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A Melville Triptych
by
Frank X. Roberts In the First Panel of the Triptych a young reader (a student perhaps) having recently been introduced to the writings of Herman Melville, has sat up all night reading Moby Dick. As the sun rises, the reader, bleary-eyed and somewhat baffled as to what the author's words really convey, thinks: “If Melville is not all at sea, I certainly am. Maybe I’ll ask . . .”
Melville and Me At Sea
(The Reader Questions the Author)
Well, Mr. Melville, here comes the dawn,
We've sailed all night around the horn
And met that great whale you call Moby Dick;
I gather you think he's quite symbolic;
But when he got mad and acted so odd,
It was a whale not a symbol sank the Pequod!
Your novel is deep, difficult and wordy,
Will I get it, you think, before I'm thirty?
Now I must read another few can understand,
Titled, some say smilingly, The Confidence Man,
And also your short story, written enigmatically,
About one of fiction's oddest characters, Bartleby.
Please, please, Mr. Melville, explain to me
Why your writings are so full of ambiguity.
(The Author Answers)
As in life, in my stories strange things occur,
Yours mystically, Herman Melville, mariner.
In the Second Panel the same reader some years later, but perhaps not yet quite thirty, is in a smokey, dim-lit room with a mixed company of young adults. Their talk has turned to the life and writings of Herman Melville.
Discussing Herman Melville
The room is indirectly dark,
With ashtrays on the floor,
Ashes and beer bottles
And the din of many voices . . .
First voice: “For me his big white whale
Still floats in its tropical sea
Surrounded by gallons
And gallons of salty ambiguity.”
Second voice: “He was odd, you know
The result of being friendless,
And away from home
At a very early age—or
Because he had a mad father,
And a madder mother
Whom he loved with Oedipal intensity.”
Third voice: “His sea life really began
In Fairhaven, on the South Shore,
Where the wooden ships left
Beneath bearded iron men
And beardless boys,
With thoughts of world and time.”
Fourth voice: “Water has power to draw,
And calms, beyond pat knowledge,
And the critic’s piecemeal probabilities,
The need to know; rooms have doors,
Exits to the river, to the sea.”
Silence . . .
In the Third Panel it is many years later. The reader, now past middle age, sits by the fire on a winter’s night, sips a glass of port wine, and smiles at the pun in the title of the following poem about Herman Melville, as he was near the end of his writing life.
Melville In Port
Melville, he wanted deep divers,
Or at least that's what he said
Somewhere in a letter or a tale,
Men who would follow all rivers,
Never minding where they led,
Or a dark and distant trail.
He went to work in the Customs House,
Twenty years a New York mole,
Waking to do a daily job,
With nothing to crease or arouse
The anger in his dampened soul;
He dived and drowned in the mob.
Twenty years on the New York shore,
He sighed and simmered away;
If he thought deeply, nobody heard;
He kept his counsel and the store,
Looked into the depths of New York Bay,
And never published another word
Frank's extensive career in teaching and librarianship began when he taught English in the U.S. From 1961 to 1963, as part of a Columbia University program called “Teachers for East Africa,” he taught English and American Literature in East Africa. There he met his wife, Dorothy. They returned to the U.S. where he simultaneously taught and finished two Masters’ degrees, in Education and in Librarianship. In 1968 they returned to England where Frank taught Library Studies, and adopted Hodge, a cat who later traveled around the world with them. In 1972, Frank was “seconded” for two years to teach at Makerere University in Uganda, East Africa, but left reluctantly after one year when the tyranny of Idi Amin became intolerable. From there it was back to England, then Australia and finally to America in 1979, to Buffalo where Frank earned his doctorate. Later they moved to Colorado, where he was Professor of Library Studies at the University of Northern Colorado until retiring in 1997. Frank published James A. Michener: A Checklist of his Work with a Selected Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press) in 1995. He has written on bookmarks, specifically on medieval bookmarks, his special area of interest. A poet by avocation, he writes eclectically but traditionally. Frank and Dorothy live in Colorado with two very senior citizens of the feline persuasion. He can be reached at
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