?”
“I’m not ‘with’ anyone—but I am against slavery. What normal person would not be?”
“You see no contradiction in being against slavery and against the abolitionist movement? I should advise you, I too feel the same way.”
“I did not say I was ‘against’ the abolitionist movement. I said I was not ‘with’ anyone. I am a writer, not a politician or a pamphleteer.”
The carriage stopped in front of the Everett House and Melville stepped down and entered the hotel. Whitman remained behind and resolved to not pursue the issue any further—mostly due to the fact that Melville had just said something that had penetrated him profoundly. “A writer, not a politician or a pamphleteer.” Then what was he?
Melville, aristocratic and confident, handsome and a risk taker, innately stylish, had cut his family bonds with a vengeance. He had worked as a seaman, a whaler, became a mutineer, a lover of savages. A voracious reader of the classics while sailing the vast Pacific and the perilous South Atlantic, his work reflected all of that. The new whale manuscript would surely become a holy bible of American letters. And what had he done? Drifted from job to job, never too far away from kith and kin, teaching, writing his articles, getting all hot and bothered by each and every political craze to grab the headlines, getting tarred and feathered for fooling around with that boy in Southold, writing sentimental sensationalistic silly novels with which he had hoped to achieve fame and fortune by the collar and on the cheap—works that painfully embarrassed him now sitting in the carriage. Melville imbued the exotic with Yankee austerity and deep naturalistic wisdom with titles such as Omoo, and Typee, White Jacket, and now The Whale—each one a steady improvement on the one before it while he had tossed out his “novels,” Richard Parker’s Widow and The Half-Breed: A Tale of the Western Frontier, Franklin Evans—his maudlin stories, The Wicked Impulse!, Death in the School Room—Good God! Spending his energies willy-nilly, one day a copy editor, one day president of the Brooklyn Art Union, one day a poet, one day a carpenter, one day a flaming Democrat party man, one day the muckraking reporter, all the while chasing boys hither and thither, and here he was doing all he could to wrest half an hour from two men who have the real thing in their veins and who had no time for him and why should they?
Melville returned with Emily and Austin, who both greeted Whitman with smiles and kindness as they took their places in the carriage. As evening surrounded and descended, they headed back downtown. Whitman was now quite subdued and Melville—sensitive, if only unconsciously, to his change in humor—felt a complimentary tinge of yearning and regret. It was aided and abetted by the effects exerted by the violet July hues taking possession of the atmosphere. He knew, not simply as a poetic concept but as a physical fact felt in that moment anatomically, how it was at that very hour at Arrowhead. And among his loved ones that would be found there, he pictured above all his wife and child, his wife still young and laden with another life miraculously folded within her womb and their little Malcolm who might be sitting on the kitchen floor playing with a scrap of potato peel, innocent and vulnerable, while he, their protector, wiled away his time flirting and strutting about down here in the city so changed from his own youth. Emily looked at him, saw that he had “gone away,” and felt a stirring in her breast.
“Where do you hope to publish this interview, Mr. Whitman?” she asked in a gentle tone, leaning forward.
“With a bit of luck, they will take it at the New York Herald and at the Brooklyn Eagle.”
“You look much more like a poet to me,” said Austin. “More a poet than a journalist.”
Whitman smiled at the young man taking an instant shine to him. “As a matter of fact, that is what I mostly do. But of course there’s no money in it. So …”
“I knew it!” said Austin, slapping his knee theatrically, quite pleased with himself.
“A poet, you say,” said Melville, coming about. “An admirable vocation if there ever was one. You must show me some of your verse.”
“I’d be pleased to. It is something I need to do more of.”
“Do you show your work easily?” Emily asked. “It seems to me poems can be so private.”
“Private they may be, but they are written to be read, read by others, in my case certainly, and that experience can be very stimulating.”
“Quite right,” said Melville.
“Tell me, brother,” said Emily, looking to lighten, or at least distract, the somber spirits of the two older men. “What does a poet look like exactly?”
Austin pointed to Whitman. “Like him.”
Everyone laughed.
“I mean look at me,” he went on, “I look like a banker’s son. I exude the opposite of personality. Whereas Mr. Whitman displays a raffish, interesting, bohemian bent.”
“And do you think,” she went on, “that a necessary condition for one to be a poet?”
“For one to be a real poet? The authentic article? Yes, I do.”
Emily looked down at her black skirt and gloves, at her customary appearance, the undertaker’s daughter. Then she looked up. “What says you, Mr. Whitman?”
“I disagree. I find it difficult to imagine Mr. John Milton, or Livy, or the oriental masters of verse affecting a particular sartorial slant. I think the persona of the artiste is something perhaps that has accompanied the decline of craftsmanship.”
“This is a very interesting idea Mr. Whitman,” Melville said.
“So then, this look of yours has an element of theater to it?” asked Austin.
“It pains me to admit it, but I daresay it does.”
“The decline of craftsmanship,” Melville repeated.
“Yes,” Whitman said, “I am sure the artisans and even the writers of verse during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance did not consider themselves artists as we now define the term. They had a place and knew it. The artist as hero, as a rebel, as a figure who has stepped to the side of society as it were, is relatively new—or so it seems to me.”
Melville noted the Morewood mansion coming into view and moved his toes around within his boots. “This is a conversation that merits continuance. But here we are, arriving at our destination.”
“I’m very grateful for the time you have been able to spare me. Please convey to Mr. Hawthorne my regards and wishes for his good health when you see him, and if you find yourself bored or insomniac at your dinner party, I shall be at the Downing Oyster House, probably until it closes.”
The carriage came to a halt. Whitman jumped out first so as to lend Emily his hand.
“I have heard of this place,” said Melville, impressed with the poet’s athleticism. “Where is it exactly?”
“At five Broad Street. It is owned and run by a black man and serves the best oysters in the city to a crowd composed of politicians, businessmen, socialites—and ladies with imagination.”
“I take note.”
“Ladies with imagination?” asked Emily placing a hand under her throat.
To his associates regaled in velvet smoking jackets at the Reform Club in London, John Rowland Morewood—taking gentlemanly understatement to a new extreme—referred to his Manhattan residence as “our flat in New York.” The flat in question was a three-story house of generous proportions with an august limestone facade, filled with fine French furnishings, that had an ample private garden, a reflecting pool stocked with trout, and a live-in staff of eight servants. The staff that evening had been augmented with ten additional people to accommodate the seventeen dinner guests. A table had been constructed and set for the event on the garden’s graveled main patio under a white awning.
As Melville and the Dickinsons were shown in, fussed over, and presented, the main focus of activity was taking place in the cavernous living room where champagne was being offered. The Duyckinck brothers and their wives came
over immediately to greet Melville and his two guests with goodwill and interest. They saw nothing at all amiss in the explanation as to how they met and came to travel with the authors to the city, and a vigorous conversation was initiated concerning the merits and virtues of the Massachusetts countryside and of New England small-town life with everyone expressing only positive views with the exception of Austin who, rapt in this new found world of urban luxury felt only shame that evening at his village roots.
Though rarely in need of one, Sarah Morewood had an ideal motive for that evening’s gathering. Thanks to a marriage made by one of her husband’s distant cousins, a Londoner well placed in the Sherry import business who had betrothed a Spanish woman of title, the guest of honor was a Spanish duchess pertaining to that same aristocratic Iberian family, a thirty-year-old widow of great wealth and beauty called María Luisa Benavides y Fernández de Córdoba. Concurrent with his elation at having arrived at a social gathering of the kind he had always dreamed about, Austin Dickinson found himself instantly besotted as the duchess was presented to him. Her English was perfect and annunciated with a Belgravian British air. The young woman’s neck was long and delicate, her cheekbones high, and her green eyes set slightly farther apart than normal, endowing her with an expression of perpetual grace. What most beguiled him was her long blond hair rolled into a stylish bun and pierced with a tortoise shell peineta. This latter object and a magnificent Mantón de Manila she wore about her otherwise bare shoulders were the only two concessions offered to her native culture. All the rest was pure Paris but worn unpretentiously. Austin was not alone in his state of worship for this exotic creature, but what did distinguish him almost at the outset of his arrival, to everyone’s surprise and to some gentlemen’s annoyance, was the interest she began to show in him.
Melville, most mindful of the familiarity that existed between his hosts and almost half of their guests with his wife and kin, and still wounded by his most recent confrontation with Hawthorne, was on his best behavior. He made a special point of introducing Austin and Emily together at all times and in Emily’s presence jokingly encouraged Sarah Morewood to find her a suitable dinner partner.
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