The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 72. AC Benus "...the great adventures that lie ahead..."

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Introduction to the Secret Melville Series

 

 

I. Objectives

 

What I feel most

moved to write,

that is banned –

Yet, altogether,

write the other way

I cannot.

—Herman Melville ^[1]

 

My goals for this Introduction are not fancy or complex.

I hope by the end of it a reader will see Melville is not so scary. And you will in fact find his “truths” are familiar to our continuing struggles of the present day: environmental and cultural sanctity; freedom from religion (especially all those judgmental, and purporting to be Christian); same-sex love as a natural and ubiquitous element of life on Earth; love’s supreme strength to stir heroics in people; and the universal power of forgiveness.

A second ambition of this Introduction is to show that screenplays are not so scary either. Like all the writing forms you are already familiar with, to read them you basically start at the top left-hand corner of the page, read right and down – and the story unfolds before your eyes. In fact, it is a hallmark of all well-written filmscripts that they play out in your mind as a series of images and dialogue.

To boost this confidence in simply being able to pick up a script and start reading, I’ve provided a brief “how to” essay as Series Appendix 1 (Volume 3, page 263)

A third objective might merely be to get you ready for the great adventures which lie ahead. It’s no accident that most open-minded scholars readily admit Melville wrote the greatest novel that exists in the English language. His importance as an artist is multifaceted, and this arguably shows best in his characters. Everyone you are about to meet are as real as living people, and each of his many, many sailors stands unique and highly differentiated. Just how successful our author is at doing this only recently struck me. For last year I picked up the novel Sea-Wolf by Jack London. In comparing the two writers’ sailors, the older maestro blows London out of the water. Melville creates flesh-and-blood “people,” while Jack never manages to lift his personalities above the drub of highly undifferentiated “characters.” For London, they are called to fill a role and don’t strive for anything more.

At this point I need to be clear and state for the record I admire London. In fact, I hold him in supreme regard as a writer, which is why it turned into such a surprise to encounter Sea-Wolf after all of my deep immersion into Herman Melville’s maritime novels. Criticizing Jack London is no attempt at character assassination on my part, for he is great, but even his importance must by comparative necessity pale next to Melville’s.

Acknowledging his skill as a writer can now allow me to show you in more detail what inspired me to create the “Secret Melville.”

 

 

II. Justification for the Series

 

My personal journey with Melville began in high school. We were given segments of Moby-Dick to study, including Chapter 4, “The Counterpane.” What an eye-opening introduction! I suppose my fifteen-year-old self read this intimate, yet humorous, installment of the book thinking “Is this chapter saying what I think it’s saying?” Being totally uneducated then about the ways and means Gay artists in the Western tradition both hid and openly discussed same-sex love, I told myself there was a possibility Melville was saying (what he is so clearly saying), and Ishmael and Queequeg have indeed formed a love-match akin to marriage. It’s one that’s meant to endure until death.

This youthful suspicion of mine concerning a possible plot mechanism to spring the entire novel forward was confirmed in my full reading of Moby-Dick after I graduated from college.

That was a period where my time constraints were lifted from purely academic pursuits, and I purposefully went back to re-read the literature that most piqued my interest in high school: the short stories of Jack London; The Scarlet Letter; Catcher in the Rye; anything by James Thurber; The Great Gatsby; The Grapes of Wrath; and most particularly of all, Moby-Dick.

Nearly a decade later, I was in the used book shop a couple of blocks from home, and chanced upon a 1929 reprint of Pierre, or The Ambiguities. The introduction mentioned this Melville novel was the one immediately published after Moby-Dick. So I bought it, eagerly hoping to enjoy it.

What actually happened upset me deeply, because I wasn’t able to read Pierre; it was entirely impenetrable. And after two or three concerted efforts to start again at the beginning and really focus, I put the book aside feeling like a failure. Later I found out Melville too must have had this experience, for he condensed it nicely. “[E]very incomprehended idea is not only a perplexity but a taunting reproach to one’s mind[.]” (Pierre, or the Ambiguities Book 21)

It was this sensation of being inadequate, coupled with the guarded praise contained in Pierre’s introductory remarks, which triggered my naturally tenacious instincts to “solve” my shortcomings.

The solution I eventually stumbled upon changed my life. Because I had decided the best way to penetrate the ‘mystery’ of Pierre was to start with Melville’s first novel and read my way up, in sequence, until I could look Pierre in the eye as a tamable adversary.

The used bookstore near my workplace had copies of Typee and Omoo, and I was bowled over. Casually, across the span of the next few years, I acquired and read the six Melville books preceding Pierre, and then went into an easy reading of my own personal white whale of print.

Why do I go into all of this detail? To show that my discovery of Melville was almost accidental, and assuredly that of a regular guy with a broad literary interest. And the justification for this Series lies in realizing Melville’s narrator for these six sea novels is the same young man. We follow his life from age nineteen to about twenty-five, at which point, he quits the sea and takes up a vocational pen instead. I recognized the life of our multi-book hero would make a fantastic sequence of movies, all culminating in the young man’s first “New York novel” of Pierre.

Only in preparing my notes for this Introduction did I discover John Brooks Moore, a Melville advocate, spoke about how all the sea books tie together to tell one, unified narrative. He wrote the following in his prefatory remarks to one of Melville’s novels:

 

Moby-Dick […] is extremely confusing unless read as a chapter in the work of Melville, not the most important chapter necessarily, however masterful[.] […] How can this [segment] be understood if the reader of Moby-Dick does not know the preceding experiences of the man, chronicled in Typee, Redburn, and White-Jacket, and the later experiences shadowed in Pierre. The novels of Melville may be said, in general, to present a crescendo of protest, rebellion, disillusion, quiescence – the end of all incurable anguish. The steps in what was certainly the almost intolerable process of development to Melville ran fairly well represented by four books of his: Redburn, the first questioning of the world and the first disgust for its ways; Typee, the partial escape from that repulsive world; Moby-Dick, the indictment of life and of things as they are; Pierre, the revulsion complete and refusal to make any terms of concessions. ^[2]

 

Perhaps now is the time to mention an aspect of Melville’s writing concerning names. In the vast area of Melville scholarship, this phenomenon probably has a title, but I’ll artlessly call it “the Name Thing.” For even though we follow our eponymous hero from his late teenage years onwards, Melville is cagy with letting us know his true name (and / or identity). Remember, the opening line to Moby-Dick is “Call me Ishmael”; meaning that’s not his name, but as far as we’re allowed to get close to him, it’s all he’ll give us. This guardedness – as if saying “You, reader, may hurt me if I exposed my true name to you” – repeats over and over; new novel, new name for the same main character / narrator. For this Series I have called him “Redburn” because this is what the boy we first meet is called in the opening filmscript of the sequence. ^[3]

Another feature of the scripts might be thought of as story reconstructions. I show events from the books in the imagined way the real life scenes may have unfolded; these lived experiences were later used by our author in the ‘non-secret’ print versions. Naturally, my motivating impulse has been to uncover the truth of the sea novels, rather than obscure the contents of the books, which – trust me – are plenty explicit on their own.

In general, The Secret Melville Series breaks down like this:

 

Movie One:

Redburn’s introduction to derring-do and the privations of sea life; his first taste of love.

 

Movies Two through Five:

Redburn’s hero-quest, seeking what was taken from him; love, his motivation to keep moving forward and not give up.

 

Movie Six:

The homeward-bound journey; struggling with the will to live a loveless life.

 

Movie Seven:

The consequences of being changed by the search for one to have and hold; love as a means of redemption.

 

With this in mind, we can look more closely at some of the recurrent themes and objectives of Melville’s first seven novels.

 

 

III. First, “the Gay Thing”

 

How ‘secret’ could all of these men forming partnerships in Melville’s novels really have been to a 19th century audience? The answer is a resounding “Not very.” However, like most artforms creating material in the public sphere primarily intended for Gay eyes, there is a (usually dazzling) surface appearance – offered up for mass consumption – veneered above great substance for the initiated. A Gay code if you like, but one that is not now or has ever been mysterious or ‘secret’ to those in the Community.

As mentioned earlier, my first encounter with Melville was reading certain chapters of Moby-Dick. One enigmatic, lost-in-translation moment that struck me even then was why on earth Ismael would wander into a nighttime church service as he looked for lodgings, at the start of his travels, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The answer to the initiated is as plain as can be, but our high school teacher either did not know herself, or felt it inappropriate (sadly) to toss it out to us. Ishmael goes into the church because its glowing “smoky light” must have been burning an inviting shade as familiar as the “Gomorrah” mentioned in the same breath. A dusky purple-shaded tint; mauve; lavender. A color-coded lantern lit above its open doors. The Gay traveler in Ishmael expected gay-friendly room and board behind the walls of what turned out to be a church. That the man stumbled into an African American religious service is part of the wry sense of humor Melville appeared to delight in inserting “between the lines” for his Gay readers – a sense of humor more often than not known by the name of camp. ^[4] But for non-initiated readers, the ‘secret’ simply stays a ‘mystery.’

It’s a topic Melville was bold enough to address to his readers directly:

 

In the cold courts of justice, the dull head demands oaths; and holy writ, proofs; but in the warm halls of the heart, one single, untestified memory’s spark shall suffice to enkindle such a blaze of evidence, that all the corners of conviction are as suddenly lighted up as a midnight city by a burning building[.] (Pierre Book 4)

 

But back to Ishmael on his night of arrival alone in New Bedford; what confirmation do we have he was seeking out the equivalent of a modern Gay B&B? First off, the signal of a classic red lantern (or, the red lights of a red light district) are well known. Melville mentioned this ‘straight’ color code specifically in Moby-Dick. After our hero-couple Ishmael and Queequeg have joined forces in New Bedford, they move on to Nantucket to locate a whaling vessel to take them as crew. In optics none too subtle, Melville has the pair’s next innkeeper be a certain “Mrs. Hussey,” whom the boys first glimpse arguing with a dissatisfied male customer in her establishment’s doorway; above them blazed a dull-red lamp said to resemble “a blackeye.” Likewise, in the earlier book of Omoo, Melville dropped the presence of politeness altogether and flatly told us about a French madam on Tahiti who worked out of a tent with a red lantern above her flap.

And then, to return to the specifics of a purple-colored lantern in this context of accommodations, the novel Melville published not long before Moby-Dick – Redburn – contains one of the most remarkable same-sex love sequences in all of English-language literature. A high-end callboy Redburn meets in Liverpool ‘kidnaps’ the American teen for a train journey and overnight visit to the capital in a chapter

Melville titled “A Mysterious Night in London.” There, on the tab of the working boy’s aristocratic client (nicknamed by Harry and his fellow hustlers as “Lord Lovely”), they stay at an exclusive Gay gentlemen’s club, which, as you can guess by now, has a lavender lantern burning above its entrance.

Moving back from the specifics, arguably more important than just where Gay people would congregate to let their hair down, socialize and meet one another, is what Melville shows us once these enduring love-matches are struck between his characters.

I’ll go into some detail later concerning Ishmael and Queequeg’s partnership, but theirs is merely one among many in Melville’s writings. These Gay couples are more heroic than not in our author’s hands, so they must have been welcome inspiration to the LGBT+ readers of his age.

In addition to Ishmael and Queequeg, there’s Captain Claret and the Master-at-Arms in White-Jacket; Chips and Bungs in Omoo; Blunt and his deceased partner in Redburn; Cabaço and Archy in Moby-Dick; Shenley and Pierre in White-Jacket; Jermin and Bembo in Omoo; Flask and Daggoo in Moby-Dick; and Charlie Millthorpe’s devotion to Pierre Glendenning in Pierre. This is by no means an exhaustive list but it will serve nicely as preamble to mentioning Zeke and Shorty.

Zeke and Shorty, “whole-souled fellows” who “got along famously,” are a contented pairing of retired sailors on Mo’orea, a satellite island of Tahiti. Sharing what Melville implies is their ‘nuptial hammock,’ they represent an extraordinary thing to readers of the 19th century: a same-sex couple’s happily-ever-after. They have literally found a piece of paradise where societal pressures will never be able to break them apart. You will find this “a place of our own” aspiration a common theme in nearly all of the 19th and early 20th century’s Gay literature, and it’s reasonable to speculate Melville himself provided the literary beau idéal of a same-sex love HEA in the works to follow by such Queer authors as Bayard Taylor, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Edward Prime-Stevenson.

However, these authors had no monopoly on themes of same-sex marriage in their times. W. S. Gilbert – of Gilbert and Sullivan fame – wrote a long poem about an established male couple going to get the paperwork finalized for their union (via a joint Last Will and Testament), and who wind up crushed in the machinations of a heatless legal system seeing only money existing between them and not love. ^[5] As a satirist and social reformer, Gilbert wrote Damon v. Pythias (London 1870) as a way of questioning how “The Law” had even the slightest justification for imposing itself on the contentment of any Lesbian or Gay ‘marriage of true minds.’ For marriage is a fundamental right, even if only legally protected through private contracts or public Wills. ^[6]

But despite Zeke and Shorty’s ideal of being able to make it together, the cold reality for most 19th century Gay men and women was of a society forcing them to marry people of the wrong gender. Even so, male love found ways to shine through adversity, and one of the most publicly prominent methods to show a great love for a former (pre-marriage) partner was in the naming of one’s firstborn son. This practice seems to have been a genuine feature of Community knowledge, as Abraham Lincoln wanted to name his oldest boy after his partner of four years, Joshua Speed. (Mary Todd had the boy named after her father instead.) Tennyson did get the naming of his eldest child after Arthur Hallam, his partner who died abroad and for whom the poet labored over the tragic love poem In Memoriam for eleven years. And not one but two of Melville’s partners named their firstborn boys after him, gifting the world a Herman Melville Greene and a Herman Melville Williams!

So, despite the cruel pressures to conform many if not all Gay people felt in the 19th century, the premise of how an abstract ‘fictional’ possibility of a happily-ever-after – which you may call a sentiment – relates to the absolute symbol of two equals joining up, leads me to the topic of which school of thought motivated Melville’s big-picture themes.

 

 

IV. What is Transcendental Thought?

 

The best way to hash out the details of a Transcendental School of consciousness is to provide context through a compare / contrast method; this can show what artistic movement it rebelled against.

In time, trends repeat, and most contemplative schools arise when shallower ones exhaust their credibility. One can observe this pendulum phenomenon again and again starting with the Italian Renaissance. The surface-obsessed early Renaissance painters, for example, gave way to the Manneristic complexity of Michelangelo (a Manneristic complexity that carried into that man’s poetry, by the way). In 16th century English verse, the Cavalier School of epicurean, live-for-the-moment poetry gave impetus for the Metaphysical School to be born in the works of Katherine Philips and John Milton.

Likewise, the dominant School of early 19th century writing, the Romantics, yielded to Transcendentalism. In each of these artistic revolutions, we can perceive the same intellectual step moving from the personal to the representational.

For English-speaking authors, the writers of the Romantic era were interested in re-straining thought to the familiar, maudlin kind. Thus, the personal of their times might be better termed the sentimental to us. Thinking of it this way, the contrast is clearer: Wordsworth’s

 

“…I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils…”

 

As compared against Tennyson’s

 

“…Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all….”

 

Tennyson’s In Memoriam – perhaps the greatest love poem of the language – explores diverse topics like Creationism versus Evolution, and Existential wondering what role God has, if any, in the modern industrialized world. Tennyson’s unifying objective was expansive; if in In Memoriam he picked up on a theme touching the clichéd, he did so to reach his readers’ intellect, via the heartstrings, and to enlarge his message to an all-inclusive understanding.

Like the sentimental gesture of pressing a flower in a book, a Romantic School artist sought to press my flower in my book as a means, through words, to remember my attachment to a memory. They seemed focused on surface preservation; as if encasing an idea in amber. Or, thought about in another way, they sought to contract the remnants of experience into a few, trifling words – which, more often than not, reverted to tropes.

So what then is the Transcendental version of the self-centered Romantic form of sentimentality? Follow the same scenario above, and imagine our new type of writer has also picked a meadow flower. For them, the flower of interest is a stand-in for every flower, pressed in a book of everyone’s ownership, to remember a shared moment of existence with all moments of existence. Or, in other words, the merely “pretty” nature of the Romantics becomes for the new school Nature, imbued with Her all-powerful language of humanity’s shared experiencing of Her. We see this in the way the important-but-neglected poet Lucy Larcom phrases it:

 

Nature’s book is never sealed.

Its pages are ever unfolding

With new and delightful instructions, […]

Gaining nearer glimpses

Of heaven through the bareness

Which follows the summer glory

Of human pride. ^[7]

 

If we reject the flower in amber aesthetic, we can see Larcom’s objective is to conjure the image of a blossom recreated each time it’s viewed with greater significance.

Larcom, like her better-known admirers Emerson and Thoreau, headed a generation of American poets rebuking mawkish English upper-class poetic taste, which was carefully censored to be free of any ‘taint’ of democratic thinking, lest it incite the oppressed to rise up against Whitehall’s empire. Self-representational government, equality, justice – these are nowadays the Transcendentalist topics best known to the public mind through exposure to Walt Whitman. But, perhaps we should also know that Whitman only became Whitman through his assimilation of Melville. Few people seem to realize Whitman’s best-remembered line, which is from his collection of tribute poems to the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, “O Captain! my Captain!” is a quotation from Chapter 132 of Moby-Dick.

Whitman embraced him because Melville as a poet and writer of fiction represents the supreme rejection of the personal in favor of the universal. In his novels particularly, and in his sea novels most explicitly, Melville illustrates time and time again an interest not in the sentimentally compressed, but in the unfetteredly expansive. He’s creating democratic tools to connect public ideas to the great unknown; perhaps to show Man’s relationship to cosmic connectedness itself.

And what “proof” is there that Melville belonged with Transcendentalists like Larcom? Well, here is just one quote, from among many dozen possible examples, to give you an idea of where our author’s heart and mind stood:

 

I am of a meditative humor, and at sea used often to mount aloft at night, and, seating myself on one of the upper yards, tuck my jacket about me and give loose to reflection. […] And it is a very fine feeling, and one that fuses us into the universe of things, and makes us a part of the All, to think that, wherever we ocean-wanderers rove, we have still the same glorious old stars to keep us company; that they still shine onward and on, forever beautiful and bright, and luring us, by every ray, to die and be glorified with them.

 

Ay, ay! we sailors sail not in vain. We expatriate ourselves to nationalize with the universe[.] (White-Jacket Chapter 19)

 

 

V. Bigotry and the Power of Gay Heroics

 

Knowing now what we know about Transcendental artistic purpose, sometimes using stock items – like flowers – to represent large-scale ideals, we can examine one of the ubiquitous features of Melville’s sea novels: the Gay hero. Each of his protagonists stand up for what is fair and just in his books, and heroism in general is an archetypical characteristic among many of his fictional people. To be a hero when called upon is an omnipresent element of all of his work.

Likewise, one of the ever-present villainies Melville’s hero must confront is intolerance. He takes on misogyny, racism, religious-based discrimination, and naturally, homophobia. ^[8]

Now, I imagine many readers of this will not be able to “picture” Melville as anti-racist, but I’d argue any preconceived baggage we carry was saddled on us by Hollywood. We must not confuse the prejudiced, and oftentimes downright grotesque, film views as having anything to do with Melville. The movie representations, both new and old, cop racial attitudes that impose their respective ages’ narrow-mindedness upon the text. One fact to show this is that Ishmael marries Queequeg in the book, so how racist could Moby-Dick’s narrator be? And a second fact to confirm this people-phobia is, how many of these movie versions of the book have the couple marry? None. And omission is arguably the worst imposition on any text.

The portrayals of Queequeg in film have not been of Ismael’s savior and partner – the one whom the protagonist of Moby-Dick tells us possessed “a spirit that would dare a thousand devils” and “a lofty bearing” (Chapter 10) – but of hateful, and possibly anti-gay, representations of a mentally-challenged brute. The 1930 movie version of the Polynesian shows him as a grunting microcephalic sideshow freak. Why? Clearly whatever reasons filmmakers chose to limit Queequeg’s role – which carries over to the pigeon-spoke, black-faced portrayal (“brown face,” really) seen in the John Huston / Ray Bradbury “Moby Dick” [sic] of 1956 – they reflect the political mandates and mass biases of when the films were created. Ironically, of course, these prejudices of 20th century moviemakers were the exact hatreds Melville’s 19th century books exposed to exacting ridicule and condemnation.

So, concerning what we think we know, we’d better clear our heads before reading what Melville had to say in regards to racial or religious discrimination.

In terms of approaching these novels, we should be extra-cautious about any pro-Christian biases we may drag into our interpretations.

Therefore, to continue along the Moby-Dick path of example, we have to acknowledge the ethnically diverse secondary officers of the Pequod are not the ‘savage’ pinheads movie versions have been most comfortable showing, but more simply non-Christians. This distinction is represented well in the scene where Ishmael is presenting his partner to get signed up on the ship he scouted out earlier. This is a “Papers, please” scene, literally, because the financial organizers of the whaling venture demand to see paperwork saying Queequeg has been formally, certifiably, converted to Protestant beliefs. Ishmael responds by insisting his partner belongs to the “First Congregational Church”; a very Transcendental stance, as you can now see. In so doing, Melville is saying Tashego, Daggoo and Queequeg – the Pequod’s junior officers – come from a worshipful congregation that has never parted ways with the Garden of Eden, which is the Earth itself. They are pure (which is why Ahab needs their blood oath in a later scene), in utter contrast to the hypocritical, self-styled Christians among the whale boat’s men and senior officers – especially Captain Ahab. The non-Christians’ presence on the Pequod becomes one of world-witnesses to Ahab’s Christianity-based bloodlust.

Conceive of the bloodlust against the white whale as being based in Christian belief, you ask? Judeo-Christian-Islamic belief, yes. Because if you come to see the junior officers as pure, spotless witnesses, then you can perceive Ahab as a surrogate for Cain, who, through the shame-ridden concept of ‘Original Sin,’ is driven mad by the so-called-religious demand of guilt. In this way, Ahab is an allegory for all civilized men and women made crazy by the conflicting notions of repentance versus lust for power, wealth, fame, etc. It’s a theme Lucy Larcom also gave thought to when she wrote:

 

Have you ever seen a Soul,

A Heaven-born one, suffocated

By earthly prosperity, dying of too

Much sunshine, its pinions

Clogged and weighted down

By the drossy ashes

Men call gold,

Until it could not flutter

Towards immortality? ^[9]

 

This then is the burden of every Son of Cain, and which in Moby-Dick, becomes part of what has driven the Pequod’s captain mad, and dooms all aboard to a living hell. But the so-called pagans – which eventually includes our “heathenish” looking Ishmael – are exempt from the clash of Cain. Ultimately this selflessness leads to Ishmael’s redemption through Queequeg’s heroic love and sacrifice, which is the only genuinely Christian display in a book Melville himself termed “wicked.” ^[10]

In the broader environmental and social justice themes of the novel, hopefully it now becomes apparent the bloodlust itself is sign and symbol of the entitlement Ahab and most likeminded Judeo-Christian-Muslims felt towards enslaving, and polluting, and slaughtering their way across the natural environment, because “God gave it to us to profit off of it as we see fit.”

Needless to say, Melville is a vociferous critic of this self-entitled hubris. No decent Transcendentalist could be otherwise. And perhaps it’s this conflict of egotistical “mine” versus a universalist “ours” that gives rise to the hero archetype in Melville’s writings. He needs brave ones who damn consequences and rush in to do what’s right, despite the modern world’s blind spot concerning humility.

A willingness to do quixotic battle with windmill giants ties in perfectly with the not-so ‘secret’ world he builds for his Gay characters. This element of bravery, if you like, is part of what makes the aforementioned Zeke and Shorty’s quiet enjoyment of life together so powerful. This couple – with their eternally safe and bucolic ‘nuptial hammock’ – display giant-killing heroism simply by denying 19th hypocritical mores the power to split them up. Their mythical greenwood is real and unmolested by homophobic hatred.

In Pierre, it’s this exact type of primal, agricultural existence that Charlie Millthorpe would most like with his belovèd Pierre in the Hudson River Valley. Melville goes to pains to imbue Charlie with a noble pedigree, along the lines of George Washington, descending from a knightly family in England who, through the centuries, is reduced to toiling for a living. But like Washington, Millthorpe does not mind rolling up his sleeves, and shows the ‘aristocracy’ of his blood by staying faithful to his love right down to the final pages of the book.

We see this same grounding in love from the heroic way Jermin (Jarman, in this series) supports Bembo, and Bembo – a Polynesian – supports his alcoholic partner in Omoo. Theirs is another ‘private’ relationship in Melville’s oeuvre where real heroism is on display as just the way Gay partners live and breathe to support one another (as perhaps all spouses should). Their union is but one of at least a dozen pairings in Melville’s sea books shown as akin to full marriage. These love matches are uniformly presented as equitable and harmonious, without any displays of petty rancor from within the couplings.

Fully compatible traits are also the attributes Gilbert gave his same-sex couple in Damon v. Pythias. But Gilbert’s satire is not on the couple or their companionability – as that’s a given, being together as they have been for decades – but rather on The Law’s capricious ruining of lives, which in the 19th century it certainly did for Frederick Park, Ernest Boulton, Arthur Pelham-Clinton; and later, Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde too. These men, lest we forget, were all arbitrarily persecuted merely for being Gay.

In this context, Melville’s un-whitewashed voice speaks to us eloquently from the pages of his book about naval life, White-Jacket. He proclaims – from the year 1850, mind you – The Law’s illegitimacy to intrude upon the lives and imprison Gay people. With clarity breathtakingly heroic for his position and era, he tells us:

 

Oppressed by illiberal laws, and partly oppressed by themselves, many of our people are wicked, unhappy, inefficient. […] We have a brig for trespassers; a bar by our main-mast, at which they are arraigned; a cat-o-nine-tails and a gangway to degrade them in their own eyes and in our own. These are not always employed to convert Sin to Virtue, but to divide them, and protect Virtue from legalized Sin and from unlegalized Vice. […]

 

Yet the worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves[.] (Chapter 94 – “The End”)

 

And also, from the same book:

 

Besides, though we all abhorred the monster of Sin itself, […] we were in a good degree free from those useless, personal prejudices, and galling hatreds […] which so widely prevail among men of warped understandings and unchristian and uncharitable hearts. No; the superstitions and dogmas concerning Sin had not laid their withering maxims upon our hearts. We perceived how that ‘evil’ was but good disguised, and a knave a saint in his way; how that in other planets, perhaps, what we deem wrong, may there be deemed right[.] We perceived that the anticipated millennium must have begun upon the morning the first worlds were created; and that, taken all in all, our man-of-war world itself was as eligible a round-sterned craft as any to be found in the Milky Way. And we fancied that though some of us of the gundeck were at times condemned to sufferings and slights, and all manner of tribulation and anguish, yet, no doubt, it was only our misapprehension of these things that made us take them for woeful pains instead of the most agreeable pleasures.

 

I have dreamed of a sphere […] where for one gentleman in any way to vanquish another is accounted an everlasting dishonor; where to tumble one into a pit after death, and then throw cold clods upon his upturned face, is a species of contumely only inflicted upon the most notorious criminals. (Chapter 44)

 

The author’s words viewed here, in the appropriate perspective-granting context of this Introduction, will disempower any gay-erasing detractors’ attempts at convoluted obfuscation to ‘explain away’ the obvious. They are wastes of breath. Melville’s meaning, despite tortured BS to say otherwise, will remain just as clear in the future as it is now, and as it was when he wrote it. In an unarguable way he states “Let me people go.” ^[11]

The Queer person as hero in the master Transcendentalist’s work is all-present. The ones who are outsiders, because they see the world from a Gay-as-outcast POV, time and time again selflessly save the day. Besides the most familiar heroics of Queequeg’s making of a coffin to save his belovèd’s life, the Māori harpooner saves the life of a disrespecting punk after the bigot had said racist and homophobic things to Ishmael and Queequeg on the ferry taking them to Nantucket. These actions almost perfectly mirror the heroics of Jarl in the A Voyage Thither section of Mardi. The man also saves the life of An’natu after she’d taunted Jarl and his partner with hate-laden anti-gay comments.

These examples are just a few among many in Melville’s writings. The opening book in this series, Redburn, is a perfect initiation into the not-so ‘secret’ way Melville discussed same-sex love. We glimpse this fearlessness in the story not only between the Greenlander and the title character, but also with Lavender, Blunt, Harry Bolton, and – on the return voyage – a sexy Italian teenage immigrant boy singing about men who want to share his bed for money. Sex, in addition to love, is everywhere in a seaman’s life, Melville says and writes to show it to us. The way this open ‘secret’ plays into the unfolding of these people and their relationships involves our author crafting prose so the initiated will nod their heads and feel satiated by Melville’s honesty. However, the same sections of prose might give an outsider momentary pause for wonder, but which he’ll soon brush off and move on – like the ‘mystery’ of the purplish lantern lights.

With this grounding in place, let’s take a look at the two screenplays presented in Volume 1. Volumes 2 and 3 will also have brief story setups for the scripts in those respective installments.

 

 

VI. Remarks: the Volume 1 Scripts

 

I will present plot summaries, hopefully avoiding any spoilers for first-time readers.

 

Redburn

 

The opening adventure of this series is an appropriate one. Redburn is among Melville’s best work, and sold very well, despite the author not thinking terribly much of his efforts. Part of the novel’s success as a work of art stems from its being a classic hero’s tale. To paraphrase folklorist Joseph Campbell’s definition of this most-ancient genre of fiction, it’s about a young person going over there; doing something; and then coming home again.

The point of such tales is to show how the journey itself alters a person, and the motivations which initially launched them on their individual quest may not be the same ones leading them back again.

In our story, nineteen-year-old Redburn has led a rather sheltered, protected – and perhaps, women-heavy – existence. He will go to sea to challenge his self-reliance and prove it to his sick older brother Peter. Redburn also seeks out the freedom many Gay men have always found in being a sailor.

Peter finds a suitable ship making the relatively quick passage from New York to Liverpool, and back. The brothers go onboard for an interview.

Separated, the teenage boy gets his first taste of ribbing from the Highlander’s crew. He can hold his own in a good-natured give and take, but one sailor – Jackson – immediately proves his nature as a world-weary sailor is anything but good. In a Melvillian twist, it soon becomes apparent Jackson suffers from the same fatal disease as his brother: tuberculosis.

So the voyage “over there” does not go by without incident, but Melville pulls in his considerable skills at humor to lighten the journey. He also begins to supply the lad with lovers and potential mates. Lavender – close to Redburn in age, but with more street smarts – initiates the sheltered boy into sailor sex, while the sexy Greenlander has more serious intentions on the protagonist’s heart.

Landed in Liverpool, the middle section of this classic hero’s journey involves one heck of an epic boy-boy romance. For soon, Redburn – distinctive in the red hunting coat – draws the attention of high-class callboy Harry Bolton. Both young men are taking advantage of the city’s Gay cruising ground, The Exchange, and strike up a friendship that immediately deepens. A romantic day in the countryside causes Harry to invite Redburn with him to London. But Bolton is not entirely upfront concerning the overnight stay in the capital. Perhaps afraid he’d alienate the sweet American boy if he told him the reason for the trip; Harry has to work. Unbeknownst to Redburn, Bolton has secured his patron’s permission to stay with the sailor at the client’s exclusive Gay gentlemen’s club in London. Redburn wakes up the next morning not entirely sure what happened, but he can see Harry’s distressed about lying to him.

Now the young couple sees “escape,” and Bolton – who had seafaring experience in his boyhood – signs up for the homeward journey of the Highlander.

The trip back, as one might predict, is not as smooth as anyone hoped.

 

Typee

 

Redburn’s initial seafaring planted wanderlust firmly in his heart, especially as homelife presented nothing to match the sexual freedom onboard ship.

He signed up for a South Seas whaling voyage, and when our story opens, he’d had enough. The Dolly’s captain has shown little interest in providing Redburn days off on Polynesian tourist spots, so the sailor hatches a plan.

He draws Toby, his partner – and the love of his life – into an escape plan. They will hike up the central mountain range of the tropical paradise Nuku Hiva, and down again into the Valley of the Happar – a group friendly to Westerners.

This trip up proves difficult and frays the relationship just a bit, but the descent on the other side is even harder.

Finally arriving where the Dolly’s search party cannot look for them, the boys settle down to a new and unfamiliar way of living. For one, to their utter surprise and delight, they quickly find out same-sex love is respected among Polynesian culture; what’s more, it’s expected and rolled into the everyday concept of family.

Another thing for which the young couple was not prepared was landing into a political powder keg. The French have set their sights on colonizing Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, of which Nuku Hiva is a part. The locals, naturally, are willing to fight for their independence, and some in the community look askance at Toby and Redburn as possible agents of the would-be French occupiers.

Tensions are inevitable, and the inevitable results in changes for the Americans.

Despite all of this, Melville’s novel is ultimately one about the strength of family to pull through adversity. And because of it, Typee too is among Melville’s best books.

 

 

VII. Apologia – “the Format Thing”

 

Since their emergence in the early 20th century, screenplays have followed a strict set of rules governing layout. This is because of widespread faith that a “properly” formatted script will yield one minute of movie runtime for every page. Thus, a 90-paged screenplay is the goal for most moviemakers who do not wish for a film to go more than an hour and a half.

The first rule of formatting assumes an 8 ½” x 11” paper size. Publishing these filmscripts in book form immediately negates all other rules concerning page-count and movie length.

However, there is another metric to use, and that is wordcount. I can compare the seven screenplays in this series against word-length / runtime for several well-known films.

First a word-count breakdown of The Secret Melville Series:

 

Redburn = 28,700

Typee = 32,650

Omoo = 29,950

Mardi = 18,050

Moby-Dick = 32,075

White-Jacket = 26,500

Pierre = 30,375

 

And now some films with their screenplay wordcounts and runtimes: ^[12]

 

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) = 18,230 = 2 H. 29 mins.

Body of Evidence (1992) = 21,325 = 1 H. 39 mins.

The Apartment (1960) = 31,000 = 2 H. 05 mins.

Adaptation (2002) = 35,118 = 1 H. 55 mins.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) = 40,140 = 2 H. 49 mins.

The Abyss (1989) = 41,000 = 2 H. 20 mins.

Aliens (1986) = 43,790 = 2 H. 17 mins.

Lord of the Rings (2001) = 44,235 = 2 H. 58 mins.

Chinatown (1974) = 46,755 = 2 H. 10 mins.

Schindler’s List (1993) = 47,525 = 3 H. 15 mins.

Traffic (2000) = 53,155 = 2 H. 27 mins.

Titanic (1997) = 63,312 = 3 H. 14 mins.

Magnolia (1999) = 66,055 = 3 H. 08 mins.

 

As you can see, despite faith in the page-number method (and the resulting wordcount), film lengths are entirely dependent on the director’s vision. The shortest screenplay analyzed here resulted in a film that is longer than the ones with almost double the wordcount. 2001: A Space Odyssey is good to mention in the context of Mardi. The nominal 18,000 words of Mardi’s filmscript does not mean I intended a short film; only that I conceived of Redburn’s exploits in this movie to be weighted towards the visual. Dialogue has purposefully been cut back to allow the director broad sweeps of South Pacific grandeur as the central characters travel from island to island.

Taken together as a matrix, the information given here shows the seven films of The Secret Melville Series can each come in at around the 2-hour mark, give or take a few dozen minutes. But again, runtime will be entirely up to the director’s artistic vision.

 

 

VIII. Conclusion

 

Having your first taste of what type of stories Melville wishes to relay from the preceding “Remarks,” I feel you’ve gained the last tool you’ll need to wade into what I’m sure you’ll find are excellent adventures and romances.

Working with each of the seven books, my confidence of purpose tells me any open mind reading these scripts and then going back to read the originals will see my interpretations are not only sound, but the most directly honest way of understanding the action as documented by Melville.

He lived Redburn’s trials and triumphs and then fictionalized them for broader, more Transcendental purposes than just making personal keepsakes.

As you come to the end of the series, you will encounter a brief appendix where I’ve gathered some choice quotes about the quality of Melville as a writer. Hopefully, you’ll see for yourself through these screenplays just how vital Melville’s legacy is to us today.

 

 

 

 

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Polynesian Text Note

 

Melville spelled Polynesian words and placenames in the best way to assure his readers pronounced them correctly. Therefore, as an example, he spells Taipi as “Typee.”

I have retained Melville’s spellings in script places where he’s denoted a proper name and one of his characters speaks it. For the descriptions and notes I have tried to use the standard spellings now in use. When encountering these words or names, please remember the ‘rule’ on pronunciation more or less follows the ‘every letter pronounced’ standard English-speaking students of Spanish are taught. The vowels present the largest hurdle – which is why Melville spelled them as he did – but they too follow the general precepts familiar to most people from studying Spanish: a always equals an “ah” sound; e = “eh”; i = “ee”; o = “oh”; u = “oogh”.

 

 

Introduction Text Endnotes

 

[1] Melville quote: from letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, September 1851. See the Series Appendix 5 (Volume 3, page 277) for the full battery of surviving love letters Melville wrote to Hawthorne.

 

[2] John Brooks Moore quote: from “Introduction” to Pierre, or the Ambiguities (New York 1929), ps. xxi-xxii.

 

[3] The Name Thing: Redburn is an unusual moniker to be sure, and a few months before Melville’s first novel of Typee was released in England, a long anonymous poem was published in New York called “Redburn: or the Schoolmaster of a Morning.” As its composition follows a time period corresponding to Melville’s stint as a boys’ schoolmaster, it seems this Redburn too belongs to the author, although scholars continue to debate the possibility. The poem in its entirety can be found here:

 

https://archive.org/details/redburnorschoolm00melvrich/page/n3/mode/2up

 

[4] Camp humor: this same section of Moby-Dick indulges in ‘wicked’ wit concerning the name of the Inns Ishmael encounters: they are all overtly phallic. There is the Sword-Fish, the Crossed Harpoons, and ultimately the place our hero is looking for, The Spouter! Almost to prove the anatomical point of the joke, the one possible place of accommodation that is not wanted is The Trap.

 

[5] Gilbert’s Damon v. Pythias: another secret-not-so-secret Gay work of art shows up in the early repertoire of composer Arthur Sullivan. The comic imbroglios of J. Maddison Morton / F.C. Burnard’s Cox and Box, which Sullivan set to music in 1866, are too detailed to go into here, but the story deals with another Gay trope of the 19th century – the “confirmed bachelor.” Messrs. Cox and Box belong to this category and have a HEA with each other by the end of the operetta. For this is when they declare themselves to be “brothers,” and hilariously confirm they are not actually blood-related. They intend to live harmoniously with one another for the rest of their lives (away from the grasping women who lured them into unwanted betrothals). The term “brothers” of course means same-sex partners, and at least in 19th century American farming, “brothers” of this type dotted the agricultural landscape. They would buy land together in some corner of a place they did not come from and live out their own Zeke- and Shorty-style happily-ever-after.

 

The libretto for Cox and Box, a “Triumviretta in One Act,” can be found here:

 

https://www.gsarchive.net/sullivan/cox_and_box/cox_box.pdf

 

[6] 19th and early 20th century Gay marriage conventions: in addition to contracts and Wills, a third legal means couple had to protect their joint assets was through adoption. The older partner legally adopted the younger to make him his closest living relative for a post-mortem retention of wealth by the survivor. A famous example is Walter Plunkett, costume designer for Gone With the Wind, who adopted his partner Lee in the mid-20th century.

 

[7] Lucy Larcom quote: from Similitudes (Boston 1854), ps. 36-37.

 

[8] “He takes on…” bigotry: it’s interesting to note that a project Melville pitched to write jointly with Hawthorne involved a woman who would take on the role of hero. This was, or would have been, his second land novel. The project is usually denoted as “the Agatha story,” and it’s possible the book was finished and published under the title “The Isle of the Cross.” For more information, see here:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_the_Cross

 

[9] Second Larcom quote: from “Butterfly in the Dust,” Similitudes (Boston 1854), page 26.

 

[10] Moby-Dick as a “wicked” book: from letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, September 1851. See the Series Appendix 5 (Volume 3, page 277) for the full battery of surviving love letters Melville wrote to Hawthorne.

 

[11] “Let me people go”: in Chapter 89 of White-Jacket, Melville speaks of rape, in guarded tones, aboard naval vessels. As the biblical Lot’s neighbors were destroyed for attempting to rape unwilling male visitors, the author’s remarks harken to the traditional view of what ‘the sin of the cities of the plains’ truly refers to. Sadly, Melville relays that reports of forced sex were unwelcomed by the authorities: “More than once, complaints were made at the mast of the Neversink, from which the desk officer would turn away with loathing, refuse to hear them, and command the complainant out of his sight.” Perhaps the reason for this was the lack of a means – or willingness – to establish consent. Which would mean since discreet consensual sexual contact was ignored, so too must be that which may have started mutually but went awry; and then drags in the last category of out and out rape as a blind spot to this lenience. That regular crewmembers, like Melville in the voice of his White-Jacket protagonist, would not associate sex with their equals in age and status as an infraction is borne out by many other passages in the book. I’ll briefly give two more of them:

 

From the wild life they lead, and various other causes (needless to mention), sailors, as a class, entertain the most liberal notions concerning morality and the Decalogue; or rather, they take their own views of such matters, caring little for the theological or ethical definitions of others concerning what may be criminal, or wrong. (Chapter 10)

 

And this:

 

You see a human being, stripped like a slave; scourged worse than a hound. And for what? For things not essentially criminal, but only made so by arbitrary laws. (Chapter 33)

 

[12] Wordcount and runtime data: wordcounts are per Microsoft Word; runtimes are per IMDb. All tallies are approximate.

—AC Benus, [i]

2020