Looking for a word to describe a people who complain about the price of gas while the entire nation of Ukraine suffers a war that precipitated the increase?
Call it Snivilization.
No, not mine. Found it–along with much else I’m about to report–in a brand-new dual-biography titled, Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times.
Yes, it was at least 130 years ago that Herman Melville coined the word, not on a mast a la Ahab in any of his novels, but in letters to friends. And yes, he is remembered for adventures in the South Pacific, as far from civilization (with a C) as you can get. But most of them tell of uncomplicated, peaceful island natives grateful for the fruit of their earth no matter how difficult it was to obtain or prepare.
Melville couldn’t resist comparisons to back home, as he recalled the huffs and puffs often expressed at any minor inconvenience or delay in what he and his contemporaries–Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau–called a “Get Ahead World.”
It was not a compliment. And it was aimed at a ruling class impatient with a servant class; at factory foremen pressuring women and immigrant workers in overcrowded, unventilated factories; at overseers cracking the whips on men, women, and children picking cotton in hot and humid fields; at bankers manipulating numbers to milk the farmers who milked the cows before any hint of dawn.
If you ever wondered how Hawaii became a state, Melville’s early novels will convince you that America had no choice but to grant statehood after destroying the natives’ way of life under the pretext of bringing the conveniences of “civilization” and the benevolence of Christianity. All the early missionaries and military had to do was make a few islanders–usually one family–rich while the rest went to work for a pittance. Statehood finally came as an act of obligatory mercy. If Melville were alive at the time Hawaii entered the Union, he’d have been amazed that Tahiti wasn’t “admitted” with it.
And who benefitted from America’s Pacific ventures? American consumers, many of whom would complain if the price of pineapples went up, no matter that the natives climbed trees and picked them for pennies a day while their ruling class feasted with managers of the Dole Fruit Company and other “investors” by night.
In retrospect, it may either amuse or anger anyone who ever heard an English teacher or literary critic fault Melville for his tendency to “go off on tangents.” In Typee and Omoo, many tangents are screeds against colonization of Pacific Islands by the French and English while the Americans tagged along like eager teens ready to share the spoils. By the time he wrote Moby-Dick, Melville’s “tangents” tended more toward philosophy, disguised in Ishmael’s skittish, puckish, rhapsodic, whimsical narration.
His target was an American public that valued its own convenience over the consequences it had for others–much as Americans today enjoy inexpensive clothing and shoes without a thought of it being all stitched together in third-world sweat shops, or think that the price of gas is all the fault of a political party and not at all due to a war waged by a foreign power that wants nothing less than the end of democracy.
For all the lip service that we pay to sacrifices made by those deployed by our military into harm’s way, America is deaf and dumb to any need to sacrifice at home. Risk over there is nothing compared to inconvenience back here.
And pay no attention to any corporate pretext for price-gouging behind the screen. Sorry for the “tangent,” but it’s what happens when a subject has you amused (by the gullibility of those who fall for it) and angry (at the consequences) at the same time.
The word for that is bemused.
“He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his disbelief,” was how Nathaniel Hawthorne described his friend after the commercial failure of Moby-Dick ten years before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Following a string of six spirited novels–the first of them, Typee, so successful it made him an international celebrity–Melville wrote dark, brooding novels that had critics (publicly) and loved ones (privately) questioning his sanity.
His fans didn’t buy them. In fact, one he titled The Isle of the Cross was declined by his publisher, as was a short story, “The Two Temples,” a biting attack on organized religion. Already absorbed in another story in his most intense way, Melville shelved and apparently forgot Isle. Unlike Billy Budd and “Temples,” the manuscript was not among papers he left behind and is presumed lost.
Imagine finding it today! It would fetch at least a million at auction, enough to put a down-payment on Beethoven’s Tenth.
Soon after the Civil War, America’s most prolific author fell silent save for a few slim volumes of poetry. He was so forgotten by 1891 that an obit in a New York paper called him “Hiram.” And he would remain forgotten until his centennial in 1919 when an enterprising young scholar named Raymond Weaver started writing magazine articles that would eventually form the first biography of the creator of Ismael, Ahab, Bartleby, and many more characters now impossible to forget: Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic.
“Mystic”? Well, the Great War had just ended, and America was rushing headlong into the Roaring Twenties. What better time for Weaver to revive the author of Moby-Dick, a book he tells us “reads like a great opium dream”?
That assessment, though not definitive, is just as valid and useful as any other made of the book, reminding me of one calling it “clam chowder” due to Melville’s combination of various ingredients. A recent natural history titled Ahab’s Rolling Sea called it an “the first environmental manifesto,” a forerunner of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with Ishmael as a “blue environmentalist.” During the McCarthy era, another critic called it our first “totalitarian novel,” a forerunner of Orwell’s 1984 with Ishmael as Winston Smith.
Back at South Dakota State forty years ago, I wrote a paper for a graduate seminar claiming that, if the Bible is “God talking to Man,” Moby-Dick is Man’s response. As a way to avoid the arrogance of appointing himself a spokesman for mankind, Melville’s “in the beginning” took on a life of its own, a reference to an outcast in the book of Genesis: Call me Ishmael.
The most recent assessment calls Moby-Dick “the warp and woof” of two books. One is the adventure story that the public would have bought, while the other is a manual of the whaling industry that would also have found an audience in its time. So why did Melville serve them up as one?
That is among the subjects of Aaron Sachs’ fascinating Up from the Depths, itself a “warp and woof” as it intersperses Melville’s life and work chapter by chapter with that of Lewis Mumford.
If Weaver set the table for the Melville revival in the 1920s, Mumford was the one who served the fare and poured the drinks. Born in 1895, Mumford found that Melville’s misgivings about an inattentive, carefree America in the 1850s leading to Civil War matched his own about an equally blissful nation in the 1920s. His far more incisive and insightful bio, Herman Melville, appeared right on cue in 1929, the year of the crash.
If Mumford wrote that book today, his publisher would change the title to Why Melville Matters.
Sachs points out, with numerous private letters to prove each point, that Melville was always on the mind of Mumford, who ranks high among 20th Century American historians, sociologists, literary critics, and philosophers of both urban planning and technology. To that end, a very young Mumford invoked Melville’s skepticism during the Red Scare that followed World War I; in middle-age during McCarthyism following World War II; in his senior years during the American War on Vietnam.
Hence, the last phrase of the subtitle: In Dark Times.
What better time to consider a possible descent back into Dark Ages than a year when our Supreme Court is for the first time eliminating basic rights, when state legislatures are openly restricting voting rights, when governors are dictating what can and cannot be taught in schools, and when a sizable segment of the American public is clamoring in favor of authoritarian rule?
In his conclusion, Sachs writes that he is…
…grateful to Melville and Mumford for reminding us that people have been living with the trauma of modernity for a long time… The fantasy of increasing security and comfort–the fantasy of Progress–is pernicious, because it distracts us from the unending misery of others and also inhibits our resilience, undermines our age-old adaptations to hardship.
Others may have called it everything from an opium dream to a bowl of chowder, from a political manifesto to a religious tract, but Moby-Dick is a warp that refuses to let you forget the woof. Sachs considers that to be a formula that might once again help snap us out of Snivilization.
Up from the Depths is not just a chronicle of one Rediscovery, but a bid for another.
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Mouth of the River 