Modern American Poetry

Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 283

had never been entirely alive. Melville was a minor author of sea tales whose
appeal was closely associated with his own life as vagabond, isolato,and
adventurer. Melville’s later fiction, where it was known, was considered the
imaginative failure of an embittered man; and Moby-Dick,if it was admired,
was chiefly admired abroad.^5 In 1925, then, Melville carried with him the
aura of an American maudit—an obscure author with a criminal appeal not
unlike that which attracted Crane to Joyce. Crane, known to dress himself as
“an Indian” or “a cannibal” at parties, saw a brother in Melville, “who lived
among the cannibals”; like Crane, Melville was a sailor and a symbolist—or,
as the subtitle of Raymond Weaver’s biography of Melville identifies him, a
Mariner and Mystic.^6
The epigraph with which this chapter begins comes from Melville’s
Mardi in a passage Weaver quotes to describe Melville’s early ambition.
Crane read Weaver’s biography of Melville, which was published in 1921; he
read Moby-Dickfour times, read White-Jacket, Typee, Omoo, Mardi,and Israel
Potter,read Piazza Tales,and read Melville’s poems.^7 The life-narrative Crane
found in these books is summarized by Weaver as an ongoing conflict
between the claims of desire and “reality”:

Throughout Melville’s long life his warring and untamed desires

were in violent conflict with his physical and spiritual

environment. His whole history is the record of an attempt to

escape from an inexorable and intolerable world of reality: a

quenchless and essentially tragic Odyssey away from home, out in

search of “the unpeopled world behind the sun.” In the blood and

bone of his youth he sailed away in brave quest of such a harbour,

to face inevitable defeat. For this rebuff he sought both solace and

revenge in literature. But by literature he also sought his

livelihood.... Held closer to reality by financial worry and the

hostages of wife and children, the conflict within him was

heightened. By a vicious circle, with brooding disappointment

came ill health. (Weaver, Melville,19)

As Weaver’s rhetoric rises to the level of Melville’s in Mardi,he depicts
Melville’s literary project as “solace and revenge” for the failure of his
youthful “Odyssey away from home,” his longed-for deliverance from “the
vulgar shoals” of “an inexorable and intolerable world of reality.” Melville’s
youthful urge to escape the confines of bourgeois civility and “home” (later,
the wife and children he holds hostage) is renewed in Melville’s will to
transcend “fireside literature,” and produce a kind of writing that would