“Blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie. ‘It is the bed of a dried-up sea,’ said the companionless sailor — no geologist — to himself, musing at twilight upon the fixed undulations of that immense alluvial expanse bounded only by the horizon, and missing there the stir that, to alert eyes and ears, animates at all times the apparent solitudes of the deep.
“But a scene quite at variance with one’s antecedents may yet prove suggestive of them. Hooped round by a level rim, the prairie was to John Marr a reminder of ocean.
“With some of his former shipmates, chums on certain cruises, he had contrived, prior to this last and more remote removal, to keep up a little correspondence at odd intervals. But from tidings of anybody of any sort he, in common with the other settlers, was now cut off; quite cut off, except from such news as might be conveyed over the grassy billows by the last-arrived prairie-schooner — the vernacular term, in those parts and times, for the emigrant wagon arched high over with sail-cloth, and voyaging across the vast champaign. There was no reachable post-office as yet; not even the rude little receptive box with lid and leather hinges, set up at convenient intervals on a stout stake along some solitary green way, affording a perch for birds, and which, later in the unremitting advance of the frontier, would perhaps decay into a mossy monument, attesting yet another successive overleaped limit of civilized life; a life which in America can today hardly be said to have any western bound but the ocean that washes Asia. Throughout these plains, now in places overpopulous with towns overopulent; sweeping plains, elsewhere fenced off in every direction into flourishing farms — pale townsmen and hale farmers alike, in part, the descendants of the first sallow settlers; a region that half a century ago produced little for the sustenance of man; but to-day launching its superabundant wheat-harvest on the world;—of this prairie, now everywhere intersected with wire and rail, hardly can it be said that at the period here written of there was so much as a traceable road. To the long-distance traveller the oak-groves, wide apart, and varying in compass and form; these, with recent settlements, yet more widely separate, offered some landmarks; but otherwise he steered by the sun. In early midsummer, even going but from one log-encampment to the next, a journey it might be of hours or good part of a day, travel was much like navigation. In some more enriched depressions between the long, green, graduated swells, smooth as those of ocean becalmed receiving and subduing to its own tranquility the voluminous surge raised by some far-off hurricane of days previous, here one would catch the first indication of advancing strangers either in the distance, as a far sail at sea, by the glistening white canvas of the wagon, the wagon itself wading through the rank vegetation and hidden by it, or, failing that, when near to, in the ears of the team, peeking, if not above the tall tiger-lilies, yet above the yet taller grass.
“Luxuriant, this wilderness; but, to its denizen, a friend left behind anywhere in the world seemed not alone absent to sight, but an absentee from existence.
“Though John Marr’s shipmates could not all have departed life, yet as subjects of meditation they were like phantoms of the dead. As the growing sense of his environment threw him more and more upon retrospective musings, these phantoms, next to those of his wife and child, became spiritual companions, losing something of their first indistinctness and putting on at last a dim semblance of mute life; and they were lit by that aureola circling over any object of the affections in the past for reunion with which an imaginative heart passionately yearns.”
Melville.
The dark oak rafters, forming the main roof gable of the house, are pitched low, so that there is only a narrow corridor, running east and west, of standing room, and this is flanked on either side by low-roofed shadows, filled with trunks, old furniture, magazines, and the like, things that Mother — though she survives in the nursing home downtown and knows she will never leave it — will not allow us to dispose of. Against the rock chimney is a makeshift desk — an old door, laid flat on crates — and running the length of this are the books — books that I have bought, found, begged throughout my life, ever since the morning when Carl and I were playing in a haunted house, and we broke into what appeared to be a secret closet, discovered a small decanter of medicated sherry, the remnants of a whalebone corset, and an old copy of TYPEE. We rescued the whalebone from the rotted cloth, drank the sherry, and spent the rest of the day devouring what the bookworms had left of TYPEE.
Reaching the desk, I sit before it for a moment, uncritical, with perception undiminished, searching a balance.
(Melville, WHITE-JACKET, called to observe a flogging: “. . balanced myself on my best centre.”
There are the titles, the feel of an old binding: MARDI, for example, an early edition, in two volumes, dark brown, maroon, and black, the backing ribbed, and inside, the marbled end-papers, and the Preface:
“Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience.”
Then, GRAY’S ANATOMY, Goss, Twenty-fifth Edition; and a disreputable copy of THE HOOSIER SCHOOLMASTER, by Edward Eggleston. A thin, modern English book, COSMOLOGY, by H. Bondi; THE SEARCH FOR ATLANTIS, by Edwin Bjorkman; and a copy of NATURAL HISTORY, March, 1952, including an article, SHRUNKEN HEADS. A TEXTBOOK OF EMBRYOLOGY, by Jordon and Kindred; also, JOURNAL OF MORPHOLOGY, Volume XLX, 1908, containing A STUDY OF THE CAUSES UNDERLYING THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN MONSTERS.
Glancing upward, at the eight-inch rafters casting regular shadows across each other and across the roof boards, down the length of the attic, I am reminded
of the forecastle of the Julia in OMOO, planted “right in the bows, or, as sailors say, in the very eyes of the ship. .”
“All over, the ship was in a most dilapidated condition; but in the forecastle it looked like the hollow of an old tree going to decay. In every direction the wood was damp and discoloured, and here and there soft and porous. Moreover, it was hacked and hewed without mercy, the cook frequently helping himself to splinters for kindling-wood from the bitts and beams.”
and there was “that gloomy hole where we burrowed like rabbits,” in REDBURN. . as well as
The Gunner in WHITE-JACKET— “. . among all the persons and things on board that puzzled me, and filled me most with strange emotions of doubt, misgivings, and mystery, was the gunner — a short, square, grim man, his hair and beard grizzled and singed, as if with gunpowder. His skin was of a flecky brown, like the stained barrel of a fowling-piece, and his hollow eyes burned in his head like blue-lights. He it was who had access to many of those mysterious vaults I have spoken of. Often he might be seen groping his way into them. .”
and
“. . he was, withal, a very cross, bitter, illnatured, inflammable little old man. So, too, were all the members of the gunner’s gang; including the two gunner’s mates, and all the quarter-gunners. Every one of them had the same dark brown complexion; all their faces looked like smoked hams. They were continually grumbling and growling about the batteries; running in and out among the guns; driving the sailors away from them; and cursing and swearing as if all their consciences had been powder-singed and made callous by their calling. Indeed they were a most unpleasant set of men; especially Priming, the nasal-voiced gunner’s mate, with the harelip; and Cylinder, his stuttering coadjutor, with the clubbed foot.”