GLR July-August 2022

when transferred to strange places or living under unfamiliar circumstances. Melville once wrote to his friend Richard Dana Jr., author of Two Years before the Mast , that no one could ever really begin to write about a man’s experience of the world without having gone through what they had endured at sea. In Red burn, Melville insists that “there are passages in the lives of all men, so out of keeping with the common tenor of their ways ... that only He who made us can expound them.” A popular song of the times states this theme more plainly: “Well, you know what sailors are.”

worries that Redburn will shame the crew by not dancing well when they go on shore leave, the boy happily relieves “his anx iety on that head.” Melville implies here that the boy is willing to fit in with the seamen’s traditional social practices when on shore. Apparently, Redburn ’s story is about the “green” begin ners called “boys” who in popular sea chanteys prove to be both brave and sexually available. Melville’s own life was so full of self-promotion that his relatives nicknamed him “Tawney” for the way in which he reworked his own part in the South Sea adventures that he wrote about. In these novels, he used the autobiographical “I” to suggest firsthand experience, which he expanded upon with exotic facts and erotic fantasies. In time, the family felt that life among the cannibals of the South Pacific had darkened Melville as surely as if he had returned home covered in pagan tattoos. These fabrications went into his first, and his only successful, novel Typee . In Typee , young Tommo flees an onboard orgy of sailors and Polynesian women to go live among the people called Typee (“lovers of human flesh”), where he develops a strange leg injury. It allows him to be a pampered, passive guest while participating in strange sexual activities. Like a prodigal son, when Tommo discovers that the islanders are indeed canni bals, he runs back to civilization, only now he has fantastic stories to tell. Even today, Melville’s travel adventures still ring true because they reveal what men are capable of doing

Melville certainly did know, because he reveals, in the words of William Benemann, “a world that holds heterosexuality to be the norm, but which allows for a wide swath of sexual ambiguity.” In Billy Budd , for exam ple, when the sailor spills greasy soup after a jolt during “sportful” talk below deck,

Whether Melville himself ever had such“intimate affinities” is unknown, but he certainly wrote about them.

Melville does not imply that Billy lacks masculinity from it. On the contrary, Melville encodes the understanding that mu tual masturbation was respectably practiced at sea. He even has the ship’s police officer Claggart compliment the sailor on his “handsome” deed as the warship’s paragon. Similarly, in the chapter in Moby-Dick titled “A Squeeze of Hands,” Melville rhapsodizes on the menial task of squeezing sperm whale blubber: “Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us squeeze ourselves into each other; let us all squeeze our selves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”

July–August 2022

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