GLR July-August 2022

ESSAY The Sea and Sexual Freedom R OLANDO J ORIF

W HEN I LECTURE on Herman Melville, I’m usually asked whether he was gay. I answer, probably not. Then I’m asked if he ever had sex with men. I answer, probably, but only when he was young, and only while at sea. I then admit that Robert Aldrich’s compendium of LGBT biographies, Gay Lives (2012) , has no separate entry for Melville. Aldrich claims that, while gay liberation mandates “an open and proud affirmation of sexual orientation,” he proposes that “sex does not provide the key to everyone’s life.” Apparently, sex alone is not enough.

flict between personal ambition and fulfillment held Melville captive, because witnessing his father’s desperate efforts to strike it rich had taught him the futility of that kind of life. He had also seen the man he idolized die, raving (in Calvinist thought, such a death indicated that the father was damned for ever) and bankrupt. The result was that while still a boy he had to enter the workforce at one of its lowest levels, as a seaman. There he learned what society does to men who fail, and how it builds empires on human suffering. Eventually, Melville real ized that he had an affinity for those men who must make their way in the world without relying on class or even race. He learned that there was manhood else where, and it was universal. At sea, Melville found that he could fit in with a way of life that contradicted what on dry land he’d been taught was proper. This discov ery extended into the sexual realm. Nevertheless, notwithstanding any notions that he may have picked up about sailors’ aggressive sexuality, his principal characters are often pas sive observers who rely on evasive words like “peep” or “glimpse” to report on same-sex activity. They ex perience no personal violence. Yet these narrators reflect the author’s difficulty with being fully responsi ble, both emotionally and sexually. It is why, in the novel Redburn , when the sailors force a spoiled boy to climb to the top of a mast by having a sailor bump his head against the re luctant climber’s backside, accord ing to historian William Benemann (who has a piece in this issue), Melville’s wordplay relates an event that only “sails as near to the edge of homoerotic explicitness as he dares.” It is also why, when Redburn returns home, he makes sure to leave behind any evidence of his experience. To those who don’t know about such things, the novel’s con fusing tone may express only an adolescent’s fear of not fitting in. However, Melville’s language hints that “climbing the mast” means that a public sexual initiation is taking place. Such ac tivity was at that time acceptable, even common practice among merchant seamen, but it was mainly confined to reciprocal mas turbation performed chiefly below decks, and generally some what in private. This fact explains why later, when a shipmate

Aldrich argues that, because sex forms only a part of a person’s sense of his or her place in the world, sex ual orientation should be a matter of “intimate affinities.” There are no personal confessions of such affini ties about Melville. Whether Melville himself ever had such affinities is un known, though he wrote of them. The attempt to ascertain Mel ville’s sexual orientation as an adult that is based on his writings has al ways proved challenging. One prob lem is that Melville did not write many books about his mature experi ences. Another one is that, as a writer, he was not very good at plots. He never quite figured out what typically constituted a book but relied instead on other people (editors, publishers) to define what he was writing. Con sequently, his first novel, Typee , was sold as a travel book on the exotic South Seas. It was actually packed with a great many things, like anti imperialism and his personal issues with manhood. But these issues only muddied the waters. What interested Melville was the fabrication of an ac

Herman Melville

ceptable narrative that allowed him to discuss provocative top ics like the nature of good and evil and how being a man means being in conflict with society. Although Melville had famous ancestors, he had no models for the life that he sought for himself. In Billy Budd , he deleted a confession that fiction can only provide a brief “respite” from a world where the individual struggles with society. This con Rolando Jorif is an assistant professor of English at CUNY–Borough of Manhattan Community College.

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