Herman Melville's "Typee" and "Omoo"

Herman Melville's "Typee" and "Omoo"

Herman Melville, in D.H. Lawrence's account, is a sea-born, half-water being, a "modern Viking" who cannot accept humanity and turns back toward the elements rather than toward his fellow men. Lawrence contrasts him with Swinburne and Conrad, arguing Melville's vision of the sea is truer because he neither personifies nor sentimentalizes it. Melville flees toward the Pacific, which Lawrence describes as the oldest, most primeval of oceans, still dreaming in the Stone Age even as the Atlantic peoples have "advanced." Into this ancient, phantom-like world of islands — Samoa, Tahiti, Raratonga, Nukuheva — Melville sails, hating the civilized world he was born into yet searching, deliberately, for paradise. Lawrence reads Melville's entry into the valley of the dreaded cannibals of Nukuheva, in Typee, as an unconscious birth-myth: sliding down the narrow, dark gorge into the green Eden of the valley is like a struggle through birth into the Golden Age. There Melville finds the Typee people gentle and generous, kinder than the "white brothers" he left on the American whale-ship. He calls the white man the ugliest beast on earth. Lawrence notes three things that still disturb Melville in this paradise: the islanders' sexual "immorality" (which secretly pleases him), their cannibalism (practiced with a private, reserved sacredness Lawrence finds no worse than the Christian sacrament), and their fierce methods of warfare. Despite these, Melville insists he has found Paradise — he can go naked as before the Fall, and Fayaway, his native girl, decks his hair with red hibiscus and frangipani, asking nothing of him but love when he feels like it. Food is plentiful, the water sweet, the people happy. Yet Melville is not happy. He secretly grizzles and longs to escape, pining even for "Home and Mother," the very things he had originally fled. Lawrence insists this is because one cannot truly go back: trying to return to the savage, uncreate past makes the civilized soul feel as though it is decomposing. Melville's unhealed leg, which worsens through his four months on the island, is the physical sign of this sickness; only when he finally escapes does it begin to mend. His escape is violent — he drives a boat-hook into the throat of one of his dearest Typee friends, sinking him, rather than be kept from getting away, showing how desperately he needed to leave despite loving his hosts. No sooner is he aboard the whaler carrying him off from Nukuheva than he is overcome with nostalgia for the Typee valley he fled in such a fever. Lawrence sees in this the pattern of Melville's whole life: he was "born for Purgatory," always convinced Paradise existed and so always suffering for its absence. Even the ease and freedom of Typee itself became a torment to him, since what he truly needed was not Eden but something to fight against — the mills of God grinding inside him needed resistance, whether from missionaries, brutal sea-captains, or governments, to be at ease. The narrative then moves to Omoo, which follows directly from Typee. Melville escapes on the ramshackle whaling ship the Julia, and Lawrence calls this Melville's happiest, most reckless book — a picaresque account of Melville turned beachcomber alongside the roguish Doctor Long Ghost. The mutinous crew of the Julia is put ashore and imprisoned on Tahiti. For once, Lawrence says, Melville lives carelessly, epicurean and ironic, eating the world "dirt and all," and never repenting of what he does under the Long Doctor's influence. But Lawrence notes Doctor Long Ghost's recklessness comes from a real despair, letting his life drift rudderless, and Melville — who always cared, who was revolted at the sight of a white man "gone savage," tattooed and given wholly over to the islanders — could not sustain that indifference. He always cared too much to become a true renegade. Melville's next step is enlistment on an American man-of-war, recorded in White Jacket: back within civilization and discipline, yet still at sea, still loosely tied to America by what Lawrence calls a long chain that "never broke." By twenty-five his wandering was over, and he returned home to Mother and, later, to marriage — an ecstatic courtship followed, in Lawrence's telling, by fifty years of disillusion. Home becomes a "torture box," his wife "a thing with clay feet," fame itself a further disgrace. Lawrence connects this directly to Pierre, in which Melville shows that pursuing righteousness and goodness only produces disaster and slow degeneration — the harder one strives to be good, the worse the mess one makes. Lawrence closes by describing Melville's lifelong, unrelinquished ideal: after despairing of the "perfect woman lover," he sought instead the "perfect friend," a hope only half-realized in his sentimental attachment to Jack Chase in White Jacket. To the end of his eighty years, Melville could not accept that perfect relationships are impossible, that each soul must remain fundamentally alone, and so he blamed life itself rather than his own impossible ideal — dying still gripped by his belief in "ideal love" and the "noble spirit," a belief Lawrence explicitly refuses to share.

By D.H. Lawrence · First published 1923 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Biography, Non-fiction · 6,620 words

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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.

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adventure · travel · South Seas · Polynesia · cannibalism · cultural exploration · colonialism · narrative · autobiographical · romanticism · nature · island life

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