While working away at his writing, Melville could be affectionate and indulgent with his four children but also tyrannical and withholding. He was prone to wild mood swings-- high-spirited on social occasions but moody and hot-tempered at home. During the mid-1850s he became dependent on alcohol for relief of his physical and emotional troubles, and there were rumors that he occasionally lost his temper and struck his wife, Lizzie. The family managed to survive financially, but this was primarily due to help from Lemuel Shaw.
In 1856, Shaw sent Melville money to take a months-long journey to Europe and the Holy Land. Melville kept a journal on the trip that portrayed him as outgoing and sociable. He visited Hawthorne during his travels, telling him that he was feeling better being away from America but that, at the age of thirty-seven, "He did not anticipate much pleasure in his rambles, for that the spirit of adventure is gone out of him." Nevertheless, by the end of the journey he had a new appreciation and enthusiasm for classical and European art.
In 1857, the country experienced yet another economic crisis, with several banks suspending operations and a sharp spike in unemployment and homelessness in northern cities. Republican newspaper columnists felt that social problems should be addressed by private charities and denounced Mayor Fernando Wood as a "communist" for proposing that public funds should be used to hire the unemployed to do public works. Additionally, large companies sent lobbyists to Washington to pass legislation favorable to them, making politicians servants to special interests. Citizens became disillusioned as the bribery of congressman filled the news.
Against this backdrop of uncertainty and hardship, Melville decided to seek work as a lecturer, choosing Roman statuary as his subject. He read directly from his notes and was accused of being dull and monotonous. By the end of the tour, he had barely earned any money. His second attempt, using the more popular subject "The South Sea," soon suffered from the same deterioration in his delivery, as he was too proud to try to entertain audiences who seemed disinterested and rude.
On August 1, 1859, Melville turned forty, and it seemed that his successes were long in the past. Still dependent on his wife's family for financial support, he consoled himself with the idea that the great artists of previous eras had been supported by patrons.
His final lecture, "Traveling: Its Pleasures, Pains, and Profits," was also a bomb, and by 1860, he had given up lecturing. Instead he became interested in reading and writing poetry, keeping this new passion a secret from his wife Lizzie. Poetry was unpromising as a career; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the only American who had come close to making a living off it.
Around this same time, Melville's father-in-law encouraged him to take another long journey, this time to San Francisco and Shanghai. While preparing for the trip, Melville finally shared his poetry with Lizzie, so that she could prepare his first volume for publication during his travels. Her supportive reaction helped mend some of the fractures in their relationship.
Unfortunately, Melville was both seasick and homesick on his vacation cruise. The ship's journey was a rough one, and at middle-age, Melville found it quite arduous, going so far as to cut the trip short and head home after San Francisco.
Melville had been especially disturbed at witnessing a young boy fall to his death while onboard the ship. He had grown stern with his children and used the accident to warn his oldest son Malcolm of the dangers of leaving home and setting off on adventures. Stanwix was not addressed nearly as often in Melville's letters; he was seemingly overshadowed by his older brother just as Melville had been.
Although Melville's first book of poems failed to find a publisher, he found new topics to explore upon his return. South Carolina soon seceded from the Union, leading to the formation of the Confederacy and eventually to the Civil War. Melville wrote numerous ambivalent poems on the topic that arose from his horror at the intense suffering and the obscene number of deaths caused by the conflict.
Melville also wrote a series of poems on naval warfare in which he portrayed the new, ironclad ships as stripping away the romance of warfare, even as he mourned the passing of the old wooden ships, which kept one in touch with the elements.
Melville's family continued to worry about his career prospects and again tried to steer him into politics, despite the fact that he felt alienated from that world. Lemuel Shaw quietly looked into a backup plan for Melville of a job in the New York Custom House, so that at least he could get out of Pittsfield, where he was still living on the farm, and move to New York. While Melville was making discouraging attempts at securing a political post in Washington, Lemuel Shaw became frighteningly incoherent back in Boston and died suddenly of a stroke before Melville could arrive at his bedside.
In the Winter of 1861, Melville suffered another attack of rheumatism. While recuperating, he began to come to terms with the world's indifference to artistic achievement and to the fact that no amount of success could stave off pain, illness, and death.
After an enjoyable family summer on the farm in 1862, Melville was dealt another blow. He suffered a serious injury during a carriage accident that made him all the more conscious of his mortality, telling an acquaintance, "I once, like other spoonies, cherished a loose notion that I did not care to live very long, but I will frankly own that I have now no serious, no insuperable objections to a respectable longevity. I don't like the idea of being left out night after night in a cold church-yard."
Melville finally sold the farm, to his brother, in 1863. He moved the family to 104 East Twenty-sixth Street in New York, where he remained for the last three decades of his life. By the time the family arrived back in New York, Melville's fame was long over, and he was viewed as a flash in the pan. New York had also changed; by 1863, the top one percent of the population controlled sixty-one percent of the City's wealth. The draft riots had occurred just prior to Melville's arrival.
In May of 1864, Melville was shocked to learn of Nathaniel Hawthorne's death.
Two years later, Melville finally published a book of poetry entitled Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Through this book, he hoped to contribute several important ideas to the national conversation, such as the idea that war itself is the enemy and that projecting evil onto an "other" is dangerous. The book, however, was a failure, and he lost money on it. Out of the public eye for ten years, Melville had failed to reestablish himself as a national figure.
Soon after, at the age of forty-seven, Melville took the oath as District Inspector of the United States Custom Service. He kept the position for twenty years, working six days a week, with national holidays and two weeks off a year. He received the relatively low salary of $4 a day, and despite performing his duties honestly and diligently, never received a raise. Regardless of his political affiliation, he had to give two percent of his salary to the Republican State Committee.
The job itself was mindless and routine. Melville checked the docking certificates and bills of lading of all incoming vessels and inspected all cargoes for violations. He also itemized all provisions prior to loading onto departing vessels. There was little social distraction from his colleagues as the majority of the men he worked with had no interest in discussing literature or philosophy. After four years of war, corruption permeated the public sector, and many appointees, like Melville himself, had secured their posts through connections. Unlike Melville, they were often corrupt and incompetent, lacking the ability to write and spell correctly.
Regardless, Melville's family was relieved he had found a job and thought it did him a world of good to get out of the house every day. They were thankful for the break from his unpredictable temper and demanding personality. Some family members began working on a plan to free Lizzie from the marriage, but she chose to stay and make the best of things.
Meanwhile, at seventeen, Melville's oldest child Malcolm had taken a clerking job in an insurance company and had begun to clash with his parents over his desire to be more independent. His parents wanted to protect him from the dangers of city life and would stay up until Malcolm returned home from his evenings out on the town. Frustrated, Melville finally took away Malcolm's key and began locking the door at precisely 11 p.m.
Malcolm had also taken a romantic interest in soldiering. His most prized possession was a gun, which he kept under his pillow. Pistol ownership had grown in popularity during this time period, with guns becoming a common household appliance among eastern city dwellers due to an increase in crime.
On September 10, 1867, Malcolm stayed out until 3 a.m. at a nightclub in Yorkville. Lizzie sent him straight to bed upon his return, and in the morning he refused to come down to breakfast, staying locked in his room for the remainder of the day. That evening, Melville broke into his room and found him curled in bed with his pistol in his right hand and a bullet hole in his right temple.
Although Lizzie and Melville remained stoic about his death, Melville grew to idealize Malcolm and pushed Stanwix even further away.
Despite the fact that he was beginning to suffer from deafness, Stanwix eventually left a clerking job to go to sea. Much like his father, he ended up jumping ship. Later, he travelled west in search of work, and, failing at that, journeyed to Cuba, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. He eventually settled in California, reluctant to return home with so little to show for his efforts. He did finally return only to stay for a short time before moving to San Francisco.
After Malcolm's death, Melville and Lizzie suffered through the losses of many more friends and relatives in rapid succession. Among these was the loss of Melville's mother, who died in 1872 at the age of eighty-two. Although Melville's relationship with his mother had been fraught, they had become warm and affectionate in her final years.
Melville devoted the winter of 1875-76 to writing an eighteen-thousand-line poem entitled Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. He placed great demands on his wife and daughters to help with the copying, sometimes rousing Fanny out of bed at 2 a.m. in order to copy or proofread. The poem's protagonist is a young American theological student seeking love and faith in an era of cynicism; death and disillusionment are its primary themes. It was written during the politics of the postwar era, which were corrupt and dispiriting, with the historian Henry Adams observing, "The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin."
Clarel was and remains little read. Three years after its publication in 1876, Melville authorized the sale of 224 copies of the book to a paper mill for pulping. He no longer expected remuneration for his work but felt that the act of writing kept him alive.
Meanwhile, twenty-five-year-old Stanwix had trouble holding down a job in San Francisco and had to borrow money from Lem Shaw, Jr. He eventually took a job in a mining shaft, where he developed full-blown tuberculosis.
By 1877, each of the top three employees at the Custom-House made more money than the President of the United States, while Melville only earned $1200 a year. Although he enjoyed some aspects of his job, he mainly endured it. He had yet to start a new project after Clarel, and, at 58, was tired and irritable. He survived yet another round of purging of employees but was unhappy to have to work longer hours. In a letter he wrote, "Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked."
That same year Melville began to suffer from erysipelas, which left him temporarily paralyzed and unable to write.
Melville's youngest child, Fanny, married in 1878. By that time, his other daughter, Bessie, was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis to such an extent that she was unable to dress herself or eat without assistance. She was an invalid by the age of thirty-two.
At age 66, Melville underscored a line from Balzac in which he states that the great secret of strong and creative lives "is to forget life's misfortunes."
In 1886, with a work transfer resulting in a time-consuming commute, Melville finally retired from his job as a customs inspector in order to concentrate on his writing. He and Lizzie had inherited enough money through the deaths of relatives to survive financially. The resulting freedom was bittersweet.
Also in 1886, at the age of thirty-five, Stanwix passed away in Sacramento from tuberculosis. Bessie remained forever in the care of her parents, and Fanny went on to give birth to four daughters but blamed Melville for all her later troubles in life. His granddaughters, however, had fond memories of listening to his tales of adventures in faraway places while they played with his whiskers.
By the Spring of 1888, Melville had drafted his poem "Billy in the Darbies" into the novella Billy Budd. It may have partially been written as an attempt by Melville, at the end of his life, to come to terms with his family history. While working on the book, another sibling died, leaving Melville and his sister Kate as the only two siblings left living of the original eight. Billy Budd's theme of an innocent young man victimized by an authority figure paralleled Melville's emotionally unsatisfying relationship with his own father as well as his treatment of his sons Malcolm and Stanwix.
After his death, the manuscript was put in a tin breadbox for safekeeping by Lizzie. Granddaughters Eleanor and Fanny became custodians of Melville's papers in 1906 and in 1924 the novella was published posthumously. Since its publication it has given rise to a record number of conflicting interpretations; Melville may have purposefully created a text that would do so. The ship on which the action takes place resembles a totalitarian state where government invocations of "national security" are used to cover violations of civil rights. Its intentional inaccuracies foreshadow George Orwell's 1984.
As he entered his seventies, Melville wrote, "After twenty years nearly, as an outdoor Custom House officer, I have latterly come into possession of unobstructed leisure, but only just as, in the course of nature, my vigor sensibly declines." By the late 1880s the public assumed he was long dead.
He continued to write poetry up until the end of his life. In 1891 he finished a bouquet of poetry for Lizzie entitled "Weeds and Wildings Chiefly: With a Rose or Two." He did not live to see a printed copy, passing away from a heart attack at the age of seventy-two. Lizzie lived on for another fifteen years, tending to his literary estate.
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