Misanthropy Read online

  Typee is about trying to save a belief in a corner of Eden in the midst of a general moral devastation whose source in the novel, initially at least, is America and American institutions. Tommo seeks to preserve some confidence in humanity through an identification with a different race, but his effort fails. Melville’s early pessimism subsequently deepens, as the novels Omoo and Mardi in their different ways demonstrate, and as any residual faith in non-white peoples steadily erodes. Redburn sustains the pessimism but largely drops the race theme. Wellingborough Redburn’s progress takes him from innocence to experience, and the bleak convictions to which it leads. The young Redburn is both an American dreamer and an American booster, impatient with ‘cheerless’ people.31 On board ship, however, he finds himself ‘a sort of Ishmael’ – the Ishmael of Genesis 21, outside human society (R, p. 114). He nonetheless persists in believing in ‘the triumph of sound policy and humanity’, and even continues to trust to a(n American) future ‘which shall see the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearth-stone in Eden’ (R, pp. 223, 239). What finally throttles this romanticism is a recognition of the irremediable, forgotten suffering of others, which is ‘enough to turn the heart to gall; and make a man-hater out of a Howard’ (R, p. 253).32 Redburn is bound to conclude that Eden is not restorable, but that people doggedly refuse to see and know it: ‘We are blind to the real sights of this world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its death’ (R, p. 383).

  Two years later, in Moby Dick, Ishmael is the name of the central character. Moby Dick is partly about trying to escape misanthropy. Ishmael takes to the seas when his ‘splintered heart and maddened hand’ are ‘turned against the wolfish world’, when his ‘hypos’ (morbid depressions of spirits) ‘get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off’ (MD, pp. 1, 52). Since he ends up on a ship hell-bent on natural destruction, with a monomaniacal captain and a crew unable to restrain or resist his insane singleness of purpose, indeed, who are caught up in it, the project seems destined to go horribly wrong, and indeed it does. Captain Ahab, the crew and the Pequod are partly an allegory for an America in principle democratic but profoundly compromised by the exclusion of women, slavery and ethnic cleansing, and in practice all too often at the mercy of immensely powerful, shadowy forces. Significantly, Melville told Hawthorne that a belief in ‘unconditional democracy’ was not incompatible with ‘a dislike to all mankind’.33 He was also inclined to believe that America was just the latest phase in the history of ‘a wicked world, in all meridians’ (MD, p. 58). Here ‘sin that pays its way can travel freely’ (MD, p. 44), there is ‘no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men’ (MD, p. 394), and ‘we are all killers, on land and on sea, Bonapartes and sharks included’ (MD, p. 144). The early Puritans would have agreed.

  In his late fiction, Melville not only brings these various themes together but also focuses them on a particular aspect of boosterist discourse. As far as race was concerned, by the time he wrote ‘Benito Cereno’, he had no life-raft left to cling to. Captain Amasa Delano is a liberal American, buoyant and optimistic, ‘a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature’ who is not liable ‘to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man’.34 As a result, Delano gets everything wrong, right up to the point when, in a last act of consuming despair, the misanthropic and apparently half-mad Cereno throws himself off his ship and into Delano’s boat. The black slave cargo on Cereno’s ship has revolted and taken it over, murdering the passengers and most of the crew and committing various iniquities, then forcing Cereno to lie systematically to his guest. Delano intuits nothing of this, rather scoffing mildly at Cereno’s ‘insane terrors’ as the hallucinations of a sick mind (BC, p. 216). So complacent is Delano’s liberal, upbeat benevolism, so inert and closed the language in which he articulates it, that he is comprehensively incapable of perspicacity, sound judgement or moral insight, a study in bland self-deceit. The past ‘is passed’, says Delano at the end, to Cereno,

  ‘why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky, these have turned over new leaves.’

  ‘Because they have no memory,’ [Cereno] dejectedly replied; ‘because they are not human.’ (BC, p. 246)

  It is abundantly clear which character has got things right.

  Critics have sometimes deplored what they have taken to be the story’s racism. But the later Melville is a misanthropist, not a racist. His rebel slaves are not inferior. Where Delano does not possess ‘more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception’ (BC, p. 164), the slaves have impressive reserves of cunning, intelligence, subtlety and ruthlessness. Far from elevating himself on to a racist pedestal, Melville slyly puts Delano there, in that Delano’s liberalism actually amounts to little more than a genially indulgent view of the blacks that is steeped in sentimental condescension and ultimately dehumanizing. Melville had no faith in any pedestal. In work after work, he flayed what he took to be the ignoble, self-exculpating hypocrisy of modern Western and especially American culture. However, he also gave up on any belief in the intrinsic virtue of the ethnic other and the supposed moral pre-eminence of victimhood. That is a Delano-type idea. When Delano exclaims, ‘Ah, this slavery breeds ugly passions in man!’ (BC, p. 214), Melville ensures that we hear a quite different meaning to the one his character intends: in the words of W. H. Auden, ‘Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return’.35

  So, too, ‘Bartleby’ takes a narrator similar to Delano, temperate, well-meaning, liberal-minded, considerate and kind, but decidedly limited in that he is inveterately attached to a clutch of sanguine beliefs and reflexes, and runs him up against a man, Bartleby, whose relationship to the world is clearly and painfully deprived of all palliatives. Bartleby stubbornly allows the narrator’s reassurances no purchase whatever, rather sticking to his own version of the thunderous no, an unalterably melancholic refusal of cooperation in and with humanity: ‘I would prefer not to’.36 In his drastic repudiation of other people, Bartleby is as immovable as the ‘dead brick wall’ at which for long periods he stares. The ‘best affections’ which the narrator believes human misery encourages in him crumble, yielding to ‘a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill’ (BA, p. 22), a dreadful intuition of the logic to unbreachable solitude and despair. ‘Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!’ (BA, p. 41): finally, it would seem, there is no more to say.

  Thus Lawrance Thompson is quite right to suggest that Melville’s vision ultimately ‘narrows down to the sharp focus of a misanthropic notion that the world was put together wrong’.37 The process culminated in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, Melville’s great, final demolition of American boosterism. The Confidence-Man boards a Mississippi steamer and systematically fleeces and bilks an array of different American types, speciously winning their trust through plausible talk. He deceives them about himself, but also about themselves. He is the Devil incarnate, and the Devil plays the best game in town, is even gambling with the house’s money. For Melville, finally, America gives no reason for any of the nineteenth-century versions of Babbitt’s confidence, still less for the empty language in which they were expressed. Having confidence in people is a mistake.

  Melville stands as the central figure in what we might call post-Puritan or, broadening it out, East coast misanthropy. From him we might turn to the figure who, though not without competitors, could claim to be the American Diogenes, Melville’s contemporary Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was born and educated at the heart of post-Puritan New England, and clearly belongs to the American Puritan tradition, if rather differently from Hawthorne and Melville. Thoreau loved nature and solitude, altogether preferring them to people. ‘To be in company’, he asserted, ‘even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating’.38 By contrast, he wrote stoutly on behalf of th
e ‘wonderful purity’ of the nature invaded and profaned by man.39 In 1846, he delivered himself of his own great thunderous no, retiring to Walden Pond, where he lived the simple life, in a lonely hut he had built for himself.

  ‘Society is always diseased’, wrote Thoreau, ‘and the best is the most so’.40 Like a good Puritan, he was a moral absolutist who supposed that complete sincerity, truth and integrity were vitally important in human dealings, but found all three in scant supply. In reality, his world was that of The Confidence-Man, and he came to expect nothing of others. This encouraged a doughty, Crusoe-like, Protestant independence, a conviction that his salvation was in his hands alone. Giving up on others, however, did not exactly mean ignoring the contemporary American scene, and Thoreau nourished an immense contempt for its shoddiness and was scornful of its pieties. He turned values right around: if he behaved well, he thought, it was because a demon possessed him (see W, p. 10). On that holiday of holidays, 4th July, Independence Day, he bustled about moving his few belongings to the Pond, in effect asserting that he alone knew what independence really meant, setting as little store by the publicly hallowed date as Dickens’s great misanthropist, Scrooge, does by Christmas. Nonconformity was his habit and his rule. In his great moment of defiance of the State, in 1846, he refused to pay his poll tax (and was duly arrested).

  Thoreau was no democrat, certainly not in the contemporary sense. Majority rule was just a matter of might, not right. There was no reason to credit the views of the mass of men, since they served the State, and ‘not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies’. There were others who served it with their heads, but they were not capable of making moral distinctions, so were ‘as likely to serve the devil’.41 Class after class of human beings falls before Thoreau’s scythe: legislators, office holders, bureaucrats and (notably) politicians – that politics seemed ‘all the rage’ with ‘the Indians now’ merely gave him to suppose that ‘a row of wigwams, with a dance of powwows, and a prisoner tortured at the stake, would be more respectable than this’.42 Farmers only bothered about agriculture, not humanity. None of these were ‘real men’. They were self-interested ciphers. But above all, there were the merchants. Thoreau loathed what he took to be America’s ‘exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures’ as being extraordinarily and unnecessarily wasteful and betokening an obsession with luxuries, inessentials, trivia. American commerce, he lamented, ‘whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins’,43 while the ‘factory system’ existed chiefly to enrich the corporations (W, p. 26). Nothing, ‘not even crime’, was ‘more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business’ (LWP, p. 104).

  Thoreau shuns humans because they will not live up to ‘higher laws’, about which he has quite a lot to say (W, pp. 210–22). He thinks far more of men as they might be than of men as they actually are. Nonetheless, for all his recommendations of the ‘higher … intellectual flights’ (W, p. 107), the most exquisite accounts of higher things in Walden are actually loving descriptions of what are, from an anthropocentric perspective, lower ones, the myriad natural phenomena that he sees around him. Walden resounds with hymns to natural beauty that spring from attentive observation, are rhapsodic and clinical together. Thoreau knows exactly how rapidly blackberries can ‘deepen their tints’ (W, p. 156); he has watched them do it. He can hear a puff ball burst. He develops an intimate relationship with beans. He thinks of himself as ‘partly leaves and vegetable mould’ (W, p. 138), and the few people he is at all drawn to similarly gain from being half-human, like the French-Canadian woodchopper who is ‘cousin to the pine and the rock’ (W, pp. 146–7). Thoreau was not a loveless man. It was merely human beings that he could not love.

  Beneath all this was a serious if not unambiguous Thoreauvian politics, which, once again, as in the case of other American misanthropists, was partly a politics of language. Thoreau was appalled by and persistently condemned slavery and the wars in the west, refusing to pay his poll tax partly because the government was prosecuting an expansionist war with Mexico. The invasion of California and the Gold Rush were ‘the greatest disgrace on mankind’ and, as the two edges of the world appeared to touch, he asked incredulously whether this was really ‘the ground on which Orientals and Occidentals meet’ (LWP, pp. 108–9). But no one else seemed to care about America’s self-abasement. What Thoreau heard instead was rhetoric, rousing voices, the ‘cheap wisdom and eloquence of politicians’ (CD, p. 19), the ‘din of religion, literature and philosophy’ in the ‘pulpits, lyceums and parlours’ (NHM, p. 194), the speechifying produced in transient and superficial moods of excitement, everywhere, the authentic sound of men imposing on themselves and others for their own advantage. It was all profoundly discouraging. For no discourse could be in the least uplifting if it were not ‘steady and cheery’, yes, but in the manner of ‘the creak of crickets’ (ibid.).

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  One could extend an account of East coast misanthropy much further, going back again to Dickinson and Plath, both of them Massachusetts women, or turning to Boston-bred Robert Lowell (‘each of us holds a locked razor’).44 But I want rather to mention Dorothy Parker, though she is half-Jewish and in essence a New Yorker, and doesn’t really fit into the Puritan tradition. Parker’s short stories are full of dull, uncultivated, conventional, superficial people who have ‘sedulously effaced all trace of individuality’.45 They are spiritually and imaginatively dead. They may travel. They may read books, and even write them. None of this saves them. They are pusillanimous, and Parker treats them with chilly detachment. ‘What’ve I got to live for?’ moans the woman in ‘Dialogue at Three in the Morning’ (CS, p. 48). The answer, as is all too clear from the whole drunken, repetitive exchange of which the story is chiefly made up, is nothing; nor could anyone conceivably supply a reason. Parker’s focus tends to be on certain American types, particularly New Yorkers. But she knows her La Rochefoucauld,46 and her vision frequently broadens and deepens. Mrs Legion in ‘A Certain Lady’, for example, appears to be the ‘Heiress of the Ages’ both because she is an exceedingly wealthy New Yorker, and because she is exceedingly vacuous.

  Parker’s people frequently behave very badly indeed. Mr Durant in ‘Mr Durant’, for example, contemplates his short-term lover’s unexpected pregnancy and subsequent abortion with remarkable complacency, then hypocritically arranges the quick dispatch of the dog his children very much want to keep, because of the ‘disgusting’ possibility that they may find it reproducing (CS, p. 29). Not only do people behave like this, in Parker’s world: they do so lightly, gaily, frivolously. In ‘The Wonderful Old Gentleman’, for example, Mrs Whittaker cheats her brother and sister out of their inheritance ruthlessly, quite pleasantly, and without turning a hair. Parker’s people are at best sublimely indifferent to others, at worst cruel, brutal and exploitative. This rubs up harshly against their pathetically desperate need for relationships. But such relationships are commonly motivated by insecurity, and therefore don’t stand a chance of succeeding. ‘Why does there have to be so much hell, all the time?’ asks Mobie, in ‘Dusk Before Fireworks’ (CS, p. 152). Hell indeed: Parker’s shrill and unnecessary people repeat their patterns, as they do their hypnotic and disastrous litanies, with an almost lunatic regularity, like infernal creatures trapped in their own circles. Parker repeatedly said that the American style of bonhomie had turned its possessor into ‘an overzealous salesman’ avidly promoting its ‘wares of good humour and vivacity’ (CS, p. 34). Her reality, by contrast, though it is very largely that of people sufficiently privileged to enjoy the luxury of confirming the American myth, rather sweepingly discredited it.

  But rich New Yorkers were hardly the most significant example of American realities giving the lie to the American myth. The histories of the Indians and slavery did so with incalculably greater force. Other aspects of American history also had a similar effect. In particular, life in the parts of America where the exceptional character of the new nation was eme
rging, newly settled lands and the (much romanticized) American frontier, was often direly un-Edenic: lonely, filthy, lawless, violent, rapacious, racist and misogynist, beyond all moral inhibitors. From William Gilmore Simms’s Guy Rivers (1834) to the anti-Westerns – Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand (1971), Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), Robert Benton’s Bad Company (1972), Dick Richards’s The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972), Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) – American literature and art has darkly borne witness to this.47

  Frontier misanthropy overlapped with and fed into Southern misanthropy. Like the East coast version, Southern misanthropy emerged, on the one hand, out of a chronic gap between ideals and realities – the wretched failure of the realities of Southern life to live up to Southern romance or genteel Southern expectations – and, on the other, the gloomy legacy of puritanical churches, notably, perhaps, the Southern Baptist. Two writers immediately come to mind, here: Mark Twain and William Faulkner. Right from the start, the comic surface of Twain’s work keeps cracking open to reveal great gulfs of horror. This stems from two sources: his experience of the frontier and his familiarity with Southern (and Western) frontier culture, and his gift of childlike vision, the imagination with which he adopted the child’s point of view. In The Prince and the Pauper (1882), for example, he has little prince and little pauper exchange places so that they can both confront the awfulness of each other’s lives. The pauper is oppressed by the world of power and status, and through him Twain lays bare its underlying reality: false pomp and circumstance and self-inflation, a paralysing conventionality that forbids all candour and spontaneity, and a casual indifference to the lives and sufferings of the less fortunate. For his part, the prince is deeply shocked by his encounter with low life in Tudor England: violence, brutishness, anarchy, dire deprivation, crass, random and sadistic injustice (‘To think that these should know the lash! … Not just in Heathenesse, but in Christian England!’).48 Even in this early novel, it was finally only the children’s story format and the child’s tone that saved Twain from the misanthropic plunge.