As the water laps at our sagging houses, as the creeks swell to tidal lagoons, as the flood-surge batters down our sandbag parapets, I climb out of an upper-storey window into the dinghy my father made so many years ago, and row out into the streets to hunt for food.
The supermarket, sited on swampy ground below the level of the road, was swallowed up right away. The stockboys didn’t even have a chance to strip the shelves before the waves came bursting in. The grocery stores and upper-level shops held out a little longer, but to no real purpose. Their façades glare down on me like a row of broken teeth: glass shards and jagged wood.
There are still some vegetable gardens and fruit trees on the headland above the bay. The looters stripped them weeks ago, but there might be a few green shoots left to harvest. Worth a try, at least.
Those few of us who chose to stay behind – unable to bear abandoning the old life: the rows of books and pictures, that sense of oneness with the past – must accept the consequences of our folly. We’re hanging on until the first real storms of winter come to sweep us away.
It’s a harsher life up in the hills, with small room for sentiment.
And that, I fear, is all that’s left to me now: sentimentality, feeling – lacrimae rerum, the eternal sorrow of things. Long evenings spent in my safe, dry room, high above the floodwaters, as I ape the rituals of a vanished life – scrawling these notes in the margins of a story lost two hundred years ago.
Sometime during the second week of June 1853, New York publishers the Harper brothers received a new manuscript from one of their best-known authors. The book was entitled The Isle of the Cross; the writer, Herman Melville.
There is little consensus over what happened next. The reviews of Melville’s previous effort, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, had been anything but encouraging. Its incest theme had not escaped censure, one reviewer commenting, ‘badly as we think of the book as a work of art, we think infinitely worse of it as to its moral tendency’, another referring to its ‘inexcusable insanity’. [1]
In fact, Melville had hardly had a success since his enchanting debut Typee, seven years before. Did the Harpers simply elect to cut their losses? They can hardly have felt very enthusiastic about throwing still more good money after bad.
Yet there would be more Melville books to come: two more novels, short stories, even an epic poem. Why was it only this one that failed to see print?
One possible explanation is the threat of a libel action. Melville had (it seems) based his narrative on the true story of a young woman abandoned by her seafaring husband.
‘In a 24 November letter to the Harpers, Melville used phrasing that implied that the firm had not simply rejected The Isle of the Cross but that he somehow had been prevented from publishing it, as if it were somehow not simply a matter of their not liking it,’ conjectures Hershel Parker in his exhaustive biography. ‘The most obvious guess is that the Harpers feared that their firm would be criminally liable if anyone recognised any surviving originals of the characters.’ [2]
Crisis ecology. That’s what you call it when a bulldozer or excavator blade shears away the edge of a bank or a field. It’s a violent break with the natural order which allows small, delicate plants to prosper unexpectedly. It’s where a botanist looks first to find anything rare, unusual, out-of-place.
My uncle used to call it ‘island thinking.’ He said the way Darwin’s finches had evolved in the Galapagos Islands to fill – however incompetently – every available niche in the local eco-system was the way things usually work on islands. I can see him now, sitting in his leather armchair, puffing on his pipe, pontificating about the mismanagement of our defence forces.
Funnily enough, he was right. We were mismanaged. We didn’t listen, even when there might have been a chance to do something – about the haze of greenhouse gases, the break-up of the great ice-shelves of the south. It’s true no mere budgetary readjustments could have stopped it, but maybe, just maybe, if we could have agreed to suspend the spree, cut back a little.
Agreed! When did we ever agree on anything? We squabbled, fought, and screamed at one another as the waters rose. As all hope disappeared.
In July 1852, Melville had made a short excursion to Nantucket Island with his father-in-law, the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, Lemuel Shaw. Their travelling companion was a lawyer, John Clifford. On the way Clifford told them the story of one of the island women, Agatha Hatch, who had been married to, then abandoned by, a shipwrecked mariner by the name of Robertson.
The ‘Agatha story’ (so-called) is one of the greatest might-have-beens in American literature. Melville outlined it in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, offering the plot-materials to his great friend and neighbour as ‘very much in a vein with which he was particularly familiar’.
Melville was presumably thinking of ‘Wakefield,’ Hawthorne’s story about a man who abandons his family, then goes to live a few streets away from them under an assumed name.
Whether or not Hawthorne ever seriously considered writing up the Agatha story, he shortly afterwards received the happy news of his appointment as American consul in Liverpool (reward for a tub-thumping campaign biography of his old classmate Franklin Pierce, the new president of the United States).
Melville was left behind: penniless, in debt, and increasingly in despair over the excoriating reviews of Pierre. So he began to write.
Icebergs this morning, floating just a little way off the beach. They’ve made it past the islands in the gulf at last, that screen of rock that has guarded us for so long. Rangitoto itself seems diminished – one more beacon of catastrophe, rather than the benign familiar giant straddling the channel.
I thought I was alone here, but as I was sculling my way back towards the house I saw a movement in an upper window: a face, a thin little face staring down at me.
I turned back at once, called out – nothing.
It was in one of the faux-Georgian apartment blocks down Sidmouth Street. I spent a good half hour clambering around the slippery inner stairs, but all the rooms I could reach were quite deserted.
It could have been imagination, I suppose. Lord knows I’ve been lonely enough to conjure up anything! It must be a good six weeks since the last official motor-launches came around, megaphones booming out across the bay:
‘Come out and you will not be hurt. I repeat, you will not be hurt. The Provisional Authority has ordered an evacuation of this area. Anyone remaining will be in breach of the regulations and may be shot or apprehended.’
Just the way they were holding their guns, knuckles tense on the triggers, would probably have kept me from responding, even if I hadn’t chanced on one of their attempts at ‘relocation’ weeks before. The bodies came bobbing up companionably at each high tide for days afterwards.
Finally I left a few apples and a lettuce at the top of the stairs. Stupid, really. I need all the food I can find. But if there really isn’t anyone there I should be able to pick them up again tomorrow. It seems a chance worth taking, anyway.
Extracts from John Clifford’s account of Agatha Hatch (appended to Melville’s letter of 13 August 1852 to Nathaniel Hawthorne):
Robertson was wrecked on the coast of Pembroke where this girl, then Miss Agatha Hatch, was living ... he was hospitably entertained and cared for, and ... married her, in due form of law ... About two years after the marriage, leaving his wife enciente [sic – pregnant] he started off in search of employment and from that time until seventeen years afterwards she never heard from him in any way whatsoever, directly or indirectly, not even a word.‘Every incident seemed branded upon the memories of both.’ The lawyer means this to justify trusting their account of the short visit, an essential exhibit in their suit to recover Robertson’s property. To me, though, it seems harsher than that: small incidents that relieved a dull and uneventful daily round, hinting at a universe of pain behind.
Being poor, she went out nursing for her daily bread and yet contrived out of her small earnings to give her daughter a first rate education. ... In the meantime Robertson had gone to Alexandria D.C. where he had entered into a successful and profitable business and married a second wife.
At the expiration of this long period of 17 years, which for the poor forsaken wife had glided wearily away while she was engaged away from home. ... her husband ... returned and wished to see her and her child … This meeting was described to me by the mother and daughter – Every incident seemed branded upon the memories of both. [3]
He excused himself as well as he could for his long absence and silence, appeared very affectionate, refused to tell where he was living and persuaded them not to make any inquiries, gave them a handsome sum of money, promised to return for good and left the next day – He appeared again in about a year, just on the eve of his daughter’s marriage & gave her a bridal present ... They all admitted that they had suspicions then ... that he had been a second time married.One can imagine the stiltedness of those two visits – the awkward small-talk occasioned by the need to ask no questions. The anxious speculations in the long watches of the night – three-o’clock-in-the-morning thinking – which persuaded them all, whether or not they ever spoke of it among themselves, that he was a secret bigamist, perhaps even a polygamist.
Certainly Melville was prepared to entertain the speculation that Agatha might not have been his first wife: ‘In his previous sailor life Robinson [sic] had found a wife (for a night) in every port.’
I was satisfied ... that their motives in keeping silence were high and pure, creditable in every way to the true Mrs Robertson. She stated the causes with a simplicity & pathos which carried that conviction irresistibly to my mind. The only good it could have done to expose him would have been to drive Robertson away and forever disgrace him & it would certainly have made Mrs Irvin [the second wife] & her children wretched for the rest of their days – ‘I had no wish’ said the wife ‘to make either of them unhappy, notwithstanding all I had suffered on his account’ – It was to me a most striking instance of long continued & uncomplaining submission to wrong and anguish on the part of a wife, which made her in my eyes a heroine.Why did she not speak out, investigate further at the time? The only effect such prying could have had, we are told, would have been ‘to drive Robertson away and forever disgrace him.’ She still, it seems, had feelings for him – as the father of her only child, if not as a husband. She was a ‘heroine,’ at any rate in Clifford’s eyes, because she cared more about others’ suffering than her own.
Was that why the story appealed to Melville? Did he see himself as a patient Agatha, suffering the unjust strokes of fate (financial, critical, literary) with ‘long continued & uncomplaining submission’? Is that why his first reaction was to offer the plot to a friend rather than writing it himself? To justify further so flattering a comparison?
Is that why it appeals to me?
She was waiting for me on the steps when I came back – a slight figure, wrapped in a somewhat ragged, ill-fitting coat. She didn’t seem particularly afraid. I nevertheless judged it better to turn the boat about and stay floating a few yards off before attempting any landing.
– Thanks for the lettuce and, you know, the fruit.
Her face was dark and intent, unsmiling, her accent a little foreign. Chinese, perhaps? Korean? Maybe with a touch of Kiwi mixed in.
I told her she was welcome.
– Any more food or stuff left round here?
– Not a lot, no. The looters pretty much cleaned us out. There’s some tinned stuff, and a few bits and bobs of garden up by the point.
– Been here long?
– Most of my life, I guess. I’m from here, actually – live just up the road there.
– You didn’t try and leave with the others?
– No. Couldn’t see the point, really. The roads were clogged, and then there were the stories about gangs and killings. It seemed better to stay put. It’s not as if I’ve got anyone else to worry about ... except the cat, and he seems pretty happy with things the way they are. How about you? Are you intending to stay?
– Don’t know.
– Look, I don’t want to worry you, but I’d better warn you that the storms can get quite bad here close to the beach, especially at high tide. You might want to move somewhere a bit further inland …
She was standing up by now, clearly anxious to retreat. If she hadn’t been so obviously starving, I doubt that she’d have spoken to me at all, let alone for so long. All through our conversation her eyes had been measuring the gunnysack of provisions propped in the back of my boat.
I’d only been intending to offer her a few apples, a cabbage or two – there really wasn’t much left at home – but those big dark eyes were too much for me. I turned the boat round and poled it in until she could make a grab at the bag.
She began to drag it upstairs with her (it was far too heavy for her to lift), then turned and smiled at me, a little furtive smile.
– My name’s Dai-yu, she said. [4]
Before I could say anything in response she was gone.
Melville, my Melville. Why Herman Melville, anyway? What is it in him that moves me, makes me want to probe his life? There’s another revealing remark in the letter he attached to the lawyer’s summary:
One night we were talking ... of the great patience, & endurance, & resignedness of the women of the island in submitting so uncomplainingly to the long, long absences of their sailor husbands ...The Isle of the Cross – Nantucket – is thus the home of suffering, patiently borne. It’s also, paradoxically, the home of the whaling trade, the place his hero Ishmael travels to at the beginning of Moby-Dick when he needs to find a ship:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet ... then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. [5]When men feel out of sorts they can always go to sea. For the women they leave behind there can be no such solace in action: no Ishmael-like escape, no hunt for the white whale.
Agatha must wait, and wait again, and be denied.
The Isle of the Cross – East Cape and Taranaki form the crossbar; Cape Reinga the head; Wellington the feet. One might perhaps place the inscription I.N.R.I. [Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum] at the level of the Hokianga. Christ’s head hangs over Auckland; his pierced heart overflows from Taupo.
Twenty percent of the inhabited surface of the globe has always lain within six to seven metres of sea level. The slightest of variations in the depth of ice at either pole could trigger such a rise. We knew that – for years and years we knew that and did nothing, pursued our breakneck course.
And thus the North Island indeed contracts to the outline of a cross.
I think of little Dai-yu, alone in the gathering darkness, fugitive from who knows what horrors – gaunt scarecrow of a girl; nervous, aloof, untrusting.
And can I really see myself as someone to be trusted? Robinson / Robertson to her Agatha? The women in my life might disagree. My only designs on her are for her company, but it may already be too late for that, far far too late.
And what does Melville have to say about his shipwrecked sailor?
In estimating the character of Robinson Charity should be allowed a liberal play. I take exception to that passage from the Diary which says that ‘he must have received a portion of his punishment in this life’ – thus hinting of a future supplemental castigation – I do not at all suppose that his desertion of his wife was a premeditated thing. If it had been so, he would have changed his name, probably, after quitting her. – No: he was a weak man, & his temptations (tho’ we know little of them) were strong. The whole sin stole upon him insensibly – so that it would perhaps have been hard for him to settle upon the exact day when he could say to himself, ‘Now I have deserted my wife’; unless, indeed upon the day he wedded the Alexandran [sic] lady ...‘He would have changed his name ...’ Melville does change his name – from ‘Robertson’ to ‘Robinson.’ It can hardly have been a mere slip of the pen, as he repeated it over and over again in each of the three letters he wrote on the subject. Was this the centre of his interest in the story: ‘he was a weak man ... and his temptations were strong’?
Melville’s temptations were indeed strong – to squander his wife’s inheritance on imprudent property investments (Arrowhead, that spacious farmhouse in the Berkshires situated so near to his beloved Hawthorne’s country cottage); to take out a secret mortgage against the house rather than admitting the extent of his debts to censorious in-laws.
His father had died in penury, having wasted a substantial inheritance. His wife’s family, the Shaws, scorned him as a half-mad wastrel (with one exception: his aging father-in-law, the Chief Justice).
Woken by a banging at the windows down below, a voice shouting something (it was still pitch dark). Peter, my little black cat, was up already, back stiffened with tension, anxious to be let out.
– Who’s there?
Something indistinguishable in reply as I leaned out of the window, words swept away by the wind. It was blowing a gale again. I hardly notice them now, waking up only when the squalls die down.
– Is that you, Dai-yu?
More banging.
– Hold on. I’m coming down.
Although I was looking as carefully as I could, shining the torch in every corner, I scarcely recognised her at first, crouching at the foot of the stairs like a small grey seal – a tangle of seaweed blown in by the storm.
Peter was hissing with anger as I pulled her up the steps (she weighed less than I’d have thought a human being could weigh), stripped her, towelled her, wrapped her like a mummy in layers of blankets – all before I could even take time to stoke the fire.
She made no efforts to resist or help through all of this, sat passive as a doll, her limbs cold as the sea itself. I chattered away to her the whole time, trying to reassure her. How had she found me? Had her room been flooded by the tide? Would she like something to drink?
The cocoa, when it came, was gulped down eagerly. Too eagerly, in fact. I should have known better. I could see a red flush spreading across her throat as the boiling liquid scalded her skin.
The story was already clear in Melville’s mind’s eye. So much is obvious from the close descriptions of it he gave in his letter to Hawthorne:
Supposing the story to open with the wreck then there must be a storm ... imagine a high cliff overhanging the sea & crowned with a pasture for sheep; a little way off – higher up, – a light-house, where resides the father of the future Mrs Robinson the First. The afternoon is mild & warm. The sea with an air of solemn deliberation, with an elaborate deliberation, ceremoniously rolls upon the beach. The air is suppressedly charged with the sound of long lines of surf ... Young Agatha (but you must give her some other name) comes wandering along the cliff. She marks a handful of cloud on the horizon, presaging a storm thro’ all this quietude.Note how closely Agatha is associated, even at this early stage, with nature and the natural world. The storm approaches like a break in her own calm and solitude. The name must be changed to avoid libel, but he implies, almost, that any name would do as well: Persephone, Nausicäa ... Dai-yu?
Any young woman wandering alone by the shores of the sea.
Agatha should be active during the wreck, & should, in some way, be made the saviour of young Robinson. He should be the only survivor. He should be ministered to by Agatha at the house during the illness ensuing upon his injuries from the wreck.At all costs Agatha must not seem a mere passive victim: Patient Griselda, half in love with her own abasement. Her courage during the wreck is designed to show us that any subsequent inactivity is due to choice.
Owing to the remoteness of the lighthouse from any settled place no regular mail reaches it ... at the junction ... there stands a post surmounted with a little rude wood box with a lid to it & a leather hinge. Into this box the Post boy drops all letters ... And, of course, daily young Agatha goes – for seventeen years she goes thither daily. As her hopes gradually decay in her, so does the post itself & the little box decay. The post rots in the ground at last. Owing to its being little used – hardly used at all – grass grows rankly about it. At last a little bird nests in it. At last the post falls.More points concerning the possible characterisation of ‘Robinson’ were given in a further letter, two months later, which concludes with the curious postscript: ‘If you find any sand in this letter, regard it as so many sands of my life, which run out as I was writing it.’
I warmed her slight body against mine all that long night – at first with little hope of success. She seemed half dead already from exposure, and however much I hugged and rubbed at her pale limbs, nothing could touch the ice within. Peter at length climbed on and added his weight to mine, purring anxiously as he stared into her face.
At that she roused a little, put out a hand as if to fend him off, then, mumbling, fell back into a fitful sleep.
That was the turning-point, I think – the moment at which she returned to us. Her life was wavering in the balance still, but gradually her limbs began to thaw, her body to relax.
When I woke in the morning she was already gone.
The sun was up. My first thought was for the boat – but no, she’d left me that at least, I found on looking out the window. She’d taken some clothes, some blankets, food … so much was clear when I checked my stores.
There was no note, no attempt to explain. What, indeed, was there to explain? Had I hoped she would stay, tend to the house while I went out scavenging for food? Create a little simulacrum of a family in this dank, rotten house? My selkie wife? Seal-woman from the sea?
S O R R Y was traced in salt on the kitchen table.
I like to think, had she had the time, she might have added: ‘Thanks.’
I’m haunted by this image of myself: another of Herman Melville’s characters, the pale, consumptive usher, ‘threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain ... with a queer handkerchief;’ searching out futile whale etymologies for Moby-Dick: ‘He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.’ [6]
My sins (like his?) are all sins of omission – failure to act, to speak out, resist the gradual erosion of our good green world. It’s perhaps a natural thing for islanders – living, as we do, at the mercy of the sea – to be a little fatalistic.
Our landscapes become ourselves.
Melville, though, for all his failures as a husband and a father – Malcolm, his eldest son, a suicide at age eighteen – was able to evade the demons of his heredity (wastrel father; penny-pinching New England; the Moloch of New York) just long enough to see himself plain:
On the one hand Robinson, the hangdog, half-repentant seducer; on the other, Captain Ahab, driven mad by his futile quest for the white whale – the type of any man who sets himself against an indifferent cosmos. Or, as in the old stories, any man who tries to change the nature of a child of the sea by stealing her skin and hiding it away.
At least I brought the girl back to life. She left before I could imprison her.
Melville puts it best: in the apocalyptic climax to his greatest novel, as Tashtego reaches up and nails a ‘sky-hawk’ to the stricken, sinking Pequod:
... and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her ...Godspeed, Dai-yu. I hope that you, at least, escape our wreck.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. [7]
Notes:
[1] Reviews quoted in "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities". The Life and Works of Herman Melville [http://www.melville.org/melville.htm].
[2] Hershel Parker. Herman Melville: A Biography. Volume 2, 1851-1891 (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 159.
[3] Herman Melville, "Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (August 13, 1852)", from Melville's Letters to Hawthorne. The Life and Works of Herman Melville [http://www.melville.org/melville.htm].
[4] Lin Dai-yu - "a well-educated, intelligent, witty and beautiful young woman of physical frailness ... prone to occasional melancholy" - is one of the principal characters in Cao Xueqin's classic novel The Dream of the Red Chamber. She is "perhaps the most studied Chinese literary woman figure in history." Haiwang Yuan, "Lin Daiyu" (2003).
[5] Herman Melville. "Loomings." Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. 1851. Ed. Harold Beaver. Penguin English Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 93.
[6] Melville. "Etymology." Moby-Dick, 75.
[7] Melville. "The Chase – Third Day." Moby-Dick, 685.
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Contributor's Note
Jack Ross has published two books of poems and four of fiction, most recently The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus, 2006). He has also edited several anthologies, including — with Jan Kemp — the upcoming collection Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press). He teaches academic and creative writing at Massey University’s Albany campus.
My interest in selkie legends probably comes from my grandmother, who grew up in an isolated Gaelic-speaking community on the West Coast of Scotland.
Tina Shaw & Jack Ross, ed.: Myth of the 21st Century (2006)[18/9-4/12/2005]
[4432 words]
[Published in Myth of the 21st Century: An Anthology of New Fiction. Ed. Tina Shaw & Jack Ross. ISBN 0-7900-1098-4 (Auckland: Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd, 2006): 84-94;
Kingdom of Alt (Auckland: Titus Books, 2010): 49-61]
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