Tremendous crowds thronged the scene soon after word of the disaster spread. .
Wives and children of miners employed in the shaft crowded about, seeking information, and groups of waiting, sobbing women and children clustered about as the news was broken that 51 of the men were known to be dead.
I recall standing beside Mother — Carl on the other side, a hand of hers reaching to each of us — waiting, hour after hour, not moving. . and when the body was brought up, the faces of the others turned toward us — curiosity locked in compassion — Mother waiting (Carl and I looking to her, even though it be disaster, wanting to be sure), waiting until the body were brought before her — and, as she recognized him, Father, her hand clutching, tightening. .
Most authentic reports of the accident were that the explosion occurred when miners either cut into abandoned workings or a slight cave-in opened old entries in which gas had collected, the miners’ lamps setting off the pocket of gas. .
Men who had been in the mine said the explosion seemed to go in gusts, some being suffocated, others horribly burned, while others were but slightly burned. Many were hurled about rooms and entries. .
Rope lines established by local authorities and miners failed to check the rush of hundreds who flocked to the mine.
(. . rushing, eddying to the disaster. .
there was the long period of waiting, and discovery — the knowledge, in the pit of my stomach, that something had happened, the excitement, the image of his face, as Carl and Mother and I saw it before us, his body — waiting for the realization, the understanding of it to burst upon me. .
like a holiday: the normal, daily laws of living abrogated — waiting to discover what it was, what it meant, that Father was dead. .
. . followed by disappointment, as there was no discovery, no bursting upon me, but only dullness, a slow seepage of understanding. . and the poverty doubled in, feeding upon itself, as we lived now, a family of three, on the compensation—$13.20 a week — allowed by the law. .
with the numbness: the absence of Father, who, even in failure, had provided a dimension that was now gone. .
Where Melville dove, Dreiser floated. . a great mass of pity, cut off. .
Hurstwood, in SISTER CARRIE, as Dreiser’s father, sitting alone, apathetic in his rocker:
“Hurstwood saw her depart with some faint feelings of shame, which were the expression of a manhood rapidly becoming stultifed.”
and the drear, the cold, wint’ry drear of Hurstwood, struggling to reclaim himself as a $2-a-day scab in the Brooklyn trolley strike. .
Dreiser, who was sterile — terminating his sons before their conception, giving them, therefore, shorter lives, shorter agonies than Melville’s sons — nevertheless took the trouble, on a trip to Europe, to hunt out his father’s birthplace. .
searching the sources, the roots, the blasted paternity. . Theodore Dreiser, Indiana-born, doorkeeper of the century. .
(in ancient Rome, the double barbican gate in the Forum — dedicated to Janus, supreme janitor — was closed during times of peace, open only in war. .
BUD
ONE
AFTER MOBY-DICK, the sinking, Melville, with pseudonyms and anonyms, kept trying to die, as PIERRE. .
“. . death-milk for thee and me!”
BENITO CERENO. .
“seguid vuestro jefe”
and BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER. .
opening lines, written when he was 34: “I am a rather elderly man.”
and like Columbus, in search of death, he turned to the Holy Land, Sodom, the 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, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death, thought I. — Old boughs tossed up by water — relics of pick-nick — nought to eat but bitumen & ashes with dessert of Sodom apples washed down with water of Dead Sea. — . .”
and Columbus, following the 3rd voyage, liberated from his chains by the Sovereigns,
(as Melville had been liberated, temporarily, from the chains of poverty, by Judge Shaw,
turned inland
(as Melville turned inland, in PIERRE,
to another scheme: the liberation of Jerusalem. .
retiring to the convent of Las Cuevas, he began work on the BOOK OF PROPHECIES:
“St. Augustine says that the end of this world is to come in the seventh millenary of years from its creation. . there are only lacking 155 years to complete the 7000, in which year the world must end.”
“The greatest part of the prophecies and Sacred Writing is already finished.”
thus foreclosing on the future of the hemisphere he had discovered,
. . condoning and justifying all brutalities against the Indians, as extreme haste must be made to convert the heathen. .
Melville:
“With wrecks in a garret I’m stranded. .”
and
“Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.”
Columbus, on Jamaica:
“Solitary in my trouble, sick, and in daily expectation of death. .”
and back in Spain, 1504, still trying to get to the Court to present his claims and grievances — too weak and ill to make the trip on foot or on horseback — requests the loan of a funeral bier from the Cathedral of Seville:
“This day, their Worships ordered that there should be loaned to the Admiral Columbus the mortuary bier in which was carried the body of the Lord Cardinal Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, whom may God have in his keeping, in order that he may go to the Court, and a guarantee was taken from Francisco Pinelo which assured the return of the said bier to this church in safety.”
. . to be carried out of his disaster like Ishmael, on the floating coffin. .
TWO
But Melville, after trying through the long middle years to die, put out a late, late bloom. .
(scores & underscores, in a volume of Thomas Hood: “. . the full extent of that poetical vigour which seemed to advance just in proportion as his physical health declined.”
. . in his sixties and seventies, came to life:
“We the Lilies whose palor is passion. .”
“. . the winged blaze that sweeps my soul
Like prairie fires. .”
“To flout pale years of cloistral life
And flush me in this sensuous strife.”
“The innocent bare-foot! young, so young!”
“The plain lone bramble thrills with Spring”
“The patient root, the vernal sense
Surviving hard experience. .”
In a volume, transparently dedicated to Lizzie.
“. . white nun, that seemly dress
Of purity pale passionless,
A May-snow is; for fleeting term,
Custodian of love’s slumbering germ. .”
“I came unto my roses late.
What then? these gray hairs but disguise,
Since down in heart youth never dies. .”