Tag: melville

How Do You “Mask Despair”? How Do You Handle a “November of the Soul”?

As my regular readers know, I have been mulling over Moby-Dick after a recent re-reading.  (Re-reading is highly recommended; see my blog here.)  In the very beginning of Moby-Dick, Ishmael tells us that when he is starting to despair, when he feels the “November of the soul,” he goes to sea.  Ishmael thinks that this is a universal solution, and the reason that all over “Manhattoes” (Manhattan) people in despair migrate to the shore, to the docks, and gaze upon the ocean: “Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.”  The ocean does help me when I am in the doldrums.   Perhaps it is the immensity and power of the ocean in relation to the paltriness of one human life.  I recently had a welcome dose of the sea, but it is not readily available to us all and is only a temporary antidote.

Thoreau reminds us that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,” so we know we are not alone.  There are others, many others, in the clutches of despair.  Old age may or may not be more liable to this condition, but it definitely provides less distraction from our own minds.  In our younger days, when we had jobs, children, obligations and a hectic schedule all around, there was still despair, but perhaps little time to consider it.  Now, it descends during quiet late afternoons and the wee hours of the morning.  And, lately, every time we turn on the news.

The ocean helps, but so does nature in all its forms.  Wendell Berry finds relief (not alleviation) from despair in wild things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

Berry finds “grace,” but only “for a time.”

There are other ways, additional ways, that we handle despair.  Niall Williams’ latest novel, Time of the Child, is about an older doctor who has lost his wife and also lost his faith.  Yet Doctor Troy attends mass, in an effort to ward off despair and order his life with the comfort of a schedule, a routine:

The doctor attended Mass, but without devotion.  After his wife Regina was taken by a cancer he hadn’t seen coming, he had lost the relic of faith he once had.  To mask despair against God, he chose an old tactic: retain a semblance of order, and in this way meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more or less than how to get through another day.

Oh, the things that we do to “mask despair”!  Is this perhaps the reason that we old people cling to habits, our houses, our ways of life? Rituals, habits, and repetitions paper over despair.  In a world and a body that are failing us, they are something that is ours – built up over a lifetime.

In an earlier book, This is Happiness, Williams talks about how an old woman has braced herself against despair:

As a shield against despair, she had decided early on to live with the expectation of doom, an inspired tactic, because, by expecting it, it never fully arrived.

Again, we know pessimistic people like this, we know times when we are like this ourselves (practically every day in the political realm, I am finding).  Not a pleasant way to live though, but, for some, expecting the worst is often a partial armor against despair.   

 So, what do we do with this despair in relation to our fellow elders: should we share it to make others know that they are not alone?  I remember, as a young woman, the first time I read Virgina Woolf’s admission that life “is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength.”  Someone was finally admitting to me what I thought was obvious, but I had never heard anyone articulate.   Mary Oliver says, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”  Yes.  The alternative is to buck up and, in our bravado, give others the hope that despair can be overcome.   Later in Walden, Thoreau exhorts us: “We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.”  I think I’m with the ladies on this one.

And there is another reason that we should share.  Our fears and worries, spoken out loud, are seldom as scary as when whispered silently through our minds.  When we expose our fears to the light, they do not disappear, but they often seem to shrink – or, at least, stop growing.  Also, remedies can be shared, as noted above.  Go to the sea, go to the woods, find comfort in ritual or habit.  And discovering that others have survived despair is the best encouragement we can find.

For anyone who came to this page by googling “despair,” and is in its clutches, please remember that you can talk to someone by texting or calling 988 for the suicide hotline.  Despair is a fact of life for all of us at times, but if there is no relief, please get some help.  You are not alone.

When I was young, I often used fantasy to counter despair.  I find it doesn’t work so well in old age.  I wrote a story in order to think about that: “Amnesia at the Airport.”  Try it.  Better yet, write your own story.  And share it.

Ishmael, Odysseus, and Seeing a Friend after 40+ Years

Ishmael, Odysseus, and Seeing a Friend after 40+ Years

In Moby-Dick, we don’t know how much time has elapsed before Ishmael – the only one who survives the voyage of the Pequod – tells his tale.  “And I only alone am escaped to tell thee” is the quote from the Book of Job which opens the Epilogue.  Ishmael has to remember, but there is no one left to keep him honest.

I recently had the experience of having lunch with someone I hadn’t seen for over forty years.  We were young wives and mothers together, and very close over a period of seven or eight years, but then moves, divorces, and misunderstandings drove us apart.  There was no internet in those times for casual contact, no Facebook to keep track of our families.  In addition, I knew this friend through my ex-husband’s family; she had been a lifeline when I had felt isolated in a new marriage.  But after the divorce, she drifted away with all the distanced in-laws.  After all those years, I finally told her how grateful I was for her friendship.

But how do you summarize forty years of your life? Especially, how do you do that with someone you once were close to? There are the facts of relocations, jobs, divorces, marriages, deaths.  There are the milestones of the children and grandchildren.  Ten or twenty minutes took care of the timelines; on what was really important in our lives, I think we barely got started.

And there is the question of what is important.  Seven or eight years into his trip home to Ithaca from Troy, Odysseus is washed up on the island of Phaeacia and the local king gives him a banquet.  He asks Odysseus to tell the guests about himself.  Odysseus had been king of Ithaca, he had been ten years at the war in Troy, and many years at sea.  He responds with these questions (which might very well have been Homer’s questions to himself when he started writing his epic): “What shall I say first?  What shall I keep until the end?”  These are the questions I asked myself when I sat across the booth from my old friend.  These are the questions that I ask myself when I think about my life.

I have done a lot of writing in my life   – novels, blogs, stories, reports – most of which were for my own amusement.  This blog is the only location where I share. And I have never written straight-forward memoir.  As I get older, however, I have had the urge to go back and try to make sense of the sweep of my life.  An autobiography, of sorts – or at least fragments of one.  But trying to piece my life together for my friend reminded me of how difficult that would be.

First, how honest could I be?  I found myself not sharing the more uncomplimentary pieces of my life.  Understandable, but regrettable.  If we don’t share our mistakes, we don’t bless the mistakes of others.  Secondly, I wonder how reliable my memory really is.  With friends, with family, we have all had the experience of recalling an event that no one remembers or that everyone remembers differently.  I brought up some things this week with my old friend that she had no recollection of and vice versa.  Did they really happen?  When biographers piece together a life, they look at documentary evidence of dates, events, truth.  Should we do the same with our own memories?  It should be noted, of course, that even if some of these events never really happened, they shaped our lives because we think they did.

Melville is, of course, writing fiction.  He slips in and out of Ishmael’s perspective and had to have a survivor of Ahab’s tragedy in order to have a frame for his tale.  Melville knew how the tale would end and what he wanted to include to come to that terminus.  We are trying to make sense of a life that, perhaps, does not make any sense.  We may be honorably trying to tell the truth, but our truths are more complicated than can be corroborated by documentary evidence.

I have tackled memoir-like writing at times, but always hidden behind the mask of fiction.  I wrote a novel about a woman visited by the ghost of Jonathan Swift.  By having to explain her life (and the last few centuries to him), she is forced to recapitulate and justify her life.  I also wrote a fanciful piece about a middle-aged woman and child trying to co-write – at the instigation of the child – a rule book for the best way to live (excerpt here).  I published neither, but learned a lot in writing them.  I’m with Montaigne, who said, “What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.” But, still, there was cloak of fiction, of story.  Was I being honest with myself?

Borges says that part of the problem is words. Words reduce the ineffable to the mundane.   In “Aleph,” Borges talks about seeing life as a whole, but the tragedy of having to move it into “successive language:” Yet, in his powerful poem, “Everness,” the master tries to convince us that nothing is completely lost:

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross,
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.

“God saves the metal and he saves the dross.”  God may save, but we must sort out the “metal and the dross” for ourselves. Borge’s poem reminds me of a line from Shakespeare’s powerful Sonnet 146: “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;” I don’t know of a better credo for life.  But to do this, we must be able to identify the dross, and honest memoir writing would probably help.

Meanwhile, how would you explain the last forty or fifty years if you ran into a very old friend?  How would you explain it to yourself?

About five years ago, I wrote a blog relaying some suggestions as to how to write a life review: “Feast on Your Life.”  Maybe it could help us as we think about it again.

Golden Nuggets From Melville

I have been re-reading Moby-Dick lately – very slowly and not for the plot.  An early critic of the novel (in a very negative review, of which there were many) said that Melville tried to combine two books – a work of tragic fiction and an informational text about whales and whaling.  I would suggest that Melville actually gives us three books and I’m grateful for it: 1) the fictional, 2) the informational, and 3) the philosophical.  Almost every chapter contains some nugget of wisdom, some spiritual musings, some explanation of the inexplicable, that makes rereading worthwhile.

Contrary to general belief, Moby-Dick does not start with the narrator saying, “Call me Ishmael.”  It begins with a brief section on etymology and a longer section entitled “extracts,” wherein Melville gives us a multitude of passages that he says were provided by a “Sub-Sub-Librarian.”  In this spirit, I will share some “extracts” from Melville over the next few months.  In the days before digital books and search engines, readers often kept a “commonplace book, wherein they wrote ‘extracts’ of anything they read that they wanted to remember, and thoughts about the same.”  So, here are some notations relating to old age from by commonplace book on Moby-Dick.

The first “golden nugget” is from Chapter 11, “Nightgown,” wherein Queequeg and Ishmael are cuddled up in bed trying to keep warm; it is December in New Bedford and there is no central heating.  Having just moved back to New England after many years, I can sympathize.  At least I have a mattress warmer (and central heating!).  Anyway, buried among the bed clothes was this little explanation of why we need to have a point of hardship to enjoy pleasure:

The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.  Nothing exists in itself.  If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable anymore. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason, a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.

“There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”  Is this why assisted living homes cloy?  Why retirement isn’t always the unmitigated joy that we thought it would be?  Is this why many people look at the poverty of their youth as a “good time”?  Oh, to have wandered the Berkshire Hills with Melville and Hawthorne (to whom Moby-Dick was dedicated) and discuss such subjects!

Here is a second little gleaning from Moby-Dick.  This one comes from Chapter 29, “Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb.”  (Note that the chapter titles sometimes read as stage directions – Melville thinks he is writing a Shakespearean tragedy, and he is right.) This one is about Ahab’s age and sleeplessness:

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.  Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels like going down into one’s tomb,” – he would mutter to himself, – “for an old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle [hatchway], to go to my grave-dug berth.”

Do we resist sleep in old age because it is too much like its “near enemy” death?  Or is it just that we are not living so hard during the day, not wrung out by the pace of life?  For myself, going to bed is not the biggest problem.  After dinner, an hour of television, and a couple of chapters of a good book, I turn into protoplasm.  But I cannot stay asleep, and those early morning hours are brutal. (If this is you, try reading Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” to know that you are not alone.)  Soon I am up and roaming the decks like Ahab, and congratulating myself that the night is over, and I have made it to another day.

As a last note, Melville wrote a whole chapter on whiteness: “The Whiteness of the Whale.”  He talks about whiteness as a source of horror (think ghosts and albino monsters like the whale), purity (think brides), beauty (think pearls), and as a symbol of the “benignity of old age.”  This got me thinking about the “white hairs” among us.

White hair used to carry the air of wisdom or power; white wigs were worn by powerful men during the 17th and 18th centuries. “White hairs” is also sometimes used as a derogatory term, a term of generational resentment. Our politicians (I refrain from calling them statesmen) have gotten old and older – but often blonder rather than whiter.  When I go to church or classical music concerts, I am often amazed at the sea of white hair and pale skin.  Melville did, later in his life, write a poem about old age in which the last image compares the white of skim milk (old age), with the rich color of cream (youth):

Old Age in his ailing
At youth will be railing
It scorns youth’s regaling
Pooh-pooh it does, silly dream;
But me, the fool, save
From waxing so grave
As, reduced to skimmed milk, to slander the cream.

I guess it just matters where you are in time’s continuum.  Melville only lived to 72; he is fairly white-haired in his last portrait, taken at the time of his retirement from the custom house at age 66.   Like Hardy, he mostly abandoned novels for poetry in his old age, and the reading public almost completely abandoned him.  It was their loss, but it doesn’t have to be ours. Pick up Moby-Dick (you probably have a copy in the house!) and open it anywhere.  You will be rewarded.

The Afterlife and Psychic Hygiene

Old folks have a reputation for worrying, for longing for the good old days, for catastrophic thinking.  I don’t think I am an overly negative person (my kids might disagree), but these are surely times to try an old lady’s optimism.  I know the stereotype is that elders are backward-looking, but I don’t want to return to the days before vaccines and the Civil Rights Act.  I am, however, searching for something positive to look forward to.

For years, parents could look forward to a better life for our children; upward mobility is not so easy anymore, for economic, environment, and political reasons.  At the founding of the UN, there were hopes for world peace.  We could find comfort that we would leave the world and our loved ones in better shape than we found them.  But no more.   So how can we alleviate our worries, calm our psyches, have the courage to soon leave life behind?

In “The Stages of Life” (recommended), Carl Jung acknowledged that old people needed something good to anticipate, and he suggested that the notion of the “afterlife” could have therapeutic value for us elders, particularly as it could take away some of the fear we face as we begin “transitioning” to death:

I therefore consider that all religions with a supramundane goal are eminently reasonable from the point of view of psychic hygiene.  When I live in a house which I know will fall about my head within the next two weeks, all my vital functions will be impaired by this thought; but if on the contrary I feel myself to be safe, I can dwell there in a normal and comfortable way.  From the standpoint of psychotherapy, it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition, as part of a life process whose extent and duration are beyond our knowledge.

Death as placebo, you say.  Maybe.

It is interesting to note that in the medieval period in Europe there was a general belief that life was getting worse, that mankind was declining from a golden age (Eden?) through silver and brass to iron.   Even earlier, Ovid gave a clear delineation of the ages in the Metamorphoses, from the Golden Age, which “still retained some seed of the celestial force,” through the Age of Silver, when constant springtime was compromised with the addition of the other seasons, to the Age of Bronze, and finally the corrupt Iron Age, when humanity let loose to “Violence and the damned desire of having.”  After this cycle of decline, the population is destroyed in a flood and new men are created out of the earth, and presumably the cycle starts again.  I don’t really know where we are in the current cycle, but “violence and the damned desire of having” sound familiar.  Any rewards or punishments were to be found in another life, in a very real heaven or a very scary hell.  The assumption of “progress” only became common after the Enlightenment.

Americans tend to believe (or say they believe) in an afterlife of some sort (reincarnation counts).  According to a Pew study in 2021, about 73% of Americans believe in heaven but only 62% believe in hell.  There’s optimism for you. More people over 50 believe in heaven and hell than younger people (no surprise there) and more Republicans believe than Democrats.  Maybe that’s why they are not so afraid of an earthly future of global warming and increasing warfare – as they say, “there will be pie in the sky when you die.”

But back to Jung and the idea that believing in an afterlife is an act of psychic hygiene.  Can we make ourselves do it?  As John Lennon inferred, we are past that.   “Imagine there’s no heaven/It’s easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us, only sky.”  Not believing in heaven is “easy;” believing has become very difficult – a little like trying to believe in Santa Claus again.  And yet I understand where Jung is coming from.  In his memoir (recommended) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung has a chapter entitled “Life After Death,” in which he recalls glimpses of eternity that he got as a child and again cautions against ridiculing the therapeutic comfort that believers receive:

Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence.  They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries. One has an inconceivable period of time at one’s disposal.  What then is the point of this senseless mad rush?

This led me to think about Herman Melville.  In a little-read book Melville titled The Confidence Man (written by the master just after Moby-Dick), one of the characters cautions against forcing old people up against the truth:

“Yes, poor soul,” said the Missourian, gravely eyeing the old man – “yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you.  You are a later sitter-up in this life; past man’s usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty.  Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams.”

And that is what facing the truths of our world reminds me of – “a supper too hearty.”  Is a belief in an afterlife an answer?  Simone de Beauvoir suggested in The Coming of Age that we all needed a project in old age, we must continue the good fight. Beauvoir says that “there is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.  In spite of the moralists’ opinion to the contrary, in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves.”  Yes.  But.  She also says (and all of this is in her conclusion to the book) that it is fairly inevitable that “illusions” will vanish and “one’s zeal for life pass away.”  And where does that leave us?

In this, as in most things, I land in Spinoza’s camp. Spinoza said that we were thinking about eternity in the wrong way; he says that we think of eternity as a matter of time rather than a matter of the moment, of awareness:

If we attend to the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their mind, but that they confuse it with duration, and attribute it to the imagination, or memory, which they believe remains after death. (Ethics V)

Reminding myself of my own mortality (try the Buddhist Five Recollections daily), helps me do this.  William Blake puts it more poetically:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

For an example of a very old lady’s momentary heaven, you might try my short story, “Like Heaven.”  For a blog on another aspect of this subject, try, “Retirement, Death, and the Land of Cockaigne.”  And try to put into words what it is you do believe.

Lastingness – In Fact and Fiction

Lastingness, by Nicholas Delbanco, may be a book whose title is better than the book itself.  The full title, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age, has a double meaning, presumes two questions: What kind of art is made in the artist’s old age?  What is the art of growing old?  I am interested in both questions.

Delbanco writes an interesting but very subjective book.  He is most concerned with how the author himself will fare in his own old age, which he is just entering.  Delbanco describes bright young lights that fizzled, artists who bloomed late, and others who improved steadily throughout their lives.  There are very few of the latter; it goes without saying that most of us have our ups and downs regardless of age.  There are also those who have what Thoreau calls “two growths like pear trees” – one earlier and one later.  Old age does not have a singular effect.

The area of the book that most interested me was how lastingness, in some cases, involved a change of form or expectation by the elderly artist.  Novelists sometimes switch to shorter forms like poetry (think Thomas Hardy), or artists limit their subject matter (think Monet); musicians change their repertoire, and some artists retire to solitary seclusion.  Many artists repeat themselves trying to rekindle past glory (almost always a mistake), and some go on to do what perhaps they should have done long ago – work only to please themselves.  This last, of course, is one of the greatest gifts of old age.  According to Delbanco, though, “lastingness” can only be determined by “assess[ing] the effect of works on others.” Maybe.  And it is doubtful that artists can always trust “others.”  Again, one of the pleasures of old age is self-evaluation, cultivating inward assessment, and discarding dependence on “the effect on others.”

John Updike’s wonderful article “Late Works: Writers and Artists Confronting the End” was published in 2006, just a few years before his own death, and posits that perhaps lasting is not so much to be valued as a new “senile sublime” that can only be seen in old age.  He defines “senile sublime” in the words of Eve Sedgwick:

…various more or less intelligible performances by old brilliant people, whether artists, scientist, or intellectuals, where the bare outlines of a creative idiom seem finally to emerge from what had been the obscuring puppy fat of personableness, timeliness, or sometimes even of coherent sense.

Oh, that we live long enough to shed our “puppy fat”!   Updike also points out that writers at the end of their lives often realize (and help their readers realize) that there is much about life that is “irreconcilable” with other parts of life.  Miranda, young and about to step into her “brave new world,” and the retiring Prospero have occupied the same stage. Billy Budd with his youth and integrity falls prey to the machinations of the evil Claggart and the dilemma of Captain Vere – and yet serves as a symbol of hope.  Old age seems to accept this opposition.

One novelist who writes about the old and lastingness and irreconcilability is Elizabeth Strout.  I recently read her Oh William!, which focuses on Lucy Barton (again) and her seventy-year-old ex-husband, who is about to become an “ex” again.  One thing that old age brings (particularly in this age of divorce and migration) is a trail of undefinable human connections, which seem to last in the mind if not always in actuality. The relationship between William and Lucy Barton surely endures in both ways.  Lucy is recently widowed by her second husband and feeling her age; William has been “left” by his latest and is refusing to acknowledge his own senescence.  Strout’s books are more about life than about plot, and particularly about the lastingness of relationships.

At the end of the book, Lucy realizes just how corralled William is by his past, and this makes her realize that she too is still moved by history she might not even remember:

And then I thought, Oh William!

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! Too?

Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves?

Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.

We are all mythologies, mysterious.  We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

Those last lines ring true for me.  Old age is about acknowledging the mysteries.  We know everything when we are eighteen; when we are seventy, we finally acknowledge that maybe there is almost nothing that we know.  Yet, I think if we are lucky – and if we last long enough, we come to love the mystery.

For a tale about the parts of ourselves that last into old age (if we can only respect the mystery), you might try my story “Needs of the Living Organism.”

Chips from the Hanging Spar – Melville’s Last Works

Melville would seem to have had a fairly miserable old age, ending with his death of cardiac failure at the age of 72.  No wonder his heart gave out.  After an initial success with books about sailing in the South Seas (Typee, Omoo, among others), Melville struck out with Moby-Dick (the greatest American novel that the NYTimes misspelled the title of in his obituary) and then again with Pierre (“Herman Melville Crazy” read a headline).  At the age of 38, he seemed to be washed up.  His last full novel, The Confidence-Man, didn’t help his reputation.  It is, however, a novel worth reading and a book of our time, of illusion and disillusion.  Not long ago, Philip Roth said that “the relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel—Melville’s last—that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam.’ ”

The characters in Melville’s novel are either scammers or those who are just asking to be scammed.  It asks the brilliant question as to why we are so prone to believe what we want to believe and not to look for the truth.  One of the most interesting passages in this regard involves an old person and is worth quoting here.  A “confidence man” is talking to a man from Missouri (no one seems to have names) about the conning of an old man on the steamer they all are traveling on.  The Missourian has just finished telling the old sick man that he shouldn’t trust in the natural remedies sold to him by the doctor/con man and the con man argues that it would be “pitiless” to take away the old man’s hope:

“Yes, poor soul,” said the Missourian, gravely eyeing the old man – “yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you [the old man].  You are a later sitter-up in this life; past man’s usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty.  Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams.”

Truth is too hard to bear in old age – and so we turn to religion, medicine, what? One might think of Jung’s call for religion as a source of “psychic hygiene” for one approaching death.  But of more interest here is Melville’s disillusionment with life.  There is none of that in Moby-Dick.  While there is the evil of Ahab, Moby-Dick is a tale of the cooperative effort of a shipload of very different men who work together to a common end.  Something has changed for Melville with time and age.  The taste of life has gone sour. 

But this was not Melville’s final statement.  I prefer to think of Melville’s unfinished novella Billy Budd as his last judgment on life.  There is still disillusionment, but there is also handsome, honest, innocent Billy.  Billy Budd has been called “Melville’s Testament of Acceptance” of life as it is (Fogle).  It has also been called a work of tragic irony.  I prefer to think that, after being buffeted about for decades, Melville shows us he remembers innocence, he remembers Eden.  And he has accepted that it is inevitably lost.  One thinks of Beethoven’s inscription to the last movement of one of his last works (String Quartet Opus 135): “The Difficult Decision.”  Over the notes he wrote the question, “Must it be?”  He then responds to himself as the movement lightens and quickens: “It must be.”

In Melville’s story, Billy must be hung even though his action was provoked by a psychopath and the whole crew is on his side.  But in the British Navy one could not get away with flaunting the rules.  It would be bad for discipline.

Melville flaunted the rules and paid the price in many ways.  I have no idea whether he had regrets in his old age, but it seems he was not particularly content.  In 1850, he had written an enthusiastic piece about Hawthorne (whom he had yet to meet), and in it he talked about how great writers did not avoid difficult topics.  And he says that “he who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great.  Failure is the true test of greatness.”  Melville himself was about to be tested.

He wrote the piece about Hawthorne in 1850, while he was working on Moby-Dick.  That great novel was published in 1851 to mediocre (at best) reviews.  In 1852, he published Pierre, which induced reviewers to doubt his sanity.  The Confidence Man  – Melville’s last full novel – was published in 1857 when Melville was only 38.  Eventually unable to sustain himself as an author, he took a job as a customs inspector in 1866 and worked at the New York Customs House for 19 years.  And then he started Billy Budd, which was published many years after his death.

According to the biographers, Melville entered a long silence at the end of his life.  Some thought he was crazy; but he was writing Billy Budd and, perhaps, came to the conclusion that we are all crazy and had to be to live this absurd life.

Melville had early success, which dwindled into an undeserved neglect and failure in his old age.  It happens.  We all have things (or marriages or children) which did not turn out as we hoped.  The question is what we do with all of that in our old age.  I wish I could tell Melville how much I love Moby-Dick; how well he read human nature in The Confidence Man, and how Billy Budd is one of the grandest of tragedies.

 In Billy Budd, the spar that Billy is hung on turns into a holy relic of sorts, with sailors chipping off bits surreptitiously because they know that there died a noble soul.  I have no chips of the spar or the true cross, but I have Melville’s books.

 If you are interested in thinking about what to do with a sense of failure in old age, you might look at my stories “A Balm in Gilead” or “A Perfect Ending.”  Or you might look at an earlier post, A Dimished Thing?.