Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times

UP FROM THE DEPTHS

UP FROM THE DEPTHS

HERMAN MELVILLE, LEWIS MUMFORD, AND REDISCOVERY IN DARK TIMES

AARON SACHS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2022 by Aaron Sachs

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For Christine—again, always.

Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided.… Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.

—HERMAN MELVILLE, 1851

What has happened in history before, may happen again: after disintegration, renewal.

—LEWIS MUMFORD, 1951

CONTENTS

List of Illustrationsxi

Preface. Melville, Mumford, Modernityxiii

CHAPTER 1. Loomings (1927–29)1

CHAPTER 2. The Whiteness of the Page (1856–65)7

CHAPTER 3. Bitter Morning (1918–19)14

CHAPTER 4. Fragments of War and Peace (1865–67)20

CHAPTER 5. Reconstruction (1930–31)29

CHAPTER 6. The Golden Day (1846–50)37

CHAPTER 7. Retrospective (1956–82)45

CHAPTER 8. A Bosom Friend (1850–51)52

CHAPTER 9. Amor Threatening (1930–35)62

CHAPTER 10. Cetology (1851–52)71

CHAPTER 11. Neotechnics (1932–34)80

CHAPTER 12. The Ambiguities (1852)90

CHAPTER 13. Spiritual Freedom (1935–38)99

CHAPTER 14. The Happy Failure (1853–55)108

CHAPTER 15. Reconnaissance (1899–1925)117

CHAPTER 16. Disenchantment (1853–55)126

CHAPTER 17. Counterpoint (1938)136

CHAPTER 18. Redburn (1839–55)144

CHAPTER 19. Radburn (1923–39)154

CHAPTER 20. Revolutions (1848–55)166

CHAPTER 21. Misgivings and Preparatives (1938–39)177

CHAPTER 22. The Piazza (1856–57)186

CHAPTER 23. Faith (1940–43)195

CHAPTER 24. The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating (1856–57)206

CHAPTER 25. The Darkness of the Present Day (1944)217

CHAPTER 26. More Gloom, and the Light of That Gloom (1856–76)228

CHAPTER 27. Survival (1944–47)240

CHAPTER 28. The Warmth and Chill of Wedded Life and Death (1876–91)252

CHAPTER 29. Chronometricals and Horologicals (1944–51)264

CHAPTER 30. The Life-Buoy (1891; 1924–29)278

CHAPTER 31. Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1951–62)291

CHAPTER 32. Revival (1919–62)302

CHAPTER 33. Call Me Jonah (1962–82)315

CHAPTER 34. Lizzie (1891–1906)330

CHAPTER 35. Sophia (1982–97)341

CHAPTER 36. Rediscovery (2019)352

Acknowledgments361

Notes371

Illustration Credits433

Index435

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1. Lewis and Geddes Mumford, 1926 or 1927

FIGURE 2. Herman Melville, 1860

FIGURE 3. Lewis Mumford, Self-Portrait (in Navy Costume), 1918

FIGURE 4. Elizabeth Shaw Melville, c. 1847

FIGURE 5. Lewis Mumford, Our House on the Other Side of the Road, 1944

FIGURE 6. Lewis Mumford, Mills from Bluff St., Pittsburgh, 1917

FIGURE 7. Clarence Stein, Plan of a Typical Lane at Radburn

FIGURE 8. Lewis Mumford in 1940

FIGURE 9. Lewis, Sophia, and Geddes Mumford at Stanford, January 1944

FIGURE 10. The Melville children, c. 1860

FIGURE 11. Herman Melville, c. 1861

FIGURE 12. Herman Melville, 1868

FIGURE 13. Lewis Mumford, Pasture at Foot of Old Mitchell Place, 1944

FIGURE 14. Herman Melville, 1885 or 1886

FIGURE 15. Lewis Mumford, 1973

FIGURE 16. Elizabeth Shaw Melville, 1885

FIGURE 17. Lewis and Sophia Mumford, September 1971

FIGURE 18. Lewis Mumford, New Bedford (with Geddes), August 27, 1936

PREFACE

Melville, Mumford, Modernity

This is a story of two modern wanderers, convinced of their aloneness but still looking for connection. Lewis Mumford, born in New York a few years after Herman Melville died there, had the chance to look backward and find a kindred spirit: as of the mid-1920s, only one biography of Melville had been published, and Mumford decided to write the second, helping to bolster the so-called Melville Revival.¹ That kind of rediscovery can be a saving grace. But it takes work.

Modernity, after all, has been full of discontinuity and disorientation. The pace of change—the slippage of time—leaves people unmoored in space. Neighborhoods are razed—neighbors move away—the world is remade. In modern cities, there is the exhilaration of possibility, of fluid identity, of new experiences—the buzz of constant encounter. There is also the reality of crowding, pollution, poverty, injustice, mechanization, alienation. To be modern, as the philosopher Marshall Berman put it, is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. To be modern is sometimes to feel in touch, tapped in, attuned; it is also to feel lonely, inward, nervous, overwhelmed. Modernity has delivered movies, rockets, computers, cell phones, and vaccines, which politicians and business leaders tout as clear evidence of Progress—in part to distract people from other modern realities, like nuclear bombs, toxic chemicals, factory farms, sweatshops, and global warming.²

Some traumas are more acute than others, but it may make sense to think of modern times as generally traumatic.³ We repeat many of the same, doomed experiments. And we often fail to notice the repetition. In certain dark times, when change comes fast and our challenges seem brand-new, it can feel as though we have been completely cut off from the wisdom of history.⁴

Melville understood modern trauma, which is partly why we know him as America’s great nineteenth-century tragedian.⁵ Just over a hundred years ago, though, almost no one had heard of him. Talk about discontinuity: in 1850, he was one of the best-known writers in the western world, but by 1900 he was utterly forgotten. It was only between 1919 (the centennial of his birth) and 1951 (the centennial of Moby-Dick) that Melville was rediscovered and ultimately canonized. Apparently, American culture in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s had need of a forebear with a dark vision. Publishers put out new editions of even Melville’s most difficult and obscure works; scholars produced several more biographies and critical studies; and college students started to read Melville as often as they read Walt Whitman, who had, let’s say, a rosier view of America’s accomplishments and prospects. The Melville Revival was part of a broad push toward revisionism, toward a fuller, more honest reckoning with the past—which, in turn, helped Americans reckon with the wars and economic panics and technological upheavals and vicious social divisions of their present.⁶

These were also the decades when Lewis Mumford made his reputation, not only as a Melville biographer but also as an urban theorist, cultural critic, and historian of technology. Though Mumford’s is no longer a household name, back in 1951—the year he published the final installment of his unique four-volume masterwork, The Renewal of Life—he was one of the foremost public intellectuals in the United States. And his influence endured for three more active decades. Your attitude toward ecology, modern architecture, and even social media has probably been shaped by Mumford’s eerily prescient writings.⁷ Today, in what many people are experiencing as a new dark age, full of foreboding over disease outbreaks, climate change, economic inequality, racial and religious bigotry, technological overload, refugee crises, neo-fascism, and near-constant warfare, it is time for a Mumford Revival. History provides perspective; perspective can help us work toward renewal. True hope, as the historian Christopher Lasch noted, rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past: history shows that better times have generally been achieved through the open-eyed efforts of those who push on despite the number of times they have already failed.⁸

Mumford is relevant today precisely because his writings confronted one of the bleakest eras in American history, spanning the anxious aftermath of World War I; the Great Depression; World War II, in which his son was killed; the invention of the atomic bomb; and the narrow viciousness of McCarthyism. Modernity was not looking particularly attractive, and Mumford analyzed its traumatic tendencies with an eloquent frankness, hoping ultimately to redirect it into more humane formulations, like Garden Cities. And, perhaps counterintuitively, it was Melville, more than any other intellectual or artistic ancestor, who helped him cope with his own overwhelmedness and then develop his alternative vision. The work Mumford did on Melville nearly killed him: he had a yearlong nervous breakdown after finishing his biography in 1929, and he placed the blame squarely on Melville’s desolate outlook. Yet he remained obsessed with and inspired by Melville for the rest of his life, referring to him constantly in both his public and private writings.⁹

One of the key reasons Melville’s legacy turned out to be so generative for Mumford is that he recognized his predecessor’s demons as being not just personal but political. Rather than a melancholy, old-fashioned man left behind by the fast-moving world, Melville was a writer keenly engaged with the concerns of his day. In chapter 1 of Moby-Dick, Loomings, our narrator, who famously tells us to call him Ishmael, goes to sea specifically because he can’t stand modern life in New York City, where everyone is tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.¹⁰ Twenty-first-century readers encountering Melville tend to see his novels as timeless and metaphysical (with Ishmael standing in for any outcast since the Bible), but for Mumford they were anchored in the mid-nineteenth century—in the rise of a stultifying new labor regime, for instance—and so they helped him think about what had changed and what hadn’t between Melville’s time and his own. Often, the resonances were surprising. The modern art of rediscovery requires frequent pauses and head-turnings, a willingness to flash back and forth in time, an openness to the uncanny.¹¹

Certainly, a book like Moby-Dick plumbed universal questions of fate and evil and the indifference of nature, but it was also about Ishmael’s peculiarly modern kind of ennui, his feeling of alienation from the environment and disconnection from the past. To Mumford, Moby-Dick succeeded not because of its evocation of grand tragedy but because it captured the tension between the two dissevered halves of the modern world and the modern self—its positive, practical, scientific, externalized self, bent on conquest and knowledge, and its imaginative, ideal half, bent on the transposition of conflict into art, and power into humanity.¹²

Ishmael, an archetypal modern hero, is torn apart and tormented by modernity, but survives to swim in its currents, buoyed by modernity’s own quirky opportunities for solidarity. Aboard the Pequod, named for a celebrated but supposedly extinct tribe of Indians, he feels a deep bond with all his diverse, worldly co-laborers, despite his pained awareness that modern history has drawn stark lines between them, has labeled some of them conquerors and others conquered. The injustice and helplessness are overwhelming—all the more so because Americans were supposed to be enjoying a land and an era of equal opportunity—but at least the whale hunters, enmeshed in modern commercial networks spanning the globe, are joined together in their fatal goal and thus welded into oneness.¹³ They know they’ll all go down together; at sea, a sense of doom provides some common ground, however watery.

For many years, I associated my own sense of cultural trauma with global warming and the dawning of the digital age, two seemingly new trends that I became acutely aware of in 1992, when I graduated from college. Two decades later, though, as I dug deeper into Mumford’s life and work, I started seeing eerie continuities between my peer group (aimless Gen-Xers) and Mumford’s (the Lost Generation). One further effect of our closer time co-ordination and our instantaneous communication, Mumford wrote—in 1934—must be noted here: broken time and broken attention.¹⁴ How much had really changed between the 1930s and the twenty-first century, between, say, the Great Depression of Mumford’s prime and the Great Recession of 2008? Could the internet have been any more jarring than electricity, telephones, and petroleum-powered airplanes? Didn’t modernity always seem to have a kind of unjust and catastrophic logic, with constant motion and relentless acceleration leading to ever more crashes and clashes, to destruction on an incomprehensible scale?¹⁵

And then I came to understand that Mumford’s investigation of the past had caused him to ask similar questions about modernity’s continuity amid discontinuity—that the trauma of World War I had not made sense to him until he studied the trauma of the Civil War—that he could see his own era clearly only after he had trained himself to look through Melville’s eyes. We are still living with the consequences of the changes that Melville started to notice: the shift to industrialism and fossil fuels, the rise of unfathomable financial systems, the disintegration of local communities and ecological relationships. So this book, though grounded in Mumford’s career in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, when he was working on The Renewal of Life, takes regular trips back to Melville’s life and times, during which Melville himself also regularly looked backward. And this book’s design is also meant to help us look ahead to the new/old crises of our present day and to the visions of the future that the past might help us generate.¹⁶ The alternating Melville and Mumford chapters, the jump cuts between the nineteenth century and the twentieth, are meant especially to capture the continuity that persists in the face of undeniable change, to provide the visceral experience of suddenly hearing history’s uncanny echoes.¹⁷

Over the last two hundred years, continuity has gotten harder and harder to discern. Historians will never agree about exactly when the modern period began in the West, but there’s a fairly clear consensus that perceptions of time started to shift drastically in the Revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century. Before that, a certain amount of continuity was simply assumed: people largely experienced time in cyclical terms, through the turning of the seasons, through holiday festivals and rites of passage, through planting and harvesting and letting land lie fallow, through weeks of labor and sabbath days of rest. There was a comfort to these cycles, especially during dark times. Everyone figured that the wheel would eventually come around again, that at least some of the dominant trends of the past would be restored. But the leaders of the Enlightenment shifted people’s gaze away from the past and toward the future, insisting on the notion of steady, linear Progress. And by the time Melville was born, in the wake of the American and French revolutions, Progress had come to mean not the extension of a continuum but a series of great, disjunctive leaps. In fact, the idea of revolutionary shifts seemed to define the new era; change was so constant and rapid that history felt potentially irretrievable and, in any case, largely irrelevant.¹⁸

Since then, the pace of change has only accelerated. Western society is more disconnected from the past than ever before. The Covid-19 pandemic was certainly a shock, but only an ahistorical culture could refer to it so relentlessly as unprecedented. Both Melville and Mumford would have scoffed at the word, because they both came to understand that, despite the seeming dominance of change, the past is always interwoven with the present. Some of our current challenges—climate change, perhaps most importantly—have novel elements, but it’s helpful to remember that past societies and individuals have confronted parallel threats. When Covid-19 started to dominate our reality in the spring of 2020, many historians wondered why we didn’t just move our activities outside, as people tended to do, with good success, during the flu pandemic of 1918–19 (which Mumford lived through). Much had changed in the intervening century, and the pandemics were not exactly the same, but in both cases the simple strategies of mask-wearing and physical distancing made a huge difference—at least, in communities where leaders encouraged a willingness to sacrifice for the common good.¹⁹

This book insists on a dialectical relationship between change and continuity. Both Mumford and Melville have their own chronological arc, showing their development as thinkers and writers and husbands and fathers. But the juxtaposed resonances between their lives matter just as much. Taking a cue from modernists like Virginia Woolf, who was one of Mumford’s favorite writers and who experimented with time and nonlinear narration in nearly all of her novels, I want to emphasize the persistent significance of the past without denying the reality of dizzying shifts.²⁰ And like Melville and Mumford themselves, I want to critique modernity on its own terms, without romanticizing simpler times, when men were men and stories had a predictable form.²¹ The deepest experiences of rediscovery are simultaneously bolstering and unsettling.

Mumford did not turn to Woolf as often as he turned to Melville, but he did note his enduring appreciation for Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse.²² The three-part story is seemingly dominated by its first and last sections, each one quite long, yet each covering just one day. The middle section, entitled Time Passes, uses only a few pages to cover ten years. During that decade, World War I comes and goes, a few key characters die (in parenthetical asides), and the islanded house where most of the action takes place gradually degenerates, despite the noble efforts of an elderly woman who scrubs the floors and brushes away the cobwebs. Time passes; entropy rules. Everything, it seems, has changed. Yet when the remaining characters reconvene at the house, it is their shared past that dominates their consciousness. All around them, as Mumford put it, they see layer upon layer of history, bursting with a sense of time that somehow includes both erosion and accretion, both unpredictability and steadiness. Woolf reminds us that although the beam of the lighthouse flashes and flickers in patterns that can be hard to interpret, it is in fact revolving at a regular rate. There is a coherence in things, thinks one character, who will soon be dead, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple effect of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.²³ Yet: they are only moments; they themselves are fleeting. They will need to be rediscovered.

The seizing of such moments is especially precious in a culture that fetishizes Progress and innovation and an orientation toward the future. Modernity feels traumatic to many people precisely because one of the hallmarks of trauma is a sense of temporal rupture: you face a horror, and from now on everything will be different. Those who study trauma suggest that it’s counterproductive to imagine a full recovery: you can never be the person you were before. Rather, the goal is to dwell with the horror as calmly as possible. But the process of working through your trauma may well involve rediscovering older parts of yourself, which, after all, are never completely erased. There is often solace in that rediscovery, even if it’s only temporary. And that holds for societies as well as for individuals.²⁴

Both Melville and Mumford, in their obsession with seeing the past in the present, remind us of the communal obligation to endure. My hope is to rediscover their capacity for realism, connection, and orientation, amid modernity’s ongoing traumas.²⁵

UP FROM THE DEPTHS

CHAPTER 1

Loomings (1927–29)

Do you know any optimistic historians? There aren’t many. Spend almost any length of time studying the past, and the rosiest conclusion you’ll come to is that our record is, well, mixed. Every time we take a hundred steps forward, we take ninety-nine back, and it’s unclear where the next one is going to land.

For every scholar willing to claim that, say, the 1950s were a great era in American history, when the income gap closed and opportunity knocked at everyone’s door, a hundred others will remind you that not everyone had a door, that there was a war in Korea, that some veterans were drinking too much and beating their wives, that women were kept from the workforce, that African Americans were kept from voting, that children grew up with air-raid drills, that artists were blacklisted and intellectuals jailed for controversial opinions, that synagogues were bombed, that radiation and toxic chemicals were seeping into everyone’s bodies.

But pessimism does not exclude the possibility of hope—because history teaches that things do shift. The most dour among us will argue that all change just represents entropy, the inevitable drift toward further chaos. But then why didn’t Nature reclaim our cities centuries ago? Yes, we are part of the chaos, but we also sometimes struggle against it: we create culture, make meaning, insist on ideals like liberty, equality, and solidarity, sometimes with startling, unpredictable success.

Lewis Mumford’s first book, published in 1922, just before he turned twenty-seven, was The Story of Utopias. It was, of course, a story of failure, because Utopia is an impossible dream. But the point was the value of the dreaming, the restless striving toward collective thriving, the determined envisioning of alternatives to hierarchy and domination. If there was no such thing as a perfect place, there could at least be a good place, which Mumford sometimes referred to as "eutopia, drawing on the Greek root in words like eulogy and euphonious. And he argued that our collective will-to-eutopia" was in fact the only thing preventing society’s disintegration. Predictably, for the rest of his life, Mumford would have to fend off the label of dreamy Utopian, and that drove him crazy. In his 1940 book, Faith for Living, he included an entire chapter called Life Is Better than Utopia, and when he issued a new edition of The Story of Utopias in 1962 he cantankerously reminded his readers that my utopia is actual life. What he always returned to was the need, in any half-decent society, to protect people’s ability to protest and resist, to contest dominant values, which so often serve merely to keep the powerful in power: Unlike utopian writers, I must find a place in any proposed scheme for challenge and opposition and conflict.¹

In short, to be a eutopian meant to believe in the constant, open renegotiation of what the good society should be, in the face of stiffening conventions and constraints—meant embracing hope, despite ever-looming Ordeals of Reality. That’s another chapter title, from the very last book Mumford published, just before the onset of dementia; it referred to the period when he was writing his Melville biography, from 1927 to 1929.

He had started work on the Melville project under congenial circumstances: summer, Martha’s Vineyard, with his wife, Sophia, and their two-year-old son, in a shabby little shack they had rented, on a lonely heath. The sea was their constant companion, washing against the cliffs, whispering or roaring, soothing or threatening, advancing or retreating; nearby was an ancient, tree-lined farm worked by two elderly women. Mumford delighted in the flow and ebb, the stimulation and repose of the landscape: a ridge of sandy cliffs, skirting the shores for a couple of miles until they sank into dunes, marked the abrupt end of the land, and at the bottom of these cliffs we sunned ourselves and bathed.²

It was a refuge, a retreat: many members of the Lost Generation escaped the trauma of the Great War by immersing themselves in nature and seeking inspiration from the past. Up to this point, Mumford had been ensconced in New York City, and he still lived there in the fall, winter, and spring, but in his writing, throughout the 1920s, he had already begun to search historical landscapes for ways of transcending his life amid skyscrapers and offsetting his society’s fixation on power and conquest. Unlike most 1920s intellectuals, though, who generally looked to Europe for alternatives to the conservatism dominating the United States, Mumford dove ever deeper into American cultural history.³

FIGURE 1. Lewis and Geddes Mumford in 1926 or 1927.

After The Story of Utopias he published Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization (1924), in which he proposed the classic Massachusetts village as the embodiment of a highly intelligent partnership between the earth and man.⁴ Then, in his breakthrough book, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (1926), Mumford wrote even more yearningly of old New England, celebrating the efflorescence of imagination in the 1840s and 1850s, noting the outdoor energy of antebellum poetry and prose, the embrace of both science and art, modernity and timelessness. The Golden Day established writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville as the archetypal American geniuses, sparking a new scholarly movement to appreciate what we now call The American Renaissance.⁵ The clear heroes of that book were Emerson and Whitman, and either could easily have served as the subject of a new biography. But Mumford chose Melville.

Perhaps he wanted to embrace tragedy as openly as possible, to shake off the public’s perception that he was primarily a nostalgic utopian. Perhaps he truly craved a dose of darkness, found it exhilarating to follow Melville in a flight … over an unconquered and perhaps an unconquerable abyss. Or perhaps he wanted to redeem Melville: his perplexities, his defiances, his torments, his questions, even his failures, all have a meaning for us.⁶

Certainly, he wished to contribute to the revival that had been initiated by Raymond Weaver’s book of 1921, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic. Mumford agreed with Weaver that Melville was distinctly modern and that his tragic sensibility was deeply relevant to the post–Great War world.⁷ But he was also eager to revise Weaver’s accounting of the second half of Melville’s life.

To Weaver, the great author’s final four decades, from 1851 (after Moby-Dick was published in November) until his death in 1891, seemed an utter waste—years of bitter withdrawal, disillusioned sterility, perhaps even mental illness. Yes, he wrote a few poems, but, as Weaver put it, his signal literary achievement was done. The rest, if not silence, was whisper. After devoting 350 pages to that early achievement, Weaver tacked on one final chapter, called The Long Quietus, to cover Melville’s whispering defeat, even referring to The Confidence-Man, published in 1857, as a posthumous work.⁸

Mumford read Weaver’s book in the fall of 1927, and paused in his research notes to record his outrage: Weaver, to support his melodramatic thesis, puts forty years into forty pages.⁹ When Mumford’s biography of Melville came out, it gave three times as much space to those final four decades, and the last chapter of the book was called, pointedly, The Flowering Aloe.¹⁰ Indeed, Mumford insisted not only that Melville had written some beautiful, poignant poetry in his later years but also that he had stumbled onto a kind of peace: especially during the 1870s and 1880s, Melville found life, not good or bad, malicious or forbearing, true or false. Something more important had happened: he found it livable.¹¹

Mumford had been through his own crucible from about 1915 until 1925, when he was in his twenties, struggling with his marriage, with vague but debilitating illnesses, with his conviction that he was destined to write plays and poetry, with a tangled relationship to his overbearing intellectual mentor, Patrick Geddes. But once he started work on The Golden Day and once Sophia gave birth to their first child (named Geddes) in July 1925, Mumford came into a new confidence. He saw Melville as the ultimate challenge. Until that point, Mumford believed, I had never pushed myself to my limits, but by confronting Melville’s dark life story, he thought he could convey the lesson of a noble defiance.¹² On Martha’s Vineyard, in the summer of 1927, islanded, surrounded by the sounds of the sea, he took great pleasure in getting a drenching in the nakedness of natural scenes, natural forces, natural acts.¹³ He seemed to assume that his sanguine disposition, his naturally buoyant temperament, would help him resurface after he went plunging after Melville into those cold black depths, the depths of the sunless ocean.¹⁴

But the writing process is fickle, unpredictable: I could not guess then that Melville’s tragic exploration of his depths would in time unbare parts of my own life which I had never been ready to face.¹⁵ By the fall of 1928, as Mumford was finishing the biography, he found himself grappling with problems, pressures, bafflements, and emotional cross-currents of my own similar to those I was probing in Melville.¹⁶ Apparently there was a deeper parallel than he had realized: he had found a brother spirit.¹⁷ And this sudden identification would evolve into his lifelong obsession not only with Melville but with the darkness of his own soul, and of human history.

As both the year and his book drew to a close, Mumford found that his energies were badly depleted, and he began hoping he would fall ill, just so he would have an excuse to rest.¹⁸ In a verse I addressed to Melville …, I pictured my relation to him, ‘a sick man,’ as that of a nurse, watching by his bedside, tending him through the fever that brought him almost to death. In that office, I poured my sunlight upon him, only to find myself being swallowed up by his blackness, falling with him into chasms no light of mine could ever penetrate. Before that vigil was over, I wrote, ‘the weakened nurse became the patient: I watched the fever take possession of my bones.’ ¹⁹ Even his marriage began to falter again, as Sophia suffered a miscarriage and expressed jealousy over Lewis’s attentions to their neighbor Helen Ascher, a dark, sensuous woman (Lewis’s words) who lived nearby both in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard and who was married but known for having many lovers.²⁰ And then, as Mumford put it, with a kind of Melvillian fatality both Sophia and I from November on went through the most desolate year of our whole lifetime until our son’s death in 1944.²¹ As Mumford paced along New York avenues, he sometimes composed obituaries, nice ones, written in the New Republic style, about myself.²² It was, as Ishmael would say, a damp, drizzly November in his soul.²³

By May 1929, Mumford should have been celebrating his book’s publication, but instead, at the age of thirty-three, he was reading Dante and imagining himself lost in the darkest of forests—in a purgatory. His son had been in the hospital for months after barely surviving surgery for a double mastoid, which had come close to infecting his brain, and Lewis would be haunted by the boy’s feverish wails for the rest of his life. He felt he had experienced one of the deepest torments a human being can know: his utter helplessness, as in a nightmare, to save the person he loves from mortal injury.²⁴ Now he was actively considering an affair with Helen, and he suspected that Sophia was already seeing another man: we felt inwardly estranged, with nothing in common except our distance from each other. By July, the adjective Melvillian had entered his lexicon to stay (though with two different spellings). The inner me has never been worse, he wrote, in his private notes. For the last few days I have been conscious of a bleak, Melvillean feeling of despair: vast, blank, senseless, but unaccountably desperate. His image is bad medicine; and when I am feeling down I begin to regret that I had anything to do with him.²⁵

Melville, it turned out, was Mumford’s white whale. But did that make him Ishmael or Ahab?

The biography did reasonably well at first, and was selected for the Literary Guild’s new paperback series. That provided a nice windfall. But sales dried up a few months later. On October 19, Mumford turned thirty-four. On October 29, the stock market collapsed, launching what would become the Great Depression. No one cared about white whales after Black Tuesday.

CHAPTER 2

The Whiteness of the Page (1856–65)

In early 1857, still alive, Melville published The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a work of darkly tangled prose. It came out on April Fool’s Day, also the day on which all of the novel’s action takes place—but no one seemed to get the joke. A frank, gentlemanly swindler aboard the Mississippi steamboat Fidèle (Faithful) offers various passengers their heart’s desire—offers, essentially, to save their lives—for a small fee or a temporary loan. The reading public wasn’t buying. Reviewers suggested that it was Melville himself who was the con artist.¹

Late that summer, Melville’s publisher, surprised by what came to be known as the Panic of 1857, went bankrupt—along with a number of other book and magazine publishers. It looked like the national economy might need years to recover. Melville’s net profit from The Confidence-Man was zero.²

Financial troubles had been vexing Melville throughout the 1850s. He wrote furiously, to keep pace with his debts. But the utter failure of The Confidence-Man, combined with the general weakness of the publishing industry, spurred him to a painful acknowledgment: he could no longer pretend that he was making a living as a writer. His masquerade was over.

Between 1846 and 1857, Melville had published ten books: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846); Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847); Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849); Redburn, His First Voyage (1849); White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850); Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851); Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852); Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855); The Piazza Tales (1856); and The Confidence-Man (1857).

Between 1858 and 1865, Melville published: nothing.

In the famous chapter of Moby-Dick called The Whiteness of the Whale, Melville wrote with horror of the dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color atheism from which we shrink.³ I picture him shrinking at the farmhouse he and his family owned in the Berkshires from 1850 until 1863, staring out at the fields and forests and mountains during the long New England winter. Sometime during that span of years, Melville crossed the narrow line between faith and doubt. A blanketing of fresh snow can soften a landscape, can seem clean and calming; or it can drain away living color, so that the countryside becomes dull, pale, sickly. It depends on your perspective.

Mumford would be the first to insist that Melville did not surrender; for he kept on writing to the end of his days.⁴ But The Confidence-Man clearly represented a crisis of confidence. The book itself, Mumford thought, revealed that sweetness and morality had become for Melville the greatest of frauds.⁵ Later, in a letter to a friend, Mumford called the novel a product of [Melville’s] madness …, written with only sand and thirst for inspiration.⁶ Mumford believed that by 1858 Melville had regained possession of himself, but for a long time afterward he would be prone to depression and violent mood swings, which tormented his family.⁷

Melville’s wife, Elizabeth, usually called Lizzie, had grown deeply concerned about Herman by the summer of 1856, when she wrote to her father, Lemuel Shaw, the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, for help. Shaw responded with money for Herman to go on a long trip and an invitation for Lizzie and the kids to move in with him in Boston. In truth, Justice Shaw already knew about Herman’s tendencies: When he is deeply engaged in one of his literary works, he confines him to hard study many hours in the day—with little or no exercise, & this especially in winter for a great many days together. He probably thus overworks himself & brings on severe nervous affections.⁸ Melville had been filling pages obsessively for eleven years, and that had taken a toll. For some time already there had been eye trouble and chronic back pain; various family members had witnessed his ugly attacks, and he often seemed dispirited and ill.⁹

We have all these testimonials, and yet we know hardly anything precise about what Melville was feeling or how he interacted with his family. Was he becoming unhinged in 1856? He himself had no comment—at least none that has survived. But he was certainly bitter about his finances and the reception of his books. Desperate to repay a substantial loan that spring, he had started to auction off precious parcels of the land surrounding his house. For a man accustomed to daily circumambulations of his estate, during which he could be seen patting various trees upon the back, such an act of liquidation might easily intensify the scorn he harbored for the money economy, and also for himself.¹⁰ That scorn is at the heart of The Confidence-Man: the novel dissects a society in which every interaction is an attempt at extortion or exploitation, in which consumers and investors are more likely to support new products like the Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator or the Protean Easy Chair than to engage with deep meditations on faith. If only, as the novelist Jonathan Franzen once wrote, Melville had been able to say to himself, when he was struggling to support Lizzie and their kids: Hey, if worse comes to worst, I can always teach writing.¹¹

What he could do, thanks to his father-in-law, was sail for Europe and then the Holy Land. Did he actually want to go? I find it impossible to tell. Did he enjoy himself? His travel journal is, well, mixed. The years 1856 and 1857 seem to have been particularly trying for Melville. But the bulk of the evidence we have about his adult life suggests that for at least a couple of decades he quite regularly swung back and forth between boisterous affability and bleak, despairing withdrawal. Did he suffer from what we might recognize today as some form of bipolar disorder? Possibly, but if so, it was not severe, for he worked his entire life and stayed married for forty-four years.

In early October 1856, having delivered the manuscript of The Confidence-Man, Melville prowled around New York City for a few days before boarding the steamship Glasgow, and he seems to have relished the break in his writing routine. His friend Evert Duyckinck described him as right hearty and charged to the muzzle with his sailor metaphysics and jargon of things unknowable; the two passed more than one good stirring evening together, during which Melville appeared to be warming like an old sailor over the supper.¹²

Once he arrived overseas, though, and renewed his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was serving as a diplomat in England, Melville seemed, in Hawthorne’s words, much overshadowed, as though he did not anticipate much pleasure in his rambles, for that spirit of adventure is gone out of him.¹³

Pleasures did come, eventually: Beautiful morning. Blue sea & sky. Warm as May. Spanish coast in sight. Mountains, snow capped, always so Captain says. Mate comes out with straw hat. Shirt sleeves. Threw open my coat.—Such weather as one might have in Paridise. Pacific.¹⁴

But, reading through Melville’s journal, one might be tempted to say that such pleasures were, in the end, overshadowed: I am emphatically alone, & begin to feel like Jonah.… Ride over mouldy plain to Dead Sea.… Foam on beach & pebbles like slaver of mad dog—smarting bitter of the water,—carried the bitter in my mouth all day—bitterness of life—thought of all bitter things—Bitter is it to be poor & bitter, to be reviled.… Whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape—bleached—leprosy—encrustation of curses—old cheese—bones of rocks,—crunched, knawed, & mumbled.… The unleavened nakedness of desolation—whitish ashes.¹⁵

Hawthorne had peered into his friend’s soul. On one of the days they spent together, they had taken a long walk along the Irish Sea; eventually, as Hawthorne noted, they sat down in a hollow among the sand hills (sheltering ourselves from the high, cool wind) and smoked a cigar. It was November. Melville summed up: Sands & grass. Wild & desolate.… Good talk. Hawthorne was more expansive: Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than the rest of us.¹⁶

When Melville returned home, he took up residence again with his family in the Berkshires. But instead of trying to compose and sell more obscure novels, he decided to go on the speaker circuit—in part because domestic life had always been so fraught for him. Each winter (the lecture season), between November 1857 and February 1860, he gave dozens of talks, throughout the Northeast and as far west as Milwaukee, on topics ranging from Ancient Statuary to The South Sea. One reporter noted in awe that the audience showed a continuous merriment in response to Melville’s facetious tone; indeed, in his role as a humorist, Melville had even managed to get his listeners to applaud his scathing criticism of the U.S. government for the atrocities it had committed against Native peoples. A different reviewer called his style nervous and vigorous, yet easily flowing, and falling constantly into the most melodious cadences. Yet most of the people who recorded their reactions to Melville’s lectures complained that he was a hopeless mumbler: his delivery was … monotonous and indistinct; the words came through his moustache about as loud and with as much force as the creaking of a field mouse through a thick hedge.¹⁷ It was not a sustainable career.

When his old creative urges came back to him, during these years, he turned to poetry, and by 1860 he had finished enough poems to make a short volume—which no publisher would touch.

That spring, he transferred ownership of the Berkshire estate to Judge Shaw. In March 1861, when President Lincoln took office, Melville went to Washington to try to get some sort of government appointment, perhaps the type of consulship that had served Hawthorne so well in his middle age. He shook Lincoln’s hand but came away with no job. In November 1862, he suffered traumatic injuries when his horse came unhitched from his wagon, and he fell with his back in the hollow of the frozen road.¹⁸ A year later, he and his family moved to New York City, to stay.

FIGURE 2. Melville in 1860.

The Civil War had started the month after Melville met Lincoln, and the pain he felt from that vicious conflict, on top of his many personal struggles, nearly broke him. Strangely, though, it also broke him out of his silence. In 1866, the year after the fighting ended, as the so-called Era of Reconstruction got under way, Melville published Battle-Pieces, and Aspects of the War, a brand-new collection of poetry.

And then, once again, he retreated. The next book he published came out a decade later: Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. It revisited the bitterness and doubt of his trip abroad in 1856–57, his confrontation with Jerusalem’s blanched hills and blank, blank towers.¹⁹

Throughout his career, Lewis Mumford cited a particular passage from Melville’s novel White-Jacket—in reference to Melville’s life, in reference to his own life, even as a kind of universal truth. But, sailor or landsman, Melville had written, there is some sort of a Cape Horn for all. Boys! beware of it; prepare for it in time. Gray-beards! thank God it is passed. And ye lucky livers, to whom, by some rare fatality, your Cape Horns are placid as Lake Lemans, flatter not yourselves that good luck is judgment and discretion; for all the yolk in your eggs, you might have foundered and gone down, had the Spirit of the Cape said the word.²⁰

Both Mumford and Melville had more than one Cape Horn.

CHAPTER 3

Bitter Morning (1918–19)

Looking backward, Mumford claimed that he did not lose his naiveté until the late 1920s: it was only his study of Melville, he said, and the pain it caused him, that had opened his eyes to the underlying realities of human experience, and ultimately allowed him to mount a useful challenge to the current faiths of my generation—our glib futurism, our pious belief in the progressive solubility of all human problems through science and technology.¹ But I think his constructive disillusionment began a full decade earlier, and at first, it was just disillusionment.

Mumford acknowledged his fatal resignation in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, and he was not alone in that feeling.² It was clear to almost everyone that the reformist spirit of Progressivism, which dominated the first years of the twentieth century, was in abeyance. That spirit would surge again in the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal, with all its idealistic government programs dedicated explicitly to social welfare. But in 1919 many American intellectuals and activists were experiencing an oozing deflation, which quickly became a boozing deflation, as Prohibition, ironically, ushered in a period known for alcoholism.³ Shell shock was more than a military phenomenon.

Mumford served in the navy for ten months, from April 1918 until February 1919, at a time when people were dying of influenza by the tens of thousands. Though he did not see direct action, he knew he had been shaped by the war’s violence, and he resented the crushing tedium of his service, despised the military’s dependence on hierarchy and authority. He railed against the navy’s addiction to inspection and drudgery, its laziness, its bluntness, its obtuseness, and its magnificent triviality.⁴ And in 1919 he saw that the bleak training camps, the humiliating routines, the blind obedience were all spilling over into civilian life, that the war had brought an ultimate massive arrest of civilization, that in fact the archetypal mode of military-bureaucratic organization was what defined modernity: grilling and drilling and complicity in violence were now what all Americans had in common.⁵

FIGURE 3. Self-Portrait (in Navy Costume), 1918.

At the same time, there was certainly a measure of relief that the war was over, and Mumford was delighted to have secured a job at The Dial, a literary and political journal whose typesetter was a young Jewish woman named Sophia Wittenberg. The Dial claimed direct descent from the Transcendentalist magazine of the same name, founded in 1840 by Emerson and Margaret Fuller and their circle of friends. But the New England Transcendentalists were never dragged to inquisitorial State hearings during a Red Scare the way Mumford’s editorial colleagues were in the summer of 1919, while Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer kept on with that series of vindictive violations of civil liberties known as the Palmer Raids.⁶ Starting in 1917, with the passage of the Espionage Act, partly in response to the Russian Revolution, and continuing with the Sedition Act and the Alien Act in 1918, the federal government had gradually created a new surveillance regime that targeted almost all forms of dissent. Not just possible abettors of the German enemy but virtually any groups or publications that expressed sympathy for communism or anarchism or even labor activism were now subject to a kind of sanctioned terror. Federal agents pulled newspapers and magazines from the mails, confiscated files from raided offices, and arrested, jailed, and sometimes even deported any leftist radicals whom they could charge with having revolutionary intent.⁷

One result was generational despondency. Mumford felt that millions of young people had been dragged along in the same powerful currents, sharing the sense of desolation, feeling bitter and scornful over the betrayal of our hopes by the politicians, the businessmen, the military leaders. The thought came to one of his friends: Perhaps we are at the beginning of a new Dark Age. Loomings, indeed. To Mumford himself, 1919 seemed like the year when the Age of Confidence visibly collapsed.⁸

But it was also the centennial of Melville’s birth—as a few critics and scholars noticed. Eventually, Mumford came to see 1919 as the start of the Melville Revival, and that helped him understand the country’s crisis of confidence in more nuanced terms. His generation had been forced to face the black side of human experience, just as Melville had in the era of slavery and the Civil War. And that kind of confrontation, while often overwhelming, could spur a determination to create a more realistic and resilient culture. To make progress that mattered, Mumford realized, his cohort had to dispense with our very belief in progress’s inevitability.

When he wrote an editorial proclaiming The Collapse of Tomorrow in 1921, he was recognizing the possibility that young people might be tempted to gravitate toward immediate enjoyment and satisfaction.⁹ But, in the face of a compromised future, he was hoping that his generation, instead of living purely in the present, might turn toward the claims of the past. What right had we to be so disheartened?—especially given the horrors that their forebears had faced. Didn’t they owe something to those who had offered up their lives in previous struggles, including the recent unpleasantness? Unless we who survived were prepared to take over, and make sacrifices as great as the dead had made doing their duty, their efforts would become meaningless.¹⁰ This was the impulse that led him first to study past Utopianisms and then to explore Melville’s cosmic defiance. By the time he wrote his Melville biography, he