Photo © Ezra Gut

In 1965 my friend decided to take a day off school and visit the grave of Herman Melville. Melville was just coming back into style as a great American writer, and my friend had become enamored of the nautical world of the novels. Wishing to pay tribute to that great author, and having learned from Melville how important navigation was, he planned his route from Brooklyn to Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx, and took the train uptown, sure the rest would be easy.

He was wrong. Not only could he not find the grave, but when he finally located someone who worked in the cemetery, he discovered he had to explain who Herman Melville was. “He wrote Moby Dick,” said my friend, truly unable to imagine a world where not everyone knew the classics. The caretaker stared blankly and went to find his supervisor. “Herman Melville,” the caretaker explained to his employer, “He wrote Mobidix.”

Eventually the grave so insignificant to the supervisor and the supervisor of the supervisor was located and the tribute was paid. But over fifty years later as I prepared to go myself to pay obedience to this profound author, I could not help but recall the long search of my friend, and wondered if the app I downloaded of the cemetery would make my trip easier.

It didn’t. Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Fiorello LaGuardia, and so many other important graves are ‘searchable,’ but I found no route to Melville and his family.

Certainly “Moby Dick” is a little better known today even if only from the movies or the endless references by politicians or by adventurous heroes in films.  But when Melville himself passed away there were few to mourn. The day after Melville died, his death was barely noted. When the obituaries began to appear (The New York Times misprinting his first name), even people who had known him were surprised; as one of the obituary writers put it, ‘his own generation has long thought him dead.” Later, on October 1, Melville’s devoted biographer William Stedman published a more extended article about him in The New York Times, noting that “The death of Herman Melville, although following a lingering illness, has come as a surprise to even his few acquaintances in the city, for their opportunities of seeing him have been extremely limited in number.” Only two friends, Stedman himself and Titus Munson Coan, were present at the funeral. In 1891 Coan easily counted the few guests and noted that the funeral was held at Melville’s home with only a brief speech from the Reverend Theodore C. Williams, of All Souls’ Church.

Melville was not known because he simply ‘preferred not to,’ like his famous hero Bartleby. And the reasons, as in the story, are not clear, but varied and murky. First and most salient was his loss of popularity as a writer. Typee, his first book, was a best seller, but his later books were less well received. As the author Melville developed, he began to write more and more philosophically and his subjects became less standard. Expecting from Melville a nautical yarn, readers found almost Kafkaesque characters and obscure verse, and did not react warmly. Melville responded by moving further inward, retreating from society, his literary retreat beginning officially with the letter he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851. “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, -- it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.”  At the same time that he was beginning to understand that his audience was losing him, he was writing most of his best work, work that would inspire generations to come, works that are only now beginning to be understood.

But in the last years of his life he was truly alone. He retreated from communication with literary circles, refusing membership to the prestigious Author’s Club in his late years on the grounds that “he had become too much of a hermit, saying his nerves could no longer stand huge gatherings” as his biographer Raymond Weaver rephrased Melville’s letter. Even Melville’s granddaughter experienced his aloneness, his isolation from others. She recalled a visit in which grandfather Melville took her for a walk in Madison Park near his home, but then suddenly disappeared, leaving her lost in a strange neighborhood. She had not yet learned to read, and only by instinct found her way back to the street before her grandparents’ home. That was where her grandmother Elizabeth had taken her husband to search for the little girl after she discovered he had returned home without the child.

For the last 28 years of his life Melville lived in 104 East 26th Street, from 1863 to his death in 1891, working until 1885 as a customs inspector, writing poems in his free time, and wandering the streets of New York. He checked docking certificates, bills of lading, itemized provisions loading on to boats, filling out report after report, something like the job Bartleby, one of his favorite protagonists, had done decades before on Wall Street. As a political appointment in unstable times, his job was not only a bit boring but also insecure and could be revoked with every election. These were not conditions for a pleasant existence.

Although he was concentrating on writing verse, he wasn’t particularly interested in people knowing of his shift in genres. As a number of biographies note, he wanted poetry to be a private matter. "Herman is pretty well and very busy,” wrote Elizabeth Melville, “- pray do not mention to anyone that he is writing poetry - you know how such things spread and he would be very angry if he knew I had spoken of it - and of course I have not, except in confidence to you and the family.”

Why did the great novelist turn to poetry? Perhaps because poetry, once a popular genre for family reading, was slowly become an elitist media, and he no longer expected a wider audience. The failure of his books following Moby Dick in 1851 took him inward. He published occasional pieces, but Mardi, Pierre, and The Confidence Man increasingly proved to him that he had abandoned his audience and they had consequently abandoned him. So he began to write poetry, wrestling with words he had no hope to communicate with others. In 1860 he tried to have his poems published with little success. Certainly the poems do not seem to believe in the possibility of an audience. As Andrew Delbanco writes, “Reading these poems is like overhearing a musician who no longer expects to play public recitals but who still practices in private in order to keep his fingers limber.” (267)

Communication became less and less important, perhaps less possible, and it is significant that the only prose work he created in this late period was Billy Budd, in which the protagonist is physically incapable of communicating the truth, even though the truth would save his life.  And this refusal or inability to communicate remained with Melville even after death.

He knew the plot in Woodlawn cemetery well. In September of 1867 he brought his elder son, Malcolm, to be buried there after Melville and his wife found him in his room with a self-inflicted bullet wound in his head. Stanwix, two years younger than Malcolm, left home after this and never returned, dying in San Francisco in 1886 at the age of 35, probably of tuberculosis. He too was brought to the family plot.

Photo © Ezra Gut

Melville passed away five years later.

The headstone of Melville lies next to the small headstone for Malcolm, which in turn is next to the grave marker for Stanwix. Elizabeth would be buried next to Herman many years later, with a demonstratively contrasting cross to mark her spot. Her faith emphasizes the strangeness of his grave.

Melville’s grave is most notable by the empty scroll. Near the ground under the scroll are inscribed his name and the dates of his birth and death. The motif of the scroll, “the scroll of life,” is a common one throughout the cemetery, but there is no other grave with a scroll that is blank.

What could Melville’s intention have been? Numerous theories have been offered. One critic has noted that the Melville family tended to write personal messages on their graves, and that the family tradition precludes a blank scroll. This may have been noted to indicate that the empty scroll was a signal for readers to complete the scroll by reading and rereading his works. And indeed there are numerous possibilities to fill this blank. Hart Crane’s poem, published in Poetry magazine in 1929, illustrates this concept perfectly:

At Melville’s Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides … High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Of course, there are also other possible theories, for example that this empty scroll reflects his many untold stories, like the secrets of the true fate of Moby Dick, the ship the Essex, and the consequent cannibalism. What Melville did not dare tell about his many adventures may be reflected in the silence of the tomb.

One might also see the scroll as Melville’s own white whale, or what he delineates in the chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale” as “A dumb blankness full of meaning”. But for me, I cannot but think of the reaction of Pip, the ship’s mad cook, who approaches the gold doubloon Ahab has nailed to the post, the doubloon that has just been analyzed in all directions by the crew, and says ‘I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.’ And indeed, his headstone is nailed to the grave like a doubloon to a post.

A glance at two collections of Melville's poetry, however, reveals clearly the secret of his empty scroll. His obsession with graves and their lack of significance in particular is clear. In his book on the Civil War, Battle Pieces (1866), the emphasis is placed on the fallen and the erasure of their heroism, the erasure in fact, of their identities. The Civil War, with approximately 620,000 fallen soldiers, negates the possibility of eternalizing an individual.

And what of the most important graves to Christianity and Western civilization? In Melville’s visit to the Holy Land, particularly the sacred tombs and sepulchers, he emphasizes the generations of anonymous graves. In his diaries of his voyage in 1856 he wrote of the abundance of tombstones he found: "Alms for oblivion," quoting Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" in Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida":

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon 

As done: 

Again and again in the journals he returned to the subject. Of the valley of Jehoshaphat he wrote, "In Jehosophat, Jew grave-stones lie as if indiscriminately flung abroad by a blast in a quarry. So thick, a warren of the dead—so old, the Hebrew inscriptions can hardly be distinguished from the wrinkles formed by Time." Anonymous graves were ubiquitous. And in the epic poem of 18,000 lines, Clarel (1876), he wrote of the lost attempt at all to find meaning in all that which history enshrines and the hope of finding life after death. The last words of Clarel are “death but routs life into victory.”

The devotee of Melville who manages to reach his grave may learn exactly this lesson: The significance of the empty scroll on the grave is not to remind the living of the dead, but in itself to redirect the gaze of the devotee away from death and memory to life.

Karen Alkalay-Gut is a poet, professor, and editor who lives in Israel and writes in English.

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